The Design of My Life

Do our lives have a design? Do we sow the seeds when we are twelve years old staring out the window at school? Or bickering brothers and sisters in front of the television? Why do some of us leave and some of us stay put? Why do some cause calamity and pain and seem to ride freely, while others suffer and suffer?

I always knew I would run away. Initially, the cost was great. Massive waves of guilt flooded through me each day, when I was a skinny vegetarian clothes-stealing au pair in Paris who told her poor parents she wasn't coming home.

I was so stubborn. Cropped my hair and wore huge earrings and went to clubs I couldn't afford at night. Caught the first metro home and sunk into bed. Wrote my first forgettable novel in a turret above a sweatshop with the boiler whirring next to me and learned to ignore mice.

Then for a while a man softened all this. And child-bearing and arduous travel made me refocus and begin to travel beyond myself. There was more restlessness, ever more. Again I yearned to slip out of my life.

Now, years on, it seems that there was a design all along. Seeking exile in order to be centred, reproducing in order to release the burden of self, being alone on a higher plane in order to attempt what I hoped I was designed to do.

Long red hair now and no mice. And today I finished a fresh new story.

the cherry orchard

The idea appeals. And I understand Chekov's tugged heart when his cherry orchard was chopped down. For it hurts to see a tree severed, its pale interior revealed.

But for a week now I have been dealing with cherries. Eating them by the gutful, hands like I've done an organ transplant, droplets on all my clothes and a smeared face. Cherry jam, cherry vodka, cherry grappa. They brings me bowls which I set on the outside table as the sunlight thins, after piano practice or I couldn't bear to watch my hands on the keys.

And I sit there pitting cherries, chucking the flesh into the pot, the stones into a bowl, looking at the corn growing in the field at the front, looking at my own trees inching upward, trying to think in a soothing way about the beauty of what I am doing when in truth I am wondering if anybody has ever invented a cherry-pitting machine, how much would it cost? could I model one myself?

Then the breeze hushes my thoughts and I think more roundly.

after the rain

Though the rain was pelting the shutters early this morning and wind whipped the garden and trees, I curled up smiling under the covers. No angst, just delight. Wasafiri, a distinguished literary journal publishing writers I adore, has after a year or so of waiting, word cuts, more waiting, approval by the achingly intimidating Board (Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Ondaatje, Gordimer) finally recommended my story 'Infection' for publication!

I am more than thrilled. I was expecting the usual close-to-the-mark-but-not-for-us. But this, approval by the gods!

I don't know when it is coming out, but surely I will be renewing my subscription. (I also have 3 short stories coming out in The View from Here this month. Hoping to see them soon.)

The best is that 'Infection' was written several years ago, it is heavy with Ghanaian heat, with illness, with contrast and deep pain. It all started from the postcard of the Princestown fort I have framed over my bed, an old concrete bastion on the rough road to Cape Coast. Not a slave castle like Elmina and Cape Coast, but still a disturbing and redolent sign of the country's mottled colonial past. In the story the protagonist, Eugene, comes back from London to reckon with a domineering mother and a dying half-sister, 'from the world of glass to the world of tin.. a man with an elaborate, undeserved education.. '

How far away are those days of palms and saltiness. I still see us driving along the plains and through the hot tin villages, plantain on tables for sale, smoked grasscutters, Winneba pineapples, the ragged sea a breath away.

Stardom

When I was eighteen I very nearly became a journalist. I called up the features editor of a big newspaper in my city and said I was going to interview John McEnroe. McEnroe at the time was a swearing, racquet-throwing idol for me, but the closest I ever came to him was grazing his arm as he passed through an annoying, off-the-court crowd.

However, needing to maintain the attention of the doubtful features editor, I claimed I had an interview with Ivan Lendl instead. Ivan, cold-blooded Czech champion, stared me down in a tiny elevator I managed to squeeze into in his semi-posh hotel (Kings Cross Sydney in the 80s, pre-terrorism, general snazziness). In my shaky suburban voice I asked the tall unearthly-looking man for an interview.

Ivan Lendl said No and when the door opened he walked away.

What was I thinking?

However. Still determined to maintain the attention of my adopted and now smirking editor, I hunted down someone else. I went down to the tennis courts, found a big sweating American player on a bed being massaged. Third rate, Steve Something. He was happy to be interviewed. They actually ran the piece. No picture of the player. No picture of his moustache. I was thrilled. I was a journalist. My parents were utterly relieved my pretensions to become a writer would disperse.

And it lasted. The next guy I hunted down was the fastest water skier in the country. He was local. I was so frigging charming he asked me out. And there was a photograph too, sure the copy was small, a big photo of the a guy holding on for dear life in a helluva spray. Wayne Something, it was miles before the internet.

This from the dreamy girl who grew up on Simone de Beauvoir and D.H. Lawrence and was determined to flee to Europe.

And did.

evolution

More work sent to a good home so delighted was I yesterday heading back to Veneto from the mushy Tuscan ski slopes. Dee-lite! It's with the very hip Kerouac's Dog Magazine and to be published in fine hard copy (300 pages of chic photography and quirky words) in October, Issue 4. I've been told the magazine sells out quickly so copies have been ordered. Have a peep at the site and you will understand why.

The funniest was, as we drove through the milky light of the green plains with spring so vigorous and the mountain edges gone, that I told my twenty-one year old the story. My young man/baby-in-the-basket, who doesn't know it but he was witness to my first story acceptance decades ago, when he truly was a babe-in-the-basket on the floor of our old chunky house in Mogadishu, Somalia.

He listened as he drove, he really did.

Hey, he paused, seeming to weigh it all up, making me feel like the desperate kid. That's good Mum, that sounds really good.

*****

And what else? 'Janet and the Angry Trees' is out online in Australian Reader. Do have a look! A Ghanaian streetworker living in northern Italy uses her village-life skills to become a carer for her lover's ancient parents, who have been discarded by modern, brash Italy.

Tears in the Fence, a lovely literary review where my story 'At the Malga' will appear in Issue 54 this year, desperately requires subscribers. Don't let another review go down!

cherry blossoms

It's been a long haul and suddenly sweaters are off and arms are bare. I am ready to regenerate the mind with green fresh growth, pruned a little, if it should become too vivacious.

I am closing off with the snow which has become gluggy and unpredictable of late, noisy and slushy so that I feel I am on a pair of water skis. I feel like real water, I am ready to roil up and down the pool.

Good news has come my way. Not a publication, but a story with a prestigious magazine which after a year is in the 'final phases' of consideration. Pray with me! I would love to find this baby a home. I also have another reply coming soon, I've been assured.

It's enough to drive one bonkers. Forget love, the words are ringing in my head. The cherry blossoms are buzzing.

true love

No news is good news, perhaps. I have slowed down, been distracted, the flutter in my head has stopped. I am not thinking but skiing. My translations are mechanical, thrifty. I just have to untangle the Italian and clip around the edges. Easy stuff. A sociology piece that beckons will be more challenging.

But I have lost the pace. I am working on promotion of my novel on the other side, and this takes up hours of productive time, grinding me into the desk, layers of cardigans, an escape to the piano with frosty hands.

I have no stories today. Nothing creative.

Just plumbers, a lunch, my love hit in my heart keeping me awake at night, and the promise of more skiing. And more.

I want my words back. I want my head to stagger.