Review of Australian Fiction, Volume 1, Issue 1 Read online

– Come on, Cleo, Angela pleaded, Agree with me, she was a wanker.

  – She was pretentious.

  – And stupid.

  Cleo clicked her tongue in annoyance.

  – Don’t be like that, she’s certainly stuck up but she is not stupid. Angela groaned and reached for her tobacco pouch.

  – She just had to rattle off the names of trendy artists and you wet your pants. Typical. But she didn’t fool me, I was listening to what she had to say, I don’t give a fuck who she knows.

  Cleo was dumbfounded, wished she could just grab the pouch and rolling papers and fling them into the sea. It was impossible to have a sane conversation, let alone an argument when Angela was in such a mood. She watched her lover finish rolling the cigarette, bring it to her lips and light it defiantly, as if daring Cleo to nag her. Well, she wasn’t going to say one word, not one bloody word. Let her smoke, she can smoke the whole packet, get lung cancer and die. Good, Cleo would take the kids and move back to the city. They were sinking into the miasma that was suburban life, reinforcing old bigotries and prejudices. It wasn’t just Angie, Cleo herself needed to be challenged.

  – Don’t you think it’s interesting that we are talking about Erina and not about Marco? I mean he was saying the exact same things. Is it that we can’t bear a forthright woman but we respect that quality in a man?

  As soon as the words were out she realised her mistake. She hadn’t meant it to sound accusatory; she had just been struck by the venomous language they had been using against the woman. Bitch, wanker, stupid, all this rubbish about smacking her. They were Angie’s words but she had been consenting to their use. But of course Angela didn’t see it that way. Of course she thought Cleo was getting back at her.

  Indeed, Angela was shaking her head in disbelief.

  – Oh My God, Are you going to make this about feminism?

  Well, actually, honey, it is about feminism.

  – I’m not making it about anything. I was just questioning why I resented her and not Marco, wondering if that possibly had something to do with gender.

  Angela started counting down on her fingers.

  – Or could it be that, first, he had a sense of humour. Second, he listened and asked questions. Third, he didn’t assume I knew of or was remotely interested in what contemporary art wankers were doing here or overseas.

  Angela paused.

  – Do I need to go on?

  – No, you made your point.

  – Good, so we agree she was a fucking uptight rude bitch. If she had been a man doing and saying the exact same things then it would make him a fucking uptight rude prick.

  – Are you two fighting?

  Titian’s nose was pressed up against the mesh of the screen door. She looked down at Angela and scowled.

  – Why are you smoking?

  Cleo was shaking her head.

  – It’s alright, we weren’t fighting, just a silly argument, nothing important.

  Titian swung open the door, came out to the verandah and pulled up a chair next to Angela. She was wearing a loose, over-sized scarlet singlet. Since puberty Titian had been conscious of her flat chest. It had been agony at times for Cleo, observing her daughter’s embarrassment, sometimes her despair, at the tyranny of the body. You’re gorgeous she tells her, every second day, You are tall and beautiful and gorgeous. You are, you are, you are. She wanted to say it to her now.

  Titian was screwing up her nose in distaste at Angela’s smoking. Teasing her, Angela blew smoke in her direction. Titian whacked her mother’s arm.

  – Don’t. Bitch.

  Angela put a finger to her lips.

  – Shhh. Your Mum doesn’t approve of that word.

  Titian was incredulous.

  – I’m reclaiming it. The sneer morphed into a wide beaming grin and she threw her arms up into the air.

  – I’m a big slut bitch, she called out, and then collapsed into giggling.

  Angela and Cleo were both frowning. The two women looked at one another. Angela cleared her throat, butted out the cigarette.

  – I don’t think you can reclaim that word. I don’t think you can do that with slut.

  Titian gathered in her legs, pouted, all confusion and insolence.

  – Why? She had mumbled the word, the confidence of a few moments ago seemingly drained for her.

  Oh my baby, oh my baby, you are beautiful.

  – Because I think there are such things as bitches. Angela was smiling up at Cleo now. Some guys are pricks, some women are bitches. But I don’t think there is any such thing as a slut. I think there are people who are really into sex and have lots of sex and I say to them, go for it, and I think there are people who have too much sex because they are avoiding dealing with shit in their lives. But sluts don’t exist. Do you understand?

  And Cleo knew what Angela was going to say next, she knew the story, she could almost tell it herself, the exact words, she had never forgotten them when Angela had first confided in her all those years ago, nineteen years ago, walking home together after a party, holding hands down Mater Street, giving the finger to the boys hanging out of the windows of their Toyota Corolla, screaming Fuck off leso sluts to them.

  Titian was still looking down, still not looking at her parents. Angela carefully touched her back. Titian didn’t react, didn’t complain. So Angela gently massaged her daughter’s back as she spoke.

  – My oldest brother, your Uncle Mick, now he’s what I’d call a prize prick. When I was sixteen I was seeing this boy, Andrew, he was Mick’s best friend. I thought I was real grown up and he’d take me out to the local pub, my whole world hung out in that pub.

  Angela rolled her eyes, recalling the pub, recalling the faces.

  – One night I had a few too many pints, I got way smashed, I was having a good time and there was this guy making eyes at me all night. He was very handsome. A bit like a young Alan Bates.

  – Who?

  – No matter. Anyway, coming back from the toilets he was standing by the cigarette machine and we just kissed. Just fell into each other and kissed.

  – Like kissing or pashing?

  – Pashing. But I heard something, I looked up and there was Mick just staring at me, like I was filthy, like I was dirt. Of course I was embarrassed and ran after him, and this is what I’ll never forget, in front of Andrew, in front of everyone there at the pub, cousins, friends, uncles and aunts, he just went, with that look on his face, like I was scum, You know what you are, everyone, you know what my sister is, she’s just one big ugly slut. Then he spat at me and said it again. He said, Slut!

  Angela was trembling, her voice was cracking.

  – I have never felt so ashamed, I hope you never ever have to feel that shame. I’ve said to your Mum, said it often, that sometimes I think that was the moment I knew I couldn’t stay in Leeds, couldn’t stay in England. If I stayed I thought I would hear those ugly words of Mick’s every day for the rest of my life. So I left.

  She breathed out loudly, recovered her composure.

  Titian threw herself into Angela’s arms. The girl and the woman hugged.

  Angela and Cleo looked at one another, Cleo mouthed, Thank you.

  Angela mouthed back, I love you.

  * * *

  Titian pulled away from her mother, sprung to her feet.

  – Okay, I won’t reclaim slut.

  She put her face right up to Angela’s.

  – And don’t smoke!

  – Don’t nag!

  Titian kissed them both goodnight, headed off to bed.

  Angela and Cleo sat in the companionable stillness, the silence broken only by the crashing now furious waves on the shore.

  – Come here.

  Cleo walked over and dropped on Angela’s lap. The two women kissed, lightly, but they lingered in the kiss, brushing lips, softly, again and again.

  Angela pulled away.

  – Sorry for being such a moody bitch.

  Cleo checked herself. She had bee
n about to apologise herself, then thought, I don’t have to. It wasn’t a victory, she wasn’t feeling vindicated. She didn’t want an apology to be meaningless, that wouldn’t be right.

  – I love you, she answered, kissing Angela on the lips one more time. She got to her feet.

  – You coming?

  Angela tilted back and forth her near-empty glass.

  – I’m going to have one more whiskey, two more fags and then come to bed.

  – Don’t fall asleep out here.

  – I’ll be alright.

  * * *

  Cleo checked in on Felix, who was still at his game console, he was still sipping from his beer. She kissed him goodnight, then hesitated in the corridor, outside the bathroom; debated with herself about just jumping straight into bed. But in the end she brushed her teeth, she flossed, applied moisturiser to her face, neck and hands. It just felt better.

  * * *

  In the morning she was awoken by shafts of golden sunrays streaming through the blinds into their bedroom. Angela was already up. The sun was unrelenting and the sky was the deepest cyan and stretched to the infinite. On the verandah, drinking her coffee, she looked out to the sea where her lover and her son were kneeling atop their boogie boards. They were tiny figures in the distance, but as the woman and the child paddled furiously to escape a rising giant wave, as the wave overtook them and brought them rolling and tumbling all the way to shore, Cleo was sure she could hear their laughter ringing joyously through the midst of the majestic, glorious day.

  Enough

  Kalinda Ashton

  It is summer; I am nineteen, our share-house has a mouse plague, and I am busy being in love with men who are not in love with me. Instead they ask my advice about the women they do love – girls who made art installations of all the found objects they’d collected on one walk through the streets between their house and the local pub, or who became apprentices at vegan shoe makers and pinned fairy wings to their red fake fur coats and took acid and worried about art and rolled down hills and printed band posters on old linotype machines with ironic quotes from the Herald Sun, or took photographs of their friends dressed like sex-workers in bad eighties’ movies for no immediately apparent reason and wrote handwritten notes about what they had learned in mime class, or made up their faces into Kabuki-style horror masks for festivals. They were beautiful, these women, and I was not, but what mattered really was that they had a sort of innocence about them, a curiosity for the world that had left me the year I turned ten and my father committed suicide.

  My friend Meaghan has “adventure” tattooed on the inside of her fine pale wrist. ‘When I was sixteen,’ she tells us while we sit in the long grass of our backyard, which we’ve tried to trim unsuccessfully with nail scissors and suck red wine from the dregs in the bladder of the cask, passing it around the circle like a joint, ‘I thought I was going to just fucking die; I was desperate, desperate, waiting, hoping for something to happen to me.’

  ‘At that age,’ I say, but very quietly, ‘I was always hoping things would stop happening to me. That’s the difference between us.’

  I wouldn’t get a tattoo, ever since I heard a bunch of high school boys on the tram, showing off by forcing open the doors and spitting out the window, talking at movie-surround-sound volume about how bad tattoos look on fat people, like the branding on a pig, but if I ever did carve longing on my own wrist it would say “wait” or maybe “amnesia”. Instead I just say tattoos are ‘so fucking pretentious’ and make fun of people who get the names of their partners or children inked into them as if they are liable to forget them otherwise.

  Mostly, these boys I like are would-be philosophers, and musicians, and actors, and writers. They misquote Nietzsche at parties and fail to hold their own in arguments about the meaning of life, while sneaking glances at the pretty fey girls they’d rather be talking to and pretending to be impressed by my greater understanding of existentialism while their own suffering stays tangled in their mouths.

  I like Sartre’s line from No Exit, “hell is other people”, and quote him a lot even though I quite like other people, most of them, and have no idea what it is really like to be alone.

  * * *

  I dream about the mice, jolt awake at night as they scratch against the skirting boards in my room, flinch as the bright-red parasol in our ornamental fireplace twitches and vibrates as the mice make their hidden way behind its cover. A mouse runs over my feet in the kitchen, dies under the armchair in our living room, settles into the space behind the heater, climbs over my bed when I am asleep.

  Meaghan, in despair, buys rat sack but I won’t let her put it out. I’m a vegetarian, and my terror of the mice is marginally outweighed by my horror of killing things. She leaves the sachets of poison tucked safely away in the drawer on my instruction but the next day it is all gone, has all been eaten. The mice have found their way to the packets in the night and had a binge.

  There is a boy in my literature class who never speaks. He draws worrying complicated pictures in his notebook and sits at the back of the room near the door. He writes stories I don’t really understand. On the last day of semester we all go to the pub. When I overhear him asking about vegan beer my heart sings and I trap him into debating animal liberation campaigns with me. He stutters elegantly, skipping like the CD I have of Modest Mouse who in my version sings “we know ev-ev-ev-ev everything”. He tells me the class frightens him, since everyone is so articulate. His name is Josh. I loved a Josh in grade five and tell Meaghan I want to marry a man with this name even though I don’t plan on getting married ever.

  ‘Eloquent is fucking overrated,’ I say and I mean it. The note my father left was some bad creative writing exercise, a turn in Scrabble for a lousy score, a crossword clue not a goodbye, some gloriously pretentious act of agony that my mother kept coming back to in the months following. ‘Does he mean he’s had enough?’ she asked me when I came home from school and didn’t know yet what had happened. ‘It could have been, I’m okay, I’ve done enough or, that’s enough, or?’ Elliptical one-word lines are fine for poems, supremely cruel for families of the dead. Enough. What a joke.

  That night, we sit next to statues of dead colonialists in the empty grounds of the university. ‘I love being awake when everyone’s asleep,’ I say. The security guards know me from all the buildings I’ve occupied, all the demonstrations I’ve been on and we greet each other affably. We walk through autumn leaves and I kick them around me and lie down in a gutter – it isn’t an affectation but not entirely natural either; I am coaxing myself into being able to get lost in things.

  He says, ‘See that girl, two blocks down, with the red backpack?’

  ‘No,’ I answer squinting across the traffic and then ‘yes’.

  ‘She’s invading my personal space.’

  Right.

  * * *

  When Josh finally takes me home with him, I’m incredulous. His room is completely white and almost bare. The carpet is perfectly vacuumed and empty. He has a computer, a desk, and a set of impossibly heavy weights lined up in perfect pairs against the wall. I bite my nails and look across at people lining up for the drag show in the Greyhound pub. I want to be with the Greyhound people, they are my people, he is an empty room. He cooks me dinner: sweet potato curry. I hate sweet potato. I eat it anyway. I bore him with politics. ‘You think too much,’ he says slicing up a lime with clumsy fingers and dropping it into the jam jar we’re both drinking from.

  I slide along the carpet and lie with my back on the floor, my feet against the wall. ‘Maybe…’ and I’m laughing but it’s gin and I know I’m five sips from weeping, ‘You just don’t think enough.’ Later, he’ll say earnestly, matter of factly, ‘But you think you know everything; you talk too much,’ and I’ll hide my face in my hands so he can’t see I’m blushing, so he won’t know I’m not amused. I don’t want to be intense. I don’t want to be uncool. In the night when he think I’m asleep he whispers, ‘I have a ter
rible talent for unhappiness,’ I recognize something in them, these men; something that had been in me once until I’d had to turn my face from it or drown. I think it doesn’t matter if they don’t love me. I’m worldly. I can be worldly. Maybe they’ll fall in love with my nonchalance and my fine mind and my lack of fear at the darkness they carry with them.

  * * *

  ‘I don’t think we should have sex,’ he tells me as we got off the tram. ‘I don’t…’ the stutter kicks in, ‘I don’t want to hurt you… I don’t treat people very well when I’ve slept with them.’ I am relieved. Is that all? I say I’m a big girl I can take care of myself. I am not paying attention.

  He draws a picture of me sitting on the curb of Smith Street, smoking a cigarette, my bag splaying its contents into the road. We walk to the Carlton Gardens in the dark. We have a beer but no bottle opener. ‘It isn’t a fucking twist-top?’ I feel bereft. I want to smash the glass and take our chances – I’ve found brute force works far more often than you might imagine – but he painstakingly works the lid free against the metal arm of the park bench.

  He is fighting with his oldest friend. Something about money or a girl he wanted to sleep with, or did, or should have. ‘The thing about borderline personality is that no matter what relationship I have with them, I only remember my last encounter with someone,’ he tells me and it’s mournful but also somehow boastful. He has the psychic equivalent of my amnesia tattoo and I envy him.

  ‘Really?’ I didn’t know he had borderline. My step-sister is borderline. I know if I choose to peel back the knotted friendship bands on his wrists I’ll see scars. I’m dating my family. I’m giving an old story a new spin. I’m tired.

  ‘Ordinary people are fuckwits,’ he slurs.

  ‘They are not,’ is all I can manage at four in the morning. I’ve already told him off for using the word ‘babe’ and talking about women as ‘dames’. He’s taken to addressing me as Ms.