BEES TO HONEY
Lualhati lifted her eyelids. Through her dark lashes, she watched the soft flit-fluttering
of the teepee walls, pink and yellow stripes swaying in sync, inwards and outwards like
breathing. Like a tulip, pulsating and sucking in pollen from the air. She laid there for a
moment, breathing with it. Sunlight from her bedroom window pierced through the fabric
drawing neat, thick stripes across the floor and over her face and body.
Lualhati slowly rolled over onto her stomach, lifted a corner of the flap door, scanned
the room left to right, crawled out. In the daylight, the room looked less scary than it did last
night; the broken leg of her Barbie vanity chair wasn’t the poison dagger that stabbed her waist,
and the shadows in the closet stopped trying to pry their way out past the broken hinges.
Since she was five, Lualhati would help her Daddy play pretend in the closet. She had to
be a good girl now, after he rescued her from the Philippines. Sometimes, though, she didn’t
like when he got too rough with her tiny body, gripping her skinny arms too tight and
slamming her down too hard. It was like a sickness took him over. A kind of parasite, slithering
under his skin, wearing him like a costume. But she could cure him when she did what he
wanted.
Gail picked up Lualhati’s lacy pink panties sitting on a small stack of old colouring books she’d
abandoned years ago and tossed them into her plastic washing basket, balancing it on the edge
of her hip. In her kindergarten days, Gail would find Lualhati’s countless half-finished
drawings all over the house, in every nook and cranny.
The only thing she couldn’t find now was that stupid doll of hers. Its skirt was ripped off
by a dog when Lualhati was three, the white fluff now spilling out of the torn stitches stretched
across its hips. It was always with her, didn’t even let Gail wash out the dirt stains and yellow
spots out from its once pristine, cotton skin.
Through the bedroom window, Gail watched as her husband appeared from the garage,
a shovel in hand, pausing for a moment to tighten the loose laces of his heavy-duty boots.
Gail could never be good enough for him. It was always the wrong clothes, the wrong
food, the wrong friends. But he’d only wanted the best for his girls.
‘Come on baby,’ he’d purr into her ear once when she’d threatened to leave, ‘who would
you be running to?’
But she loved him. She was his wife.
And anyway, Gail couldn’t leave even if she wanted to. He owned everything. He kept
the car keys, the money, he had the rights to the house, and he always made sure she was safe
inside of it. There was no better place for her than right there with him.
Gail looked up at an old photo of the three of them, blue-tacked to the wall. A crease ran
through the centre, splitting the little girl in half. When they adopted her from the immigration
agents, the house almost felt whole again. He loved Lualhati from the first moment he saw her.
He was drawn to her instantaneously, irresistibly. Like bees to honey. He’d peer at her copperbrown thighs, curious eyes sliding up and down her arms, a thick thumb grooming her straight,
cinnamon-spiced hair.
Lualhati stared at the red stickiness glued between the wrinkles of her fingers, rubs at them
hard. She needed to clean up, quickly, before someone walked in and caught her.
Lualhati remembered the first time they almost did. She’d forgotten about a bruise on
her forehead as she took off her beanie on a cold day in kinder. When she covered it back up,
she wondered why the other children had looked so concerned.
The bad man in blue came to their door later that day, asking for her secret. But her
Daddy made him go away, told him she’d only fallen and hit her head on the edge of a table.
‘Don’t cause any more trouble now’, she remembered the man say. ‘You were very
lucky to find yourself in a place like this.’
Lualhati could feel the secret expanding inside her, filling up her chest and her throat.
She clenched her jaws to keep it from bursting out, nodding at him, as her Daddy’s eyes bore
into the back of her head and his grip tightened on her shoulder. She was lucky. If they had
found out, the bad man will come for her again. He will take her away and lock her up forever,
all alone.
She was a big girl now. No more mucking around.
His drunken shouts up the hall made Lualhati jump. He was angry about something.
Angry at her.
Gail loaded the washing machine, still trying not to look at Lualhati’s blood-soaked clothes.
God, she was so young. Gail had always tried to ignore it, but it had never meant to go
this far. She should’ve done something, said something to that cop. Begged her friends to listen.
She could’ve hauled him off or stabbed him with a kitchen knife. Anything.
She clumsily poured in the detergent, way too much for half a load.
But she couldn’t have. He would never let her win that easily. They’d both be dead if
she tried. And it was too late now.
A red smear painted the side of her thumb and she ran her hands under the clear water,
scrubbed it hard with the frothy soap til her white flesh burned a bright pink.
He ripped the teepee out of his way and grabbed Lualhati’s neck, yanking it to the floor. Crack.
'This was your fault,' he growled in her ear. ‘You did this.’
His heavy body weighed down her hips, and to her own surprise, she kicked, screamed,
cried, punching blindly at him with balled fists, landing a few throws before her flailing arms
were caught in his rough hands. They weren’t her Daddy’s hands.
Pain drilling deep into her skull, Lualhati pushed her face away from him, watched the
room turn dark and wobbly, unsure if it was from the tears or her mind. The collapsing pink
and yellow stripes swam in chaos, her hair now submerged in the pooling blood.
She clenched her jaws, squeezing her eyes shut, and drifted back into her tulip.
Gail watched him shovel out a hole in their garden.
This was wrong. She couldn’t just stand there as he buried their own daughter. Ripping
her eyes away, she turned to the bloody clothes still sitting semi-submerged in soapy water,
letting the tears stream down to her chin. That wasn’t her husband out there.
She squeezed her eyes shut, but Lualhati’s limp expression flashed through the
blackness.
She opened them again and caught her warped reflection in the silver tap, staring back
with unfamiliar, piercing eyes.
Reflective Commentary
Taking The Stilt Fishermen of Kathaluwa and Gaps in the Hickory, from Maxine Beneba Clarke’s
anthology Foreign Soil, as main sources of inspiration for my original story, drawing parallels
between a local Australian and Filipino immigrant, both trapped by domestic abuse to
represent the voiceless and unite social groups. Though inspired by the ruthless and dismal
representation of the reality experienced by those who were silenced by internal turmoil and
oppression, I suggested hope for liberation from these experiences.
Similar to Clarke's third-person focalisation on Asanka, I employed a childlike narrative voice
for Lualhati, characterised by imaginative language to illustrate her naïve perception, replacing
‘police officer’ with ‘bad man in blue’. This was intended to separate her from Gail's mature
narration - a metaphorical exemplification of their inability to connect. Alike Clarke's
perspective-shifting stories, the lack of dialogue (appearing only in flashbacks) and rapid
streams of consciousness in Gail's and Lualhati's narration demonstrates their isolation from
society and their restlessness to escape from the confinements of their own minds.
While weaving a dismal tone through the whole story, I alternated between a variety of
sentence lengths to create dynamic rhythm and convey a particular mood to the reader,
reflecting the narration throughout Foreign Soil. Longer sentences had a slower pace for calmer
descriptions while fast-paced thoughts with shorter clauses convey panic and hysteria, building
tension towards the climax. To honour Clarke’s emphasis on the sounds, constructions and
subtlety of language, specific words were chosen to convey mood and imply hidden
information: soft sounding consonants for a serene atmosphere and diminishing (‘baby’ and
‘she was his wife’) to demonstrate Gail’s inferiority to her husband.
Each segment followed a consistent structure evident in Clarke's writing where observations of
the real-world lead into a flashback or a stream of thoughts. Drawing from the connections
between transitions in Gaps in the Hickory using repeated symbols, phrases and actions, the final
segments used this feature to demonstrate the unity and liberation gained after separation:
‘those weren't her Daddy's hands’ matching ‘that wasn't her husband out there’ and repetition
of ‘submerged’.