Songs for a Blind Date: Josephine Burden

By Josephine Burden

Songs for a Blind Date is the second in a trilogy. Each book stands alone but is linked by themes of place and the story of Jessica. In the second book, Ernesto, an Italian war orphan, is put on a ship to Australia when he is twelve years old. Ernesto grows into Queensland manhood in the canefields of the North and becomes Ernie, the postman who delivers Jessicas mail in a suburb of Brisbane. By the time Ernie meets Jessica, he has re-invented himself as a bachelor living on acreage with his own mail delivery company. Now he sings snatches of his own song but still yearns for the songs of his mother. Jessica is an established academic, living her own life and working on her PhD. Ernie and Jessica find some joy in each other but is it enough for them both to find new notes to harmonise the clashing chords of their different lives?

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Jul 4, 2013
• ISBN: 9781481798938

Josephine Burden

Josephine Burden is based in Malta and writes about her life, her travels and the people she loves. She published her first book after retiring from full-time work as an academic is Australia. She is currently working on a trilogy that explores the meanings of the Mediterranean Sea in her own life and in the stories of others who have lived around its shores.

Book preview

SONGS FOR A

Blind Date

Josephine Burden

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AuthorHouse™ UK Ltd.

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Bloomington, IN 47403 USA

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© 2013 by Josephine Burden. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 06/24/2013

ISBN: 978-1-4817-9892-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4817-9891-4 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4817-9893-8 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Prologue

Chapter 1 City Cats

Hearing New Notes

Chapter 2 The Italian War Orphan

What If It’s Not Very Good?

Chapter 3 Menopause Blues

Book In Hand

Chapter 4 The Queensland Way

In The Archives

Chapter 5 The Blind Date

North To Townsville

Chapter 6 Ernie Finds A Way

The Road To Abergowrie

Chapter 7 Moving On

Whatever Next?

Chapter 8 Border Crossings

Coming Together

Chapter 9 Ernie And Jessica

Epilogue From Malta

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I acknowledge the original owners of the land now known as Australia and the people of Malta who have welcomed me into their island.

In writing this book, I recognise all the men who have touched my life and who remain my friends; Boris, Jack and Tony who blended into Jake; Jens, Lou and Colin who became the sailor, the fisherman and the postie. But this book is only my story—others would tell a very different tale that would be no less fictionalised.

Thanks also to my women friends who sing their own songs in harmony with mine. Particular thanks to Marina Thacker who transcribed the music for City Cats, Lauren Daniels who helped with a very early draft of Chapter 1, Vonnie Clearskye for her poem, Life is just a Passing Phase, Auntie Vi McDermott for her inspiration in the Women’s Theatre Company, ICY TEA and to my sister who continues to inspire love in all those around her.

PROLOGUE

I hear the sounds of place more clearly as I grow old, as though the earth is calling me home. Some people stay and listen profoundly to one song until they fade into the walls and become the notes that others hear. Some move on and weave new harmonies into the song of life.

I wanted to hear the notes of new places and sail on a wash of sound until the rhythms carried me into deeper water where snatches of the songs of the world rippled across the surface. Perhaps I could pick up a minim here, a quaver there and although I can’t read music, I could work the notes together in my head and listen for the music in words.

The audiologist said that the ringing in my left ear was because my ability to hear the higher tones was declining in that ear. This causes my brain to become bored and invent things for me to listen to. It isn’t a very satisfactory explanation but the audiologist added that it was too early for the benefit of a hearing aid, so the ringing has become part of my song, like the drone of bagpipes from a Scottish moor.

When I decided to move on, the last thing I did before leaving Australia was take my collection of CDs to the local community radio station. The daughter of one of my friends said brightly that I should record the collection on an iPod and when I got to Malta I could buy a docking station and play my CDs randomly on shuffle. I never did. Without the visual reminders of the CD sleeves, the anonymous black iPod remains in a drawer and the memory of tunes merges into the background music of my life.

But the songs that I hear grow louder as the Middle Sea of my new island home swishes in my middle ear and distant forests on the other side of the world murmur their memories.

In Australia, the songs of place are strong with rhythms of drumming rain, dry heat and crackling fire syncopated by startling singular notes of bellbird and whistling kite. In Australia, people add their homeland songs to the ancient drone of place. My neighbor, Jake mixed the notes that he heard with the laments of his Scottish home and made his own song as he faded into the rhythms of mud and mangrove. Ernesto lived with the clashing notes of another world, mountains without sea, mother without form. His song struggles for shape in the bark of dogs and the bitter dream of family.

In Malta, the changing rhythms of the Middle Sea shaped the notes of my story into my first song cycle. The words became fixed on a page but the music stayed in my head. When I revisited Australia, the old songs were different. Some notes jarred and some had softened, some rang true and some were out of tune. I set to and wrote another song. Here it is.

CHAPTER 1

City Cats

Bulimba in 1864

John Watson’s ferry

Running the river to Brisbane town

Seeing the changes

Knowing the tides on sand and mud

City Cats are smooth and sleek

They cruise the river

St Lucia, the students come and go

Crossing to West End

Heads in their books at jacaranda time

Seeing the changes

Wondering how to turn the tide

City Cats are smooth and sleek

They cruise the river

At Southbank, the old men cross the bridge

Crossing the boundary

Walking from boarding house to where?

Seeing the changes

No longer wondering why

City Cats are smooth and sleek

They cruise the river

J AKE LAY IN his single bed listening to the early morning sounds of the creek. He had not heard that particular butcherbird before. He whistled the notes softly, glad that he could still pick out the tune by ear, glad that here was another day.

His heartbeat fell into the rhythm of the old Gardiner motor he could hear chugging down the channel against the rising tide. For a while he was a child again sleeping in his bunk next to the engine of the old cruiser working the tides of a Scottish loch.

He heard his neighbour, Jessica, getting out her bike and knew that it must be Saturday. She would ride to the shops to get the weekend papers and croissants and then carry on to the caravan park further up the creek to have breakfast with her friend, Lars. Like Jake, Jessica was Celtic saltwater people from the west coast of Scotland. She had moved in next door many years before. He wondered if her dark hair was turning grey by now.

Soon he would get up and sit on the front deck of his small fisherman’s cottage. Out there in his wicker chair, he could feel the bay breeze on his face and smell the mangroves at low tide. Love of sea and wetland salted his senses and brought together all the colours and tastes of his life. But above all it was sound that drew him into this edge place where saltwater met mud on the boundary of Brisbane city. So he sighed as he sat up on the edge of his bed and felt for a steady footing on the timber floor.

As he went about the morning tasks of living Jake thought about the small army of helpers that enabled him to stay in his own home. If they had replaced things in the right spots he could put together his own breakfast. He was used to working in the confined spaces of ships and boats where everything had its place within easy reach. So the small daily tasks of preparing simple meals helped him feel connected to the tides that covered the mud twice a day and sustained the rich life of the wetlands.

Today, he was able to put his hand readily on bowl and spoon, cereal and milk. He took his breakfast out on the front deck and thought about his neighbour, Jessica, while he ate. Jessica shared his love of sea and boats. They often sat together on Jake’s front deck as the sun went down behind his cottage. They listened to the evening sounds along the creek edge: the flying foxes flapping in from Bulimba Creek to the north and the tawny frogmouth leaving its roost of the day; the crash as the possum landed on the roof and drummed out its familiar path to the telephone wire that led into the mango tree. In between the quiet whisperings and noisier rhythms of the creek, they swapped stories about storms and floods and perfect days on the water.

Jessica told stories about working a prawn trawler for a year together with her partner. They worked out of Townsville in the North of Queensland. Jessica loved being on the sea but after a few months, she found the work brutalising. She never felt quite in control of the machinery, the motors that droned them through the night’s work and rolled the wires from the nets onto huge drums. She also worried about their precarious financial situation that made no allowances for the cycles of seasons and weather.

One evening on Jake’s front deck when lightning was flickering out to sea and Jake could feel the faint rumble of thunder in his chest, they got talking about wonky holes.

I’ve never quite understood what causes them, said Jessica.

Jake explained that they were depressions on the ocean floor that worked with the tides to collect mud and rubble.

Well after Graham and I had been working the boat together for almost a year, Jessica replied, one of our nets dropped into a wonky hole on the second shot of the night. We didn’t realise until we were bringing the nets up and the whole boat started leaning. I thought we were going to roll over.

Jessica gazed out through the night to the creek remembering how she had tried to balance all that weight of mud with her own feeling for a turning point.

How did you fix it? asked Jake, stroking the armrests of his chair with his hands.

I did what I would do on a sailing boat and ran out on the opposite outrigger. Graham still mocks me with that story—totally useless on a trawler with a net full of rubble.

Jake waited without comment for the story to continue.

Anyway, Jessica went on, Graham put the brakes on the drum and we went very slowly ahead for what seemed like hours as we streamed the nets and eventually emptied all the mud back into the bay. He was hanging on the spreader boards trying to undo the cod end with a boat hook. I felt totally helpless. We lost the whole night’s fishing time as well as the catch for that shot.

It was a clarifying moment for Jessica. As the dawn came up and they steamed back into the creek with the seagulls wheeling, she decided to leave the boat and return to her shore job. Her partner took the trawler north and worked the boat with the help of crew picked from the regular stream of travellers who turned up on the wharves seeking the meaning of life. Inevitably, their relationship foundered and Jessica moved away from Townsville. A few years later, she bought the house next door. Since then, Jessica enjoyed the sea in boats that relied on muscles and wind rather than machinery and on her 50th birthday she had bought the old dragon class sailing boat that now sat in her front garden. Jake still had some of his sight then and went to Jessica’s party when all her women friends walked down to the boat ramp to bless the boat.

Squabbling mynah birds brought Jake back into his morning. He had finished his breakfast and it was almost lunchtime. He heard Jessica return from her visit to Lars. Jake called out a greeting and hoped she would come over for a chat. She did.

How is Lars? asked Jake. He liked to hear about the Norwegian sailor whom he had never met but whose story helped him make sense of his own world now that he could no longer see. Lars and Jake had both been seafaring men. Lars was from a Norwegian shipping family and Jake had worked on the dredges on the Brisbane River and later skippered one of the little cross river ferries that continue to link North and South Banks. When the new high-powered catamarans had been introduced to turn the river into a major commuter route Jake had written a song that he called City Cats. He sang it to himself sometimes as he sat on the front deck waiting.

"He’s nearly finished the model of Bluenose," replied Jessica. There was an uneasy hesitation in her voice. Bluenose was one of the first America’s cup contenders, a fishing clipper that needed speed to get the catch to market. Lars had started building the model after he had learnt of his illness.

Jake allowed the silence to drift through the timber of the deck. He had pieced together the story of Lars and Jessica who had been lovers, brought together by Jessica’s sailing boat. A year or so after she bought the boat, Jessica put it up at a boat yard where Lars was working with a friend to restore an old Herreshoff. As Jessica eased her boat onto the slip ready to be pulled out, Lars was caulking the hull of the Hereshoff and came over to help her. He was wearing a carpenter’s apron.

Their affair began the following day as they both straddled Jessica’s timber mast struggling to get the screws out of the ancient mainsail track. They looked up from the concentration of keeping the mast steady with their legs and straining to turn embedded screws, caught each other’s eye and laughed at the blatant humour of the situation. After the mast was stripped, they cracked a bottle of red wine.

Over the next month they completed the painting and refitting and the boat went back in the water. After that, they no longer had a shared task to bring them together and they