Pink Mountain on Locust Island
Page 13
Flying locust. My Aunty Linda and me eating blueberry muffins across from one another on a plastic table. There’s a fly that keeps buzzing and then it lands on my Aunty Linda’s shoulder. It sits there for an hour. She has been praying. She goes to the bathroom for it, because she doesn’t like it when people pray in public.
HOME RUN BALLAD
We go to her Baptist church and I think about Reverend Bugsy helping me and I think about all the people I’ve been trying to make my messiah recently. And how Aunty Linda is sitting next to me and how she’s the only person I never tried to make my messiah, but how she is still sitting next to me. The hymn organ is playing, the organist practicing a slow pop ballad, he doesn’t know we’re here, he’s just playing for the entertainment of himself.
I try praying for Sadie and look furiously at my hands in my lap. I frown hard. I ask Aunty Linda how you know when it’s working.
She tells me that nobody knows and that’s the best part.
I tell her that I don’t know why nobody wants to make art about me.
She says that there’s no bigger sin than to think of yourself as something that lasts beyond the time you die.
I tell her tomorrow everybody will forget about Sadie to remember somebody else and she tells me: isn’t that kind of like a wildlife documentary?
I tell her: did you know that locusts were the first insect they found a human drawing of, it can be found inside a buffalo’s bone in the south of France.
A SPUR-THROATED VARIETY
Behind the yum cha Yuya tells me her ma’s gone on a trip to Shanghai. I tell her that this is the story of my life and Yuya puffs her cheeks and blows out air. She says that her ma said that she could never be understood in this city. That she was always the lioness or the tiger mummy or the dragon lady. Never a serious business, just a herbal healer. She always wanted to have the power of fixing people because she needed to prove herself, because she wasn’t enough as a woman, especially an Eastern woman. That’s how this city made her feel.
I tell her that her mother’s a drug criminal, actually. Yuya gives me a look with squinted eyes. She tells me: well, industries like that are sometimes built from not being able to try anything else.
I tell her that just because a person is not secure doesn’t mean they should make people’s lives crazy.
She tells me she doesn’t care, that her ma may’ve been making other people’s lives crazy, but she only did it to make hers better. I’m quiet for this.
When we run out of things to be angry about Yuya walks off to the swimming pool on her own. I watch her readjust her bag on her shoulder a few times.
SAHARAS
Out beyond the dunes is nothing, and Santa Coy looks at me with his black marker in his un-preferred hand, shiny black tar matter where his pupils are supposed to be. A goblin. He draws my kneecaps and nothing else, like my legs are ritual. A dry, hot condition. Buzzing, and the car is deflated underneath us. I will bring locusts into your country tomorrow. I tell him I like it being this way: just me and him. I wonder if anybody’s ever been killed by a woman’s leg.
The man from the couch is my hero. Santa Coy tells me the man from the couch killed an innocent woman. I tell him that he saved me. He tells me that the man from the couch slaughtered a woman for moving an inch. This is proverb. I tell him get used to it.
Acknowledgments
My endless thanks and dedications to my mum and dad, Christina and Adrian Lau, for always providing a loving and open-minded space in which to grow. You are at the core of all works that I attempt.
To Anna and Nathaniel for your conversation and influence. I am blessed to have such talented and passionate people around me.
To Marina and George Lau for inspiring me, and for all the love you give.
To Jesse Mercieca for the significant role you played in shaping this book from its first paragraph. Thank you for your wholeheartedness and for illuminating the importance of speaking my mind.
My hugest gratitude to Brow Books for first publishing this book with me, as well as for the passionate work they do for the literary community. Thank you so much to editor Sam Cooney for his care and diligence, and for mentoring me throughout the process of my debut novel. Thank you to Rosetta Mills, Brett Weekes and Chris Black for their dedication to seeing Pink Mountain reach its final form.
I’d like to acknowledge that this book was written, edited and first published on land owned by the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. I pay my respects to Elders past, present and future.
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JAMIE MARINA LAU is a multidisciplinary writer and artist. Her debut novel, Pink Mountain on Locust Island, won the 2018 Melbourne Prize Readings Residency Award and was shortlisted for the 2019 Stella Prize, a 2019 New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award, the 2018 Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction, and the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal. Her writing can also be found in various publications. She is currently writing her second novel, Gunk Baby, working on various projects, and producing music.
Pink Mountain on Locust Island is typeset in GT Walsheim and GT Sectra.