“I have something for you,” her maé says, reaching into her stained pouch, even as Ne’za’s fear is full to bursting. She doesn’t need a lantern to know that a broken thing is curled inside. Unlike her siblings who’d start dribbling digestive venom and enhance their jaws in anticipation of gorging on something alive, Ne’za wants to grow indistinct, then vanish from her maé’s goading gaze. But it won’t happen. She can’t make herself invisible.
“If it helps, know that it’s roadkill,” says Maé.
It doesn’t help—not even when Maé pulls out the dead thing (it’s no relief that the poor thing is dead) and pats it between her mortar hands as if she’s shaping pancake dough.
Ne’za likes pancakes, real pancakes, not baby-wombat-patty cakes, all fur and squashed in rotted blood and broken bones. The woman at the flamboyant stall on market days makes maps on her pan, hollers out, “Hey, hottie cakes! Hey, hottie crepes!” as she ladles out wet batter onto a griddle until it gets bubbly, then she deftly flips it. Ne’za likes to watch how she tucks notes or coinage into her ample bosom, serving pancakes folded or rolled, and topped with everything Ne’za loves about the market: caramelised jam, brie, chocolate, banana… She hangs out for drips and slips from a toddler’s hand or mouth, discards from folk with unimaginable “too much”—it must be an illusion, how can anyone have too much? She prowls in anonymity, twisted in hunger, melting into contours, eyeing up what scraps she can get, sometimes wrangling with mongrels to get it or share it so she can scoop it with happiness into her willing tongue. Afterwards, she wishes today was yesterday. But life catapults her back to moments she’d rather forget.
Maé doesn’t like Ne’za hanging around humans, unless it’s to stalk them. And now she’s insisting on the wombat patty.
“We shouldn’t eat anything off the side of the road,” Ne’za tries to explain her reluctance.
“Do you know? I had to wrestle it from a black dingo.”
Maé, like this, is undeterred.
“Beast nearly took my arm, such canines.”
She shows Ne’za the toothmarks on her arm. “Smacked the bloody thing, would have eaten it too, but it bounded two meters high with a jolly good yelp.”
Ne’za thinks she knows the dingo. A pretty thing that slinks, curious, along the creek near the den where Ne’za lives, then turns its neck at 180 degrees to see if Ne’za is still watching, and she always is. She’s fascinated with creatures, but never enough to eat them.
“We’ll get sic—” she tries yet again.
“Those are guidelines for humans because their guts are weak,” says Maé. “We don’t have to wait for something properly butchered and hung to eat it. Don’t you think?”
“Um…”
The tiny wombat smells. It’s nothing Ne’za wants to eat. She likes baby animals—alive and mischievous. She likes to look at their playfulness and marvel. Like the curly-haired poodle puppy with the blackest button eyes that she saw the other day at the itinerant dog groomer’s. The eeny meeny doggo was running about and sniffing everywhere, chewing on everything and being super friendly with anything that moved, to the steep annoyance of the groomer, who smacked it and it yelped.
He owns a campervan—the groomer. He has cold, grey eyes like hard pebbles, but entices customers with rainbow words in paint: “Clip, wash, trim and dry”. His business promises “treats, walking, flea treatment” but he shoos Ne’za off when she tries to approach it. She doesn’t mind, really, if he could just give her a go of “continuous warm water, blow dry and fragrances.”
Ne’za knows how to read. She learnt by watching behind a tree when the visiting teacher from the city made a tent that was warm with yellows, teals, blues, pinks, purples and olives—the colours of spring. Ne’za listened as the kiddies learnt to read and write, and say after Missy, the teacher: “Sat, pat, nap, tip, nip, sit…”
Ne’za shaped the words in her mouth and said with them: “S… a… t… sat. P…a… t… pat.” Sometimes, she wanted to walk up to the open side of the tent, the one facing her tree, and sit down as a pupil to also learn. But she didn’t think Missy or the pupils would like it if Ne’za showed up naked. Sometimes she wears a smocking dress in rainbow strips, or a floral knit—both rescues from the second-hand tip on a market day.
She doesn’t like to walk around naked like Maé or her brothers Ak’eem, O’gando and Aha’rugu. But the clothes are dirty and she doesn’t know how to wash them. She made a mess when she tried soaking them at the creek; they nearly drowned and Maé was livid! Mostly because she doesn’t like water and says monsters needs to keep their monster smell to stay scary. Ne’za doesn’t want to be scary, even when she’s hungry.
Maé says scariness paralyses prey, makes it easy to catch them. But hunger is an inconvenience, and it grips Ne’za with a precarious need. It’s a bruise and an abrasion. It’s a fracture and a terror. It’s an infinite recognition that her preference is fruit and vegetables. Mangoes, papayas, guavas. Kale, pumpkin, yam. Never flesh or anything that bleeds crimson.
Today, like always, Maé is not letting go on her quest. She stretches the patty between her hands and, in the tenderness of rot, it falls away from the fur that holds it. She bounds, without warning, snatches Ne’za’s head under an armpit and thrusts the slimy off-colour steak into her mouth. Ne’za feels hot as she resists Maé forcing her to swallow. Tears fall from Ne’za’s eyes as her mother pinches her nose to make her gasp for air. The sticky moistness of rot glides down her throat but refuses to arrive in her stomach.
“We’re yet to make a beast of you,” shrieks Maé. “So bloody vile. What you need is the psychology of monsters. Look at this mess.”
But there’s no mess. Because her siblings Ak’eem, O’gando and Aha’rugu have appeared from nowhere and loped, leapt and snatched in ravenous jaws her pink, green and yellow projectile mid-air.
“Now, there’s a moment,” says Maé, oblivious of Ne’za’s distress. She doesn’t notice as Ne’za wriggles loose. Maé is too busy with pride and runs slimy licks on the brothers. No lick today for Ne’za.
~
She contends with her problems each night. She pats down tufts of beardgrass, arranges mop hair leaves in a second layer and burrows in her den. She ponders about how she can try to belong more. What’s a nuclear family when it chatters and glows in the dark in her absence and goes quiet when she appears? The den hates her too. When she steps out for air, it rearranges itself and the way back is no longer there. If it were a house, like the ones other children lived in, and it reordered itself like this, she’d have to squeeze through a tiny bathroom window—the closest access from where the threshold would be. But such is her luck, what do you know? The house would have relocated itself so that she fell into a cooking pot of simmering broth—she’s sure of this.
She thinks for a long time about how she would squeal if she landed into that hypothetical pot, how she would fall out of it in a daze, her head dizzy from all that scalding but her blisters healing faster than the room transmuted itself. Well, they would heal faster if she was like her brothers. Instead, she bleeds and scars.
~
Ak’eem, O’gando and Aha’rugu are generally sympathetic to Ne’za’s difference, but are unable to hold back their monster urges, like Ne’za can. They fit in the den, not as in bodily fitting in, but as in belonging. Maé calls Ne’za an anomaly. What, without a flattened head, pushed out nostrils and wide-spaced eyes, who can blame her family for recognizing and pointing out her difference?
Sometimes, she wonders if she was adopted. On those times, she gets recurring dreams of being snatched. Of a human creeping into the den while they’re all asleep, and stealing Ne’za, a baby still, from Maé’s warmth.
Ne’za wonders if she’s manifesting in those dreams a bizarre desire for acceptance.
She can’t be an authentic monster. If she were true-born, she’d have saw-like teeth and be heavy-bodied like the rest in her family. To be honest, she wouldn’t mind if all she had was a fierce-looking snake head, or even just a protruding jaw. But she doesn’t. She’s all streamlined. Her smooth lips are the colour and shape of a petal. Once, she was sick, and lobs of skin formed on her chin. Bright-eyed, she went on hands and knees on wet reeds, and watched her reflection across the surface of a duck pond near the playground with yellow, green and bright red swings, seesaws and slides. She beamed her glee at her face in the dancing waters—it was the most monster she looked, and she yearned to look more of it. But instead of getting better, as in more raggedy, her chin smoothened days later.
There are all kinds of things that shout her difference. She loves petals: The crimson of a flame lily. The blush inside the white and yellow star of a gazania. The tongue pink of a protea that matches her lips. She doesn’t like hunting things down. She prefers hiding and watching children on carousels at the bazaar on market days and wishes she could talk to them. Once, she tried to make herself noticed, but someone squealed and people pelted her with eggs, tomatoes and pebbles. Hurled coins that she picked up before she ran.
Today, she sniffs around houses, chances a peek through parted curtains but figures out she will return tomorrow to changed locks at the main gate, as if they know or smell she has been. She imagines someone reporting her to the guard who stalks the market. He waves his baton at her, “Shoo!” One time he hurled rocks, and it nearly took her leg. She trembles with the thrill of being hunted, the ribbons in her hair flowing as she runs. She’s not fast, though, not like her siblings who lope in long strides and leaps.
~
It’s another night, this one especially cold.
Ne’za is too lean for it. She wishes she wasn’t here. But her sense of duty overwhelms her craving for escape from a parent who is barely perfunctory. Maé is an arc and a dash, her shoulders carrying the weight of the universe in its disappointment of how Ne’za’s turned out. What Ne’za needs is a swimming hole that shimmers in late summer, but she wouldn’t swim in it, because monsters shouldn’t swim for fun, unless it’s to creep on unsuspecting prey. All Ne’za wants to do is peek at catapulting children having fun in a splash. What she needs is to see a baby tight in its mother’s arms, small and trusting—a trust she’s never had. She has always been wrong: Too small. Too un-hideous. Too gentle. Too squeamish… She’s “too much heart” for a beast that must thrive on meat.
Anchorless in the dusk, she tries to focus. If only she were a stone. Or a tree. Or a bird. A hole even—that is a fate she’d prefer to accept.
Each sleep is an autumn of secrets. Anything can happen in dreams, and here it is again. That seaside bazaar in a kaleidoscope of wind. Children’s skirts streaming like flags from the carousel in a lost country, the moon so low that Ne’za can almost touch its dusty face. It whispers words she can’t decipher as they fade into the mouths of golden moths flying in and out of the children’s dead eyes. Maé’s ribald laughter filtering in her dreams. We’re yet to make a monster of you… of you…
~
Maé, Ak’eem, O’gando and Aha’rugu have cornered a stray piglet. Tomorrow is market day—did someone lose it, or did it escape? It’s squealing murder and they’re laughing. Aha’rugu pounces to catch it and it leaps straight into O’gando’s arms. They pull it apart still alive. How can she forget the squealing? The sounds of chomping flesh and bone? Now the silence is worse.
And the blood, all this crimson. Maé is pushing Ne’za, nose down, to sniff and swallow the wet copper warmth of soaked earth. Ne’za’s bellow is of dread, hurt and wrath. It is the cry of a creature that’s had enough.
Even Maé, Ak’eem, O’gando and Aha’rugu are taken aback, for a moment.
~
…a monster of you… of you…
The sound wakes her to the reminder that she hates this dream.
The leaves of her bed whisper solace. Ne’za climbs into both her raggedy dresses rescued from the tip, stepping into each from the neck and hugs herself in them. Omens yawn and roll over, as she waits for the sun to rise. Their laughter is mirthless in her head, like Maé’s goading one, until dusk dissolves.
~
Whispers shimmy up and down the dirt road along the creek. It’s market day and people load produce, barter wares or their chillum onto carts even though, on market days, there is always a bus that runs to and from the city.
It’s an icy day. From her hiding spot in the creek, Ne’za can see a mountain cap peeking through fog in the horizon. There’s a snow flurry as she bends into herself, tries to make herself obscured like the trees in a unilateral forest: tall skinny trees, unbarked—looking all alike. Such trees can pretend to be unseen, and nobody notices them under the ashen skies. Ne’za wants to be invisible, but she isn’t, and she knows this because the dingo is watching. It has a dense coat and a white tip on its tail. There are ripples in the grey waters, but it’s not a croc or the dingo that bounds onto a tree.
Ne’za resists to check her reflection, and walks with as much purpose as she can, while being inconspicuous, all the way to the bus stand. She squeezes and tucks herself into a seat, wishing that she overflowed into the aisle like a monster would do, but she doesn’t. The driver pays her no mind, just accepts the coinage she hands him, and dishes out change. After a long time, well, to Ne’za anyways, the bus purrs then heaves as the driver changes gears.
Ne’za closes her eyes and imagines she’s the only one on board. Only she isn’t. There’s a girl smelling nice, with roped hair and a billowy frock. Ne’za wishes she was as carefree as the girl, but quickly forgets her as it begins to rain. It fascinates Ne’za how the shower is faster than the bus’s wipers, and how the lights are green all the way to a sombre horizon.
She watches greedily as the city-bound bus whooshes past white cake-style houses—Ne’za likes cake. She’s never eaten one, just seen slices of it in one of those itinerant cafés that come near the creek on market days. She’s sure she’d like a tarty one with “malt custard,” or swollen with “raspberry jam” or “lemon curd.” The pangs of hunger are a real pain when she looks at the “chocolate croissants” that promise a “rich crème” inside. She doesn’t know what a crème is, but it sounds nice. She likes the bigger wedding cakes more. The rounds ones and the cylindrical ones and the ivory ones… the rustic-coloured ones too.
~
She feels like a mourning song. She could never camouflage as a rock to dart out and seize live prey, drag it away in a drip of slime, her blade teeth peering from a jaw of jaws.
~
The bus coughs on the climbing road.
Ne’za notices an athletic girl jogging with a rucksack uphill along the swirly, bendy road and all that drizzle. She likes the look of the ghost trees alongside the road, bare arms spread out to say hello. The bus races past a sign that says NO THROUGH ROAD behind which red brick cedar cottages solemnly stand. Ne’za thinks how nice it would be to live in one of those.
Somewhere along the way, nearly everyone gets off and it’s just her and the driver, and the carefree girl smelling apple fresh. Now the bus is going down, down, towards a bay and she can see the waters rising out to meet them. A cliff face hedges the road, and Ne’za doesn’t like how fast the bus is gliding. From the look on her face, the apple fresh girl doesn’t either.
The bus slows down along an ocean esplanade, then stops. Ne’za climbs out. She’s curious about the sign that warns against blowholes but is fascinated with the boulevard names: Stone Fruit, Bay River, Whispering Vale. She climbs a wet and leafy track, then a rocky track, then a ferny edge towards the blowholes. She doesn’t get too close and leans against a stringy bark tree with mop hair leaves leaning out to the bay, and looks at the black humping waters below.
The day is cold and sunless, damp all the way and soaking her two layers of dress. She thinks of her mother’s heartless words: “We’re yet to make a monster of you.”
She sits on tufts of beardgrass and waits for the sun to set, because she doesn’t know what else to do. She doesn’t want to go back home where she’ll look at a reflection and yearn for more. Ne’za wonders how it would feel to step into a blowhole and have it crumble and cascade her down the rocks and into the hungry sea.
“Wanna grab something to eat?”
It’s the carefree girl.
“Okay,” says Ne’za.
The girl helps her up, and Ne’za is surprised by how soft and warm the girl’s palm is. They saunter into a beachcomber restaurant that has a TV on and it’s Saturday night footy where the commentator is speaking of marks and disposals, roaring “Oh! Beautiful off the boot. Goal!”
“I’ll get us some tucker,” the carefree girl says.
“Is it wombat patty?”
The girl looks quizzically at Ne’za, then laughs. “You’re funny.”
“I don’t eat meat.”
“No dramas. You eat veggie dogs?”
“I like them, but is there cake?”
Her friend laughs. “My, aren’t we ravenous.”
The footy players are tossing the ball with their hands as well as their feet. Ne’za looks at the tackles, momentum, men in tiny shorts running the ball out.
“Steers that through!” cries the commentator.
Spectators are spilling from the stands and Ne’za wishes she was there to witness firsthand the player named Jezza climb into the kick, a whopper bender around the corner.
“It’s unbelievable!” bellows the commentator.
The carefree girl rolls up from the bar with their veggie dogs and two thick slices of a layered cake lathered with cream, a caramel goo and chocolate shavings.
“Chocolate and pumpkin cake,” the girl says. “It’s on special. Must have known you were coming.”
Ne’za is so hungry, she fears her saliva might wet the floor.
But she wants to save the cake for last. She puts her mouth around half the bun, and chomps. Tomato and mustard squirt everywhere. Ne’za is embarrassed, looks at the throwaway thongs on her feet.
“I’m sorry I’m a monster,” she says.
“What are you on about? Being a black girl doesn’t make you a monster,” the carefree girl says. “No one’s ever taught you to do different, is all.”
A girl? Ne’za looks at herself, then at the carefree girl. She looks at the patrons and waiting staff in the restaurant. It dawns on Ne’za with such suddenness that she doesn’t look that much different from them. Sure, a hair here, a colour there… Aiyayaya! thinks Ne’za. Maybe those thoughts about adoption or dreams of being snatched, and all, had merit.
She just got the facts a little wrong is all.
END
