Coral Hull: Prose: I Will Never Live In Mosman: Marina

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
MARINA

Marina, I hear your name and I remember how frightened I was of you at school. And I remember you skinny little brother and I ask about him years later, just to make sure he's still alive and doing okay. Marina, we all remember the day when your name was called at assembly and when no one answered, not even your brother with his face in shadow.

Marina will be a girl when I am eighty. She will stand there in her faded kind of way by the bottlebrush tree and by the hopscotch chalk marks, monkey bars and the school yard of our early lives. She will tell me what happened to us all. Of course I will be too old for her to recognise, yet I will know her. My memory growing long and stretching back into itself.

Marina, you are the girl who did not go forth into your life. Marina, we thought that you left us behind when you died of hepatitis, but it was really us who left you behind. Did she die of hepatitis from that tattoo or was it her father's doing? We all believed that tattoos were bad and that the blue ink had poisoned the skin on her arm. We didn't want to think too closely about our own relatives.

When she never turned up to school, the teachers didn't tell us why. The school assembly ground was boisterous with her space. It was as though we were all huddled awkwardly together and she was nowhere and everywhere. We just didn't know what to do with ourselves. We didn't know where to put our feet, so we stood on our school bags in case her ghost was standing on the asphalt. Because why shouldn't she be standing there with the rest of us today?

We didn't want to follow Marina down that route, because we were only young. We had only known so many dawns and each day was big with time. We didn't miss her and then we got frightened about not missing her, as if something bad would happen to anyone who didn't miss her. But we had always been frightened of her and why should we like her now? Now we would just be more and more frightened of her, because there seemed no explanation.

When she died with hepatitis we said, 'see?' We nodded to each other. 'See what happens to bad girls with dirty legs who are poor and don't wash.' 'See what happened to her.' We knew that it could happen to any one of us. Marina was now bigger than the school, but still we didn't want to be like her, because she was nothing and here we all were with our crossed over legs and little packets of chips.

The autumn wind was roaring through the playground and even Marina, who was very big and nasty, wasn't in it. It was bigger than a season. It was a gigantic roar that came from nowhere and dragged her into it. She howled like a dog, somewhere distant. Yet she wasn't anywhere. No shadow held her physical form and even before the big storms, there were no ghosts of her trying to haunt us and soon we forgot about her life and her history as well.

This was easy to do because none of us really knew her. I said 'mum?' When she answered 'yes', I didn't have anything to say, because I couldn't fathom it. I couldn't fathom why and it was too big a road for me to begin to travel on. I only knew that Marina had it coming to her. She met death on the same path and not long after her birth. It waited for her and blocked her way forward now and forever.

'Marina,' I call out in my dreams, 'don't go that way, come with the rest of us.' Oh Marina, we were from the poor streets, but we could all see that you had it coming to your miserable life more than most of us. If only she had listened for once. She was darker skinned and her skinny legs and wild temperament were badly bruised and wayward. Her school uniform was torn and we blamed her. She was the girl who had the gritty feet and dirty toenails wedged in sandals.

We were frightened of her oily scalp, her angry bullying and her foul mouth and she packed a rich thump. But even more than her, we were frightened of things too big to begin with. We were frightened of where she was going to go, before any of us could follow her, or show her a way out. We were frightened of what her death would teach us and the trapdoors of death were everywhere. It was dark. It was teaching us all the things that our teachers and parents had never taught us.

Marina, I've had everything that you didn't have and not because I am any better than you, but because you died from hepatitis. Because you were poor and died from a tattoo. And if you were my little girl now, I would keep a very close eye on you, because I would know that this life was coming to swallow you up and take away what it had given without warning and just because, well because of nothing.

Sometimes I am very close to that dead end street that you went down. I am on my way as well and there is death brushing silently past me. I whisper, 'today I was very close to the nothingness.' 'And how did it feel?' 'It felt like I was a light-filled rain shower, very alone and very peaceful.' Then the moment passes and you think how many brushes with death do we have before we are finally taken? How many choices will we have in that moment?

I am walking two parallel paths. I am saying one thing while my heart thinks of another. I am tossed between two thought processes, distracted, not really myself. Does death live in our lives as vertical and horizontal lines that we move through being touched at every point? When we are children running to catch the school bus, does death wait for us with Marina inside it? Does it wait for us everywhere in the atmosphere no matter how fast we run? I would prefer it if she wasn't there.

It now appears that everything we do is a step in the direction that Marina took. We can't do anything without risking our lives and yet we must go on being children and then adults and then old people and then bigger than the school. When we are older we will find other ways to avoid the death lines. For there has been a lot of death at our school and we are walking through an atmosphere of it. Those wreaths at the sites of car accidents, that's not half of it.

Is there death in my school shoe as well? Did another little girl wear them before we did? Would another little girl wear them after me? Or after I go to the place where shoes are not needed? I really don't know where I'm going, so I go on instinct. Every day is as big as a life and the sun is the night light of it all. I have not stopped time. I don't make a mistake and take the wrong path. Yet in my mind the day is under my control. I have stopped this moment for now.

And this is all because of who you were Marina and what you are now. Because what you are now and who you were before you were a child, has been happening for a long time. You were only in your yellow tunic with the bottle green blazer for a very short time. That was hardly you. You are really invisible. That is the you I know the most about. The you who is not there. Now that I am an adult, you would be so small to me. Yet you are everywhere. Only my memory of you is limited by my own life experience.

Oh Marina, I am sorry that you had a short and tough life. And that we were so frightened of you. And that you were ugly and a bully. And that all that was taken away. Death is the adult with the big creepy hands who has no heart. It wasn't even cold the day you disappeared. It was a sunny, disinterested day. A matter of fact lizard eye day. A day where many bees and flies died and where leaves were born from stems. But all of this means nothing to you, the school girl who was and who is no longer.

    

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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