2000 School Magazine

onqin@I works

THE LAST PAGEANT

After I had turned twelve no-one knew what to do with me. My mother stopped needing me so it wasjust a natural progression when she stopped loving me: whittling away her affections as I turned into a lumbering giantness. In the world, her world of Miss Hardware, Girl in a Million and Beef Week Queen, chubby was cute. Obsession crept around our house. Hid in the albums which she sat drooping, red-rimmed, over. She saw little girls with corkscrew curls dressed in their mother's shoes giggling from the stairs, peeking around mirrors and tinkling on the hallway piano. All reminding my mother of what I was not. Pageants were like oxygen, titles encompassed identities, sashes measured self-worth. My own obsession I hoarded. Shovelling it into my body like food, building temples of cardboard cut-outs starved of attention. We sat alone, apart, whilst another I did not have, another prize I had not won. I needed the attention. To absorb it like cocktails, smiles and kisses. I had stored the camera flashes, the cheesy grins up-drenched myself with them, like I was a solar panel, flat and silver, living off my excess in the cool indifferent night as I waited for the next pageant. But the sun no longer rose and I flounder. Crawling to my mother with obsolete entreaties only to find clouds cutting me off. "But darling how humiliating': So I planned the last pageant. And left the house pressing the cold leather of my mother's white heels against me. It was midday at the pool. Chlorine and hot grease fought for airspace. Snores and Gossip dodged amongst the layered bodies. I stood obvious against the white walls of the change rooms. Like a pink stain on the left leather heel of my mother's shoes. The heat from the concrete crept up, staining my body. Red suit, red face, red skin. A round red droplet against the bleached white sands. Women thumbed books, men played with children, nobody looked, nobody cared. My heels caught and ground in cracks. They did not sound like my mother's shoes which would slap fatly against the patio tiles or dangle silently from her hands. Cool wrinkled hands smelling like bacon. On my five year old hips they had rested. To push and sway my body teaching its arms, legs, lips to say seductive, provocative, coy, sweet. I went towards the stage with a stumble not a sashay. Standing on the stage denated, like my mother is pricking me once again with red claws and a shiny mouth after losing to someone, sweeter, smarter, someone that could sing the God Ship Lollipop in a higher key. Wishing to dissolve in the chaotic colour around me like I do now in the rows of swimsuits. The billowing towels on the wire fence remind me of the blustering skirts of old debutantes and frenzied mothers as they jostled children at mirrors. Saturating cherub faces with paint and plastic. We stand/parade against the corrugated iron slabs. Have the heated lines branded across our broad shoulders and thighs as we lean. U move, we move. A long caterpillar of bobbing on the eyes of curious bathers. Escaping the camouflage of solid limbs and the shaking hollow in my belly I see through their eyes. Through tinted glasses chiorinated pupils and cigarette smoke. I see large pale blobs moving in a haze. Weiostle and bump. Sinuously curving arms, stomachs, feet are pushed forward. Lips swabbed with red are pouted. No one watches, no one cares. Boys stilldartin and out of sleepy granddads. Lifeguards snigger on the stand. But I will get attention, I do get attention. I get it when they come. Dressed in pressed blue. Cutting up the stunted summer day with pressed blue and batons. Eyes once more eat up my body; lick at my skin, bore through the stretched patterned costume. As we pass the stands I hear, "Bludgeoned with a high heel!as the poolleaves me"her own mother': Asl am escorted out, I once again feel eyes.

MIChejle Brady I I Woolcock Sculpture

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