Savage Daughter: A finalist in The Great Australian Yarn 2024

At St Joseph’s convent school, we believed two facts: the inaugural hailstorm of the year fell in April, and Francesco Fantini topped our class. I envied Frank. Each month we competed in a series of tests. Creative writing followed a spelling quiz and a maths test. Hands sticky with jam from lunch, I toiled, composing complicated illegible plots into the afternoon. I stopped the minute the bus’s diesel engine rattled and coughed into the yard. The coarse mechanical engine swamped the snarling saw noises and the clatter of timber planks in the timber mill adjacent to our school.

Thirty-one pupils attended St Joseph’s. Hunched in the middle of barren gravel with no green playing fields, the convent walls mottled with grime shimmered with calefaction. Two classrooms attached to the rear of a large house, formerly the wooden mill manager's residence at Karridale, featured tall windows and dark wooden floors. The wooden building, painted a pale blue was topped with a corrugated iron roof which extended over a concreted veranda. Mixed grades scraped desks and stools in each classroom.

Tying the girls’ pigtails together, swinging on our wooden chairs and throwing honkey nuts, we bickered as Sister Veronica taught, her metallic Irish accent intoning the Angelus prayer at noon. Praying and teaching permitted no idle chatter or kindness. Her tight wimple made her neck look scrawny. She clawed at a permanent rash, fed by burning heat, on her face.

Every afternoon I journeyed home to a farm with a cattle grid as a front gate, paddocks of endless cinereal sheep, and an asbestos house built by my father. The Blackwood river bordered one side of the farm.

The year the Americans landed on the moon; unexpected rain created ravines which bolstered the Blackwood. Swollen vegetation and fallen logs merged with the swirling murky river. Days trapped by storm meant an opportunity to plan my revenge on Frank Fatini. I stole a copy of the Reader’s Digest Condensed Stories from its position supporting a broken lounge chair. I read of shipwrecks and buccaneers.  I hid from my mother in the dark recess of the long veranda. Naylor, the old dog, tasked with keeping his one good eye open, stood guard. Torrents of water cascaded, clattering on the iron roof, flooding the chimney, inviting smoke to torture my eyes and tickle my throat.

The floods succumbed to summer hardness. Steaming Christmas punctuated the boring summer holidays. The weather blistered. We washed with Velvet laundry soap in the muddy and murky dam to conserve water. In February, the academic year commenced. For my creative narrative, I copied from the stolen Readers Digest.

 Frank Fantini wrote a gruesome tale regarding the Martyrs of Otranto, saints slaughtered for refusing to convert to Islam. In February, Sister Veronica added the scores and pinned them to a corkboard. Awarded one mark less than my foe, I hummed the ditty “second hand rose” and seethed. A friend said Signoria Fantini supplied the nuns with a mutton shoulder that month.

Devastated, I pressed Mum for help.

 ‘Can you tell the story of a martyr like Joan of Arc and her burning at the stake?’

 ‘No Joey, not now. Take this billy to the sorting shed and don’t spill a drop.’ She untied her apron. ‘Are you trying to make me cross?’

‘I might win with a boring dead saint. I’d have something to write. Martyred, flesh ablaze, red hair yanked by a pitchfork, an axe splitting her tongue.’

‘Don’t be such a savage,’ Mum snapped. ‘Offer being second to a boy up for the holy souls suffering for our sins in purgatory. And give Naylor a good brushing, he’s starting to stink. I know he sleeps with you.’

She tied her hair with an elastic band. 

‘Out of my way. I have pots to wash and a garden to weed. I want you to take the tea things to the shearing shed. Your father and brothers are waiting.’

She swatted me with a wet tea towel. Naylor, tail midway between his legs, slinked towards the tank stand.

‘I can’t write muck stories with spuds as characters,’ I whined. ‘Why isn’t our family exciting? We need to have secrets. Secrets are ace.’

 I flounced, shaking the billy, abandoning the hot kitchen. The rusted shearing shed shimmered in the hazy distance. The cups clattered and clinked as I screeched my favourite song. A song which encouraged girls to walk on sharp stones and not cut their hair or lower their voices. I swung the billy around my head trying not to spill a drop, singing and daydreaming, forming ideas for a winning story.

One month later the fifth column wrote of saints, martyrs, and pious Catholic boys again. Frank revealed his parents told him tales of virgin nuns, the ancient Knights Templar and an infallible Popes. He bragged stories regarding saints and martyrs guaranteed high grades.

On test day the nefarious child’s shoes announced an extra polish and he combed his oily cowlick flat.   Frank said his mother took special care of his shirts. I envisioned her pounding a washboard, her arms aching, her eyes puffy. I imagined he received the juiciest piece of meat at dinner, his right as a male, the burnt pieces given to his sisters. Mum told me parents recognised girls grow, bloom and decay, babies sucking at dry breasts, our lives not recorded.

Frank boasted his Italian parents warned him against playing with Australians, especially the girls, dismissing us as a gaggle of trouble in our brown shirts.

 ‘Your Mum’s mouth is narrow and mean, and she wears lipstick.’ Frank jeered.

 I punched his nose.

‘I will beat you in the next test. See if I don’t.’ I left him mopping blood from his shirt.

I was proud of my mother and the way she drove our Desoto station wagon, brown stockings on her plump legs, wearing short cotton frocks. Blonde hair curled, she painted her lips orange, splitting her pale face. She projected an aura of respectability as she strolled the unimportant town of Margaret River. The Italian ladies wearing sombre black dresses walked in the shadows.

On an ordinary Monday in March, I trooped from the front gate, swinging my case. Twirling circles in the sand with my brown T-bar sandals I greeted Naylor. Worn by the relentless temperature, he collapsed, exhausted. Indifferent to my presence, Mum surveyed thunderous clouds. I pushed my dog-eared exercise book her way.

‘What do you expect? Praise? Encouragement? You talk nonsense. Why write fantastical ideas of shipwreck? Write things you know.’

‘It isn’t what I wrote. I’m the problem. Sister Veronica hates me.’

‘Nonsense. Nuns don’t have favourites. They love all God’s children.’ Frowning, she placed pumpkin scones in a Tupperware container. ‘Imagine a pleasant scenario for your next story, be interesting…. something to please Sister Veronica.’

I wonder what could be interesting about women who stare at children with wide vacant eyes and continuously adjust their scapulars. Sister Veronica concealed her character with her tunic and veil. The nuns dangled enormous bloomers on the clothes line near the school toilet. They prayed with closed eyes, archaic waxed dolls melting in a sea of sweat with gargantuan crucifixes hung from thick waists.

When the school is silent, when the last orange bus has left, I believed Sister Veronica glared at the gravel grounds, looked at the pellucid sky, and asked why she taught clenched jawed children with flattened noses who reminded her of little pigs. I once overheard Sister Veronica saying she thought all Australians sounded drunk as their sentences began with ‘but’.

‘Offer prayers to Mother Mary for inspiration. Or to Saint Jude. He’s the patron of lost causes. Go. Pink elephants don’t exist, madam.’ Mum gathered food into a willow basket. ‘I want this kitchen clean. Think of it as penance.’ She handed me the broom.

Kookaburras laughed in the branches of a distant tree.

A week after the monthly tests, I opened my test booklet in our dusty and dim classroom. I added an extra mark to the eight the teacher pencilled in for creative writing on the results page, praying she would not notice as March flies buzzed around the light. We queued to show our record folios to allow Sister Veronica to calculate our overall score. My foe, first in line, smugly awaited his result. Retelling the tale of Giordano Bruno, a saint burnt in Rome for his thoughts, resulted in his usual mark of eight out of ten for writing. I had written a story about my special bond with Naylor. We received the same mark for Maths and Spelling.

I shuffled to the teacher’s desk. Raised on a platform, fronting a blackboard, this polished table spoke of a previous grand existence. The musty smell of Chalk fragments fused with the all-pervading stench of sweat. A faint flutter of breeze came from the tall open window, dissipating the worst of the days heat.

I crossed my fingers behind my back. The teacher selected a scarlet biro pen and with a sharp gaze at the class and a loud sigh circled the extra mark in garish red ink.  

‘Joey, little girls like you make me question my vocation. We will say no more regarding this.’ She whispered, ‘You are surrounded by vipers in this forsaken country and I pity you.’

Walking to my seat, overheating causing my fringe to itch and my heart to pound, I winked at Frank.

Next Day, after the class monitor displayed the test results, a slow rumbling murmur of surprise delighted me. My nemesis, tubby and stout, his face puce, declared the results unbelievable.

‘You cheated, didn’t you?’

‘Who, me? Unfair, I know you think Aussies stupid.’

‘I don’t. Mamma and Papi expect me to always win. They help me with the stories. Anyway, Papi says Aussies have no history and no culture.’

At playtime I waited behind a hedge with my friends, a freckled girl called Raelene and Susan who worried her fat ankles and fleshy thighs made her ugly, We threw sharp gravel stones at the Italians eating vegemite sandwiches, cut into shapes, for lunch.

Smirking with glee, I collected the gold paper star for April. Following an interminable bus ride home I discovered Mum washing dishes.

 ‘Hurry I need to catch the shops before they close.’ Mum said discarding the wet cloth and grabbing the car keys.

‘I don’t want to go back to town.’ I felt the small glossy flecks of the gold star in my pocket. ‘I want to celebrate coming first in the class.’

‘Come with me and I’ll buy you some new tights to wear to school. For trying.’

‘Can I have red ones, please? Do people who cheat go to hell?’

‘Not if they pray and are sorry. Seems right. Red is the devil’s colour!’

Mum, padded into the bedroom and applied a slash of vibrant coral lipstick to her mouth.

The ancient car juddered as we drove into town, dispersing gravel dust into our faces, rendering our mouth’s dry.  Mum parked in front of McKeown’s hotel and I looked inside the dining room of polished wood and chintz. Vases of flowers adorned each table and I glimpsed spoons, teacups with saucers, crystal glasses and cake forks. I pictured ladies on warm Sunday afternoons, wearing chiffon dresses and silver sandals, soft and round, eating melting cream teas.

Sitting in the car, my feet on the dash, I observed a drunk man leaning against a telegraph pole. Sliding downwards, until his legs splayed and his saggy arse hit the pavement with a crack, he clutched a brown wrapped packet in his hands and exposed his crooked teeth before closing his eyes against the sun. The street sweeper, with his coconut broom, swept around the pole and the man. A Holden EH Ute, dragging a crate of squealing pigs, rumbled through town. The air foetid with the stench of shit Mum returned to the car with her packages and slapped my legs.

‘Feet down. I brought blood-red tights at Thomas the Draper.’

On the return journey Mum braked to avoid a coffin shaped bus which barrelled along the narrow road. She pulled into a passing bay to allow a swirling dust cloud to abate. The bus, a twice weekly service to Perth, expelled mushroom coloured dirt like an immense glaucous monster.

I glimpsed Sister Veronica on the bus. Her waxen mouth was closed, and her arthritic knuckles cradled a battered holdall. I waved as the bus swerved. Sister Veronica stared straight ahead, making the sign of the cross with her right hand, ignoring me.

With red tights draping my neck, a shabby sprawling dog mat sitting at my feet, I said three Hail Marys to atone for my cheating and tore up my gold star. Little flecks of gold fell into a small sad heap on the floor.

The precious star was nothing but a few scraps of paper dancing in the paddocks with the easterly wind when the first hailstorm of winter arrived in May.