We’re pleased to announce the winner of the October/ November WWWC: Djuna Hallsworth! Responding to the prompt ‘on your bike’, Djuna’s story, ‘Nail Polish’, is a tale of womanhood, family, and how the ripples of trauma affect a group.
Read her winning entry in full below.
Nail Polish
We picked out the colour together. She wanted green but I, as the teenage cousin with all of seventeen years of life experience, managed to sway her towards indigo. It will match more of your clothes than the green will, I reasoned. This was the kind of logic that I’d read in Cosmopolitan and books on style and fashion that I borrowed from the public library and consumed instead of my textbooks and assigned novels. At seven years old, the advice wasn’t especially relevant to Zoe, but she silently nodded anyway. I picked out a bottle of indigo nail polish from further back on the shelf. I never take the one at the front, reasoning that someone has probably tampered with it. Call me a cynic, but there’s not much else to do around here.
I gave her the ten-dollar note I had been keeping in my wallet. She didn’t have a bank account and even if she did, it seemed somehow inappropriate to bank-transfer money to a child. It would take some of the thrill out of handing it to her and letting her undertake the transaction herself. It would be like sending an e-card to my mum, instead of choosing one off the shelf and writing in it with one of the many pens that end up stashed in the bottom of my backpack. Some of them have bled blue ink into the fabric but it’s too late and, in the scheme of things, too insignificant for me to care enough to clean it up.
Back at home, I laid a towel out on her bedroom floor and let her peel the plastic off the top of the bottle.
I could tell she was tingling with anticipation, her eyes fixed on my fingers as they unscrewed the bottle and delicately, with practiced hands, dabbed the bristles against the rim until just the right amount of paint remained. Then I set to work, starting with the nail of her index finger. She wasn’t watching my hands anymore but my face, which was lowered in concentration to avoid spilling the sticky liquid on her soft cuticles. When I looked up under my fringe, I saw the hint of a smile creep into her eyes, as if we were sharing the most enticing secret.
I inspected the nails of her right hand to check that each was comprehensively coated, then set to work on her left one. When I was done, I retrieved a cotton bud and some nail polish remover from her mother’s bathroom cabinet and tidied up the edges. Her small, round fingernails looked like the scales of an elegant fish: beautiful and modest. She studied them for a few moments while I folded up the towel and fastened the cap tightly onto the bottle.
Aren’t you going to do yours? she asked. We’d been silent for so long I had almost forgotten what her voice sounded like.
No, I don’t think so, I replied. Only because work won’t let me.
She nodded solemnly, like she understood the hardship of being a teenager forced into conformity by an unforgiving system.
But yours look lovely, though, I made sure to add.
A shy smile. I know, they do. They look perfect. Thank you.
Just be careful not to smudge them.
That serious, silent dip of the head again. She would never smudge them. She might never let another touch person touch her again.
I was just a little older than her when my father died. Zoe’s father — my uncle — took the accident very badly. At first, he tried to make a joke out of it, declaring that his brother had taken the expression on your bike a little too seriously.
I just wanted him to bugger off for a while, he insisted, a beer in one hand and a smile forcing its way across one side of his face. His eyes betrayed the truth: nothing about the situation was funny.
Soon, he became solitary and sullen, barely leaving his bed, which forced my aunt to move into the spare room with the old, squeaky futon and faded curtains. She tried to talk to him properly, sit down and have a real conversation but, from what I had heard, it had been impossible. My uncle talked about living out the dreams of my father — whatever they were; I was too young to know — but all he did was crawl back into that bed and search his mind for somebody to blame.
He left to work in the mines a few months later. It was inexplicable. The only thing he had left was his family and it seemed like even they were not enough. He sent money and birthday cards, but he hadn’t come back to visit in six years.
Aunt Judy didn’t like to mention him in front of Zoe or me, but I knew when she and my mother were alone together they would talk about the brothers for hours. They would start in hushed voices, catching the chance to revisit the trauma every time Zoe and I went outside to watch the neighbour’s cat chase moths. I’d see them through the kitchen window; initially, they would keep one eye on us to make sure we weren’t listening in, but then they’d forget themselves, and their voices would begin to carry further. Unforgivable, I’d hear them say. Responsibility, and taken for granted. Delusion. Aunt Judy would be bitter but mum would be sad. Then they would both be angry. They might pour a gin. They might pour another. The mosquitoes would slink out of wherever they had been hiding during the day, but I’d still try and keep Zoe in the garden for as long as possible, pointing at the moon and commenting on how the trees looked in the glow of the orange street lamps. Then the crickets would start their nightly hum, eventually swelling into a steady chorus, loud enough to drown out the sounds of two women lamenting the men who left them too soon.
About the author
Djuna Hallsworth is a Perth-born, Sydney-based academic, teaching and researching in the Humanities. When she’s not producing scholarly work, Djuna writes short and long-form fiction and draws cartoons inspired by her cats.