Of Ashes and Rivers that Run to the Sea by Marie Munkara

Author:Marie Munkara
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia
Published: 2016-08-28T04:00:00+00:00

5.

We’re sitting drinking tea on my mum’s front veranda and watching the world go by when Aunty Marie Evelyn and Uncle Stanley Bushman pull up in their ute. They call me over and hand me a bundle of vines that grow on the sand dunes at Tarntippi beach. The ones that have lilac-coloured flowers and that the green ants travel along between their nests to go visiting their mates and sniffing out food. Mummy beams like she has just been given a million dollars and tells me to get her rocks. She sometimes uses these rocks to do her washing. One flat one that she lays the dress or whatever on and the other one that she beats the crap out of under the running tap. No soap, just sheer determination. And it works too, my mum’s clothes are lovely and crisp and clean and smell like sunshine. I get back with her rocks and she has a sheet laid out on the floor with the vine lying on it. She places the stem of the vine on her flat rock and starts hammering away, flattening out the acrid-smelling stems and bruising the leaves and crushing flowers as she works her way along. I’m a bit apprehensive – is she going to make me eat this, I wonder? Will it taste like spinach or brussel sprouts or chewy salty beach vines?

When she’s finished she motions for me to move her rocks away and then carefully begins to wind the vine around her right leg from the knee down to her ankle, neatly tucking leaves in here and a flower there and poking in loose ends. After that she produces a roll of bandage and winds it over the vines to keep it all in place. Job done, she goes back to her cup of tea. I’ve noticed that she rubs this leg and limps occasionally and she uses a walking stick. I’ve never bothered to ask why but after this strange ritual I am curious to know what’s wrong with her leg. She opens her mouth and the word flies out and pierces my heart like a spear. Leprosy.

I am shocked because I thought lepers only existed in the Bible and lived in poor countries like India and Africa. I thought they walked with bells around their necks warning people to keep clear and lived in colonies where they couldn’t infect anyone and where their limbs and appendages dropped off. I slide my ill-informed thoughts into the rubbish bin and slam the lid down tight, angry that our First World country can live in ignorant bliss of our Third World problems. I am angry that my mother could even catch leprosy in the first place in this wealthy country because it is a disease of poverty and this makes the reality of her situation even more ugly and unfair. I bet there wouldn’t be too many white people afflicted with leprosy in Australia because if there were it would be front-page news.

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