Twenty Five Pages

Pages from the beginning an early draft of My Mother, Duras — an Indochine Journey.
Synopsis

My Mother, Duras weaves three strands of memoir into one: the author’s lifelong infatuation with the French writer Marguerite Duras, a journey she takes through Vietnam following her footsteps, and a musing on mothers and melancholy.

 

                                                        MY MOTHER, DURAS

        My Hanoi taxi driver is not Mr Friendly. There’s no ’where are you from, where are you going, welcome to my country’ repartee. From the minute we pull out from the airport curb he is busy taking calls on his various phones and seems to be running a second business from his cab. I feel a little insignificant but pretend it suits me and pull out my medium-sized notebook to continue my bumpy scrawl. I had made a pact with myself the day before I set out on this trip, that I would capture every skerrick of detail -— all the minutiae of life that flash before me. Who knows when I will it need it? Who knows, who cares? I’m on a roll - I’m writing again, thank the gods! Nothing mind boggling of course; just lists, doodles, observations, all that pre-writing garbage you have to get out of your head before the real stuff starts to flow.

        I knew getting on a plane would do trick. I’ve been senso-perving since I hit the departure lounge in Sydney, not just watching people, but picking up colour, shape, scent, tone, light, sound, texture; pretending I have a torch camera stuck to my forehead with a sense detector on my lapel so l can zoom in and out at will, capture grabs of sound, light, movement; feel the temperature on the back of my neck, the rattle of air past my nose.  If it sounds obsessive, it is.  If it sounds mad, you have to be. MD was great proof of that.

MD - Marguerite Duras

       You don’t know who I’m talking about?  Already I’m writing like her, using initials for real people instead of their names. Why make it easy for anyone was MD’s philosophy. Why have a plot when you can have pages and pages where nothing happens but weeping and then weeping again. Why write a novel like a novel, why not write it like a film? Why not have actors reading the same novel as if it was a play, in the novel?  Why not publish your most famous work as a tiny novella, based on your early life in Indochina, finally win the big prize, the coveted Prix Concourt, then write another version of it a few years later with a new title? Why? Because you are MD and you can! let me warn you, MD is not everyone's cup of tea, MD is an acquired taste. People who hail her as their hero and there are many, have to earn the right to belong to the MD club. Following me, following her may just be a way to do that, as long as you can keep this trip under your hat: we don't want every one avec leur chien, jumping on the bandwagon.

        In the fading dusk a parade of giant billboards swish by. On one side of the road a couple of huge electronics factories (Sanyo, Panasonic) are taking up acres of land and closer to the roadside some ramshackle workshops, fruit stalls and makeshift eating-places. Further on, lining the streets on every side, tall shop-houses, so narrow they remind me of a childhood story book where giant giraffes live in skinny houses and poke their heads out the top windows. Two men squat like ducks high up on an unfinished structure looking out at all the buses, trucks and taxis squeezing off the freeway into the smaller streets of the city where garlands of liquorice black wires hang from rickety electricity poles.  Soon we wind our way into the narrow busy streets of what must be the old French Quarter, dodging throngs of people out walking, buying, and eating low on tiny low plastic stools. At first I can’t see the hotel’s narrow frontage but Mr Friendly has obviously been here before. He lets me out with a grunt and a hint of a smile, then drives off taking another customer on his phone.

         The Classic St Hotel has an elevated reception area open to the street and a tiny downstairs lobby with carved Chinese chairs arranged among antique pots and statues. The unusually tall guy behind the small desk is Mr Truly Friendly and in the nicest way explains he has let my room out as he thought I would be arriving earlier. We work out I had given him the wrong arrival time, but it’s all good — they have a cheaper room they can give me for the night. Mr TF shows the way, carrying my small heavy red suitcase.

         ‘Books’ I tell him, ‘I’m a writer.’

         ‘Oh’ he smiles and says nothing more, not, ‘oh that’s a good life, are you here for a festival, are you famous in your country, where can I buy your book?’

          ' I am on a pilgrimage to the sites of Marguerite Duras, ' I add, expecting a flash of recognition when I mention her name.
            'Oh' he replies in a disinterested tone. I notice the slant of the stairs and hang onto the polished wood railing so I don’t fall backwards. He opens the door to my room. It is windowless, airless and has no bathroom. 

       ‘Share bathroom downstairs near kitchen,’ Mr TF tells me as he leaves. I don’t mind. I have been stuck in the middle of the middle row on a Boeing 747 all day. It’s been a windowless day.

                                                                      

MD in her early 20s

                                                                     

        I unpack a few things including a photo I printed from the internet of MD as a young woman. She must be in her early 20s; her dark hair is pinned up, drawn back from a vast forehead in the style of the time; eyes downcast, directing the viewer past her dainty nose to her dark red cupid lips. She wears a collarless jacket: thin white stripes on black or blue and a striped blouse with a loose bow at the throat, held in place by a Diamante brooch. A wisp of hair escapes behind her left ear. When I first saw this photo I didn’t stop to interpret the expression caught between looks in a split second of time — it was the cupid bow lips and the wide forehead that drew me in, shocked me with its familiarity. I knew I’d seen it somewhere before, but where?  I went searching under the bed for the mustard-coloured vinyl suitcase, labeled: Old Family Photos KEEP!  Right at the back, behind boxes of forgotten things I can never quite bring myself to throw away. I pulled it out, brushed the dust and fluff off, unbuckled its vinyl strap and opened it up to the precious photographic heirlooms within. Still in their original frames, cradled in soft fabric, I carefully removed the wrappings, peeking in at each diorama of the past, resisting the urge to pull them all out for a look as I usually did. A marker in my memory told me the one I was looking for was near the bottom, nestled among shards of glass from a breakage I meant to clean up last time I visited this wee treasure trove, and there it was — I knew I wasn't imagining it. I pulled the cloth back to reveal a tinted photo of my mother Marjorie, wearing the same kind of  blouse with the tie at the throat, sporting the same exposed forehead, same movie star lips as Marguerite. Only the eyes were different. My mother’s eyes stared directly at the camera with such a look of resigned sadness that left me startled.

My mother Marjorie

                                                               

         It's dinnertime and I’m not hungry but I do want to make plans for tomorrow. I only have a few days in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City before I head to Cambodia to run a workshop there. I want to interrogate Mr TF again on the subject of MD and ask him if he knows anything about the house in Hanoi she lived in when she was young. Perhaps he didn't understand my accent before I wonder, as I re-negotiate the sloping stairs. From his tall stool behind the narrow desk Mr TF raises his eyebrows and asks for more information.

          ' I’m sorry, I don’t have an address,’ I tell him, but it would have been early last century, long before you were born,' I tease, ' somewhere near a small lake. Surely it will have a plaque or sign like famous writer’s houses do?'

He gives me a blank stare. I say the name again slowly in my best French accent.

          ‘Marggaaaarreeete Duuuraaass.’

At last his eyes light up and from under the counter he brings up a folder and hands it to me.

          ‘Yes, yes, Marguerite, Marguerite,’ he says, nodding.

 I open the folder and nestled in the plastic sleeves are brochures for a magnificent wooden junk, fittingly named Marguerite.

          ‘Halong Bay, Halong Bay,’ Mr TF insists, ‘you must go!’

           I’ve seen the iconic pictures of antique junks with yellow sails navigating the famous limestone islands and I recall my travel agent telling me it is an absolute ‘must do’. It’s tempting and I even want to say yes on the spot, just to please Mr TF, but tell him I only have a few days here and will make a decision in the morning. Meanwhile I am on a mission to find ‘my Marguerite' in Hanoi. He gives a nonchalant nod of his head and puts the folder away. I bid him merci, bon soir and climb back to my airless cave. There I make a few notes, set the air con on low and get ready to fall into bed. I try to turn off the light and wonder why I can’t. My hand is still clutching my pen and doesn’t want to let go.

                                                          

           In the middle of the night I wake to the picture of MD staring at me from the bedside table. Before I came on this trip I began making a scrapbook with the photos I’d collected of Marguerite and my mother Marjorie. Both petite women, their physical resemblance is uncanny, and continues throughout their lives into old age.  Born in the decade before the roaring twenties, the photos show them across the years dressed in similar fashions of the times, which adds to their likeness. As old ladies they even wear the same kind of quilted cap and dark rimmed glasses. They could certainly be sisters, although Marguerite had only brothers and Marj was an only child. If they had been siblings, Marguerite would be the older; born Marguerite Donnadieu at the beginning of the First World War in 1914; while Marj — Marjorie Gingell, was born near its end, in July 1918. As bookend war babies neither had an easy entry into life. When Marguerite was only six months old, her mother became ill and was sent back to France for treatment. She didn’t return for another nine months and Marguerite was left in the care of a Vietnamese servant boy. Similarly Marj’s mother Jeanie, was seriously ill for the first years of her life and little Marjorie was looked after by her maternal grandmother, Granny Tonkin, who ran a boarding house called Penzance, in a small Victorian country town called Camperdown.  I remember the name of the boarding house because Marj left it written down among notes scribbled on scraps of paper we later found in all the drawers and wardrobe bottoms of her home. We found poems too, and small mounds of newspaper and magazine cuttings, put aside to send off to the kids, grandkids, friends, famous people — anyone she thought would benefit. There is a photo of Penzance with Marj aged three or four, in a Pollyanna dress and lace up boots, standing outside the boarding house. Granny Tonkin is in the background, another bairn in her arms, her drunkard husband banished from the house once more. 

          I also found another picture of Marj, a knock kneed girl of four or five, in a white embroidered dress and long white socks, holding a bouquet of chrysanthemums, her hair tied back in a big white bow and that intense gaze, staring directly into the camera. It’s a look of wisdom beyond her years: a knowing determination, and even at this young age, that tinge of sadness.

          Marguerite wears the same big floppy white bow in her childhood photos.  Her long hair falls down across her small shoulders, her large eyes interrogate the camera with a wary self assuredness. How is it that a French girl born in a village near Saigon would not have looked out of place at the church fete in Camperdown, Australia? I imagined them as playmates, getting up to mischief behind the weatherboard shed where little girls of their age went to Sunday School, the wisp of mother's absence hovering over them both like an invisible veil.

                                                                

          I sleep the rest of the night soundly to the whirr of the air con and wake early, too early for breakfast. After my day of plane travel I’m ready to walk. I’m more likely to find MD’s house on foot anyway.  As I pass the front desk I notice Mr TF has been replaced by a Mr Not So Friendly. I’m not going to embarrass myself again by asking him the same questions about how to get to the small lake. I don’t have a map or guidebook and I didn’t Google Hanoi sights before I left, but I do have my copy of MD’s The Lover in my bag and an excellent biography, Marguerite Duras: A Life, by Laure Adler, with the appropriate sections post-it noted. Choosing a random direction, I venture out into streets full of people setting up for morning selling, gossiping, and more low eating at low tables; workers slurping on hot bowls of steaming breakfast pho, with noodles and fresh herbs piled high.

           
        I guess now is as good a time as any to tell you why I so admire MD, and yet it's not so simple. Unlike most walking, stalking, living, breathing, star-eating fans of great artists, I have not read every single one of her fifty-five written works and not every work I love. Some I even hate. Some cause me scream in frustration at the page or the screen. Of all her plays, films, novels, notes and essays, I have my favourites. Her most famous, L'Amant (The Lover), and a later version of the same story, The North China Lover, have a predictable effect. On reading only a few pages I want to write. Why? Duras gives you permission. Her writing says: write what you need to write, how you need to write it. Break the rules, experiment, be as repetitive as you need to be, don't adhere to the Aristotelian rules of structure, disregard all rules if that is what is required to tell your story. And if people don't like it, it's their problem. But there’s something else; Duras’ later writing especially has such a sense of space about it, like something you might experience when meditating or witnessing a breathtaking view. The presence of that view may hold pain, loss and sadness, but there is also tenderness, beauty, fearlessness, contemplation. Duras' writing echoed the teachings I'd heard from the Buddhist teacher  Chogyam Trungpa — that basic sanity begins with a sense of hopelessness, a recognition of the groundless nature of all existence.

 

 

 

Chogyam Trungpa in Tibet before he came to the west.

           So along I trundle like any tourist out for stroll with their nose stuck so far in their Lonely Planet Guide Book they can't see where they are going let alone find the place, only my nose is stuck in a big fat biography about a French woman who for a brief time from 1916 to 1920 was a child living in a house somewhere around here, with her French school teacher parents and two older brothers. Like my own school teacher family, they moved often from town to town: Hanoi, Saigon, Phnom Penh, Vinh Long, Sa Dec, following advertised positions in the French Civil Service Gazette. In Hanoi, MD's mother couldn't get work so she borrowed money, bought a house near the 'Small Lake' and set up a private school. Three decades before, the central area of Hanoi had been a nasty swamp but the French had turned it into an elegant urban parkland with adjoining perfumeries, cafes, fashion boutiques and grand official buildings of government and finance. Despite such gentrification her parents didn't like Hanoi and after a couple of years moved on to Phnom Penh in Cambodia (Cambodge), also part of French Indochina at that time.

          Perhaps MD wasn't here long enough for Hanoi to claim her as their own, I ponder, as I follow my nose turning left and right a few times before ending up on the shores of a small green lake around which every one, young, old and very old, are walking, jogging and knee bending their way in an anti clockwise direction. Those not circumambulating are playing badminton on courts set up on any bit of extra pavement space.  A group of women perform a graceful movement sequence with red fans and a bride and groom are already out on a photo shoot catching the early morning light. I decide to join the communal constitutional for a bit. No one seems to mind or even care; they are too busy to return my stranger-in-a-strange place smile. I want to stop and ask them about MD's house but feel it would be an intrusion, so I make a plan to fan out and explore the streets that lead off from the lake. It's a good intention but all it yields are grand old marble banks, shop houses (those tall skinny buildings with a shop front down stairs and residence upstairs) and one or two old villas that look like they could be, but how would you know? I check my books. The only description I have to go on is ‘the house by the Small Lake’ but is it a small house or a big house, and which lake? Hanoi, I’ve heard, has a number of them.  After up and downing several streets and not getting anywhere I know I will have to stop and ask someone.

          In front of a nineteenth century bank building with marble columns reaching to the sky, I find a little old Vietnamese lady selling guavas. There’s no one else around and all she has is a straw mat, a basket of fruit and some very antiquated scales — her tiny presence defying the grandiosity of the edifice that dwarfs her. She is as old and skinny as my mother was at the end of her life and gives me a grin as alive as the pink flesh of the guava she cuts open for me to taste. Surely she would know something about the history of this area, so I give it a try.

           'Marguereeeeete,’ I sound out, 'Marguereeete Duraaaassss…lived around here?’

          In sign language I draw circles in the air and gesture to the buildings around us. The old lady gives me a bemused look and starts to pile some guavas onto her scales, asking me with her eyes if I want a kilo or half kilo, showing me with money she takes from beneath her tattered ao dai, how much.

             ' No, no, I mean...' I dig into my bag and pull out the fat biography and open it at the page of the photo of MD and her family. A tired mother sits facing the camera, fan in hand, her children around her.  It’s a candid snap. Their clothing is casual; no effort was made to dress up in their colonial finery for this picture. Marguerite is still only small. She looks as if she is about to cry and timidly clutches her mother’s arm. Her older brothers, shirtless in the heat, exude a confidence you know will soon get them into trouble.

          I look to the old lady for a response. She has given me her undivided attention, listened carefully, and although she looks up at me with the same blank look of Mr TF, I still won't give up.

          'Around here? La maison de Duras, pres d'ici?’

          The old lady squints again at the photo, nodding and smiling as she goes back to her counting. I put my book away, take out my purse out and buy a kilo. It’s one of my favourite fruits after all. I'll make a meal of them later back in my hotel room. Already I can taste the sweet pink flesh with its small hard knobbly seeds on my tongue.

                                                                 

          Marguerite said she had no childhood; that the story of her life does not exist. Her parents moved their family from place to place, following their teaching postings. They would just be settling in when they would have to pack up and move all over again.  After Hanoi they followed the Mekong River to Phnom Penh, then Vinh Long then Sa Dec. Marguerite said she didn’t remember the houses or the furniture that was in them, but she knew her way around and how to escape to places grownups couldn’t find her.

         My mother's little family moved often too, following the railway line instead of the river. Marj’s father Jim had worked his way up from station hand to station master and so they moved on up the line: Camperdown, Colac, Maryborough, Ballarat. As an only child Marj was not lonely; she had plenty of cousins to play with and the advantage of not having to share her parent’s love with other siblings. Her mother, Jeanie, played piano and sang at the local dances and Marj took up the piano too. She always told me her childhood was a happy one, filled with music, laughter and warmth, but the mustard-coloured suitcase offered no evidence to confirm this, and I realised that I’d never seen any pictures of Marj as a prepubescent girl or teenager. Marguerite on the other hand had plenty. Marguerite's mother was often taking her children off to the photo salon and there are other candid snaps that document her teenage years.

        Leafing through the photos I’d found of Marguerite I was able to get clues to my mother’s girlhood: her petiteness, her broad forehead, her curly locks of hair, sensual lips. Marj would have been both shy and cheeky like Marguerite ; a child who looks like she loves life, despite her mother's illness when she was so young. Marj would love her mother to death as Marguerite did, would bask in her attention, would perform clever acts just for her, would learn to play Chopin's waltzes on the family piano and ride her bicycle down to visit her father, my grandpa Jim, at the Camperdown Station where he changed the signals for the trains to pass safely through town. She would know all the young women who worked in the station refreshment rooms and loved to watch passengers in their travelling best burst through the doorways, rushing the long wooden counters to order brimming hot cups of milky tea and steak and kidney pies baked fresh that morning. Then as fast as they’d arrived they would be gone, back into their red leather upholstered compartments, doors closing, handles turning, as Papa Jim blew the whistle, raised the flag, letting the engine driver know it was safe to proceed. Then there might be time for Marj to be made a fuss of by the refreshment room girls as she sat on the high stools at the counter and they treated her to a lamington or two and a conversation about how she was going at school.   She was doing well of course, always in the top of the class, although perhaps not quite as well as Marguerite, who in her final primary year was dux of the whole of Cochin China.

                                                              

Marguerite(right) withe her mother Marie Donnadieu

          I head back to rejoin the exercising crowd feeling a little dispirited from my fruitless search until I notice a curved red bridge leading to a small island at one end of the lake.  Leaning on the rail at its entrance, a couple of thin grey-haired photographers old enough to have fought in the American War (which we know as the Vietnam War and of which so far I have seen no remaining evidence). They chat and share cigarettes before their tourist snapping day begins and as I nod good morning and step onto the bridge it comes to me in a flash. I imagine Marguerite coming here as a child, skipping across the bridge with her nanny or houseboy while her mother was busy setting up her foreign language school in a French villa nearby.

          I follow the curve of the bridge to the gateway of the small island and pay a few dong for my ticket. I enter the leafy shade of trees dangling their branches in the pea green water, past a fireplace where paper offerings to the dead are smouldering in a pile of ash, and arrive in the courtyard of a small temple facing the lake.  Smoke is rising from a large round metal incense brazier, curling up towards a decorative ceramic relief under terracotta eaves. I peer in through the temple’s carved red doors, the air around me cool and peaceful.

          She would have come here, I'm sure of it now; daily walks to get her out of the house. The nanny wouldn't be able to look away for a second or she might find her swinging out over the water from a willow branch or throwing sticks at bubbles surfacing on the murky water.

          I find my way into a small room next to the temple that tells the history of the lake and its famous giant turtles, like the one in the glass case in front of me, which once inhabited the lake and confirm that yes, this temple was built in the eighteenth century, long before Duras and her family arrived. There is a famous Arthurian myth connected to the turtles, one of which is said to have taken the sword from the Emperor Le Loi, given to him by the Golden Turtle God, Kim Qui, to fight the Chinese, to restore it to the depths of the lake.

          A door from the room leads back into the temple and I arrive before an elaborately carved wooden altar. A couple of elderly Vietnamese ladies are lighting incense sticks and doing the rounds. Not knowing whom my prayers might be for, I follow suit taking a couple of sticks from a dispenser and lighting them from a candle. Then I feel it, as strongly as if she were standing right beside me; the presence of my little mother, Marjorie.

                         

       Marj was eighty-seven years old when she died in her sleep at the beginning of 2006, several days after I’d arrived in Jakarta on a four month writing fellowship. Because of my tight budget and the difficulty of re-jigging my visa, I didn't go back for her funeral. I’d spent a day with her in her Melbourne nursing home before I left, and while throughout her long depressive illness she had told us often enough she wanted to die, and there’d been some scares in recent years, there was no inkling she was close to death. We shared her favourite apple strudel that she couldn’t quite finish, and said everything to each other that we needed to. I reminded her that her life had not been wasted; that her creativity lived on in her kids and grandkids.  Marj was a poet and artist whose words although never published, inspired all who read them. Her rushed sketches and unfinished paintings still vibrate with her creative spirit, and remain my most precious possessions. 

          Marj was feeling a little off colour that day, but as I tucked her tiny sparrow-like body into bed, she still managed to ask me questions about all my friends and activities. I gave her the news as usual and told her how happy I was to be going back to Indonesia for a long writing stint and would send postcards and long letters as usual.  I hadn’t imagined my next postcard would be her eulogy.

        My kids, then aged 23 and 19, went to the funeral in my place. My daughter read out my words with confidence and my son smsed me a running narration of the proceedings from the funeral home chapel. ‘Hi Mum, heaps of peeps here, all going in now.’  ‘ Hi Mum, finished the service, Cyd did good, who are all the people I don’t know saying hello to me?’  Hi Mum, having tea and tim tams.’ Hi Mum, Marj is in the hearse now. We are waving her goodbye. ’ His messages made me feel as if I was almost there, but now Marj was on her way to the crematorium all alone and I needed some kind of ceremony of my own to send her off.  I remembered reading an article about the temples in Jakarta’s Chinatown so I ran out of my boarding house and hailed a taxi. The joss house temple I found there was much bigger than this one and had many inner and outer sanctums and courtyards. While for years I’ve been a student of Buddhism, the Tibetan school I follow is quite different to the Chinese variety.  But I needed fire and ritual and this crowded temple was full of smoke and people going from altar to shrine to deities to giant red candles, taller and fatter than any man, waving bundles of sweet smelling incense and praying with such fervor that I knew it would help. I joined the queue to a table where an old Chinese man was selling incense and purchased a huge bundle. Lighting the whole thing at a burner, I went about as they did, praying to dragons, goddesses, tall ceramic bearded men (that strangely reminded me of my dad), bowls of oranges and Ming vases full of flowers and the red, red, redness of it all, asking for her safe passage to wherever she was going.

         Marj wasn’t one to stand on ceremony and had given up on churches long ago. When a nurse once asked her religion for a form she was filling out, without missing a beat, Marj answered, ‘nature’. How I didn’t manage to seriously ignite myself or someone else, I don’t know, but I hoped all my burning and waving had somehow led her to an eternal eucalypt forest where she could pick wild pink heath and hunt green hooded orchids to her heart's content.

          Standing in front of the flower and fruit laden altars of this small pagoda on Hoan Kiem lake, I realise she is not in that forest, but here in this temple and every other joss house I will ever visit.

       The little old Vietnamese ladies pass by again and smile and nod, lifting their palms to their foreheads in prayer. I smile back. I plant my incense stick in the brazier next to theirs and hope in the mingling of smoky perfume, wherever she is, Marj will watch over them and they her.

                                                              

           Stepping back into the courtyard, I contemplate the whereabouts of MD again. I haven’t managed to find her house and there is no way of knowing if she ever visited this temple, but if she did, that means I am standing on hallowed ground. I don't know whether to pray, mumble some mantras, or jump up and down on the spot. There aren't many people around so I slip my shoes off and attempt to walk as casually as I can on every flagstone in the courtyard, rubbing my feet into the paving stones in the places I think Duras's four year old footsteps would most likely have fallen. I even rip out some pages of my notebook and make some rubbings with my lead pencil. If there is a possibility of taking home some kind of evidence of a place where a child who happened to become a great writer, may have stood, why not do it? And if this is a hallowed place, why not put it to the test, why not scan the small courtyard for a place to sit down and write?

          I choose a spot that looks across to the small pagoda rising out of the water at the other end of the lake. I set down my bag of fruit and books, lower myself onto the holy flagstones and lean back against a pillar, taking out my special-plain paged moleskin note book and smooth rolling pen and stare into the close distance, thinking, thinking...

          ...about the pain in my right shoulder which seems to have gotten worse since the flight from sitting uncomfortably and carrying luggage on the side I know I should avoid. About how I must remember to carry a small air cushion for moments like these, like the travellers I scoff at who at the departure gate, wear them around their necks before they even board - as if I am some kind of tough flyer, no-frills expert, shunning the comfort package, then wishing I had socks and a blanket like the person sleeping peacefully next to me. About how next time I fly I won't order gluten-free- vegetarian unless I want to eat two pieces of cardboard with a lettuce leaf stuck between them!

          A bunch of noisy school kids invades the quiet of the courtyard. My bottom is numb and my notebook empty.  I get up, gather my stuff and make my way to the exit. Just before the gate, I stop in front of the barely smoking fireplace where people have thrown in paper money to help the dead on their journey in the after-life. I tear the empty page from my notebook and throw it in. It’s a symbolic gesture I know, but I need help in this life not the next. I wait long enough to watch the edges of my blank page curl into flame and turn to ash. Hungry for breakfast, I head back to the hotel.

                                                           

(c) Jan Cornall 2017