By DAMIAN WEST
Her body proves to her just how creative God can get when he’s in the mood to get down; an oblong stacked atop a square stacked atop feet splayed like deflated car tyres; feet engineered just this way for just this moment for the sole purpose to maximize surface contact with the bubbling mudflats and, thereby, the meeting of two worlds; gravity channelling the world enveloped by her skin to squeeze out pockets of air from the salt water yabby burrows down below in gentle sulphur exhales.
Breathe
Donna likes to think she has only elaborated on god’s perfection. Dimensions of the five-foot-six stack of four-sided shapes are now around twenty percent smaller compared to ten years back when she finally swore off the grog for good. She shuffles through the inch deep water leaving behind plumes of soft sand sediment that take a minute to settle. Her eyes are fixed down, a few feet in front of her toes, searching for life in the slither of salt water separating sky from earth.
She walks in a shuffle out of habit. A foster father had introduced an earlier Donna to the sand flat shuffle as means to prevent treading on the countless brown stingrays that swarm these same banks on a rising tide before evacuating to deeper waters on the run out, leaving behind a sand-mud moon pocked with craters bigger than dinner plates, each holding the inner gloop and exoskeletons of a few yabbies and soldier crabs in a cup of lukewarm soup. Soon these craters will encircle her as the last of the ankle deep waters recede. She will notice too the unbroken, parallel lines that trail her like a rutted bush road, and will become suddenly aware of her shuffling gait and the stingrays and the foster father and her twenty-five years of daily walking meditations: hands clasped behind her back; eyes fixed on her leading big toe; and the requisite short shuffle – a daily practice in aid of moving beyond all those things that happened.
i) Name five things you can see
Donna sees a Boeing 747 bank heavily to the left as it sizes up its final approach to Brisbane’s domestic airport. Two towering steel chimneys belch sparks. Near stranded toadfish, oyster bellies tickled by the rising sand, squirm for deeper waters. A watchful cormorant sits poised on a windswept mangrove tree. The unfeeling oil pipeline that juts out from Bulwer Island rests on spindly pylon legs like a frozen caterpillar. A two metre graphite fishing rod plunged into the sand, the whole ensemble propped up just a fraction shy of plumb, waits, waits.
Donna watches her husband watch the rod in tethered anticipation; an unempirical, hopeless kind of hope that the whole outfit might, at any moment, double over or better yet break free from its mud sand foothold and skid off across the mudflats towards the grey green channel, leaving in its wake a single rut in parallel to Donna’s two. She knows that every time they fish in Boggy Creek, they come armed with buckets and how those buckets return home empty, and that the only time they arrived bucketless was the day they caught more fish than they knew what to do with, and jury-rigged storage and transportation solutions that left their car smelling like a fish monger’s floor for months to come.
She wonders for a moment how hope perseveres the way that it does.
ii) Name four things you can touch
The thin veneer of tidal salt water vanishing fast from beneath her feet, Donna shuffles forward into one of the vacated stingray lagoons that are now everywhere. The sharp contrast in water temperature excites her. The ebbing tidal veneer is also being warmed by the mudflats rising up from below, but never gives up its threadbare connection to the channel and, thereby, to the continuity that unites salt waters everywhere, that keeps everything mixing, churning and balancing out. The lagoons though are like the sea’s abandoned children, at least until the channel comes up again to escape itself and reclaim them as its own once more. Donna changed schools seven times as a child. She was never taught the laws of thermodynamics, but she knows them, knowledge housed deep in her bones the same way the watching cormorant accounts for the refraction of light.
She curls her toes through the silky sand silt, gathering between them the discarded soft shells of crustaceans devoured by the crater’s denizen ray perhaps an hour earlier.
She alerts herself to her skin and sets her skin free to touch the sun and to embrace the cool north-easterly sea breeze that she knows will continue to build until late afternoon when the temperatures of land and sea start to converge to end the cycle for today.
Donna shuffles from the lagoon towards the fishing rod with the breeze at her back. She sees her husband, now further down the beach, hunched over, extracting yabbies from their burrows with the suction of a leaden alloy pump. Just for a second, she pities those yabbies, how they’ll be sacrificed to feed the creek’s resident bait thieves.
She reaches forward towards the tip of the rod and takes the monofilament line gently between her thumb and index finger, feeling through it the workings of a different world: The rat-a-tat-tat of juvenile bream taking turns to dismember the current sacrificial yabby; the familiar bump and bounce of the sinker as the strong outgoing current drags sinker, yabby and all in a wide arc across the rocky creek bed; and that constant subtle vibration, the hum of the universe she likes to think, that can always be sensed through a fishing line, even when all else seems still.
iii) Name three things you can hear
The oil refinery across the creek clangs to the pulse of a slavish electronic metronome. The whir of a descending passenger jet carves the swamp air in two. The building sea breeze puts the sounds of scrunching cellophane in Donna’s left ear (the ear facing the wind). Then there’s the more distant drone of the sprawling subtropical metropolis, its interminable advance into the intertidal zone where it will bring lasting transformation, magical advances, brave new sounds, new fire breathing dragons. Donna thinks back to when the river last escaped itself and enveloped half of Brisbane.
But now, at last, the mudflats start to speak, first in a hush, but soon rising to swallow Donna whole like a phone that calls at four in the morning. The flats sizzle in inextricable harmony; a chorus of tiny independent, interdependent voices that not long ago sung songs of fear and defiance as the stingrays hid the sun. The rays had sung songs of war and hunger. None of this could be heard by Donna who had been trapped in a different stratum from the knees up. Now she hears everything as the yabbies and the fiddler crabs and the molluscs and the blood worms sing their own songs of war and hunger, and she wonders who or what it is now that gets to sing songs of fear and defiance and how far on this goes. She wonders if the yabbies click when the factories clang, just as the midnight curlew wails at the passing of an ambulance. For now, Donna allows herself to hear a single song.
iv) Name two things you can smell
Donna is hit by the same sulphur tang as salt waters everywhere. The smells of sweet fishy decomposition bubble up with each foot step, and the surrounding factories also blast sulphur in fiery exhalations. Pinkenba smells of the tangle of life and death mingled with polluting industry and seasoned with uncooked prawn heads.
The sounds and sights of this place have changed with time but the scent abides, and it’s this olfactory data eased in through the nose that makes her wild as it casts its unbroken monofilament line into the depths of her viscera to lure wordless memories. She feels the line grow tense and fears it might break.
Breathe
She’s learnt neither to tug the line too sharply nor to let it grow slack. Donna senses the line’s breaking strain and plays around its edges where she feels unsafe and knows she’s safe.
Donna sees the mangrove stands across the creek, how a preternatural king tide has recently dyed the trees a dust brown up to midway where, suddenly, they burst into incandescent emerald green the colour of rice paddies. The roots of the stands, now fully exposed, are strewn with human detritus that, in her mind at least, dissolves and renders meaningless concepts like land and ocean and nature and civilization.
She now feels safe unsafe. A memory of the violence shoots up and she lets out an inch of line and again sets her skin free to touch the sun. Nobody had believed her when she told them. Some thought she was possessed. She curls her toes and feels the soft crunch of pebble grit between them and breathes slowly as she holds the line.
A new memory comes up, this time of the foster family that, at sixteen, were the first people in the world to believe her and believe in her. She now bathes in the unbroken memory of the family and this special place where, at the height of fragility, she learned to bait a hook and throw a cast net and, for the first time, feel her nervous system start to untangle to reveal love and hope.
v) Name one thing you can taste
Donna finds comfort reliving the bag of Doritos she had eaten in the car on the drive down, how the cheese and tomato and salt still lingers, how her tongue and the insides of her mouth still tingle and fizz from the action of excitatory chemicals developed in laboratories to keep people emptying their pockets.
While intimately bound up in memory, Donna understands how the activation of taste calls upon a certain agency in comparison with the other senses. No taste without action.
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Her meditation complete, Donna throws her eye out beyond the creek across the river to Fishermans Island and is dumbfound by just how far the port now reaches into Moreton Bay. Cranes as far as the eye can see cast their brontosaurus silhouettes against the fading light. Ships bigger than buildings pump out their bilges while cargo containers stacked into impossible lopsided pyramids wait in patience for a butterfly to flap its wings. She can still pinpoint by way of landmark where the port once ended and the sea began. The island now extends more than a mile beyond.
Land reclamation, said the voice inside Donna’s head.
There was something about these words that aroused the critic within, for “reclamation”, one should expect, refers to the act of reclaiming – taking back something rightfully owned that has been lost or stolen. Donna understood how the island’s never ending advance into the bay is in reality the complete opposite of reclamation, but rather the naked theft of sediments belonging to the sea. When Kiribati finally drowns, nobody in the grips of the ensuing humanitarian disaster will have the gall to label the event as ocean reclamation, she thought. But reclaim to her was a word alive with beauty and power and justice.
Suddenly, she’s alert again to the distant drone of the metropolis and its forays into her special place. It saddens her for a second but she takes consolation in the moment. She turns to see her husband has since walked across the flats to the edge of the channel. She moves to rejoin him, and with the meditation done and the stingrays gone, she walks too. She arrives to find him removing from the hook the mere shell of a yabby stripped hollow by pickers.
I think I’ve had enough for the day, he says. Nothing but baby bream piss-fucking around. You good to go?
Give it one more cast. I wanna kick around for a bit, she says.
How come?
Nunya, she says.
What’s nunya?
Nunya fucking business!
They both smile. A’right, he moans in his unique brand of dramatic effect that she still treasures. He rebaits the hook, casts, and strides into the channel. “Shuffle, shuffle,” Donna yells. He raises his knees even higher and plants his feet down all the harder, laughing. A good enough man, Donna says to herself, presently amused by his boyish defiance. Mike embodies a fun kind of recklessness that never strays beyond limits. Above all, Donna values him as a true friend and ally in her quest to reclaim.
She turns away to see the setting sun has cast her shadow long and thin like a dreamtime spirit. She feels all at once the push and pull of opposites that surge through this place like a universal scream. She knows the mudflats have a life force of their own, and how the events of today will go on forever in glacial time on a scale she will never come to fathom. She knows how the stingray and yabby are one, as are the developer and the mudflats, the oppressor and the oppressed, the past and present, and life and death. She knows she’s walking the path and how herself and everything else here comes from the stars.
Fuck!
Donna turns to see the rod in Mike’s hands doubled over and hurries back. Mike releases the drag as line screams from the reel. They both understand the 9lb monofilament is not enough. Mike keeps the rod tip high and, sensing the line’s breaking strain, plays around the edges. Each time the fish shows signs of tiring, Mike lowers the tip and winds in frenetically to retrieve lost line before tightening the drag and lifting the rod to maintain tension. The fish takes off again, but this time Mike eases the drag less than before knowing the fish will have tired from its first big run. Donna, Mike both understand this is a game of inches as they stand in tethered anticipation staring madly at the pinpoint where the line disappears into the grey green brine. The fish makes more savage runs, each shorter than the last before Donna, Mike both understand they’re winning the fight.
They gaze breathlessly, intently into the water as far as the fading light allows, each in silent understanding that anything is possible until, just now, up out of the grey green, shoots an enormous flash of gold.
BAD ORIGAMI 