The Dark Poet

By Kathryn Gossow

Some people are so broken they can only cut us.

With poetic dexterity, Aurealis Award finalist Kathryn Gossow interweaves eight short stories of longing and alienation featuring outcasts and the misunderstood. From a homeless storyteller to a gardening soothsayer, to a copy editor who owns a pair of stubborn chickens, readers will come face to face with the humanity of people easily judged by a rigid society.

At the heart of these stories is the Dark Poet, a charismatic and broken man leaving a trail of debris as he drifts in and out of people's lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Odyssey Books
• Release date: May 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781925652659

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Published by Odyssey Books in 2019

www.odysseybooks.com.au

Copyright © Kathryn Gossow 2019

The moral right of Kathryn Gossow to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of the publisher.

A Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available from the National Library of Australia

ISBN: 978-1-925652-64-2 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-925652-65-9 (ebook)

Cover design by Michelle Lovi

Cover photo via Alamy

For all the girls who loved a boy they shouldn’t have, and all the broken boys that heal.

Memory Games

Yesterday it was the EFTPOS machine that brought you into my mind.

Steven. Stevie. The king hit of regret and guilt has receded with the decades. I’m sorry. Troubles compound over the years, new concerns bury our adolescence. I’m not sure if we don’t become ‘other’ people. But you will never get to learn that. We can’t debate and discuss.

Yesterday began as most others. In the morning, I pulled my front door closed and imprinted to my memory—I need three things at the supermarket this afternoon. To remember all three things, all day long, amidst the policy interpretations, urgent emails and office trash talk was one extra demand too many. I just needed to remember there were three things. The detail of those three things could wait until I needed to remember them. They say in middle age we should work our memories. Use tools to remember things. Mind games to imprint new people’s names to memory. I don’t know if they work. I don’t have time. I’m just frantically trying to keep the fridge stocked.

It was different in our day. Remember how the three of us rode home from the supermarket, grocery bags balanced on the handlebars of our pushbikes? The inner city traffic buzzed around us. The idea of owning a car was unreal, and I said who needed one anyway? We had buses and bikes and a twelve-dollars-and-fifty-cent grocery budget. You and Paul still yearned for your own wheels. Maybe it’s a boy thing.

Of course, when I arrived at the supermarket yesterday afternoon, I had forgotten what I needed. I sat in the car, my head in my hands like a grieving widow … ham, paper towels and … and … and—until it leapfrogged into my brain. Marmite. My teenage son has a Marmite addiction.

I am not bound by a tight grocery budget these days, this decade, this century. It is a new century. I make decisions based on nutrition labels, time constraints and pleasing a family horde that stands in the middle of the kitchen and moans, there’s nothing to eat, within minutes of unpacking groceries.

Money worries still niggle, but tend to be nebulous. What will it cost to put the kids through uni? Should we do more to provide for our retirement? Should we buy an investment property? A long way from when we bought three peaches, one for each for us, as a treat.

I wandered through the aisles in a fuddled fog, almost as though in a maze, not a rectangular building of straight lines that I know so well that I sometimes name the items in each aisle to put myself to sleep. Like when I wake up at two in the morning packed full of prayers of worry.

I stood among the three hundred and thirty bread options, my mind blank. Marmite, paper towels and … and … nothing. The trolley traffic moved around me like I was a stone in a murky, flooded river, until at last. Ham. I grabbed some bread just in case and went to look at the specials in the cake section.

They have self-serve checkouts now. And scanners. Barcodes on each item read by a flashing line of red light. Blip. Blip. No one ever has the job of rolling sticky prices on every item for a checkout chick to finger into the cash register.

Blip, blip—and then I run my EFTPOS card through a slot and—wham—there you are in my head—because you will never know. Never see this wonder of technology. Never take it for granted.

The day after they found you, the police handed over the contents of your car including the Buzzcocks tape we recorded off Paul’s record. Drops of blood spotted and obscured random letters. Remember that song—Ever fallen in love (with someone you shouldn’t’ve)? We loved that song. Drips of dried brown blood blotted out letters so the title became Eve allen in love (with some you should).

The blood transfixed me. Life extinguished. Flowing in veins, a violence I didn’t want to envisage, and then, only this. Brown splatters obliterating letters.

I cooked your last meal. You told me to steam the vegetables instead of boiling them. I imagined your body, lifeless, my beef and vegies half-digested in your stomach. Some people said you did it on purpose. I knew it wasn’t true. A person, no matter what happens later, cannot be concerned about retaining the nutrients in vegetables and then go out and do that on purpose.

Once you are in there, stomping around in my head in your Doc Martens, I cannot prise you out.

I unlocked my car with the press of a button. Beep. I think how you would have only known you could do this with a key. I scroll through hundreds of songs on my iPod and play Missy Higgins through the car stereo because you’d have hated her and she might chase you away. At home I look up a recipe on my iPad, flick through the pages with my finger, carry my laptop onto the deck, read my emails and pay my phone bill. I see the size of my TV and imagine you drooling.

The world just moved on without you. You were gone before the birth of the world I got to be an adult in. You would have loved all these gadgets. The easy access to porn, and music, and this thing called the internet that in 1987 was something I had never heard of. Not that I remember.

The last time I saw Paul was one New Year at an obscure, out of the way pub in the hinterland. Years ago, before I had kids. The night was a fizzer and the band in the lounge outnumbered the audience. I went into the bar and Paul was there. We both said, ‘Wow the last time I saw you was …’ but neither of us wanted to finish the sentence. After the funeral, he took off to Melbourne. The lease was up on the house, and he just left the sub-tropics for somewhere drearier.

I ran into someone one day who tried to tell me Paul had become a junkie. I didn’t believe them. They just heard it from someone else. I think sometimes I could look him up on Facebook, but I don’t think he’d go for Facebook. Okay, truth, I have tried to look him up on Facebook but he is not there. You would have hated Facebook. I am not even going to tell you what it is.

Maybe I could look you up on Facebook. Pretend it is possible for you to be there. It’s not that weird. People pay for their Twitter accounts to keep posting after