My writing samples
Below are some samples of published writing of mine.
The Drill
“Deep unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state”- Ira Gershwin
Ritual initiation is a feature of almost every society, culture and religions. Since tribal times an ordeal or test of character has been required before one could be fully accepted into the group. Ceremonies range from getting a tattoo to running a gauntlet of violent attacks from public circumcision to wearing gloves lined with the sting of Amazonian bullet ants.
Shanghai has its own remorseless rite of passage it makes its residents undergo: The Drill. Those who have already undergone the horror of the drill will shudder at its mere mention, its bathe brain-rattling sound still haunting their memory. I talk, of course, of being torn from sleep by the tooth-grating sound of spinning metal penetrating concrete a few feet overhead.
It is the anthem of a developing nation, and I was warned: the second-hand Lonely Planet book I bought before leaving my peaceful corner of Australia was clear, “If you want peace and quiet, then Shanghai is not the place for you, one of the fastest developing cities in Asia, construction is everywhere. Shanghai currently boasts a large percentage of the world’s cranes.”
The construction noise most common in Shanghai is that of home renovations. With a rise in affluence comes the desire to improve living conditions. Around Shanghai, people’s living quarters are given a facelift, but rather than a scalpel, the tools of the trade are hammer and the dreaded drill much to the dismay of neighbors.
The roar of The Drill is not shut out by loud music. A pillow over the head is pointless. Earplugs are ineffective. There is a time when every newly arrived Shanghai resident realizes they must face the noise and adapt. With adaptation comes personal change that involves letting go of part of oneself, the death of old beliefs and behaviors. With death comes grief and so it goes that an inductee to The Drill follows the five stages of grief put forth by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross.
The first stage is Denial. On the initial mornings of The Drill you refuse to accept that this strident uproar will be a regular fixture of your life. A positive resolve is assumed, (“It can’t last more than a week.”) Each night one heads to bed hopeful of silence only to have optimism crushed under the thudding head of a hammer. I tried picturing an avant-garde percussion ensemble rehearsing in the apartment above- the conductor madly flailing his arms
-and reflected on their artful use of space, drama and suspense as the clamor reached its 7am climax. Such mirthful musings are invariably short lived, and give way to the next of the five stages. Anger.
You have become a sadistic psychopath with Tourette’s Syndrome. Stalking around the house screaming expletives whilst imagining the depraved acts of torture you can return upon your tormentors using their own tools as weapons. You storm up the stairs and scream at the builders, who stop for a moment to gawk at the spectacle of a loony laowai spouting nonsensical syllables before they smiling to one another, and with a shrug, return to the pressing work at hand.
Stage three: Negotiation. The ordeal of The Drill may provide the motivation to find out about laws governing noise pollution in Shanghai. “Surely construction cannot rage on until the late hours of the evening and then resume at dawn.” You might ask a local, upon which they inform you there are restricted times for construction. Suddenly those long neglected Mandarin studies are resumed with a specific emphasis on vocabulary addressing noise issues.
“Government regulations stipulate that you must begin work at 8am and cease work at 6pm,” you learn to announce tone perfect, “failure to follow these laws will necessitate a call to the police upon which you will receive a warning or a fine.” Your newfound phrases are rewarded with some relished moments of silent respite. But the builders gradually disregard the time restrictions, the police begin to ignore frequent frantic calls from that fussy foreigner and you fall into stage depression.
Depression.
Like the rings inside a tree trunk, the dark circles under your eyes tell your story. One of severe sleep deprivation. Your negative disposition isolates you from your friends who are sick of hearing you complain about the construction. Your lover refuses to sleep over due to the cacophony, while your constant requests for sanctuary at their apartment have left them feeling claustrophobic. You are on the edge of tears at all times, and suffer a complete lack of energy. All that is left is to sit in your room, stare at the wall and endure the racket.
Then something incredible begins to happen. Like the Buddha under the bodhi tree, the droning of The Drill begins awakening “the one note,” within you. The great universal “Aum” that floods you with cosmic love. You are overcome with compassion for the workers upstairs and realize that you share a common bond with them. They, too, are immigrants to Shanghai drawn to this metropolis from the countryside in search of the same opportunities that led you here. You have become one with them, one with the city and one with The Drill. The fifth and final step has been attained: Acceptance. And Shanghai can now accept you as a true resident.
First published in That’s Shanghai
Mandy’s Song
I take a deep breath and look from my hands floating above the keys, to my reflection in the shining black façade of the old upright piano’s cover; we have both seen better days. It is as though my shadow is looking back at me. My blues eyes make black pools, insistent that I begin. I exhale and let my hands fall upon the black and white teeth of the piano’s keys. The melody I have heard all my life, carried to me by my father, breathes alive. As the solo introduction unfurls, something within me unclenches, the old stories roll across my mind; this song is my inheritance, like the genetics of my blue eyes.
My father and my grandfather both had these same blue eyes, like the colour of tropical blue seas in island getaway pamphlets. My family grew up a long way from paradise though. And those blue eyes could turn ice cold with the piercing family temper. My grandma was attracted to my grandfather because of those eyes but soon learnt to fear what dwelt behind them.
Grandpa ran a small farm with the land he bought with a grant from his First World War army service. After he watched it turn to ruin from drought, meanness emerged from him. Dad always referred to Grandpa as ‘the bastard’, I didn’t even know what his name was for many years. Dad said when Grandpa returned home in the evening everyone grew tense, his arrival often announced by the outcries of his horse in pain as he was in the habit of whipping it for no reason.
Dad often spoke of the look of fear in the large animal’s eyes when he approached it after these beatings. Feeding the horse clumps of hay and stroking its nose it would finally calm, the large puffs of air through its nose growing softer and slower. In the high space under the house where the horse was tied, Dad would be able hear to Grandpa’s angry yells above him.
Dad said Grandma was quick to learn not to argue with Grandpa; the bruises that would result caused too many whispers from the people in town. She grew more nervous over the years and eventually began having panic attacks or ‘spells’ as they called them in those days. She was sent away for ‘rest’ at her parent’s home in Bellingen for various periods. That is when Mandy came into everyone’s life.
Mandy was a half-caste aboriginal woman from what we now call the stolen generation these days, brought up in a Catholic orphanage after being taken from her people as an infant. She was 15 when she met my Grandma’s father, a priest involved in administration overlooking many of the orphanages. Her cheerful ways were so endearing that he invited her to work for his family.
Dad adored Mandy, with her loud rolling laugh that shook her whole body. Dad said she gave great hugs and looked after him and his younger sisters attentively and affectionately.
Mandy loved to sing. They would sing together when they hung out washing or walking home after hunting rabbits with Grandpa’s old rifle. Mandy had a particular song she would sing, a sad melody. It was one of the only songs she remembered from her childhood with her people, she said that song got her through many lonely years in the orphanage. She sang it to the kids as a lullaby or when they all hid from Grandpa, holding them all close. She sang it through the horse’s cry, the slamming of doors, his swearing and the stumbling rhythm of his footsteps on the floorboards announcing his return home after drinking with the logging team he had started worked with. It was a new job after all the farm animals had died or been slaughtered and required him to go out for days at a time after which he would usually return home drunk after ‘knock off with the boys’.
Grandpa was even more horrible to Mandy than to Grandma. He would scream abuse at her, ‘ya bloody boong!’ He seemed to act as though she were a spy sent by Grandma’s family. They never liked him and he always rejected their help out of pride over the years. Grandpa needed Mandy in Grandma’s absence but resented her; he reckoned that Grandma’s family had finally got their daughter back and sent this woman as a replacement.
Grandma returned for short times to see us but was very withdrawn; Dad said it was probably depression. He remembered sitting and watching her stare off into space for long periods of time. She caught onto Mandy’s sad song, absent-mindedly singing it to herself, the falling melody and the circling return to a single note, a kind of melancholic meditation. In those days families were bound by tradition and obligations, the rules of the church and the time but Grandpa managed to bring it all crashing down one day.
One night when he was 14, Dad woke to the sounds of screaming and yelling. When it died down he ventured outside his bedroom. Dad went looking for Mandy and found her underneath the house near where the horse was usually tied. Her dress was torn and there was a strange look on her face, like something was broken inside her. Tears streamed down her face, Dad tried to hug her as she shook, humming the sad melody to herself over and over.
Whenever Dad told me that story he would always look off into the distance, the memory of powerlessness and hurt seemed to never leave him. He said he wished he could comfort Mandy as easily as he had calmed the whipped horse. He never understood why Grandpa did what he did to Mandy. He went and found Grandpa’s rifle and loaded it, waiting for the old man’s return. Dad said he fired two shots at Grandpa and the only reason he didn’t kill him was because he missed.
It was not long after that that everyone was sent to Grandma’s parent’s place in Bellingen, Grandpa was left alone in Moree. Dad said he never saw him again and he didn’t care. Mandy stayed on with them but left after a few months. Dad said he managed to overhear why she was sick every morning, she was pregnant with Grandpa’s ‘bastard’. They gave her money and apparently she set off back to she was taken from, to be with her people again somewhere near Rock Hampton in Queensland. Dad said he thought about Mandy a lot over the years and always intended to track her down but you know how life is sometimes. That melody was all that was left of her to him, he would find himself singing it absent-mindedly at times.
Dad didn’t have much to say about his time in Bellingen apart from cool river swims and the lush land in contrast to the dry and cracked earth and itchy scrub of Moree, plus a few defining schoolyard scraps. When he came of age he decided to join the service, eager for adventure outside of his quiet country town life. The Japanese were moving down through Papua New Guinea and they needed new forces to defend Australia from attacks from the north. Dad could always reel off the division numbers and loved to share all he knew of how the campaigns played out but I never paid attention to those details, there were more colourful tales than those.
The war was huge for Dad. He had times he would get a distant look in his eyes and his breathing became heavy, breathing through his nostrils as though he was a boiler letting out steam pressure. I could never imagine what visions flashed through his mind. This was when he would sometimes tell us tales of shocking violence in a matter of fact tone, as though relating weather details. Telling of turning the flame thrower on a group of Japanese men climbing a chain link ladder they had attached to a rock face, seeing their charred bodies the next day like burnt barbeque. He told us of torrential downpours in the mountains, the jungle debris damming the water above them and then suddenly breaking in flash floods, washing ANZAC troops and Japanese alike, down slopes and river beds, tumbled along with a mass of snakes, spiders and other jungle creatures; of finding the dead bodies of his fellow soldiers, their supply lines severed by the allied forces, their butt cheeks cut away as food for the starving Japanese troops.
There were so many of these stories that I would sometimes wake from nightmares as a child, Dad would also wake and sometimes we would find him running around the house with a rifle screaming about the Japanese. They said it was the malaria flaring up again in his bloodstream. Mum was good at calming Dad down in these times, holding his head to her chest, singing sweet melodies with her beautiful voice. Mum managed to suppress the storm within Dad with her soothing influence; she seemed to anticipate when it was brewing. She did the same when we had fired his temper up, reasoning with him whilst we rubbed our stinging butts from where his hand had unleashed pain upon there.
Dad met Mum when he returned from the war. She was a jazz singer, working with local bands that devoured any new records the American troops brought with them on the ships and then played the music in local halls and clubs. Dad said he wasn’t sure what he was more transfixed by, her beauty or her voice. It was as though she could bring the sun out with her singing. Around the house she would sing Ella Fitzgerald songs, scat solos and all. My sisters and I would all turn to stop and listen, smiling to each other.
Mum said it was those blue eyes of Dad’s that first got her attention; I was lucky to have inherited them she would always say when I was trying my best to be cute. They were a funny couple, Dad was an engineer by trade, concerned with mechanics and the logic of things. Mum was spontaneous and improvisatory. I think I follow after my Mum. She got me into the piano and into jazz. While my piano teachers pushed Bach at me my mother enticed me to Art Tatum. Music made everything random in the world feel like it was meant to be. I would move with the restrictions of playing all of the notes and expressions dictated by the score that my teachers required and then feel released with Mum on an old standard that one of her old swing band friends taught me the changes to.
Over the years Dad was going deaf, all of the artillery shell explosions and gun fire in the war must have taken their toll. I often wondered what it felt like for him, in a world growing ever more silent. I would sometimes catch him looking out the window, quietly humming Mandy’s sad song to himself. My life on the other hand was just opening up. The piano was a microcosmic universe that was expanding all the time.
I got my picture in the paper with one of my classical piano competition awards, a young Sydney pianist to ‘keep an eye on’ whose ‘real passion was Jazz’. A couple of years later we heard that Grandpa had died, alone in a cabin near Dorrigo where he still worked logging. At the bottom of his chest of drawers was the clipping of the same article. I always wondered about Grandpa and why he turned out the way he did. As I watched Dad sit alone with the torment of his memories I wondered at the effect the war had on both of them. All Dad said was ‘good riddance to the bastard’.
One day I was at a jam session at a club in Sydney and in walked someone I hadn’t seen before, a large looming figure of a man, sweating, dressed all in black and carrying a saxophone in its case. He took out his instrument, a dark lacquered colour saxophone with intricate engraving and we counted off ‘Just Friends’. He had an enormous sound that even dwarfed the drums and put a lot of power behind the notes as though almost out of desperation. When it came time for him to solo he attacked the song with brutal violence. ‘Just friends, lovers no more’, went the song, it was as though he was adding ‘and now I am forcing myself on you’ as he attacked the soft flesh of the harmonic structure with angular lines like a fevered rapist. When he finished his solo I looked out at the shock that lay on the faces of the audience, their side conversations made dumb by the saxophone’s lament of ‘fuck you’. I loved it.
His name was Mark Raymond and we immediately became friends. He opened my ears to Ornette Coleman, to those beautiful Coltrane melodies that rambled through the keys, to Sonny Rollins and his strange sense of humour making us giggle at his antics on Sonny meets Hawk. Mark’s record collection was like being submerged in liquid illumination. Music was not all Mark turned me onto, he also introduced me to heroine. With heroine it was as though I could hang out in that quiet place I found when the spirit reached me on the bandstand, like my personality was washed clean. Mark and I played and got high all the time.
Word got back to my mother through the older players in the scene about how I was spending my time and who with. There was a lot of yelling at home, Mum cried when she saw the track marks on my arms and Dad lost his temper; he threatened to kick me out. ‘Fuck you, I don’t need you’, I said and went into my room to begin packing my clothes and records. Dad lost it; he stormed into the room and grabbed me by the throat, pushing me against the wall. Mum screamed for him to stop but I kneed him in the stomach hard. He went down for a moment and as I made a run for the front door he tackled me and sat on top me, lifting his hand for the blow. Mum grabbed his arm, ‘Darling, no’, came her soft voice. He was suddenly aware of himself, he climbed off me and everyone sat in corners of the kitchen sobbing until I finally pulled myself up and left without a word.
I didn’t see them for a long time. Mark and I went through life in a haze, when we weren’t playing music we were high. Years went by, the gigs got worse until I found myself playing in RSL clubs backing washed up 50s rock stars. I did the odd gig playing my own or Mark’s music that managed to keep the beast of free expression from tearing my insides apart. The dope was getting less able to numb me to the bare room I lived in and the desperation of money for dope. Mark and I saw ourselves as an elite creative musical force, the only two brave enough to live life on the edge and make the most spontaneous jazz. I see now how stupid we were.
It was some time in the 80s my sister found me at a gig. Mum had died in a car crash. I couldn’t fathom the reality of the situation, I didn’t let myself. I went straight ‘home’ to the needle and the spoon. I didn’t go to the funeral, I couldn’t face the family and instead climbed into bed with the sadness. My sisters told me how much Dad had deteriorated after Mum died – he seemed to retreat further into himself, his heavy breath through his nostrils betraying the tumultuous thoughts inside him. He stuck a Japanese flag above his bed, one that had been wrapped around a dead Japanese soldier, covered in Japanese characters and stained with blood. My sisters said more stories from the war would come, shocking ones. He would sit alone in rooms singing Mandy’s song to himself, rocking back and forth. They said his mind was starting to go. The doctor suggested it was from the concussions from mortar blasts and the stress of war.
Some plain-clothes police busted me after a gig; they opened my music satchel to find a baggy of dope. Somehow, I managed to be sent to rehab instead of jail. There, I was awash in grief for the first few months, as though all the pain I had avoided in life was suddenly rushing back over me all at once. My mother’s songs haunted me and I couldn’t forget that last day we saw each other and the way I had left. My sister and father came to visit me in the ward. My sister went on about her kids I had never met but I wasn’t listening. I watched Dad stare out the window; he was humming something to himself. I had so much to say to him but couldn’t find any words.
When I got out I went to see him but my sister warned me he had deteriorated even more. He was now in a home. I sat with him, he picked up a picture of Mum and started telling me about her as though I had never met her before. ‘She had a voice like an angel and what a looker eh?’ Something in my heart sank. Something had switched off behind those blue eyes. We went for a walk and the whole time he hummed Mandy’s song and afterwards it was stuck in my head, the melody swimming around and around, never leaving.
Word had got out that I was clean now. I got an offer to do a long tour for Musica Viva across the top of Australia, playing in schools in far off aboriginal communities and a range of evenings from halls to miner’s parties in sheds. The salary would help me pay off money I owed, so I took it. We drove down dirt road highways, the red dust forming clouds behind us, the sunsets taking our breath away through the artful mix of pastel hues, the pinks and oranges emerging as the sun sunk on the horizon, the purples emerging in the twigs of the ghost gums. I lay in lonely motel rooms after the gigs, Mandy’s song rolling around my head.
We headed through the Pilbara desert, towards Darwin, then flew to Cairns and weaved south, town by town. The red earth was replaced by green oceans of young sugar cane fields, ‘Queensland rots the teeth of the world’.
Mandy’s song seemed to grow louder within me over the days. After a gig I sat at a dilapidated piano by the bar, the piss and beer smell stronger in the quiet of the late night, and started putting chords to the melody, embracing the rise, fall and return to the single note of the melody stroking out tensions and relaxations in the harmonic progression. It flowed from me and something felt right. I wrote out the chart so we could rehearse it at the next sound check.
We had arrived in Rockhampton. I had wondered if I would run into Mandy but I didn’t even know what she looked like or if she was even alive. I didn’t even know her last name. I took a walk beside the river in town, the dried leaves of the gum trees crackling under my feet and the cicadas’ deafening roar everywhere, Mandy’s song burning my brain with repetitions. I was eager for the gig.
Now I sit at the upright piano in the old hall, like something out of a Wild West film, hundreds of years of debutant balls and bush dances engraved into the old wood floors. People sit on white plastic chairs as the introductions finish and the band begins Mandy’s song, the saxophone weeping the melody, the brushes coaxing the song forward like someone holding up a staggering friend. All that sadness suddenly feels lighter, as though I have switched on a tap with the music and it all flowed out. The melody is kept sacred, only small ornamentations and variations decorating its edges.
The last note comes to rest, I take a deep breath in and exhale, my shoulders relaxing. Looking up, I again see my reflection in the glossy piano cover. There is a long silence before the applause begins like growing rain. I get up from my piano stool and walked down the wooden steps from the stage. As I make my way to the bar a light skinned aboriginal man with grey hair bars my way. His large hands grip my shoulders lightly and I look up. He has my father’s eyes, brimming with tears.
Published in Extempore Literary Journal