Coral Hull: Prose: I Will Never Live In Mosman: I Met The Devil In An Abandoned Railway Yard

I MACKENZIE KNIGHT I A CHILD OF WRATH A GOD OF LOVE I FALLEN ANGELS EXPOSED I

CORAL HULL: I WILL NEVER LIVE IN MOSMAN
I MET THE DEVIL IN AN ABANDONED RAILWAY YARD

The Devil flaunts his sexuality. He always offers you something sleazy, in return for your eternity. It was coming on dark in Liverpool, on the outskirts of Sydney. I stood by a piece of jagged metal and concrete pipe, at the abandoned railway yard near the train station. The grass had caused an itchy rash to appear on my thighs. My mother was off at the plastics factory in Lidcombe. My father was drunk in the outback and had been lost in the floods up near Naromine. Later I found out that he had gotten so stoned out on a property, that he had slept it off on a stranger's grass mat floor for three days, so the story went. A couple of flies hadn't shifted from his shoulders in the heavy weather. The dull heat was trapped beneath the persistent outback rain. It was the kind of heat that made the wings of mosquitoes heavy and sluggish. My father's sleeping form had again offered itself up to their realm, both as a lifeboat and a dinner plate. By the time he stood up, the brown flood waters that had drowned millions of other insects, lizards and snakes were receding. He walked out into the blue muddy day, bleary eyed and amazed at the world like a boy. He was suprised that he had again come back to life, even after he had again tried so hard to destroy himself. He was bordering on professional at it by now.

Meanwhile, back at Flemington station my mother struggled home from afternoon shift at the factory, carrying her old brown coat on her front as though it was her next baby. She was so hard and callous inside, that she would have the rest of her life to be dissatisfied, in the company of men weaker than herself. She spent her mornings before work in a constant state of flight, never keeping still enough to be acknowledged or talk to a daughter like me. On her days off she would restlessly sort through her jewellery box, trying to untangle the fine gold chains or pick up autumn leaves that littered the front yard lawn. 'They get into the swimming pool,' she said. And there they would drown. It was love she was really looking for, but she was never still enough to find it within herself. Whenever she stopped, she suddenly she saw her situation for what it was and she got frightened. Inside this anxious woman, as inaccessible to her children as lawn frost in autumn, was the great fear of death without love. At about the time the flies shifted from my father's shoulders out on the floor of a derelict house, my mother stumbled across her first dead body in the gutter outside the Collingwood hotel. She was on her way home from the factory after midnight. I didn't go home. I never knew where my brothers were. They didn't like me and I was tired of cooking tea for them.

Instead I hung around in the abandoned railway yard that afternoon. I stayed there long after I should have left, my forehead falling into shadow like the side of a hotel wall. I was beginning to believe that it didn't get any better than this, so I turned to nobody for sustenance. The weeds that had lifted the hives to the surface of my legs were oozing sticky white milk. My face was plastered with zits. I thought I am going to have to toughen up. I wanted the gift of not feeling anything at all in the world. The gift of no pain and no joy. I was prepared to forfeit all hope to stop feeling. I believed that to stop feeling altogether, was the only way to alleviate the terrible lovelessness that existed all around me. Yet each time I was ready for the final abandonment, it was the same Devil who was waiting there for the hand-over, his black wings tucked into his lapel. I saw visions of the world I half lived in every time I closed my eyes. In the early hours of the morning, there were the nightmares of disembodied hands, coming out from the darkness to strangle me or knock me down. On other nights I was a lost child who ran barefoot, down icy corridors with paint flaked walls and hallways of smashed glass. I ran through these empty haunted houses towards my mother. She was always walking away, her cold frail back turned on my desperation.

The Devil placed these dreams inside me. He slipped them through my open mouth while I slept and into the corners of my psyche. It was like he was trying to force my tears back in, or making me eat what I had screamed out. Beneath his suit he was the god of another land, a place more lonely and beautiful that I had ever imagined. The dark hair emerged from his sleeves, running along the backs of his hands like wild horses throwing up sand along a windy shoreline. His smile was inviting me to run like an untethered mare beside him. But I was too afraid to begin the fatal transformation, where hand became hoof. Yet he seemed intent upon cutting my fear to pieces. Pretty soon these visions were to walk with me, through the parks and along the streets. They appeared each time I closed my eyes, because to look out at the world was too painful. Each time I created darkness by a blink, that space got filled by a heart intent upon my murder. White floaters sailed across my eyes like yatchs, so that when I stared out into the world, it was like looking through a broken window glass. When I closed my eyes it was so painful, that I thought my pupils were being cut to pieces, and the tears I wept were blood from my vision shreded by boundaries of amnesia.

This world was hard enough to face. It was cold and callous and would predate upon me, whenever I gave it the opportunity. So I didn't often let it in. When I got weary I hid myself in the giant industrial pipes, where some kids had played and others were murdered. It was simply a matter of not being picked off, before you were big enough to defend yourself. Inside there was the other predator of self-hate smashing me up, until pretty soon I was perpetually hiding from all of it. The gap into which I could squeeze into, in order to escape became narrower, until it was like being wedged inbetween two walls that were closing in on me. My head was beginning to split from the pressure, while in my heart I fell apart. I felt that there would be that final snapping sensation, where I would begin to giggle a path to hysteria. It so happened that years later, when I was lying mad on a mattress on the south coast of Sydney, that I just kept yelling out, 'Mrs Walker Mrs Walker Mrs Walker,' to the person who was looking after me, until he began to laugh. Then I laughed too, and cried out her name all day and all night. I didn't know why and concern was a thousand miles down from that height. I could have been saying the words, 'salt 'n' pepper salt'n'pepper salt'n'pepper,' for really it was only an excuse to perpetually scream, falling through the layered worlds of myself.

I met the Devil in an abandoned railway yard. He was hiding up in an oleander tree wearing a black hat. He wanted to fuck me but wouldn't say it outright. I was a sixteen year old virgin and wanted it with no one. He said that he didn't have to touch me and promised death with love. This prospect of an ending seemed to excite me, and he was quick to notice my indecision. The pain was so intense that his invitation to leave the world, was a welcome mat placed down at the doorway to a better existence. He was offering it to me on a platter, if only I would be lead there by him. They were all the little boxes on his magic table and he was about to lift the lids. I thought because he offered this, that deep down he really loved me. I was so screwed up inside, that I thought that simple intimacy meant my self destruction. It was one way of leaving the earth. At least I wouldn't be alone. How could I know what love or touch felt like from another human being? 'I am all beings to you,' his dark lashed eyes spoke to me like feathers. Inside his enormous chest was the heartbeat at the centre of the cosmos. If I could just fall in I would never be lonely. He was the mother I never had calling me back home, so I could start all over again. But I always declined his invitation. The truth was that I didn't know how to accept him. I didn't think I was worth an invite from anyone, let alone a handsome supernatural being. So when I said 'no' I was left alone. He was disgusted and delighted by my lack of self worth. It was only predators like the Devil who ever pursued me and only my damaged frightened heart that always ran away to be lonely.

Yet the Devil himself didn't give up so easily. In between his stylish visitations to other lost souls and all the fucking and galloping in his sodden fields, he came back to make sure. It was his job to attend the wars of the wounded fighters, offering his coarse hand with the promise of lifting them up through their savagery and injuries. Many of them died wrapped up in his cape before they ever woke to a new life. The Devil appeared in all the bottlebrush trees that I moved past on my way home from school. He said, 'I'm losing interest.' He tossed me down some amphetamine and said that he would be the only one to ever love me. He said, 'deep inside your heart is where I live. We're from the same side of the city, Angel.' He smiled when I winced. His propositions were sexual in tone. He was somehow hypnotic, trantric, trance-like and winged. But in reality he wanted nothing less than my soul and my soul wanted someone to want it. It seemed like a good arrangment. For years on end he would visit me in dark rooms. Even after my first boyfriend went home, he would smooth talk his way into my life. But that was in the future five years from now. Today I walked right past that tree and swallowed the drugs. He was close to consuming me and I was willing to be eaten. The maggots moved up to the surface beneath the ground, my school shoes sinking in. He promised that we would be together for eternity and that if only I would truly take him in, I would never be frightened again. You know I might have succumb but I didn't know how to. It seemed that The Devil himself was unable to convince me, that I was worthy.

This dark god deserves points for persistence and I don't blame him for becoming testy. But I was just a girl terrified of personal contact, even of the vague intimacy one could have with the Devil himself. The days I spent in the abandoned railway yard at Liverpool station were filled with indecision. I was unable to leave my old life and unwilling to enter the new one that he offered me. I was looking for another way out, through the industrial waste of this world. If that's what we start with, that's what we've got to work with. No-one came into my life to replace the Devil or to offer me what he had offered. Many years later, when I was lost, I lit a candle each time I saw the dark figure with the long mane and shiny black boots entering through the front gate. Fortunately for me I was frightened enough to keep everything out. I did not distinguish between the good and the bad. I judged everything on its ability to love me or threaten me, without knowing the difference between the two. He attempted to enter into who I really was which was void. I viewed the world in such a wide-eyed way, that the largeness of the pupil gave a warning, to all but the worse of the predators. These human predators who thought stupidly to themselves, her fear is what will lead me into her. So that even when I didn't want them, it was like a net hauling them in, so that once touched by the infinity of my core and the absence of what it meant to be human, they could have their time of being lost and afraid.

    

This website is part of my personal testimony that has been guided by The Holy Spirit and written in Jesus' name.

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