Three Fictions
by Girija Tropp
THE MATTER OF BABY
Moses puts the baby down when the car comes past the trees flanking the first curl of a long drive into the property. It putzes onto the gentle grass slope. The sun is a bit bright so he places the diagonal corner of the cotton blanket over the baby’s face. Then he worries about breathing problems so he pushes the fold back. He is going to ask Hibiscus, his lost sister, to give the baby her special name.
He waits on the banks of the dam till she parks the old Volvo. The day has started now, he tells the baby. He ponders on the way that Hibiscus’ legs cycle under a calf-length green skirt and how the brown thongs lift through the grass. “You have good circulation like me,” he says, giving her a kiss on the right cheek. She smells of wood gum.
“Why do you say that?” She is looking at the baby.
“Like me, you don’t wear much on your feet even though the weather is turning cool.” He bends down to pick up the blanket parcel. “Meet the baby.”
“Who does it belong to?”
“My…” He pauses. “Wife of yesteryear.”
“So how come you’ve got—is it a him or a her?” Hibiscus strokes the baby’s nose and the eyes open wider.
“What happened is that my mother was watching TV.”
“Oh?”
“She was trying to make the baby quiet and was getting very tired. Mother is old and has been sick recently. So she told me to take a walk so the baby can stop crying. I have been feeding her milk from a bottle. I have no good ideas about how to feed youngsters.”
Hibiscus puts her satchel down and her hands out for the baby but it turns its face away. “Oho, Moses, you are his favourite person. Tell me, when did our mother give this baby to you?”
“Yesterday. In the evening.”
“There will be some very worried persons looking for this baby.”
Moses hangs his head. “I suppose I should have rung but I didn’t have the right coins. When you have a baby, you can’t just stop doing things for it and start doing something else. Last night I thought of ringing after the baby fell asleep but you can’t ring people at home after ten.”
“I think you will have to take the baby back.”
“Okay.” He sits down on the grass.
“I mean now.”
“But we haven’t had a picnic yet.”
Hibiscus shakes her head. “We might be God-saved but we are in the real world. The police are probably out looking for you.”
“I don’t want to go into hospital and I don’t want drugs.”
“Stay calm.” Hibiscus chews her lips. “What’s the number of our mother?” She dials and puts the thing to her ear and her head to the side. “Hello there, this is Hibiscus and I am ringing for Moses to tell you that the baby is with us, and is well and safe.
“Easy there Mother, relax and take a deep breath or the other way around. No, he wasn’t trying to steal anything. And I’m not an imposter!” She has to move the mobile from her ear again and back. “You asked him to walk the baby and he took… Mrs Mother, now please settle down or I will hang up.” She drops her hand so that the mobile is pressed to her thigh and their mother, ElsieMaw, is talking to a lime green skirt.
HOW TO BE A FISHERMAN
Hibiscus takes the baby so he can organize a good piece of stick and tie a string to it, and then add a bit of meat on the end of the string. He has convinced her of the deliciousness of a yabby meal. He casts the string into the water and is so focused on his yabbying that he does not speak, and she has to repeat the question. “So whose place is this?”
“This is my old friend Dean’s house. He has also got problems like I have, you know what I mean by the reality problem. I told him that drugs are not necessary but he is into his medication.”
“I can see that you have a purpose to calling me here.”
“Can you do something for my friend Dean?”
The baby begins to whimper, and they feed him from the milk bottle. Moses repeats his question about Dean. “Well,” Hibiscus says and she seems to be having trouble knowing how to answer. “It’s like this—there is the right time, the right place and even the right person in addition to a person’s readiness for saving. I might not be the right person. I have no instruction to come here and save a Dean. However, the fact that you’ve asked me to save a Dean at this place and in this time might count as instruction. That is, if you have received instruction to ask me. However you have not been passed into the inner circle so I doubt it. Nevertheless, I will do my best.”
“Dean is not awake yet but we will start cooking the yabbies, and wake him up in time to eat.”
“Just yabbies?”
“There should be something else in the cupboards. Maybe some noodles.”
Hibiscus shades her eyes. “Is that a vegie patch I see over there?”
“I believe it is. There is a fence around, and it has beds with wooden planks, and I see green plants all of a similar nature in rows.”
“I think you have described the essential composition of a vegetable garden.”
“What a miracle! Have I told you how such marvels are constantly occurring to me since I met up with you?”
“Yes you have, as a matter of fact, but you wait till you are an Ascended Master, the fruits of the earth shall wait in line for your touch.”
Moses reels in the sixth yabbie and drops him in the yellow bucket and ties on more meat scraps. “I want the whole world to find miracles,” he says fervently and casts the line. A yabbie bites almost immediately.
“We, the God-saved, can get a little over-enthusiastic.” Hibiscus says.
They throw back the younger yabbies into the opaque water and fill the bucket with fat scrumptious-looking older yabbies. Moses thinks how amazing it is to find so many yabbies hiding in such a shallow dam.
“It’s because of the coming spring,” Hibiscus says. “And we have some very warm days that are conducive to the wellbeing of yabbies in dams.” She grins, and brings out a banana which she offers first to Moses. He takes a bite and then she takes a bite, and then he takes a bite and then she takes a bite, and in this manner they finish the banana. When the pail looks to be three quarters full of yabbies, Hibiscus says how these creatures could feel crowded, and they tip half their catch back into the water. As they walk towards the house, Moses expresses his feelings with some movements that he calls gladden-the-heart. “I have always dreamt of being a fisherman.”
FRUITS OF THE EARTH
In the kitchen, Moses puts a big pot of water on to boil, and starts cleaning and shelling yabbies. “Normally,” he calls out into the lounge area, “these would have to be fed on milk till they are cleaned out but we are hungry. We are to expect a little grittiness.”
“T’s’okay,” Dean calls out above the guitar notes, and says something about East meeting West.
Moses lifts the yabbies in time with the music rocking his brain. His chin bobs forward and back as he works. Peeled shells are chucked into the compost bin. Another saucepan of water goes on to cook while he hunts for some noodles. He finds tomatoes and onions. He chops these up into another pan of oil, and adds some herbs from pots on the window sills that need watering, a matter immediately rectified.
“We need vegies,” he calls out.
“Soon,” Hibiscus says in a drowsy voice. “Do you mind if I wait a little? I’ll even help with the veg.”
Moses sniffs the air. There is a mushroomy smell adding to the smokey warmth of burning logs.
“Want a drag mate?” Dean is asking over the sounds of the east.
“No thanks.” Moses bends over his yabbies and talks to them as he works and wishes them happiness in his tummy. After a while his hunger reaches an ecstatic intensity. Hare Ram, Hare Krishna, Dean chants. Gopalajaya, jaya, jaya. Shell after shell is dropped into the bucket, and a glass bowl fills with yabbie meat, and noodles get dropped into boiling water, and he pepper-and-salts the cooking tomato-onion mix. There is a moaning sound that catches his attention. Moses stops for a minute. Hibiscus? The music has changed without him being aware. No longer is it live music. Instead, there is a CD playing softly. There is another soft slippery sound, and cloths rubbing against other cloths.
Radha, Radha, Radha, Radha, Radha. Moses sings with the CD.
It is time to get the vegies so he turns the flame down and tiptoes out. A side glance towards the fireplace confirms the fact that Dean is lying on top of Hibiscus. Under the navy blue woollen robe, Dean’s backside is making a prayer to love. Hibiscus has her hands outflung and her face is hidden by hair, but she is making a noise like more, more, more.
Suddenly, she yells, harder, harder, harder and her heels drum on the robe. Moses realizes he has stopped and redirects himself to the front door. God bless you, my children, he says to the air. Some distance from the house, with the vegie garden getting closer, he flings the pail into the air and catches it again, letting out a great whoopee. There is every chance that Dean is going to be saved. With the knife, he cuts a bunch of silverbeet, and picks some beans from a kind of small homemade greenhouse. He would like to get more fruits of the earth but has to consider the timing of the meal.
Girija Tropp is the winner of the Boston Review Prize and the Josephine Ulrick Literature Award. Her work has appeared in Agni, Denver Quarterly, Mississippi Review, Fiction International, Chimurenga, and Best Australian Stories. She has completed two novels, working on a third, and lives and works in Australia.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of these three pieces? These three pieces came out of work that I began about 2003. It wanted to see through the eyes of the character Moses and the only way I could do it was to enter his world. I remember being frustrated and enthralled by the task. Moses was a relative of mine and I desperately wanted him to be ’saved’. In fact, come to think of it, being saved as an idea has followed me around for a long time. I recall a time in my early teens when I was having a particularly bad time in a third world hospital, having a vivid hallucination of Jesus commanding me to save the world. As to the Hibiscus in the story, I wanted to find the people who were ‘real’ to Moses and created her character out of an experience I had in my childhood. In Africa, when my parents would have one of their nighttime arguments, my mother would take us out to the hibiscus hedge to wait for Air India to land and take us home—they were both teachers employed after the country gained independence. The voice of these writings seemed to come alive when I could relax into that interesting space outside logic. The final draft of these pieces happened easily when I turned my contemporary eye over the writing. The need to keep the pieces under 600 words also decided me on refinements during the editing process.
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