Dare You is an entire conversation captured in an instant. She is the glance over a shoulder on a crowded train platform. It is full of people, noisy and dense. The crowds swell and surge, slapping against one another, a dull roar in the ears. There is helplessness, a lost sensation as people from different places and across time gather their feeble belongings and cram onto trains taking them places they know nothing about. There is the smell of wet wool, of panic and humidity trapped in coats. This is a time of owning little, and craving nothing except the safety and peace of a warm clean bed in a house of warm rooms. There are worn hands and tired eyes. This is a place of passing through and never staying.

But imagine for an instant you turn and stare across the tide of people. For a moment you look out over their busyness and their desire to be gone. You can see their bent backs and hear a baby’s cry. You hear the mutter and roar of a thousand voices, of calling out like birds to one another. The bark of officials.

And she looks back at you.

She stares right at you. It is a challenge or an invitation. She dares you to cross the line. In a glance she can tell you to step back out of her private space, she can tell you her loss and her anger. She is a woman to be reckoned with.

But you can’t work out any more than that. She’s glanced at you, and now she’s gone. She’s borne on this tide of people who are sucked out to sea on their trains that are forever departing the platform.

Then leap.

Watching them trust their anchor
lifted only on a breath,
I too lean back, close my eyes, let go.
An idling breeze lifts me and my feet
hang.

I rise on the scent of impulse,
forgetting my decisions.

But unlike the spiders
I drag line, net and hook like a drunkard.
I do not fall with grace.
In a wild-eyed blindness,
I am jettisoning silken threads.

There is no right or wrong
in this search for a rooted hold.
There is only my heart,
high in my throat.

I fish, not knowing.

He carried coals. He knew he did. As he leant and swayed with the tram on his daily commute, leaning into the muscle of his shoulder and enjoying the tension, he knew he carried them. As he neatly folded shirts, or aligned paper on his desk, he knew he carried them. A kiss on the cheek, a laugh with friends, sweeping the yard, a friendly wave in the carpark – he carried coals. They were warm and deep, comfortably buried beyond reach down past his spine. There was something weirdly soothing about their tender singeing, their raw complaint. They were something to be accustomed to.

But now and again. Now and again.

Now and again the coals would simmer and murmur to themselves and he’d rub his solar plexus thoughtfully. It would take a deep breath, a leaning over the sink, to help them settle, to rest again.

“Indigestion,” he’d say with a nod to his work colleague who glanced at him quizzically.

Breathing quietly, he’d still them. He’d close his eyes and imagine them dark and metallic, considering the impossibility of burning stone. The improbability of them. He could will them down, to a degree. He could cajole them into losing their heat and settling back into their familiar glow. He’d taught himself how to do this over time, a necessary teeth-grinding meditation.

Coals are dangerous. Without guidance, a strong hand and discipline, they can threaten to overtake you. They can blacken you, leave you raw and skin stripped. But they are an essential danger, as without them you lose your definition and your meaning. Living with coals becomes a delicate balance of keeping the fire charged, but never stoked.

He straightened his tie as he straightened his back. The burn resisted his early attempts to quieten, but he could feel the resistance loosening and his breathing slowing.

His tie was perfectly straight.

A Moreton Bay fig tree leaned in overhead as if it was looming to see what she was doing. There was the idle sounds of cicadas rubbing their legs. The sweaty smell of mulch and leaves pressed forward. Laurel ping-ping-pinged the sound up louder on her iPod and swooshed her finger around to choose another song. She felt like some funk. She felt like some R&B. Hell, she didn’t know what she felt like.

Another drag in on the cigarette. It shouldn’t feel good, she thought, but God it does.

The trees groaned and sang to each other around Laurel, and the ridge of root in the park bed shuddered. A tangling mess of vines and yawning branches overhead knickered, laughing at the brightly coloured young woman sitting below them at her park bench. They giggled at her nail polish and her spraytanned arms. The old treated wood of the park bench tittered along with them, smirking under the coloured PVC of Laurel’s bag. She was a cuckoo in their nest. The consistent muttering and sniggering of the glossy dank leaves of the strappy rainforest plants that edged the park went quite unnoticed by Laurel as she flicked her ash off her cigarette.

The ash fell in a gentle arc.

The hot fallen cigarette dust fell amongst the grass. This set up a mumbling and grumbling within the shoots, their waving bodies swaying away, repelled like a sea anemone. There was a ripple of discontent that crossed the grass tips at Laurel’s feet. The grass bent their heads to each other and passed on their dissatisfaction like Chinese whispers.

Not nice, they said as one. Not nice.

The mulch and dank heard the complaint, passing it up the torso of the tree like a breath. Not nice, they whispered back with their flickering dark tongues. Not nice.

Laurel’s iPod let out a tinny swish and beat, and she tapped her fingers against the table. Her cigarette glowering. She breathed deep and vaguely appreciated the sweet smell of earth and bone. She felt a flicker of something happy. Above the trees groaned, and there was a thick-voiced crack amongst the branches. Not nice, the tree said to itself. Not nice. The plants breathed in together, and then out.

Laurel didn’t feel the branch fall.

Before the ambulance came, the park keeper stood over Laurel’s prone body and reached to turn off her iPod where it lay stained in the grass. The hissing noise stopped. His boots pressed into the warm soil where Laurel’s hand now rested, her pale flesh dappled by the green light. It was quiet. The tips of the grass were flat now, lying underneath Laurel’s chest, her bent neck and head. They had been stroking her ear and cheek, reaching up to her unseeing eye. They would spring back when her body was removed. Laurel’s cigarette had burnt a few of the leaves of the strappy plant when it fell. There was a shiver of electricity that could still be felt.

Not nice, the dark mulch said one final time. Not nice.

The treated wood of the table giggled quietly.

I make sure that I walk quickly for the last couple of kilometres before I get to the homestead. The dust has gotten into the cracks in the leather of my shoes, and I want to lean down and rub at them with a spittle moistened finger. But I daren’t. If I stop for long the spirits might see me then. Well, they might pay me attention. I don’t want that. So I focus on the flattened plain in front of me, and the dusty white gravel that burns my eyes.

They’re spooky alright. Shapeless wafts of wind that push past you, pretending you don’t matter. My mum says that they never did her any harm as a kid, but you hear about other kids going missing and imagine the hollow, echoing pain of unanswered sobs in this landscape. Well. That’s enough to make me pick up the pace.

I’m not really frightened. Not truly. Not like when Charmaine’s dad decided to lean in the window of the room we were sleeping in the night of the town New Year’s Eve do, and whisper to Charmaine in that thick, fleshy-lipped voice of his that was soaked in beer. He made all these weird sounds and grunts, and Charmaine went stiff and silent in the bed next to me. He slurred Charmaine’s name urgently outside the window, and said something like “c’mon”, and then he moaned and I could hear him pissing against the wall outside. He didn’t come in though. He fell against the window frame instead and someone else laughed around the corner and he went away. Charmaine didn’t talk after that. No. That was scary. Not like the spirits in the grass.

I keep my head down when I pass the old tree. I don’t know why. Nothing bad has ever happened there but it just looks a bit like a really angry old woman. She’s kind of glaring at me. The roots of the tree are peeling up out of the earth and I sometimes think that she’s picking up her skirts and getting ready to run at me. So I don’t look at her directly. Just out of the corner of my eye. The old tree seems to hide the spirits, or else they don’t like her either, because the spirits don’t bother me again until I’m over the rise and out of her sight. I get a stitch round about here. There’s a pain in my side that says I’m walking too fast, but I daren’t slow down.

Once I got annoyed at being watched by the grass spirits that I flew around and shouted at no one in particular, but directly at the grass spirits that no one can see. They knew I was shouting at them. I can’t remember what I shouted. Something like “just shut up”. And they did. The whispering stopped. It only stopped for about a minute, though. They went back to pushing past me and showing their shoulders, and I had to walk even faster. As I did they kept up their whispering and wafting, and then they blew into a gust. They grabbed handfuls of fine gravel dust off the road and swept it into my face and eyes.

Mum said it was just a willi-willi, a gust of air, nothing more. When I got home after running the last bit I was hot and dirty from the dust, and she told me not to be silly. The grass spirits don’t throw stones, was all she said. How could they? Well. I reckon they do. I only feel better when I’m inside the cool of the hallway, looking out back down the gravel road, watching the wind kick up the dust in circles and the unmistakable shadow of the breath of the landscape.

It’s not just the wind, mum, I said. It’s not. She just looks at me without seeing.

I open up my chest and let the sky in.

I pull out the stuffing from last year.

I use a crochet hook to clean out the corners.

The bags of ribbon are on the dining table.

Running my hand down the ragged scar.

It makes me smile.

I have chosen a jaunty thread this year.

I will pack in more this time than last.

Safety pins hold the corners closed.

Wrapped in tight, I am held together warmly.

Everything I have is handmade.

The sounds of the tracks with their shiny silvery noise had cracked through my ears only a heartbeat before. But now that has gone. All that is left is this pocket of honesty and a shivery shaking wind.

The trees trembled their leaves and the plastic wrap from the chips had scuttled underneath the bench. I was thinking to myself that if you simply walked into this moment, this one and this one alone, you would not know that the train had passed. You would not have been aware of the block of light, refractions and people’s busyness, the squeals of metal being huffled to their next destination. All you would see is the delicious shaking and feel the wind in your hair.

I had sat and watched the train pass.

My ankles were crossed, and I could see my shoes reflected in window, window, door, window, window, door. My bag was on my lap. In the time it took me to look up and see my crossed ankles repeatedly move away and closer to me, their reflection bending with the light, the train had passed. On and away. I was left with the big handful of silence which washed in after the noise, filling the cracks like water.

So I sat in the moment, in the pocket, the pocket that followed the train.

The sound had disappeared along with the taillights of the disappearing carriage. Inside the pocket I sat with my head high and eye bright. I felt sharp and alert, birdlike on the platform with my hands gripping the bag on my lap. I was cocked. Glancing about me I could see people gathered in their dull waiting state, and immediately in that pocket I could see them for what they were, shaped by their journeys and trevails. The pocket gave me a chance to unwrap them, and the moment of honesty that followed the train washed over them like satin.

There was the older woman who smelt of loneliness, a confused garbled scent which reminded me of onions. She was rubbing her knuckles and thinking only of her dog. She did not look at me when I glanced over her.

The two twin schoolgirl sisters who were casually pulling at their hair to artfully arrange it. In the pocket of honesty they froze for an instant. In that sharp light, in the pocket, I could see the fraction of loathing of one sister for another. It was a tangled hatred, tripped up tightly with love. The smooth arcs of their brows, unlined, held secret furrows and future arguments.

There was the man who sat with his legs wide, his patent leather shoes buffed. I saw through his vacant stare and into the wire of the headphones he wore. I knew that the wires carried no music, no words. All he had was the voices in his head, an echoing rant of displeasure and disappointment. This would be all that he needed before he reached his destination. They would fuel him on.

I was drunk on the moment, the pocket of air that burgeoned around me helping me to see what we are and were. I shook my head fast to drink in the truth before the pushing rush of reality washed in over me once again, restoring the world.

The pocket moved on and I waited for my train.

The Germans have a word for it – heimweh. It’s in a book I read. I liked it the minute I read it. It kind of means homesickness, but doesn’t really. It actually means a longing for a place you know, a place you’ve forgotten but you need a gentle nudge to be reminded. I’ve often wondered about the fact that the Europeans can have single words for things that we can’t explain with one. Take for example, schadenfreude. It sort of means taking pleasure in other’s misfortunes, but that description doesn’t really cut it. I take it to mean that there are a lot of other colours in that word instead of just the black and just the white.

Right now though I’ve got a dose of the heimweh. I’m sitting here and playing with the sound in my mouth. Tossing it about, licking it.

It started round about the same time I started to to notice that my mother is stumbling over her English words. It’s as if she’s struggling to remember the plain Jane she was taught when she arrived in this country. She finds herself filling the gap with her original rolling European sounds, the ones that fit so delightedly in my ear.

I can see the flicker of disgust and frustration on her face as she wrestles with her language beast, grappling to grip the slippery surface. I know it must be tough for her, but I am looking forward more and more to the blocky sounding word that finally falls from her lips. It’s the one that sums up everything she’s been trying to say.

After it happened a couple of times, I did ask her to explain herself, but that just made her more agitated.

I stopped asking.

My mother and I take our cups of tea out on to the verandah and she frowns against the light as it bounces up off the plastic cover she’s put down to protect the old table from the bird shit.

She’s been talking to me about the old country, a dose of her own longing. I pretended not to notice when it started to happen because this is the sign I’m told you’re meant to look for. It means they are getting old, losing a grip. But it strikes me that my mother is hanging on more forcibly than before. There’s nothing fey about her. And I kind of like it when she tells me about the old country, her heimweh. Her cheekbones get more pronounced as she speaks, I’m sure of it.

I don’t hold her hand. That makes her nervous.

We drink tea from chipped mugs made from a weird brown glass material. I don’t question this. She’s had them as long as I can remember. She scratches at the bird shit on the plastic cover. We sit companionably.

The old country falls from her mouth in fits and starts. I don’t ask any questions, I just collect the words as she sprinkles them out. I know I’m waiting for the next moment when she blocks, struggles, stumbles with her new language, but then spits out her word in the old.

Out falls a perfect description. A lump of coal where a lump of coal should be. A word that fits the circumstance and the place. It comes from far away and long ago, but it is comfortable with the cups and the bent chairs, perfectly at home amongst eucalypts and harsh sunlight.

I am joyous. I am reminded of something I forgot, nudged towards something I thought I knew. Fish swim, wind blows and balloons rise.

My mother wipes her mouth and frowns.

.

I had not imagined the removal of poison to take quite such a long time, and to be such hard work.

Today lying flat in the afternoon light, twisting my head to catch a glimpse of glossy green-black garden, I wonder again at the simplicity of poison. There is a scudding movement of mercury in my limbs, the sound of rushing water in my ears. I can hear behind the roar the sound of  glasses full of water being hit with a metal rod.

I am in my body and not of it. I am asleep and yet I’m not behind my own eyes.

There is a sheer simple stupidity in ingesting poison. Years ago I took it in great drafts, served up to me in crystal. I recalled seeing it swilling in the glass, and noticing that it had a welcomingly oily grin. I can look back on that time now.  I can step back. There was the offer, and my acceptance.

I took the glass. I drank willingly, greedily even. In the back of my head were the little voices of disquiet that I shushed. Instead I looked elsewhere, seeking that smile of approval.

“That’s it. Drink it down.”

What harm could these little drops do me?

This was poison was made of small words, tiny and barbed but sometimes thick and weighty. Crushed into a paste, they were inserted into my food, into my drinks. Those potent little words, twisty and malevolent, were made into cordial. Some of them became soap with which I bathed. I knew they were there. I could sense it.

Today I try hard not to beat myself too regularly about consuming them. Anyone could make the same mistake, I tell myself without conviction. It was easy to confuse them for something else, I say. You could drink them down, consume them, cover yourself with them without realising.

I tell myself that now, but even then I knew they were poisonous.

As they were being prepared – gently, and lovingly even – I could smell it on his fingers, his breath. I could see the deeply held glitter of their animosity, the glimmer of their resentment and their jealously in my drinks and on my food. Yet I chose to ignore. It was my choice. I always had a choice.

I chose to breathe deep, shut my eyes and drink.

Poison made from words is like heavy metal in your bloodstream. It never leaves. You drag the stones of them in your kidney and liver. It builds in your joints in a yellow sap, and behind your eyes. It can burn red in your throat and you cry it out in hot splashes. It can turn your body against yourself.

Mine turned. Eventually.

Today I lie on a couch nursing sallow skin, a burning heart and the repeated sound of grinding teeth. As the spine of my book arcs, so do I.

My hands roam over the skin of my stomach, my hips and side. I find what I’m seeking with my eyes closed. I can feel the pus-filled poison under the surface of my skin – resting like an orange just under my ribcage. Massaging it, I can feel the anger it contains, red-hot and blistered.

It is a blunt act that comes next. In my half-hearted sleep, my fevered imaginings, I am taking a spoon that’s round and cool and I’m digging at my side. I’m working around the solid nauseous ball like I’m coaxing out roots. It is at once all pain, and all nothingness. The poison ball is spongy and thick, noxiously innocent. I can push at it with ever more insistent fingers.

I will spoon out the poison made of words. It will not come today, and it may not come out tomorrow, but it will.

Eventually.