Narrator

Creative response: Between the walls transcript.

The town of Eldermoor stood still, almost like it had been trapped in time. Its narrow streets were lined with old stone houses, their walls steeped in stories that whispered when the wind blew through the cracks. Inside one such house lived Mara, whose days had recently begun to blend into grey shadows and soft murmurs of her past.

Inside the house, Mara walked slowly through the empty rooms, the silence pressing close to her, providing her a warm sense of comfort. Each corner held a memory – the faded family portrait, sat slantwise on the wall, the creaking floorboards, which had once reverberated with the soft pitter patter of her siblings, was now silent and filled with the scent of wood and dust. These fragments made up her world.

Outside, the sky wore a dull colour, as if waiting for something to break the stillness. The people in the streets of Eldermoor moved quietly, caught between routines and old grievances. Their voices, when heard, echoed off the high walls, carrying the weight of long-held secrets.

Mara felt torn. She wanted to reach beyond the town’s borders, to find more than the stories inside those walls. But at the same time, the town was part of her. Like the ivy that trailed out over the pot plant from her bookshelf to the floor, she too felt tangled between comfort and loneliness of her home and the town.

The walls, in their silence, reflected Mara’s own uncertainty. This world is one of hidden emotions and half-remembered dreams – a space that suggests how people live inside their personal and shared histories, sometimes trapped, sometimes longing for change.

Narrator

What a good one looks like.

It started with drawing a name out of a hat and ended with a man in jail. Or it might have been the other way around. It is unclear. It is a loose collection of memories that jump around, struggling to coalesce into meaning. These memories are not from the same time or place, but there is a pattern there, somewhere.

Perhaps it is best to start with what seems like the beginning, but the beginning is a story I've heard third or fourth hand. It is a story that happened to my mother. Or at least around my mother. It is a story that is about her father, my grandfather. It is here that the thread of stories and memories start to appear, like a fractured bone.

On my 18th birthday my mother shows me the newspaper clippings, remnants from a time before I was born, when my mother was not yet 18. You would think I’d be immediately drawn to the oversized headlines of My Mate Ruined Me and Stolen Money – or even the sensational detail about my grandfather stealing almost a million dollars and being sentenced to 16 years in gaol, but it is the story between the lines that draw me in. I invent the story in the gaps, the story of my mother and her sisters, of growing up with their father in gaol. I fill in the part where their mother dies a few years into her husband’s gaol sentence and my mother becomes a mother to her younger siblings.

I keep pulling at the thread, time unravels and draws me in. I remember the sound of cicadas and the colour of Jacaranda trees in November bloom. I'm at my grandfather's house. There is an old wooden TV against the short wall. At school that day, it was my job to carefully write the names of each horse, to cut up the slips of paper, to place them all in the hat. I walked around the classroom as each student drew out a name. I remember the slip of paper, but I cannot remember the horse’s name.

I remember running home to my grandfather’s house to watch the race. He told me he didn’t gamble much anymore, that he used to spend a lot of time at the races, but that everyone puts a bit of money down on the race. I showed him my slip of paper, my horse. I'm standing at the dining table, well, I'm kneeling on a chair at the dining table, surrounded by the smell of cigarettes and beer. The race begins. I listen for my horse’s name, try to make sense of the announcer on the TV rattling off horse after horse. The man on the TV speaks faster and faster as the race crescendos. I try to see my horse on the TV, but I can’t find him. My grandfather explains to me that my horse was scratched before the race begun, he had broken his leg getting into the starting gate. He would be put down.

Of course this is all an invention. It is the collision of two memories and two points of time. These memories don’t belong to me, they are stolen and pieced together. An attempt to understand and to preserve a story.