clearing in the jungle. The airport was a two-room building where customs officers in khaki uniforms opened her bags and poked through them, then nodded. My grandmother rode in the back of an army truck over bumpy dirt roads, past trees hung with vines. She arrived at San Antonio in one of the cane trucks and took the ferry across the river. A group of people stood at the ferry dock, waiting to cross, and my grandmother accosted them. ‘I’m looking for my daughter, Jennifer. Where is Jennifer?’ They smiled back at her. ‘Ah, su hija! Yeni!’ They pointed up the Rio Hondo. ‘She’s out swimming in the river.’
Nostalgia is a funny thing. I remember vividly the very air of San Antonio, the warm, sweet, almost rotten smell of the river and the jungle, the feel of green clay between my fingers. I remember the taste of ripe guava and the taste of guava not quite ripe but eaten anyway. I remember all the words to ‘Springtime in the Rockies,’ a sentimental song our friend Lohinos played, the light of the kerosene lantern shining on his polished guitar. Everything from the language to the air was new to me, and so I noticed everything, without knowing I noticed it. I learned to see the way I learned Spanish, unaware, and it was in Belize that I learned it.
Now, twenty-two years later, I travel when I can, looking for amazement, for a girl in a blue leotard who seems to have no bones, for plants that wilt at the touch of a finger and then come back to life. Those months in Belize were among the most vivid in my life and I remember them with an ache of longing. But at the time it was a world too raw, too strong for me. And when my mother announced the following year that we were returning to San Antonio, I shook my eight-year-old head and refused to go.
Paola Bilbrough
That spring we lived in Canvastown there were mushrooms the size of dinner plates in the fields, frayed at the gills with lice.
My mother wore a feather in her hair, naked in profile, always painting.
My father, stringy ponytail, pink shirt, threw pots in a cow shed.
I wanted to be the neighbour’s child.
She, fat and breathless, would seat me on top of their enormous freezer, a mortuary of animal carcasses, feed me bright yellow pickle, doughy bread.
The odour of basset hounds, mutton gristle and hot vinyl.
She created nothing, sat indoors eating melted cheese from a dented frying pan.
Furrows on her husband’s brow plowed deep, skin red as raw beef.
He could listen with the trees, make a willow stick dance to the song of an underground stream.
The flick of my mother’s brush on canvas, buzz of mason bees building clay houses, the dull roar of my father’s kiln.
Across the road, the weaver at his loom, weaving a poltergeist’s footfalls into a vermilion carpet.
Sound gradually drinking in all its listeners.
The fat woman and I didn’t listen.
She was bored with the water diviner.
Resplendent in a green chenille housecoat, she turned afternoon into evening by watching
I liked to lie in her overgrown garden, watch crab apples pull malevolent faces from the tree, poke out their wormy tongues at passersby.
Appetites
Sara said her father had been a thief; she remembered other people’s fruit lighting up the bushes, oranges like planets, old sweet apples falling into her father’s flour-bag shirt. She ate nasturtiums, waxy honey. Sugar was forbidden.
Dan would gut Sunday loaves, the colour and texture of kapok. After school, mouth stained green; jelly crystals straight from the packet. Every night chocolate pudding thick and dark as estuary mud flats.
He had a milk run, drank from scratched glass bottles, cream coating his throat when he swallowed.
Sara was allowed goat’s milk, thistle milk, any milk but cow’s. That’s what separated them, she said, his complacent suburban appetites.
She thought of milk from the top of the bottle as she fingered the satin skin of his inside wrist.
Kanji
My father and I slept in a Japanese car case, kanji printed on the wall in place of family portraits.
Nights I lay awake, the black characters assumed flesh.
Clothes rustling as they changed posture.
Every morning a walk through macrocarpa to a household of stained armrests, chapatis and chipped enamel mugs.
Only chopsticks lay in our drawers, Hand-whittled and oiled.
In spring we made elderflower lemonade, white star flowers fizzing to the surface.
The elderflower a witch among trees, its character more disturbing than the kanji on our walls.
A tree whose shadow could make the mind curdle like milk.
In summer, cherry wine: each of us scrubbed calloused heels, crushed fruit in the belly of the bath, feet beating out a warlike rhythm.
A dense, sweet, almost rotten smell. Legs covered with red-black juice, the blood of summer.
Membrane 1
I was a festival child.
Cherry picking season we endured unwashed hair, scant meals.
My father was a puppeteer,
I remember sunken eyes, bruised cheeks, empty glove bodies.
In the front row of Punch and Judy
I held a stranger’s baby, its heartbeat filling the whole head.
The fontanel before the bones knit: a frog’s throat as it swallows.
Dancers knotted up baling twine hair. Rain.
And mud warm between the toes.
Seven-year-old skin gossamer between myself and the world.
In Dublin, your mother cooked Sunday roast, her stretch-suit vivid hydrangea pink.
Your father argued about the Pope over tea. All I knew of Ireland was our plow horse, Connemara.
Membrane 2
Rain, pale Irish skin, the band screaming
