The Smell of Dust

It started when he wrapped his hand around my throat and pressed his thumb into the hollow of my neck. I could feel the chain-link of my necklace imprinting itself on my flesh. He was still living in the house we had rented together, in the bungalow in Box Hill. I had moved out several months before, first to a house-sit, then to a room of my own. The sheets smelled stale and the house was cold. When I suggested turning the heating on, he said he didn’t want the extra expense—just put a jacket on.

That night, as I was sinking into sleep, I tripped in the darkness and screamed out loud as I fell. It was the first time I had responded to fear not by freezing but by calling out for help.

*

I was on my way to the optician's for an eye exam. I kept getting headaches when reading, which was making it difficult to study and work. A phone call from a withheld number—I didn’t answer. Then a notification of a new voicemail. When I dialled 321 to retrieve it, I was surprised to hear his voice.

He had been sitting in a meeting, he said, when all of a sudden he couldn’t see. The paramedics had checked him over, told him to go home and rest, but his boss wouldn’t let him go home unless there was somewhere there to look after him—and his brother was out of town. Could I come over to the house, just for a little bit?

Sometimes we choose to suffer in order to coerce and control.

When I got to the house, he was sitting on the grey sofa in his black puffa jacket, smelling of cigarette smoke.

I did not want to be there. I did not want to be in that dark, cold house. (When he emailed me the listing during the pandemic, when I was still in Scotland waiting for the travel restrictions to lift, I had read ‘south-facing’ and pictured sun-filled rooms, a fecund garden. It wasn’t until many months after I arrived that I realized the geographical flip.) In that poorly lit space, I felt my clarity fading, felt the heat of assertion being drawn out of me. There was always a sense of unwanted company—unseen people blocking the windows and crowding the rooms.

*

The next morning, I returned to the share house in Hawthorn, my new home. I dug a new flowerbed in the garden, one foot deep and ten feet long. I edged the bed with old skirting boards retrieved from the neighbour’s skip. The earth was cool beneath my fingers as I sank the sunflower seeds into shallow depressions. I patted the soil down and gave the bed a light watering with the seaweed fertilizer Seasol.

When I was taking a shower, scrubbing the earth from beneath my fingernails, I realised I had left my necklace, the mirror pendant, at his house, next to the bed.

*

It’s difficult to say whether I am awake or asleep when it happens, when these memories, these images, rise up and transport me. I’ve practiced past-life regression several times, and transgenerational trauma is widely accepted these days. Still, it’s difficult to tell whether they’re memories from my own past lives, or the collective memories of my karmic and familial ancestors, or if they’re the repercussions of my own actions—my karmic debts haunting me.

I was lying in bed when the surroundings began to shift. The smell of laundry detergent faded and the smell of dust permeated me. I could feel the dust scratching the back of my neck as he held me down, his legs straddling my body, his hands wrapped around my throat. His face, flushed and damp, was quivering as if suppressing tears, his lips quaking.

*

Three days later the sunflower seeds began to sprout. I took a photo and sent it to my best friend. (My throat was still sore, so no voice messages, only texts.) The Myna birds squabbled over the bread crusts I had tossed onto the lawn, until a Red Wattlebird swooped down, sending the Mynas fluttering off.

*

When I stepped into the treatment room, as usual, I was not sure what to say. Suddenly I felt foolish, or rather I felt I could, or should, feel foolish, as a deflection and defence.

I sat down at the edge of the treatment bed and S placed a stool beneath my feet. She began by gently massaging my shoulders, my neck, my head. Take a few deep breaths, she said, and focus gently on the pain in your throat.

On the walls, in between diagrams of the human skeleton and the meridians, were posters of Hilda Af Klint’s paintings and framed quotes. At my eye level was a photo of snow-capped mountains captioned with a Pema Chödrön quote: ‘Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.’

As S massaged various acupressure points on my shoulders and the sides of my neck, I closed my eyes and my vision turned terracotta red. It’s then that I started talking, started telling her about the dream—or the past-life memory, if I can call it that, I said. I felt S nodding and let her questions draw me out. She had me describe my surroundings, my clothes, my shoes, my hair:

The landscape is flat and dry, in shades of silver, green, and red. I am standing inside a weatherboard house, looking out the flyscreen door at chicken pecking in the backyard. I am sweating slightly, despite feeling cold inside. My flannel shirt and pleated skirt are sticking to my skin. My feet are tense in my hard leather shoes, and my muscles ache. My head is itching, my hair long unwashed. Soon he will return from the goldfields, the half-brother who demands me for his wife. I have tied a green scarf around my neck to ease the pain and to hide the bruising from prying eyes.

What does he want from you? S asks.

He wants freedom—freedom from the confines of poverty and our dying goldrush town. In his mind, I’m the road to a better life. I tell him it’s incestuous, that I don’t feel that way, but he refuses to listen. He is desperate, as if having me is the difference between life and death.  

S moves around the table as I talk, always a hand on my shoulder, arm, or leg.

And if you refuse to go with him, what will happen?

I know what will happen. He’ll—

He’ll kill you.

Yes, I know. I know that.

There will be a way forward.

She increases the pressure at the point where my shoulders meet my neck.

Let’s find that way forward, she says.

She has me lie down and places her hands beneath my head.

He wants to leave the goldfields and go north, to New South Wales, I say.

And you?

I want to leave, yes, but not with him.

Well, maybe you need to make a plan. What skills do you have?

We both know how to bake, from our mother. Her parents were bakers back in Ireland. I’m thinking, if we can find somewhere to sell bread, set up a bakery, maybe we could survive.

Yes, you could survive, and then…?

And then?

Well, once things are somewhat stable, then you can start thinking. Or rather, you need to start thinking about yourself. How might you do that?

I close my eyes and take three deep breaths.

One day, when he’s out, I take half our savings, slip them into my breast pocket, and leave the house. I don’t tell anyone I’m going. I take that money and I run.

*

When I got back to my room in the share house, I turned on my laptop and opened the folder containing the photos we scanned last year—the shoe boxes of old family photos my aunt had collected over the course of fifty years.

As I went through them with her, laying them out on her dining table, she told me about my grandparents, great grandparents, great-great grandparents, how they came over in the mid-1800s from Ireland, Germany, and France, how they lived in rural Victoria before moving north to New South Wales, and finally to the suburbs of Sydney where she and my mother grew up.

Wallet-sized black-and-white photos of my great grandparents standing outside their weatherboard bungalows, chickens pecking in the yard.

My grandfather as a young boy, perched high up on a workhorse with two other children, several adults labouring in the unfenced fields behind.

My grandparents on their wedding day.

My grandmother as a young girl in her school uniform—I could see myself in her smile.

I closed the laptop, stood up, and went out to the garden to water the plants. The sunflowers were already knee-high.

*  

Tuesday evening at Box Hill Community Arts Centre. I laid my first set of prints on the drying rack—an aerial view of an English breakfast in a frying pan. Then I took a fresh rectangle of lino and sat back down. I began tracing, directly onto the surface, a still-life I photographed during the pandemic—a small vase of wildflowers on a café table on the Isle of Iona. I hadn’t drawn for years, not since I was a teenager, but the movements came naturally. I was able to depict the vase with correct perspective, able to sketch the flowers with a quick series of free-moving lines.

At twenty past seven, people began to rinse their lino blocks and wipe their sections of table clean. I left my work in the box reserved for our class, put my coat on, and wished my classmates goodnight. When I stepped out onto Station Street, I didn’t turn right towards the train station but left towards his house. Some of the house fronts were decked out with Christmas tinsel and fairy lights. There were big red bows around the trees.  

He had invited me for dinner, to say thank you for the other night. I’ll make the pumpkin curry you like, he said, as if it were already decided that I would come. I did not want to go, but then I thought of his soft child-like body, of him sitting on the grey sofa in his black puffa jacket, smelling of cigarette smoke, and I could no longer speak honestly.

He had lit half a dozen tea lights and arranged them on the table and counter in the glass holders I bought at the charity shop last summer. Later, when I was stacking the dishes in the sink, he came up behind me and put his hands around my waist. A serpentine sensation—the lack of sharp edges made it difficult for me to recognise how I really felt. Afterwards, in the bed on the still-stale sheets, I stared at the ceiling as he slept. I placed my hands on my stomach, took three deep breaths, and made a promise to myself.

In the morning, I woke at first light, picked my clothes up quietly, and tiptoed to the bathroom where I showered and dressed. I fastened my necklace and placed the silver mirror in the hollow of my neck. I was in the kitchen making coffee in the percolator when he came in, blurry-eyed, his blue towel dressing gown hanging open at the waist. I rubbed my fingers over the mirror pendant and smiled without meeting his eyes—just enough distance to protect myself, but not enough to trigger doubt.

I drank my coffee standing up, looking out the flyscreen door at the backyard, at the overgrown flower beds I filled last summer with French marigolds, Chinese spinach, green beans, and stalks of corn. While he was in the shower, I prized the house key off my key ring and placed it on the kitchen counter, next to my empty coffee cup. I closed the front door quietly behind me and walked out into the morning light.

About Laura Swan: Born in Australia and raised in England, since 2005 Laura has been based in Nepal where she works as a translator and interpreter (Tibetan-English). She has studied creative writing at Faber Academy and University of Cambridge and is currently enrolled in a Creative Writing MA at Lancaster University. Her work has appeared in Porridge Magazine and Verandah Magazine.

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