What’s so funny:

humour as a subversive technique in

contemporary feminist

literature

by

Claire Duffy

Previous Qualifications

BA Professional and Creative Writing

BA Honours Professional and Creative Writing

Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Deakin University

August 2018

lswan

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lswan

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Acknowledgements

Thank you.

To the supervisors who have stood by me along the way: my primary supervisor

Maria Takolander. Maria’s guidance, support and sterling praise has been superior

in every way. And David McCooey (who is a whizz with concision), Cassandra

Atherton, Marion Campbell, and Janine Little who have stood in at various stages

along the way. Professional editor, Floriana Badolotti, provided proofreading

services, according to the guidelines laid out in the university-endorsed national

‘Guidelines for editing research theses’. Janine Little for reading the exegesis and

giving valuable feedback. The brilliant administrative support from Robyn

Ficnerski at Deakin University. The men I have met who did strange things that

gave me material for my creative work. Zanna, you inspire me to keep being nutty

at every opportunity. My dear friend Lisé Baker who heard every complaint,

every joyful moment, and every perplexing difficult experience. Lisé, I could not

have done it without your friendship, honesty, and wisdom. Lastly, to all the

funny, hilarious, courageous, demanding, and angry women who make humour, I

couldn’t have done it without you either.

i

Contents

Candidate Declaration ..................................................................... 2

Acknowledgements ........................................................................... 3

Creative thesis ................................................................................... 1

It’s not me, it’s you .................................................................................. 1

J E X P R E S ........................................................................................... 8

The concert pianist isn’t home ............................................................... 22

Dried blood and cornflakes .................................................................... 30

Bulbzilla ................................................................................................. 46

Jacqueline .............................................................................................. 52

A smear .................................................................................................. 73

Let’s cut some shit ................................................................................. 82

Keep clear of big shits ........................................................................... 87

The procedure ........................................................................................ 98

Adam and Eve and Lucy Fir ................................................................ 103

The little Golden Notebook ................................................................. 118

Dead bird ............................................................................................. 132

Who’s cooking dinner? ........................................................................ 146

Things that are not there ...................................................................... 154

ii

Cake loves Mary .................................................................................. 162

Exegesis.......................................................................................... 179

Introduction.......................................................................................... 179

Chapter 1 Feminist humour in literature: laughing at patriarchal

nonsense ........................................................................................................... 187

Gendered humour theory: a history ........................................ 190

The dominant reiterative drive ................................................ 198

Feminist humour is not an oxymoron ..................................... 203

Chapter 2 Radicalising the feminine grotesque: Angela Carter’s Nights

at the circus and Marie Darrieussecq’s Pig tales ............................................ 211

What is the grotesque? ............................................................ 211

Why is the grotesque funny? ................................................... 216

Nights at the circus ................................................................. 219

Pig tales................................................................................... 226

Chapter 3 Parodic feminist literature: Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad

and Danielle Wood’s Rosie Little’s cautionary tales for girls ........................ 234

What is parody? ...................................................................... 235

Feminist Parody ...................................................................... 243

Rosie Little’s cautionary tales for girls................................... 245

Postmodern Penelope ............................................................. 251

Conclusion ........................................................................................... 261

References ............................................................................................ 263

iii

1

Creative thesis

It’s not me, it’s you

Ms Parker kept a spray water bottle, just like the one at the hairdresser, on the

window sill beside the laundry door. Whenever she spotted a cat making its way

down the drive she would rush to the laundry, grab the bottle and go out the back

door to wait in ambush outside the back of the house. Butterflies leapt about in her

belly as she anticipated the cat’s head appearing around the corner of the house.

Then she would squirt the water while making a terrifying hiss. She would

scrunch up her nose, which lifted up her cheeks under her eyes, partially

obscuring her vision, and let loose with a terrible sound squeezed between her

bunched-up tongue and the roof of her mouth. ‘Psssssssss!’

So there Ms Parker was in the early afternoon, flicking through her

Instagram while sitting at her living room table, when down the street came not a

cat, but a man. When she spotted him through the front window, at first, she

thought of the water bottle and stood up to go to the laundry, but as she stared

through her gauze curtains at the man she changed her mind. She stared at him,

watching the way he had a curiosity about him, the way you look when you’re

walking in the bush after being in the city for a long time.

The man stopped on the nature strip at the front of Ms Parker’s property

with the air of someone with nothing much to do. Then he looked both ways, up

and down the street. His back was slightly arched, and he didn’t blink as though

he was now paying attention. After a while he dropped his shoulders and focussed

on Ms Parker’s place. He then continued his inquisitive walk down her driveway.

2

Ms Parker followed him, moving from room to room down the inside of the

house, being careful not to get too close to a window. She watched the loose-

limbed movement of his body with fascination and noticed how quickly he

snapped to attention when he heard her accidentally bump into a piece of

furniture.

When he came to her car parked in the driveway, he spent a good deal of

time looking over it. He stared in through the windows, especially on the driver’s

side and as he walked around and around the car he trailed his hand over the duco.

Ms Parker followed the motion of his fingers and noticed how lightly he touched

the contours of the car’s exterior. He came to a halt at the driver’s side and stood

facing the car door. Ms Parker watched as he slowly pressed his whole body

against the car, moulding onto the shape of it. Then he laid his head sideways on

the roof and outstretched his arms, soaking in the warmth. Ms Parker guessed that

it was a bit too hot on his cheek though, for he straightened up, turned around and

pressed his backside onto the door slowly smoothing his hands in circles on the

warm duco.

It looked to Ms Parker as though he might settle there for some time so she

backed away from the window and, once she lost sight of him, turned and left the

room.

She changed out of her house clothes into her gardening gear and put on

the protective gloves she kept under the kitchen sink. She thought the dull colour

of the grey dust coat she wore when she was spraying poison on the garden might

be less likely to alarm him, so she went out through the back door and crept across

the grass to the shed where she kept it. The aluminium shed door made a loud

scraping sound as she opened it, so she didn’t bother closing it on her way out for

3

fear of frightening him off. By the time she went back inside, though, the man was

gone. She looked up and down the driveway through the lace curtain in the spare

bedroom, but she couldn’t see him anywhere.

It took another day before she found him. She was walking from the car to

the back door, having returned from work, when she noticed the shed door was

still open. She went to close it and spotted the man inside. He had found a

sleeping bag and was curled up on a pile of discarded sheets. She heard the steady

rhythm of his breath and didn’t disturb him. Later, after she had changed out of

her work clothes, she watched him through the kitchen window as he emerged

from the shed and returned to the car where he showed particular interest in the

sun-warmed duco.

She had caught a man once before; only once, a long time ago. Knowing

how unusual it was for men to be this far from the city and finding that first one in

her yard had been very exciting. She left bacon in a dish in the back yard for three

days, bringing it closer to the laundry door each day. Eventually she had him

eating out of her hand. She remembered the skin on the back of his hand as he

accepted the first cup of coffee she offered him. They were in the kitchen and

their hands almost touched. His were pale with freckles and covered in almost

transparent hair, and she thought they might be the hands of an office worker. She

had kept him for a while, but he looked like a juvenile and had become restless.

He seemed to enjoy the bed and meals she gave him but was just as happy to

leave when she unlocked the doors. There was no point forcing him to stay

against his will.

The one in the yard now looked like an adult so she reasoned that he was

probably looking for a permanent home. She thought of several different foods to

4

offer him before deciding on something mild like cheese and dry biscuits in case

he suffered from heartburn. Eventually, he sat at the kitchen table and ate while

she watched him.

On the second day Ms Parker decided to start up the car to see what his

reaction would be and was pleased when he showed interest in the sound of the

motor revving. She thought a drive one day would be possible, but not yet. She

wanted to be sure he would return to her when she called to him.

Ms Parker brought the pile of sheets from the shed into the laundry and

called to Mr Parker. Ms Parker was pleased when he recognised his new name,

and then responded when she called him. He followed her into the laundry and

stood watching as she heaped the sheets into the washing machine. She started it

up and took his hand and led him further into the interior of the house. His hand

was large and warm and firm.

In the spare room she tried to show him that the sheets on the bed were

better than the old pile from the shed. She wasn’t sure if he understood, so she

took off her shoes, pulled the bed clothes back and lay in the single bed. She

squeezed across to one side, then reached up and took his hand, drawing him

down beside her.

He sat on the edge of the bed with his back to her and took off his shoes as

she had done. He squished in beside her and she flipped the blankets over them

both. Mr Parker took a few moments to get his head comfortable on the pillow

and to adjust to the weight of the blankets on top of him. They lay still, looking up

at the ceiling, and after a short time Ms Parker noticed Mr Parker had turned his

head and was looking at her. She turned and smiled at him.

5

Mr Parker took to life in the house in no time. He was interested in doing

chores, which pleased Ms Parker very much. It was a lot of work looking after the

house alone. The first thing she had him do was finish making the wooden bench

seat that had been sitting idle in the garage for years. It was a project the first Mr

Parker had started and never finished. Once she saw he was busy with the bits of

wood and tools, she left him to it and went back inside and upstairs to her study.

She could hear him working as she dealt with all the boring emails she had been

avoiding all week. After a while she noticed how quiet the house had become. She

sat still and listened carefully. There was no sound coming from the yard or

downstairs.

A search of the ground floor and the garage confirmed her fears. The man

was gone. She suddenly thought of the car. She hadn’t bothered securing the car

keys because she didn’t think he would be that bold. She ran to the driveway and

saw the car was where she had left it. There was nothing to do but wait and hope.

Inside, she went to the spare bedroom and got back into the bed. Lying on

her side, she ran her hand over the pillow where his head had been and closed her

eyes. The exhaustion of her early-morning start overtook her, and she fell asleep.

It was afternoon when she woke, and Mr Parker was standing in the doorway

smiling, holding the end of a piece of string in his hand. It looked like the string

she used to secure the legs of a chicken when she was roasting it. He held it out to

her, so she dragged herself out of the bed and took hold of the string. She

followed it down the corridor to the kitchen, winding it into a messy ball in her

hand. It continued out to the yard and around to the side of the house. Mr Parker

had placed the completed wooden bench seat at the front of the car in the

6

driveway. He had tied the string around it in a limp bow; a gift for her. He showed

her how she could now sit on the bench seat and look at the car.

After that Ms Parker showed Mr Parker how to drive her on short daytrips

to the country on her days off. He didn’t seem to mind where they went but

became distressed if she left him in the car and moved out of sight for too long,

like when she had him stop in a park one time, so she could use the public toilet.

One Saturday afternoon after coming home from work she had Mr Parker

drive her to the newsagent. As they arrived at the shopping centre she was

surprised to see Mr Parker wave enthusiastically to someone. She had to crane her

neck to get a look at who he could have been waving at. She recognised her

neighbours, Sally Fielder and Fernando Torres, as they moved towards the pet

shop. She was even more surprised to see Fernando wave back at Mr Parker and

then give him the thumbs up.

Later that afternoon, she and Mr Parker were sitting at the living room

table reading sections of the paper. Ms Parker told Mr Parker she was tired and

would go and have a sleep. Mr Parker nodded and kept reading the paper. She left

the room and went upstairs, but she didn’t go to bed. She sat at the top of the stairs

and listened. She could hear pages of the newspaper turning. She heard him go to

the kitchen and make something to eat. Finally, she heard the laundry door open

and close, and she knew that he had left the house.

She crept downstairs and went out the front door. She slunk across the

front of the house and poked her head around the brickwork to sneak a view into

Sally and Fernando’s adjoining driveway. Mr Parker was there, walking down

their driveway, in his usual loose-limbed way. Ms Parker pulled her head back out

of sight and pressed her back against the bricks. She clamped her hand over her

7

mouth to stop herself from crying out in surprise. She took a quick look around

the corner and saw him enter their side gate.

That night Mr Parker came home drunk. Ms Parker had left his dinner on

the table with a tea-towel covering it. She lay in bed and listened as Mr Parker

stumbled in at the back door. She heard him bump into a chair in the darkened

kitchen. She didn’t hear him heat his dinner, but she heard several times the

unmistakable sound of vomiting and the toilet flushing.

It was an unpleasant task, but Ms Parker knew what she had to do. So,

there was Ms Parker in the early afternoon, sitting at her living room table flicking

through her Instagram, when down the drive came, not a cat, but a man. This time

she didn’t watch but continued her usual routine. It was time for her afternoon

nap, so she switched off her phone. As she walked up the stairs she heard the

laundry door open and the man walk in through the kitchen. Ms Parker continued

up the stairs. She plugged her phone into the charger on her desk and went to her

room and sat on the bed. As much as she didn’t want to listen, she couldn’t help

hearing the ruckus downstairs in the spare bedroom as the man-catcher surprised

Mr Parker. Mr Parker roared and thrashed about before the man-catcher finally

gained control of him. Ms Parker could just make out the soothing sounds that the

man-catcher was making to try to calm Mr Parker down.

She heard the back door slam and, soon after, the van drove away. It took

her little time to strip down to her underwear and get into bed. She lay

comfortably on her side and thought about what colour she would like to paint the

wooden bench next weekend.

8

J E X P R E S

Jana tugged at the soggy and limp newspaper that was hanging from the front of

her letterbox. The local paper appeared in her letterbox regularly, though Jana

couldn’t have said which day it was delivered because it often hung there for days

before she thought to clear her mailbox. She didn’t receive much in the way of

snail mail anymore. All her communications were online these days. Whenever

she did get around to retrieving the paper from the letterbox, she mostly scanned

the sports pages on the way from the letterbox to the recycle bin, where she would

drop it in. The front section of the paper, in her opinion, blabbed on about local

news that she wasn’t keen to read about. She already knew most of what was

going on from chatting with clients in her job as a delivery driver, and from her

friends who she spoke to at the sports club. If it wasn’t talked about in those

places it wasn’t worth talking about, as far as Jana was concerned.

That morning, though, after she had pulled the rolled-up paper from the

slot at the front of the letterbox, she noticed an article on the front page that

caught her attention, and she began walking back towards her house down the

slope of her driveway in the warm autumn sunshine, scanning the other headlines.

It was at times like this that she appreciated the previous owner’s generous hand

with cement; the driveway, the pavement that ran under the eaves across the front

of the house, and the carport attached to the side of the house were a great

expanse of greying concrete, which was punctuated by a long, black drain at the

bottom of the slope across the entrance to the carport and a circular drain, like the

kind you’d find in a laundry floor, on the pavement between the house and the

retaining wall of the front garden. The place was a great improvement on her last

house, where she had had a husband with all the handyman skills a householder

9

could need and none of the initiative to use them. He had completed, with the help

of his brother, a retaining wall on the high side of the block, but no pathways were

ever conceived, and they were forever tracking muck inside the house, which in

the end devalued it.

A rain shower overnight had rinsed the concrete driveway of the dust

stirred up by autumn winds, but it had left the paper limp. The end of the paper

that had been hanging out of the letterbox was particularly wet. Jana carried the

paper to the carport, where she stored her bins and where her red delivery van was

parked. The lettering on the sides of the van said The Jana Express in white,

and the numberplate was red with white lettering that read J E X P R S. The high

roof of the carport had been one of the features, as well as the expanse of cement,

that had drawn Jana to the house when she was in the market to buy, because most

garages and carports didn’t have the necessary height for her van. She leaned

against the van. The morning sun on the side of the vehicle warmed her shoulders,

and she flicked open the first page of the soggy newspaper to find a particular

article that interested her. She passed over an article about some high school

students who were running a fundraiser for one of the other students who had

leukaemia. Another headline announced that a local artist was holding an

exhibition of her glassware in the foyer of the theatre in town. On the facing page,

a pensioner-aged woman appeared grim-faced in a photo. The woman was

wearing stretchy brown trousers that pulled against her bulging abdomen, which

was made to look grotesque by the low angle of the photograph, flat black lace-up

shoes, and a yellow sweatshirt with an embroidered floral arrangement in the

centre of her bust. She was standing on a road in one of the bayside towns nearby.

Jana could almost hear the photographer telling the woman how to stand and

10

where to point. She was holding out her right hand, pointing to a pothole and

beyond that to the crumbling shoulder of the road. This was the article Jana was

interested in, because she herself had been avoiding this stretch of road when she

could because it was so badly deteriorated. In the article, the council said nothing

was going to happen for a while, which Jana noted, and she sucked on her teeth in

disgust. The photograph was also a reminder to her not to be tempted to wear

embroidered sweatshirts; they were so 1970s and people needed to move on.

Jana tried to flick to the sports pages, but only the next page flipped over

and fell limply onto her left hand. She found herself drawn to a quarter-page

photo of a café, which was in the shopping strip in Oakey, the town on the ocean

side of the peninsula where Jana lived. The colour photo was taken at night and

the shop had its lights blazing. People holding bottles of beer were standing and

sitting around the entrance to the shop, with some people spilling onto the road.

Jana recognised the shop and read the caption. The article announced that The Old

Gas Station was resuming its night-time gigs.

Jana thought it was probably because the summer tourist trade had dried

up. She had driven and walked past the shop plenty of times when making

deliveries in Main Street. The shop sold burgers and chips, and she’d always

thought of it as a surfie shop because it was near the beach and had a certain look

about it. Maybe, she thought, it had a surfboard hanging in the window. She didn’t

really know. She looked at the image again, but there wasn’t a surfboard in the

window. Instead, the rows of small square window panes were plastered with

notices and what looked like photos. The article mentioned a website where she

could order tickets. Jana tore out the article, checked that her club’s teams’ scores

11

were mentioned in the sports pages, and then threw the rest of the paper into the

bin, letting the yellow lid slam shut.

Jana was sixty-one and hadn’t been to see a live band for decades. She

lived on her own now and kept herself occupied as treasurer of the sports club

when she wasn’t making deliveries to the small villages on the peninsula and in

the city. Jana remembered how, when she was a teenager, the live-band scene had

been very popular. It was right when she was learning to drive and leaving school.

She’d been to so many bands with her friends: Midnight Oil, the Sunnyboys, the

Models, the Reels, and plenty more; even international bands. She had been

thrilled when the Stray Cats had played at the university refectory one time. Some

of her friends played in bands too, and she would go to their gigs whenever they

played. Even though the music venues were dingy pubs or the university

refectory, the music seemed to get inside her bones and she would dance until she

was covered in sweat. But it had been a long time since she had thought about

going to see a live band.

Jana went inside with the torn bit of newspaper, sat at her kitchen table

and opened her laptop. She looked up the address and read about the band that

would be playing that night. They were called The Buzzards and were described

as a blues jazz fusion band. The reviews she read made her think that the band

would be playing her kind of music. She decided to give it a go since her football

team was playing away; this chance find helped her make the decision not to

travel to see them this week. She clicked the link and bought a ticket for that

night’s gig.

Later, after she’d finished a frozen TV dinner washed down with a beer

and the news had ended, Jana went to her bedroom and opened the closet doors.

12

She slid hanger after hanger along, trying to decide what would be appropriate to

wear. She yanked out two shirts with embroidered flowers at the shoulder. She

had completely forgotten she owned them and decided they were just as awful as

the woman’s sweatshirt in the newspaper photo. She flung them on the floor near

the door for throwing out some time later, when she would go through everything

in her cupboards and drawers. In the end, she chose a chambray shirt, dark blue

cotton trousers and leather boat shoes. She also grabbed a denim jacket from the

closet just in case she had misjudged the temperature in the venue and needed

something warmer.

When it was just about time for the band to begin, Jana drove the van out

of her town and across the peninsula on the most direct road to the ocean side of

it. There were a surprising number of cars going in both directions, or at least it

was a surprise to Jana, because she didn’t go out at night very often and, when she

did, it was more likely to be to the sports club for a committee meeting or into the

city for a match. She had no idea there were so many people on the move while

she was at home at night. When she arrived on Main Street in Oakey twelve

minutes later, she was surprised to see that every car park was taken, including the

loading zones where she normally parked. She was in luck, though, because just

as she turned the corner a parked car pulled out and drove off. Jana reversed her

van into position right across the road from The Old Gas Station café.

She sat in her van and checked out the street before going in. Main Street

was well lit, and Jana could see that there was quite a bit of activity up and down

the street, unlike the High Street in her town, which was dead quiet at this time of

night, as she had witnessed driving home from the sports club after meetings. Jana

guessed that the people wandering up and down Main Street must be on their way

13

to dinner, but she hadn’t thought there were enough restaurants in the street to

attract that many people. Jana undid her seatbelt and shifted her attention to The

Old Gas Station across the road.

The shopfront was a mess of images and notices, just as she had seen in

the photograph in the paper earlier. She realised now that the surfboard she had

thought was hanging in the shop was on the logo, on the sign hanging above the

entrance. The sign showed the silhouette in black of an old Holden with a man

standing next to it. He was holding a surfboard under his arm, and beneath the

image the words THE OLD GAS STATION were written in white against a red

background. The windows of the café were littered with so many pictures and

scraps of paper that Jana doubted the people inside could see out. To the right of

the glass front door, Jana could see a person collecting their food order from a

service window. So, she realised, the shop was still serving meals and she could

have had a burger instead of the awful TV dinner she’d pulled from the freezer.

She would try a burger if she ever came to see a band again. Outside the shop,

near the curb was a row of low hoardings sectioning off an area of the footpath

containing tables and chairs, leaving the path closest to the shopfront clear for foot

traffic to pass by. A group of men were seated at one of the tables, laughing and

talking. Then a couple, who Jana thought to be in their sixties like her, wandered

down the footpath and stopped at the doorway to go inside.

After watching the action for a few minutes, Jana decided to go in. She left

her denim jacket in the van, feeling that she would be warm enough without it

because it was a warm night and she still had a mild hot flush every now and then,

which worked in her favour. She locked the van and walked across the road and

past the men sitting at the wooden table. They also looked as though they were in

14

their sixties, and Jana noted that one of them, a younger one, wore an old-

fashioned hat like the detectives used to wear in the police shows she watched as a

kid. When she stepped inside the shop Jana felt as though she had stepped back in

time. The floor was tiled in large black-and-white vinyl squares, and the chairs

were the kind with chrome tube frames and red vinyl cushions with white piping

around the edges, like the ones her parents had had at home in the sixties. Above

her head, Jana saw not only a long surfboard like she had imagined but also other

surf equipment. There was a pair of oars and a contraption she had seen surf

lifesavers use in black-and-white footage on TV. They used the contraption to reel

a line out into the surf during their exercises or a rescue. A knotted fishing net

made from hairy green rope was slung across part of the ceiling, and the far wall

was plastered from ceiling to floor with music posters. To her left a small stage

area was set up with the band’s equipment, and behind that was a large black

drape that blocked the window. She was right that no one would be able to see

through the front window. The chairs and tables that she imagined would

normally be set up in the centre of the café were now arranged along the far wall,

with some chairs in rows in front of the band area. On the right was the burger

bar, staffed by young people in casual beachwear and black aprons that featured

the logo on a pocket on their chests.

Jana stood taking in the scene for a few moments, thinking she needn’t

have bought a ticket if she could just walk in the way she had. People were

scattered throughout the room, some sitting patiently looking toward the stage on

the chairs there, and some standing in small groups near the tables bunched along

the far wall. A man approached Jana from behind the bain-maries on the right and

asked to see her ticket. She had her phone ready with an electronic copy of the

15

ticket, which she showed him. He was much taller than Jana and had a bushy,

greying moustache. He was wearing knee-length shorts with lots of pockets and a

black T-shirt with the café logo on the breast pocket. He wore dirty black crocs on

his feet and Jana could imagine that he might have once stood on the sand dune at

the back of the beach assessing the surf conditions; perhaps he was the man in the

logo. After he welcomed her, he moved off toward the back of the café, checking

the other patrons. He seemed to know some of the people he spoke to, because he

put his hand on the shoulder of one man and kissed one woman on the cheek.

At a counter near the serving area, a young woman was selling drinks.

Jana bought a beer and headed toward the back of the café, where she found a

couple of stools with the same red vinyl cushion tops with white piping and sat

down on one.

After a while, Jana pulled her phone out of her trouser pocket and looked

at the time; it was half an hour later than the stated start time and there was no

sign of the band, which was beginning to annoy her. As people continued to

arrive, Jana watched the way they found a place either seated in front of the band

area or at the high tables near the serving counter where they would order food.

The tables on the far wall were all already occupied with couples or groups of

four. Again, she noticed that some people seemed to know one another as though

they’d arranged to meet there. There was a buzz in the air, which reminded Jana

of a football crowd before a big match. As she sat and watched people arrive, she

had the feeling that she had somehow been transported back to her teenage years

along with everyone else there, except now everyone had aged. The men wore

dressy shorts and crisp cotton shirts or Hawaiian shirts; the women wore colourful

dresses with swirly colours or enormous palm trees and strappy, glittery sandals.

16

Then two men walked in the door, and Jana watched as the man with the

moustache approached them about their tickets. The men shook their heads and

then stood looking at the man and listening. They pulled out their wallets and paid

the man, and then they walked up to the bar just as Jana had done. As one of them

bought the drinks, the other wandered up to the back of the café and stood near

Jana. He turned and looked around, and she caught his eye.

‘Hi,’ Jana said.

‘Did you buy a ticket?’ he asked.

‘Yeah,’ Jana said, thinking it was an odd question. ‘Let’s hope it’s worth

it,’ Jana said, and she meant it.

‘It’s a bit steep, isn’t it,’ he said.

Jana thought this was a stupid thing to say so she didn’t answer.

‘My name’s Peter. What’s yours?’ Peter said.

‘Jana.’

Peter had glasses with wide black frames, and he was wearing a black

long-sleeved T-shirt, black jeans, and black boots. Jana thought, with his pale bald

head and slim shapeless body, that he looked like an erect penis in disguise and

then had to suppress a laugh as soon as she thought it. Peter, unlike the other

people who were filling the café, didn’t seem to be in jolly mood. Peter’s friend

walked over and gave him a beer, and they turned to face the front of the room,

where Jana hoped the band would soon appear.

Then more men began to straggle inside, and Jana recognised them as the

men who had been sitting outside. Instead of finding a spot in the crowd, they

walked to the band area and began picking up the instruments. The one with the

detective hat took a seat behind the drum kit. The tall man with the moustache,

17

who had been checking for tickets, emerged and flicked a couple of switches high

up on a column that divided the room, dimming the lighting in the café and

spotlighting the band.

As soon as the band began to play Jana felt the music hit her body with a

force she had forgotten. It was nothing like the start of a football match and she

liked how the band made her feel. The lead singer was a stringy man with a

craggy face and crooked teeth. Jana didn’t expect such a gravelly voice to come

out of his skinny frame. The other band members also displayed surprising vitality

and Jana couldn’t help imagining that if she saw them in their everyday lives

walking in the supermarket or hanging out their clothes she would never suspect

that they could exude that much energy. In the online reviews, Jana had read that

each of the band members had previously played in Australian bands like Jo Jo

Zep and the Falcons and Daddy Cool, and she thought she might recognise some

of them, but she didn’t because they were no longer the young musicians she

would have remembered. For the first few songs the audience, including Jana,

listened to the band as though assessing them and then clapped when the song

finished. Then Jana found herself tapping her foot on the bar of the stool she was

sitting on. Jana swigged on her beer, put her stubbie on a counter and began

moving her arms and clapping along. The deep throaty blues were just the kind of

thing she was in the mood for. As the music continued, women moved into the

space behind the last row of chairs and started dancing. Jana could hear people to

her right talking above the sound of the band and she turned to see two couples

sitting at the last table against the wall. She watched them for a while wondering

why they had come to see the band if they wanted to chat so intensely. But, then

the two women stood up and moved onto the dance floor. They danced with each

18

other as though they were a couple, moving closely and writhing around each

other. Jana looked at the two men they’d left sitting at the table, who watched on

impassively and drank their beers. Looking at the men standing alongside her, she

was reminded of her younger days, when the boys would hang out at the back of

the room and check out the action.

The band began a song Jana recognised, and she stood up and joined the

other women dancing and they smiled at her and made space for her to dance.

Jana moved closer to Peter, who’d been swaying slightly but not looking like he

was enjoying the music. Jana leant across to shout into his ear.

‘You gunna get your money’s worth? Dance?’

Peter turned his head and swayed as if he was trying to find a focal point.

Jana wondered if the beer he’d just finished wasn’t his first for the night, but she

didn’t have the chance to think further on it. Peter turned his attention back to his

mate, and they wandered off. Jana started dancing to the deep rhythmic

thrumming of the bass guitar. More people moved to the dance floor and started

dancing. Jana moved to the music and tried as best she could to lose herself in the

rhythm while also trying not to bash into the people who were sitting along the

edge of the dancing area.

After a few more songs the band stopped playing and said they would take

a break. Jana didn’t buy another beer even though she would have liked to,

because she knew she would be driving home later and didn’t want to risk being

over the alcohol limit. She moved closer to the band and sat on a high stool and

watched the people in the café moving about. She observed a man whose gut

pushed against the tight blue-and-white striped T-shirt he was wearing and who

had silver hair cut in a navy-style buzz cut. Jana thought he looked like a teenager

19

who didn’t realise he’d grown up. His legs were covered in corkscrew blond hairs

and his thongs slapped on the floor as he sauntered by. As he reached the door,

Jana could see him fishing in his pocket before he drew out a packet of rollies and

stepped onto the pavement outside. Peter brushed past him, re-entering the café on

his own. To her surprise, he made his way over to her and sat at the other side of

the tall table.

‘What did you think?’ Peter said to Jana, leaning in. she wondered where

Peter had been and suspected he’d been to one of the other venues in the street.

‘You’re drunk,’ Jana said.

‘You’re right. Something wrong with that?’ Peter said and pulled half a

smile. He leant hard on the tall table and it rocked forward. Jana grabbed the table

and righted it again.

‘It’s not a very attractive feature,’ Jana said.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Peter said, and half grinned again.

Jana stood to leave, and Peter followed her out onto the pavement. She

walked past the chairs and tables outside where people were talking and laughing

loudly. Jana again observed how these people seemed to know each other and

how she was a stranger. Peter continued following her across the road to where

her van was parked. They stopped on the pavement next to her van.

‘So,’ Peter said, ‘are you going to take me home?’

Jana looked at his bald head and remembered her earlier thought. A little

drive wouldn’t hurt, she thought. After all, she was a delivery van driver. She

unlocked the van and pulled open the side door. She put her arm around Peter’s

waist and directed him to the opening. He put a foot up onto the edge of the

doorway, and Jana put her hand on his head to protect him from bumping it on the

20

frame the way she’d seen police do in the movies. Peter collapsed into the empty

van and seemed to fall straight to sleep. Jana stood looking at him and then at the

people passing up and down the street. She knew that a loose package in the van

was dangerous, so she hopped in and untied the trolley from the side wall of the

van, lying it down. She manoeuvred Peter onto the trolley, with his head near the

handles and his legs draped over the base, securing him with ockie straps. Then

she secured the trolley to an anchor on the bed of the van. As an afterthought, she

grabbed her denim jacket from the front passenger seat where she’d left it earlier

and folded it into a wad and propped it under Peter’s head. She knew about the

trouble damaged goods caused.

Jana pulled out from the parking space and drove slowly up Main Street.

Instead of following the main road to the town where she lived, she turned right

and drove into the dark night. Once she’d cleared the last of the industrial

buildings and the streetlights, the paddocks spread out around her pale in the

moonlight. It wasn’t an ideal time, but she decided to drive to the road she’d seen

pictured in the newspaper to see for herself how bad it still was. In a normal work

day, she didn’t have time to just wander off and check out road conditions, but

tonight she had no obligations, and she figured Peter wouldn’t mind, so she

travelled for ten kilometres and then turned into Mackey Rd. It wasn’t long before

she noticed a pothole, and then broken tarmac jumped up under her tyres.

She stopped in the middle of the road and opened the glove compartment

on the passenger side of the cab. She found her headlamp and pulled it over her

head. She pressed the button and the six-hundred lumen light shot out from her

forehead. She stepped out of the van for a closer look at the damaged road. The

photo in the paper hadn’t shown the true extent of the damage, and Jana

21

confirmed that she’d have to avoid using Mackey Rd at all until the council

repaired it. Satisfied that she had the information she needed, Jana returned to the

van, put the headlamp away and drove slowly away, avoiding the worst of the

road damage so as not to harm her shock absorbers any more than necessary.

It was now after midnight and Jana was ready for bed, so she headed

home. It was a relief to consider that, being a weekend, J E X P R S didn’t have

any deliveries in the morning. When she reached undamaged tarmac, she sped off

for home.

22

The concert pianist isn’t home

A man in a fawn jacket squatted on his haunches and pawed through a box in

Martin’s carport. The box was filled with the sometimes-useless items found in a

third drawer in the kitchen. The man stood up and shifted his attention to a brown,

four-tiered bookshelf. The books that Martin had once stored on the bookshelf

were now lined up in cardboard boxes on the carport floor. He was selling them

for a dollar each. The man in the fawn jacket looked down at a box of books but

didn’t bend to pick one up. Martin watched him from behind a folding card table

in the corner of the carport and was philosophical; he thought of all this stuff—the

tired linen, chipped tools, worn furniture, books full of dated knowledge—as junk,

and he could understand if no one else wanted it.

Martin had been planning the garage sale for months, mentally sorting

through his possessions, deciding what he could jettison without causing him

anguish. Some things were obvious, like the books, and consequently the

bookshelf. It was a long time since he had taken a book from the shelf. Mostly it

had been to assist Helen with her Saturday Age crossword puzzles. But others

items, like the Chinese vase, were more difficult. He included it at the last minute.

The mute piano definitely had to go, though. He hated its potential, all the tunes,

crashing sounds, sweet melodies, ker-plunk, ker-plunks that no longer came from

it and never would while it remained with him. He had never played a note on it

himself and the hands that had once pressed the keys down were gone. Now he

couldn’t even bear to look at it.

Martin had written on a small piece of white card the night before the sale.

PIANO FOR SALE

EXCELLENT CONDITION

23

$50 000

INSPECTION ON ENQUIRY

He folded the card in half, so it would stand at attention. In the morning,

before anyone had arrived, he arranged the folded sign on the card table in the

corner of the carport and stuck it down with a gob of Blu Tack. He made sure the

other items on the table were well away from the sign —a pair of cufflinks that he

had never worn shaped like dice with different colours for each spot; an unopened

deck of cards with the Sydney Opera House on the back; a stack of plastic shot

glasses in pink, green, yellow and blue; a silver pie server; and a pair of black

sunglasses he had found in a chest of drawers.

The man in the fawn jacket put his hands deep in his trouser pockets and

distractedly began to move toward the driveway whilst glancing through the junk

for a potential gem. Martin willed him to pick up something, anything, and take it

away. The man eyeballed another table, which was covered in kitchenware, on his

slow and inexorable journey out of the carport. He stopped and lifted the Chinese

vase from amongst some cake tins, nested measuring cups and plastic cutlery. The

blue hand-painted images on the vase depicted a Chinese village surrounded by

fields. In one field a tiny figure and a pair of bullocks ploughed a rice paddy.

Helen had used the vase often, most often in the spring when the ranunculuses

bloomed. They were her favourite flower, as much for their lustrous petals as for

the limited time in which she could relish their bright colours. Much to Martin’s

horror, the ranunculuses continued to thrive. There was no one to tend the garden

but it continued to maintain itself. It carried on growing and blooming and

producing fruit in the same manner it had done when loving hands had pruned and

24

watered and weeded it. He was insulted. Martin felt insulted by the prosperity of

the garden.

Another car pulled up in the street. Martin could see the couple in the front

seats. The man sprang from the driver’s side. He had on faded baggy shorts and a

polar fleece vest, blue on the outside and yellow on the inside. The vest flapped

open as he moved around to the passenger side. The woman popped her door open

and carefully twisted her torso so that her feet dangled below the car door where

Martin could see them. The man came around the car and stood holding the door

open. The woman came to a standing position after several heave-hoes, using the

door frame and the inside of the door to lever herself out of the passenger seat.

She also had on a polar fleece vest, red on the outside and a lighter blue on the

inside this time.

Martin looked hopefully towards the new customers, and then checked the

table in front of him. He slid his middle finger tip along the fold of the piano sign.

The man in the fawn jacket had returned to the bookshelf and began leaning over

it, inspecting it for stability. He had one hand on the top, giving it small pushes to

see whether it would wobble or not.

The man and woman walked into the carport, he with a bounce, and she

with a limp. Martin glanced up briefly and mumbled a greeting. The man and

woman began to move through the aisles of furniture and belongings that Martin

had created when he placed his unloved belongings out for sale as though they did

it often.

‘Ed! There’s a piano,’ the woman said, pointing at the sign. Martin’s heart

skipped a beat. As much as he hated the piano, or at least its potency, he hadn’t

really thought about what it would feel like to be rid of it.

25

‘It’s a bit steep, isn’t it, mate?’ Ed said after reading the sign on the

folding table, behind which Martin was still standing.

‘No, not really,’ said Martin, ‘it’s a Steinway’.

‘Oh’.

Ed and Marilyn looked at each other. On the other side of the carport, the

man in the fawn jacket slid his hand along the top of the bookshelf and decided.

‘Give you five for the bookshelf,’ he called across the carport.

Martin looked around Ed at the man and then at the bookshelf.

‘Take a box of books?’

The man looked down at the books.

‘Ten without the books,’ Martin added.

‘Righto, I’ll take ‘em’, the man in the fawn jacket said.

Martin took his money and remained standing behind the card table while

the man made two trips to his car, once with the books and the second time,

balancing the bookshelf against his shoulder. Marilyn picked up the Chinese vase

and checked the base for its maker’s mark. Ed had circled the garage in the time it

had taken the man to remove his goods.

‘Better have a look at the piano, then,’ said Ed as he arrived back at the

card table.

Martin looked toward the street.

‘Can you come back later?’ Martin said.

Marilyn glanced at Ed and continued to scrounge through the tools.

‘Is it for sale or not?’ Ed pushed.

‘Yeah, but I . . . need to watch this stuff,’ Martin said spreading his hands

in front of him.

26

‘Come on, luv, we can come back after lunch,’ suggested Marilyn.

‘Nah, don’t worry. ‘S’probly not that good anyway.’ Ed turned toward the

street.

‘Helen’s a concert pianist.’ Martin blurted out in a bid to prove the quality

of the piano. He grabbed the sign and crumpled it in his hand. He picked at the

remaining Bluetack and rolled it into a ball, then dropped it onto the cement floor.

Ed turned back towards Martin and waggled his fingers in front of him at

waist level, sliding them back and forth mimicking playing a keyboard. His nails

were manicured and painted with clear polish. Martin at once remembered the

night before Helen left for her first concert in Berlin. She had been to the

manicurist and had her nails painted a deep red. Martin was mesmerised by the

blood red fingertips as he stood beside the piano and watched her practice.

‘Bit of a tinkler meself,’ Ed said with a grin, showing a set of perfect white

false teeth.

Marilyn held up a drill and asked Martin how much. ‘Sure you won’t be

needing it again, luv? A drill can be quite useful round the house,’ she said when

he told her the price.

‘What about Marilyn here watches the shop and we slide inside for a tickle

on the ol’ ivories?’ Ed waggled his piano-playing fingers across an imaginary

keyboard again and flashed a winning grin and an exaggerated wink at Martin.

‘Just give them what they want if anyone asks,’ Martin instructed Marilyn

before leading Ed across the front of the house, up the stairs, and into the lounge

room, or at least what the floor plan stated was the lounge room. It had never

functioned as a lounge room while Martin and Helen had lived there. It was the

only room large enough to accommodate the baby grand piano, so he and Helen

27

had done without a lounge room. When Martin and Ed entered the room, the only

piece of furniture in it was a large piano-shaped object under a white throw-sheet.

The floor-length emerald-green drapes were drawn and the only light came from

the open front door and a room at the other end of the corridor leading away from

the lounge room. Ed’s eyes gleamed and he rubbed his hands together as he stood

and waited for Martin to whip the cover off. But Martin closed the front door

behind them and continued across the lounge room and down the corridor and

didn’t come back straight away. When he returned, he wore a pair of white cotton

gloves on his hands and a fur ruff around his neck.

Ed continued rubbing his hands together and stepped in closer to the

piano. Martin noticed, for the first time, that Ed’s slim and shapely legs sported no

hair. They seemed to gleam unnaturally and reminded Martin of a swimwear

model, only with socked and sandaled men’s feet. Martin looked from Ed’s legs

back up to his face.

‘Right, then, we going to get this show on the road?’ Ed grinned and then

sucked in a huge breath through his nose. He smoothed the front of his shirt,

tugged at the hem of his vest, pointed his chin up toward the ceiling, and slowly

let the breath out through his mouth.

Martin was reminded of the hush in the concert hall as the lights came

down whenever he had been to see Helen play. It would bring into contrast the

conversations and rustling of programmes that he hadn’t noticed before, and

which then seemed so loud. He disliked the audience’s lack of attention before a

show, how they could sit and talk of everyday happenings as if the grandeur of the

concert hall hadn’t cancelled out all that trivia. He, instead, would occupy the time

before the beginning of a concert by mutely observing the stage preparations, and

28

the ushers doing their best to seat everyone before the lights dimmed completely,

or the flicker of movement behind the curtain indicating last minute preparations

on stage, and lastly, the selection of stage lights hanging above him.

Martin leant down to lift the hem of the white throw-cloth and Ed joined

him at the other side. With great flourish, they lifted the sheet high above the

piano and dragged the cloth backwards along its length. Martin let the cloth fly

away dramatically behind him and Ed stood and stared.

A gleaming black, model S, baby grand piano mirrored the room around it.

Martin took the fur ruff from around his neck and began gliding it gently over the

surface. He made sure he kept one gloved hand over a tiny chip on one edge that

he hadn’t been able to repair.

Ed moved to the piano stool and asked, ‘May I?’ but before Martin could

reply he slid into position. When he attempted to lift the lid it wouldn’t open.

Martin watched the tips of Ed’s thumbs turn white as he tried to open the lid, and

then go back to pink as he let go again. Ed turned and looked up at Martin.

‘Helen likes to lock it when she’s not here.’ Martin said.

‘You got a key?’ Ed looked toward Martin’s trouser pockets.

‘When she gets back you’ll be able to ask her where it is.’

Something crashed to the ground outside in the carport and the two men

turned to look at the front door. Martin walked to the door and reached to open it

and remembered he still had the gloves on. He tugged them off, opened the door,

turned to Ed and waited. Ed tried the lid one more time and slumped slightly. He

slid across the stool and walked past Martin out the front door.

In the carport, a young woman was squatting at Marilyn’s feet picking up

pieces of the broken Chinese vase. Up Martin’s driveway near the street, a boy

29

with a tear-streaked face was standing next to a pram in which an even smaller

child was sitting wide-eyed watching their mother. The boy’s little hand was

gripping one of the metal struts on the pram’s side. The mother was apologising to

Marilyn and offering to pay for the broken vase. Martin walked to the centre of

the carport staring at the pieces of smashed ceramics on the floor. He stopped,

open-mouthed, in the middle of the tables of mostly unloved junk. The woman

stood up and unclipped a small, grey coin purse she had pulled from her coat

pocket and took out a two dollar coin.

‘Is that OK?’ she said holding the coin out to Marilyn who nodded and

told her to leave it on the table. The mother left the coin and hurried up the drive

to her children, where she released the brake on the pram and pushed it hard

across Martin’s uneven lawn and down the street.

Martin remained silent, staring at the broken pieces of crockery in

Marilyn’s hands. She offered him the small pile of rubble and took her newly

acquired drill to their car. Martin mutely accepted the pieces of shattered vase into

his cupped hands. All he could think was that he would have nothing to put the

ranunculuses in now that the vase was broken.

He stared into his hands and noticed that inside the base of the vase there

was the ring of black crust, which was now sharply cut in two from the break. He

wondered if Helen knew there was dried scum at the bottom of her favourite vase.

Martin continued looking along the edge of one piece of the broken vase. He saw

that the image of the ploughed field remained on one chunk of the vase. And, on

another piece, he could see that the bullocks continued ploughing. But, the little

man was gone. The crack had rent him through and he no longer existed.

30

Dried blood and cornflakes

Shelley Abraham knocked on the front door of a brown-brick flat-roofed suburban

Canberra house. While she waited she looked down the driveway at the weeds

that were growing up beneath the shrubs that were covered in little white flowers.

She pushed the doorbell a couple of times and listened to the chimes ringing

inside the house. A few moments later, the front door flew open and Maxine

Spinner’s ten-year-old sister, Chloe, stood there with an idiotic grin on her face.

Shelley was delighted to see big dimples suddenly punctuate Chloe’s pink cheeks.

Moments later, Maxine came sliding around the corner, her limbs uncoordinated

and lanky.

‘Get out of the way, you pipsqueak,’ Maxine said when she arrived and

crashed into Chloe. She yanked at Chloe’s shoulder and pushed her aside.

‘I got here first,’ Chloe whined and elbowed her way back in front of her

sister.

Maxine reached over Chloe’s shoulder with her long skinny arm and

grabbed Shelley by the forearm. She dragged Shelley inside the door and left

Chloe to close it. As Maxine slung her arm over Shelley’s shoulder, Shelley

turned her head back to give Chloe an encouraging smile and waved her to join

them. Maxine propelled Shelley into the house, her socked feet slipping on the

parquetry flooring as she guided Shelley back around the corridor into her

bedroom and Chloe followed closely behind. The blinds in the bedroom were

pulled down and the light was on.

Clothes, shoes, and jewellery lay scattered over every surface of the

bedroom. Maxine walked carelessly through the mess on the floor and sat in front

of her dresser. She looked at her reflection in the mirror. There was a pale blue

31

scarf dangling on one side of her reflection and a pair of fawn tights on the other.

She brought both hands up to her face and slid her first and second fingers along

the skin below her eyes. Shelley had seen girls in TV ads for face cream do this

and she had wondered what they were doing. She looked into the mirror from

behind Maxine at the skin beneath her own eyes. She thought they looked fine,

although she noticed her hair had frizzed out into a halo of blonde during the walk

from her place to Maxine’s. On either side of her forehead, the bangs Maxine had

cut for her had become cloudy puffs instead of manageable bangs. Maxine was

able to sweep these tufts of hair to the sides of her head and they stayed put, at

least until she turned her head or leant forward. Shelley attempted to flatten the

ridiculous clouds of frizz but had little success.

‘Where’s your mum?’ Shelley said looking around the bedroom. It felt

uncomfortable that there was no grown up in the house.

‘At work,’ Chloe said from the doorway where she was leaning on the

doorframe. Shelley watched her rub one big toe back and forth on the carpet just

inside Maxine’s room.

‘She’ll be home later, won’t she, sis,’ Maxine spoke to the dresser mirror,

and eyeballed Chloe’s reflection.

Chloe looked down at the pale tufted carpet in front of her and nodded.

Shelley wondered what sort of job their mum did that kept her out late on the

weekend. Then she remembered her own mum had to stay back at work

sometimes when the books didn’t add up. Maxine’s parents both seemed like

distant shadowy figures to Shelley. She hadn’t met either of them yet.

‘Dolly says scarves are in this summer. You need a scarf with that top,

Shell,’ Maxine said to Shelley’s reflection. ‘Chlosey, go and get that cream one of

32

mum’s, the one with the tasselly ends,’ Maxine said to her sister and tilted her

head back and stretched her eyebrows as high as they would go.

‘I’ll show you how to tie it.’ Maxine’s voice strained because of the

position of her neck. She dropped her head back down, opened a messy tray of

eye shadows and used her long fingernails to pick out the little black brush sitting

in its slot at the side of the tray.

‘It’s OK, I don’t need a scarf,’ Shelley said, but Chloe had already gone.

She watched Maxine in the mirror as she applied sky-blue makeup to her upper

eyelids. Shelley noticed in the reflection that there was a bra lying on the bed next

to her. She looked to her right and there it was dangling over the edge of the bed.

The top of the bra cups was made from pink and white polka-dotted fabric, and

the bottom half was plain white. There was a tiny white satin bow between the

cups.

‘Got one?’ Maxine’s hand was poised in the air in front of her face, the

blue-tipped brush barely a centimetre from her eyelid, as she watched Shelley’s

reflection. Shelley looked down at the bumps on her chest and then back at

Maxine’s reflection. Shelley still wore clothes from the children’s range.

‘Nup,’ Shelley said, and sat on the corner of the bed.

Maxine shifted her focus back to the mirror and reapplied the little brush

to her eyelid.

Chloe returned with the scarf and lassoed it around Shelley’s neck. Shelley

dropped to the floor and began neighing. She rose up onto her knees and rolled

her hands in front of her like a bucking horse. Chloe pushed Shelley’s shoulders

down so she was on all fours, and then mounted her back. Chloe gripped her

33

thighs around Shelley’s waist and Shelley galloped out of the room with Chloe

reining her in with the scarf that was still around Shelley’s neck.

‘Don’t you want your face done?’ Maxine yelled from the bedroom.

*

Shelley sat on a wooden bench in the open-air courtyard at the centre of

the shopping mall near school. She gazed at the windows at the front of

McCawley’s Ladies Wear. While she waited for Maxine after school she twiddled

with one of her plaits. In the shop window reflection, she saw the bright green

leaves on the tree beside her flutter in an eddy, and behind that, she could see the

shadowy green school jumpers of other students who were hanging out in the

square. The groups were divided by the grade levels from school and she watched

in the reflection as emissaries moved between groups. She guessed they would be

checking out who wanted to go out with whom or arranging what everyone was

doing on the weekend.

On the inside of the store window, the mannequin’s face stared upwards at

a spot under the covered walkway just outside the shop. The mannequin held out

one elongated, cupped hand. Shelley imagined what invisible object it was

reaching for.

‘Let’s go,’ Maxine said as she arrived from an alleyway on the far side of

the square that led from the direction of the school, where they were both in the

same third-form class. She dumped her bag next to Shelley’s beneath the tree and

Shelley followed her into McCawley’s. The air inside the shop was stale and the

sound of a radio came from beneath the counter just inside the front doorway.

Maxine began looking through a rack of blouses that had a scarf attached

around the neckline; the one on display had the scarf tied in an extravagant bow.

34

Shelley followed along and dragged her fingers over the shoulders of the

garments, feeling the fabrics as she went. A chemical smell drifted off the blouses

and Shelley wiped the back of her wrist across her nose.

‘Go and look at the bras,’ whispered Maxine, and then she looked towards

the shop assistant behind the bench near the door. Shelley guessed Mrs McCawley

was older than her mum. Mrs McCawley stared out through the glass front door

and slowly moved one of her hands up to the back of her head. She gently pressed

her hand against the bun of dark brown hair, each finger dreamily locating one of

several bobby pins that held it in place like a great fleshy spider carefully

traversing a rocky outcrop.

‘Where?’ Shelley said.

‘Back there,’ Maxine pointed with a look towards the back of the store.

Shelley wandered past a carousel of bell-bottom trousers to the back of the

store and began sliding one bra after another along the rack. She looked at the size

tags, and then at her chest.

‘Can I help you, luv,’ Mrs McCawley said. Shelley turned to find Mrs

McCawley beside her. Mrs McCawley was used to school girls messing about in

her store. She held her hands in front of her and slid them over and over each

other as though they were itching to fit this young girl into a bra.

‘Nah, just looking thanks,’ Shelley said.

‘Well, call out if you need a hand,’ Mrs McCawley said and then walked

back to the front counter where she took a newspaper from the shelf below and

took up reading where she had left off before the two girls arrived. Maxine

appeared from the other side of a rack of knitted cotton vests.

35

‘Old bat can’t wait to get her hands on you.’ Maxine flicked through the

first few bras along the rack. The plastic hangers clicked against each other and

then she selected a pale blue trainer bra.

‘Here, try this one.’ She grabbed the next two white bras and slipped them

into Shelley’s hand. ‘And take these too.’ The tag on one of the white bras was

12B, and the other was 14A.

‘Go and put the blue one on,’ Maxine said. She led Shelley to a cubicle,

pulled the curtain across its doorway and began searching through a row of

knickers.

Behind the curtain, Shelley held the bras at arm’s length and dropped them

onto the white plastic chair in the corner of the cubicle. She pulled her school

jumper over her head and unbuttoned her uniform. Goose bumps formed on her

arms as she let the uniform fall to the floor. In the mirror she saw a girl wearing a

white singlet and brown briefs. She stood looking back at the reflection of herself.

Her legs were darker between the top of her socks and the line where her uniform

ended. The tops of her legs were white and fleshy, and her singlet hung like a tube

over her torso. She held the size 10A blue trainer bra up to the bumps on her

chest, which sat like marshmallows beneath the soft spongy skin of her chest. She

recalled when she was changing for PE Maxine had insisted she needed to wear a

bra, so Shelley pulled the singlet over her head and dropped it on the floor with

her other clothes. She tugged at the straps of the bra to unclip them from the

hanger. She threaded her hands through the shoulder straps and manoeuvred her

way into the bra. She was just pulling it down over the bumps on her chest when

Maxine whispered through the curtain.

‘Have you got it on yet?’

36

‘Yeah,’ Shelley said and stood holding the triangles of fabric against her

bumps and stared at the reflection of the curtain behind her hoping Maxine

wouldn’t pull it aside and see her mostly nude girl’s body.

‘Put your uniform back on over it and bring the two white ones out,’

Maxine said.

Shelley was buttoning up her uniform when Mrs McCawley slid the top

half of curtain aside just enough to poke her head into the cubicle. Shelley spun

around and looked up at Mrs McCawley. Through Mrs McCawley’s reading

glasses that were still sitting on the end of her nose, Shelley noticed the magnified

uneven clumps of black mascara on her eyelashes and the thick makeup beneath

her eyes.

‘How did you go?’ Mrs McCawley said with a smile causing the makeup

to crinkle and crease. ‘Is your mum coming in?’ Mrs McCawley raised her

eyebrows and pulled her lips back. She pulled open the curtain once she saw that

Shelley was dressed. Shelley could see through the lace insert of Mrs McCawley’s

blouse to her bra. The white fabric of the bra was smooth and firm-looking next to

her pale crepey skin.

Shelley slowly tilted her torso to her right and looked past Mrs McCawley

into the shop, but it was empty. She turned to the plastic seat in the cubicle and

picked up the hangers. Mrs McCawley breathed through her nose as Shelley

placed first one white bra, then the second, and finally the blue trainer bra into her

outstretched hand.

‘Think I’ll wait till mum’s with me,’ Shelley said brushing her hands

down her flat chest and sidling past Mrs McCawley.

*

37

Shelley stepped off the bus at the shops late on a Friday afternoon, and

began walking along the footpath up the hill. It was the start of the August school

holidays and she was staying over at the house Maxine’s father rented. It wasn’t

far from Shelley’s old family home, the one she grew up in, but it had been a

while since she’d been back to that suburb.

Shelley remembered Maxine’s description of the house. It was a white,

rendered brick house on the corner of Wattle and Correa streets. Turkey oaks

lined Wattle Street and their crowns were spread so wide that they overhung the

guttering of Maxine’s roof on one side, and on the other they formed a living

tunnel over the road running up the hill. Leaf buds covered the branches of the

trees all the way up the street giving them a soft green fuzz. On the fence line

along the Correa Street side of the house, cotoneasters covered in red berries grew

out of control. As she approached the house, Shelley could see Maxine lying face

up on the grass beneath one of the oak trees on the wide front lawn. Chloe was

doing cartwheels and Maxine appeared to be scoring them. Chloe completed a

cartwheel and when she came up out of it she spotted Shelley. She ran to the edge

of the road and waited for Shelley to cross. Maxine rolled over and called out.

‘Hey, pipsqueak, haven’t you got piano practice?’

Shelley met Chloe at the curb, and they walked arm-in-arm back to the

tree, where they slumped on the grass next to Maxine.

‘Go on, Pip, go and practice,’ Maxine shooed Chloe inside.

Shelley followed Maxine inside the house to a room at the back with a

window to the backyard—Maxine’s bedroom. Maxine stopped in the doorway

and Shelley looked past her into the room. There was none of the mess she had

seen in the bedroom at Maxine’s mother’s house.

38

‘When dad first moved in, there were still toenail clippings stuck in the

carpet.’ Maxine turned and looked down at Shelley. ‘Dad reckons the old man

who lived here died in this room,’ She turned and took a running leap onto the bed

to avoid touching the carpet and drew her long legs up to her chest.

‘Eeoooow!’ Shelley leapt across the carpet too and rolled onto the bed.

She sat up and leant over and looked down at the cream and brown floral carpet to

see if she could spot anymore clippings. For an awful moment she wondered if

this was the bed the old man had died in.

‘Hey, Terry’s coming round later,’ Maxine said. She relaxed and sat with

her back against the wall. She stretched out her long legs across the bed, so her

feet dangled over the edge of the bed. She combed her fingers through her fringe

and flicked the bangs back from her face.

‘He reckons you need a boyfriend,’ Maxine said.

Shelley had never thought about having a boyfriend. Not even her older

sister had a boyfriend and she was in fifth form.

‘Do I?’ Shelley said. She had only ever heard Maxine talk about Terry and

all she knew about him was that he was twenty-two, which seemed like way too

old for her.

‘Well, don’t you want one?’ Maxine said.

Shelley stared at the ceiling. The white paint on the walls and ceiling

covered the blotchy uneven surface. She remembered that her mother had

plastered pink-and-white floral wallpaper to the ceiling in the old house so Shelley

and her sisters would have something to look at when they were lying in bed.

‘Maybe,’ Shelley said. She reached inside the neck of her shirt and ran her

finger underneath the strap of the new trainer bra she and her mum had bought

39

from McCawley’s. She was still adjusting to the tightness of it circling her

ribcage.

‘You can meet Rob when Terry comes around. We’re going to the drive-in

in Rob’s car so you have to come,’ Maxine said.

Chloe appeared in the corridor and swung around the door frame. When

she smiled big dimples formed deep in her cheeks and Shelley loved how they

made her feel.

‘Dinner’s ready,’ Chloe announced and straight away pushed off the door

frame and ran back to the kitchen. Shelley looked at the window and saw that

steam had drifted all the way to the bedroom and the window was now fogged up.

When they arrived in the kitchen Shelley noticed how, unlike her mum, Mr

Spinner didn’t make cheese sauce to cover the awful taste of boiled cauliflower

and corned beef.

*

‘Not too late, alright?’ Maxine’s dad said as he stood on the step at the

front door. As Shelley and Maxine hurried out the door beneath the arm he was

using to hold the old screen door open, Shelley glimpsed his underarm hair up his

sleeve; it was sticking to his skin. She ducked down to avoid touching him and Mr

Spinner snuck in a tap to her backside with his other hand. Shelley yelped and

leapt down the steps behind Maxine. In the fading light of the early evening

Shelley saw that on the little patch of lawn where she’d seen Chloe doing

cartwheels earlier a man with shoulder-length wavy brown hair, who Shelley

thought must be Terry, stood next to the opened doors of a dirty yellow Datsun

Bluebird. He was wearing a short-sleeved cream cotton shirt and brown flares. His

arms were stringy and muscular and there was a hint of a moustache on his top

40

lip. In the dim interior light of the car Shelley could see the shoulder and a bit of

arm of the other man, who she supposed was Rob. After Maxine bent down to get

in the back-seat Terry gestured to Shelley to get into the front of the car. He

slammed shut her door and then waved to Maxine’s dad, who waved back and

bent down as if to see that Maxine was safe. Shelley looked through the car

window in time to see Terry dip his head and slot into the back seat behind her.

‘This is Rob,’ Maxine said indicating the driver. Shelley flashed a look at

him and saw that he had brown curly hair that dangled down over his ears and

forehead.

‘And this is Terry,’ she said turning to the boy in the back seat. He

grabbed her around the waist and pulled her to him. Their skinny arms wrapped

around each other and Shelley thought of two stick insects.

Shelley clicked her seat belt into place and looked at the dashboard. The

radio was on a commercial station and there was a stick shift between the two

front seats. She waited until Rob had driven for a few minutes and reached across

and put her hand on his thigh. She had heard Maxine and some other girls talking

about this kind of thing and hoped she was doing it properly. After a while her

arm went stiff but she was unsure whether she should move her hand in case this

signalled something that she didn’t mean. She wasn’t really sure what the signals

were or what he might interpret her hand gesture to mean. Neither did she know

what she wanted.

When they had settled in at the drive-in, Shelley licked the ice cream Rob

had bought her. In the back seat, Maxine and Terry joked about Rob being a

cradle snatcher, which made Shelley feel like a stolen baby.

‘Rack off ya drongos,’ Rob said.

41

‘Where’s the beer,’ he said, and shifted in his seat to look over into the

back seat. When Terry handed him a can of Tooheys, he cracked it open and took

a long draught from it. He offered it to Shelley in a gesture that seemed to cement

the twosome. Shelley shook her head and continued licking the ice cream. She

was unsure where Maxine was leading her.

*

‘You’re dropped,’ Maxine made the announcement over the telephone to

Shelley. Shelley sat at the breakfast bar at home late in the afternoon. The radio

station her mother liked was playing classical music and Shelley leaned across the

bench and turned the volume knob to Off. The silver, ridged dial gave a satisfying

click as it turned off.

‘Why didn’t you tell him you had your rags?’ Maxine said. Shelley could

tell Maxine had cupped her hand over the mouthpiece when she said this because

her voice seemed enclosed all of a sudden.

‘I didn’t have my rags,’ Shelley said. She was puzzled by the comment,

but after a moment she thought she understood.

Shelley gazed out the kitchen window at the ducks in the backyard. A

magpie swooped across the backyard and landed in the big gumtree next door. It

swung its beak skywards and began warbling. Maxine was saying something

about Rob’s face the morning after they had been to the drive-in. His mother had

asked him about the dried blood around his lips. Shelley remembered the sharp

pain when Rob had pressed his blunt fingers into her vagina. She had been more

interested in the final scene of The little girl who lives down the lane that they’d

come to see at the drive-in. Alice, the girl in the film, laced tea with potassium

42

cyanide and gave it to Frank, who was about to expose her deadly secret; she was

a murderer.

After the movie ended, Rob had driven them to a lookout on top of one of

the hills surrounding their town. He had found a spot isolated from the other cars

parked there. Shelley remembered hearing the sounds of Maxine and Terry

kissing in the back seat and had guessed that she should be doing the same with

Rob. But he had drunk more cans of beer during the film, and now had somehow

folded himself into Shelley’s foot well. He was trying to press his head in between

her legs, but her trousers were in the way and she wasn’t helping to free them.

From below, Rob had reached up and pulled on the door handle. The rush of cold

air had made Shelley shiver and the light from the one streetlamp had shone on

Rob’s face. Shelley had looked down at him and could see the strip of white

eyeball beneath his iris. Rob had ordered her out of the car, and then had pulled

himself lizard-like onto the tarmac. He had stood and taken her by the wrist, and

they had walked over the edge of the car park and down the steep slope. He had

pushed her down onto a rough track and pulled her trousers off. As he lay on top

of her, his half-flaccid penis had flopped around between her legs for a while, and

then he had rolled onto the grass and vomited. Shelley had rolled the other way

and recovered her trousers, her underwear lost to the weeds. She had scrambled

up the hill and returned to the steamy car, and jumped in.

Still looking out of the kitchen window at the magpie, she asked Maxine,

‘What’s a twenty-four-year-old doing still living with his mum, anyway. Reckon

he must be a baby.’

*

43

‘I miss you,’ Shelley said to Maxine and put the phone back in its cradle.

Light from the pathway street light next to their house made a bright square on the

lino at her feet. Maxine now lived in Melbourne with her mother and stepfather.

Shelley walked across the lit square of lino and pressed her hands on the

windowsill. She leaned into the window and breathed onto the glass. She opened

her mouth, pressed her lips onto the glass, and rolled her tongue around and

around the way Maxine had shown her. Shelley lifted her forearm to the window

and looked at the globule shape she had made in the steamy patch on the glass.

A car pulled into the driveway: it was her mother arriving home from

night school. Shelley wiped her sleeve on the window, turned the kitchen light on

and started the kettle. She tipped the cold tea out of the pot and prepared to make

her mother a fresh cup.

‘Anyone home?’ Shelley’s mum called from the garage.

‘Just me,’ Shelley said. Her sisters were already in bed. She opened the

internal stairwell door and watched her mother making her way up the stairs with

her arms laden with books and bags.

‘Max called,’ Shelley said, as her mother unloaded her things onto the

breakfast bar.

The kettle began to whistle and Shelley poured a splash of boiling water

into the pot. She swirled it around and tipped the water into the sink. The tea

caddy lived in the cupboard above the bench where the kettle sat. Shelley reached

up and brought the battered tin down to the bench.

‘Do you want me to do that?’ her mother asked.

44

Mrs Abraham worked at a TAB during the day and was studying social

work at TAFE at night. She began pulling books from a cloth bag she used for her

course material.

‘Max’s already got a boyfriend,’ Shelley said as she waited for the kettle

to reboil.

‘Well, she’s like that, isn’t she?’ Shelley’s mum picked up her books and

walked out of the room.

Shelley poured boiling water over the tea in the pot and bent down to the

cupboard below the bench for some mugs. Her mug was the orange one, her

mum’s was blue. She brought the mugs to the bench top and turned the teapot

around three times before pouring. Her mother returned to the kitchen and took

the carton of milk from the fridge and handed it to Shelley. She pulled out a stool

from beneath the bench and sat on it resting her head on a bent arm.

‘Know what I learned tonight?’ Shelley’s mum said. ‘That people whose

eyes show white at the bottom make you feel sick.’ She opened a copy of

Psychology Today and flicked to a picture of Abraham Lincoln.

‘Eeew, that’s revolting,’ Shelley said and sipped her tea, then felt a yawn

growing in the back of her throat.

Shelley tipped the rest of her tea into the sink and rinsed her mug. She

kissed her mother goodnight and walked down the darkened corridor to her room.

Shelley undressed in the dark and looked at the bunk beds where her younger

sisters lay sleeping. She pulled her nightie out from underneath her pillow and

slipped it over her head. She sat on the edge of her bed and looked out the front

window. A tree shadowed the window and the shadows of the leaves fluttered on

her green striped bedspread. She pulled the blankets back and pushed her bare

45

legs into the cold bed. She ran her feet up and down the sheets to warm them up

and then turned on her side, tucking the fold of the bedclothes under her chin. She

imagined Rob’s reaction as he was shovelling cornflakes into his face when his

mother asked about the blood on his lips. He mustn’t have even washed his face

let alone had a shower. She didn’t feel dropped. Instead she closed her eyes and

went to sleep.

46

Bulbzilla

Abigail made tea in the large pot and returned to her bedroom with it and a mug

on a tea tray. She arranged the extra pillows on the bed, so she could sit up and

drink tea while she perused the garden through her bedroom window. The

flyscreen on the sliding window had loosened over the years and now it left

crosshatched marks on the glass whenever the rain and wind came in hard and

pressed it onto the glass. Abigail thought about cleaning it, but not that Saturday.

The dirty window faded from her consciousness as she scanned her garden. She

noticed that a large branch of the moonah had begun dangling over onto the grass

and she made a mental note to trim it, so it would be easier to push the lawn

mower beneath it. The bark was finely cracked, and she had grazed her arm on it

in the past when she was gardening. When she looked down at the grass beneath

the moonah she noticed a bulb poking its green pointed leaves up through the soil

at the edge of the garden bed. Abigail couldn’t recall what variety of bulb she had

planted there or why she would have only planted one or why she would have

stuck it so close to the brick edging. It must have been a long time before she had

fallen ill because she couldn’t remember doing it.

She was not expecting Harry that Saturday, and her son, Emmet, was away

playing board games in Albury. She was looking forward to a relaxing lie-in. It

was ten o’clock and the angle of the sunlight was causing sharp shadows next to

the plants, so that it almost looked as if there were two of each of them. She could

tell there was a stiff breeze out there because the plants were being whipped

around, and it looked like a cold one, inasmuch as a breeze could look like

anything. The lavender flowers swooshed back and forth dramatically, causing the

47

native bees to buzz about wildly as they tried to find a foothold on the purple

blossoms.

Abigail idly ignored the muffled sounds coming from outside her home:

the lawn mower buzzing in the next street; the rhythmic whacking of a hammer

somewhere nearby; the person some doors away who was working with a

mechanical saw of some sort. Abigail suspected the last was the old man next

door, who seemed intent on sawing down any tree, shrub or bush that grew higher

than his diminutive five-foot-three stature. It was, thankfully, too early in the day

for the teenager over the back fence to be vigorously polishing his Rock-God

imitation on his electric guitar. He was probably sleeping in from his late-night

efforts the night before, when Abigail was trying to get to sleep.

The slam of a car door registered in Abigail’s mind for a moment and then

she ignored it, but then a knock on a window somewhere in the house caught her

attention. Still, she continued observing the thin leaves of the lemongrass plant

that was fluttering about in the breeze outside her window and hoped she had

imagined the hard knocking. But there it was again. She plonked the half-drunk

mug of tea onto the tray and lifted the whole thing to one side of her bed. She slid

out from under the doona and pulled on her old grey track pants and an oversized

black hoodie that Emmet had grown out of, so that her crumpled pink nightgown

poked out from under the hem of the hoodie.

The knock on the window came again—this time with a voice calling her

name. She marched into the front room and looked out at the street to see who

was there. She heard the knocking again and realised it was coming from the back

of the house. She poked her head around the living room partition and saw Harry

standing in the back yard. He was leaning over the garden bed to reach the

48

window and peering in through cupped hands. The stickers Emmet had stuck all

over the window when he was growing up hampered his view. From inside the

house, Abigail saw that he appeared to have a paper bag stuck to the side of his

head, but it was just that he was holding a paper bag in one of the hands he had up

to his face.

Abigail remained still, hoping he hadn’t seen her. She liked Harry an

awful lot but she worried that he was forming ideas. She put a hand up to her hair

and was pleased to feel how messy it was because she didn’t want to encourage

Harry. She sighed and stepped around the partition into the living room and

waved at Harry. He pushed back off the window and smiled a cookie-cutter smile,

the contours of his face sharply contrasted by sunshine and shadow. He poked the

air in the direction of the kitchen door with one hand while waving the brown

paper bag in the air with the other.

Abigail met him at the kitchen door and wondered if it was wrong to take

the paper bag of baked goods when she knew they were really a salvo, testing the

air for romance. It all seemed to fit neatly together: Harry the kind-hearted

saviour, she the wretch in need of rescue. But she saw that his behaviour was self-

serving. She felt trapped into being kind to a man she didn’t want to encourage.

‘Thought it was my turn to bring smoko,’ Harry said and then produced an

exaggerated smile. The croissants inside had begun to leave an oily stain on the

paper bag. Harry had a light-weight, V-necked wool jumper on over a white T-

shirt, and he wore dark, close-fitting jeans. She was yet to invite him inside, but

he was kicking off his deck shoes, revealing orange-and-grey argyle socks. His

eyes glinted like broken glass behind rimless rectangular spectacles.

49

Abigail sighed and started on the coffee. Harry sat at the table, but she

remained standing at the kitchen bench, though she did indulge in one of Harry’s

croissants. She served him coffee and listened to him speak for a while, and then

she remembered the peculiar bulb in the garden outside her bedroom window.

Abigail mentioned it to Harry and led the way outside. She knew he would have

an opinion about it, whether he knew about the plant or not.

The dark green plant seemed to be even bigger than Abigail had noticed

from her bedroom. From its peak, a large bud dangled at a sad angle. She was

surprised at its size; it was huge, the size of a softball. Its colour reminded Abigail

of a fresh bruise; it was a brooding purple-grey, deepening almost to black where

it met the stem. She leant down to cup the bud with both hands, and to test the

strength of the stem. The bud looked as though it might break the stem in half, but

the plant seemed sturdy enough. Harry was making noises, so Abigail stood back.

When Harry bent over to have a closer look, the stem seemed to straighten,

causing the bud to bobble up and down with strange vigour. Perhaps, Abigail

thought, it was the wind. Harry, though, stepped back a few paces and grew silent.

Abigail became aware of her nightdress flapping in the wind, and she smoothed

her hands against her thighs to pin down the fabric.

‘I’ve probably outworn my welcome, hey?’ Harry grinned at her, his blue

eyes twinkling through the lenses of his rimless glasses. He thanked her for the

coffee and scuttled to the side gate, where he flung his arm in the air in a gesture

resembling a wave. He was gone before Abigail could thank him for the morning

tea. It wasn’t as though she didn’t appreciate his help, but she couldn’t help

feeling she owed him something. She took herself back to bed where her tea had

gone cold and she no longer had room for it anyway.

50

Late on Saturday night Emmet returned home and put on a load of

washing. Abigail called to him to order them a pizza, and when he came into her

bedroom, she expected it would be to ask her what toppings she wanted. Instead,

he came in to tell her that there was a plant beginning to block the pathway to the

Hills Hoist. It was dark outside, but Abigail thought of the strange bulb-like plant

she had first seen outside her window that morning. She would have to investigate

tomorrow.

Abigail was lying in bed dozing on the Sunday when she heard a mower

start up in her front yard. Abigail groaned and pushed her face into the pillow.

This would have to stop. Harry’s offer to mow the lawns had been terrific while

she was too ill to do it herself, but she had recovered now, and it was no longer

necessary. The side gate banged open and the mower sound grew in intensity as

Harry began cutting the lawn out the back. Abigail sat up in bed. Fortunately, the

curtains were closed.

Abigail grabbed the black hoodie from the bedhead, trundled into the

bathroom and pushed her feet into an old pair of runners that were dry and crusty

from a long walk on the beach she had taken before she fell sick. She could hear

the mower travelling back and forth across the yard and then it seemed to stop

outside the laundry door. She expected Harry to knock, but there was only the

sound of the mower, which didn’t seem to be moving anymore.

Abigail looked in the mirror and grimaced. Harry would have to cope with

her morning-face because she couldn’t be bothered washing right now.

Abigail walked to her laundry, pulled open the stiff door and stepped out

onto the cement strip that ran along the back of the house. She looked around the

yard. Harry seemed to have disappeared. The mower was standing just near the

51

moonah, with a track of cut grass behind it and uncut, but barely much longer,

lawn ahead of it. Abigail walked to the mower and turned it off. She looked

around the yard, trying to spot Harry.

Then she saw the giant plant by the path to the Hills Hoist. Emmet was

right; the whole plant had grown so big it now hung into the pathway. Dangling

from the closing petals of the unidentified bulb was the end of a shoelace. As she

stared at the flower, the shoelace slithered into the flower like spaghetti.

52

Jacqueline

Jacqueline woke to a dark, cold bedroom and the sound of her mother padding

down the corridor. She lay still and remained half asleep.

‘Wakey wakey,’ Jacqueline’s mother, Donna, said in a sing-song voice, as

she tapped with her fingernails on Jacqueline’s bedroom door. Jacqueline

squeezed her eyes tight and remained tucked under her doona until the alarm on

her phone went off two minutes later. She touched the phone, turning the alarm

off and heard the sound of the radio babbling start up down the corridor in the

kitchen. In a well-rehearsed move, she flipped off the doona and grabbed her

dressing gown, which hung on the end of her bed where she’d flung it the day

before, and then hurried down the corridor to the bathroom. This was her early

week: seven o’clock starts at the council and the freezing forecast was turning out

to be correct.

After Jacqueline finished her shower she could hear her mother calling to

her from the kitchen. Jacqueline knew that her mother would have waited until

she heard the change in sound, travelling from the pipes in the bathroom to those

in the kitchen, to know exactly when Jacqueline had turned off the shower.

Jacqueline muttered through gritted teeth, ‘I tell her every fucking day.’ Then she

took a corner of her towel to the mirror, leaving linty traces in the big circular

swipe she made. She stared into the mirror and repeated to her reflection, ‘I don’t

want anything to eat, don’t talk to me, just make my coffee and leave me alone.’

Jacqueline heard her mother call out again. She opened the door and yelled

down the corridor. ‘I’m coming, Mum!’ A gust of cold air shocked her damp skin.

She pulled on her dressing gown and went back to her bedroom where she

pushed her feet into her Ugg boots. She cinched the belt in around her waist

53

against the freezing morning air and walked down the carpeted corridor into the

warmth of the kitchen. She sat at the breakfast bar, where her mother had placed

Jacqueline’s cup of coffee, and scooped up the cup. When she shifted her weight

on the stool to find a more comfortable position the dressing gown fell open and

exposed her bare muscular legs.

‘Bloody hell,’ she said.

‘Language!’ Donna said without breaking her breakfast-making routine.

Jacqueline put the cup down and yanked the dressing gown back into

place, folding it over her legs. Then she drank a few more mouthfuls of the milky

coffee while trying to ignore her mother, who was moving from cupboard to sink

to benchtop preparing breakfast for Jacqueline’s father. Her mother wore a

dressing gown covered in tiny pink roses; it was a gift from Jacqueline’s father

last Mother’s Day and it replaced the one he’d given her two years earlier. That

one had little yellow birds all over it and had never been warm enough,

apparently.

The usual talk-back radio was on. Jacqueline watched her mother put more

bread in the toaster and tip a dash of hot water into the teapot to warm it for her

father’s morning cup of tea, which he always said, especially of her special brew,

he couldn’t start the day without. Jacqueline left her coffee unfinished, took a

triangle of Vegemite toast from her father’s plate and left the kitchen as her

mother began disagreeing with a caller’s comments about gender quotas for

parliamentarians.

‘Oh, that is ridiculous . . .’

In her bedroom, Jacqueline chewed on the toast as she put on her uniform

and filled a backpack for her weekend stay at her friend’s flat. She re-emerged in

54

the kitchen wearing her work clothes with an orange fluoro vest over the top. She

had her black woollen coat and backpack draped over one arm, and her shoulder

bag slung across her body. Now her mother was running hot water into the sink

and singing along to Cyndi Lauper’s ‘Girls just want to have fun’ that the radio

station was playing in between all that talking.

‘I’m going to Leila’s after work,’ Jacqueline said. Her mother stopped

singing and turned to look at Jacqueline. ‘I’ll probably stay at her place,’ she said,

meaning that she definitely would be staying over. She pulled on the heavy black

coat, the sleeves not quite covering her wrists, a complaint she’d had since a

growth spurt when she was twelve years old sent her towering over her

classmates.

Her mother picked up the whistling kettle with a pink gloved hand. ‘Right-

o, luv. Dad and I’ll be at the club tonight if you need us.’ Jacqueline’s mother

looked at Jacqueline from beneath raised eyebrows. ‘But don’t ring the mobile

sweetie, send a note.’

‘A text, Mum. It’s called a text,’ Jacqueline corrected her mother—yet

again.

Jacqueline had given her mother the phone as a Christmas gift last year.

Her father behaved as though she had given her mother a hand grenade.

‘You know what I mean sweetie. I’ll check it in the ladies’ room when I

get a chance to slip away. You know how dad hates the phone going off when

we’re out.’

Jacqueline rolled her eyes.

‘I’ll see ya later. Gotta go.’ She turned and walked out the door.

*

55

Like any Friday at the end of an early week, Jacqueline’s work day

dragged on but the good thing about early starts was early finishes, and knock-off

time was three-thirty. She didn’t have to look at her phone to tell what time it was

because cars filled with parents and little kids were heading to the nearby school

and that meant it was just about time to knock off. After she’d driven the backhoe

loader onto the tray of the truck, she drove herself and two other workers back to

the council station in the twin-cab work ute. Frieda, who worked in the office, was

holding a party that night at her parents’ house while they were away for the

weekend and Jacqueline had said she and Leila would go even though she didn’t

know Frieda that well. Once she’d left work she walked to the bottle shop down

the street and bought a bottle of tonic water and some beer. She carried her drinks

to Leila’s flat and let herself in. She dumped everything in the kitchen and went to

the laundry and pulled her work boots off there. Jacqueline had been using Leila’s

flat as her home-away-from-home ever since Leila let her bring some of her stuff

over saying that she could stay over whenever she wanted.

With a couple of hours to kill before Leila came home from work,

Jacqueline began to prepare herself for the night ahead. She stowed the drinks in

the fridge and then had a shower to rinse the dust and grime from her body after

working on the roadside all day. After the shower she hoiked a onesie from inside

the storage bag she kept in the second-bedroom cupboard and put it on. It was a

gift from Leila who had modified it adding piggie hoofs at the ends of the legs and

the sleeves so that it was the right length for Jacqueline’s extra-long limbs, and a

curly tail hanging out the back. She went to the kitchen and poured herself a

generous gin and tonic and returned to the lounge room and sat on the couch

where she repainted her nails deep purple. Being careful not to smudge the drying

56

nail polish she sipped her drink. When her nails were dry she stretched out on the

couch with a feather cushion under her head and her legs dangled over the other

end of the couch. She stared at the ceiling, but it wasn’t long before she closed her

eyes and let herself doze off.

Jacqueline sat astride God and rocked hard on his erect penis. She was

pleased to discover God had a thick penis and was surprised it was made from

alabaster. She loved that full feeling in her vagina when she was having sex.

As she rocked on his penis, she leant hard on his shoulders and looked

down at his body lying there beneath her. It was firm and brown-skinned. She

watched his abdomen move, the muscles tightened and slackened off each time

she sucked his penis deeper inside her. Shiny black hairs and beads of sweat

glimmered with each of his movements. God allowed her all the time she needed.

Spread out around his head on the white pillowcase, his long hair formed a wavy

halo. In the centre of the halo in his wise face were deep-set black eyes that were

watching her, but he didn’t respond. His robe was rucked up around his chest and

he lay with his arms out to his sides. The wide sleeves lay limp in the shape of

flattened bells covering his hands.

Jacqueline began to wake from the dream and thought about the way

vaginas ranged in size as much as penises did. She knew from experience that she

had a deep vagina that took a thick penis comfortably, unlike Leila’s which was

smaller. While the sensation in her vagina remained with her, she pulled her legs

up from over the end of the couch and rolled onto her side. She squeezed her

pelvic floor muscles, enjoying the zinging sensation centred on her clitoris and

radiating down her legs and up into her abdomen. She thought about the purple

dildo she kept at Leila’s flat in her bedside table and she toyed with the idea of

57

grabbing it but, instead, she squeezed her legs together and cupped her hand over

her genitals and pressed hard. That would do for now.

The sound of a car door slammed. Jacqueline opened her eyes and she

noticed that the day had changed; it was darker and colder than it had been when

she arrived earlier. Jacqueline twisted around and sat up, stretching out and

yawning a huge yawn. Then Jacqueline heard Leila chanting in a high-pitched

voice outside the front door, ‘Little pi-ig, little pi-ig, let me come i-in or I’ll blow

your house down.’

Jacqueline laughed out loud so Leila would hear her through the door. She

imagined Leila creeping up to the front door like the Big Bad Wolf. Then Leila

burst through the door and Jacqueline threw her head back chuckling at the

silliness. It was one of the things she loved about staying over at Leila’s: they got

away with all kinds of nutty behaviour, not like at her parents’ home.

‘You were sleeping, you slack tart,’ Leila said. ‘You were supposed to get

us dinner.’ Leila stood in the doorway, her brown leather handbag dangling from

her hand.

‘Yes, I was supposed to. And I did,’ Jacqueline said pointing a deep-

purple-tipped finger in the direction of the kitchen. ‘So, shut it.’ Leila closed the

door and glanced over to the kitchen where she saw the take-away chook from the

supermarket sitting in a sweaty plastic bag on the kitchen bench. Once again

Jacqueline had made a half-hearted effort, but Leila thought to herself that she

would be able to make a decent meal of it with the vegies in the fridge.

‘Everyone needs their beauty sleep. Even hot babes like me.’ Jacqueline

grinned and stretched out her long arms like a showman. Then she dropped her

arms and patted the cushion of the seat next to her on the lounge. Leila put her

58

handbag down on the kitchen counter and came and sat on the couch. She leant

back into the seat and took Jacqueline’s hand in hers and stroked the purple

fingernails.

‘I like it,’ Leila said. She curled her fingers between Jacqueline’s and

tightened her hold. Jacqueline squeezed Leila’s hand in response.

‘You ready for tonight?’ Jacqueline said.

‘Who’s going to be there?’

‘Freida. Her friends, I guess. Should be good.’

‘Well, you’ll have to stay with me. I won’t know anyone,’ Leila said.

*

In another house, on the same morning, Richard was in the kitchen of his

mum’s home. He had turned on the little blowy heater his mother kept in one of

the kitchen cupboards for the very coldest mornings, so the room would be warm

by the time his mother came in for her breakfast. Richard’s mother was in the

shower and Richard put the kettle on and sat two slices of bread in the toaster.

When he heard the shower stop he pushed the lever and the bread began to toast.

This was their routine every weekday morning.

‘Morning, luv,’ Liz said to Richard as she came into the kitchen a few

minutes later, her long curly hair still wet and a towel draped around her neck to

catch the droplets of water.

‘Coffee’s made,’ Richard said. The toaster popped, and Richard fished the

slices out onto a plate and pushed it across the counter alongside his mum’s

favourite coffee mug. Liz poured a coffee from the plunger on the bench, and then

she took it and the plate and sat on one of the two wooden chairs at the small

round table near the full-length window that looked out onto the front lawn.

59

Richard poured his own coffee into the stainless steel insulated cup his mother

had bought from an online discount store for him. He went to the table and picked

up his puffy black coat that had been draped over the back of the other kitchen

chair and shrugged it on. If it was cold inside their house, it would be colder still

in the workshop out the back of the local petrol station where he worked.

‘Better be going,’ Richard said and kissed his mother goodbye.

‘I’m making hamburgers for tea tonight,’ Richard added before he picked

up his coffee to head outside to where his metallic blue ute was parked.

‘Right-o, luv. Should I bring home a couple of beers?’ Liz called as she

buttered her toast.

‘Yeah, why not,’ Richard said over his shoulder and closed the door.

It was foggy outside, and when Richard opened the ute door, the air in the

car was icy. Richard headed off down his usual route to collect Mick, who lived a

couple of blocks away from Richard in a rental with a few other young blokes.

Mick was the latest apprentice mechanic at the workshop and Richard didn’t like

it when he told stupid jokes and played around. He didn’t mind giving Mick a lift

to work but only if he was waiting on the nature strip out the front of his house

when Richard drove past, otherwise Richard motored on and Mick had to find his

own way to work. On that Friday morning, Mick was waiting on his front lawn

stamping his feet and slapping his arms across his skinny man-boy body. He

stepped up to the kerb, leaving dark green footprints on the frosty lawn. Richard

pulled over amidst clouds of vapour from the exhaust pipe.

‘Cold enough for ya?’ Mick said, as he pulled open the door and got in.

His breath burst out of his mouth in a cloud as he pulled the door shut and clicked

60

on the seat belt. His breath disappeared once they got going, and he crouched

forward rubbing his hands together deep in his lap.

‘Probably get a few flat batteries this arvo. People forget to turn their

lights off,’ Richard said as he indicated to turn right. He knew what to expect on a

foggy day.

They drove down the tree-lined hilly road to where the fog was even

thicker in the lower sections of the suburb. They turned a couple of corners and

slowed to drive through the roadworks outside the supermarket where a backhoe

was digging a hole, and then on past the school and towards the petrol station.

‘Watcha you doin’ tonight?’ Mick asked while throwing a mock punch at

Richard’s arm. Without waiting for an answer, he continued. ‘I’ve got a friend

who’s having a party while her olds are away. Plenty of chicks. You’re comin’.’

He made the statement as though it was a given. Mick always invited Richard to

things and didn’t seem to care that Richard always rejected his offers of

friendship. Richard thought Mick mucked around too much in the workshop. He’d

seen it before and it always led to accidents. Richard hesitated before answering

because he wasn’t really listening. Instead, he was thinking about whether he’d

make Mexican or Thai burgers for his mum that night. It gave Mick the

opportunity to leap in. ‘Great! Can you pick us up at nine?’ He drummed both

hands on the dashboard and leant forward to see if there were any cars coming.

‘All clear,’ Mick said.

Richard checked for himself anyway before he drove across the road

because he didn’t trust Mick’s judgement, and then he entered the driveway of the

petrol station. As they rolled over the smooth cement, Richard tried to think of

something to say to get out of going to the party, but it was too late. At least he’d

61

still have time to cook tea for his mum and he could always leave if it was too

awful.

‘Looks like we beat Curly here, again,’ Mick said, observing that there

were no other cars in the yard. They pulled into a car space at the back of the

workshop and waited for Curly, the head mechanic, to arrive. The chilly air

pressed on the windows and Richard left the motor running and relished the

opportunity to sip his hot coffee.

‘I can’t stay long tonight,’ Richard said, cupping the insulated cup for

warmth and staring at the wire fence in front of the car. He noticed a piece of torn

black plastic hanging from a loose wire. It was dripping with moisture from the

fog. ‘Mum’s washing the sheets in the morning, and I have to get up early.’ It was

a silly excuse, but he hoped Mick would change his mind about the invitation.

‘You’ll be right mate’, Mick said, ‘we don’t have to stay long if you don’t

want to,’ he lied. He reached down and turned the heater up as high as it would

go, before rubbing his hands in front of the hot air that was blowing from the

heater vent.

*

When Jacqueline and Leila arrived at the party, there were people hanging

around inside the house, but Jacqueline didn’t know any of them. They made their

way through the crowded house out to the back yard where they found Frieda and

some other people from Jacqueline’s work sitting around the fire pit on a

collection of outdoor chairs and benches. When Frieda saw Jacqueline, she stood

up to introduce her to her friends. She walked around the fire pit and tried to put

her arm around Jacqueline’s shoulder, but Jacqueline was taller than Frieda had

realised, and she had to stretch her arm up and over Jacqueline’s neck. After the

62

introductions, Frieda slid her arm back by her side and went and sat in her chair.

Jacqueline and Leila stood for a moment looking for somewhere to sit and then

the people on one of the bench seats shuffled along to make room for them. They

squeezed in close to each other and Jacqueline found that her legs were crammed

against the person’s next to her on one side and Leila’s legs on the other.

‘G’day, I’m Jacqueline,’ Jacqueline said to the man she was sitting

alongside. He looked about the same age as her.

‘Richard,’ Richard said. Jacqueline shifted a little to free her arm, so she

could shake his hand. As she turned to shake hands, the sides of their legs rubbed

together, and she could feel the warmth of his body through her jeans. She took

his hand and gave it a shake. It was warm and rough. Then she leaned back a little

to introduce Leila who was sitting on the very end of the bench. Leila bent

forward to see around Jacqueline and gave Richard a small wave and then thrust

her hand back into the pocket of her cream woollen coat.

‘How do you know Frieda?’ Jacqueline said.

‘I don’t. Mick, that one over there,’ Richard said waving the neck of his

stubbie in the general direction of Mick who was standing behind Frieda, ‘he

knows her. I gave him a lift here.’ Jacqueline nodded. Leila tried to snuggle in

closer to Jacqueline to keep warm, but Jacqueline had begun chatting to Richard

and had twisted so that her back was towards Leila.

After a while, Mick started jumping over the fire pit, being stupid, which

didn’t surprise Richard. Frieda was drunk, and she laughed at Mick when he

slipped on landing and crashed into the bench full of people. Jacqueline took the

brunt of the fall and grabbed Mick around his ribcage. She could feel his bones

through his clothes. Richard, who’d had more beer than he was used to—

63

including the stubbie he had when he ate tea with his mum—fell backwards off

the bench, and Leila jumped up and leapt out of the way. Jacqueline shoved Mick

back onto his feet and then stood up. Once she had him upright she turned to help

Richard. She leant over the bench seat and offered her hand. Once again, she felt

the warm roughness of his hand and she liked the firmness of it. She recognised

the hands of a working man. She pulled him back up onto the bench seat and he

brushed spilt beer from the front of his coat.

‘Jack, can we go,’ Leila said. Jacqueline looked at her and then down at

Richard.

‘Oh, don’t go,’ Frieda said. She had been enjoying Mick’s antics and was

now sitting in his lap.

‘Can we go please?’ Leila said again.

‘Hang on,’ Jacqueline said to Richard.

Jacqueline turned to Leila and walked with her towards the house. They

stood by the door and talked for a couple of minutes and then went inside.

*

Jacqueline threw an empty stubbie into the recycling bin near the door at

the back of the house where it clinked against the other empties. She went inside

and wound her way back through the remaining people in the kitchen to the

laundry and took another couple of beers from the trough full of ice and was about

to return to the back yard, where the party was still going on around the sunken

fire pit.

Jacqueline had thought about going home hours earlier with Leila but now

she was glad she’d stayed. Once Jacqueline and Richard started chatting they soon

realised they had some things in common, like an interest in engines and

64

machinery. As she was returning to the backyard with the beers she’d taken from

the laundry trough she heard a commotion outside. There were less people in the

house now and before she reached the outside door Richard and Mick came in

through it. As they stumbled into the kitchen, Mick was telling Richard a joke,

comparing a casino to a woman: ‘Liquor in the front, poker in the back,’ Mick

finished the joke laughing loudly. Richard was unsteady on his feet and he didn’t

laugh.

‘Whad you say?’ Richard said. As he turned to look at Mick, he lost his

balance completely, and Mick lost his grip on him. Jacqueline caught Richard just

in time and propped him up under his armpits still with a stubbie in each hand.

‘Wazza madder,’ Richard said as he swivelled his head around and smiled

up at Jacqueline.

‘Time to go home mate,’ Jacqueline said.

Mick produced a broken-toothed grin. ‘She’s all yours mate’, he

whispered into Richard’s ear. Then he looked into Jacqueline’s eyes. ‘Richo’ll

give you a lift, won’t you, mate.’ Mick said and slapped Richard on the back.

Jacqueline looked down at Mick, who soon stopped grinning. ‘I’ve got

him now,’ she said. Mick retreated out the back door.

Jacqueline put a stubbie in each pocket and then grabbed Richard by his

shoulders and steered him through the house and out the front door. So, this was

her lift home, she thought.

‘My coat, my coat,’ Richard piped up when they’d gone down the steps to

the front yard, where Jacqueline saw frost was beginning to form on the grass in

the cold night. It would be another freezing morning.

65

‘You’ve got it on, ya drongo. Let’s go,’ Jacqueline said and pushed

Richard back on course to the road. They crossed the dewy front lawn and

stopped at the kerb, where Jacqueline propped Richard up against the side of

someone’s car.

‘Give us your keys,’ Jacqueline said, looking down at him with her hand

out.

‘You find ‘em,’ Richard said and giggled. Jacqueline looked down

Richard’s body for a moment and then stepped in closer one foot either side of his

legs. She could feel Richard’s breath on her neck as she leant down and pushed

her hand into one of his trouser pockets. They had become drunk friends and she

had lost all inhibition. As she reached her hand into his pocket and started feeling

around, even though it was at an awkward angle, she could feel that his thigh

beneath the trouser pocket was much firmer than Leila’s and she decided she quite

liked the feel of.

‘Ooh,’ Richard said. He lifted his arms up and then as Jacqueline was

mucking around with the things in his pockets trying to locate his car keys,

Richard flopped his arms over Jacqueline’s shoulders to balance himself.

Jacqueline stopped moving and looked Richard in the face. She leant in

closer. She could feel the warmth emanating from his lips and she pressed hers

onto his. Richard’s arms fell to his sides and he started to moan. Jacqueline was

suddenly reminded of the dream she’d had earlier that day and felt an electric

explosion in her genitals. Then Richard’s moan began to sound more like a cry of

anguish and Jacqueline pulled away for a moment. She realised she had finally

found the keys and she slowly pulled them from his pocket but didn’t move right

66

away. That was until Richard went pale, brought a hand to his mouth and bent

over to the side and vomited all down the car door.

‘Charming!’ Jacqueline said leaping out of the way.

Jacqueline fiddled with the key until she found the button to unlock

Richard’s car and hit it to find out where his car was parked. Across the street the

lights flashed on Richard’s metallic blue ute.

‘Nice!’ she said. And then, ‘We’re going to freeze our tits off if we keep

standing here.’ Jacqueline helped Richard to stand up again. Richard zig-zagged

across the road as he followed Jacqueline to the car. Then he remembered Mick’s

joke and grimaced. He stopped in the middle of the road.

‘He’s a cockhead you know,’ Richard said.

‘Who?’ Jacqueline said and turned to face Richard.

‘Do you like it? You know. Down there?’ Richard pointed to her crotch.

He was thinking of the line about liquor in the joke Mick had told.

‘What?’

‘I’ve never done that, you know,’ Richard said and smiled.

‘Come on.’ Jacqueline walked over and dragged him the rest of the way

across the road and around to the passenger side where she helped him into the

seat. She shut his door and went around and sat in the driver’s seat. She slid the

seat back to cater for her longer legs and then adjusted the steering wheel, so she

could drive. Jacqueline turned the motor over and the heater began pumping cold

air into the cabin. She turned it off to give it time to warm up.

‘Fuck,’ Jacqueline said. She thought of Leila sleeping alone and knew she

couldn’t drive the car, not with the number of beers she’d drunk.

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Richard repeated her, ‘Fuck.’ And then turned to Jacqueline, ‘What’s the

matter?’

‘Where do you live?’ Jacqueline said.

‘We are not going there,’ he said. He waved his hands in front of his face.

‘No way. My mum’s there and she won’t be happy to see me like this. With you.

No waysers,’ Richard said.

‘Right,’ Jacqueline said. Again, she thought she better not drive because

she was drunk, not as drunk as Richard but still too drunk to drive and she didn’t

want any trouble with her licence because she’d be out of a job if she lost it.

‘Right,’ Richard repeated her again.

*

Jacqueline blinked and brought her hands up to her eyes then gripped her

head and grimaced. A deep throbbing began behind her forehead. She breathed for

a few seconds and then rubbed her hands on her thighs. She squinted her eyes

open and looked around at where she was. Her coat was over her legs, but it did

little to protect her from the freezing morning air. The bucket seat she was sitting

in felt slippery and the car dashboard almost shone it was so clean. She thought

Richard must really love this machine. The morning sky was beginning to lighten,

and she looked out at the trees in the suburban street where they were parked. As

the magpies began their morning warble, Jacqueline tried to recollect saying

goodbye to Leila the night before. She remembered dancing in the lounge room

and singing along to Daft Punk’s ‘One more time’. And then she remembered

knocking on a door thinking it was the toilet. But when the door opened, Frieda

had walked through with a T-shirt with ‘Fuck Yeah I’m a Feminist’ written on it.

68

Her hair was messy and the make-up around her eyes was smudged. Then Mick

walked out of the darkened bedroom and pushed past Jacqueline.

‘You OK?’ Jacqueline said. Mick shrugged and kept moving.

It was cold in the corridor and Jacqueline could see goosebumps on

Mick’s upper arms.

Jacqueline had followed Mick to the lounge room where she saw Frieda

slouched on the lounge picking at her fingernails. Mick didn’t stop to talk and left

to go back outside.

‘I didn’t do anything he didn’t want to do,’ Frieda said.

Before Jacqueline could recall anything else, Richard stirred, and she

turned to him. She noticed how the whiskers on his chin had grown overnight or,

perhaps, she thought, she just hadn’t noticed them last night. Kissing a whiskery

face held no pleasure for her. Come to think of it, she didn’t recall whiskers

during their brief kiss the night before. Her attention had been in Richard’s pocket

so it’s possible she just missed the scratchy chin.

Richard looked at his surroundings just as Jacqueline had done and she

watched his face as he too realised where they were. Richard’s first thought was

whether he was going to be late for work and then he remembered it was

Saturday. He looked through the windscreen at the flowering gum tree on the

nature strip on the other side of the road. The ground was littered with fallen pink

blossoms and gum leaves that the galahs had chewed off.

Richard said. ‘What are we doing here? Pass me that water bottle.’ He

pointed to a bottle in the driver’s side door pocket.

‘It’s fucking freezing. Let’s go to my place,’ Jacqueline said. She started

the car and the heater blasted cold air on their faces again. Richard adjusted the

69

vent on his side, so it didn’t point at him and turned the heater down to give it

time for the warm air to begin circulating. They both clicked on their seatbelts and

Jacqueline pulled into the road and hit the accelerator. The streets were empty,

and the sun was only just breasting the horizon, which they only caught glimpses

of between the trees and houses. As Jacqueline turned into the court where Leila

lived, a shaft of sunlight pierced the gap between a house and the trees and flashed

into her eyes.

‘Oh, please, kill me,’ Jacqueline said and squeezed her eyes shut and then

squinted for the last few metres before turning into Leila’s driveway where she

stopped behind Leila’s flame-orange Suzuki Ignis.

*

Jacqueline’s mobile phone began ringing and she stirred. She was lying

face down in her bed at Leila’s place. As she began to wake up she felt as though

she’d been asleep for a long time. The phone continued ringing and she lifted her

head trying to figure out where she had left it. She pushed up on her elbows and

peered into her pillow. The air on her face was chilly and she could smell her own

stale beer breath. She turned towards the sound of the phone and hung out over

the edge of the bed to reach a pile of her clothes from where she could hear the

sound. She dragged her jeans toward her and felt in the pockets until she found the

phone and answered it.

‘Hi-i,’ Leila said.

‘You’re awake?’ Jacqueline said. She struggled back under the doona and

collapsed in the warmth. A breeze outside made the palm leaves on the tree next

door slap together.

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‘Obviously,’ Leila said. ‘Why did a pig just drive a ute out of my

driveway?’ Leila said from somewhere in the flat.

Jacqueline stretched her legs out across the bed and found it empty but still

warm from where Richard had been. She could hear clanking on the other end of

the phone.

‘What are you doing?’ Jacqueline said. She sat up and patted the doona in

a few places just to check that Richard really was gone. Her hand hit on

something hard and she shoved her arm under the doona. She stretched across to

where the lump was and pulled out her purple dildo. A pubic hair and some lint

were stuck to the shaft and she grimaced then dropped it on top of the doona.

Then she remembered Richard’s face when she’d taken it from the bedside table

drawer. She smirked at the thought and the smile stayed on her face as she

listened to Leila clanking about on the other end of the phone.

‘Cooking,’ Leila said.

‘Hang on,’ Jacqueline said and hung up.

She flicked off the doona and got out of bed leaving the dildo where it

was. She fossicked in the clothes strewn about on the floor looking for her piggy

onesie, and then understood what Leila had just said. Richard was wearing it. She

remembered that Richard had complained that it was too cold after they’d had sex,

and she had grabbed the first thing to hand. Richard pulled the soft fabric under

the doona with him to warm it up and then they giggled as he struggled into it. So,

she dug into the bag in the cupboard and pulled out a pair of track pants and a

hoodie instead. She grabbed last night’s socks and pulled them on. When she went

to the kitchen she looked out the window at where Richard’s ute had been parked

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and it wasn’t there. She remembered being excited by the power it had when

she’d hit the accelerator going up the hill in the early hours that morning.

Leila’s hair was wet, and she was wearing her sloppy clothes: a purple and

white striped jumper that sagged at the elbows, dark green woolly leggings and

brown loafers. She had earbuds in her ears and was listening to a song. Jacqueline

could hear the tinny sound of Avril Lavigne’s ‘Complicated’ coming from the ear

buds.

‘Whatcha cooking?’ Jacqueline said. Jacqueline stepped across the kitchen

to the bench where Leila was working and tapped the phone to see what time it

was and was surprised to see it was two o’clock in the afternoon.

Leila continued grating a carrot into a glass bowl. Flour, milk, eggs and

the other ingredients for a carrot cake were spread on the kitchen bench and there

was a cookbook open on a wire book stand off to the side. Leila was concentrating

on grating and listening to the lyrics of the song. Jacqueline stuck her finger in the

mixture to swipe a taste and Leila leant across and whacked her fingers with the

edge of the grater.

‘Ouch,’ Jacqueline said. She grabbed the mixing spoon covered in cake

mixture and flicked it in Leila’s direction. A blob landed in the middle of Leila’s

forehead and began sliding down her nose. She gasped and dropped the carrot and

grater on the bench. Jacqueline stepped toward her and grabbed her by the

shoulders. She bent down and began licking the mixture off Leila’s face. But

Leila was having none of that and picked up the bowl of grated carrot and pulled

the neck of Jacqueline’s hoodie open and tipped the carrot in.

Richard pulled into the driveway of Leila’s house and was pleased to see

the orange car was still parked there. He switched off the engine and grabbed the

72

tray of coffees he just bought. He walked to the front door still wearing the piggy

onesie and knocked. He could hear laughing and loud noises inside. For a few

minutes he listened and then he knocked again and called out.

‘Jack?’

When no one answered the door, Richard sidled across to the kitchen

window and peeked in. There was a small plant in a pot on the inside of the

window and the venetian blinds were down but not closed. The noises and

laughter had stopped. As he adjusted his eyes to the different light inside the

kitchen he opened his eyes wider and stared. Leila sat on the far kitchen bench

with her legs spread wide and Jacqueline was bent over with her head in Leila’s

lap.

73

A smear

When I arrive at the doctors’ waiting rooms I am disappointed to see that almost

every chair is occupied with waiting patients. When I approach the reception

counter I attempt to speak to one of the four receptionists, but each of them stares

either into the screen in front of them or past me, and their mouths are working

away at a conversation. They each have a tiny headset wrapped around their head

with an earpiece and small black plastic microphone that curves around their face

and ends near their mouth. I don’t interrupt. When one of them ends the phone

call she has been answering I tell her which doctor I am here to see. The people in

the waiting room sit preoccupied with their own reasons for being there and don’t

make eye contact. There is an empty seat between a young man, thirty-something,

with pale skin and white hair, and a painfully thin older woman. When I take my

seat, the old woman slowly uncrosses her legs and then recrosses them away from

me. She tucks the folds of her dress under the leg closest to me with a long bony

hand. I can see the veins snaking their way beneath her skin. The yellowing,

pointy nails scrape on the plastic chair as she pushes her hand beneath her leg.

The chairs are arranged in a U-shape around the outer walls of the waiting

room. There is a large coffee table piled high with magazines and a television that

is mounted near the ceiling up on the wall to my right, which is broadcasting

morning television. The sound is turned down and captions run across the bottom

of the screen. As the waiting begins I notice that one of the old men sitting

opposite me is mesmerised by the TV screen. He has to turn his head to his left to

see the screen from where he is sitting and I can see a white dressing on the top of

his head and several oozy, red patches elsewhere on his balding head. He has little

74

patches of wiry hair in random places over his skull, and tufts of the same wiry

hair poking out of the ear I can see.

As I sit there waiting amongst the dozen or more people, from my handbag

on the floor at my feet I hear my phone cheep a singsong bird whistle. I pull the

phone out and read the text message: ‘Congratulations your mobile have won

US7.8M for Commonwealth Games Award. To claim contact Mrs. Judith C

Martins via: clarkejudith60@yahoo.com.hk’. I snort at how ridiculous the bad

English sounds and the incredulity of the dollar amount and then delete it.

The TV man looks away from the TV to find the source of the snort and I

see that his face is lopsided, with one jowl hanging lower than the other. The skin

beneath the right eye droops and his bottom lip sags slightly on the same side of

his face. He looks at me and I don’t look away. He doesn’t seem to care that I am

watching him watch me. The tanned skin on his face and neck is wrinkled and

there are little lines next to his mouth like parentheses. His eyes flicker as though

his mind is resetting, then his mouth opens slightly, and he turns his head to stare

up at the TV again.

Dr Florentina Vaduva appears near the reception desk and I am surprised

when she calls my name.

‘Tina.’

I haven’t even had time to feel bored and then angry for the waste of time

it is to sit and wait in a doctor’s surgery. She always makes me feel as though she

knows me well even though my visits are irregular and infrequent. She indicates

with a nod and lifted eyebrows that I should follow her and she heads off down

the corridor behind the wall the TV is hanging on.

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‘I’ve had a cancellation. You’re in luck,’ she says as I follow her past

other doctors’ rooms.

When we reach her room and after she has closed the door she asks me

why I have come to visit her. For a brief moment I wonder why she doesn’t know

and then I realise she has dozens of patients and I can’t expect her to know

everything about each of them. So, I tell her.

‘I received a reminder for my pap smear,’ I say as I sit in the patient’s

chair. It is too high for my feet to reach the floor so my legs dangle below me as

though I am a child.

‘Let me just see,’ she says as she sits in a swivel chair angled side on to

the desk and looks at her computer screen. Her desk is littered with the usual GP

accoutrements: a printer, paraphernalia from pharmaceutical companies such as a

notepad and a stapler, a stethoscope, an otoscope, an in-tray with blank scripts,

medical books, and a scattering of pencils and pens. She scrolls down the

computer screen, which she always has angled so the patient can see it, and then

scrolls up again and says, ‘Yes, you’re right.’

Dr Flo, as I think of her, sits back in her swivel chair.

‘There is good news and bad news,’ she says and waits a beat looking

straight at me.

She is originally from Romania, not that this is particularly important, but

I like to think her directness is part of her foreignness; a quality of hers, the

directness that is, I have always appreciated. Although, what she has just said in

her Eastern European accent makes my stomach tighten. Dr Flo is not one to use

metaphors. What bad news could there be; it’s been two years since my last pap

smear.

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She picks up a piece of scrap paper that is lying on her desk and swivels

her chair so her whole body faces me. As she moves the piece of paper I can see

that it has been torn from one of the pharmaceutical company’s notepads and that

she has made notes in pencil as though she had scribbled on it during a phone

conversation. She leans forward with her hands cupped in her lap and speaks

directly to my face. The scrap of paper stands like a mainsail in her hand.

‘When we do pap smears we are looking for the Human Papilloma Virus,’

Dr Flo begins. I wonder if that’s the bad news. Her eyes are green, and round and

she has a slight lisp. Her straight brown hair is cut in a bob and has never changed

in all the years I’ve been visiting her. I watch her mouth as she speaks and see the

action of her tongue when she makes sibilant sounds.

‘There are one-hundred strains of the virus, but, we are only looking for

numbers eighteen and nineteen,’ she says and brings the page up to allow me to

see her scribbled notes. I can see on the torn page there are strings of letters and

numbers and in amongst them I spot an eighteen and a nineteen and then she

whisks the page away again and tosses it back on her desk. I’m wondering which

one I have but I give her time to continue because there is never any doubt with

Dr Flo that she will get to the point.

And, I remind myself, she did say there was also good news.

‘Now, if we find either of these, you come back in one year.’ She draws

out the word ‘one’ with emphatic diction that makes it sound like she is saying

‘wan’. Again, she waits a beat and I look at her round green eyes. Now I

understand that this is the bad news.

‘The good news is,’ she says and then grins. I see how her two front teeth

slightly overlap and wonder whether she lacked dental care when she was a child.

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She flicks her eyebrows up again and continues, ‘that if we don’t find these strains

you don’t have to come back for five years.’ The Count from Sesame Street

springs to mind and I half expect her to laugh: Ha Ha Ha, the way The Count

does. She is triumphant. I am relieved.

The breath I was holding comes out in a small puff. I adjust myself on my

seat and straighten my arm while she attaches the blood pressure machine; a

routine practice during every visit. With that done, she continues talking as she

walks to the little basin at the far end of her room and begins preparing her

equipment. She turns her head and continues speaking to me over her shoulder

about the latest scientific findings in relation to pap smears. Then she indicates

that I should come over to the bed.

‘Do you want me to do a breast examination as well,’ she asks as she rips

open some packaging.

‘Might as well,’ I reply as I move to the examination bed.

‘Well, you’ll need to take everything off,’ Dr Flo says and sweeps her

arms up above her head then down and around to her sides in a circle indicating

everything. She points to another chair next to the examination table and shows

me there is a blanket to cover myself with. Before I begin undressing she reaches

beneath the examination table and takes something from under there. She places a

small cushion about the size of a flattened birthday cake on the bed and covers it

with what she calls a ‘blue’; a hygienic paper square backed in blue plastic. She

then slides the curtain, which is also blue, around the bed and disappears back to

her desk.

‘Lay on the cushion,’ her voice calls to me.

78

While I’m undressing I try to recall ever seeing this cushion before and I

can’t. Once I am undressed I step up the little set of stairs onto the table and

realise the pillow’s usefulness. As I lie back with the little polystyrene-filled

pillow beneath my hips it tilts my pelvis up, so she will have a better view of my

vulva and, I suppose, easier access to the throat of my vagina.

A little pillow, a handheld mirror and a headlamp; that’s what I need, now

that I think about it, next time I’m checking between my legs. That little

assemblage of loose flesh is hard to see if you’re the owner of it. Not like a cock

and balls hanging out for everyone to see even when they don’t want to. Yes, the

cushion might just change the angle for a more successful view.

Lying on the examination table, I pull the blanket across the middle of my

torso, so Dr Flo can access the relevant parts of my body. As I lie there listening

to Dr Flo preparing I force myself not to think about the oddness of being naked

in a room with another fully dressed person that I have no intention of being

intimate with. This is all part of being a woman, I remind myself.

Dr Flo appears from around the blue curtain and she stands next to the

bed. Her hands flutter for a moment on my right breast before they gain

confidence and smooth and press all the tissue of that breast. Her hands launch

into the examination of my left breast with total confidence and then it is done.

I’m beginning to feel a cramp forming in the back of my right thigh. Dr Flo steps

over to the sink and continues her preparation. She asks how I am and I make a

little sound in the back of my throat. She is doing something to the speculum as

she walks to the side of the bed and holds it up and looks down at my face but I’m

not really paying attention because the pain and tension is building in the back of

my leg.

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‘Hang on a minute,’ I say as the cramp takes hold. I shoot my right leg out

straight and bend my foot up towards my face as I try and stop the cramp.

‘Take your time,’ she says as she withdraws one step, still holding the

speculum up at her head height. I grip the blanket and look down at my foot.

Thoughts are swirling through my brain; how much more embarrassing can I

make this situation. I concentrate on relaxing my leg in tiny increments trying to

find the right spot that will make the cramp go away.

‘OK?’ Dr Flo says.

‘Uh-um, just a sec,’ I say. I’m not convinced I can bend my leg yet

without it cramping but I give it a go. I bend my legs, slowly bring my feet

together and flop my knees out sideways in the usual way. Dr Flo steps toward the

bed and I can see her preparing to move into position like a dancer. She tilts

forward and brings the speculum down but I feel the cramp in my leg take hold

again. I kick my leg out. On its trajectory, my foot glances off the speculum and

Dr Flo jerks the instrument away. She retreats somewhere, I can’t see; I’m too

busy trying to get my leg under control. All the while Dr Flo assures me that

everything is OK.

‘Oh, God, I don’t want to hurt you,’ I say with a little laugh. I try again to

relax my leg but it’s no good. She stands ready and I have another go at drawing

my legs up and putting my feet together. I gradually let my knees flop open and

Dr Flo bends in again and aims the speculum at my vagina but the cramp returns

and I kick my leg out again just missing her head. She jerks back swinging both

her head and the speculum away and we both laugh. It’s no good. Then I realise

it’s the pillow that’s causing the trouble.

‘Maybe it’s this,’ I say and lift my hips and remove the pillow.

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‘OK,’ she says and takes the pillow.

I lay back and finally I can relax enough for Dr Flo to get on with the

examination. She inserts the instrument and I begin to moan. She makes an

adjustment widening the speculum for access to my cervix. I’m working hard at

relaxing my leg.

‘Won’t be long,’ she says sensing my agitation.

‘Oh, God,’ I say as my other leg begins tightening up.

‘Hold on, hold on,’ Dr Flo is down between my legs and she doing what

she needs to do but I am holding back another buck. I groan. She is bent over at an

odd angle and I look down to see her scraping away at my insides and I really

don’t want to have two cramped legs with a speculum hanging out of my vagina

or even worse I don’t want to kick her in the face.

‘Do you drink enough water?’ Dr Flo says as she continues the

examination.

There are some times that talking is just not possible and I know that

maybe I don’t drink enough water but generally, I’m pretty OK at keeping up the

fluid levels in my body. I don’t answer her. Instead I make a garbled sound and

look frantically at her face. My legs begin to twitch, and she scrapes a bit more.

‘That’s it, it’s done,’ Dr Flo says as she fiddles with the speculum then

whisks the swab away. My legs shoot out as I try to stop the cramping. Now we

are both laughing hard. Dr Flo is busy at the basin and I am grabbing at the

blanket as my legs finally relax.

*

At the front counter I wait for one of the receptionists to acknowledge me,

so I can make my payment. Four of them chat into their ear pieces to someone on

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the other end of the phone line. I then notice my T-shirt hem is facing the outside

and realise I have put it on inside out. I look down and can see the underside of

the phrase, which is facing my belly. It says ‘Pregnant women aren’t sick’ which

is true. I lean forward and pull the T-shirt over my head. I turn it the right way out

and let it slip back over my head and turn to look out the windows behind the

people in the waiting area. The sun is shining, and the carpark is full.

The old man with the dressing on his head is still sitting in the waiting

area. But, now he has stopped watching the TV and he is staring at me. His eyes

look from my belly to my face. He catches my eye and then quickly looks down at

the devilish smiley face again, which is now facing the right way out. There is a

slimy feel in my underpants. Dr Flo didn’t wipe the gel from my vulva before I

almost kicked her head in. I shift my weight from my right leg to my left and the

gel slides back and forth.

82

Let’s cut some shit

On her way to the hire place, Ellie could see up ahead that the traffic lights were

green, and the cars were moving through the intersection. She and her son had

demolished the pergola in the backyard a few days back and she was on her way

to pick up a circular saw from the hire place to cut the pergola up for fire wood. It

was school holiday time and the crossing Ellie had just passed through was

unattended, and the flashing speed signal was switched off. She had travelled on

this road enough times to know that the green traffic lights she could see up ahead

would be orange, if not red, by the time she reached the intersection. And sure

enough, with a hundred metres to go, the lights blinked to orange and then red.

Ellie pulled up next to a ute stopped in the right-hand turning lane. About five

hundred metres past the lights on the other side of the intersection, Ellie could see

there was a temporary traffic sign on the shoulder of the road indicating a lower

speed limit. She couldn’t see what the cause for the reduced speed limit was, but

she imagined it was some kind of roadworks.

It was early morning and, once they’d collected the saw, Ellie and her son

aimed to spend the rest of the day sawing and stacking wood. The traffic was light

but steady; cars, trucks and work vehicles passed through the intersection in front

of Ellie. While she sat waiting for the lights to change to green, she let herself

become absorbed again in the radio program that had begun just as she had left

home twenty minutes earlier. A perinatal psychiatrist was discussing the novels

she had written based on the cases of kidnapping, child abuse and infanticide she

had dealt with in her career. Ellie was both repulsed and enthralled with the horror

of the subject matter, and she was amazed the way that some women were able to

focus so severely on their goals even though the outcomes were so terrible.

83

Somewhere outside Ellie’s car a person began shouting, but it was hard to

hear what was being shouted because of the interview on the radio and the noise

of the traffic streaming across the intersection in front of her. Ellie looked out the

front windscreen and in the rear-view mirror, but she couldn’t see anyone. She

heard the yelling again and realized it was coming from the ute in the lane to the

right of her. She looked at the driver. He had his passenger-side window down

and was pointing and yelling. Ellie looked to where he was pointing, which was in

the direction of the reduced-speed sign on the other side of the intersection. She

looked back at the man. She estimated that he was older than her, perhaps in his

sixties or seventies. He wore big, square, wire-framed glasses perched high up on

his nose, which she also noted was too big for his face and was very red with the

strain of the yelling. Ellie saw that the skin on the rest of his face was also shiny

with the exertion of shouting, and the more he yelled the further the red spread out

from his nose. Soon his whole face and neck would be red and shiny. He was

clearly upset about something.

Ellie turned her attention back to the radio. When the shouting interrupted

her again, she looked at the man and saw that he was trying to say something to

her. She reached for the button that would lower the window, accidentally hitting

the wrong button and lowering the rear-passenger window instead. This confused

her and she hurriedly pressed another button because the man was still shouting

and she thought it must be urgent. Again, she mistakenly hit the wrong button and

the front passenger window began to lower. Now she studied the buttons on the

door handle and made sure she pushed the correct button that lowered her

window. It looked as though the man was trying to tell her something about the

hazard she was going to encounter up the road because he was pointing at her and

84

then at the road sign, or at least that’s what Ellie thought he was pointing at.

Maybe he knew something and was going to tell her about it.

‘What was that?’ Ellie shouted to the man once she had her window open.

‘Can you read that sign?’ the man screamed and pointed to the reduced-

speed sign down the road.

Ellie looked at the sign and tilted her head slightly to the left, trying to

figure out what the man meant. It was a clear sunny morning and there were no

obstacles between them and the sign. The sign was clearly visible. Something the

woman said on the radio caught Ellie’s attention again. She was explaining what

neonaticide was, a term Ellie had never heard. The woman explained that when a

mother gave birth and then killed the baby within the first twenty-four hours this

was called neonaticide. She went on to explain that some women—often with

limited education and life skills—didn’t know they were pregnant and committed

neonaticide because of the shock of the pain and delivery. Ellie wondered, just as

the woman said many mothers do, how that could even be possible.

The man, again, shouted something, but Ellie was so interested in the topic

on the radio she didn’t catch exactly what he said. She reached for the volume

knob of her radio and turned it down.

‘What did you say? I can’t hear you,’ Ellie said, and she leaned her head

toward the ute and looked at the man. He was very agitated.

‘You probably don’t how to read,’ the man angrily said, gripping his

steering wheel.

Ellie looked at the sign again. It seemed as clear as day to her. She

wondered if the man needed help. When she turned her attention back to him, the

man jabbed his finger at her.

85

‘I saw you,’ the man said pointing at Ellie. ‘Back at the roundabout.’

Ellie recalled that when she came out of the roundabout earlier, there had

been a ute in front of her. The road leading away from the roundabout went up a

slight hill and curved gently to the right. She knew it well. Years ago, she had

borrowed her brother’s F100 long-wheel base ute. It was souped up to manage the

mountainous terrain where he worked as a timber hauler in the high country. It

had more horsepower than Ellie had ever known. She had exited the roundabout

and planted her foot on the accelerator. The Effy had launched so fast that she had

felt a rush of blood to her groin and experienced an instant clitoral erection. She

had finally understood why so many young men enjoyed speeding in cars.

Whenever Ellie exited this particular roundabout she gunned it in the hope

of repeating the thrilling sensation again. But in the Golf that morning, with the

ute blocking her way out of the intersection, she had indicated to the left and

changed lanes so that she could accelerate up the curved section of the road the

way she usually did—albeit without quite the same power-fuelled thrill as she’d

experienced in the Effy. Ellie considered herself to be a good road user, never

breaking the speed limit by very much, at the most seven kilometres an hour. She

considered herself courteous and thoughtful, and she had taught her sons to drive

offensively so they could anticipate trouble before it happened.

Back at the traffic lights, Ellie turned to the red-faced man.

‘I saw you. You were trying to pass me. I know your type,’ he said.

‘What?’ Ellie realised the man was angry. At her. For going faster than

him. She realised he had been stewing all the way down the highway while she

was listening to the radio, oblivious of him. She wondered whether he thought he

86

was clever arriving at the intersection before her when she wasn’t even aware

she’d been in a race with him. It was all in his head.

Ellie closed all three windows, and then the lights changed to green. Ellie

accelerated away from the intersection. She passed by the roadworks and made

her way to the hire shop where her son was waiting for her.

‘Let’s cut some shit,’ Ellie said as they entered the hire shop.

87

Keep clear of big shits

‘I was wrong about the pee,’ Charlie said as she and Lauren walked through the

staff room and out onto the verandah. The staff room was on the sixth floor of the

renovated wool-store building in the heart of Geelong and the view through the

glassed north-facing wall took in the whole of Corio Bay and the land beyond. As

soon as they walked outside, Charlie could feel the potential of the heat to come,

but for the moment the temperature remained bearable.

‘Oh yeah?’ Lauren said mockingly. ‘How very unlike you.’

A wedge of shade close to the glass-fronted staff room ran the length of

the verandah. Lauren dragged a chair into the shade near a table and sat down and

scratched the tip of her nose, which made her wince.

‘Is that still troubling you?’ Charlie said. She remembered Lauren recently

seeing the doctor about an iffy patch of skin on the end of her nose.

‘Nah, I just have to keep out of the sun. Eventually I’ll be one of those

people with a patch of bum skin on my nose. That’s my guess, anyway.’ Lauren

pulled her lunch out of her bag and put it on the table. She lifted the lid of a plastic

container and used a fork to toss the salad in it.

Charlie took a seat at the other side of the table and looked out at the view.

She could see a wide vista of the bay, the port to the right and, on the distant

shore, the You Yangs, a series of granite ridges rising from the volcanic plain that

sweeps across that part of the land. The sea was a glorious sparkling blue except

where the breeze ruffled it gently and then a deeper, more ominous, black-blue

shade spread across the surface.

‘The boys weren’t peeing on the toilet floor, after all,’ Charlie said.

88

The breeze died back to a whisper and Charlie unclipped the flap on her

satchel and pulled out a paper bag with a sandwich in it. There was little activity

on the bay unless you knew where to look. About ninety yachts were moored in

the Western Beach bay and Charlie noted the way they all swung in the same

direction on their mooring lines. She knew the breeze acted uniformly on each

boat but nonetheless she found it pleasing to see them all aligned this way.

‘I feel bad. I bailed up one of Tyrone’s friends who had been staying over

one weekend. God knows what his name was. I can never keep track of who is

who. Anyway, he insisted it wasn’t him. He said he’d let Tyrone know though.’

‘Who was it then?’

‘We go by the mantra of if-it’s-yellow-let-it-mellow, if-it’s-brown-flush-it-

down. And because there’s only a sliding door between my bedroom and the loo I

trained my boys from a young age to sit down when they wee. The noise coming

through the door, you know?’ Charlie noticed a tug boat was manoeuvring a bulk

carrier away from the wood-chip terminal at Corio Quay across the other side of

the bay and she watched it for a moment. ‘That was when the boys were younger,

when we first moved into our place.’ She pulled a bottle of lemon-and-lime

mineral water from her satchel, unscrewed the lid and took a swig. Charlie

watched a breeze riffle over the water, darkening it. The patch of darkness slid

over the water where it approached and then surrounded the ship. Just as suddenly

it disappeared, as the energy went out of the gust.

‘In my twenties I used to go out with this guy who lived with one of his

old school mates. One time when I was in the loo, I heard him call out to his mate

in this mock whisper, “What’s that sound?”. I’m having a wee, and I hear them

giggling just on the other side of the door. There is nothing I can do and then I

89

hear, “Is that a waterfall?” and then raucous laughter. I mean, how childish was

that?’ Charlie noticed that there were two tugs and they were swinging the ship

towards the Corio Channel. Charlie’s eye wandered along the western shoreline to

the St Helen’s boat ramp as she took a bite of her cheese and salad sandwich. She

could just see the mast of the Coast Guard vessel poking up behind the scrub

growing along the front edge of the breakwater. She had skippered the vessel two

nights back to tow away a boat with a seized motor that was drifting towards the

ammunition jetty at Point Wilson.

‘Who’s Tyrone again?’ Lauren laid the lid back on her now empty salad

container and unwrapped a nut slice she’d made for her weekly lunches. ‘Is he the

one who lives in the garage?’ Lauren picked at the edges of the nut slice and

nibbled on the nutty clumps.

‘Yeah, I keep a boy in my garage,’ Charlie said, ‘for spare.’ Charlie smiled

and looked sideways at Lauren.

Lauren laughed. ‘Does he pay rent?’ Lauren asked.

‘Yep. He works with the same people Hamish works with.’ Charlie’s

youngest son worked for a mussel farmer in Portarlington.

‘So, who was peeing on the floor?’ Lauren asked again.

‘Oh, yeah. I ripped off a bit of loo paper and dipped it in this puddle

behind the loo to see if it was pee. It was definitely yellow. Who pisses on the

floor and leaves it there? Yuck!’

A car in the street below turned onto Cunningham Pier and stopped for a

woman with a pram and a toddler who were crossing in front of it on their way to

the foreshore playground. From their vantage point, both Lauren and Charlie

could see there were no parking spaces on the pier. They watched as the car

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wended its way to the restaurant at the other end of the pier and then made a

many-pointed turn to wend its way back off the pier in search of a parking space

elsewhere.

‘I cleaned it up,’ Charlie turned and looked at Lauren. ‘And not for the

first time.’ Charlie raised her eyebrows.

‘Hmm,’ Lauren rolled her eyes.

‘So, I call a plumber and begin explaining the problem,’ Charlie said. ‘He

listened and then he asked me if I had a husband. Like that, “Do you have a

husband?”’ Charlie stared at Lauren wide-eyed.

‘What did you say?’ Lauren asked.

‘Well, at first I didn’t know what he meant. What has a husband got to do

with it? Then I twigged. He didn’t think I knew what I was talking about and he

needed to speak to a man. Can you believe it?’ Charlie said.

‘I figured it out myself. Turns out the join between the trap and the outlet

had a tiny leak. It’d have to be over forty years old so not surprising. The puddle

was yellow because the water in the loo was mostly pee given the aforementioned

mellowing. I bogged it up with a squirt of silicone. Ha ha, “bogged it up.”’

Charlie curled her top lip and grinned.

Lauren groaned. Then she put her hand up to her forehead to shield her

eyes from the glare and squinted out over the bay.

‘Is that a tug boat? I thought they went at the front.’

‘I feel bad for dissing the boys but . . . you know. Who else could it have

been? My boys sit down to pee and so do I.’ Charlie took another swig of her

drink. The breeze was beginning to pick up again and the air was that hot air from

the north that sweeps down from central Australia.

91

Charlie leaned out to see what Lauren was talking about. The two tugs and

the ship were making way now. She estimated they were making five knots

through the water.

‘They can push too,’ Charlie explained to Lauren as she sat back in her

chair, ‘or manoeuvre from the side. I would have liked to work on a tug if I was

younger. Bit of a closed shop though. You have to know someone.’

Charlie recalled a conversation with the former Coast Guard commander

at St Helen’s. He worked at a Western Beach boat repairer’s before he had a heart

attack, and he told her the only way to get work on a tug in Geelong was if you

were related to one of the working captains. He was a bull of a man with a barrel

chest and meaty haunches. Even when he was making milky, sugary coffee

Charlie could imagine his tattooed arms heaving mooring lines or stowing an

anchor.

Lauren pinched off a morsel of nut roll and squashed it between her

fingers. The mixture grew sticky and she began smacking her fingers together and

pulling them apart. Lauren’s nose began to tingle again and she realised she was

no longer in the shade and that the sun was beginning to burn her face. She stuck

her fingers in her mouth and sucked the nut mixture off, and then shifted her chair

so her face was no longer in the sun.

‘You know how I take the bus from Belmont in the morning?’ Lauren

said. Each day a shuttle bus operated between the two university campuses with a

stop-off at the half way point in Belmont.

Charlie picked up her drink and took another swig. Then she too shifted

her chair to sit in the diminishing sliver of shade.

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‘Remember that time I was waiting in the car for the bus and it came and

went before I had time to get out of the car? I had to wait for the next bus?’

Charlie nodded.

‘Well, the other day I wasn’t going to let that happen again. So, I’m

rushing to the bus before it zooms off, lugging my bag, my lunch and trying to

pull my ID out of my handbag to show the driver. I climbed in and just plopped

down in the first free seat.’

Out on the bay, the ship that the tugs were manoeuvring sounded five short

blasts.

‘I’m squished in next to this guy and before I have time to put my wallet

away, he starts telling me his whole fricken life story. I mean I’m a complete

stranger to this guy and there he is telling me he’s on the spectrum, and he’s

worked in the army for twenty years or whatever it was, and that the army won’t

let him take their test. Then he starts talking about the university and how he’s

doing Engineering. I mean, who does that?’ Lauren bit into a Gala apple and juice

squirted into her hand.

Charlie looked to see why the ship had sounded its warning signal. She

tracked a line between the ship and the channel markers. She spotted the problem

near the third channel markers.

‘Bloody idiot!’

Lauren released an explosive laugh and slapped her hand to her mouth as

apple sprayed out of it.

‘Who? Me or him?’ Lauren said.

‘No, that idiot in the channel,’ Charlie pointed with her drink bottle to a

fishing boat anchored in the channel. Lauren turned toward the bay but the sun

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flashed in her eyes and she winced and turned back to the table where she flicked

a few morsels of apple and the blob of nut mixture onto the deck.

‘Anyway, it sounded like this guy was building up to something and I just

thought, why are you telling me this stuff? So I cut him off. I said: “If you’re

looking for career advice don’t ask me”. Aren’t you just sick of blokes expecting

you to listen to everything they say?’ Lauren said.

Charlie took another bite of her sandwich. A sliver of carrot fell onto her

lap and she brushed it onto the deck.

‘And, you know what? That didn’t stop him. He started telling me how

much he earnt and complaining about how hard it was to feed his four kids and

pay his mortgage. I told him it was more than I was being paid. Then the bus

driver said it was more than he got in a fortnight. You know what I said then?’

‘No, what did you say?’ Lauren’s story had got Charlie thinking about the

number of times she’d met blokes who went on to tell her all about their lives,

forgetting to ever ask her how she was doing, or if she even wanted to know about

what they were doing. ‘Oh, that reminds me. I have to tell you about this bloke in

the pool. But go on, what did you say?’

‘It was beautiful. Even the bus driver smirked when I said it.’ Lauren put

the apple down and flung her hands in the air as if she was going to make a big

announcement. ‘After I said it was more than I get paid, I said: “And, I could talk

for hours about bringing up kids on my own and surviving on a single income, so,

SUCK IT UP.” That shut him up. Not another word out of him. And the bus

driver had to stifle a laugh. It was magic.’ Lauren relaxed back into her chair and

picked up her apple again.

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The ship blasted five more warning signals to let the fisherman know he

needed to move out of the channel. Charlie knew the ship was signalling that it

couldn’t manoeuvre but she wondered if the Coast Guard would be called out to

rescue a fisherman overboard. The small vessel was still anchored in the channel.

Then she turned her attention to Lauren.

‘I was in a class at the pool last week,’ Charlie began. ‘We’re doing this

amazing workout. You can really feel the muscles working like in a gym workout.

I love this instructor. By the end of the session you can feel which muscle groups

she’s been making us work on. You know, you can tell she’s thought about it.’

Charlie looked at Lauren. ‘So we go through this whole session and I’ve had this

amazing workout. There’s a lane at the shallow side of the pool for walkers, you

know, with bung legs or weak hearts or whatever. The whole time we’re doing the

class one of the walkers is this big man. He’s got this gut on him and he’s hairy,

with a balding patch and huge black moustache. You know, black hair from his

arse to his head. I don’t mind a bit of hair on a bloke.’ Charlie looked across at

Lauren again.

‘Yeah, me too,’ Lauren said and took a bite of apple.

‘He’s watching us as he walks up and down.’ Charlie noticed the small

fishing vessel was beginning to move. The person must have hauled in their

anchor. Charlie couldn’t see the anchor but she suspected it was a Danforth; it’s

the right one for a sandy bottom. Then white spume flew out from the back of the

boat as the driver motored out of the channel.

‘The whole time this hairy bloke has been trying to engage with someone

in the class which, I might say, is mostly women. Smiling, winking, staring. No

one was taking any notice of him. Then we’re doing the warm down. You can tell

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the instructor does yoga because we’re doing all these stretch-and-hold positions.’

Charlie moved her hands out to the sides in a crucifix position. ‘We’re all

balancing on one foot with the other foot wedged against our knee and we’ve got

our arms up and the water makes it even harder to balance. It looks amazing with

all of us moving in unison. Really satisfying.’ Charlie watched as the tug boats

slowly peeled away from the ship as it left the Corio Channel and swung into the

Hopetoun Channel on its way to Port Philip Bay.

‘Then we’re all stretching one arm up and over our head to the opposite

side so you can feel the pull all the way down your body while you’re trying to

keep your balance in the water.’ Charlie swayed one arm over her head and bent

her head toward her shoulder. ‘You can feel it all the way down your ribs.’ She

ran her hand down her side. ‘Then this hairy arsehole grins and says “Whose turn

to cook dinner?”’ Charlie said this phrase in a sing-song voice exaggerating the

way the hairy man had said it.

‘What did he mean? That you were vying for the chance to cook his

dinner?’ Lauren said, her apple half way to mouth and eyebrows furrowed.

‘You know I don’t wear my glasses in the pool. They’re those laminated

frames that I’m not supposed to get wet. So I’m half blind but I look right in his

direction and I say “Why don’t you shut your face and mind your own business”

just loud enough for him to hear.’

Charlie noticed how the tugs had moved in line formation on their way

back to the dock.

‘Oh, you should have seen his face,’ she continued. ‘Even without my

glasses I could see he just couldn’t comprehend what I’d said. It was like he’d had

a power outage in his face; his jaw dropped and that grin just vanished. He just

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didn’t get it. Why wasn’t I laughing at his joke?’ Charlie brushed a fly away from

the last of her sandwich, which she had put back on its paper wrapping on the

table.

‘I turned back to the instructor and ignored the bloke. Next time we turned

that way he was pulling himself up the ladder and getting out of the pool.’ Charlie

put the last of her sandwich in her mouth and brushed her hands out over the deck.

‘Heard from that guy in Port?’ Lauren tossed the apple core into her salad

container and closed the lid. The shade was now completely gone, and Lauren

needed to move inside.

‘Actually, he called last night,’ Charlie said. She had met Johan at the

Portarlington jetty when she was launching her boat about six months earlier.

‘He doesn’t know it, but he spent most of his breath talking to my sofa. He

just goes on and on.’ Charlie brushed crumbs from her lap and folded the

sandwich paper into a little square. ‘Last night I put the phone down on the sofa

next to me while I watched tellie and he just kept talking. I picked the phone up a

couple of times to see if he’d stopped talking. Didn’t even notice I wasn’t there.

Boy can he talk,’ Charlie said.

‘He’s one of those blokes who’s done everything and knows everyone.

You know what I mean? If you mention flying they’ll tell you about being a pilot

or if you mention the queen they’ll say they were once a butler at the palace.

Doesn’t matter what you say they’ve got a story about themselves. Last night, he

made me an offer in a roundabout way,’ Charlie said.

‘What, is he going to marry you?’ Lauren laughed.

‘Pretty much. He was bragging about his veteran gold card. Said he’d be

able to pay for my kids’ private education and that the Commonwealth would pay

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for anything I wanted. All I could think about was having to live with him and put

up with him talking about himself all the time. He was basically trying to bribe

me. He didn’t say it in so many words, but he meant marry me and you can have

all these benefits.’

The bulk carrier slid through the water past channel marker after channel

marker heading to Port Phillip Bay and eventually Bass Strait.

Lauren stood and collected her lunch box. Charlie hoicked her satchel off

the back of the chair next to her and slung it across her body.

‘You busy tonight?’ Lauren pulled the glass door open for Charlie to go

through.

‘Yeah, we’re giving yet another Keep Clear of Big Ships presentation

tonight. Obviously, there are still those who haven’t got the message,’ Charlie

said indicating the fishing boat that had anchored in the shipping channel.

98

The procedure

A Gregorian chant played throughout the suburban house in an inner northern

suburb of Melbourne. In the bathroom, Pity rubbed a towel over Joseph’s lean

body and playfully swatted his hands away while she reached up to dry his hair

and back. When she was finished, Joseph secured the towel around his waist and

Pity took his hips and steered him out of the bathroom, down the corridor and into

the bedroom.

They came to a stop in front of the bed, and Pity moved around to face

Joseph, smiling a small smile. She began unbuttoning her shirt, holding Joseph’s

eager gaze as her fingers progressed from the button at the top of her shirt to the

last button at her waist. She was a new bride, and Joseph had let her know that

this was what he wanted her to do, sensed that Joseph had been waiting for this

moment.

As each button popped undone, more and more of Pity’s chest came into

view. Neatly tucked across her chest were two delicate, long-boned hands. The

translucent skin, unexposed to the sun, was unblemished and the palest of pinks.

The hands lay one over the other, fitting snugly against her chest like a Chinese

puzzle. The long fingers, tipped by trimmed, pale-pink fingernails, curved across

her rib cage ending just before her armpits.

When Pity finished unbuttoning her blouse, letting it hang loosely, she

closed her eyes and took a deep breath, letting it out in one long sigh. The hands

on her chest began to unfold, as though awakening, revealing miniature forearms

and wrists. The fingers opened, releasing a delicate perfume, and stretched. Then

they came together again as in prayer and Pity lost herself in the freedom of the

moment.

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The Gregorian voices continued to float through the house, and beams of

light filed through the half-open shutters, arriving on the far wall of the bedroom

in deep yellow slashes.

‘Under the gaze of the one I love, and with a heart full of longing, I call on

the spirit of love,’ Pity said and then stood, with her eyes closed, silently

contemplating.

Joseph, standing before Pity, gave into his desire and grunted. He enclosed

the delicate pink hands between his own. He dipped his face down and breathed in

their sweet essence.

*

It was only some months after, and Pity was up late, working on the

ironing. She set the iron face down onto the lower edge of Joseph’s work shirt and

pressed toward the collar. Her right arm was aching from repeatedly pressing the

iron onto a garment and then lifting it into the standing position. The pile of

clothes that had filled the basket was now reduced to a couple of shirts. Sweat slid

down the side of her torso under the loose singlet she wore, and she squeezed her

elbows to her sides to stop the itching droplets from running any further. She

thought about stopping for a drink as a cloud of sweat-smelling steam puffed up to

her face.

The walls of the room were painted a dark chocolate colour and were

mostly hidden in shadow. The only light in the room came from a flexible floor

lamp, with its beam directed over the ironing board. Pity stood on a thick, white

rug that was her preferred spot for ironing. She was wearing pink towelling

slippers, which had five bunnies, like little marshmallow creatures, i the place of

every toe. Each bunny had a tiny set of whiskers and their noses and eyes were

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stitched in black yarn. Sometimes she overheard them having conversations with

each other, though they were silent now. She shifted from one foot to the other

and looked at the bunnies. They lay mute across her toes.

Pity picked up the last shirt from the basket and placed it on the ironing

board with the button-sided front facing up. It was her favourite shirt, but she had

left it for last because the frilly front was tricky to iron. She liked the shirt because

the frills hid the size and shape of her breasts.

‘Pity!’ Joseph called from the bedroom.

Pity stepped into the corridor and looked toward the bedroom. She paused

and then withdrew quietly into the kitchen. A small dining table with a white-and-

gold-speckled Laminex top and blotchy chrome legs stood in the middle of the

room. Three different chairs were squeezed around the table. Pity went to the sink

and turned the tap on. She let the water run until it was cold and then filled a

glass. She sipped the water slowly, feeling it replenishing her body with each

mouthful. She filled the kettle and turned it on, then sat on the only chair with a

padded seat; the one she had chosen when she and Joseph were shopping for

furniture at the second-hand shop after they moved into the terrace house.

‘Pity, are you coming to bed or what?’ Joseph called from the bedroom.

Pity closed the kitchen door with an outstretched foot and shifted her

position on the chair. She held a green mug lightly between her hands and twirled

it around on its base. It made a small percussive sound as it wobbled on the table

top. She waited for it to come to a stop and twirled it again, the vibrato rattle

played in concert to the rumbling kettle. Pity listened to the bunny chitter-chatter

until the kettle boiled. She could never understand what they were saying, but it

always comforted her.

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The next thing Pity knew, the tea in the mug was cold and she was looking

down into it. She jerked her head up and sucked in a huge breath. The bunnies had

stopped chattering; Probably asleep, she thought. She stretched her hand out and

felt the mug, then pushed herself up, switched off the light and left the kitchen.

She passed the room with the lamp and ironing board, and then slipped

into the bedroom, listening for a moment before she moved around to her side of

the bed. Joseph lay on his back as peaceful as an exhausted labourer, which he

was. Pity wanted his rich, muscled body entangled with hers, but the times she

had asked as much of him, he had disappointed her. She wanted pleasure that was

deep as a mountain lake, deep and blue, silent and sure. He didn’t seem to

understand. He found passion for himself through her body, that was for sure but

hadn’t yet learned to listen to her.

*

The front door closed with a click, and Pity listened as Joseph’s footsteps

crunched away down the street. Pity got up and showered, singing along with the

bunnies, who waited faithfully on the tiles outside the shower recess. It was a song

about skipping through thorn bushes and meeting their true love at the fair. The

frilly shirt still lay on the ironing board, and Pity grabbed it as she headed to the

kitchen for a quick breakfast. She had an early appointment at the clinic.

The clinic had a heavily painted metal fence and a pathway leading to a

façade that featured two fat Georgian columns. The front door was painted with

black glossy paint and had a central knob, but it was not open. The actual entry to

the clinic, as Pity slowly discovered, was down a side path, overhung with dark

green plants. It led to a red door. Pity stepped into the waiting area and asked the

receptionist for Dr Tinton. The receptionist flicked open an appointment book

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without looking up at Pity and marked a cross through one section of the calendar.

She told Pity to take a seat.

Dr Tinton called Pity in to his room after a few minutes. She immediately

noted his hair, which looked like a wig.

‘Pity, I have the psychologist’s report, but this is a highly unusual

procedure. I just want to make sure you know that it will be quite permanent.’ Dr

Tinton leant on his desk and watched Pity’s face.

She lightly touched her chest, hidden by the ridge of frills, and then

dropped her hands back down into her lap. ‘I no longer want to be just a body

part,’ she told him quietly. ‘I don’t want to be special. I don’t want to be revered.’

She knew that Joseph would be devastated. She only wished she had her bunnies

with her. They gave her such pleasure, and their presence always made her feel

more certain.

‘Well, if you’re ready we’ll get started,’ the doctor said, standing and

gesturing towards the corner of the room. ‘Step behind this curtain and take your

top off’.

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Adam and Eve and Lucy Fir

‘We can draw on my account,’ Eve said as she counted off an option on one of her

fingers. She and Adam were in their upstairs bedroom, where she was sprawled

across the bed looking at the ceiling. Adam was lying face down on the carpet

between the bed and the window. As Eve counted off each option, she lightly

squeezed the tip of a finger. ‘And,’ she said as she squeezed another finger, ‘we

can strip out the kid’s accounts if we need to. We can start over.

Eve rolled onto her stomach and hung her arms over the edge of the bed.

Adam was lying on the floor nearby. Eve trailed her fingers across the creamy

wool carpet and crossed her ankles in the air. The pearl drop-earrings that Adam

had bought for her when they were on holiday in Broome last winter dangled

against her cheek, leaving a tiny arc of cool skin.

‘We can walk away from this.’ Eve flipped back over onto her back. She

brushed her fingers over the cotton bedspread and felt the firmness of their king-

sized bed beneath it as she listened to her husband sobbing. Adam murmured

something, but his voice was muffled by the carpet and all Eve could hear was his

misery.

He was lying face down in his work suit with the weight of his head on his

forehead which made his neck ache, but he wasn’t concerned about that right

now. His arms lay at his sides, hands palm-side up, and his feet, still in the brown

Florsheims he wore to work, were pressed toe-downwards into the carpet. Adam

lifted his head for a moment and stared into the wet stain on the carpet caused by

his weeping. A gob of snot exploded from his nose when another wave of anguish

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suddenly gripped him. He flumped his face back into the damp patch on the carpet

which hurt his nose, causing him to cry out again.

Eve lifted her head and looked down at Adam again. He was like the shop

mannequins that were left in the windows at the change of season—only with far

less potential.

‘Oh, for God’s sake! Will you get up?’ Eve said. ‘We can do this on our

own. Forget about your father. After all, he’s the one who got us into this,’ Eve

said as she thumped her fists onto the bed. The Global Financial Crisis was not the

end of her world. Sure, they’d need to make some changes, but that could be a

good thing.

*

That was on Thursday. The next Monday morning, Adam closed himself

in the empty board room on the thirtieth floor at the bank where he worked with

his father. He stood by the windows and massaged his neck while he waited for

Michael, his father’s stock advisor and his best friend, to ring with information

about the state of Australia’s government bond stocks. He lowered his hand and

unconsciously stroked the leaves of one of the Happy Plants that broke the

austerity of the boardroom while he stared out at the view of Sydney Harbour and

the Botanical Gardens. His mobile phone began to vibrate against the satiny

Tasmanian oak boardroom table. He turned toward his phone and winced at the

sharp pain that shot through the muscles at the back of his neck. He grabbed the

phone and slid down into the nearest executive chair and answered.

‘Yeah, Adam, you been watching the trading screens?’ Michael said.

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Adam could hear the tension in his voice and noted that there was also a

certain excitement in the way Michael spoke as though this whole crisis was

exciting for him.

‘Not yet.’ Adam didn’t share Michael’s excitement. ‘Hey, tell me about

the bonds,’ Adam slid even further down into the chair so his bottom was almost

hanging off the end of the seat, and pressed the phone onto his ear.

‘Yep, you can tell your “friend” all’s well with government bonds,’

Michael said and waited a moment. ‘So, are you going to tell me who this

“friend” is?’

Adam visualised Michael leaning into his mobile, and sat up shifting his

bottom further back in the chair. He put his free elbow on the table and held his

head in his hand and talked at the table surface. ‘Are you sure? Are you absolutely

sure about government bonds? I mean, I don’t want to give my friend false hope

or anything.’

‘I’m fairly sure I know what I’m talking about,’ Michael said sarcastically.

‘Government bonds are solid. Your old man doesn’t pay me a king’s ransom to

get my facts wrong. Are you going to tell me what this is all about?’ Michael said.

‘It’s Eve.’ Adam’s words bounced straight off the table back to his face.

‘What’s Eve?’ Michael asked.

‘My “friend”,’ Adam sighed and closed his eyes. He could feel the grease

from his forehead transferring to his hand.

‘Eve owns those bonds?’ Michael’s voice went up in pitch.

Adam winced and wiped his hand on his wool trousers.

‘Yeah. Sometimes she scares the shit out of me.’ Adam pushed on the

floor and his seat rolled backwards away from the table.

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‘Mate . . . how did she know what to buy? . . . And how come you didn’t

know? What planet have you been on? Jesus . . . Adam.’

‘Look, the old man doesn’t know. He advised us to go with . . . well you

know about that and we did . . . well I did. And now we’ve, I’ve . . . you know . . .

lost it all. So . . .’

‘You’re in safe hands with me, you know that. Sounds like you’re in even

safer hands with Eve. He won’t find out she went behind your back through me.

Where’d the money come from?’

‘The day spa. Obviously, it’s been doing better than any of us realised.

S’pose I should’ve taken a bit more notice.’

‘Well, at least she didn’t borrow; she hasn’t jeopardised any of your other

assets. I can’t see what the problem is. I’d say you’re one lucky bastard.’

‘Right. Thanks. There’s something else,’ Adam swivelled in his chair to

face the window and focussed on one of the yachts tacking across the harbour. He

watched as the white trail in its wake formed and then disappeared as it scudded

across the water.

‘Might have to talk to you later,’ Michael said. ‘I’ve got a call from China

due any time now.’ Adam could hear Michael’s office phone ringing and then

Michael hung up.

*

It was late in the afternoon and Eve was dancing in the lounge room with

her children, Cain and Abel, and her friend, Lucy Fir. Eve stood with her legs

apart twisting her hips to Prince’s ‘When U love somebody’ which was playing

loudly from the speakers in the ceiling. With every hip swivel Eve dug the soles

of her feet into the soft pale mauve pile of the carpet she had chosen when they

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redecorated the home. Adam turned out to be indecisive in naming his choices

when it came to the interior decorating. Eve bent down and took hold of Abel’s

hands and swung his arms back and forth, then she spun him around on the spot.

Eve looked across the lounge room at Lucy and Cain shaking their arms in the air

to the rhythm of the song and smiled at the joy on their faces. The last sunlight of

the day streamed in through the wall of windows that faced the balcony and back

garden. Sunlight enriched the colour of the creamy leather lounge suite and deep

purple of the feature wall. When she wanted to relax, Eve would sit in the lounge

with a glass of wine and take in the garden Adam had designed. She thought at

least that was one skill she could leave in his hands. In the centre of the back yard

she had requested he plant a native frangipani, not the introduced, showier

frangipani. Each year she waited with anticipation as the tiny yellow flower buds

grew and then finally blossomed. She would open the drapes wide, slide the glass

doors open and let the fragrance fill the whole room.

Eve shared Lucy’s belief that music touched a deep chord in the psyche,

and Eve felt energised whenever she let the music transport her like this. Lucy Fir

was the founder of a motivational company that encouraged its clients to become

fully realised individuals. Eve didn’t know what that meant when she first read

Lucy’s promotional material, but she was now convinced that Lucy Fir’s Six

Statements had changed her life. She had also made a best friend in Lucy, who

said the Statements were a way of life, an aesthetic ideal, a code of behaviour.

And Eve agreed.

Lucy Fir’s Six Statements

1. Individual actions must benefit the individual before anyone else.

2. Individuals must work for nothing but their own profit.

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3. Music is a magical tool, a universal language.

4. Erotic Crystallization Inertia (ECI) is the natural order.

5. Responsibility to the responsible is the morality of a proper life.

6. Knowledge is the discovery of the power of your own intention.

Adam pulled into the double garage and entered the house through the

internal door. He stood in the corridor listening to the music coming from the

formal lounge at the far end of the house.

‘E-eve?’ Adam called down the corridor. The music continued unabated.

He closed the door to the garage, where he had parked his Jaguar next to Eve’s

Porsche Cayenne Turbo and walked up the passageway. The aroma of roast lamb

and rosemary wafted from the kitchen as Adam passed it on the way towards the

sounds at the back of the house. Further along the central corridor Adam came to

the formal dining room; he thought for a moment about the meal they would share

at the French-polished table with his father that evening. He would set the table

after he had first helped the children with their dinner in the family room. When

he reached the lounge room, which ran the width of the back of the house, he

covered his ears as best he could against the children’s raucous squealing and the

sexual music.

‘Can you turn that down?’ he screamed into the room.

Eve turned to the doorway and saw Adam bent over to one side trying to

hold his briefcase, block his ears, and greet the children. Eve watched the two

boys hopping about their father and then walked to the stereo and killed the

volume. Cain and Abel were squealing and running around Adam’s legs. Adam

dropped his shoulders and looked down at their curly heads. Eve knelt on the floor

in the centre of the lounge room and called to the boys and opened her arms wide.

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Cain turned to her and was first to push away from his father, and then they both

ran to their mother. Eve pulled the boys in towards her body and hugged them

tightly. She looked up at Adam over their heads as she leant in to speak quietly to

the children. They relaxed in her grip, and as she loosened her hold on them, they

burst from her arms. Cain led the way again as they ran down the corridor and up

the stairs to the playroom.

‘Hi, sweetie,’ Eve said as she stood and embraced Adam. She kissed his

lips, held his face in her hands, and looked into his eyes. Adam moaned a little

moan in the back of his throat.

Lucy Fir stood in the middle of the lounge room with her hands on her

hips, slightly out of breath. She watched the couple re-acquaint with each other

through this ritual. In her view, this was a natural event that occurred when lovers

came together, even after the shortest time apart. But if it didn’t come naturally,

well, she was here to help with that. In her programme, she called it Erotic

Crystallisation Inertia and it involved physical touch and breathing together.

‘Adam, we were re-energising. Care to join us in some music therapy?’

Lucy said.

Adam broke his gaze with Eve and almost let out a squeal. He looked past

Eve across the lounge room and saw Lucy smiling at him; her tongue suggestively

between her teeth.

‘No thanks, Lucy. We have a guest tonight. Got to spruce up.’ Adam

shivered without knowing whether it was the thought of his father being in his

house with him or Lucy being in his house with him.

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‘I heard,’ Lucy said. ‘Perhaps your father might give credit where credit is

due this time.’ Between them, Eve and Lucy had a name for Adam’s father: The

Law. In their opinion, it best described his attitude to his son.

When they had first met, Lucy had advised Eve to enforce Statements One

and Two, which encouraged Eve to keep her financial portfolio private from her

husband and father-in-law, but now, Lucy thought, credit was due to Eve for her

insight. She had, after all, avoided The Law’s financial mistakes. They were all

saved by it.

*

That evening after dinner, Adam and The Law sat in the lounge room; The

Law on the cream leather lounge and Adam across the room on a single lounge

chair. They had finished dinner and kissed the boys goodnight. Adam stood and

opened the sideboard. He pulled out a bottle and poured his father a glass of

whiskey in the tumblers that Eve had set out on the sideboard.

‘Ice?’ Adam said holding a cube of ice in a pair of tiny tongs in one hand a

silver ice bucket in the other hand.

‘Grmph,’ his father said without looking at Adam.

Adam carefully placed the ice cube in the glass of whiskey and handed it

to his father. Adam walked to the glass wall and flicked a switch set in the wall

out of sight behind the drapes. Lights in the garden flicked on and trained

spotlights on the native frangipani and a garden bed just beyond the decking.

Adam went back and poured himself a glass of water and sat in his chair. He tilted

the glass back and forth watching the water level come closer and closer to the

rim, and wished Michael was with them. Michael seemed to know how to keep

the conversation going with Adam’s father, but Adam seemed only capable of

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creating gaping silences. The two men sat opposite each other and waited for Eve

to return from tucking the children into bed. The Law stroked his salt and pepper

beard and stared at the join between the wall and the ceiling. Adam smoothed a

crease in his trouser leg and, looking down the line of his leg to the floor, noticed

a scuff on his brown shoe.

‘Anyone for another drink?’ Eve said as she entered the lounge room. She

raised her eyebrows and looked at Adam. Had he made the announcement? Eve

walked to the sideboard and began pouring herself a whiskey. She turned with

glass in hand and admired the Jan De Cock triptych, Module CDLXVII, hanging on

the opposite wall above Adam’s head. She remembered the description of this

artwork as a work that presents aesthetic and political alternatives to the world as it

is. It appealed to her newly formed ideas in line with Lucy Fir’s Six Statements.

‘I believe my son wishes to discuss a few matters with me. Perhaps you

could go to the kitchen and make something.’ The Law looked at her from under

his heavy, greying eyebrows.

‘Actually, we both have something to tell you.’ Eve looked at Adam again

and sat in the other lounge chair opposite the old man. Air puffed out of the

leather cushion as she sat down hard on it. ‘Sweetie?’ she said to Adam as she

gazed at The Law.

‘Um, Dad, you have always looked out for our best interests,’ Adam said,

looking at his father and then across at Eve who was smiling benignly at the old

man.

‘And we are grateful,’ he said, while looking into his glass of water.

The Law cleared his throat and picked up the glass of whiskey that he had

placed on a coaster on the coffee table. The ice cube clinked as he took a sip. He

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cupped the heavy glass in his hands and sat back in his lounge seat, tilting his

head back and staring at the pendant light hanging above them. The clutch of

frosted glass globes threw a soft mauve glow on the ceiling above, and sharp

white light onto the coffee table where a copy of Overview: a new perspective of

Earth was open at a satellite image of Australia.

‘We would never do anything to undermine that, and you’ll always be

welcome wherever we are. Eve loves your involvement with the kids. Don’t you

Eve?’ Adam shot Eve a glance, but she was still looking at The Law.

The Law raised his eyebrows and spoke to Adam: ‘Would you like to get

to the point of this discourse?’

‘Adam has decided on a career change,’ Eve turned to Adam, who knitted

his eyebrows and shot a look at his father, before returning his focus to his glass

of water.

The Law had orchestrated Adam’s life from the day of his creation. He

mapped his career at the bank. He coerced the previous owner of their house into

selling it to Adam and Eve. He tried his best to co-ordinate the dates of the

conception of his grandchildren, though Eve had had her own ideas about that.

Eve continued, ‘Adam has a deep passion for horticulture and has never

had a chance to pursue it apart from out there,’ Eve made a wide sweeping gesture

with her arm indicating the garden outside the large glass windows. ‘He’s starting

a new career. In the meantime, I’ll be the bread winner, and we have some secure

investments for the long run.’

‘I believe, dear woman, those investments are currently virtually

worthless. But I wouldn’t expect you to understand that.’ He took another swig of

his whiskey and stared at Eve. ‘Besides, if my son was truly thinking of carrying

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out this harebrained scheme he would have already told you that all that money is

gone. Gone.’ The Law placed his glass back on the coaster and pushed against the

cushion of the lounge as if to stand up.

‘I am well aware of your investment choices,’ said Eve, ‘but I made my

own investments and they are still viable.’

The Law remained seated, his hand still pressed into the cushion on either

side of his legs. He looked at Adam from beneath his eyebrows but before he

could speak Eve continued.

‘We’ve also decided to move.’ She crossed her legs and sat further back

into the lounge chair. ‘To Bathurst. It’s not far by train or car.’

The Law pushed hard against the cushion and stood up in a rush.

‘Adam, have you lost your mind?’ he screamed. ‘This will cause

everlasting pain if you allow this to continue.’

‘I knew this wouldn’t go well. Where’s Michael when you need him?’

Adam mumbled into his lap. He slumped back into his chair and put his glass of

water on the side table. He looked at his father from under his eyebrows and

watched the red flush rise from his father’s neck up onto his face and tried to think

of what Michael would say.

Instead he blurted out, ‘Lucy helped her open a second day spa in

Bathurst. They love her up there.’ Adam couldn’t take his eyes off the Law’s

darkening face. He kept talking for as long as he thought he could get a word in.

‘And the country air will be great for the kids.’

‘So take them on holidays there. For God’s sake!’ The Law stamped a foot

on the carpet and slapped his hands on the side of his legs. ‘You’ll never afford it.

This house,’ he said, waving his arms in the air just missing the pendant light, ‘has

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probably lost most of its value.’ The Law dropped his hands to his sides looking

quizzically at Adam.

‘Who’s Lucy?’ he said.

‘She’s a friend of Eve’s. She’s the reason we survived the crash,’ Adam

explained.

The Law glared at Eve. He hissed, ‘You should be producing babies and

meals, not behaving like a brothel owner saucing up tarts for gentlemen’s

pleasures. You’re evil.’

The phone rang and before the second ring Adam pushed himself out of

the chair and scurried into the hall to answer it. He wasn’t expecting a call but was

pleased to hear the positive voice of his good friend Michael.

*

Adam stood in his pyjamas looking out the second-floor bedroom window.

He watched Michael drive away in his black Range Rover with Cain and Abel in

the back seat. Michael had offered to take them for the weekend while Adam and

Eve sorted their belongings before the packers arrived on Monday morning.

Eve called to Adam from the walk-in robe.

‘You won’t need these anymore.’

Eve came out of the walk-in robe with an arm draped in silk ties which she

dumped on the growing stack of corporate wear on the carpeted floor. Silk ties

slithered in all directions over the suit jackets and pants.

‘“It’s not agriculture, Dad, it’s horticulture”.’ Adam repeated for the third

time pressing one fist into the palm of the other hand. ‘I told him, didn’t I Evie?’

‘Yes, you did,’ Eve muttered without looking at Adam. ‘Right after he

questioned whether outdoor work was suitable for an ‘educated’ man.’ Eve rolled

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her eyes as she walked back into the robe and began shucking coat-hangers along,

deciding what they would need in Bathurst and what they could sell on eBay.

The doorbell chimed, and Eve called from the robe.

‘Get dressed, Adam, for God’s sake. And go and see who that is.’

Adam’s phone vibrated on the bedside table. He sat on the bed to answer

it. Eve threw the brown Florsheims out the door onto the growing stack of

expensive clothes that Adam would no longer need. The doorbell chimed again,

and Eve appeared out of the robe. Adam was picking up his phone, so Eve left to

answer the door. After a few minutes she returned with Lucy.

‘That was Michael,’ Adam said laying the phone down again. He turned

towards the door and then he noticed Lucy. ‘Lucy!’ Adam stood up. He became

aware that the top buttons of his pyjama shirt were undone and his chest hair was

showing.

‘They’ve arrived.’ Adam said by way of reporting what Michael had

called to tell him.

‘Hello Adam. Big day.’ Lucy noted with a large grin. She wore deep red

lipstick and he teeth seemed extra white. She had pulled her blonde hair up into a

ponytail. She put her hands on hips and stood with her legs apart as though she

was about to begin a dance routine.

Adam grabbed at the top of his pyjama shirt with one hand and as a second

thought slid his other hand down to his pyjama pants to check they weren’t also

gaping.

Eve folded her arms and stood in the double doorway of the bedroom.

‘Michael is an angel, isn’t he? The Law always did relate to Michael better than

us,’ she said.

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‘Thank God for Michael’ Lucy said. She nodded, and her ponytail

bounced up and down.

Adam wasn’t sure whether to crawl back into bed or to leave the room. He

looked at the pile of clothes in the middle of the bedroom as though it was the first

time he’d noticed it, which it probably was.

‘Michael knows how to talk to The Law,’ Adam admitted as he stared

distractedly at the uneven wear pattern on the sole of one of his brown shoes.

‘Saved my neck more than once, that’s for sure.’

‘Responsibility to the responsible is the morality of a proper life and

Knowledge is the discovery of the power of your own intention, Adam.’ Lucy

recited points five and six from her Six Statements.

‘What?’ Adam looked across the room at Lucy and then shivered.

‘We have work to do. Lucy, feel like helping me cast out some more of

these sinners?’ Eve and Lucy looked at each other and laughed. Lucy rubbed her

hands together.

‘Let’s do it,’ she said, and they marched into the walk-in robe.

*

‘So, how’s the packing?’ Michael’s head spoke out of Adam’s computer

screen. ‘What did the old man say?’ Michael adjusted his screen, so the boys were

more visible in the back ground.

‘Oh, Eve and Lucy are hard at it. I made them some lunch, but they were

too busy uploading images to eBay to eat it,’ Adam said.

Adam could hear Cain and Abel bickering in the background and he asked

after them. He missed them.

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In his theatre room, Michael and the boys had been playing on the Xbox

when Adam had Skyped.

‘We went bowling and they had pancakes for lunch. We’ll cook up

something for dinner soon.’ He turned to watch the boys who were sitting on the

edge of a two-seater lounge concentrating on their characters on screen. ‘They’re

playing a devil of a game now,’ Michael said and then called out to Cain.

‘Cain, I don’t understand why the animal sacrifice has more value than the

grain offering.’

Michael picked up his laptop so Adam could see the boys playing. He tried

to follow the game as Cain won the level again. Abel just couldn’t stop Cain from

killing him. The boys were engrossed in the game. They stared hard at the screen

and kept pressing the buttons on the console and then Abel died for the fourth

time.

‘It’s going to be all right, isn’t it Michael?’ Adam spoke softly.

Michael didn’t hear Adam over the ruckus Abel was making.

‘Better go mate, these two are going to kill each other if I don’t get some

food into them. Righto, bath time you two,’ Michael put the laptop down and

signed off.

Adam listened to the Skype signal that indicated he was disconnected. He

sighed and stood up looking at his study wondering why he didn’t know what on

earth was happening to his life.

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The little Golden Notebook

Jenny woke to the sound of the vacuum cleaner, which reminded her it was

Saturday—cleaning day. Stephen would be hard at it. Jenny knew she wasn’t

supposed to be angry and she didn’t think she was, but something about living

with Stephen bothered her. She lay in bed for a bit longer, idly stroking the pubic

hair below the fatty folds of her stomach. It reminded her that Stephen was as

passionate about sex with her as he was about doing the house cleaning, which

were both good things as far as she was concerned. The vacuum cleaner stopped,

and Jenny listened. She could hear the bass notes coming from the radio at the far

end of the house. Stephen had ‘The Music Show’ playing on the radio, as he

usually did on a Saturday morning.

Jenny stretched her body to its full length; toes pointed and poking into the

tucked-in sheet at the bottom of the bed, and her arms stretched out wide above

her head over the top of the headboard. Then she relaxed and twisted around to

pick up a notebook off the bedside table. Stephen had given it to her last Tuesday

on her thirty-fifth birthday. He thought she would appreciate the cover. It was a

reproduction of the original cover of The Golden Notebook with large cursive

letters spelling out the title and author on a golden background. She had read the

novel in high school and it had exploded her ideas about her body, and about the

boys who had begun acting like testosterone-driven machines. She didn’t notice

the front cover when she flicked the notebook open to jot down the story idea that

had been formulating during that dreamy time just before she had fully woken.

Jenny was still deciding what to call the man in the story but she knew it

would begin with S. He was old and he regretted losing the love of his life to

another man; a baker from Barwon Heads.

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When Jenny finished jotting down her notes, she flipped the bedclothes off

and rolled out of bed, enjoying the first touch of the carpet on the underside of her

puffy feet before she put her full weight on them and plodded to the ensuite.

When Jenny returned from the shower, naked and not quite dry, Stephen had

already remade the bed with clean sheets and pillow slips. He had arranged her

notebook and pen next to each other on the bedside table, and he had tucked her

black leather slippers under her side of the bed. Small droplets of water squeezed

out from between the draped folds of fat on her back and dribbled onto the doona

cover after she plonked herself down on the bed. A horseshoe of dampness

formed around her bottom as she sat and jotted another thought about the story

into her notebook.

The female character had to have a name beginning with J, like hers. It

was silly, she knew, but these were preliminary notes and things could change as

the story developed. She decided that J would have to die so S could experience

the greatest human emotion of loss.

Jenny slapped the notebook back on the bedside table and lay on the floor.

In her notes, she had just broken S’s leg and she wondered if it would be possible

for a person to drag themselves up onto a lounge seat if one of their legs was

broken. She reached out with one arm and tried to pull herself forward. She

couldn’t drag herself at all, even with both legs intact, but S was a skinny old man

with huge reserves of stamina. Jenny would make him do it, especially since he

was daydreaming about J when he tripped and broke his leg. Silly old fool.

The coolness of the damp doona cover touched her skin as she plonked

back down on the bed. She looked down at her breasts and her protruding belly

below them, and the great sausage legs bent over the side of the bed. She turned to

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see which clothes Stephen had laid out for her to wear. A pale-pink and lime-

green long-sleeved T-shirt with a diagonal hemline; light grey tights; and a

charcoal skirt, also with a diagonal hemline. She felt like tearing something or

burning something.

Jenny strapped on a bra and pulled the T-shirt over her head and past her

bosom. She squirmed and struggled as the T-shirt man-handled her bulges. She

rolled backwards across the newly made bed and flung her legs skywards, giving

her fanny an airing before she pulled on her underwear. She poked one foot into

the toe of one stocking leg and the other toe into the other stocking leg and pushed

them both ceiling-wards and dragged at the tights. She wrestled them all the way

to the top of her thighs one leg at a time, and then rocked herself upright and

landed her feet on the floor. Still sitting down, she gripped the top of the tights

and tugged them up until they sat snuggly against her crotch, and then she stood

and struggled to finally pull them up to her waist. Jenny sat down again enjoying

the cooling effect of the wet doona through the tights. Then, she picked up the

skirt and laid it on her lap so it hung down over her legs. She opened the waist of

the skirt and, gripping it with one hand, flung it towards her feet like a lasso and at

the same time bent over as far as the rolls of fat around her belly would let her. In

a well-practiced manoeuvre, her toes caught the waistband elastic and, as she

sprang back into an upright position, she dragged the skirt up her legs. Then it was

a couple of tugs to haul the skirt up and into place on her waist. She looked in the

full-length mirror and saw how the skirt hung over her legs like a dark grey

lopsided coal bucket. Stephen often bought clothes for her that had a diagonal

hemline. She suspected he did it in some fashion-driven attempt to enhance her

unfashionable bulges.

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The smell of croissants warming in the kitchen drew Jenny out of the

bedroom. She passed Stephen who was standing in the laundry doorway about to

head back to the bedroom. She thought about kissing him or at least touching him,

but he smelt like bleach and his sweaty face and pink rubber gloves put her off.

Anyway, she knew to stay out of Stephen’s way on Saturday mornings. She didn’t

want to interfere in his house-cleansing ritual, and she knew to leave him to it.

She, instead, would meet her best friend and literary agent, Louise, later at a

gorgeous seaside café in Queenscliff.

In the kitchen, Jenny found that the coffee pot was almost cold. She took a

croissant from the oven, tossed it from hand to hand, and stood over the table

picking away at it. While she waited for Stephen to return to make a fresh pot of

coffee she eyed the Saturday Age, which was open on the square wooden table.

With greasy fingertips Jenny rifled through the loose leaves, sending sheets of

news floating to the floor. The ensuite toilet flushed at the other end of the house.

Jenny knew the ensuite was the last room in Stephen’s routine. It was part of their

understanding that he would wait until she was out of bed before he tackled

cleaning that end of the house and she would stay out of his way. She listened for

his footsteps on the carpeted hallway.

‘Your review’s in the paper,’ Stephen said as he entered the kitchen and

noticed the pages of the newspaper that had fallen to the floor. He was still

wearing pink rubber gloves and was carrying the wire basket containing an array

of cleaning products. ‘On page thirteen. Have you looked?’ he said as he carefully

stepped between the strewn news pages.

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Jenny banged her hand on the table squashing the folds of newsprint that

sat messily there, sending a shower of croissant crumbs tumbling from her breasts

down the tiers of her body onto the table and floor.

‘No. I couldn’t find it. The paper’s messed up. Again,’ Jenny said, ‘and the

coffee’s cold.’

Stephen walked to the island bench and bent down to stow the basket of

cleaning products in the cupboard under the kitchen sink. He peeled the gloves off

making sure they remained the right way out and draped them side-by-side over

the top of the bottles so they could dry. He straightened up and lightly wrapped a

hand around the coffee pot on the stone benchtop to see if it was warm enough for

another cup. He filled the kettle with filtered water, emptied the coffee pot into the

compost bucket, and then rinsed it under the tap.

‘Louise’s picking me up at ten-thirty. I’ll have coffee with her.’ Jenny

stuffed the last of the croissant into her mouth and returned to the bedroom to

collect her bag and a large sun-hat. The shop assistant in the Lorne boutique

where she had bought the hat told her it was hand-woven in Madagascar. The

allure of the hat had been, in part, its size—the proportions seemed to fit her

body—but also its exotic country of origin. Jenny imagined a thin, dark-skinned

man toiling in the shade of a lean-to, his bony brown fingers and pale fingernails

crafting this outlandishly large hat for her. She pulled the hat on and sank down

on the side of the bed and opened the notebook. She thought about S, the old man

in her story, and wondered if she might give him a girlfriend. He was probably too

old to have a girlfriend now, but he might have had a girlfriend soon after J, his

wife, had left him all those years ago. In Jenny’s experience men were incapable

of lasting more than six months after a long relationship before they sought

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another partner, except Stephen. He had been married once and remained single

for years after until he met Jenny, who he said was his first and only love.

She thought about the story some more and it occurred to her that she

would have to rethink the section where S was baking biscuits for it to make

sense. The timing wasn’t right. If he had been sitting on the lounge with a broken

leg for that long before help arrived, and the oven had been on all that time, it

would have caught fire. But she wanted him to be reminiscing about J by baking

one of her favourites—ginger snaps. A car horn tooted out the front of Jenny’s

house and she closed the notebook and shoved it into her handbag. She opened the

sliding door on her closet and selected her favourite pair of brown lace-up shoes.

She knew Stephen wouldn’t like her wearing them, but they were the only shoes

she had that didn’t pinch, or squeeze her feet. She had bought them without

Stephen’s advice and that made them even more special. She pushed her feet into

the gaping holes and plonked her way to the kitchen, the shoes slapping against

her heels with every footstep. Stephen had re-assembled the newspaper on the

table by the time Jenny returned. He had the Arts pages open and had circled in

thick red marker an article about a sculpture exhibition. Beside the paper was a

fresh cup of coffee.

Jenny stood in the doorway and Stephen turned his head and looked from

her face to the shoes and back to her face. Stephen stood and walked towards her

until his face was inches from hers. Jenny’s cheek twitched at the smell of coffee

and bleach that wafted towards her a moment after Stephen stopped in front of

her. He leaned in under the brim of her hat and lightly touched his lips to hers,

then remained close to her face looking in to her eyes. He cupped a breast with

one hand. She thought of the wobbly water-filled balloons that had sailed off-

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course and over the fence last summer after water restrictions ended and the

children next door were allowed to play with the hose. The image faded when

Stephen ran his hand down her T-shirt and over her abdomen. He pressed his

fingertips into the stretch fabric of her skirt and found the mound at her crotch.

Jenny breathed in sharply and straightened her back.

Stephen tilted his head, looking up at her hat as though it was the first time

he had noticed it. He stepped away from her, bent down to the floor, and knelt in

front of her. He sat on his folded feet and picked at the dusty shoe laces. He

tugged them tight and took his time tying each one into a perfect bow. He pulled

his shirt cuff down over the heel of his hand to wipe the shoe leather clean, but

before he could manage it Jenny slid her feet back one at a time, without lifting

them off the floor. She stepped around him in two big steps, stretching the hem of

the skirt to its limit, and turned down the corridor to the front door.

‘Don’t forget it’s movie night tonight,’ Stephen called after her, smiling.

His hands lay at rest on the slope of his thighs.

*

It was late in the afternoon and it had been raining since Jenny left in

Louise’s Mercedes that morning. The rain was still percussing on the roof when

she arrived home. Stephen would be back from the gallery soon, and Jenny settled

herself on the wide elevated verandah overlooking the backyard, transcribing her

story from the notebook onto her laptop.

Jenny became aware of a droning sound and stopped work. A far-away

motorbike engine grew louder and then died away, as if the motorbike had turned

off and accelerated in another direction. Jenny looked over the laptop lid and

stared through the mesh screen that surrounded the entire verandah. She hadn’t

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noticed that the rain had stopped, and now that she wasn’t working so intently the

sound of whining insects seemed to grow in intensity. Jenny’s laptop illuminated

her face and the underside of the sunhat. She had forgotten to take it off after she

hurried through the rain when Louise dropped her home. The laptop screen

reflected on her bright-blue-rimmed reading glasses, forming a tiny white square

in each lens. She resisted the urge to find a distraction from the writing, anything

other than sitting there watching the little blue light on the memory stick blinking

at her like an all-knowing eye, waiting to store the next line, the next word, the

next letter. It was her job and she deserved the privilege of having time to sit and

think. She imagined what a hearse filled with cakes instead of flowers would look

like. She was writing J’s funeral and she wanted the baker from Barwon Heads to

show his devotion to her by baking a hearseful of biscuits and cakes.

Water dripped from the bougainvillea onto the mesh screen that

surrounded the verandah. The droplets slid down erratically, sometimes rushing,

and other times meandering to the decking below. Jenny gazed over her glasses at

the darkening sky and became aware of the honey-eaters messing about in the

shrubs down in the yard. She heard Stephen’s ute pull into the driveway at the

front of the house. The honey-eaters took flight when the ute’s tyres squelched

over the grassy patches between the cement squares of the driveway and headed

down the side of the house to the backyard. The ute swung around to the back of

the house and came to a halt under the verandah below Jenny’s feet. The

headlights flicked off, and a door opened and soon slapped shut again. Footsteps

crunched across the gravel, and the downstairs door opened, then closed again.

After a short time, the light from the kitchen came on and spread in sharp

angles across the verandah. Jenny hadn’t noticed how dark it had become, and

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Stephen didn’t notice that Jenny was home. She heard the kitchen tap come on

and then the sounds of food being prepared. She listened to his voice inside as he

chatted to himself, and occasionally burst into lyrics. And then his voice stopped.

Jenny heard plates clink on the stone bench. She closed the laptop and

walked to the verandah railing. The town was out there somewhere, but the

darkened clouds hung low, giving nothing away. Jenny noticed a droplet of water

on the outside of the mesh screen. She reached up to it and slowly dragged her

finger down, dragging the droplet with it. It gathered other droplets on the way

and soon it dribbled quickly to the decking at Jenny’s feet. She noticed a clutch of

light globes near her feet and wondered whether Stephen was going to use them in

a sculpture.

The kitchen light blinked off, and Jenny turned and looked through the

French doors. She saw the back of Stephen descending the internal staircase. In

the darkness outside in the yard a breeze unsettled the wet leaves, causing a tiny

Mexican wave of water droplets to spread across the bushes. The downstairs door

opened again, and Jenny heard Stephen walk across the gravel to the ute. His

name was in her throat, but he swung the door open and hopped in before she had

time to say anything. The ute reversed into the yard and swung around the side of

the house. Jenny could hear the rhythmic squelch of the tyres passing over the

cement squares and grassy patches in the driveway before the ute entered the

street where it drove away.

‘Polly wanna cracker?’ Jenny called to the parrot over the back fence. She

couldn’t see the bird in the darkness, and it probably couldn’t hear her from that

far away, but she knew it would be hanging there protected by the eaves of the

neighbour’s house. It would be waiting for the woman to cover the cage for the

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night. Jenny realised she was hungry and went inside, where she found a note on

the stone bench.

Dinner in the fridge.

Eat when you like.

Movies at 8.

Back soon.

S xx

It was six thirty. Jenny opened the fridge and saw two plates of salad

covered in plastic wrap. The rain had begun again, so she went out to the

verandah and brought her laptop in and locked the French doors behind her. She

re-opened the fridge and chose the plate of salad that had carrot and beetroot on it.

She knew it was hers because Stephen hated red vegies, and only ate cooked

carrot. She carelessly slid her plate of salad onto the stone benchtop, held the

fridge door open and bent down to get a good look. She searched through the jars

on the door and found the mayonnaise; she opened the clear cover on the top shelf

of the door and selected a block of hard cheese; further rummaging on a lower

door-shelf revealed a jar of pickled onions; and from the meat drawer she pulled

out leftovers from last night’s roast pork that Stephen had sliced and covered in

plastic wrap. Finally she searched at the back of the fridge for the black olives.

Jenny grabbed the pile of salad in her hand and pushed it to one side of the plate,

and then piled layers of pork, cheese and mayonnaise on the other side. She

dribbled more mayonnaise over the salad and plopped a couple of pickled onions

and olives into its creamy strands. She washed her hands and returned the

leftovers to the fridge. She opened her laptop at the table and began feeding

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forkfuls of food into her mouth with one hand as she tapped at the keyboard with

the other.

Jenny pushed the last forkful of pork into her mouth and saved her work.

She wanted another shower before going out again. Jenny let the hot shower wash

over her until her skin was a deep pink. She wished she could just change into her

pyjamas and relax. The coal-chute skirt had been cutting into her waist by the

time she had finished dinner, and she didn’t want to wear more uncomfortable

clothes. Jenny heard a cabinet door slap shut and knew it was time to turn off the

water. Stephen was home. He opened the steamed-up shower door and stood

ready with a sand-coloured bath sheet spread out at shoulder height. Jenny

stepped into it, dripping onto the sand-coloured bath mat, and stared over

Stephen’s head at the unreflective expanse of steamed-up mirror behind him.

Stephen bent to the task of wiping down her plump pink body like he would a

horse after it had run a hard canter. As he moved from drying her hair to rubbing

down her torso Jenny spread her legs, so he could dry them. Stephen bent down to

dry in all the crevices.

‘You’ve got your period!’ Stephen said.

‘Oh God, really?’ Jenny said and looked down at the top of Stephen’s

head. He had a cyclone of curls radiating from the crown of his head.

She felt blood mixed with water dribble down her legs, but before she

could react, Stephen reached into the cabinet behind him for a face washer. He

mopped up the blood, starting at her feet and reaching up to her crotch, and then

pressed the scrunched-up face washer between her legs.

‘Close up,’ he said.

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Jenny stared again at the unreflecting mirror while she shifted her weight

and squeezed her legs together to grip the face washer in place until he had

finished. Stephen continued drying, and then patted rose scented talc all over her

torso and thighs with a large powder puff.

‘When did it start?’ Stephen said.

‘I wanted to tell you . . .’ Jenny said and pulled on the clean knickers that

Stephen handed her and peeled the sticky paper from the back of the pad before

pressing it into the crotch.

‘I can’t believe it.’

‘About Lou’s offer, I mean,’ Jenny said.

‘Another month gone,’ Stephen said into the bathroom mirror as he

dangled the towel over the drying rack below it. Jenny walked into the bedroom,

the skin from her crotch to her knees sliding together silkily from the talcum

powder. Stephen noticed blood stains on the towel and pulled it off the towel rack

again.

‘Louise wants more stories,’ she called back to him from in the bedroom

as she tugged a loose-fitting black dress from off a hanger in the closet, ‘For the

publisher.’

‘You know we can try again,’ Stephen called from the bathroom as he

heaped Jenny’s clothes from off the bathroom floor and put them in the hamper

with the stained towel.

Jenny searched in the tallboy drawers for the lacy black shawl she was

fond of.

‘I’ll be able to keep working for another year,’ Jenny said to the long

mirror on the bedroom wall.

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‘It’s OK, we can try again.’ Stephen turned on the basin tap.

‘She’s talking about a contract.’ Jenny yelled at the mirror. She smoothed

her hair with the flats of her hands and watched in the reflection as the curls

popped up again after her hands had passed over them. She heard the water drain

from the bathroom basin and watched Stephen reflected in the mirror in front of

her as he strode out of the bathroom behind her and down the corridor.

‘What did you have with the salad?’ Stephen called behind him as he

headed toward the kitchen.

Jenny knew Stephen would have already checked the fridge.

‘Just some of that dressing you made. I didn’t like it.’ Jenny said to the

empty room.

Jenny lifted the notebook with The Golden Notebook cover from off the

bed where she had flung it on the way to the shower. The cover reminded her of

Lessing’s ridiculous notion of a ‘real man’. She thought of Stephen choosing the

notebook for her and smiled. He was nothing like Lessing’s idea of a ‘real man,’

but he was useful to have around the house while she concentrated on her work.

Jenny sat on the toilet with her knickers round her ankles, leaning back on

the cistern, with one hand holding the notebook open and a pen in the other. She

sat there bleeding and writing in her notebook.

‘Let’s go,’ Stephen called from the kitchen.

Jenny flipped the notebook shut and flicked it through the ensuite doorway

to the bedroom floor where it spun in circles and came to a stop beside the bed.

She wiped the blood and mucous from her crotch and flushed the toilet. In the

bedroom she bent down to collect her Golden Notebook from the floor and

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shoved it into her handbag for later. When she had time, she would research

whether cakes were allowed on a coffin.

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Dead bird

I

I was surprised how the owl felt when I first held it in my hands. It was

luxuriously soft. It reminded me of the cashmere jumpers I loved to run my hands

through in high-end women’s boutiques. The kind of garment that is supposedly

casual and yet costs so much it becomes too precious to wear. I was equally

surprised when, later, my interest in the owl faded like an old shirt.

On the day I discovered the owl, I was driving through a stretch of

farmland that lay between where I lived and where I worked. When we first

moved to the area we thought living out of the city would be better for the kids,

which it was, until they decided they didn’t really like the surf, or want to take up

biking, camping, or hiking. As I approached the spot where the owl lay on the

road, I tried to make out what it was. I steered the car so that the wheels straddled

the dead body. It was only as it disappeared under the front of the car that I

realised it was an owl.

It was different to other roadkill. Other dead animals that littered the

highway with tufts of ragged, grey, fur flapping in the car-driven breeze were easy

to ignore. This animal, however, was more intact, and whiter than all of that.

Serene. Dignified.

I pulled off to the side of the road, which sent up a cloud of dust that

continued ahead of my now stationary car, and gently settled again as though it

had never been. The tick-tick of the car indicator grew in intensity as I stared in

the side mirror at the white slash on the road behind me. The garbage truck that I

had been following rumbled off and then the road was free of vehicles. I threw the

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car into reverse and it wobbled on and off the hard edge of the road as I tried to

keep it under control, unused as I was to reversing at speed.

I came alongside the still bird and pulled completely off the road. The owl

lay in the middle of the lane, apparently unharmed, except, of course, that it was

obviously dead. I stepped out of the car and had to wait as another car

approached. From the side of the road, I could see the meticulous pattern the

feathers formed. There was a distinct change from the white, downy, chest

feathers to the tawny-brown flight feathers on the wing and back. They appeared

undisturbed.

I watched as the bird disappeared under the passing car and then

reappeared as the car drove on. I moved swiftly into the road, scooped up the bird,

and returned to the verge. The compact body was surprisingly light. Light as a

feather, or perhaps a hand full of feathers.

The owl’s heart-shaped facial disc was surrounded by a ridge of pure-

white tufted feathers; more white feathers created a graceful curve into the centre

of its face to complete the owl’s face. One sleeping eye with a black lid, which

looked as though it might spring open at any moment, one damaged eye, and a

surprisingly small hooked beak were the only features on its face. The beak was

lightly smeared with blood; a sign that this bird would not wake up again. The

wings were neatly folded away, and its talons were curled as though they were

each holding a tiny ball; I imagined when the bird was alive the talons would have

remained alert, ready to snatch a furry meal or cling steadfastly to a branch during

the daylight hours. They would never have been softly curled as they were now.

The rest of the body formed a gentle bullet of the softest feathers with a thatch of

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creamy-white chest feathers, flecked like an ermine ruff on a royal robe, and a

camouflaged body of mottled browns, creams, and black flecks.

A far-off rumble echoed across the sky, threatening an early summer

storm. After opening the car boot and fishing out a cloth shopping bag, I carefully

placed the owl in it, taking care not to ruffle the feathers. Then I lay the bag gently

in the boot. I returned to the driver’s seat, pulled back onto the road and continued

my journey to work, oblivious of entering the suburban streets. I passed through a

belting rain storm, which stopped as quickly as it had begun just as I arrived at the

university car park.

The temperature that day was forecast for the high twenties and leaving

the owl in the car all day didn’t sound like a good idea. I collected the owl inside

its cloth bag as though it were a package from the supermarket, along with my

other bits and bobs, and took them all into the office. As I opened the office door,

I wondered at the appropriateness of having a dead animal inside a work space.

Where is the appropriate place to store a dead owl when you’re at work? I had no

idea. And would it become malodorous during the day? I didn’t think so. It was

only freshly dead; I believed it would be days before it began to stink. I briefly

considered putting it in the staff refrigerator. But I decided my colleagues

wouldn’t like an owl in there with their sandwiches. It was certainly better off

indoors with me than sweltering in the boot, mainly because if it did begin to

stink, I didn’t want the pong permeating the upholstery of my car.

II

My colleague, Mandy, was already in our shared office and had a huge

pile of essays on her desk. Although she is much younger, we have been teaching

for the same period of time and have become close friends. I came to the

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profession late, busy as I was with the whole kids and divorce thing. In the years

since my marriage failed I have often remembered a day in high school, sitting in

the sun with a group of girlfriends tanning our legs. Each girl was describing what

sort of man she wanted to marry and how many children they wanted. I remained

silent because I wanted none of it, and yet I felt an exquisite pressure to conform

ten years later, which I was unable to resist.

I began the usual business of the day: opening and responding to emails,

preparing for classes, and writing up notes. All the while Mandy and I chatted, but

in the back of my mind I was deciding whether our friendship could bear sharing

the room with roadkill.

I had almost decided not to mention it to her, but I felt compelled to share

its beauty. I wanted her to experience the wonder of an animal one would rarely,

if ever, see close to hand. In death it retained the majesty of a predator, and

offered a glimpse into a world ordinary people never see. I explained to Mandy

that I had something interesting she might like to see. We often shared shopping

finds, bargain clothes, special treats we gave ourselves, or gifts for our families. I

wasn’t sure whether to prepare her before I opened the bag or to allow her to

discover for herself the wonder I had felt when I first held this beautiful creature. I

placed the bag on my lap and dipped my left hand in, carefully cupping the body

of the bird. Mandy swivelled her chair around so she was facing me. She leaned in

and put her elbows on her knees and her hands under her chin so that her face was

closer to the level of the bag. Her eyes were large with expectation and she

grinned conspiratorially. I drew the bird out by holding it still and sweeping the

bag away to the floor. I felt like a cat might when it drops a dead mouse at its

owner’s feet.

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The owl was inches from her face. At first, I did not comprehend the

squeamish grimace that ran across Mandy’s face, nor the momentary gleam of

terror in her eyes when she drew back, her spine suddenly taut. I grinned as she

looked from the bird to my face and back to the bird again. I shifted the bird’s

position in my hand to allow her to see it better. The head flopped to one side,

exposing the only significant bodily damage. One eyeball casing had erupted from

its socket on impact with the vehicle that had killed the owl, and now it dangled,

black and distended, on the bird’s cheek, the eyeball missing. When she squealed,

I pulled the bird away.

‘Ooh, ooh, its eye,’ my younger colleague gasped and pulled back even

further, banging her chair into the desk behind her.

I spoke falteringly of how I had come across the bird. Mandy giggled

nervously and placed her hands up to her face, covering her mouth, her eyes

flickering from the bird to my face. It didn’t take very much for me to notice that I

had transgressed some unspoken rule.

‘What are you going to do with it? She said, her eyes still wide.

‘I want to keep it. I don’t know how I will . . . I don’t know.’ I said.

‘But won’t it . . .’

Mandy closed her mouth and opened it again without making a sound. Her

hands twitched up to her hair. She ran her fingers through the long strings of hair

and down to the chain around her neck. She fiddled with the teddy-bear charm on

the chain and tried to smile.

‘Feel its feathers.’ I proffered the bird for her to stroke. ‘Here. Look at it.

It’s so beautiful.’

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The magnificent heart-shaped white face was defined by what appeared to

be rigid feathers standing to attention, forming a distinct outer edge. I gently

brushed my finger pads over them to show her it was OK. I was expecting the

outer feathers to be stiff, but they relented, bending softly under my touch.

She stretched out one long finger and touched the owl’s chest feathers. Her

finger momentarily sank into the luscious downy covering, and then she pulled

her hand away.

III

Later that day, when Mandy had left, I began an internet search for

information about owls. I had begun to love my new acquisition the way I loved

the telescope we were given as kids. The telescope opened up the night sky, but it

also gave us secret access to our neighbour’s backyards and inside their windows.

It had given us a whole new perspective on the world outside our fence.

One web page I browsed stated that in the US it was illegal to collect

native animals from the road. Even collecting bird feathers was illegal. I tried to

imagine why but couldn’t come up with a reason. I knew that some birds used

fallen feathers to build their nests, but surely the amount of feathers people

collected would be so few that they wouldn’t have such a great impact on birdlife.

I did eventually think that perhaps this law discouraged people who wanted to

illegally trade animals, either dead or alive. I was glad I didn’t live in the US

where the government seemed to have so much control.

Another search revealed that owls have a confusing array of mythological

associations ranging from the harbinger of death to the holder of wisdom.

Whatever the stories say, my experience with Mandy had taught me that there is a

vast difference between a mythic creature and an actual one.

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Eventually I narrowed my search to Australian sites to see if I could find

out what type of owl I had found. I discovered that the creature was a Barn Owl. I

read that the thick downy chest feathers were more like fur; their purpose was not

only to keep the bird warm, but also to cut out flight noise. The long flight

feathers on the wing were also formed to make flying silent. A stealthy flying

killer. Wisdom and death.

I was having trouble finding specific information on what I should or

could do with the owl. More specifically, I wanted to find out how best to collect

the feathers without losing the pattern in which they had formed on the creature.

After all, it was the way they were configured that made them so fascinating; it

wasn’t just that the feathers were individually beautiful.

Finally, I contacted the Melbourne Museum in the hope that they would

have proper scientific knowledge and be able to guide me. I entered their help

page and sent off a message.

Tue 13 Sep 2011

Dear Melbourne Museum

On the way to work today I found a dead Barn Owl on a road in Geelong.

I was wondering if there is any way of preserving it. And can you tell me if

birds carry any diseases that I should be concerned about?

Thank you

Tara Piper

IV

When I arrived home that night I made two trips from the car to the house.

First, I carried a bag of books to the study, dropped my handbag in the bedroom,

and the lunch cooler in the kitchen. Then I returned to the car for the cloth

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shopping bag, which I had propped in amongst the other bags in the corner of the

boot to prevent it from rolling around on the trip home. The best place in the

house for the owl seemed to be the laundry. There was little chance of

contamination there, as I saw it, so I placed the bag with the owl in it on top of the

washing machine.

Dylan, my youngest son, is seventeen. When I came home from work he

was sitting at the computer table in the living room and didn’t notice either of the

trips I made from the car, even though I walked right past him both times. Adam

is nineteen and was closed away behind his bedroom door. He wouldn’t have

noticed my arrival either, if I hadn’t banged on his door and asked him to turn his

music down. This is the way things seem to be now. My existence matters little to

them; at least so long as I continue providing a roof over their heads and food in

the fridge. I jealously dream of living their self-centred lives, in which I arrive

home from school or university and disappear into my room, re-emerging an

hour-and-a-half later to find that someone else has cooked a meal, tidied the

kitchen, opened the mail and paid the bills.

‘There’s something I want you to see,’ I called to Adam as I re-emerged

from the laundry. This was said as I caught a glimpse of him disappearing into his

bedroom after he had made a quick foray into the kitchen, head down, trying to

avoid eye contact with me.

‘What?’ he called down the hallway. ‘I’m busy,’ he added and closed his

door. I knew with certainty he would be returning to one of the thousands of

computer games he played and that he wasn’t ‘busy’ in any sense that I

understood. Rather, he was ‘busy’ with his own preoccupations and wasn’t

interested in mine. Fair enough, I guess.

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‘Dylan, come and look at this,’ I called, a little louder. Dylan was still

sitting at the computer table in the living room at the other end of the hallway. He

hadn’t looked up when I walked past him earlier, and he didn’t hear me now.

Headphones. I have to communicate with my children, I thought, as though they

are deaf. I walked back down the hallway from the laundry to the lounge room

and knocked on the computer table between Dylan and the keyboard, my

preferred method for gaining my son’s attention. It beats yelling, and it avoids the

inevitable angry outburst when I jiggle a shoulder or an arm, both of which

disrupt the mouse-controlling hand. I waited until he slid a headphone off one ear;

I didn’t merit his full attention. I waited until we had made eye contact and then

said, ‘Come and have a look.’

I walked away without waiting for a response. Either he would come or he

wouldn’t. As I returned back down the hallway I knocked on Adam’s door, swung

it open, and flicked the light switch on and off. He turned towards me, reached for

the volume knob and turned it down, marginally.

‘Come and look,’ I said and headed towards the laundry.

The two boys crammed in through the laundry door behind me hoping to

get it all over and done with as quickly as possible. I gently drew the bird from its

bag on top of the washing machine and began discussing the interesting features I

had noticed. I pressed one finger in-between the inwardly curled talons and spread

them out. They were just as you would expect for a predatory bird; sharp, curved

and wickedly pointed. In fact, I saw now that the owl looked a little like Adam’s

avatar, a hybrid human/bird character with unearthly powers, and wondered if I

should say something about it. Instead, I pointed out the sharp beak and

commented on how small it appeared for the body. Then I explained that, in fact,

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once you held the bird it became apparent that much of its bulk was feathers and

there wasn’t very much weight in the body at all. I showed them the owl’s

amazing facial feathers and described how they work like a satellite dish capturing

sound and directing it to the owl’s ears. Lastly, I described the function of the

tapered wing feathers: silencing flight noise.

‘What are you doing with THAT?’ Adam exploded, and burst into

disbelieving laughter.

‘Oh my God, Mum, you are crazy.’ Dylan rolled his eyes and pushed past

his brother to get out of the laundry.

‘Wait, Mum, I have to get a picture of this.’ Adam rushed out of the

laundry and returned with his iPhone. I spread the wings and pointed the owl

towards the camera as though it was flying, and Adam took a photo.

‘This is going on Facebook.’ Adam whipped around and left the room

releasing further bursts of incredulous laughter. In a few moments, I heard his

bedroom door close.

I was left standing in the laundry simulating a Barn Owl in flight to an

empty room. I turned it to face me, tilting it this way and that, imagining it flying

through the night air. The body and outstretched wings formed a powerful

streamlined silhouette.

V

The next day was a non-teaching day so I settled into my home study and

opened the email account I had given as a return address for my owl enquiry.

There were a couple of perfunctory messages from sites I subscribed to, but I

skipped past them to the one from Melbourne Museum.

Wed 14 Sep 2011

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Enq 16690

Hello Tara

Thank you for contacting the Discovery Centre at Melbourne Museum

with your enquiry. We think you should be aware that in order to collect and

retain a native species such as a Barn Owl you need to have permission from the

appropriate state authority.

In Victoria, it is the DSE who issues these permits. If you wish to retain

specimens such as this you should consider acquiring the appropriate permit from

DSE via their website at http://www.dse.vic.gov . . .

If you find dead native animals such as this in the future, please feel free to

contact us and we will enquire with our researchers if they are interested in

acquiring the specimen for the museum’s research collections, or please deposit

the specimen at your nearest DSE office, who will freeze the specimen and

arrange for it to become part of our collections should it be of interest to us.

I hope this information is of some help with your query.

Regards

William

Discovery Centre Team

I was shocked. It turned out that, in my unpermitted state, I had broken a

law, just like in the US. I stared at the screen thinking about what it was that I

wanted.

VI

The knife block sat between the kettle and the sandwich maker. I took

each knife out and assessed its worth as a gutting tool. The large carvers were

obviously no good. I knew how meagre the owl’s body was and these were not

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suitable. The breadknife was no good. That left a paring knife and a slim blade I

used for cutting soft cheeses. I took this one to the laundry and lay it on the top of

the washing machine next to the bag with the owl in it. I took the owl out of the

bag and lay it next to the knife. I picked up the knife with one hand and tried to

hold the bird with the other hand. I looked between its legs to see if there was an

obvious place to start, but I couldn’t decide which bit to cut first. I wanted to

preserve the white patch at the front, so I couldn’t slit it up the middle the way I

had done before with a fresh fish. But there was no obvious place to begin. I

flipped the bird onto its front and couldn’t see any way of easily removing the

skin without making a debauched mess. I returned the knife to the kitchen. There,

at the window, looking out into the garden, I remembered watching ants strip the

innards of a dead galah that had fallen in the vegetable garden last summer.

There was a large shoe box in the garage, which I had kept from when

Dylan last needed new boots. It sat on top of a crate of my old records. I picked up

the box and saw that the first record in the pile was Brian Eno’s Taking tiger

mountain (by strategy), a favourite from my teens. I remembered losing myself in

that album, with headphones on, of course, when I lived at my parent’s home. I

remembered, too, how it had been a deeply personal selection. Prog rock wasn’t

the kind of music played at parties or at the pub, so unless you knew a fellow

follower it was a loner’s music.

I put the record back and carried the shoe box out to the front yard. I

looked to the garden bed with the Buddleja bush, also known as the butterfly bush

because it attracts butterflies, and heard the bees droning around its dangling

purple blossoms. Whenever I weeded in that garden bed, I would eventually find

myself swatting ants off my hands, feet and arms. I had never actually seen the

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ants’ nest, not in the way I remembered them from when I was a child and our

parents took us camping. Then, an ants’ nest could be so big we didn’t realise it

was there until it became obvious that the whole campsite was one big ant’s nest

and we’d have to start again somewhere safer.

In most cases I wouldn’t encourage ants. I had known ants to make their

nest in the brickwork of a home. The first home my husband and I bought was

never completed and the back yard was wild with weeds. Every so often, when the

ants swarmed the walls, I would lay poison in the little holes in the brickwork.

They would sacrifice a few hundred workers until they found a new route around

the poison, and then they would pop out of another hole in the brickwork, soon

swarming again. I would start over and lay poison in another spot, then find a twig

and tickle around inside the brickwork to bring them out into my trap. After

continual failure, I decided that as long as the ants didn’t come crashing through

the plaster ceiling onto the children’s beds I would tolerate them.

I opened the lid of the shoe box and saw that it was still stuffed with paper.

I tipped the refuse out of the shoe box into the wheelie bin and took the box to the

laundry. I laid the open box on the washing machine and placed the Barn Owl in

it. There was plenty of room for air to circulate. Conveniently, there was also

already a small opening about the size of a matchbox on one side of the shoe box.

It saved me cutting a doorway for the ants to enter and leave the crypt that I had

created.

The owl lay on one side in the middle of the box. I picked it up one more

time to feel how soft the feathers were. How wonderfully warm it must be for an

owlet to snuggle under its parents’ wings. I carried the owl, enclosed in its shoe

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box, where cats and rats couldn’t ransack it, and took it to the front yard. There I

placed it beneath the low lying branches of the Buddleja bush.

VII

At first I kept an eye on the situation, especially when I saw a steady

stream of ants using the tiny portal to make their way into and out of the shoe box.

The owl held its form for a long time, and the rotten smell came weeks after I

expected it to. I lost interest, though, sometime after the smell had left.

The last time I looked in the box, a huntsman spider had taken up

residence there amongst the snails that had been steadily chewing their way

through the collapsing cardboard. The ants had ceased trailing in and out of the

door hole so I suspected they had done all they were going to do. Other creatures

had moved in. The feathers had lost their lustre, and the body was collapsing in on

itself. The power I had once seen remained only in my memory. My owl was

hollow.

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Who’s cooking dinner?

The thought of sweating it out in the pool that Friday morning was not the only

thing on Bernie’s mind when she drove to the White-Water class at her local pool.

Rather, her attention was divided between making it to the class on time and

making to the toilet on time. Just as soon as she started the car that morning she

became aware, thanks to her inner sphincter, that there was a load on its way or,

as an old friend used to say, that she was headed for a meeting with a brown

mullet. She knew there would be no holding on through an exercise session to

answer this call. She spent the fifteen-minute journey calculating how exactly she

would manage the situation in a one-piece cossie that takes a fair bit of wrestling

to get into let alone to get out of. Bernie could manage a pee in a cossie; all it took

was a quick yank to the side at the leg hole while squatting on the toilet. It was

better than doing a pee in the pool, which might have been an option for some but

not something she had contemplated, at least not since she was about ten years

old. Even then it would have had to have been just before leaving because

otherwise that was just gross!

After she parked her car and swiped her membership card, she entered the

indoor pool. She rushed to find an empty plastic chair on which to dump her bag

and towel. Chairs were placed around the outer wall of the pool area, and the first

empty chair she spotted was nowhere near the entrance to the change room, what

with her arrival time being so close to start time and the other swimmers having

already arrived. This made matters even more urgent. She quickly deposited her

things on the available chair and made her way to the change room. Inside a toilet

cubicle, with the door securely locked—she certainly didn’t want anyone

accidently walking in on her while she had her cossie yanked aside with all her

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bits exposed—she pulled her trackie pants down and slid the fingers of her left

hand under the elasticised edge of the right leg of her cossie. She slid the gusset

over and to the left of her vulva and then, twisting her torso, she used her right

hand to pull the back of the cossie leg hole taut over her bottom cheek. There

wasn’t much give left in the fabric; the leg hole was already stretched just about to

capacity. It was a funny thing, noticing that, just as men were said to hang either

to the left or the right—their testicles that is—she too seemed to hang more to one

side than the other—not her testicles, that is, but her lips. They hung to the right.

She eased herself onto the toilet and breathed out slowly and closed her eyes. She

sent all her attention to her anus and then tried to relax as best she could.

After it was all finished, Bernie made her way out to the poolside and

backed down the ladder into the pool. At first, the water seemed cold and she

yipped as she lowered herself into it. The worst of it was when the water reached

the level of her breasts and armpits. Her feet hit the bottom of the pool and she

turned just in time to see a big, hairy man quietly laughing at her; he had thick,

black hair on his chest, belly, and shoulders and stood at least a foot taller than

Bernie. His moustache and the hair on his head were littered with greys. When he

turned away, she noticed how the black hair crept down his back too. It started at

his shoulders and grew in a strange pattern that seemed to curve around his rib

cage, follow his spine down and then spread out again at the hips, where it crept

all the way down into his board shorts. In a horrifying moment, Bernie found

herself imagining him in the full Monty, and it wasn’t what she expected to be

concentrating on in an exercise class at the pool.

She walked behind the hairy man as he crab walked down to the other end

of the pool, down one of the exercise lanes reserved for hydrotherapy and often

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taken up by old men. She crossed the lane and lifted up the lane rope to avoid full

immersion. The next four lane ropes had been removed to make space for the

class, and Bernie found a spot not far from the walking lane. Because she had

arrived so close to the start of the class, it was a spot at the back of the pool.

Bernie lost interest in the big hairy man as she started jogging on the spot to warm

up in the way some of the other women, who were chatting and laughing with

each other, were also doing. Bernie didn’t know anyone in this class and didn’t

feel the need to talk to anyone, so she kept up her solitary jogging.

As the instructor was setting up the sound equipment, Bernie inspected the

various torsos, or what she could see of them above the waterline, and the cossies

that the women were wearing. A much larger group of people came to this session

than the session she usually attended. Bernie could see the scapula on a skinny

woman’s back, sliding beneath her papery-looking skin as she moved her arms to

and fro. She wore glasses in the pool; a practice Bernie didn’t do. She had become

used to the blurred vision during these water sessions, although as she peered

towards the front of the class, she found that she could not see the instructor very

well from her position at the back of the large group of women. As the instructor

began some small talk, while adjusting her microphone headset, Bernie realised

that it was also going to be hard to hear the instructions and perhaps even the

accompanying music very well. None of this bothered Bernie too much because

she worked at her own pace, which in this class was much harder than the other

old duckies, and she pushed her limits as far as she could to make the most of the

opportunity.

The bony woman was jogging vigorously now, and the bun on the back of

her head bobbed up and down. To the bony woman’s right, a fat woman with a

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dark-coloured cossie was also jogging on the spot. The skin on her back was

smooth and pink except where it showed signs of sun exposure. A faint outline of

a shirt or dress ran from shoulder to shoulder just below the crease of skin at her

neck. The skin below the line was paler than that above. The strap of her cossie

was navy blue and very wide—much wider than the bony woman’s cossie

shoulder strap, which was only about two centimetres wide. The fat woman’s dark

brown hair was short and wavy, the ends bobbing over her ears as she pumped her

arms back and forth. Bernie could see a fold of flesh arcing around the side of the

fat woman’s torso a few inches beneath her armpit. Bernie knew what that was

like because she too had grown what felt like a backpack in recent years; it was

like a shield of fat beneath the skin, reaching from the clavicle all the way down

over the rib cage to her waist. It sat there on her back, weighing her down, falling

into a crease above her waist. Worst of all, sometimes the crease in her skin would

pinch a fold of her shirt, and she would have to tug at the hem to pop it out again.

There were women of all sizes, shapes and ages, although they all seemed pretty

ancient to Bernie, which was one of the reasons she preferred the Monday night

class. There were fewer, and younger, people in that class, which made for a more

challenging workout.

Bernie became aware that the instructor was about to commence the class

because people around her began quieting down and focussing their attention

towards the front of the pool. Bernie made another attempt to focus on the

instructor, but she would have to get by taking cues from those around her. The

reason Bernie didn’t wear her glasses in the pool was because the frames were

fancy laminated things with bits of silk in the shape of feathers pressed in between

the layers. The manufacturer recommended keeping them dry to avoid

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delamination. And Bernie could see pretty well without them, all things

considered. The music came to her in small bursts, competing with the sound of

the water sloshing about, the echo of the other pool users in the large covered

area, and the annoying hiss and murmur of people who insisted on chatting

throughout the session. Bernie picked up the faint beat of Buddy Holly’s ‘Peggy

Sue’ and made out the instructor turning side on and making exaggerated skiing

movements at the front of the pool. Bernie checked the motion with the other

women around her, and then changed her action to match theirs. She started

jumping and scissoring her legs, swinging her arms in opposition against the

water. She squeezed her gluteal muscles with each backward swing of her leg to

force them to do the work of pulling her leg through the water. Each arm swing

stretched and strengthened the deltoid, pectoral, and trapezius muscles.

Bernie was aware of the slow-moving walkers in the pool lane to her left.

While Bernie continued following the warm-up instructions, taking her lead from

the women around her, she occasionally looked directly at the walkers. There was

an old man with skin so white that it had clearly not seen any sun for years. He

had wispy, white hair, and a large protruding belly, which pushed against the

water as he slowly ploughed his way up and down the lane. The younger, hairy

man that Bernie had encountered earlier was still there too. Bernie guessed that he

was in his 60s. He was much taller than the white man. She noticed over time that

he sidestepped for a couple of laps and then walked front on for a couple of laps.

While she continued working hard on her body, Bernie noticed that hairy man was

taking an interest in the action in her part of the pool and that he was grinning.

Bernie stared past the man and concentrated on the muscles she was exercising.

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The instructor now had them doing star jumps, interspersed with jogging full pelt,

with twenty-second intervals of gentle swaying to catch their breath in between.

A new track that could have been ‘Rock around the clock’ made it to

Bernie’s ears in irregular bursts over the noise of water moving and the

reverberating sounds in the large building. The class strode forward for six steps

and then backed up for six steps. The forward movement of all the bodies moved

the water forward, so that when everyone backed up the water provided extra

resistance to work against as they reversed their stride. Bernie could feel her

external obliques working to keep her upright.

Then the music changed to a slow ethereal sound, and the instructor

slowed their movements to begin working on a warm down. Bernie pressed

forward on her left leg and stretched her right leg behind. She pushed hard to

make sure she stretched her Achilles tendon. As she made the strong movement a

little bubble of air squeezed out between her buttocks and wriggled up between

her back and her cossie. She could feel it escape and wondered whether anyone

could tell, but when she looked at the backs of the class members in front of her

she couldn’t say that she would have noticed if the same was happening to one of

them. She contemplated what effect the exercising had on the guts of the other

women in the class.

The instructor had them swap over and stretch the other leg. Then

everyone in the class stood upright to pull one arm across their chests, holding it

firmly in place with the other arm, to stretch the deltoids and trapeziuses. They

continued by swapping arms.

Bernie saw the white-skinned man slide by one more time and then walk

up the ramp and out of the pool. The hairy man continued his sidestepping march

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as the class continued its warm down. Their next move involved standing on one

leg while stretching the opposite arm up above their heads. Bernie couldn’t help

marvelling at the sea of arms. It was very much like a forest of trees that all look

the same until each tree becomes an individual. One arm was slender and long and

the next was weighty with muscle and fat from years of cooking and eating. A

younger arm was firm and lightly tanned, yet another puffy at the joints of elbow,

wrist and fingers. Bernie was lost in the beauty of this moment and as her

breathing slowed down she could feel her heart beat calming down after the

vigorous exercising. After holding the stretch for a good while, Bernie saw the

instructor bending to the other side and the sea of arms followed as one.

The hairy man was passing next to Bernie. ‘Whose turn to make dinner?’

he said and laughed.

Bernie seemed to be the only one in the pool to hear what the hairy man

had said. She looked again at the sea of arms and saw what the hairy man could

see: a lot of women with their hands in the air as though they were vying for the

teacher’s attention.

Bernie turned back toward the hairy man and, without her glasses, looked

as best she could at his face. She could see that he thought his comment was very

funny and she wanted to let him know she disagreed. She was feeling strong in

her body after the workout.

‘Your male privilege is showing,’ Bernie whispered loudly and pointed to

his large, hairy belly. The hairy man’s eyes lit up, and he looked down to where

she was pointing and then up again, but by this time Bernie had turned back to the

class and was following the instruction to wave her hands under the water while

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twisting from one side to the other. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the hairy

man hauling his large body up the ladder at the far end of the pool.

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Things that are not there

Tilly knew that she could no longer avoid looking in the mirror on the wall in her

lounge room. She had resisted yesterday because she thought what she had

glimpsed was too absurd. But she was sure she had seen it again today out of the

corner of her eye, as she had passed the lounge room on her way to breakfast.

It was now well into the morning and she stood at the kitchen bench

spreading the last dollop of creamy icing on the cake. The lemon tang of

dishwashing liquid mingled with the rich aroma of baked cake. With a last spray

and wipe over the bench and sink, and with everything put away, Tilly was

prepared to face the mirror.

She took the cake to the lounge room and placed it in the middle of the

coffee table without letting her eyes wander to the mirror. She stepped back to

admire how well the cake looked on its pedestal plate amidst the collection of

white and dark-wood furniture.

She turned to the mirror. She walked to it and slid her hand along the

lower edge of the frame enjoying the cool texture of golden oak leaves and

twining vines. Standing very close to the glass, she took a calming breath and

looked in.

At first, all she could see was her face, the pores caked in ivory-tone

makeup; her eyes, green with flecks of brown, like her father’s. She expelled her

breath, which formed a misty cloud on the glass. She stepped back and swiped at

the cloudy patch. She saw the whole room reflected back at her. It was a room she

had spent many hours perfecting: the chiffon swags draped above the floor-to-

ceiling windows; the polished-wood display cabinet encasing her crystal

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collection; the creamy damask lounge suite; and the textured white-and-gold

wallpaper imported from France.

She twisted her torso to move her shoulder out of the way and, keeping her

eyes on the mirror, saw the high-backed white lounge chair behind her and the top

of the cake sitting on the low table in front of that. The creamy icing on the cake

looked so luscious Tilly was salivating at the thought of the first mouthful. Then

there it was, just as she had spied it yesterday. On the far side of the mirrored

room, on a side table, was a large leather-bound book. She was certain there was

no such book in her own lounge room, but there it was in the mirror.

The book had a dark green leather finish with gold lettering down the

spine. She couldn’t make out the words, but she could see that it was a short title

and that the author’s name had three words. She stared intently at the book, trying

to think of where it might have come from. Maybe a visitor had left it there. But

that was ridiculous. A dark leather book would have stood out immediately in her

beautiful white and gold lounge.

Tilly brought her head as close to the mirror as she could without touching

it and looked at the reflection of the carpet on the floor. It looked just as her carpet

did, but then she noticed that the white carpet had tiny sand coloured speckles all

over. Tilly leapt back from the mirror and looked down at the carpet at her feet.

There were no speckles in her carpet and, as far as she could recall, there never

had been. She turned to face the table in the far corner of the room; there was no

large leather-bound book.

Tilly turned back to the mirror and inspected it, taking particular notice of

the glass to see if there was some trickery there. Was it really a mirror? The frame

was as it had always been. The glass was spotless, except the smudge where she

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had wiped her breath away; she would clean that later. She stepped to the left,

keeping her eyes on the far wall in the mirror. It moved in the other direction

exactly at the pace she moved. She leapt swiftly to the right to see if she could

find a flaw in the image, but everything reflected just as she expected it to.

Tilly stopped. She looked at the cake in the mirror room. Someone had cut

a slice from it. Tilly pressed her sweaty hands to the mirror, for once not caring

about the marks she was making on the spotless glass, and stared at the chocolaty

interior of the cake and the whiteness of the icing. A sob escaped her distorted

mouth. She whipped around and stared at the table where she had left her cake.

There was a slice missing from that cake too. A dirty plate and a scrunched up

napkin lay messily on the table. Tilly ran to the corridor leading to the kitchen to

see if there was someone else in the house with her. She would never have left a

mess like that. She stood still and listened. There was no sound, just as she

expected. Then from somewhere far away she heard music. She craned her neck

and listened. The sound was coming from the lounge room. She followed the

unfamiliar melody and found herself standing in the doorway, her attention, once

again, drawn to the mirror.

A movement in the mirror caught her eye. A tall woman with brown hair

in an orange floor-length dress was leaving through the frosted glass sliding doors

on the far side of the mirrored room, the exact doors that Tilly now stood in. Tilly

dashed to the mirror and saw the last edge of the hem of the floaty dress flicking

out behind the woman as she left the lounge room.

Tilly stepped back from the mirror and cradled her head in her hands.

Nothing was making sense. She knew that if she had eaten cake she would

remember it; cake was, for her, a reward earned after hard work, not some trifling

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matter. She also knew that she didn’t own an orange dress and it couldn’t have

been her leaving the room in the mirror because she was still in the room now.

Tilly decided she would calm herself with a piece of cake. She sat in the

large lounge chair with her back to the mirror and noticed she had nothing to cut

the cake with. However, the cake had been cut before, there was no evidence of a

knife in the room now. She went to the kitchen and returned with the long knife.

She sank the shiny blade into the gooey icing just as the doorbell rang. Tilly’s

fingers tightened around the handle.

Cheery banter spilt from the mirror. The knife slipped from her hand. It

clattered onto the table and then onto the floor, flicking icing and bits of cake

across the table and carpet. Shocked at the mess she had made, Tilly cried out and

slid down onto her beautiful white carpet, scraping at the chocolate cake crumbs

with her hands, her breath coming in raggedy gasps. Now she could hear several

women laughing and cooing, discussing the cake and the wonderful smell in the

room.

Tilly crawled to the wall below the mirror and slumped against it,

forgetting the chocolaty smudge on the carpet and the trail of chocolate handprints

now leading to the wall. Unsure of whether the people in the mirror could see her,

she stood up next to the mirror with her back to the wall and listened. She heard

the hostess describing the delicious scent: she had fed a lemon through the

Insinkerator in the kitchen, sending a lemony scent throughout the house. The

other women laughed loudly and congratulated her on her cleverness. Tilly knew

a plug-in air freshener would do a much better job, like the sunshine-and-fresh-

citrus scent she used.

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Tilly took several deep breaths and refreshed her face with a wet wipe

from the pack she kept in her pocket. She peeked in the mirror. The room was

washed with warm yellow light and the woman in the orange dress was walking

barefoot below a magnificent cut-glass chandelier. With the curtains drawn,

delicate light beams twinkled all around the room and there were four women

who all seemed to glow under the light. The leather-bound book was now on the

table near the cake. Tilly strained to see what was written on the spine, but it was

facing away from her. The tall, brown-haired woman led the other women,

laughing and chatting, out of the room towards the kitchen. She wanted to call out

to the women in the mirror, but they were gone.

She began to sob and pressed her head against the cold glass. Her hands

lay flat on the mirror above her head and with each great sob, saliva and snot

spattered the once clean surface. Her hands slid down off the mirror leaving long

sweaty streaks. Tilly cried even harder because now she had another cleaning job

to do and all she wanted was to enjoy her cake. She rounded the high-backed

white chair and remembered the mess on the carpet. She knew it was much easier

to clean a stain when it was fresh than when it was dried, so she went to the

laundry where the carpet cleaner was stored and lugged the machine to the

kitchen. She filled the water containers and hauled the carpet cleaner into the

lounge room.

The brown-haired woman had returned. She was now standing with her

back to the mirror, reading from the leather-bound book. The other three women

were sitting comfortably on the chairs and eating chocolate cake with silver

spoons, their coffee mugs sitting on woven sisal placemats. Tilly dumped the

machine and approached the mirror. She stood close enough to look over the

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woman’s shoulder. Printed at the top of the page was the title ‘Great-Aunt

Matilda’s Recipes, Proverbs and Quotations’.

Tilly watched the women taking pleasure in each mouthful of cake and in

each other’s company and then looked at her empty room. She yelled and lunged

towards the glass coffee table in the middle of the room. She grabbed at the cake;

her fingers gouged out a hunk of warm gooeyness and pressed it to her mouth.

Sticky crumbs tumbled down her front and scattered on the floor. Tilly laughed at

the rich taste, spraying more soggy crumbs across the carpet. She filled her mouth

again and swallowed hard. She grabbed more handfuls of the brown and white

mess, forcing it down her throat. The cake was large and soggy in her mouth and

throat and she was forced to push some of it back out with her tongue. Tilly

looked down at her clothes and began to wipe her hands up and down her blouse.

The cake was destroyed, and Tilly sat in a heap on the floor in front of the

lounge chair. The filthy mess spread around her body; an erupted chocolate

volcano. Her arms and legs, even her neck, seemed to be enormously heavy as she

stood up and faced the mirror. She saw herself standing in the room surrounded

by the demolished cake; she was a dark smear in the whiteness. Her hair hung in

streaks and stuck to the sides of her face. Makeup, mixed with chocolate and

saliva, smeared her face.

Tilly bent down and picked up the knife. Its smooth handle was slippery

with squashed cake and icing. Tilly lifted the knife in front of her and brandished

it like a sword, threatening the Tilly in the mirror. She walked toward the mirror

with the knife in front of her until the point touched the glass with a loud crack. It

slid upwards as she moved forward. She pressed her face onto the glass and kissed

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her image, running her tongue round and round on the glass. She pressed her

breasts against the golden frame and watched herself writhing.

She stopped and looked at the room in the mirror. It was her room.

Standing on a sideboard was a white photo frame with a picture of her in France.

She remembered the day she visited the pâtisserie and charmed the chocolate cake

recipe from the chef. The knife was still in her hand. She swiped it across her

thigh, cleaning the stickiness off. She collected the dirty cake-plate and took it to

the kitchen sink. In her usual routine she filled the basin with hot soapy water, so

she could wash as she cooked, and began making another chocolate cake with all

the care and attention of a midwife with a newborn baby.

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162

Cake loves Mary

It had been one month since the publican Mary Keenan moved to the coastal

village of St Leopold. Mary had already heard the local men who stopped in for a

drink at the public bar recount stories about packs of older women. She wondered

if they were trying to test her nerve. One night, Mary and her dog, Cake, set

themselves up on the lawn at the back of the pub. Sitting on a beach lounger that

she had found in a box in the backyard, Mary positioned herself on a patch of

grass cleared of rubbish. It was after midnight mid-week. It was late autumn, but

the weather didn’t show any signs of cooling down and, according to what Mary

could find out here and there, packs of older women preferred warmer

temperatures. From her position near the fence through the slats she could see the

street and, beyond through the casuarinas, glimpses of the bay. In the milky, blue

sky Mary watched a huge yellow moon climbing from the horizon on the other

side of the bay. Cake lay splayed on her belly on the grass at Mary’s feet chewing

a piece of whitened driftwood she’d found on the beach earlier that morning.

*

Old Jerry Maguire—that’s what people had been calling him for

decades—was eighty-nine and had known Mary since she was a little girl.

Because he had also known Mary’s grandmother, Ma Keenan, who had also been

a publican, he was relieved when Mary phoned and offered to purchase his licence

for the Queen’s Crown in St Leopold. Mary had saved everything she’d earned

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from the pub she had owned for twenty years before it burnt down. It wasn’t the

pub her grandmother had owned; that was long gone and so was her grandmother.

But Mary had taken what she’d learned from her grandmother and started out on

her own when she was twenty-three. The whole district around the inland town

where Mary served the local farmers and the townies had been tinder dry that

summer, so when the roiling north wind drove the fire over the forested ridge to

the north of the town it raced down the slope like a runaway car and crashed

through everything. It was with a small suitcase of clothes that she had snatched

before she fled the fire and with her new friend, Cake, that she arrived at the

Queen’s.

Cake hadn’t always been at Mary’s side. Mary had first driven past Cake

on a dirt road she’d found herself on when she had fled the fire. When Mary had

pulled the car over to the side of the road, next to the grass and flailing saplings,

she had waited until the dust and ash settled before she opened her car door and

leant out looking back to where the dog stood. The Australian terrier with its

coarse black-and-tan coat, matted with sticks and gum leaves and sticky black

gunk from some melted thing, stood not quite in the gutter of the dirt road as

though it was her right to choose to walk on any part of the road she wanted. Her

pink tongue bobbed in and out of her mouth and her shiny black eyes, slightly

hidden by scruffy eyebrows, were fixed on Mary. Looking at the dog, Mary was

reminded of her first and only attempt at baking a cake when she was fourteen. It

was in the kitchen behind her grandmother’s bar where a girl, usually some local

her grandmother took under her wing, would rustle up hearty breakfasts for the

travelling salesmen who relentlessly passed through the town on their way to

somewhere else. The cake was Mary’s idea of a surprise for her grandmother’s

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sixtieth birthday. By the time she had finished there were lumps of cake hanging

out of the white icing, which sat in blobs unevenly covering the blackened crust of

the cake beneath. Cake had that same thrown-together-but-falling-to-pieces look

about her. For a reason Mary will never know, Cake decided for them both. She

barked up into the hot air once and then trotted to the car door and looked up at

Mary as if to say, ‘Come on, what are we waiting for?’ Cake leapt into Mary’s

lap, which comforted them both, and that’s where she rode from then on, even on

their trip all the way to the coast.

Inside the cool interior of the Queen’s, Mary and Cake followed Old Jerry

through the lounge past empty tables and chairs. In the daylight Mary recognised

the drabness that the glittering night lights hid. Everything was old, and she would

have to work hard to make up for Old Jerry’s neglect. Mary also noticed the way

Old Jerry’s backside—dressed in a huge pair of grubby, dull, grey trousers, which

were hoicked up above his waist and held in place by a brown leather belt with a

twist in it—was just as broad and hard-looking as she remembered it from when

her grandmother had sent her there for the school holidays. He was rather more

stooped than she remembered, and she understood his desire to finally retire to his

sister’s home back in town.

‘Your grandma was a tough old bird,’ Old Jerry said over his shoulder to

Mary as they moved through the dining room and into the main bar, which

remained just as she remembered it from all those years ago with the faded red-

and-navy-blue carpet, dusty light shades and yellowing walls. Mary nodded.

‘That’s Hills,’ Old Jerry said, waving a hand in the air without stopping

for a proper introduction. Mary looked along the bar at the silhouette of a woman.

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The glare from the large glass windows at the far end of the room made it difficult

to see her in detail, but Mary could see a woman bent over the counter behind the

bar and seemingly intent on writing something. She had stiff curls that clung to

her head, a pointy nose and chin, and a lean body. Hills looked up briefly when

Old Jerry mentioned her name, and Mary nodded to her. Hills looked back down

at her work and Mary followed Jerry through the bar and into a corridor with a

single low-wattage globe. The corridor took a left turn and then led to the rear of

the building, eventually ending at a locked wooden door. Mary could hear Cake

following closely behind her as the flooring changed from thread-bare carpet to

smudgy green and black lino and the little dog’s nails tick-tacked along the cool

but dim passage way.

‘I keep the key here,’ Old Jerry was saying as he pulled at a string around

his neck, which disappeared inside the pale blue cotton shirt he was wearing. As

he tugged at the string, a lump beneath his shirt wriggled its way over his big

belly and up his chest and then a large old-fashioned key appeared at his throat.

Jerry bent a little further forward than his stooped back already did and unlocked

the door. He pulled the key out and straightened up. Then he swung the door

open, revealing a sun-soaked yard. Warm air from the sunny backyard floated

onto Mary’s face. But, before Old Jerry would let Mary and Cake pass, he lifted

the key string from around his neck and held it aloft between them.

‘I s’pose this is yours now,’ Jerry said. He held his hand out to her with the

key string draped over it and the key dangling below. Mary looked at his face,

seeing all the years he’d been working etched into the craggy skin. She knew

those lines didn’t come from sun-exposure as one might expect of a seasider but

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from simple old age. She stuck her pointer finger through the string loop and Old

Jerry let it drop.

‘S’pose it is,’ Mary said, looking down at the key that still held some

warmth from Old Jerry’s belly. She slid the string off her finger, letting the key

fall into her other hand. The string was stiff and dropped over the side of her

palm. It reminded her of the cold greasy string from around a roast pork-roll, like

the ones she’d seen the girls in her grandmother’s pub bake many times.

Mary and Cake stepped past Jerry into the warm sunshine. Out the back of

the pub was a large yard with high fences, and somewhere beneath the clutter of

boxes, old furniture, broken tables and torn advertising flags Mary knew, was a

lawn. They wandered along the path that led towards the wonky clothes line,

looking around at the mess. Cake began roaming around the yard, sniffing at the

piles of boxes and old furniture that were piled everywhere. Then Old Jerry led

them through the stacks of junk to a cottage in the far right-hand corner of the

yard. Mary turned back to look at the boomerang-shaped two-storey building. The

afternoon sun shone onto the back of the building and washed out the pale blue

paint of the exterior walls. Mary brought her hand up to her eyes to shade them

from the glare bouncing off the building and wondered whether the

accommodation rooms on the upper floor where she stayed as a kid were in as bad

shape as the rest of the pub.

*

Cake lay sound asleep at the bottom of Mary’s bed, while Mary lay awake,

listening to the waves wash softly on the beach over the road. Even though she

was exhausted from the cleaning and sorting that she and Hills, the bar manager,

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had been doing, she found the sound mesmeric and wondered how she would ever

be able to unhear it so she could fall asleep. Then she heard something different.

Someone in the street laughed. She lay still for a little while longer, listening to

what began to sound like a party, with voices getting louder, a can being kicked,

running footsteps on the road surface. Cake woke up and barked, and then they

both got up and went to the front door of the cottage. Mary had heard from Hills

that there had been increasing reports of packs of older women on the loose, and

Mary wondered if that was what she was hearing now. She pulled on the

Drizabone that she had hung on the hook on the front door and opened the door.

Cake rushed outside barking and ran to the slat fence at the side of the main

building. The retreating sound of the partygoers told Mary they’d run away.

The next morning after opening time, Mary and Hills were sitting at a

table in the lounge, going through the books before the pub filled with patrons

looking for an early lunch. Hills pointed with a pen to columns of figures and

flipped over another page of Old Jerry’s accounts.

‘Why do they call you Hills?’ Mary said.

‘Why do you call your dog Cake?’ Hills said.

‘Fair point,’ Mary conceded. Not everything needed explaining.

‘Do you think climate change has anything to do with the older woman

problem?’ Mary asked Hills.

Hills shrugged her shoulders. She scratched the side of her head with the

end of the pen.

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‘Someone called the cops last summer,’ Hills said.

‘What did they do?’ Mary said.

‘Nothing. We ended up putting one of those inflatable wavy-arm men in

the beer garden out the front. Worked for a while but everyone gets used to it,’

Hills said.

‘Have you ever seen them?’ Mary said.

‘People talk all the time. I wouldn’t worry about it if I was you,’ Hills said.

‘People respect the publican round here. You should be right,’ she added.

*

It was late on a Tuesday night and Mary had finished closing the pub, but

she wasn’t going to bed straight away. She and Cake were set up in the yard

again. The air outside was cooler now and there was a breeze causing the

casuarinas across the road to sigh every now and then. Cake sat at attention, her

ears pointed skyward as she concentrated on the encroaching sound. Mary stood

in the middle of the grass area, and then she heard it too: what sounded like a pack

of older women moving down the street. Mary could hear one of them singing an

ABBA song. Cake growled deep in her chest.

‘Shush,’ Mary said and waved her hand at Cake. Cake’s ears dropped for a

moment, she flicked a look at Mary’s face, and then she sat at attention again and

stared toward the sounds coming from the other side of the slat fence. Mary didn’t

want the revellers to run away this time. She wanted to get a good look at them.

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As they approached the road in front of the pub Mary could hear snatches of

conversation, so she walked closer to the fence to hear better.

‘I used to fly aeroplanes. Upside down! Now I can’t even go up a ladder,’

a woman said and laughed.

‘It’s not heights for me,’ another woman said. ‘It’s tight spaces. Can’t

stand to be shut in.’

The women were now walking right by the pub and Mary held her breath.

Cake growled again, and Mary could hear the women’s footsteps speed up. Mary

shooed Cake back inside the cottage and locked her in. Then she ran back into the

yard. She went through the gate, pulling it shut behind her. When she reached the

beer garden at the front of the pub she looked up the street to see if she could spot

the women. With the help of the moonlight and the street lights Mary could see

that there were no cars or foot traffic moving along the beach road. Then, up the

street, on the opposite side of the road, Mary could just make out the group of

older women. They had stopped in the park and were hanging around the picnic

tables on the approach to the boat ramp.

Mary navigated through the tables and bench seats in the beer garden until

she came to the low brick fence that ran along the edge of the footpath out the

front of the pub. She stepped over it and crossed the road, trying to remain in the

shadow of the casuarinas growing along the shore. Mary had read in the online

news reports that these older women were increasing in number. One article listed

historic dates when the journalist believed older women had first either escaped or

been released into the wild. The article said they had a preferred range, following

trails between places that provided shelter, food and water. There were other

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articles that said they were dangerous and known for their intelligence and

boldness. Mary had decided she would figure it out for herself.

Mary was now in the shadows watching what the women were doing. She

saw that the older women were sitting and standing in small clusters amongst the

trees on the shoreline. Some were drinking from glass bottles, and some were

laughing. Then Mary heard raised voices. Three older women were down on the

jetty, and two of them were pushing and shoving each other. One of the women,

who was wearing a dark jacket with big shoulder pads, pushed another woman,

who was much taller than her. Then Mary noticed that the tall woman, who was

now wobbling dangerously close to the edge of the jetty, was in fact a man. The

third woman, who was wearing a long flowing dress, grabbed his forearm and

yanked him back from the edge. She started shoving him back in the direction of

dry land and waved a hand in the air at the other woman who stood watching with

her hands on her hips. Mary couldn’t help wondering why the older women were

arguing about the man on the jetty.

Not wanting to disturb the older women, Mary kept her distance next to

the casuarina trees and listened for a bit longer. After a while she started to feel

tired and a bit bored. The main occupation of these older women seemed to be

conversation, and Mary was beginning to wonder what all the fuss was about. She

recognised their highly complex system of communication, which one article

had—correctly as it turned out—described as involving talking, listening, and

touching. Every so often the groups shifted, and the ones who’d been casually

slouching on the picnic benches would wander off a way, and the ones who’d

been leaning against the trees would come towards the pack around the table. This

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all seemed like ordinary behaviour to Mary. Then a car drove down the main

street and turned onto the beach road and headed toward the jetty. It pulled up

opposite the park where the older women were gathered. Mary was a fair way

away from the car, but she was curious to see whether the women would take any

notice of it. Then one woman stood up and started giving a few of the older

women hugs, waving to the rest. She and the woman in the long flowing dress,

who was still helping the man from the jetty, wandered over to the car. Mary

watched as the driver, a man, hopped out of the car, and the older woman who’d

been farewelling the others took over the driver’s seat. The man from the jetty and

the woman in the flowing dress got into the back seat. Mary gasped when she

recognised the person who’d been driving. As he walked across the front of the

car through the headlights, she saw that he had a stooped back and a broad, hard

backside. It was Old Jerry. Once he’d positioned himself in the passenger side and

closed the door, the older woman, who was now in the driver’s seat, gunned the

engine and drove away back towards town.

*

For six months, Mary and Hills worked together to make the pub more

attractive. They sorted through the garbage in the yard, scrubbed and repainted the

accommodation, and spruced up the beer garden with new potted plants and beach

umbrellas. By the time spring was almost over and summer was approaching, the

pub had a whole new feel and the locals were spreading the word.

‘Had a phone call this morning,’ Hills said to Mary as they tidied up the

counter where they’d been sorting out the roster. It was Sunday, and they were

hoping for a quiet evening.

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‘Mmm,’ Mary said. She was writing a list of jobs for the bar staff when

they came on shift later in the afternoon.

‘Some bikers are coming this way this afternoon.’ Hills said, picking up a

pile of dark-blue terry hand towels that needed storing in the cleaning cupboard.

Old Jerry had mentioned that St Leopold was a natural end point for

tourists, but he’d never mention groups of bikers. ‘This person wouldn’t happen to

be Old Jerry by any chance?’ Mary asked, wondering exactly how many bikers

they should be expecting.

Hills just turned and looked out the large glass window at the grey sky and

the casuarinas tossing in the stiff breeze.

Later that afternoon, while Hills was taking her break before the evening

mealtime, Mary was helping behind the bar and overseeing the younger staff

members that she’d been training since the last university holiday break when she

had taken on extras. Just as Hills had warned her, the bikers began turning up just

after four in the afternoon, and because the weather had turned foul, most of them

were lounging in the dining room as well as the bar instead of out in the beer

garden where Mary would have preferred them to be. Mary sent one of the young

staff members to collect empty glasses from the bikers in the dining room. The

young woman came back with a stack of empty glasses which she slammed down

on the bench.

‘Those creeps don’t know how to keep their hands to themselves,’ she

said.

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A loud crash in the beer garden took Mary’s attention and she looked out

the front windows. Two men in black leather gear were using beach umbrellas in

a mock sword fight. Dark clouds had shortened the afternoon and the solar lights

strung above the beer garden had begun to blink on. At that moment, Hills came

back from her break and gestured to Mary that she would go and calm them down.

Mary watched Hills take charge of the drunken bikers, sending them across the

road to the car park behind the casuarinas. Inside, the bikers who had been

watching their sparring mates booed as Hills yanked the glass door open and

returned to the bar. Then another younger member of staff called Mary to the

other end of the bar, where two local men had been sitting in their usual spots.

‘Hi, Harry,’ Mary said.

Harry pointed to the men’s toilets. ‘Old Jerry at least kept them clean,’

Harry said.

The young woman who’d been collecting glasses brought another stack of

glasses and handed them over the bar to Mary.

‘Table forty-nine want to book a room for the night,’ she said.

At the end of the night, Mary convinced the last of the bikers who’d drunk

too much to walk the few kilometres along the beach road to the caravan park

where they could stay the night.

Come Monday morning, Mary saw the last of the bikers off and went back

to her cottage where she wrote a list of things she needed from the shops around

the corner. Cake barked and turned a circle when she saw Mary putting on her

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orange spray jacket. Mary pushed back a lock of dyed pink hair that had fallen

across her eyes.

‘Come on, we’re going for a walk,’ Mary said. She grabbed a couple of

shopping bags from the basket next to the front door and the dog leash from

Cake’s bed. They went out through the gate in the slat fence and when they

reached the shopping strip, Mary wound Cake’s leash around the pole outside the

chemist. As Mary was straightening up she saw a flash of colourful material. The

woman she had seen at the park—the one with the long flowing dress—was

guiding a tall man into the chemist. Mary looked up and down the street. Older

women were in plain sight wherever she looked. There was an older woman with

a shopping trolley coming out of the supermarket. She had a streak of maroon in

her brown hair and was pushing the trolley towards her own car in the car park.

Then a Volvo driving down the street slowed and stopped at the pedestrian

crossing for another older woman, who had some letters in her hand and who had

just come from the post office on the other side of the road. A hand in the car

waved and the woman on the crossing waved her letters at the driver. The driver,

Mary saw, was also an older woman, who was wearing dark glasses. Mary looked

across the road and saw an older woman inside the bakery selling bread and then

there was another one standing at the teller machine withdrawing money.

Suddenly, Mary realised there were older women everywhere. Had they always

been there? She tried to recall. Then she remembered her grandmother. She must

have been an older woman. Mary wondered why she hadn’t noticed before. Then

Mary turned around again and saw Cake looking up at her. Cake wagged her

scruffy tail once and then tilted her head to one side as if to ask what they were

doing now. Mary reached down to pat Cake and as she did so she noticed her own

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hands. On the back of her left hand was a brown spot she hadn’t noticed before.

She was reminded of her grandmother lying in the hospital bed. Every day Mary

would visit, and her grandmother would always hold out her hand for Mary to

hold. That’s what her hand looked like now.

Mary forgot all about her list and pulled at the leash, and she and Cake

hurried back to the cottage in the yard behind the pub. Inside the cottage, Mary

dropped the leash without taking it from Cake’s neck and stormed into her

bedroom. She stood at the end of the bed and ripped at her spray jacket. She threw

it off and pulled at the buttons on her shirt. As each layer of clothing came off,

Mary searched for signs of being an older woman. Cake wandered into the room

and jumped up on the bed, turned a circle and lay down, the leash draping over the

side of the bed. Mary was naked now and she pulled at the drawers of her bedside

table until she found the long-handled mirror that she saved from her

grandmother’s things after she died. She held the mirror up to her face and looked

into it. She wasn’t quite sure what to look for, but she had to find out whether she

might be an older woman.

Mary bent down and looked at her legs. There was a patch of skin on her

left thigh that had raised pores she remembered noticing when she was about

twelve. It was still there. The scar on her left forearm from when she fell out of a

tree was still there. She held the mirror down to her chest and looked at her

breasts. The nipples were brown and puckered with a few whitish pores around

them. One or two long hairs poked out at odd angles. Mary changed the angle of

the mirror and looked at belly. The skin was pale and smooth with some faint

white lines. She tugged at the skin and saw the stretch marks more clearly. Then

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she fluffed her pubic hairs and lowered the mirror to see them from front on. She

bent her knees and stuck the mirror between her legs. There was her vulva, the

same as it had always been. At least, Mary thought so. She sat on the bed and lay

back, but she couldn’t see properly. She went to the lounge room and picked up

two of the seat cushions and brought them into the bedroom. She organised the

cushions and her pillows so that she could take a good look at her genitals. Mary

wondered what all those older women’s genitals looked like and how she could

tell whether she was one of them or not.

Later that Monday afternoon, someone knocked on Mary’s cottage door,

which woke her from a nap. She was lying on her bed and Cake was curled up in

the crook of her belly. Mary realised she was still naked and looked around her

room at the clothes that were still scattered everywhere. The knock on the door

came again and Mary scrabbled for some clothes and pulled them on. When she

answered the door, Cake pushed past her legs and danced on her back feet,

seeking a pat from Hills who was standing there in the late afternoon sunlight.

‘Are you alright?’ Hills said. She leant down and gave Cake a scratch

behind her ears.

‘Course I am,’ Mary said.

‘Your shirt’s inside out,’ Hills said, pointing at Mary’s shirt.

Mary pulled at the neck of her shirt and saw that Hills was right. She

grabbed Hills by the arm and pulled her inside.

‘When Old Jerry retired, did he say much about where he was going?’

Mary said.

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‘To his sister’s place. In town.’ Hills looked around the cottage. The

lounge and kitchen were open plan and there was a small dining table between the

kitchen bench and the two-seater lounge. There was an open laptop on the dining

table. ‘Is everything OK?’

‘Did you ever meet her?’

‘We chat often. She popped in here this afternoon. She was meeting with a

group of her friends. I think they meet regularly.’

Mary thought of the older women she’d seen in the village earlier that

morning and wondered if they were the group of older women Hills was talking

about.

‘Do you know what they do? I mean, at night?’

Hills looked at Mary and smiled. Mary saw how Hills’s face creased when

she smiled. The skin on her cheeks had folds running from beneath her eyes to the

jaw bone. A line formed beneath her nose and a spray of lines radiated from

around her eyes.

‘How old are you, Hills?’ Mary said.

‘Sixty-four,’ Hills said. ‘I was wondering if you can manage on your own

tonight. I don’t think there’ll be much happening.’

Mary had a feeling Hills was an older woman and that she might be going

to meet with Old Jerry’s sister and all the other older women.

‘Is there something happening tonight?’ Mary said.

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‘I wanted to catch up with some people I haven’t seen for a while,’ Hills

replied.

*

At quarter past eleven that night, Mary let Cake out the front door. Cake

wandered to the slat fence and sniffed at a patch of grass. Mary followed Cake

into the yard and rolled out a blanket on the ground. She went back inside and

collected the lounge cushions from her bed and plonked them down on the

blanket. In the kitchen, Mary prepared the fresh bread and camembert she’d

bought from the village late that afternoon before Hills went off to meet her

friends. Now she returned to the kitchen and took the tray out to her spot on the

grass. She lay on the blanket and looked up at the stars. She lay still for a little

while longer, listening to what began to sound like a party, with voices getting

louder, a can being kicked, running footsteps on the road surface. Cake trotted

over to Mary and licked her face, and Mary fed her a blob of camembert.

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Exegesis

Introduction

In 2011 when I began this project, I attended my university’s summer

school where the faculty gathered its PhD candidates in an open forum to

welcome newcomers and to share information. We sat in a lecture theatre and

one-by-one we introduced ourselves and named our projects. I was second to last,

and when it came to my turn, I did as all the other candidates had done and

introduced myself and my project: a PhD in creative writing that explored

feminist humour in literature. Up to this point, there had been no comments or

discussion from any of the twenty or so candidates about each other’s projects. As

I finished speaking, the final candidate, a young man, laughed and responded

with, ‘Feminist humour—that’s an oxymoron, isn’t it!’ It is a response I had

previously heard from members of the general community, especially from older

men, and exemplifies Mary Ann Rishel’s description of humour in which she

states that to create humour ‘is playful incongruity that contains a tension

between two levels of meaning followed by a clash of sufficient complexity that

surprises and delights and leads to a resolution of that meaning’ (2002, p. 42).

Historically, one might argue that feminism and humour have not been ‘like

things’. It is also a view recorded by Regina Barreca, a second-wave feminist and

humour scholar, in an article addressing the rise of feminist humour in the 1990s,

in which she argues that ‘men have declared that women do not have a sense of

humor’ (1992, p. 76). But to hear such an opinion voiced in a scholarly forum was

surprising and even shocking. However, it only confirmed for me the significance

of what I was doing. For even one person to single out this topic for ridicule

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amongst an entire cohort, it showed me how important it was to recognise and

theorise feminist humour. As Barreca puts it another of her books, ‘for women

and other groups exiled from the centers of power, [humour] can signal the

transformation of speechless outrage to persuasive, vocal and joyous audacity’

(1994, p. 17)—expressions that need to be recognised rather than silenced.

While the focus of this exegesis is contemporary feminist literature, it is

worth noting that contemporary culture has welcomed a surge of feminist humour

in various media. Feminist comedians such as Amy Schumer, Tina Fey, Bridget

Christie, Hannah Gadsby, Celeste Barber and more, films such as Bridesmaids

(2011) and No men beyond this point (2015), and TV shows such as Girls (2012),

Broad city (2014), Another period (2015), and The Katering show (2015) provide

examples of feminist humour, featuring female characters who refuse to conform

to fixed gender roles and therefore create space for non-normative identities. In

addition, Lizzie and Sarah (2010) and Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette (2018) voice

female anger that Rosie White notes represents instances ‘of symbolic feminist

violence on the critical limitations of contemporary media culture’ (2013, p. 421).

These examples illustrate, in Barreca’s words, how ‘much of women’s comic play

has to do with power and its systematic misappropriation’ and the ‘reclamation of

certain forms of control’ (1992, p. 76) over women’s lives. However, feminist

humour also reminds us how women’s humour has been traditionally excluded

from definitions of humour. As I will argue, humour theory has always defined

itself in terms of masculine ideals, and the feminist comic revolution that we are

witnessing signals the necessity for deeper examination of who humour makers

can be and why there is a backlash to feminist humour. In this exegesis, I examine

the theoretical foundation of cultural criticism in relation to humour and show that

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masculine ideals drive every iteration of humour theory. Feminist humour

challenges patriarchal ideas about who makes humour and what its subject can be.

Patriarchal ideology typically restricts and controls women’s agency, but feminist

humour is a site for anger, resistance, solidarity and joy within a social system.

Nicholas Holm’s Humour as politics recognises that there is a ‘political aesthetic’

(2017, p. 12) to humour, and that ‘the aesthetic aspect of a text can do political

work’ such as ‘the negotiation, contestation and distribution of power’ (p. 12).

However, he notably fails to devote a sustained level of attention to feminist

humour—something this exegesis attempts to correct. I will discuss feminist

humour that uses a political aesthetic, beginning with how it can be used to

challenge the gendered bias of humour theory, before analysing examples of

feminist literature that use various forms of humour to challenge institutionalised

ideals of the feminine.

Feminist humour is a topic that obviously continues to generate an

unconscious anxiety, as my earlier example at summer school shows. Regina

Barreca makes the point in a collection of essays discussing feminist humour in

literature that ‘humor is about risk and privilege’ (1994, p. 17). The British

comedian Bridget Christie exemplifies that risk, albeit it in another cultural

arena—that of stand-up. She has worked solidly since the beginning of the

twenty-first century to bring feminist humour to the comedy circuit in Britain,

gaining success with the Fosters Prize for Best Show in 2013. However, Ellie

Tomsett notes that the rise in feminist humour ‘has resulted in a crisis of male

identity and a reassertion of traditional masculinity’ (2017, p. 63), in a backlash to

the increased ‘inclusion of women into the competitive and predominately male

industry’ (p. 63). As I explore in the first chapter of this exegesis, contemporary

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humour theory itself has a patriarchal bias in that it has always been discussed as a

topic of male culture; and in that culture, women typically laugh at men’s humour.

Eric Bressler, Rod Martin, and Sigal Balshine published a paper in 2006 in which

they attempted to argue that there was an evolutionary purpose for women to

laugh at men’s humour, although they were unable to find a satisfactory

conclusion to prove their thesis. Contemporary developments in female and

feminist comedy show that it is not the case that women cannot make humour; it

is that patriarchal cultural stereotypes have not conventionally understood women

as agents capable of assuming centre-stage. Thus, if a woman is laughing at

something other than a male stimulus, she causes anxiety. If women laugh at the

social structure, they cause anxiety. If women cease laughing at humour that men

generate, they shift their attention away from the male-centred, male-dominated

social arena; feminist laughter is female-centred, female-focussed, and female-

dominated. We find this in the examples of feminist comic literature that I go on

to examine in the first, second and third chapters of this exegesis. The

transgressive effect of reading stories that express women’s subjectivity can be

understood using what Andrea Doucet and Natasha Mauthner call ‘relational

narrated subjects’ (2008, p. 404), by which they mean that a reader gains an

insight into another person’s existence by reading about it. They argue that

all we can know is what is narrated by subjects, as well as our interpretation of

their stories within the wider web of social and structural relations from which

narrated subjects speak (Doucet & Mauthner 2012, p. 404).

With this in mind, humorous stories narrated by feminist agents sit outside

traditional narratives, so that readers learn of new subjectivities ‘in the wider web

of social and structural relations.’

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Feminist humour in literature is as old as literature written by women, but

because of the anxiety it engenders in a patriarchal culture, feminist humour has

often had to mask itself. A prominent example of literature that scholars recognise

as humorous in its satiric commentary on eighteenth century social politics is that

of Jane Austen. This thesis, however, focusses on contemporary Western feminist

novels that use humour strategies to challenge patriarchal ideology about women

and their bodies. In Chapter One, I argue that Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges are

not the only fruit (1985) uses humour to subvert patriarchal values invested in

social institutions such as the church, the family and marriage. Winterson has

herself described her novel as threatening because it exposes the heteronormative

bias in social institutions that aim to control women’s lives (1985, p. xiii). Chapter

Two focusses on the grotesque with an analysis of Angela Carter’s Nights at the

circus (1984) and Marie Darrieussecq’s Pig tales (1996). These two texts turn

their attention to the female grotesque, which has roots in the patriarchal idealised

male body made famous by Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. Their comic

novels destabilise the abjected grotesque female of dominant discourse. The

protagonists in these novels find agency and power in their bodies, flagrantly and

outrageously challenging the abjection of women’s bodies in patriarchal

discourse. Regina Barreca notes that ‘outrage is one reason why any argument

concerning the relationship between anger and humor is powerful’ (1994, p. 29).

The texts I analyse in Chapter Three use parody to question cultural narratives

that position women as passive, pretty objects that are traded in patriarchal

relationships. As Linda Hutcheon argues in A theory of parody: the teachings of

the twentieth-century art forms (2000), parody has the quality of containing its

origin text whilst also creating a new work that comments on both the different

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contexts and worldviews of the old and the new. As such, the parodic work can

stage a comparative mockery. In The Penelopiad, Margaret Atwood (2005a)

parodies the foundation myth The Odyssey by giving voice to Penelope, who

remains largely silent in most versions of the story. Danielle Wood parodies other

foundation myths and stories, such as fairy tales, in Rosie Little’s cautionary tales

for girls (2006). This collection of short stories uses parody as a defamiliarising

tool in the work of cultural criticism. The works I analyse all have in common

their use of humour to point out patriarchal ideology’s absurd attitudes to women,

and to declare an agency for women denied in traditional patriarchal culture.

The first chapter of this exegesis charts the development of humour

theories, drawing from Ancient Greek literature to the present. What is noticeable

is that the humour theories develop and change depending on cultural shifts over

time. However, what does not change is that the predominant thinking about

humour is always founded in patriarchal ideology, which inherently does not

consider female subjectivity. What becomes obvious is that humour turns out to

be another tool for perpetuating masculinist values and eliding the voices of

women in patriarchal culture. Take, for example, the logic of Thomas Hobbes in

confirming and building on the Superiority theory as one of the three traditional

forms of humour. His case study is his personal experience of the court of King

Charles I, an exclusive male-only setting. He describes a ‘sudden glory’ (2009, p.

80) when he outwits his peers, which elevates his position in the group. Hobbes’

theory represents access to a display of humour and status unavailable not only to

women but also to the working class, and yet this theory of humour retained its

validity in scholarly literature for centuries. In the second part of this chapter, my

analysis shows how humour can work to deconstruct accepted notions of gender

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identity, which are theorised in relation to Judith Butler’s (1990, 1993)early work

on identity and Pierre Bourdieu’s (2001) claims that the reiteration of gender roles

forces the whole of society into an unconscious masculine bias. The chapter then

turns its attention to Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges are not the only fruit as a text

that uses dark humour to invert the absurdity invested in patriarchal institutions,

which she represents as dangerous, flawed and discriminatory rather than upright,

natural, and desirable.

The second chapter discusses the use of the grotesque in feminist comedy.

It begins by theorising the ways in which patriarchal ideology idealises the male

body, which implicitly renders the female body grotesque. It then moves to an

analysis of two novels: Carter’s Nights at the Circus and Darrieussecq’s Pig tales.

Carter renders the grotesque female body powerful and desirable using the comic

strategy of inversion. The grotesque female body is rendered strong, an economic

asset, and agential. In Pig tales Darrieussecq transforms her female protagonist

into a pig, drawing a link between the grotesque female body and a culturally

abjected animal. However, again using the strategy of comic inversion, the novel

reclaims the female body as a site of power and generativeness, rather than disgust

and powerlessness.

The final chapter focusses on a comic strategy that is as ancient as the

West’s known literary tradition: parody. Parody was a form of humour the

Ancient Greeks employed to invite festivalgoers to think twice about the

messages in the serious plays performed in the Dionysian festivals. Margaret

Atwood uses parody to question the ancient Greek canonical text, The Odyssey. In

it she imagines what the original story does not: Penelope’s thoughts and actions

in the long years that Odysseus was absent after the Trojan War. Atwood parodies

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the portrayal of various characters and messages of alleged wisdom which, over

millennia, tradition has accepted without question. Wood, too, parodies

foundation texts such as the Bible and fairy tales. Wood’s collection of short

stories, Rosie Little’s cautionary tales for girls (2006), situates itself in a fairy tale

context that creates familiarity for the reader. However, a parody holds both the

origin text and the parody within the one text, meaning that the origin text exists

at the same time as the parody, prompting the generation of comparison and

critique.

Traditional humour theorists (Freud 1960, p. 189; Critchley 2002, p. 5;

Bergson 1900, p. 16) suggest that humour works to expose social anxiety. This

makes feminist humour a powerful strategy to challenge patriarchal ideology that

restricts female agency. As women take control of humour, they assert their

agency. As Regina Barreca puts it, ‘the unsolicited laughter of women spells

trouble for those in power’ (1992, p. 76). The recent upsurge in feminist humour

suggests that the time for such a challenge is now ripe. The revolutionary

phenomenon of women making other women laugh on the public stage has

inspired this exegesis but also my own creative writing, which draws on the

humour strategies other feminist literature employs to challenge patriarchal ideas.

Some of what I have written is based on personal experience and some is based on

what I observe in the lives of others. However, my creative writing is also

grounded in the cultural space in which I observe the radical effects of watching

or reading feminist comic writers and other performers assert their agency and

critique the social structures that have for so long confined them to being passive

objects. I am proud to defend the position that humour and feminism are not

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incompatible or an ‘oxymoron’. Feminist humour represents, instead, the resilient

and vital presence of women in a patriarchal world.

Chapter 1

Feminist humour in literature: laughing at patriarchal

nonsense

This chapter starts from the premise that humour is culturally constructed in the

same way as we understand that gender is constructed. Contemporary culture

reacts to humour along gendered lines that preference male humour, with this

gendered response existing at an unconscious level. When feminists are accused

of not having a sense of humour, it reminds us that there is a connection between

humour, power, and the body. The word ‘sense’ suggests that people link humour

to a natural bodily phenomenon like seeing, hearing or any of the other senses.

This chapter will argue that the ‘sense’ of humour is as socially constructed as the

gendered body, as defined by theorists such as Judith Butler (1990) and Pierre

Bourdieu (2001), and that our understanding of humour is invested in patriarchal

power.

Take for example the following two jokes.

Joke 1

Man: On the weekend, my daughter told me that twenty-five percent of

women were taking a pill for their brain.

Woman: Really?

Man: Do you know what that means?

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Woman: No.

Man: It means that seventy-five percent of women are not taking a pill for

their brain.

Joke 2

Question: What do you call a woman who has a lot of sex?

Answer: Her name.

These two jokes show contrasting gendered positions. The first positions

the male speaker as an authority on women. It infers that women are an identical

group in need of being controlled. The second subverts this notion by suggesting

that women are in possession of their own authority and that each woman is

different and entitled to do whatever she wants. It also contests the patriarchal

notion that women should be chaste. It is not a great leap to understand that

gendered humour that laughs at one gender will not be appreciated by the other

gender. Gail Finney notes that ‘most people are disinclined to laugh at jokes of

which they are the butt’ (1994, p. 2). However, she also notes that it is women

who ‘have been the objects of a good deal of male humour’ (p. 2). When the

creation and reception of humour is inverted from its traditional position,

traditional structures of power and values invested in those traditions are

challenged. Rosie White’s analysis of the BBC pilot Lizzie and Sarah confirms

this theory, describing it as ‘a comedy which subjects the British white middle

class to an uncomfortable examination of its own gender politics’ (2013, p. 424).

What is notable about this pilot is that it addressed ‘questions of power, marriage,

and domestic labour’ (p. 416) reminiscent of 1970s feminism, but it was relegated

to a late-night airing and was considered too outrageous for further

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commissioning. Thus, the comedy of women, as a threat to patriarchal power, is

perhaps most conveniently ignored.

This chapter will show that humour has traditionally been theorised using

male-based values. However, feminist humour exists, and feminist comic

literature—the ultimate interest of this chapter—is a site in which women assert

their agency to question patriarchal values. Regina Barreca confesses that when

she was young she was warned about feminists and told that ‘too much of a sense

of humor in a woman made her unattractive’ (2013, p. 174), suggesting that

laughter is associated with agency in a way that is troubling to patriarchy and its

identification of women as objects. Feminist literary humour can destabilise long-

standing conventional ideas about gender and comedy, but it also challenges

traditional theories of comedy, demonstrating how in Western culture comedy has

been routinely theorised in patriarchal terms. The scholarly analysis of humour

has been founded on a patriarchal authority that marginalises and undervalues

women’s experiences. However, the occlusion of women’s agency and humour

implicit in patriarchal theories of humour creates a cultural space for women’s

writing to unsettle conventional patriarchal assumptions about both humour and

gender. Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges are not the only fruit (1985), which this

chapter will go on to analyse, illustrates key aspects of comedy’s subversive

power. It also shows how humour works to both express and alleviate social

anxieties about issues that are normally taboo or unsayable. This is also true in

other forms of humour, as Joanne Gilbert points out in her work on female stand-

up comics, Performing marginality: humor, gender, and cultural critique (2004).

An unpalatable message can be made more palatable through humour; a

politically charged position can be defused by being presented as ‘just a joke’.

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However, as Gilbert also asserts, ‘comedy is an age-old proving ground that

separates wits from fools with far-reaching rhetorical, political and social

implications’ (2004, p. xiii). The implications of the feminist humour in

Winterson’s text are certainly significant. Winterson’s novel ultimately represents

women in ways that have been historically unspoken: as powerful, resilient,

intellectually rigorous, homosexual, independent and resourceful, rather than

weak, dull, dependent, and focussed only on male support and sexual attraction. It

is a book that demands the reassessment of a patriarchal tradition of identity but

also of humour theory.

Gendered humour theory: a history

The contemporary world understands comedy and humour in relation to a

scholarly tradition that is profoundly grounded in patriarchal values. The

foundational work of scholarship when it comes to literary genres, Aristotle’s

Poetics (2006), provides us not only with a seminal description of both tragedy

and comedy, but also a reflection of the social norms that governed men’s and

women’s permission to participate in the construction of Greek society. It is the

argument of this chapter that those social norms continue to inform thinking about

the creation and reception of comic literature in contemporary times. As David

McWhirter argues, ‘comedy as a genre, it would seem, is almost fatally

overdetermined in its reinscription of fixed, traditional gender roles and

hierarchies of power’ (1994, p. 190). Attitudes to laughter, both ancient and

modern, also influence how we think about the appropriateness of humour in

relation to women and their bodies.

Theorists such as Judith Butler have demonstrated how normative values

attributed to women and their bodies are culturally constructed and can therefore

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be challenged. Feminist theories of humour similarly emphasise the social

constructedness of what can be humorous, who should laugh, and who makes

humour. Feminists have long recognised how institutions like the family, the

church and the state subjugate women to reinforce masculine domination. Pierre

Bourdieu describes this patriarchal social organisation as one that is informed by

an ‘androcentric unconscious’ (2001 p. 56), arguing that society unconsciously

operates in favour of both masculinity and heteronormativity. Theories of humour

are not immune to this unconscious effect. Indeed, because of the unconscious

masculine domination that exists in society, humour theories bolster the

androcentric position and necessarily discredit or discount humour that resists it.

Andrew Stott in his book Comedy suggests that each ‘authorial generation’

(2005, p. 3) builds on the knowledge of the previous generation, which can be

seen in the gradual change in the most longstanding humour theories. Indeed,

when it comes to comedy, theorists still rely on the earliest thinkers to

differentiate it from tragedy. Thus, the dominant institutional force of patriarchy

in Aristotle’s time continues to influence attitudes regarding who may produce

comic material. In Joe Sach’s translation of Poetics (2006), Aristotle clearly

defines the elements that he attributes to tragedy but his work of a similar nature

on comedy is lost. However, Leon Golden shows how in the first five chapters of

the Poetics ‘both tragedy and comedy are treated with almost equal completeness’

(1984, p. 285), which means they contain sufficient comparative commentary

about the two genres to glean Aristotle’s formulation of what he believed

constituted comedy.

Comedy, according to Aristotle, shares its vital elements with tragedy.

Aristotle states that both tragedy and comedy primarily involve making stories

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that mimic life exactly as it is (2006, p. 19). He differentiates tragedy and comedy

by noting that tragedy imitates people of serious moral stature, such as those

embodied by noble characters, whereas comedy, which must not cause harm,

dramatises what is ridiculous in characters that are representative of inferior

persons (p. 21).

It is important to note that ancient attitudes to laughter viewed it as

potentially dangerous. When people laugh, they appear to lose control of their

bodies. John Morreall notes that fear of losing bodily control due to laughter is

written in ‘the two great sources of Western culture: Greek philosophy and the

Bible’ (2009, p. 4). Plato wrote that the loss of control of the body was akin to

loss of power, and he advised statesmen and men of the serious strata not to lower

themselves in this way. Morreall states that Plato saw laughter as an emotion that

‘overrides rational self-control’ (2009, p. 4) and as a trait unfit for the guardians of

the state. Winterson parodies this notion in Oranges are not the only fruit when

Pastor Finch warns the congregation ‘that the possessed are given to

uncontrollable rages, sudden bursts of wild laughter, and are always, always, very

cunning’ (2001, p. 11). This fear of the body—and the gendered nature of that

fear—becomes even more evident in early Christian concerns about comedy and

laughter. Early Christians draw on both Greek philosophy and biblical sources to

formulate their attitude to laughter, which they deem dangerous because, as Stott

writes, their ‘abrogation of the body and the rigid imposition of pious abstinence

made physical pleasure suspicious’ (2005, p. 128). As Simon Critchley explains,

laughter ‘invites comparison with similar convulsive phenomena like orgasm and

weeping’ (2002, p. 8), linking it to bodily functions that are associated with a loss

of control. For Christians in the Middle Ages, this lack of bodily control reflected

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the ‘debauched lives of their pagan masters’ (Stott 2005, p. 128) in opposition to

whom the Christians ‘founded their principles of conduct’ (Stott 2005, p. 128).

Early Christians also ‘believed women were more susceptible to laughter,

equating their mirth with sexual immorality’ (Stott 2005, p. 128). Laughter was

thus perceived as the manifestation of a base instinct that kept ordinary humans

from reaching the sacred state to which Christians aspired. Moreover, this distaste

for bodily functions, which Julia Kristeva correlates with abjection (1982, p. 3),

reflects the patriarchal distaste for woman and the female body—a site of cyclical

oozing and excreting that is out of man’s control.

It is thus not surprising to note that comedy in ancient times was not

necessarily funny. Comedy gave serious attention to humorous situations without

encouraging a loss of bodily control. Aileen Nilsen and Don Nilsen’s analysis of

literary humour suggest that comedy remained unchanged up until medieval

times:

Comedy is a term that literary scholars ‘owned’ long before the popular culture

gave it today’s more generalised meaning of something that brings smiles and

laughter. In medieval times, the word comedy was applied to literary works that

were not necessarily created for the purpose of arousing laughter, but at least had

happier endings and less exalted styles than tragedies. (2008, p. 246)

Official comedy, of course, was also a male-dominated cultural field.

Although ideas about comedy have evolved, and expressing humour seems to

have become a more acceptable activity than in ancient times, social attitudes that

marginalised women in antiquity—especially those that linked loss of bodily

control to femaleness and excluded women from public humour-making—

continue into the modern era. Ellie Tomsett, for example, details a male backlash

against feminist stand-up comedians (2017), as mentioned in the introduction.

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It is important to acknowledge at this point that while humour is

sometimes used interchangeably with comedy, for this discussion I separate them

as distinctly different terms; humour is the sense of mirth, hilarity, or joy a person

feels in a variety of situations, while comedy is the theatrical form that Aristotle

describes. Making such a distinction is important if we want to leave Aristotle’s

definition of comedy behind. However, more theoretical ground needs to be

covered and critiqued if we are to leave behind the patriarchal biases evident in

theories about humour in ways that clear a path to acknowledging feminist

humour.

During the Enlightenment, the explosion in philosophical thinking fostered

new ideas about humour, and at the end of the twentieth century, those ideas had

formed and reformed into three main humour theories: the Superiority, Relief, and

Incongruity theories. As I will argue in my synopsis of these theories below, these

ideas about humour remain heavily invested in patriarchal ideology. The gendered

link between humour and the body also endures. Stott argues that humour is often

‘simultaneously shown to be closer to nature than art, and closer therefore, to the

body than the soul’ (2005, p. 28), in much the same way that women have

historically been linked to nature rather than higher states of being.

The Superiority theory, which holds with the ‘idea that laughter is an

expression of feelings of superiority’ (2009, p. 8), as John Morreall writes, had its

genesis in early philosophical thinking in Ancient Greece and held sway until the

Enlightenment. This theory suggests that when someone laughs it is at another

person’s inferiority. Benjamin Jowett’s translation of The Republic of Plato states

that Plato argued that ‘persons of worth, even if only mortal, must not be

represented as overcome by laughter’ (2009, p. 211), asserting that laughter

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represents a feeling of malice toward those people one is laughing at. The link

between humour and hostility endures. As Joanne Gilbert argues, ‘as a social

phenomenon directly linked to aggression, humor is inevitably tied to power

relations’ (2004, p. 13).

For Thomas Hobbes, who served as an advisor to the aristocracy in the

seventeenth century, the Superiority theory of humour is apparent in a person who

takes delight in the shortcomings of another, as noted in the introduction to this

exegesis. For Hobbes, mirth is inextricable from a

sudden glory . . . caused by some sudden act of their own that pleaseth them; or

by the apprehension of some deformed thing in another, by comparison whereof

they suddenly applaud themselves (2009, p. 80).

Hobbes observed his contemporaries enacting this form of humour in the

halls of power. For Stott, Hobbes was a key figure in ‘the tradition that

understands laughter operating within a moral framework that sees laughers as

self-regarding and uncharitable’ (Stott 2005, p. 134). Notably, Hobbes’ theory of

humour was ‘confirmed by the superior members of society’ (p. 134). The

Superiority theory of humour is thus founded in social power relationships, such

as those found in patriarchy. Laughter is about the sense of power one has over

another in a social hierarchy.

However, the ongoing analysis of humour after the Enlightenment

acknowledged that more things make people laugh than malicious one-

upmanship. The Incongruity theory recognises that simple mismatched

expectations can result in a humorous response. The obvious example is a joke. A

joke is funny when one outcome is expected but another outcome is the result; it

is a surprise. The consequence of the change in expectation causes laughter. In

fact, Mary Ann Rishel notes in her comprehensive book on writing humour,

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Writing humour: Creativity and the comic mind (2002) that ‘you can make any

situation incongruous by changing what is normal, logical or expected’ (p. 35).

The Incongruity theory arose in the eighteenth century when thinkers began to

question Hobbes’ reasoning and suggested that there were other reasons for

humour that amounted to ‘a juxtaposition of incompatible contrasts’ (Stott 2005,

p. 134). Morreall suggests that ‘human experience works with learned patterns.

What we have experienced prepares us to deal with what we will experience’

(2009, p. 10), hence the expectation that is felt at the beginning of a joke.

However, the incongruity occurs when the recognisable pattern is disturbed—such

as by the twist at the end of a joke.

Thus, theorists in the eighteenth century who challenged Hobbes’ narrow

humour theory recognised that wit and unexpected connections between ideas also

resulted in a humorous response. Humour need not arise from cruel aggression.

Unrestrained laughter at this time was still deemed undesirable because it

continued to represent a loss of control, but as Stott argues, the Incongruity theory

of humour shifted focus to ‘the operation of verbal triggers, and the juxtaposition

of elements in the production of comic effects’ (p. 135). It thus emphasised

cerebral rather than bodily sources of humour. In addition, given ‘wit and

linguistic invention were culturally privileged skills’ (Stott 2005, p. 136), the

Incongruity theory also identified humour with an elite male social group. The

ability to display wit was not only a valuable masculine social skill amongst in-

groups, but also evidence of superior intelligence and, indeed, a form of control.

According to Morreall, although the Incongruity theory has its inconsistencies—

for an incongruous experience does not always bring one to laughter—it ‘is the

most widely accepted account of humour in philosophy and empirical psychology

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today’ (2009, p. 112). Thus, the cultural norms that constructed those supposed

markers of intelligence and wit centuries ago continue to limit the field of humour

makers in the twenty-first century.

Incongruity is the second of three so-called theories of humour. The third

relates to a sense of foreboding or expectation that does not come to fruition:

Relief theory. A twentieth century development, the Relief theory of humour

arose in the field of psychology, which made a new claim to understanding the

human condition. A burst of laughter brings with it a feeling of release, or so

Freud theorised at the turn of the twentieth century. Freud asserted that we

recognise a joke from speech patterns and bodily clues, and that we prepare

ourselves for an emotional reaction to that joke. According to Freud, laughter

releases the psychic energy that it took to generate those emotions (1960, p. 189).

This notion developed out of growing scientific knowledge of the human body at

the time. In Freud’s work on the unconscious, he speculated that humour was the

result of the release of pent-up unconscious thoughts that remain largely hidden

(taboo) in social interactions. The notion of a release echoed earlier medical

speculation about the workings of the nervous system, which doctors thought

transmitted gas or fluid through the body to the brain that could build up and

needed release. Freud, combining the Relief and Incongruity theories, focused on

the importance of social relationships in humorous interactions. Notably, Freud’s

discussion about humour in Jokes and their relation to the unconscious (1960)

focusses largely on Jewish jokes, which he seems to take some pleasure in. Elliot

Oring observes that ‘no other ethnic, religious, or social grouping is featured in

the book’ and that ‘in the context of a psychological work on joking [it] is at once

striking and perplexing’ (2003, p. 116). Additionally, Walter Metz states that

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Freud’s study ‘is filled with sexist jokes in which the tendentiousness balks

against an authority that is seemingly female and castratory, impinging upon

men’s prerogatives to pleasure’ (2004, p. 100). Carmen Popescu states that

The relief theory, whose assumption that humour can act as a ‘safety valve’ has

had great influence on modern humour scholarship. Although Freud’s theory has

been strongly criticized for these claims, his contribution to the view that jokes

can be seen in relation to social taboos has become very central to humour

scholarship. (2010, p. 38)

Freud’s contribution to humour studies is thus valuable, despite its

ideological blind spots, for the connection he made between humour and social

taboos—a point that this chapter’s examination of feminist comedy, which breaks

taboos around female agency, will soon take up.

The dominant reiterative drive

Contemporary culture continues to accept traditional and patriarchal ideas about

humour and gender as if they are natural and unquestionable. It is for this reason

that in a patriarchal society people scoff at the juxtaposition of humour and

feminism as if it is an oxymoron; the two concepts just cannot be brought together

in any logical way when the socially constructed woman is the object of humour

and not the subject. Because all discussion about humour arises out of the culture

of those participating in it, as I have tried to show in the above review of humour

theory, it is necessarily tainted by the preconceptions of that culture.

These norms and biases are largely unconscious, but this is not to say that

patriarchy isn’t highly visible. As mentioned earlier, Pierre Bourdieu argues that

society reinforces masculine domination and consequently the subjugation of

women through its key institutions of the family, the church and the state.

However, he also argues that these are founded on ancient origin myths, which

fundamentally oppose nature and culture, and which legitimate ‘the positions

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assigned to the two sexes in the division of sexual labour and, through the sexual

division of the labour of production and reproduction’ (Bourdieu 2001, p. 18).

Thus cultural (or symbolic) arrangement is historicised as natural, and in the

organisation of

the whole natural and social order, it is an arbitrary construction of the male and

female body . . . which gives an apparently natural foundation to the androcentric

view of the division of sexual labour (p. 23).

Bourdieu also states that the division between the sexes is artificially

derived in order to allow men to dominate social interactions:

Far from the necessities of biological reproduction determining the symbolic

organization of the sexual division of labour and, ultimately, of the whole natural

and social order, it is an arbitrary construction of the male and female body, of its

uses and functions, especially in biological reproduction, which gives an

apparently natural foundation to the androcentric view of the division of sexual

labour and the sexual division of labour and so of the whole cosmos. The

particular strength of the masculine sociodicy comes from the fact that it

combines and condenses two operations: it legitimates a relationship of

domination by embedding it in a biological nature that is itself a naturalised

social construction. (p. 23, italics in original)

Society thus operates from an androcentric unconscious that favours

masculinity and heteronormativity, and perpetually repeats this organisation of the

social order in a ‘long collective labour of socialization of the biological and

biologicization of the social’ (p. 3). Humour does not escape this reiterative cycle.

Bourdieu’s claim is echoed in the work of other theories that aim to

disclose the constructed formation of gender identity. Judith Butler, for example,

analyses gender, sexuality, and the body as identity categories. Her work

combines elements of feminist theory, gay and lesbian studies, philosophy and

psychoanalysis. However, she strongly builds on the post-structuralist

understanding of subjectivity, with roots in the work of Michel Foucault, in which

the foundation of bodily categories is a product of regimes of power and

knowledge or, as Bourdieu describes it, the androcentric unconscious. According

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to Gill Jagger, who writes on sexual politics and the power of performance,

Foucault develops ‘accounts of subjectivity as necessarily involving a form of

subjection—subjection, that is, to social power and regulation’ (2008, p. 12). In

Butler’s radical critique of identity categories, she considers sex, gender and

sexuality as cultural products, implicated in bases of power, rather than natural

effects of the body—similar to Bourdieu’s notion of the historicization of the

symbolic. In Gender Trouble, Butler begins by questioning the assumption

adopted by second wave feminists ‘that there is some existing identity’ (1990, p.

1) in the category women. She suggests it is through language that this identity

forms, and that a heterosexual matrix constitutes gender. She suggests it is not

enough to seek recognition within language and argues that the structure of power

in which language is located must also be examined. Her inquiry exposes the

foundational categories of gender and sexuality as ‘effects of a specific formation

of power’ (p. viii) in a Foucauldian sense. Butler argues that the foundational

categories of male and female identity are culturally conceived and are compelled

by compulsory heterosexuality. In Oranges are not the only fruit, to which I will

turn my attention shortly, Winterson demonstrates this powerful formulation when

she and her lover attend church. In front of the congregation the pastor accuses

them of ‘unnatural passions’, which bear ‘the mark of the devil’, and demands

that they ‘truly repent’ (1985, p. 103). In other words, Winterson shows how the

church adheres to foundational categories of male, female, and heteronormativity,

a view which the novel mocks by satirising the sanctity and authority of those

church and community leaders who attempt to enforce their particular ideology

through threats and action. Traditional notions of gender and sexuality are thus

revealed less as natural and essential characteristic of individuals than as a series

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of performative gestures that the individual is compelled to replicate within a

heterosexual matrix. Butler notes in Bodies that matter that Derrida’s notion of

citationality, in which he asks whether ‘a performative utterance [could] succeed

if its formulation did not repeat a “coded” or iterable utterance’ (1993, p. 13),

underscores this theory of performativity. She accordingly argues that ‘a

performative is that discursive practice that enacts or produces that which it

names’ (1993, p. 13). Iterated performances create accepted facts.

Cordelia Fine, a cognitive neuroscientist who disputes what she calls

neurosexism as justification for sexual difference, provides support to Butler’s

theory of gender performativity. She shows that much of contemporary science

about gender has ‘a surprising number of gaps, assumptions, inconsistencies, poor

methodologies, and leaps of faith’ (2010, p. 216) that are repeated as true but that

are culturally influenced rather than based on proper scientific judgement.

Examples include once-accepted facts, such as the belief that women’s brains are

smaller than men’s brains; the belief that if women enter higher education their

uteruses will dry up and populations will decline; and the belief that if women are

given the vote the whole of society will fail because women are naturally

disposed to family rather than politics. Fine also argues that ‘[t]he gendered

patterns of our lives can be so familiar that we no longer notice them’ (p. xxvii),

but, as we can see, they have an insidious effect on the cultural and social

definition of so-called normal behaviour. We see this represented in Oranges are

not the only fruit when Jeanette claims that she tried to conform to her school’s

expectations ‘but I never succeeded; there’s a formula, a secret, I don’t know

what’ (Winterson 1, p. 45). Jeanette’s ignorance of the ‘code’ is related to her

homosexuality, making her an alien in the so-called normal world. The

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androcentric unconscious institutes these gender categorizations, which are, as

Mary Crawford states, ‘not simply a way of reacting to differences but a way of

creating them’ (2003, p. 1417).

If, as Fine, Butler, Crawford and Bourdieu suggest, acts that reinforce

masculine domination are perpetually repeated in our social institutions, then we

can understand how the theories of humour that this chapter outlines also

perpetuate that masculine domination. They reinforce notions about who should

make humour, who is the appropriate subject of humour, and who should laugh.

The creation of humour is instituted as a masculine activity and not the domain of

women, and both men and women unconsciously agree to this belief. It is

important to acknowledge that theories of comedy and humour sprang from

specific privileged social situations, and the voices that come down to us from the

past are of those who had the opportunity to speak. Historically and culturally,

women have lacked a similar privileged position in the public sphere. Therefore,

recorded history represents women in limited ways that remind society of the way

in which traditional patriarchies would prefer women to exist. We must also

remember that these elite masculine attitudes to humour drive the social anxiety

about feminism and humour.

To put this idea in context, the cultural anthropologist David Cohen asks

whether women, despite being ‘relegated to the ranks of slaves and children’

(1989, p. 3) in classical Greece, were as powerless as history suggests. As a means

of determining women’s status in the classical period, he examines ancient Greek

plays as a representation of social attitudes of the time. He states that in

Aristophanes’ comedies, Lysistrata, (411BCE), Ecclesiazusae (392BCE), and

Thesmophoriazusae (411BCE),

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much of the sexual humour derives from the way in which he exploits the

contradiction between the cultural ideal and real life, between woman as men

think she should be, woman as men fear she is, and the mothers, maidens, wives,

and widows of everyday existence (1989, p. 5).

These tensions reveal how the women of antiquity, Cohen claims, despite

living a life secluded from the male public domain, had fully functioning

networks in social, religious and economic spheres that went unrecorded in the

historical lexicon apart from brief mentions in plays. In fact, the very social norms

that privileged men also excluded them from female spheres. Consequently, those

men who recorded history, philosophy and the like, and who we perpetually draw

on for our understanding of cultural values, were blind to the complexities of

women’s lives. Certainly, ancient Greek playwrights were not writing with an

audience of women in mind. As Isabel Ermida notes, ancient Greek theatre was

performed almost exclusively for men of a high social rank and ‘became an

instrument of power in the hands of the upper classes’ (2008, p. 17).

It is in this context that we can understand how men have acquired

permission to judge what is humorous and who can make humour. In this

androcentric state it is socially incomprehensible for humour to be generated by

women, regardless of real examples of it. The dominant reiterative drive to

conform to social norms works to persistently re-affirm positions of male power

and female subjugation. Our gendered understanding of humour is unconsciously

repeated too—an androcentric bias that feminist humour challenges.

Feminist humour is not an oxymoron

Gail Finney observes that ‘when men have written about humor, laughter, and

jokes, they have meant male humor, laughter, and jokes’ (1994, p. 1). Even in

2007, the cultural critic Christopher Hitchens belittles the comedy of women with

spectacular arrogance:

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If I am correct about this, which I am, then the explanation for the superior

funniness of men is much the same as for the inferior funniness of women. Men

have to pretend, to themselves as well as to women, that they are not the servants

and supplicants. Women, cunning minxes that they are, have to affect not to be

the potentates. (2007)

Before proceeding with my discussion of how feminist comedy challenges

the androcentric unconscious and demands an unsettling of masculinist visions of

what is funny, it serves a good purpose to first address what constitutes the field

of feminist humour. I do not use the term women’s humour because that is not the

same as feminist humour. Women’s humour, like feminist humour, also sits

outside the universal arena of humour because humour is defined in patriarchal

terms, as I have shown. However, feminist humour consciously works within the

androcentric to ‘[offer] some sort of challenge to the system’ (Barreca 2013, p.

182). Oranges are not the only fruit, for example, represents institutions such as

the church, marriage, and the family as dangerous, flawed and discriminatory

rather than upright, natural, and desirable. Oranges also embraces the abject, with

the abject defined by Julia Kristeva as that cultural notion of the body—typically

associated with the woman’s body—that ‘disturbs identity, order and system’

(1982, p. 4).

Culturally, feminism is not associated with humour. In fact, there is even a

joke about a man who goes into a feminist bookshop and cannot find the humour

section. The humour here is an example of the Superiority theory in that the

speaker is drawing on a hostile emotion to inform a play for social power. In this

case it aggressively attacks the feminist position. The joke reminds listeners that,

in the androcentric vision, it is men who make humour about women; the opposite

is inconceivable. Feminists are kill-joys, and they do not have the power to be

funny. The joke is also bound up with the idea, as Finney reminds us, that

‘traditionally women are supposed to be nice, and comedy necessitates

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aggressiveness, satire, and ridicule, not niceness’ (1994, p. 2). When people laugh

at this kind of joke what they are really doing is participating in the reiterative

behaviour that reinforces the dominant ideology. As Bourdieu suggests in

Masculine Domination, the structure of domination in which culture exists is the

product of ‘an incessant labour of reproduction’ (2001, p. 34). Feminist humour

exists, but like feminism itself, it is a subversive act that resists the structure of

domination by interrupting that persistent repetitive labour of reproduction.

However, for feminist humour to have an effect, it must be officially

recognised. Michael Mulkay states that when humour is used as a tool to subvert

dominant patterns its success depends on support in the serious realm, by which

he means the dominant society. He argues that humour that is anonymous (such as

that seen in graffiti) or informal (such as in political lampooning) does not work to

‘express a powerful rejection of society or any of its institutions’ (1988, p. 175).

However, he also notes that subversive humour is linked to ‘specific social

categories and to social confrontations that are operative in the realm of serious

action’ (Mulkay 1988, p. 175), such as the feminist movement. So, for feminist

humour to work subversively it must be supported by ‘criticism and confrontation

that is already under way within the serious realm’ (p. 177). Mary Crawford

makes a similar point when she argues that, although ‘women and men use humor

in same-gender and mixed-gender settings as one of the tools of gender

construction’ (2003, p. 1427), it can also work to deconstruct gender when it

creates and affirms common meanings in a subversive culture. Humour within a

group helps to establish a commonality between the members of the group, as

well as alienating persons seen to be outside the group. What is more, comedy,

‘like all humanly, historically constructed social and aesthetic forms, is always

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contingent, always open to transformative reappropriation’ (McWhirter 1994, p.

200). Feminist humour certainly demands a reassessment of what counts as funny,

particularly because, as Tomsett notes in regard to the work of the British

comedian Bridget Christie, ‘she is using her anger and humour to challenge

structures and ideas that impact all women and men negatively’ (2017, p. 65).

Humorous feminist literature—as practiced by renowned writers such as

Jeanette Winterson—is a site in which subversive work has earned institutional

recognition, disrupting the androcentric vision that society unconsciously

reiterates. Winterson’s Oranges are not the only fruit (2001) is an

autobiographical narrative about a working-class girl who lives with her adoptive

parents but finds that she cannot conform to the Christian, patriarchal and

heteronormative worldview to which her mother subscribes. In her introduction to

the book, Winterson states that her novel ‘exposes the sanctity of family life as

something of a sham’ (2001, p. xiii) and the same can be said of the other

institutions represented in the novel, such as the church, marriage and

heterosexuality. The novel represents, as Megan Becker-Leckrone argues, a

‘subjectivity [that] functions less as a fixed entity than as a locus of determining

forces’ (2005, p. 22), revealing how the church, marriage and heterosexuality

work to construct a submissive identity for women. In Kristeva’s terms, the

defiant narrator of Oranges also represents patriarchy’s abject other; the unruly

horror that ‘signifies the other side of the border’ (1982, p. 3). The character,

Jeanette, inspires literal horror; indeed, she is portrayed as a child of God who has

‘fallen under Satan’s spell’ (Winterson 2001, p. 102). The androcentric vision

relies on what is beyond its boundary to substantiate what is within it. As Joanne

Gilbert puts it, ‘without the margins the center cannot exist’ (2004, p. 4).

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However, Winterson uses humour to subvert that binary, to disempower fixed

subjectivity and break the status quo through its representation not only of

Jeanette, but also of its other female characters. Rather than women who conform

to the patriarchal norms, the women in this text function as powerful determined

agents with qualities that are traditionally associated with masculinity: single-

mindedness, strong leadership, and fiscal capability. In addition, female

homosexuality is comically represented as a desirable alternative to dreary,

disappointing or dangerous heterosexuality.

Both the Relief and Incongruity theories play a part in the humour in this

text. The humour comes from both the relief at discovering that what is

considered normal is in fact an arbitrary social construction, and from the

recognition of incongruous juxtapositions. Feminine identity in the androcentric

vision proscribes self-determination, self-identity, and homosexuality. Oranges

overturns that vision with women who perform femininity in complex, individual,

and unconventional ways. The child protagonist, Jeanette, learns that traditional

femininity is idealised in school and the church. Girls who perform femininity by

adopting correct attitudes and attributes such as cooking, sewing, and

heterosexuality are rewarded with positive reinforcement, prizes, and gifts.

Jeanette fails this femininity test, but her inability to conform is not portrayed as

aberrant. As she herself explains, despite their patriarchal rhetoric, ‘the women in

our church were strong and organized. If you want to talk in terms of power I had

enough to keep Mussolini happy’ (2001, p. 121). As I have discussed in relation

to the Incongruity theory, when what appears to be normal is suddenly

defamiliarised, the result is amusement. In Winterson’s novel humour paves the

way for an alternative vision of female subjectivity—and of patriarchal authority.

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Patriarchal spiritual leaders are represented as deceptive, unreliable and immature

in situations where one would normally expect them to be powerful, authoritative

and knowledgeable. A pastor argues with a child over Bible-story felt toys (2001,

p. 13), and he also can’t remember the names of the characters in the various

Bible stories (whereas the child Jeanette can). In another instance, Jeanette’s

mother is spiritually misguided when she venerates Pastor Spratt and his Glory

Crusade by describing him as ‘very impressive’ and ‘like Errol Flynn, but holy’

(p. 8). The juxtaposition of Christian righteousness and physical attraction,

speaking of the taboo of a woman’s desire and of a man’s objectification, creates

an incongruous result leading to the humorous response. In another episode,

Jeanette confuses the seven seals in the Bible story for amphibious animals and

spends weeks trying to find reference to them in the Bible (p. 11). According to

her mother, Deuteronomy is full of ‘Abominations and Unmentionables’ (p. 41),

and the Bible becomes a source of perverse interest to the young Jeanette in ways

that subvert not only Christian but also patriarchal authority, including visions of

the clean perfection of the idealised, complete, male body:

Whenever we read about a bastard or someone with crushed testicles, my mother

turned over the page and said, ‘Leave that to the Lord,’ but when she’d gone, I’d

sneak a look. I was glad I didn’t have testicles. They sounded like intestines only

on the outside, and the men in the Bible were always having them cut off and not

being able to go to church. Horrid. (2001, p. 41)

The narrative, in addition to undermining the institution of Christianity,

also uses humour to subvert the sanctity of marriage. In Oranges, marriage is

rarely depicted as stable, safe, or loving in the families that the protagonist

encounters. Instead, marriage is established as burdensome, disappointing and

inevitable, especially for female characters. In her own family, Jeanette’s mother

keeps busy through the night rather than sleep with her husband, even though she

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espouses a devout Christianity that promotes female servitude. In amongst her

mother’s photograph album are images of her old beaus, one of whom is a

woman. When Jeanette expresses curiosity about why the photo resides in that

particular album, her mother stealthily removes the photo, which causes Jeanette

to wonder about her own mother’s sexuality. It is also the case that Jeanette

encounters only one relationship amongst the people she knows that seems to be

built on love and it is between two same-sex church members. Jeanette’s mother

forbids her to take a holiday with these two older women when they offer

because, as her mother says, they deal in so-called ‘unnatural passions,’ a bizarre

code that her mother uses for anything related to sex or procreation, including a

radio program about the life-cycle of snails (2001, p. 21). The humour points to

the absurdity of fear surrounding the body, sex, and nature.

When Jeanette refers to the ‘formula, a secret . . . that people . . . seem to

understand’ (2001, p. 41) but that has not come ‘naturally’ to her, what we see is

how, in Bourdieu’s terms, ‘the androcentric vision imposes itself as neutral and

has no need to spell itself out in discourses aiming at legitimating it’ (2001, p. 9).

However, the novel also reveals how ideology and reality rarely mesh. Jeanette

recognises that she has failed the androcentric vision of femininity, but even those

perpetuating a traditional mantra of gender and sexuality veer far from the norm:

her mother is a terrifying tyrant in both the home and the church; women speak of

suffering marriage; and homosexuality is forbidden. Here the Incongruity theory

is transformed into a political act to challenge not only the ideology but also the

success of patriarchy.

Contemporary culture exists in the crucible of patriarchal norms. It is

improper to theorise about humour without acknowledging that the theorists who

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founded our thinking unconsciously conformed to gender biases that are

structurally instituted and perpetually reinstated. The conclusions this chapter has

come to are focussed more on the category of humour rather than on the

commonly accepted notion of comedy that Aristotle derived in the Poetics. His

ideas describe specific elements of the tragic and comedic theatrical forms that we

continue to recognise in cultural productions. Humour, on the other hand, elicits a

changing diagnosis depending on the times in which it is described. However, the

humour theories spanning the ages, from Plato and beyond, evolved as cultural

products that are unconsciously coupled to patriarchal norms. Feminist humour, as

we have seen, has been regarded as an oxymoron. However, as Winterson’s text

demonstrates, feminist humour exists. It breaches the perpetual iterations of

patriarchal bias that most people are primed to enact. When a woman is the

subject of humour rather than the object of humour, she undermines the power

structure that creates her. Her laughter also challenges patriarchal anxieties about

women’s bodies—something to which the next chapter will attend in its analysis

of the use of the grotesque in feminist comedy.

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Chapter 2

Radicalising the feminine grotesque: Angela Carter’s

Nights at the circus and Marie Darrieussecq’s Pig tales

Dominant patriarchal literary culture names certain feminine qualities grotesque

based on historical ideas of the classical masculine body. In an act of

disobedience, feminist writers plunder the literary tradition that renders women

disgusting, embracing the comic and regenerative power of the grotesque to

reclaim and empower the female body. The feminist grotesque estranges the

masculine bodily ideal implicit in the grotesque female form and transforms the

female body from the abjected grotesque to a powerful subject. This chapter will

discuss the grotesque in relation to humour and the body, and particularly the

female body, and how feminist literature arrests the patriarchal discourse that

associates the grotesque with the female body. I will analyse Angela Carter’s

Nights at the circus (1984) and Marie Darrieussecq’s Pig tales (1996) to show

how humorous feminist texts disrupt these attitudes to the female body,

transforming it from a site of disgust to a site of power.

What is the grotesque?

The term ‘grotesque’ derives from the Italian word for cave, grotta, and originates

from the late fifteenth century when archaeologists uncovered Ancient Roman

ruins, discovering cave-like corridors that were ornamented with unearthly

distorted figures and plants. This kind of ornamentation ‘led to the association of

the grotesque with both antiquity and fantastic artistic licence’ (Trodd, Barlow &

Amigoni 1999, p. 4). The notion of the grotesque then expanded into artwork,

such as the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel, which displayed

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grotesque and disordered representations of life and death. In the nineteenth

century, ‘Raphael’s grotesques in the Vatican constituted a form of amorality, or

refusal to encounter the necessary struggle to constitute fact as image’ (Trodd,

Barlow & Amigoni 1999, p. 4) according to John Ruskin, who connected ‘art,

ethics and the nation in nineteenth-century culture’ (Hartley 1999, p. 82). The

grotesque also inspired literature that described the low world of the body and the

earth, such as François Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel (1693), which

relished the array of grotesque bodily functions. The grotesque continued to

inform the Romantic and Gothic periods, which explored intense human

experiences of the violent and irrational, as well as nineteenth-century Christian

art, which depicted life-like representations rather than abstract or metaphoric

images of Christ. In the twentieth century, surrealist painters such as Dali,

Picasso, and the lesser-known Leonora Carrington extended the grotesque,

challenging standard representations of everything from the human form to

animals and the built environment; and as White notes, ‘“grotesque” [is] a term

widely used in accounts of women and television comedy’ (2013, p. 417).

The grotesque has always been associated with the excessive, the

disfigured, the taboo, or those things deemed unnatural. The humour induced by

the grotesque reveals a sense of ambiguity that mixes pleasure and disgust (Stott

2005, p. 87). Shelagh Wilson, who discusses grotesque taste and Victorian design,

notes that the grotesque work of potter Robert Wallace Martin, for example, has

‘a total effect of horrific, violent, uncontrolled bodily energy’ that ‘is mitigated by

humour’ (1999, p. 143). Maria Biscaia, in Postcolonial and feminist grotesque

(2011), focuses on the grotesque’s subversiveness. She differentiates the

ornamental arabesque that ‘appears as an elaboration of leafy and floral motifs

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which are drawn from nature’ from altogether different grotesque figures, which

are more dangerous because they are ‘born out of the human imagination’ (2011,

p. 109). In other words, the arabesque presents no danger because it closely

represents nature, but grotesqueries represent imagined and unnatural beings that

break out of the natural order of things and thus call to mind the demonic. Such

grotesque beings exceed the natural environment and disturb rational notions of

being.

The unearthed images in the Ancient Roman grottos depicted human-

organic forms: nocturnal creatures, slithering creatures, the plant world—a jungle

that was an inextricable tangle—invading the familiar human environment. These

grotesque forms confronted the privileged class’s sense of order and decency; the

grotesqueries eroded the division between the self and the undesirable other

because the images inextricably linked the civility of the existing world with the

abjected ‘natural’ other. Wolfgang Kayser records that Vasari of the Vitruvian

School, which restored ancient classical architecture in the fifteenth century,

strongly disapproved of grotesque art because ‘contemporary artists decorate

walls with monstrous forms rather than reproducing clear images of the familiar

world’ (1981, p. 20). Trodd, Barlow and Amigoni state that ‘following the

recycled Classicist strictures of Vitruvius the term develops pejorative, decadent

associations in architectural theory’ (1999, p. 4). Theological leaders saw

reflected in the grotesque the myth of the fall, according to which humans

are perceived to be creatures who have fallen from our essential state of

perfection into a state of finite existence with all of its existential ambiguities and

vulnerabilities, anxieties and propensities for human evil (Yates 1997, p. 55).

They thus expressed anxiety at the failure of these grotesque figures to

reproduce the classical and rational masculine body—Leonardo da Vinci’s

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famous ‘Vitruvian Man’—which was celebrated at the time. These barbarous and

monstrous forms were viewed as shocking, disturbing, and disgusting.

At the same time, the blended forms were artfully depicted and seemed to

represent some innate sense of connection between ‘man’ and nature, a

connection that existed somewhere beyond the rational. In her essay on abjection,

Julia Kristeva (1982) links the grotesque with the uncontrollable natural processes

that humans experience—birth, illness, death, aging, growth and transformation—

all of which classical thinking occludes because these processes betray the

rational perfection of the classical body, which is historically male. History

records the female body as a betrayal of this rational perfection because it has

powerful cultural associations to natural processes such as birth, death, sexual

desire, and menstruation that are devalued—or, in Julia Kristeva’s terms,

‘abjected’—in the patriarchal order. Female bodies, which menstruate and cleave

open to give birth, and which fluctuate in size, shape and smell, threaten the clean

perfection of the idealised complete male body.

Cultural norms associate the female grotesque with the transgressive body

that exists outside male bodily perfection. The political construction of

masculinity as normative is involved in the abjection of the female form. In The

monstrous feminine (1993), Barbara Creed examines depictions of women in

horror films to show how this understanding of women as abject or grotesque

persists in contemporary culture. She argues that horror films persistently

represent women’s bodies as abject and monstrous in order ‘to bring about an

encounter between the symbolic order and that which threatens its stability’ (p.

11). Creed argues that horror films that represent women as monstrous position

the viewer to recognise female bodies and their functions as grotesque. Films such

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as Carrie (1976) and Alien (1979), for instance, which depict a menstruating girl

and an alien creature that births itself from human bodies, portray women as

monstrous because of their association with menstrual blood and childbirth. Creed

argues, in line with Kristeva, that

menstruation and childbirth are seen as the two events in woman’s life which

have placed her on the side of the abject. It is woman’s fertilizable body which

aligns her with nature and threatens the integrity of the patriarchal symbolic

order. (Creed 1993, p. 50)

For Creed, the female body ‘carries a strong element of the grotesque’ (p.

50), whereas ‘the male body signifies form and integrity’ (p. 49). Or as Bourdieu

has deduced, ‘the androcentric vision imposes itself as neutral’ (2001, p. 9) in the

patriarchal order, which necessarily abjects the female body.

The association between the grotesque and the feminine is also implicit in

the work of Bakhtin. In Rabelais and his World, Bakhtin links the grotesque, as

performed in carnival, with ‘the lower bodily stratum’ (1984, p. 12), delineating

the upper and lower stratum of the body along gender lines. He states that

‘downward is earth, and upward is heaven. Earth is an element that devours,

swallows up (the grave, the womb)’ (p. 21). Earth here is associated with the

lower parts of the body—the genitals, the belly and the buttocks—key body parts

that open to the external world in ways that betray the classical impregnable male

body. Earth is also associated with the female body, which is the antithesis of the

ideal and rational male body, and which is associated with death. By contrast,

heaven is the element of idealised perfection and is associated with the face or

head, which patriarchy aligns with rational thought and masculinity.

Wolfgang Kayser, in his examination of the grotesque in art and literature,

argues that the grotesque ‘contradicts the very laws which rule our familiar world’

(1981, p. 31). The grotesque points to the forbidden and dangerous. However, as

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the association of the grotesque with nature and maternity suggests, the grotesque

also has a generative power. Bakhtin himself argues that the grotesque has ‘an

element of birth, of renascence (the maternal breasts)’ (1984, p. 21), so that once

the subject is lowered to its earthly position it reaches ‘the reproductive lower

stratum, the zone in which conception and a new birth take place’ (p. 21). It is in

this sense that contemporary feminist literature takes possession of the grotesque

female body and reconceives it as an exclusive powerhouse of regeneration that

the male body can never emulate.

Why is the grotesque funny?

Given its reliance on the unnatural or incongruous, the grotesque is not only

potentially shocking and horrific but also potentially surprising and comic. The

ironic mirror of the grotesque provides an uncanny moment of realisation of one’s

mortality that nevertheless remains safely distanced in its nonsense. In his book

on comedy, Andrew Stott states that ‘the grotesque could be described as an

embodiment of the abject. A form of humorous monstrosity devised for satiric

purposes, the grotesque marries the repulsive and the comic’ (2005, p. 87).

However, while grotesque formations can bring delight in their playful silliness,

the nonsense is never complete. Wolfgang Kayser suggests that grotesque images

disturb ‘cultural order by depicting life not only as playfully gay and carelessly

fantastic, but also something ominous and sinister’ (1981, p. 21). A humorous

response to the grotesque helps to distance the viewer from what could be a

terrifying realisation about themselves; but no matter how far the grotesque

exceeds us, the dark and horrible other that we see in the grotesque nevertheless

reflects our natural mortal bodies.

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The human body is a site for grotesque humour because there is a tension

between the idealised body and the abject body and its functions, represented by

the genitals, the anus, urine, blood, vomit, and excrement. Laughter, mockery and

satire relieve the fear of mortality that the abject body incites (as we see in

responses to horror films, to return to Creed’s example)—at the same time that

laughter itself ironically emphasises the grotesque body. Stott makes precisely this

point in regard to women’s laughter and the grotesque. He argues that women

‘have been systematically denied the power to be funny’ (2005, p. 99), especially

because ‘comedy is culturally associated with a degree of sexual openness’ (p.

99). As a result, women who are funny and women who are laughing are

‘fearfully bodily and biological creatures’ (p. 100) who pose a threat to ‘the ideals

of beauty and romance transposed onto women by men’ (p. 100). Nancy Walker

notes ‘that a woman’s artistic forthrightness has traditionally been equated with

sexual indiscretion’ (1995, p. 25). In other words, the laughing woman is doubly

abjected: firstly, as a non-man, and secondly as a gaping grotesquery.

However, it is precisely through humour and the grotesque that some

feminist literature works to challenge patriarchal norms. In a patriarchal world,

the abjected female body can never be completely ignored because patriarchy

must measure the idealised male form against its imperfect opposite. Thus, when

feminist literature deploys the abjected female body for its own purpose of

ridiculing patriarchal standards, that grotesque feminine form becomes an

instrument of power and humour.

As I have stated, humorous feminist literature uses the grotesque to

subvert the symbolic order that abjects and objectifies femininity and the female

body. Additionally, comic feminist literature itself becomes grotesque according

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to the laws of the androcentric unconscious. Patriarchy abjects the female body

that threatens the clean and absolute male body. The woman who laughs at that

abjection is thus doubly grotesque and dangerous because her laughter depletes

the grotesque feminine of its horror. While the female body is always already

contained in the realm of representation, it causes dread when it threatens to

disorder the very culture that contains it. In a patriarchal context, the dominant

voices of male culture-makers have used their privilege to name subordinates.

Thus, the labelling of the grotesque is always an act of power. Peter Stallybrass

and Allon White agree that ‘with the most powerful socio-economic groups

existing at the centre of power, it is they that generally gain the authority to

designate what is to be taken as high and low society’ (1986, p. 4). However,

marginalised groups can reappropriate the grotesque, as we see in feminist

literature, through transgressive strategies of political irony, condescension or

satiric wit. In Feminist alternatives (1990), Nancy Walker makes a clear

connection between humour and negation of dominant ideologies or discourses.

She states that ‘pointing to the absurdity of the official languages of a culture is a

method used commonly by members of oppressed groups’ (p. 44), and that ‘the

initial step in negating the hegemony of oppressive language is to question its

authority by making fun of it’ (p. 44). Irony is an important comic strategy here.

In The disobedient writer Walker notes that ‘by inviting the reader to mistrust

what is said, the ironic writer causes us to question all reality’ (1995, p. 28),

partaking in ‘a reading that resists sexist and racist formulations’ and ‘that results

in a new text that attempts to overturn these formulations’ (p. 3). Using ‘irony sets

up tension between opposites’ (Rishel 2002, p. 159) and ‘appeals to the intellect’

(Rishel 2002, p. 159) of its readers.

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Feminist literature such as Angela Carter’s Nights at the circus (1984), to

which I will now turn my attention, resists the power of horror that unconscious

patriarchal structures locate in the grotesque female body, often using humour to

make explicit and to ridicule the androcentric bias of the social order. This text

demonstrates the way feminist literature uses humour to reclaim the grotesque

female body as a site of power rather than disgust, and to expose and challenge

the androcentric unconscious narratives that marginalise othered subjects.

Nights at the circus

Angela Carter’s Nights at the circus (1984) is a humorous feminist text that

reclaims and revises the language of the dominant patriarchal culture to re-

envision femininity and the female body. In this novel, Carter subverts masculine

authority and its definition of grotesque femininity. Female flesh, raucous

laughter, and fantastic stories are the locus of power in a narrative of social

transformation. Using narrative strategies such as irony, metafiction, polyphony

and the inversion of the grotesque, Carter’s work comically destabilises dominant

patriarchal culture that names women’s bodies grotesque.

Maria Biscaia, in her discussion of the novel, claims that polyphony ‘has

become a central trait of the twentieth and twenty-first century novel’ (2011, p.

33). She also argues that the grotesque

has comfortably settled and grown [in] postmodern literature by reason of its

preoccupation with Otherness and its audacity in investigating the human

condition, particularly through the novel which presents the best tools to develop

the dialogic potential of the grotesque (p. 431).

Carter’s novel certainly highlights its polyphonic or multi-voiced nature in

ways that destabilise the socially constructed and abjected femininity of dominant

discourse. At the start of the novel Fevvers, the winged aerialist, dictates her life

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story to Walser, a young New York journalist who is traveling the world ‘for a

series of interviews tentatively entitled: “Great Humbugs of the World”’ (Carter

1984, p. 8). The fact that Walser has selected Fevvers as his initial example of a

‘humbug’ relays to the reader that he is invested with the authority to casually

determine the truth about women, supported by a media corporation that finances

him to ‘travel wherever he pleases whilst retaining the privileged irresponsibility

of the journalist’ (p. 6). After this introduction to Fevvers and her unusual origins,

the narrative voice shifts from the protagonist’s first-person narrative to Walser’s

internal thoughts, and then the narration shifts again to Lizzie (Fevvers’ adoptive

mother-cum-manager), changing from a first-person narrator and then to a third-

person narrator. As in many of Carter’s texts, intertextuality also introduces

polyphony, repeating and revising the narrative voices of an earlier tradition,

plundering literary history for its feminist agenda. Greek and Roman mythology,

the Bible, and traditional fairy tales are some of the texts alluded to in the novel.

The myth of Icarus is reflected in the scene in which Fevvers and Lizzie climb to

the roof of Ma Nelson’s brothel for Fevvers’ first flight. Lizzie pushes Fevvers off

into the air in the same way that Daedalus does to launch Icarus. The myth of

Helen of Troy hatching out of an egg is reflected in Fevvers’ own account of her

birth from an egg. The painting of Leda and the Swan that hangs on Ma Nelson’s

drawing room wall is another intertextual reference that also results in the egg

from which Helen hatched. Roman mythology provides Fevvers with the role of

Cupid, which she plays as a young girl while ‘the ladies introduced themselves to

the gentlemen’ (p. 22). The first bloom of Fevvers’ wings inspires Ma Nelson to

say, ‘To think we’ve entertained an angel unawares!’ (p. 25). Here Fevvers

assumes the role of an angel in the brothel, which references Coventry Patmore’s

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(1854) ‘Angel in the house,’ a well-known Victorian poem that I will discuss

shortly. But the notion of the angelic house-bound woman is demolished when

Fevvers instead spreads her wings and leaves the confines of Ma Nelson’s brothel,

which itself is a mockery of the loving woman Patmore describes as the angel in

the house.

At the heart of Carter’s text is the polyphonic fracturing of the

misogynistic voice of patriarchy, specifically in relation to the female body.

Carter endows Fevvers with a cornucopia of grotesque body parts and behaviours:

an extraordinary raucous and metallic voice, a larger-than-life body, enormous

feet, teeth as big and carnivorous as those of Red Riding Hood’s grandmother,

gargantuan enthusiasm, and table manners of the Elizabethan variety. Fevvers’

first attempts at flying serve to remind her of her own grotesqueness:

Like Lucifer, I fell. Down, down, down I tumbled, bang with a bump on the

Persian rug below me, flat on my face amongst those blooms and beasts that

never graced no natural forest (p. 31).

In that moment she thinks, ‘I knew I was not yet ready to bear on my back

the great burden of my unnaturalness’ (p. 31). However, Carter’s grotesque

protagonist Fevvers, rather than inciting disgust, grows into her larger-than-life

form and displays it to a willing public who find her sexually desirable.

Fevvers seems to relish her gargantuan body and knows that it acts as an

aphrodisiac for rich and powerful men. Before a performance as an aerialist, when

she dropped her wrap and donned her plumed topknot, it was as though a huge,

not altogether friendly bird appeared among them. She cast a glance at the

opulence reflected in the mirror, admired her own bosom. In the auditorium, they

demanded her. (p. 211)

Walser, although not rich, is one of these powerful men who desire her. He

is aware that Fevvers uses theatrical deception as part of her arsenal to maintain

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the ambiguity of her body, and he wishes to see beyond her confidence trick to the

truth. At the same time, he is overawed by Fevvers’ embodiment. Fevvers

foregoes the feminine convention of reassuring others and ‘ignore[s] his

discomfiture’ during the distillation of her tale. She

yawn[s] with prodigious energy, opening up a crimson maw the size of that of a

basking shark . . . and then she stretche[s] herself suddenly and hugely, extending

every muscle as a cat does (p. 57).

Walser, ‘confronted by stubbled, thickly powdered armpits, fe[els] faint;

God! She could easily crush him to death in her huge arms’ (p. 57). Fevvers is a

marvellous giantess, endowed with ‘gargantuan enthusiasm’ (p. 21), and when she

shakes Walser’s hand as they depart after the night of storytelling she has ‘a

strong, firm, masculine grip’ (p. 103). The feminine grotesque is represented as

independent and physically powerful in a way that defies masculine

objectification.

The comic strategy of irony is at work here in disrupting the grotesque

female body and opening up the concept of the grotesque or abject female body to

a different meaning. Linda Hutcheon theorises irony as occurring at the edge of

what she describes as discursive communities (1994, p. 123), in which its

doubleness—its communication of something that might not be held to be true—

challenges certainty. She suggests that irony is neither the thing it purports to be,

nor its opposite, but a third meaning that is relational to both. This third meaning

involves ‘the oscillating yet simultaneous perception of plural and different

meanings’ (p. 66). Hutcheon states that

for those positioned within a dominant ideology, such a contesting might be seen

as abusive or threatening; for those marginalized and working to undo that

dominance, it might be subversive or transgressive (p. 52, italics and bold in

original).

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The irony in Carter’s feminist text plunders the dominant ideology’s

meaning of the female grotesque and infers a new meaning that disrupts the power

relations inherent in the ideology.

Fevvers embodies the elements inherent in the grotesque: she is part

woman, part animal; she performs acts of superhuman ability; she has oversized

limbs, eyes, mouth, and bottom; and she gorges herself on food and champagne.

Nevertheless, she is powerful and affable, rather than alien. The otherness that

Fevvers represents is also ironically undermined as she takes over the narrative,

becoming the subject of her own story rather than the object of the masculine

gaze. This coincides with the ways in which Fevvers flees the entrapment of the

powerful men who repeatedly desire her.

Using the comic strategy of irony, Carter takes a powerful gendered

language—that of the grotesque—and turns it on itself. In fact, the narrative

craftily twists meaning and interrupts expectations, as apparent in the description

of Fevvers’ dressing room: ‘the room, in all, was a mistresspiece of exquisitely

feminine squalor’ (p. 8). Here the narrative borrows the authority inferred in the

word ‘masterpiece’ and transfers it to ‘mistresspiece,’ imbuing grotesque

femininity with masculine power and authority. As Fevvers lets ‘a ripping fart

ring round the room’ (p. 8), the narrator wonders at her ‘bonhommerie—

bonfemmerie?’ (p. 8), testing the reader’s willingness to reimagine the pejorative

French term, ‘bonne femme’—old woman—into the masculine ‘bon homme’—

good man. At such points in the narrative, Carter directly challenges and recasts

the gendered language that names the female grotesque.

The female voices in this text satirise the dominant cultural expectations of

femininity. As noted briefly earlier, it is possible to read this novel as a parodic

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and acerbic rejoinder to Coventry Patmore’s nineteenth-century poem ‘Angel in

the house’ (1854). While parody will be discussed in detail in the final chapter of

this exegesis, it is worth noting briefly here its intimate relationship with irony, as

theorised by Hutcheon. In this poem, Patmore’s idealised woman is domestic,

docile, obedient, and angelic. Carter, however, creates an altogether different

angel in the house. Her protagonist has the wings of an angel but none of the

docility and blind obedience. Carter favours a larger-than-life aerialist whose

physicality opposes Patmore’s passive feminine attributes. At the age of seven,

Fevvers’ guardians notice little downy buds on her shoulder blades and at once

declare her ‘Cupid! Why, here’s our very own Cupid in the living flesh!’ (1984, p.

22). Fevvers explains to Walser in her dressing room how she first ‘earned her

crust’ (p. 23), sitting in the alcove of the drawing-room of the brothel house in

which she was living, where she literally became the angel in the whorehouse—

‘the guardian cherub of the house’ (p. 23). The ironic twist is that this ‘angel’ rises

beyond the roof of the house and literally flies away from domesticity and

servitude.

Parody and irony form part of the polyphonic strategy of the novel, and the

related device of metafictionality further draws out the cultural voices that have

created, as Judith Butler describes in Bodies That Matter, a ‘discursive practice

that enacts or produces that which it names’ (1993, p. 13). Carter’s refusal to

reinforce one single view of gender, challenging the reiterative performance of

gender that Judith Butler and later Pierre Bourdieu (2001) discuss, is itself a

grotesque act that invites the reader to laugh at rigid identities and social

constructs.

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Carter essentially rewrites the ‘monstrous feminine,’ the trope of the

powerful woman identified by Creed in horror films, but not by offering its

opposite of a docile and consumable femininity. Fevvers portrays confidence,

independence, entrepreneurial initiative, greed, and self-determination on a

gargantuan scale, even to the point of self-endangerment. Her greed blinds her

sense of self-preservation, for instance when she enters a transaction with a Grand

Duke: she offers him a chance to experience her exotic body in exchange for

diamonds to match the bracelet and earrings he has already gifted her. In the

marble halls of the Grand Duke’s mansion she ‘smiles like a predator’ and tells

herself, ‘Here comes Property Redistribution Inc. to take away your diamonds,

Grand Duke’ (p. 218). But she finds the Grand Duke’s wealth and his grotesque

manner disgusting; he ‘presse[s] his bearded mouth to the palm, giving her a

sensation of hot, wet, turbulent, unpleasant hairiness’ (p. 217). The reader is asked

to both laugh at and find grotesque the romanticised exchange that is traditionally

represented in popular culture as a treat for the woman and empowering for the

man. Indeed, Carter refuses to adhere to the traditional storyline of the beautiful

passive woman who submits to the wealthy older man, and before Fevvers is

overwhelmed by greed for the Grand Duke’s riches, ‘she contemplate[s] life as a

toy’ (p. 225) and, with ‘the bitter knowledge that she’[s] been fooled’ (p. 226),

forgoes the dazzling riches he owns and returns to her freedom with her loving

mother Lizzie. Thus, Carter’s novel continually challenges patriarchal notions of

the grotesque through its comic strategies and turns of narration, tapping into the

ambiguity and polyphony of the grotesque tradition to challenge univocal and

masculine authority.

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Pig tales

Marie Darrieussecq’s Pig tales (1990), like Carter’s Nights at the Circus, is at

once a humorous rebuttal of absurd notions of the female grotesque and a

terrifying representation of misogynistic attitudes that sexualise and victimise

women. Darrieussecq’s first-person narration limits the reader’s perspective and

forces them to co-experience the protagonist’s transformation from a young

woman into a living, snuffling, mud-wallowing pig. The reader becomes aware

that the further the protagonist’s sexualisation advances the more like a pig she

becomes, until her complete sexualisation coincides with her full transformation

into a sow. Thus literalisation (of metaphor) is employed as a comic strategy.

Darrieussecq further undermines dominant discourses surrounding femininity

with the use of grotesque humour centred on bodily functions. The result is the

absurd and ambiguous defamiliarisation of normative ideas of femininity.

This section of the chapter will analyse how Pig tales uses grotesque

humour to challenge the objectification and consumption of the female body in

the patriarchal order. The novel comically literalises how the grotesque

characteristics associated with pigs, such as greed, dirtiness and excessive

behaviour, are also misogynistically linked to women’s bodies, thus challenging

questionable notions of femininity, female sexual desire, and the consumable

female body.

As noted, the epistolary novel limits the reader to a single perspective.

This invites intimacy but is also defamiliarising because the distance between the

protagonist’s experience and what the reader experiences (provided by third-

person narration, for example) is absent. Indeed, the humour in this novel is

derived, in part, from the tension between the reader’s presumed knowledge of

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human sexual development and the narrator’s innocence at her sexually

developing body. The novel uses the grotesque, which Kayser claims is ‘a play

with the absurd’ (1981, p. 187), to undermine patriarchal ideals; a fully grown

woman-pig recounts ridiculous and horrific attitudes to women’s sexuality. The

narrator reverses the patriarchal mirror that would reflect women’s bodies as

grotesque, and instead shows the grotesque nature of the patriarchal ideology that

conceives of women’s bodies in this way. In addition, the novel portrays

masculine power as horrific and unnatural.

As the narrator’s sexual and animal transformation takes place, the first-

person narrator reveals her burgeoning sexual drive and an overpowering desire to

eat, sexual and culinary appetites having been historically linked. However, both

pursuits are represented as natural and satisfying rather than excessive and greedy.

The piggy protagonist develops a barnyard appetite that sees her gobble gifted

flowers, snuffle up acorns strewn in the park, and rummage through garbage

scattered in the street. As these developments occur she recounts to the reader the

bizarre and often horrific treatment she receives at the hands of her employer and

clients, her boyfriend and even her mother, because of her transformation into a

woman with appetite. As the bodily metamorphosis advances she develops extra

teats, begins to grunt in her sleep and moan during sex, behaviours that confuse

her boyfriend, who is both repulsed and attracted by these changes. Pig informs

the reader: ‘Honoré said my grunting bothered him, then it was my squealing;

when he wouldn’t sleep with me anymore, I slept in the living room. It was better

for both us, since I could sprawl comfortably on my side and snore’ (Darrieussecq

1990, p. 20). She then finds her female sex organs more overtly rejected:

There was a changing room reserved in Honoré’s name when we arrived, which

made me feel wonderful. I thought it was a good omen that he’d arranged

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everything beforehand. In the cubicle Honoré managed to rise to the occasion and

sodomize me. I think he couldn’t bear even to think about my vagina any more.

(p. 47)

During this encounter Pig describes her ‘unparalleled view of her vulva,’

noticing ‘the greater labia were hanging down a mite lower than usual’ (p. 47).

Thus, Pig refuses to recognise any horror associated with her sexuality, though

she does reflect on patriarchal cruelty, recalling how the Ancient Romans served a

dish of stuffed sow vulva, which she describes as ‘a culinary practice that was

both macho and cruel to animals’ (p. 47).

As the narrative progresses, Pig begins to wet the bed, her hair begins to

fall out and then what remains of her hair turns bristly, she develops skin

eruptions and an allergy to makeup, and her eyes seem smaller and her nose

begins to look slightly piggish. In response, the men who visit the perfume retail

outlet where she works display increasing sexual desire that she describes as

animalistic. The narrator relates the story of a client who hires her for a week,

portraying male rather than female sexuality as perverse:

The marabout laughed a lot over the difference in our colours, with him so black

and me so pink, it fired his appetite. We always had to get down on all fours in

front of the mirror and make animal noises. Men are really strange. (p. 32)

Linda Hutcheon discusses the way an ironist is able to target a system, of

which the ironist is also a part, ‘to produce different ends’ (1994, p. 16).

Darrieussecq ironises the situation by placing the focus on the pig’s observations,

which reveal the ideological system that creates her, and which shows the

absurdity of a masculinity that reduces women to animal objects in order to be

able to embrace their own animalism. As Walker puts it, ‘irony is a mask that the

reader is invited to see as a mask in order to view simultaneously the reality

underneath it’ (1990, p. 27, italics in original).

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Indeed, irony is central to this novel, as it was to Carter’s text. To begin

with, there is the ironic conceit of a pig writing her own tale. When the narrator

apologises for her ‘piggy squiggles’ (Darrieussecq 1996, p. 1) at the outset of the

novel, she flags not only an ironic position but also a subversive one. Here we

have not only a pig but also a woman appropriating the literary tradition that

excludes her. She even comically and condescendingly simplifies her language so

that the publishing gatekeepers will accept her claim that women experience

double standards in a male dominated culture. The narrator explains that she

hopes the publisher is ‘gracious enough to take into consideration the enormous

effort’ she is making ‘to write as legibly as possible’ (p. 1), even though, of

course, the type on the page is perfectly clear. In other words, the narrator is

reminding the reader of the extra effort a pig, or a woman, must make to be

noticed in a male dominated industry.

Irony can work to flag an absurdity or to point to an incongruity of a

received tradition. Walker makes the point that irony is a way of negating the

truth or validity of a received tradition and pointing to its incongruity or absurdity

(1990, p. 22). It becomes apparent, in this opening gambit of Pig tales, that the

author is ironically signalling her intent that publishers (who are statistically more

likely to be male) will have difficulty comprehending this text not because it is

written in so called piggy squiggles, but because the narrative directs its gaze

toward the absurd way in which men treat women as sex objects. The narrator

seems to be speaking slowly as if explaining a particularly tricky subject—

women’s subjectivity—to an uncomprehending audience. The narrator goes on to

suggest that this text is dangerous not only for the publisher but also for the

reader. In this case, the irony flags the dangerous act of a discourse that rewrites

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femininity as a natural state and refuses to reiterate negative unnatural

characterisations of femininity. Hutcheon explains that irony, used in this way,

exploits ‘in order to recode into positive terms what patriarchal discourse reads as

negative’ (1994, p. 32). For the reader to recognise the irony he or she must

belong to a discursive community with a ‘mutually shared factual background’

(Hutcheon 1994, p. 99); or, as Simon Critchley puts it, ‘there must be a tacit

consensus or implicit shared understanding’ (2002, p. 4) between the sender and

the receiver for humour to work. The narrator seems aware of this fact in the

opening passage of the novel, and the humour is, of course, pertinent to this

problem.

In The modern satiric grotesque and its traditions, John Clark suggests

that ‘the grotesque is repeatedly associated with gross unnatural distortions’

(1991, p. 19), but that successful satire ‘comingles the comic and the gross into a

kind of witty grotesque’ (p. 53). The humour in this text draws on grotesque

imagery to expose and critique the horror invested in women’s bodies by those in

power. It exposes misogynistic ideologies as absurd. It also mocks the alleged

superiority of the pig’s male sexual partners, who perform grotesque acts on her.

After establishing a regular clientele at her perfume retail outlet, Pig describes her

clients, who act out their newly unleashed desires, as savage, wild-eyed and acting

as though they were from the jungle. However, it is her natural sexuality and her

sexual agency that are demonised. What the men want from her is a carefully

stylised performance of femininity—one equated with the carefully stylised

performance of sexual pleasure, epitomised by the faked orgasm. When she stops

faking her sexual response and begins genuinely enjoying herself, her clients, her

employer and her boyfriend find her disgusting. She tells the reader that

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even though I had to restrain my ardour and put up with their unnatural fancies

(you know what I mean), I sometimes got off anyway. And some of those old

customers pointed out to me somewhat reproachfully that my way of shouting

had changed considerably. Naturally, since I’d been faking it before. If you

follow me. (Darrieussecq 1990, p. 30)

There is a strong cultural association between humans and pigs. Marvin

Harris, who researches the relationship between pigs and humans in Cows, pigs,

wars and witches (1989), charts the history of both positive and negative

connotations associated with pigs. In early societies, pigs competed with humans

for food and shelter. Unlike cows, sheep and goats, pigs relied on nuts, fruits,

tubers and especially grains for sustenance. This put pigs in direct competition

with their human keepers. Pigs and humans are also alike in other ways. A pig’s

soft pink skin is sensitive to sunlight in the same way as human skin, and pigs will

seek to cover their skin in mud if it is available for this reason. The misconception

that they are filthy creatures arises because a pig will roll in its own waste if

shelter is not available to protect it from the heat and sun. This fact underlies the

negative connotation that pigs are filthy. On the positive end of this spectrum,

pigs provide a waste-disposal service for their keepers because they will eat scraps

from the kitchen, and in turn convert that waste into a rich food source for their

keeper. For this reason, pigs were penned close to or within the home rather than

in fields away from the home as other animals were. Another reason pigs were

penned is that unlike other ‘domestic animals [that] were valued primarily as

sources of milk, cheese, hides dung, fiber, and traction for plowing’ (Harris 1989,

p. 43), pigs could not be herded or milked and preferred shade and mud holes.

Additionally, Harris notes that pigs are maladapted to the climate in Middle

Eastern countries where the Bible and Koran arose, in which pig prohibition is

encoded, because it is too hot for pigs to survive. This factor, Harris suggests, is

the basis for the prohibition of pig meat in early Christian and Islamic societies.

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Attitudes to women in early cultures also considered women as more dangerous

than men. John Gould examines the record of women in ancient myths and

remarks that ‘men have their own unlimited and competitive aggression to fear,

but they have to fear too the devious and consciously destructive sex of women,

and what that brings is death’ (1980, p. 55). To this day, to be piggish is to

succumb to animalistic behaviour such as being filthy, greedy, and uncontrolled.

Women, in patriarchal society, are sometimes conflated with pigs because of these

negative connotations, especially when they behave in ways that challenge norms

associated with femininity. The insult, ‘fat pig’, is slung at women who have

supposedly transgressed in some way or who refuse to comply with cultural

norms associated with physical appearance. Women, in a patriarchal society, are

also consumed in that they are objects for male consumption. Carol Adams, who

links the oppression of animals with the oppression of women in The sexual

politics of meat (2000), argues that once a person or animal is objectified, the one

who imposes the oppression violates the objectified either by denying them their

freedom or by slaughtering them (p. 73). Adams proposes

a cycle of objectification, fragmentation, and consumption which links butchering

and sexual violence in our culture. Objectification allows an oppressor to view

another being as an object. The oppressor then violates this being by object-like

treatment: e.g. the rape of women that denies women freedom to say no, or the

butchering of animals that converts animals from living breathing beings into

dead objects. This process allows fragmentation, or brutal dismemberment, and

finally consumption. While the occasional man may literally eat women, we all

consume visual images of women all the time. Consumption is the fulfilment of

oppression, the annihilation of will, of separate identity. (p. 73)

In Pig tales, the protagonist crosses over from consumable woman to

consumable pig. She is vilified in both roles. But in an act of defiance Pig refuses

to be a consumer of pig meat, which is to say that she refuses to masochistically

comply with the patriarchal order that consumes meat (women). Instead, she

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prefers slices of potato in her sandwich. She relates an episode during which her

boyfriend Honoré prepares a meal for her:

He wanted to please me by doing the shopping for once and preparing a little

charcuterie party for the two of us at home. Well when I saw the potted pork, I

just threw up then and there, in the kitchen. (Darrieussecq 1990, p. 40; italics in

original)

It is a comic image that also marks the point at which the protagonist

begins refusing the objectification of her body. Pig’s refusal to continue eating

pork represents her refusal to allow the consumption of her own body, figured as

pig-like and grotesque. As Adams notes,

with the lens of feminist interpretation, we can see that the animal’s position in

the story of meat is that of the woman’s in traditional patriarchal narrative; she is

the object to be possessed (2000, p. 105).

Instead, in Pig Tales, those bodily qualities that cultural attitudes designate

as the feminine grotesque, such as being fat, being in possession of a vagina,

having a big mouth and demonstrating a vigorous appetite for food and sex, are

qualities in which the protagonist begins to revel.

The grotesque points to the forbidden and dangerous, and in a patriarchal

society it has been uncritically associated with women’s bodies. Revisionist

feminist literature like Nights at the circus and Pig tales appropriates the abjected

female body, the repository of this fear, and comically undermines the logic and

power structures that name it thus. At the heart of Carter’s text is the embrace of

the grotesque feminine body as powerful, and the ironic polyphonic fracturing of

the single misogynistic voice of patriarchy. Darrieussecq also embraces the

grotesque female body, while also showing the absurdity of that misogynistic

concept, and extending the grotesque to the masculine. The disobedient feminist

writer, as Walker (1995) argues, negates the power of the dominant authority by

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appropriating its language and cultural artefacts, and deconstructing its ideologies.

Humour and narrative strategies such as irony, satire, polyphony and metafiction

create new meaning. Grotesque humour, in particular, has a regenerative element

that feminist literature seizes to empower female subjectivity and to ridicule

traditional patriarchal attitudes to femininity.

Chapter 3

Parodic feminist literature: Margaret Atwood’s

Penelopiad and Danielle Wood’s Rosie Little’s cautionary

tales for girls

For centuries, critics have equated parody with laughter and ridicule; ridicule that

condemns an origin text and suggests it is no longer worthy of its former literary

status. But more nuanced thinking has emerged in the twentieth and twenty-first

centuries suggesting that parody works in more sophisticated ways. For example,

a parody can be subversive and challenge long-held beliefs, working in large-scale

ways to critique power structures in society; or it can work in smaller ways,

offering an individual critique of an author or a specific work of literature, art or

architecture. In this chapter, I will discuss how feminist literature employs parody

as a subversive political tool to critique patriarchal values associated with

femininity.

While the reappropriation of the grotesque apparent in Carter’s and

Darrieussecq’s novels is evidence of the comic strategy of parody, my analysis

here will focus on two texts that renounce women’s silence in the origin texts they

parody. Recent 20th century literary theorists who focus on parody, from the

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Russian Formalists through to Linda Hutcheon, argue against a critical view from

past centuries that demotes parody to be a lesser-valued art form. Instead, they

develop new theories that reinstate parody’s value as a defamiliarising tool for

cultural criticism. The feminist texts I discuss deploy parody for its comic and

critical repurposing and revisionary ability. Their acts of subversion destabilise

notions of passive femininity that have persisted from antiquity into contemporary

culture. Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad (2005a), which parodies The Odyssey

(Powell 2014), and Danielle Wood’s Rosie Little’s cautionary tales for girls

(2006), which draws on a range of texts such as stories from the Bible and fairy

stories, deploys revisionary humour to challenge cultural texts and traditions that

position women as objects who are acted upon by men. These parodic texts

acquire what some recent theorists such as Margaret Rose (1993) and Robert

Chambers (2010) have called multistability. Parodies are multistable because they

hold both the origin text and the parodied text within the one text. This means that

the reader who identifies the origin text at the same time as taking in the parody is

exposed to a further reading of the origin text; the self-reflexivity of the new work

in relation to the old prompts the reader to generate a third, new meaning.

However, because a parody relies on readers’ prior knowledge of the origin text

for it to work, the potential for multiple readings can fail to be activated. The

multistable feminist texts I discuss work to open a space for women’s voices that

allows revisionary viewpoints to emerge from a patriarchal structure by parodying

universally familiar narratives.

What is parody?

Parody theorists, much like parodic writers, look back in order to look forward. I

will follow their practice, beginning with a consideration of the origins of parody

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in Ancient Greece before examining scholarly theorisation through the ensuing

centuries, in order to arrive at an understanding of feminist parody at work today.

In Parody: ancient, modern, and postmodern, Margaret Rose (1993) describes

how parody operated in the theatrical culture of Ancient Greece. It was not a

minor artistic form as many view it today, but a central part of Ancient Greek

culture. Plays, performed in tetralogies, included a satyr play that reworked in

comic form the serious content at Dionysian festivals. Thus parodia, or parody, as

we know it, had a clear target and was designed to provide cathartic or emotional

relief by eliciting laughter. The Ancient Greek parodies, Rose states, created

humour by then rewriting the plot or characters so that there was some comic

contrast with the more ‘serious’ form of the work, and/or create comedy by

mixing references to the more serious aspects and characters of the epic with

comically lowly and inappropriate figures from the everyday or animal world

(1993, p. 15).

This dynamic between the source and parodic texts thus generates humour

from irony or incongruity. Frank Lelièvre similarly summarises the techniques

and purposes of Ancient Greek parody, while also referring to parody’s

development as a form by comic poets (such as Aristophanes) who made use of

serious poetry, chiefly tragedy, to ‘make play with material of a serious work’

(Lelièvre 1954, p. 73). This involved, in part, mimicking and mocking the style of

an author: ‘selecting and illuminating the special characteristics of the author

whose material is employed’ (p. 81). However, as Lelièvre argues, parody was

often not only mimicry but also ‘a form of criticism using the medium of humour’

(p. 74). In the Ancient Greek tradition, parody examined social and religious

issues or criticised politics and politicians. Aristophanes is the most critically

acclaimed of the ancient poets who wrote Old Comedy. Shomit Dutta in Greek

tragedy states that Old Comedy

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directly confronts topical socio-political and cultural issues; it includes vitriolic

abuse of well-known individuals as well as uninhibited obscenity and slapstick; it

shows a marked propensity to the fantastic and the absurd (2004, p. 185).

Angus Bowie in Aristophanes: myth, ritual and comedy adds that

Aristophanic comedy did ‘not so much lecture or preach at its audience, as offer it

ways of looking at itself’ (1993, p. 14). Parody had aesthetic and social value for

doing so, and according to Malcolm Heath’s translation of Aristotle’s Poetics,

Aristotle asserted that ‘comedy is an imitation of inferior people—not, however,

with respect to every kind of defect: the laughable is a species of what is

disgraceful’ (1996, p. 9). However, by the seventeenth century, the view on

parody had changed. As Mikhail Bakhtin argues, ‘in modern times the functions

of parody are narrow and unproductive. Parody has grown sickly, its place in

modern literature is insignificant’ (1981, p. 71). Parody’s reputation further

deteriorated in the Romantic period in relation to the increasing value of

individuality when it came to Romantic understandings of the creative act.

Humour also lost value, as Linda Hutcheon suggests when she notes that

nineteenth-century English literary critics felt humour in literature ‘appeared to

subvert the dignity of art’ (2000, p. 77). Parody fell into this category of

humorous literature and also lost its value as a critical tool.

Contemporary theorists have re-examined parody to argue that it performs

an important role in social criticism rather than merely imitating or ridiculing

another author or author’s work. Mikhail Bakhtin (1981) in The dialogic

imagination suggests that ‘late forms of literary parody, forms of the type

represented by Scarron’s Énèide travestie, or Platen’s “Verhängnisvolle Gabel,”

that is, the impoverished, superficial and historically least significant forms’

(1981, p. 52) formed the basis of critical thinking in relation to parody in previous

centuries. Paul Scarron’s writing focussed on the burlesque, a comic form of

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writing, and according to Joe Carson, Scarron’s language ‘is closer to what might,

perhaps anachronistically, be termed schoolboy humour’ (2004, p. 87), noting that

Scarron’s work fell into ‘the baser elements of this form of comedy’ (p. 85).

August von Platen hit out at his contemporaries, the satirist Karl Immermann and

Heinrich Heine, with ‘an “Aristophanic” comedy . . . portraying Immermann as an

obsolescent Romantic’ (Sammons 1989) in a public spat that ‘damaged the

careers and reputations’ of them all. Bakhtin goes on to argue that

these impoverished and limited conceptions of the nature of the parodying and

travestying word were then retroactively applied to the supremely rich and varied

world of parody and travesty in the previous ages (1981, p. 52).

Hutcheon notes in A theory of parody that the Russian Formalists, before

Bakhtin, revisited parody as a form of writing and argued that it was a way of

estranging accepted life to look on it anew, ‘of denuding contrast, of

defamiliarizing “trans-contextualization,” or of deviation from aesthetic norms’

(Hutcheon 2000, p. 35). The Formalists, who influence Bakhtin, argued that to

parody was not to ridicule but to re-examine what seemed normal. Hutcheon is

herself one of the twentieth-century literary theorists who have transformed

thinking about parody, suggesting that parody works to re-examine accepted

beliefs and to offer alternative points of view when it comes to tradition.

Rose builds on the ideas of the Russian Formalists and Bakhtin’s theory of

carnival to suggest that parody invites renewal. The humour generated by parody

is central to this. For Rose, ‘parody may aim both at a comic effect and at the

transmission of both complex and serious messages’ (1993, p. 29). When we

perceive something as incongruous and therefore humorous, as Morreall writes in

regard to the incongruity theory of humour, this response comes from ‘the fact

that human experience works with learned patterns’ (2009, p. 10). When

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something associated with a ‘learned pattern’ does not materialise we laugh with

surprise, showing how humour can defamiliarise or unsettle our expectations in

ways that mobilise rethinking and renewal. This is the case in relation to parody

and its destabilisation of the source text:

the parodist will usually aim to create a comic or surprise effect by letting readers

or viewers realise that they are receiving something different from the work

which is parodistically imitated (Rose 1993, p. 70).

As Rose puts it, this can be done in such a way as to invite reflection and

criticism:

the parodist may . . . criticize and refunction less self-reflexive works of fiction;

to educate their own readers to a greater awareness of both possibilities and

limitations of fiction; and to create new works from old (p. 99).

However, Rose is also attentive to the role that reader reception plays for a

work to acquire its status of parody (p. 38). Parodic quotations can be useful in

this regard, drawing more direct attention to the source text and allowing the

author

to make ironic or startling comments on them . . . both making the quoted text

appear ‘strange’ . . . and of associating it with the work of the parodist in a

manner in which it was not previously associated (p. 79).

In this way, the parodist who embeds original material signals a

revisionary agenda to the reader, inviting the reader to construct new meaning

from the old.

In Henri Bergson’s essay on laughter, he evokes the way in which

imitation can challenge what he calls ‘automatism’:

to imitate anyone is to bring out the element of automatism he has allowed to

creep into his person. And as this is the very essence of the ludicrous, it is no

wonder that imitation gives rise to laughter. (1900, p. 22)

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In a similar way, Simon Dentith (2002) links parody with imitation, or

repetition, of an original work, and with defamiliarisation and laughter. In

Dentith’s view, parodying is a common social activity that is competitive. His

analysis is awash with military terms such as battle (p. 23), police (p. 27), seize (p.

32), attack (p. 37), skirmish (p. 23), war, and skewers (p. 27), reinforcing his

stance that parody and writing are forms of competition. His approach suggests

that parodies in the postmodern age are cultural practices that are, at least for the

most part, weapons used to resist control and closure, even as they preserve the

form or content being parodied through the mere act of repetition in the

‘competitive relations between texts’ (p. 37). However, he also claims that the

parodies that use repetition challenge some element of the origin work and of

necessity create something new.

After Rose, Dentith portrays parody as, paradoxically, destructive at the

same time as it is regenerative. Parody, he claims, has always played a role in the

various waves of desacralisation of authoritative cultural practices over the

centuries. His analysis ranges from an anti-Jacobin journal in the seventeenth

century that, in his view, had a ‘critically conservative function in defending the

common-sense values of “centrally minded” people against the dangerous

extremes that enthusiastic poets are ever likely to fall into’ (2002, p. 26), to the

twentieth-century novel. He cites authors such as James Joyce, Salman Rushdie,

and Rabelais, among others, portraying their parodic work as ‘scatological,

fantastic, and wildly inclusive of discursive styles drawn from all directions, high

and low, academic and popular’ (p. 78). For Dentith, postmodern parodies are

particularly effective at defamiliarisation because of their multiplicitousness and

their self-consciousness or metafictional nature: they ‘drag into view the modes of

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discourse, other possible ways of understanding the world’ (p. 175). It is through

parody that many humorous feminist texts work to expose rigid patriarchal

ideologies that limit our ‘ways of understanding the world’.

Hutcheon’s analysis in A theory of parody: the teachings of the twentieth-

century art forms (2000) similarly locates parody in the world, rather than simply

seeing it as a practice of ridicule in culture. She argues this is because parody, to

work, requires a decoder (the parodist) and an encoder (the receiver), both of

whom exist as real people in historical and social contexts that differ in ways that

render parody always unstable. Hutcheon argues that the process of receiving and

understanding a parody will vary from culture to culture and from one time-period

to another even within a single culture. She regards the work’s ‘situation in the

world’ (p. xiii), as she puts it, as critical to identifying not only a work as a

parody, but also its potential agency for defamiliarising action. Hutcheon also

draws attention to how parody both distances us and involves us; the reader is

asked to look back from a distance and at the same time to step into the narrative

and participate in it (p. 92). Related to this is parody’s double-voiced nature. The

fact that a parody takes another work as its basis introduces ‘a bitextual synthesis

or a dialogic relation’ (p. xiii), which allows both texts to exist ‘while remaining

distinct in their defining differences’ (p. xiv). Thus, parody’s double-voicedness

does ‘not ridicule the backgrounded texts but use[s] them as standards by which to

place the contemporary under scrutiny’ (p. 57). To take this idea even further,

Hutcheon argues that a parody is a metaphor that goes beyond literature. In this

way parody’s double-voicedness, she suggests, ‘takes on dimensions beyond the

literary confines of the text, becoming a metaphor for broader contexts’ (p. 92). In

other words, parody asks its reader to participate in the generation of different

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texts in different contexts, and the generation of different meanings across

cultures and histories. By recognising a parody, the consumer (whether reader, art

critic or architect) draws the past into the present in a self-reflexive way. The

parody thus forces the consumer to reflect on the social and moral world that

produced the source text as well as on their own cultural world that has produced

the parodic text.

Similarly, in Parody: the art that plays with art, Chambers argues that the

essence of parody ‘is a beside-or-against doubling up of material to create

confounding, ambiguous contrasts’ (2010, p. 4). He focusses on the boundaries

around the origin text and between it and its parody, describing various and

complex ways in which the two texts can be brought together, which he labels

‘bang’, ‘bind’ or ‘blend’ (p. 36). A parody that ‘bangs’ material together abruptly

undercuts the expectations of the reader/viewer; the explosiveness of this action

creates the bang (p. 67). By comparison, other texts ‘bind’ incongruous material

in a manner that he suggests resembles stuffing a sausage; the ‘inappropriate

pairings of conventional elements’ (p. 84) bind together as if they somehow

belong, generating an initial shock that dissipates to enjoyment. The act of binding

makes the elements highly visible and self-disclosing. Examples can be found in

magical realism, mixed media, and hypertextual literature. Finally, a parody that

‘blends’ involves a more seamless joining of material, which Chambers describes

as a dance between the origin text and its parody, and that is playful or has

meaningful contrasts. These forms of parody, he states, create multistable art,

inviting multiple interpretations (p. xi). He likens the linked conclusions to the

yin-yang symbol, which has ‘the illusion of shifting alternatives, each seeming to

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grow out of the other’ (p. 30) and creating the possibility for ‘a bevy of different

potential responses to multistability’ (p. 31).

While I will not engage with Chambers’ categories of parody, the feminist

parodic texts I will now discuss certainly ‘tend to present or to facilitate sets of

contradictory or linked alternative conclusions’ (Chambers 2010, p. 29). As

Hutcheon writes, parody ‘is not a monologic mastery of another’s discourse. It is

a dialogic parodic reappropriation of the past’ (2000, p. 72). However, that

dialogism is also integral to the cultural and political ‘work’ that these parodic

feminist texts aim to achieve. Their parodies maintain and frame their origin texts

in such a way as to invite the contemporary reader to question the authority of the

origin texts and the assumptions around their historical creation. The feminist

parodic texts that I include here, which parody canonical literature, are, in the

words of Laurent Jenny, ‘self-consciously revolutionary texts,’ which ‘rework

those discourses whose weight has become tyrannical’ (cited in Hutcheon 2000, p.

72). They grow from origin texts that have silenced women’s voices. They ask the

reader to view the past with a critical eye in order to place our contemporary

cultural legacies under scrutiny. In this way these parodic texts go beyond the

literary to invite a self-reflexive consideration of the social and moral worlds

generated by different writers and readers.

Feminist Parody

Parody serves the critical function of political subversion in feminist literature

and, in the cases I will discuss, the defamiliarising and satirical power of humour

is integral. Foundational texts of Western culture, such as fairy tales, canonical

fiction, and the Bible, to name a few, are the targets of Danielle Wood’s Rosie

Little’s cautionary tales for girls (2006). Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad

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(2005a) targets the eighth-century BCE text The Odyssey. Fairytales, the Bible

and The Odyssey have been the subject of various parodic revisions. Texts from

Carter’s The bloody chamber (1979) through to the film Shrek (1990) parody

fairytales to far-reaching effects; parodic works that reference The Odyssey

include James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Derek Walcott’s postcolonial

Caribbean epic poem Omeros (1990); and the Bible informs Mel Brook’s The

history of the world, part 1 (1981), Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979), and

Thomas King’s Green grass, running water (1993) for different parodic effects.

There has also been substantial feminist criticism and revisionary interpretation of

the canonical texts and particularly sacred texts such as the Bible, as the

Dictionary of feminist theology (1996) and Laura Donaldson and Kwok Pui-Lan’s

Postcolonialism, feminism & religious discourse (2002) show. What such creative

and critical interventions also remind us, as Alicia Ostriker argues, is that

theological texts are infinitely contestable; it is not just the poet or feminist who

reinterprets, but also ‘Fathers of the church, theologians, scholars, rabbis, priests,

and ministers’ who find ‘what one desires to find, one bends it to one’s wish’

(2008, p. 466). The Bible, Ostriker claims, ‘is a layered text which invites

transgressive as well as orthodox readings’ (p. 467). Fairy tales, as a different type

of foundational text, have also come under the critical eye of academics and

analysts, such as Jack Zipes (1993) and Daniel Haase (2004). However, fairy

tales, originally part of a women’s oral tradition before being appropriated by the

Brothers Grimm and other men for the pleasure and instruction of women and

children in the domestic space, also demonstrate a historical malleability. Danielle

Wood’s Rosie Little’s cautionary tales for girls (2006) and Margaret Atwood’s

The Penelopiad (2005a) are feminist parodies of foundational traditions in

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Western storytelling—from the Homeric myths to modern fairytales—that have

carried patriarchal ideology from the past into the present. These feminist texts

continue the process of parodic contest that challenges the voices of other writers

(authorised by their masculinity) and reorganises the past to contest the singularity

of patriarchal ideology. Giving voice to women characters in texts that have

traditionally silenced women’s perspectives, these parodies use incongruity and

defamiliarisation to portray female subjectivities, revealing women as agents of

desire and power.

Rosie Little’s cautionary tales for girls

Danielle Wood’s use of parody in Rosie Little’s cautionary tales for girls (2006),

a collection of short stories, refashions not only well-worn narratives and narrative

tropes but also well-worn cultural practices and customs relating to gender roles.

The familiar stories and scenarios that Wood imitates and parodies, as Hutcheon

describes it, use ‘repetition with critical distance’ (Hutcheon 2000, p. 6) to create

a tension between the reader’s expectation and the dissonant experience of

Wood’s stories. The fairytale patterns build a certain expectation, but the parodic

setting of these fairytales in quotidian rather than mythical circumstances

contributes to the subversion of the reader’s expectation. In this way, Wood draws

attention to their ‘situation in the world’ (Hutcheon 2000, p. xiii), destabilising the

mythical territory and authority of the original narratives. Here we see how the

‘comic dislocation’ (Rose 1993, p. 21) created by the parody, when the narrative

departs from the conventional and familiar, is what jolts the reader’s attention.

Wood’s stories may look like a collection of traditional stories featuring dark

forests, wild places and sexual awakenings, but they are far from traditional;

rather they parody the mystified but ultimately absurd values of patriarchal

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tradition. The familiar becomes unfamiliar, as the Formalists recognised, and the

reader (Hutcheon’s encoder) must work to recontextualise these multistable

stories that now present the opportunity for different interpretations, values, and

subjectivities.

A function of parody is to create a dialogue between the past and the

present. The book title, the section titles, the story titles and even the character

names of Wood’s collection reference fairy tales or Bible stories. However, Wood

continually and comically undermines these familiar but non-reflexive origin

stories that position women as objects of patriarchal discourse. Wood also

explicitly directs the reader to recognise the parodic nature and didactic purpose

of her parodies. The Rosie Little of the book’s title is the comic hero of these

stories, but she also offers homilies that outline the critical message of the stories.

In doing so, the book also parodies guidebooks for girls and women, as well as all

those foundational cultural texts that teach women and girls their position in

society. The preface to this collection is a letter from Rosie Little, which self-

reflexively signals to the reader that the book is a parodic text. In Rosie’s letter,

she establishes herself as the reader’s guide to the collection. She assures the

reader that the stories are not ‘written for the benefit of good and well-behaved

girls’ but for ‘stout-booted and stout-hearted girls’ (2006, p. 3). The direct speech

draws the reader into the text, immediately requiring them to contrast the ideal

femininity constructed through fairy tales and other stories, which typically

reward the ‘good girl,’ with the kind of contemporary version of femininity this

book will espouse. Rosie Little also pens short metafictional essays in each of the

stories that not only disrupt the reader’s attention, but also make fun of ideologies

that characterise women in fixed ways. The book is, in other words, eminently

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self-conscious and self-consciously parodic. Rose’s description of a parodic form

known as the ‘comic heroic’ is relevant here—a form that ‘can be used to make

conscious certain norms which can then be made fun of or made problematical’

(1993, p. 173). Wood’s parodic stories certainly serve this function.

Rosie’s interventions, in particular, often draw critical attention to

particular features of the story being re-told and mocked. For example, in ‘Eden’,

a revised Adam and Eve story, Rosie Little interrupts the narrative just as she has

been describing a male character who has ‘monolithic white teeth in his wide

mouth, which [sit] above a goatee and a nose that one might describe as . . .’

(2006, p. 100). Here our narrator pauses to provide the reader with a long list of

characters described as having an aquiline nose in the literary canon. Rosie then

includes a list of blank lines for the reader to record characters with aquiline noses

that they encounter in their reading career. The blank lines notably shift the

reader’s focus from passive reading to active participation in the text’s

construction. The reader’s immersion is broken, bringing them back to the critical

task of engaging with and questioning tropes or stereotypes repeated in canonical

literature. In addition, the literary intrusion forces the reader to attend to the

process of writing and the act of the author concocting storylines and characters in

relation to a tradition. Each of Rosie’s interruptions prevents the reader from

passively accepting the story at face value, reminding the reader that the

revisionary cautionary tales being read are fictions about fictions.

In another story, ‘The depthlessness of soup,’ Wood conjures domestic

imagery associated with the hearth and kitchen—and witchcraft and spell-

making—often found in fairy tales. Soup is typically associated with nourishment

and comfort, but this story is more about anachronistic traditions. Will and Paula

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are preparing for a dinner date. Both are ready to commit to marriage, but neither

is sure of the other’s feelings. Days earlier Will sought Paula’s father’s permission

to marry her. Paula’s father, who is deeply interested in restoring a motor car and

not the slightest bit interested in his daughter’s private life, does not meet the

expectations of a traditional narrative in which he would, as the father of the

would-be bride, either grant or deny permission for his daughter to marry:

The car fell silent and Paula’s father hauled himself out from behind the wheel.

Returning to the front of the car, he planted both hands on the edge of the engine

well and peered into the workings.

‘I’d like to marry her,’ Will repeated, edging around to stand by the passenger-

side headlight where he might catch the older man’s eye.

‘Fucking oath,’ said Paula’s father, but Will was almost certain that the curse

pertained to the car and not to his inquiry.

‘So, is it okay? If I marry her?’

‘Who, Paula?’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s it got to do with me?’

‘Well, you know, traditionally . . . I thought it would be polite, you know, the

done sort of thing, to come, and ask . . .’

‘Been a long time since any of my bloody daughters listened to anything I had to

say.’

‘So it’s okay with you then?’

Paula’s father looked up from the engine and Will felt, for the first time since

he’d arrived, that he had his full attention.

‘Better ask Paula, mate. Reckon you’ll find that she’ll be the one to decide

whether she’s going to marry you or not.’ (2006, pp. 132-33)

Paula’s father’s reaction points to the anachronistic convention of a father

being the keeper of his daughter and the absurdity of a prospective groom who

thinks he must follow an archaic tradition in seeking permission for a woman’s

‘hand’ in marriage. Will continues to abide by convention when he attempts a

traditional down-on-one-knee proposal during their date at a restaurant, a public

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place that puts the onus on the woman to either agree or appear to be ungrateful

should she reject the man’s offer. Paula focuses on her desire for his commitment,

not knowing what Will has planned. Her unexpected agency also rewrites the

traditional narrative of the fairy tale proposal because, rather than being the

passive recipient of her lover’s proposal, she actively (if uncomfortably) seeks his

commitment to their relationship. The final act of this story is Will’s tantrum

when he argues with Paula.

‘Please shut up. Darling, shut up. Sweetheart, shut up. Trust me, you do not want

to have this conversation now.’

‘I don’t even know why I’m still sitting here, why I’m bashing my head against

this brick wall when it’s clear that you just don’t know how to say it. If you don’t

want to marry me, then what’s the bloody point of us sitting here, all dressed up

pretending that there’s something to celebrate, when—’

‘For fuck’s sake!’ Will shouted, standing up. ‘Here. Look here. See this? It

contains an engagement ring. Happy? Are you happy now? Is this how you

wanted to get engaged?’

Hush spread through the restaurant in a rapid, unfurling circumference from the

epicentre of Paula and Will’s table. Other diners fell silent, cutlery suspended,

mouths open. They stared at Paula’s stunned and silenced face, and at Will, who

stood, looking defeated with a black velvet cube in his fingertips. They watched

the cube move away from his fingers, tumbling through the air, a die that landed

numberless, with a splash, in Paula’s soup. (p. 143)

Will’s commitment to convention and Paula’s desire for agency contradict

the traditional conventions of the fairy tale engagement script, which is parodied

here.

Repeatedly in Wood’s stories, the subversion of dominant ideology

inevitably results in a power struggle. The cautionary tales in Wood’s collection

depict the resistance Rosie and her female friends encounter when they choose not

to conform to an ideology that seeks to contain them. Wood’s first short story in

the collection, ‘The deflowering of Rosie Little,’ flags her intention to question

the language and mythology surrounding a girl’s virginity. Virginity has

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historically been, and in many contemporary instances remains, a highly valued

possession that girls are taught to protect and prize; they mustn’t ‘lose’ it or be

‘deflowered’ of it. With a virgin bride, the patrilineage of any progeny can be

more easily controlled, and thus she represents a valuable commodity in a

patriarchal world. Girls’ value and their reproductive purity are significantly

reduced, if not completely obliterated, if they ‘lose’ their virginity prior to

marriage. In this story, Wood parodies the language of property associated with

sex. Rosie Little recounts the way in which her virginity is ‘taken’ at a grammar

school party by a drunken young man, who uses her for sexual gratification and

homosocial status. Rosie is tricked into drinking more than she can handle in a

game the boys call Rene Pogel. Rosie lets the reader into the grammar boy joke by

telling them that spelt backwards it reads Leg Opener. The boys find this

hilarious, but Rosie realises she has been tricked and manipulated. In an aside

written from the perspective of her older self, Rosie confides to the reader that she

had recently met a forty-year-old man who hadn’t progressed ‘in the evolutionary

stakes, much beyond the proto-mentality of the Grammar boarders’ (p. 16) and

who had named his yacht the Rene Pogel. Wood parodies the ‘playful’ tone of

these men but uses it to ridicule them. Remembering the night that the ‘young

lord’ (p. 9) took her virginity, she parodies both the mystification inherent in the

word ‘deflowering’ and the vulgar language of the emerging patriarchs

represented by the grammar school boys:

the most interesting word I learned from the young lord was ‘snatch’. Placed in a

sentence: ‘Christ your snatch is tight’. For such was his elegance as he clumsily

ruptured my hymen while I lay beneath him on the splintery bed of a jetty. (p. 9)

Rosie wonders at the word ‘coitus’, thinking it sounds rather like ‘a

demure game played on the decks of ocean liners’ (p. 8), while exposing the

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violence of coercive sex. At the same time, she describes the young lord as having

a ‘lavender headed erection’ (p. 13). The association with lavender conjures

flowers traditionally linked with older women in their dotage, thus undermining

the power of the phallus. His kiss, she notes, is more like an ‘alarmingly vigorous

sucking’ (p. 16) at her mouth rather than the passionate melding of mouths she

had imagined after spending three weeks watching the character, le Vicompte de

Valmont, seduce her friend Cécile Volanges in a romantic theatre production.

Rosie Little thus parodies and questions not only the patriarchal language of sex

but also misleading stories of romance. The supposedly momentous ‘loss’ of her

virginity is ultimately represented blithely: ‘I simply continued on my way—my

basket lighter by one cherry—and never crossed his path again’ (p. 20).

Wood’s short story collection parodies conventions and practices that are

entrenched not only in our stories but also in social interactions. In the final story,

Rosie comes to realise that she has always had a guide: an older woman whose

worldliness provides Rosie with the confidence to act dangerously. Each of

Wood’s stories, to borrow from Hutcheon again, is ‘a dialogic parodic

reappropriation of the past’ (2000, p. 72) that, rather than instructing young girls

to be obedient and passive according to the patriarchal mores of history, models

ways to be courageous, witty and self-determined into the future. This is the

parodic feminist moral that Wood’s stories offer her female readers—those ‘girls’

that Rosie Little’s ‘cautionary tales’ are explicitly written for.

Postmodern Penelope

Margaret Atwood’s postmodern novel The Penelopiad (2005a) focusses on

Penelope and her maids in a parody of Homer’s The Odyssey. In Barry Powell’s

recent translation of The Odyssey, he claims that ‘the Homeric poems [the Iliad

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and The Odyssey] have been at the core of Western education’ (2014, p. 17),

forming foundational stories of Western culture. For Powell, Odysseus’s journey

is a symbol for ‘the human spirit in quest of the meaning of human life’ (p. 26);

Odysseus is thus represented as the ‘everyman’ and his story imbued with

universal significance. Judy Little reminds us that ‘traditionally men, not women,

have been encouraged to see themselves as the hero’ and that ‘“Everyman” has

usually been a man’ (1983 p. 14). In Powell’s description of Penelope, she is ‘the

ideal woman, long suffering, ever faithful, and ingenious in preserving the honor

of the home’ (p. 32), in line with patriarchal conceptions of womanhood, but he

notably does not imagine what her experience means for the human spirit. In an

interview recorded in the The Guardian before the stage version of the novel,

Atwood, on the other hand, asserts of The Penelopiad that Penelope

wants to tell “you” that she’s not what people thought, that other people had told

stories about her, but now she is down in the underworld she doesn’t care about

social convention, she’s going to tell her own story (2005b).

Nancy Walker claims in The disobedient writer that to reappropriate a

work in this way

is to exercise a different kind of disobedience, one that questions the singularity

and ownership of certain themes, plots, tropes, and narrative strategies. Such

revisions are a way not only of subverting the traditional text, but also of laying

claim to it, entering into dialogue with it on an equal plane. (1995, p. 5)

The story of The Odyssey describes how Odysseus took twenty years to

return from the battle of Troy where he fought to retrieve Helen from her lover’s

arms while Penelope remained faithful to him, resisting suitors and using her

wiliness to hold onto his estate for his ultimate repossession. Atwood takes the

distant and mythological past of The Odyssey and reinvents it through a

postmodern and feminist perspective. Atwood brings into focus, through parody

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and comedy, how the female experience of Penelope in the original text is two-

dimensional; Penelope is always only loyal, patient and, I might add, silent.

Atwood’s Penelopiad gives her female character a leading role, desires of her

own, and a voice—traits that are decidedly contemporary. The ironic doubling in

this text provokes a humorous contest, with irony—as Walker claims in Feminist

alternatives: irony and fantasy in the contemporary novel by women—‘negating

the truth or validity of a received tradition and pointing to its incongruity or

absurdity (1990, p. 22). The parodic technique, as Rose states, ‘will foreground

the techniques of the less reflective novelist’ (1993, p. 107) because it functions to

disrupt what its predecessors took for granted. In the case of Atwood’s parodic

text, it is the narrative convention of the loyal wife, who allows the epic

adventures of the male hero to remain at the forefront of the story.

The Penelopiad parodies The Odyssey at various levels, including

structurally. Imitating and parodying its oral, verse and performative origins,

Atwood’s novel uses first-person narrative techniques and narrative styles more

commonly found in poetry, limerick, and song. She also evokes cabaret-style

routines involving maids dancing in tap shoes, and a chorus in the style of an

Ancient Greek play. Susanne Jung, discussing the theatrical version of The

Penelopiad, describes how ‘the dance of chorus girls turns into a grotesque

mocking shadow of an entertaining dance of the Broadway musical chorus line’

(2005, p. 49). The structural fracturing implicit in Atwood’s revision of The

Odyssey allows for its disruptive reimagining to include female subjectivity. The

demystification of gods that we see in the text also reminds the reader that this

text is questioning the very foundation of Western culture and those sacred tenets

associated with male authority. Ultimately, Atwood’s parody makes the claim that

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Odysseus’s story ‘doesn’t hold water’ (2005a, p. xxi), using parody, as Dentith

characterises it, to question the ‘single language of authority’ and as a ‘weapon in

the battle between popular cultural energies and the forces of authority which seek

to control them’ (2002, p. 23).

Atwood, like Wood, attempts to address the possibility that readers might

not recognise the source text or the parody’s potential for subversion. The book

includes an academic-style introduction in which Atwood asserts her authority by

informing the reader that her research provides reason for a review of the

canonical text. Atwood tells her readers that she has chosen to focus on Penelope

and the maids because she questions their representation in the Odyssey myth.

Specifically, she questions why the maids were murdered after Odysseus returned

from his quest and, secondly, she wonders what Penelope was really up to while

Odysseus was away for twenty years. Atwood’s feminist interrogation and

reconstruction of the origin text, in Rose’s terms, alerts the reader to ‘a greater

awareness of both the possibilities and limitations of fiction’ (1993, p. 99). The

Penelopiad generates an alternative version of the canonical story, transformed

through a parodic feminist perspective.

The Penelopiad reduces the heroic male characters to half-forgotten

memories, liars, and clods who spend twenty years on today’s equivalent of an

indecent intercontinental pub crawl. Penelope makes her thoughts clear right from

the start when she says of Odysseus,

He was always so plausible. Many people have believed that his version of events

was the true one, give or take a few murders, a few beautiful seductresses, a few

one-eyed monsters. (Atwood 2005a, p. 2)

In Walker’s discussion about another of Atwood’s novels, The handmaid’s

tale (1985), she highlights how such contemporary feminist novels are engaged in

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mythological ‘“reconstruction”’ (Walker 1990, p. 39). Atwood’s novel certainly

reconstructs The Odyssey and its ‘truths’. The novel casts Penelope as a young

woman who is cognisant of her position in the hierarchy of her family and society,

and whose perspective on the major events of the original text is transformative of

how those events might be understood. For example, the chapter titled ‘Helen

ruins my life’ announces the Trojan War not in heroic terms, as the origin story

does, but as having a demoralising effect on Penelope because of its patriarchal

context. In so doing, the novel questions the entire moral code represented by

Homer’s story. While Penelope recognises that she is second prize to Helen

because great value is placed on beauty, she questions why Helen was not

punished given her beauty caused such trouble:

Helen was never punished, not one bit. Why not, I’d like to know? Other people

got strangled by sea serpents and drowned in storms and turned into spiders and

shot with arrows for much smaller crimes. Eating the wrong cows. Boasting. That

sort of thing. You’d think Helen might have got a good whipping at the very

least, after all the harm and suffering she caused to countless other people. But

she didn’t. (Atwood 2005a, p. 22)

Penelope’s logical argument challenges the value ascribed to women’s

appearances in the source text as an unexamined given, and therefore parodies the

patriarchal objectification of women.

Speaking directly to the reader, Penelope’s musings parodically

defamiliarise and dismantle the truths of the target text. Penelope directs her

speech to the reader in the way that Chambers describes as ‘appearing to step

outside the frame of the performance into the real world’ (2010, p. 83 italics in

original). Like Wood, she interrupts the reader’s immersion in the text to promote

a subversive interaction with the text and its source, and to guarantee that the

uncertain act of parody is understood. This is evident when she explains the

marriage system that forged the link between her and Odysseus; a feudal marriage

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that strengthened both families. Penelope explains how, during the ceremony, she

remained hidden beneath her veil, as custom dictated. However, while this is

understood as a demonstration of modesty on the behalf of the bride, Penelope

parodically reveals how valuable a veil is for hiding a woman’s feelings.

As for me, I had trouble making it through the ceremony—the sacrifices of

animals, the offerings to the gods, the lustral sprinklings, the libations, the

prayers, the interminable songs. I felt quite dizzy. I kept my eyes downcast, so all

I could see of Odysseus was the lower part of his body. Short legs, I kept

thinking, even at the most solemn moments. This was not an appropriate

thought—it was trivial and silly, and it made me want to giggle—but in my own

defence I must point out that I was only fifteen. (Atwood 2005a, p. 38; italics in

original)

Again, it is Penelope’s agency that is contrasted against the submissive

ideal. Odysseus’ heroic body here is suddenly the object of Penelope’s and the

readers’ humour.

The brutality of the relationship between fathers and female children in the

allegedly golden age of Ancient Greece represented by The Odyssey is another

target of Atwood’s parody. Penelope acknowledges that her father counts her as

one of his objects—an object he attempts to throw away when she is a girl

because she is female. During strolls with her father throughout her childhood,

Penelope confides to the reader that she finds it hard to show affection for a man

who might at any time pitch her off a cliff or stove her head in.

You can imagine. There I would be, strolling hand in hand with my apparently

fond male parent along a cliff edge or a river bank or a parapet, and the thought

would occur to me that he might suddenly decide to shove me over or bash me to

death with a rock. Preserving a calm facade under these circumstances was a

challenge. (Atwood 2005a, p. 10)

The parodic juxtaposition of harmonious family life with the prospect of

kin murder is disturbing and funny all in one. Penelope’s matter-of-fact tone only

highlights the incongruity.

257

Atwood also parodies the naturalness of motherhood, so often sanctified in

Western traditions of storytelling, by drawing attention to the brutality of mother-

child relationships depicted in Greek mythology. This also contributes to

undermine the universal value so often attributed to Homer’s text. Penelope’s

mother is a Naiad who ‘was beautiful, but chilly at heart’ (2005a, p. 11). Penelope

says: ‘When I was little I often tried to throw my arms around her, but she had a

habit of sliding way’, and

I often slipped her mind. If my father hadn’t had me thrown into the sea she

might have dropped me in herself, in a fit of absent-mindedness or irritation. She

had a short attention span and rapidly changing emotions (p. 11).

Hutcheon argues that ‘often the works of the past become aesthetic models

whose recasting in a modern work is frequently aimed at a satirical ridicule of

contemporary customs or practices’ (2000, p. 11). In the case of Atwood’s novel,

the target is surely as much the contemporary valorisation of the Homeric texts

(which reveal anachronistic rather than universal values for human conduct) as

contemporary understandings of gender and the rigid roles contemporary culture

ascribes to them, such as the ‘naturalness’ of women as mothers.

Atwood also mercilessly parodies the authority of the gods in The

Penelopiad in a way that echoes her parody of the authority of patriarchy.

Penelope refuses to honour the superhuman quality of the gods and instead

describes them as childish and even stupid. When Penelope finds herself in the

underworld, she muses that her father may well have arranged for her to be

thrown into the sea because an oracle told him that she would weave his death

shroud. Her father must have thus thought that if she were dead then he would live

forever. However, the authority of the oracle is diminished when she suggests that

her father ‘must have misheard, or else the oracle herself misheard—the gods

258

often mumble—because it was not his shroud that was at issue, but my father-in-

law’s shroud’ (2005a, p. 8). When the one-hundred suitors come knocking at

Penelope’s door, they begin questioning Penelope’s reliance on the word of the

oracle after years of waiting for Odysseus’ return. She ‘reminded them that the

eventual return of Odysseus had been foretold’ (p. 111), ‘but as he failed to turn

up, year after year, faith in the oracle began to wear thin’ (p. 111). Atwood brings

into focus the convenience of an ambiguous oracle when clarity is needed and

mistaken clarity when ambiguity is inferred in ancient myths.

Rose argues that

the parodist will usually aim to create a comic or surprise effect by letting readers

or viewers realise that they are receiving something different from the work

which is parodistically imitated (1993, p. 70).

Atwood often achieves this surprise effect through the incongruous

injection of twentieth-century ideas and slang language use. The opening

paragraph includes the word ‘factoids’ so that instantly the readers know they are

in a hybrid world that addresses the past from the present. Characters continue to

spill other incongruous words from their mouths, jolting the readers from the past

to the present. The maids, who perform in chorus lines parodying the chorus of

the ancient play, are said to have ‘All Access’ (2005a, p. 32) passes to their

performance area. They also perform with an accordion and a penny whistle, and

label Penelope ‘Penelope the prissy’ (p. 147). Penelope describes herself as a

‘plain Jane’ (p. 37) and Helen’s husband Menelaus as ‘rich as stink’ (p. 33).

Atwood again breaks the ‘third wall’ of fiction when she has Penelope address the

reader in colloquial fashion thus: ‘in your world, you don’t get visitations from the

gods the way people used to unless you’re on drugs’ (p. 24).

259

The narrative focus on the exploits of Odysseus and his men in the original

story of Homer work to mythologise masculinity. Atwood profoundly challenges

this in her parodic text by shifting the viewpoint to that of Penelope and by

shifting the historical lens through which we understand the values of Homer’s

time. Penelope parodies and undermines the heroism of those male characters

glorified in the original myths. In the ancient stories, Menelaus is represented as a

great king and warrior. As Helen’s husband, he gathers his allies to retrieve her

from Troy, which begins the ten-year war. In Atwood’s novel, however, Menelaus

is as ‘thick as a brick’ with ‘the manners of a stump’ (2005a, p. 77). This not only

parodies the heroic character, but through the contemporary and recognisable

voice of Penelope, builds ‘complicity between the reader and the writer’ (Walker

1990, p. 27). This happens again when she characterises the suitors as ‘aristocratic

young thugs’ (2005a, p. 107) and ‘mannerless young whelps’ (p. 109), who harass

her and whose actions paint a picture of ugly masculinity borne out of male

privilege. Even Odysseus comes in for criticism when he returns from his journey.

Penelope decides it is better to pretend not to recognise his disguise, highlighting

her superior understanding of masculine psychology: ‘it’s always an imprudence

to step between a man and the reflection of his own cleverness’ (p. 137).

Twentieth century theorists, who have re-examined the work parody does,

provide valuable new ways of thinking about the function of parody that suggests

it does more than ridicule and undermine an origin work. Wood and Atwood

refuse to iterate absurd notions of femininity and instead use literary devices to

comically repurpose old narratives to create multistable autonomous texts. These

texts require their readers to reflect on the social and moral world within the text,

as well as the situation of women in the world today.

260

261

Conclusion

This exegesis has attempted to expose the patriarchal foundation of humour

theory in order to clear a space for the appropriate recognition of feminist humour.

As noted, humour theory developed in scholarly literature based on male values,

where laughter was viewed in relation to patriarchal systems of power. In the

twentieth and twenty-first centuries, feminist humour—in both literature and the

cultural arena more broadly—has issued a significant challenge to historical ways

of understanding comedy. This exegesis has also attempted to celebrate some

contemporary examples of feminist comedy in literature including the original

creative works. In these short stories, I have taken ordinary activities involving

men and women and turned a feminist gaze on them with the result of

defamiliarizing stereotypical patriarchal structures. For example, Jenny in ‘The

Little Golden Notebook’ is concerned with matters of her mind, her creative

works, and her husband carefully tends to the household and her body much like a

worker bee. The works this exegesis explores employ specific forms of humour,

such as irony, the feminine grotesque and parody, to subvert patriarchal bias as

they turn the humorous gaze towards the power structures that aim to contain and

limit women’s agency. The humour in these stories rather than eliciting a

guffawing laughter draw on an aesthetic of feminist humour with fictive tonalities

which comes from being horrified.

In this exegesis it has not been possible to examine the full spectrum of

forms of humour or humorous feminist novels, and there is certainly scope for a

future exploration of other powerful interventions in feminist comic writing. The

black humour of Helen Zahavi’s (1991) Dirty weekend, for example, is a tonally

complex novel that turns the tables by representing a woman as a serial killer of

262

hapless men in a slasher plot. Kathy Acker, the late twentieth-century punk

author, also engages black humour to expose the absurdity of power structures

governing gender roles. Her avant-garde experimental writing defiantly questions

not only gender roles but also the written form. She refuses to adhere to plot lines,

includes hand drawings, and uses violence, nonsense, and humour to disrupt

authority.

Ideas of femininity in patriarchal cultures exist because of a dominant

reiterative drive to conform to social norms that persist in institutions such as the

church, the state, education, and the family. Feminist humour is a tool for gender

disruption and reconstruction, but it is also something that elicits laughter and

entertains. As Barreca puts it, ‘the unsolicited laughter of women spells trouble

for those in power’ (1992, p. 76), because it means that women are embracing

their agency, their bodies, their appetites, and their right to mock and critique

patriarchy and its ideas of the ‘natural’ on an increasingly visible cultural stage.

Feminist humour is not an oxymoron; it is a phenomenon perfectly consistent with

the use of humour for political purposes throughout time. It is a phenomenon that

should be recognised and celebrated in our times.

263

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