Peter Sharp Memorial Award
Equal runner up - Junior section
St Michael's Collegiate School
“It always feels impossible,” my father tells me, “until it is done.”
Those words make me shake, as if a cold fog surrounds me, but the words seem to give him comfort. Those eight words are said multiple times a week, at every opportunity. The words trail out of his mouth and sink themselves into the room, shutting my sister off, making my brother as heated as I am cold. But my dad will repeat them, always coming back to them. And we let him, no matter how much it hurts, no matter how much it reminds us that life is no fairy tale. Life does not always end happily. It will cut people out of your life as fast as a gardener cuts her rose.
I trudge up the stairs, trying to shove the words from my head. Another wrestling match is about to begin. It is getting harder and harder to win, the words getting stronger, throwing me off. I count the stairs, ‘17, 18, 19…’, but I am getting closer to the top of the stairs and still I struggle.
I open my mother’s study. Her smell brings the sting of salt to my eyes. This is one of the last rooms to be packed up before we leave. A life I have known for too long is gone completely. I sit down ready to sort through as much as possible, before the night falls and the true me awakens.
I stand in the middle of the dusty room. A gypsy aesthetic surrounds me, with deep reds, every wall covered in fabrics and prints. Colourful pillows cover the chairs, a huge rug covers the floor. A single plant sits on her desk, its leaves a pale brown, the once yellow petals rotting on the floor. The plant is between life and death; it will be difficult to revive and yet easy to kill.
Soon her desk is cleared, and my brother carries it out of the room. I mope towards a box of journals, some old and weathered, some new and colourful. They can all fit into one leaving box, but what use do I have of her memories? Which one of us gets to choose which memories to keep? And these are her memories not mine. Am I even to read them?
I start sorting through the pile. The first is new, only half-filled. The date on it labels the days before mum died. I let gravity grasp the book, it falls from my hands to a garbage bag at my feet. More journals are to be read. Some with unfamiliar handwriting. Words too personal to bear are skimmed until I only read those highlighted with the pastel-coloured pens we bought her on Mothers’ Day. The yellow is all used dry.
I read my favourite highlighted sentence for maybe the fourth time this evening: ‘family is one of life’s masterpieces’. The date on the page reads back to last year at my sister’s graduation when Dad and I watched my mother, after years of handing other people’s daughters the science prize, pass the paper scroll to her own. My mother will never hand me mine.
By the time the sun is setting, my eyes are dry from reading and I am cold in the darkening room. I finish flicking through Mama’s journals. I choose only four. These had the best memories, wisest words and favourite photographs. But that leaves the notebooks that belonged to her mother, and her mother’s mother. I am tired of sorting things out and tired of my sadness. I want to go downstairs to the warm kitchen, but my mother’s words return: “It always feels impossible until it is done.”
I flick through pages, conjuring deja vu. I was not alive when these pages were written, and yet I feel part of the story. I read words I know from heart. ‘Work hard in silence. Let your success be your noise’ was something my mother would say before our grand finals. And another of my mother’s favourites, ‘I changed my thinking, and it changed my life’. I smile when I read, ‘It is hard to forget someone who gave you so much to remember’. My mother said this about her own grandmother. The words repeating in my head, memories of school projects, first love, grand finals.
These words I learnt through the years are the words I grew around. These are the words that guided my actions and nudged at my decisions. These words have been shared by my great grandma to her daughter and to me. Through generations, the words have shared knowledge, wisdom and insight. Like that chocolate pudding recipe that Dad cooks. His mum taught him, he taught each of us, we will teach our kids. I remember my mother telling me that our cells carry knowledge like books carry words and this library builds the next generation. From mother to child, our cells contain ancient knowledge that goes back further than the written word, further than even a human child. Such a strange word, mitochondria, that describes life as a library.
After the five-minute warning for dinner, I finish the last journal that tells the story of Granny Kathy and the birth of my mother. Mum lived a happy life, giving Kathy three grandchildren, but Kathy tells the story as one that begins with the fear of being a young unwed mother in a world that judged her for it. The journey would have been hard for Kathy but, from what I read, she had few regrets. Mum has highlighted the part where Kathy gives advice to her future self. The words tingle with recognition, as though they have been spun into my very being: ‘it always feels impossible, until it is done’.
. . .
Acknowledgements
The quotations used in this story are taken from the wisdom of Nelson Mandela, Joseph Chilton Pearce and Frank Ocean.
Forty South Publishing and the Tasmanian Association for the Teaching of English (TATE) congratulate everyone who entered our short story competition in this challenging coronavirus-affected year. We would also like to recognise the extra work put in by teachers and parents to support these young writers and to maintain the general education of young Tasmanian school students.
The themes this year echoed the world-wide pandemic. For the Juniors (Years 7-9) the themes were ‘Connection’ or ‘Community’ and for the Seniors (Years 10-12) they were ‘Isolation’ or ‘Island’. Students were free to interpret their chosen theme in any way they wanted.
Chris Gallagher judged both sections and was impressed with the overall standard of entries. She could not split her two top stories in the Senior Section and so the senior prize has been shared by Tabitha Glanville (Scotch Oakburn College) and Tara Sharman (Hobart College). In a first for Clarence High School, Oenone Schofield took out the Junior Section with her story, ‘Home’.