The Lifted Brow Issue 34: Part 2

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34

LIA AND ARO RA U ST

SNAKES & LADDERS ANUSHKA JASRAJ

1.1

2.1

There are thirty-six possible combinations that could result from rolling a pair of six-sided dice.

My horoscope tells me my visions of the future are not accurate, but should always remain hopeful. An erotics of despair.

1.2 Originally know as Moksha Patam or Gyanbazi (Hindi: Game of Knowledge), Snakes and Ladders is a board game that was made popular in Victorian England by Jacques of London. It was re-branded as Chutes and Ladders before being released in the U.S. by Milton Bradley in the 1940s because chutes seemed less terrifying than snakes.

2.2

1.3

“Homo Ludens,” which translates as Playing Man, is a wellknown treatise on games, play, and culture. It was written by cultural theorist Johan Huizinga, and first published in 1938. From Huizinga, I learn that dice-playing was popular among the gods in Hindu mythology.

According to Susan Stewart, the difference between games and play is that the former has fixed rules and outcomes, while the latter requires being open to chance.

To flirt with a man whose partner lives in another country: snake or ladder?

Later, he says: you told me you like Anais Nin. That’s like giving someone a copy of The Unbearable Lightness of Being in high school. It’s like saying you want to have that kind of affair.

1.4 The ludic fallacy, identified by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his 2007 book The Black Swan, is “the misuse of games to model real-life situations.” Taleb explains the fallacy as “basing studies of chance on the narrow world of games and dice.” The adjective ludic originates from the Latin noun ludus, meaning “play, game, sport, pastime.”

- Wikipedia entry

1.5 In most games there are a limited number of ways to begin, and infinite variations once the game has begun. A founding cruelty: my emotional masochism, and his aestheticoevasive sadism.

1.6 All moves are determined by rolling the dice. The first player to reach the final square on the board is considered the winner. Unlike Chess or Parcheesi, a player’s movements are not affected by any of the other players.

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In the ancient Jain version of Snakes and Ladders, the squares of vice outnumber the squares of virtue. It seems inherently flawed: a game based entirely on chance, whose goal is to deliver morality lessons.

2.3

2.4 We never sleep together. We write letters, we talk, we speculate. Is there such a thing as an emotional affair?

Later, he says: I’m in an open relationship. Later, he says: this is against the rules of my open relationship.

2.5 Maybe celibacy - the kind between us - is a perversion, I write in one of my letters, only half-joking. He writes back: I can’t seem to remember the Lacanian definition of perversion.

2.6 He wanted to be a portrait artist, but instead he moves furniture around the room, and makes paintings of a green cabinet. I agree to let him draw me, but establish arbitrary rules, which are simultaneously symbolic and absurd. He is never allowed to draw my face. I never undress for him.

He draws my body in fragments. He paints a portrait of my desk.

3.1

4.1

I accuse him of using me as a means to an end. When I am angry, he outbids me with his anger. I’m sure I’ll make a good anti-hero some day, he says.

To have a lusory attitude is to accept the arbitrary rules of a game. This psychological concept was introduced by Bernard Suits in 1978. Anger is opposed to acceptance. It is inappropriate conduct, and may result in a penalty. The penalty for anger is bitterness.

3.2 Once, I met a Danish exchange student who was studying international relations. We talked about why Denmark is known as the happiest country, and he asked about my lover. I told him we broke up. He won in the end because he dumped me, I said. Oh, that’s so American, the student said. You both lost.

3.3 The origins of tarot can be traced to fifteenth century Italian card games, before it came to be associated with occult practices in the eighteenth century.

3.4 I shuffle the cards while forming a question in my mind. The deck I use is non-traditional, and the cards are inscribed with fragments of text by Emily Dickinson. The Ace of Wands is a symbol of optimism.

3.5

4.2 In game design theory, the spatial boundary of the game is known as the magic circle. Meaningful play occurs within the magic circle. The chess-board, the doll’s house, the playground, the stadium, the poker table, the computer screen, the page of a notebook.

4.3 In theory, a cyclical game of this nature might never end.

In theory, it is possible to win without ever climbing a adder, or sliding down the slippery skin of a snake. A game such as this requires no skill.

4.4 There’s no point in trying to avoid each other while we’re both living here, he says. He paraphrases Anne Carson: You have to dance a tango to the end.

Sometimes I think of you as a man, he says, or maybe I want you to think of me as a woman.

4.5

3.6

4.6

“Luck is not chance,” Emily Dickinson reminds me.

“How can snakes move across very harsh and abrasive environments and still have belly skin that is shiny and smooth?” asked Stanislav Gorb, who studies biomechanics at the University of Kiel in Germany. “Is it the material the scales are made of? The tiny microstructures on them?

The molecules they are coated with?”

- Inside Science News Service

The phrase, back to square one, originated with this game.

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ANUSHKA JASRAJ

5.1

6.1

A group of psychologists came up with a set of thirty-six questions as part of a ‘practical methodology’ for creating intimacy between subjects in an experimental context.

The key to increased intimacy, they found, was mutual self-disclosure. To fall in love, a pair of subjects must ask each other these thirty-six questions, and then stare into each other’s eyes for four minutes.

We ask each other the questions, but he avoids my gaze.

Love is descensional: a falling.

6.2 Games of chance can lead to psychological addiction.

6.3

A moral dilemma is a situation where an agent must make a choice between two or more actions, and is destined to fail regardless of which path she chooses.

On our last day together, he is cleaning his studio, and absently hands me a pile of papers. Lists, furniture measurements, letters I’ve written to him, and notes in his handwriting, addressed to no-one in particular.

There is a cruelty between couples in French films both having affairs - cruelty or maybe a kind of knowing. It has its own sexual quality.

It is almost summer. We walk through Beech Forest. The trail dips halfway through, and he says something about spatially induced sadness. You weren’t supposed to read that, he says, but his best friend is a Freudian psychoanalyst, and they don’t believe in accidents.

5.4

6.4

S and I are talking about having a child, he tells me.

When the outcomes of the game are certain, the pleasure mechanism begins to falter. Repetition compulsion, Freud tells us, can over-ride the pleasure principle.

The next morning, he drives me to the airport.

5.2 He returns from a weekend-trip to Canada, where his partner lives. He says: we adopted a dog named Ludo.

On my birthday he gives me a pair of vintage Bingo cards.

5.3

5.5 Richard Long is a British sculptor and land artist, famous for the photographic work, A Line Made by Walking. He paced back and forth in a field, until the grass had flattened beneath his feet and created a visible line.

5.6 There are two types of cheating within games. The kind that is expected: when a player bluffs during a game of poker.

The other transgresses the game: when a player overturns the board, bringing everything to a stop.

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6.5 Only half-joking, I ask him in an email: Do you love me yet?

You know I can’t, in fairness, answer that question, he says.

I send him an excerpt from Kafka’s letters to Milena: about how letter-writing is communication between spectres.

6.6

.

The probability of rolling doubles is sixteen percent.

If a player rolls two sixes, she may repeat her turn.

This essay will appear in The Shell Game: Writers Borrow Readymade Forms, from the University of Nebraska Press.

THE TOWN’S DAY SHAUN PRESCOTT

An excerpt from The Town, a novel forthcoming August 2017, published by Brow Books.

E

ach year the town had its own special day. On this day the main street was cordoned off from the bottom petrol station all the way to the top petrol station, and market stalls lined the streets selling Pluto Pups and other types of deep fried food, or else novelty T-shirts and cheap toys. At one end of the street near the top petrol station, a band played in the park, and there was a jumping castle too.

The day celebrated the fact of the town being a town. For one day in autumn, just before the biting morning frosts set in, people were invited to acknowledge that they lived in the town. It was an opportunity to feel warmly towards the town, and given the festivities, and the coloured lights that criss-crossed the main street at night, and the thousands of litres of beer involved, few could resist being part of the occasion.

I attended the town’s day because I was having trouble writing my book about disappearing towns. Adult couples, teenagers and troublemakers milled the streets, browsing keepsakes they could purchase at one of the dozen or so stalls set up in the area. The stalls sold shirts, stubby holders, flags, stickers, plush koala bears and car decals, all decorated with the Australian flag and the name of the town. In the park there was a special cordoned-off area where people were permitted to drink beer from tin cans.

It was necessary to line up to gain entry, but since few people left the special cordoned-off drinking area once they had entered, I was unable to enter, and so not able to have a beer. Instead, I bought a Coke and sat on the grass as the band played a cover of ‘Electric Blue’ by Icehouse.

Jenny from the pub eventually called over to me. She was serving beers inside the cordoned-off drinking area, and motioned that she could get me inside. Soon enough the security guard manning the entry waved me over and I was welcomed in.

In the cordoned-off drinking area customers lined up, bought their beer, and then joined the end of the queue again. As she opened beer cans for townspeople, Jenny explained to me that it was her biggest business day of the year. Her pub hardly did any business anymore, aside from mine, so it was lucky that her father was friends with an organiser of the festival. The money she made on this one day was enough to sustain the pub, so I should be

grateful that the festival existed, she told me, since I was the only person who ever drank in the pub.

Jenny was always making comments to me like this.

But I wasn’t about to complain - I was privileged that she spoke to me at all. Especially on this day - there was no need for Jenny to speak to her customers in the cordonedoff area, as there was only one variety of beer, and it was not permitted to buy more than two beers at once, as per council regulations. Jenny automatically served two beers to each customer. If asked for only one, Jenny would insinuate that this person had consumed enough for the day, and should get some fresh air, i.e ., leave the cordoned-off drinking area to make room for someone eager to buy and drink two beers at once.

I watched as Jenny served the beers. At one point Rob rattled at the fence nearby and motioned me over. He wanted to get inside the drinking area. He said he’d do anything to get in, and besides, I wasn’t drinking anything so there was no reason for me to be in there.

He was right that I wasn’t drinking any beer, but I liked watching Jenny work. Also, I did not want to exploit my privilege by requesting a swap. I told Rob that he might as well drink at one of the pubs on the street, two of which had a view of the stage, but he was not satisfied with this solution. The line into the cordoned-off drinking area was blocking the view of the stage, and besides, he really wanted to drink with his friends, who were already inside.

I explained that it was impossible and he marched away.

A

t that time of evening, as the sun was starting to go down and the band were becoming a little more upbeat, the line to the drinking area was snaking around the perimeter of the park, to the extent that the whole park was enclosed by a wall of thirsty revellers, none of whom would ever have a beer this year in the cordonedoff area - they would need to wait until next year.

But on closer inspection it was obvious they were all drinking. Many, if not all, of the queuing revellers were sipping from small flasks, and hidden cans and bottles, and probably becoming more drunk than anyone in the official drinking area. I explained the situation to Jenny, who was amused.

Of course they’re getting drunk, she said. No one was going to refrain from drinking, even if it was against council regulations to drink outside of the cordonedoff area.

45

SHAUN PRESCOTT I wondered aloud why the people wanted so badly to her beers. After another fifteen minutes there, with Jenny enter the area, since they were able to drink outside of it refusing to be drawn into any light conversation, I looked anyway, albeit illegally, and Jenny made a gesture with at the grass again. The mayor was still offering the same her head which suggested I had already made her point. commentary as before: that the town was good, and that it You’re exactly right, she told me. To be in the official was the townspeople that made it good. drinking area was to be officially drinking. Then she Jenny glared at me when I asked if the mayor’s speech waved vaguely at the queue, and suggested it would be would ever end. It was an indictment on my character safer for me to stay in the cordoned-off area. that I noticed its length at all. The line for cans of beer The mayor was scheduled to give his speech at 8:30pm. inside the cordoned-off area was longer than before, When the time came he ascended the steps and waved to snaking around in double queues. It seemed like every the audience at the front of the stage, which comprised attendee at the town’s day was lined up for something. only twenty or so men, women and children. Everyone And then the mayor’s speech ended. A stubborn quiet else was lining up at the perimeter of the park. He stood lingered for a minute or so, as no one wanted to be seen in front of the microphone, tapped it, and made to have enjoyed the mayor’s speech. A defeated what must have been a joke, because he animosity seemed to pervade the main laughed loudly. And then he spoke at area, but the official drinkers in the great length. I asked Jenny whether cordoned-off area soon caught a she enjoyed what the mayor was second wind. Many started to saying, but she was too busy sing improvised songs about serving beers. She probably the town. Outside of the area, Many other men and women couldn’t hear either; amid queued people dispersed and started to roam around the park the noise of the cordonedlet their guard down as the in search of things to destroy, off drinking area it was band returned to the stage. while the rest stood cross-armed impossible to make out his Jenny pointed as the mayor at the outskirts, still in rough words. Occasionally there left the stage. See, she said. queue formation, ready to view was a moment when his Now the queues will fall apart. the spectacle. voice stopped echoing around I could see that several men the park, and these magisterial were removing their shirts pauses were met with ironic despite the autumn chill. Two hollering from the queues. From a collaborated in the removal of a safe distance, the people of the town park bin from its metal frame before were demonstrating to the mayor tossing it aside, the bin and its contents that they believed he wasn’t very good. spilling across the green grass. Many other The mayor is a prick, Jenny said. I asked why she men and women started to roam around the park in disliked the mayor, but she motioned that she’d not be search of things to destroy, while the rest stood crossdrawn on any political topic during work hours. Just armed at the outskirts, still in rough queue formation, look at him, she muttered. ready to witness the spectacle. Empty cans of soft drink As the speech was delivered, those lining for beers were pegged, picnic mats were torn apart, celebratory inside the cordoned-off drinking area settled into a banners were dismantled, tree branches were cracked murmur. They faced towards the stage with neutral from their trunks, and shirts were set alight, twirled and stares, letting the mayor’s platitudes wash over them thrown. A monotone hymn erupted from the dispersing like a television commercial. It annoyed them to have cordoned-off drinking area queue, resembling a more the mayor speak during an event designed for drinking, religious version of the improvised songs about the town. but they were resigned to it, and might have believed the It was a yearly ritual to destroy a bulk of the park’s mayor was entitled to his moment, since they had been facilities after the mayor’s speech, Jenny explained. After lucky enough to gain access to the drinking area. a full day of drinking in the sun, it was the only gesture As he droned on, I gestured to Jenny that I might have the people could muster. a can of beer after all. She handed me two and I edged The destruction was carried out in a jovial fashion. towards the cordon to survey the festivities. From there, There was no anguish in the eyes of one man who, while it was easier to understand what the mayor was saying climbing a nearby electrical pole, removed and set alight his speech centred around how the town was good, how a cardboard placard celebrating the town’s day. Another it had always been good, and that it was the hard work woman smashed a glass bottle against a floodlight case, of its citizens that made it good. The few teetotallers but she did so with tears of joy in her eyes, and her efforts sitting in the grass were packing up their picnic blankets were rewarded with encouraging hoots and hollers. No and mustering their children, squeezing between the one made an effort to conceal their prohibited alcohol fences of queued drinkers on their way to parked cars. any longer. Instead, the people flaunted their public Finding nothing but the queue and the evacuated grass, drinking by skulling conspicuously from two-litre bottles I wandered back to the bar and watched Jenny dole out of bourbon and vodka. These bottles were dutifully

46

THE TOWN'S DAY

smashed against a nearby surface once finished with.

There wasn’t actually much to destroy. According to Jenny, no one dared destroy anything which might land them in prison for a night. It was enough just to be seen to be destroying something, preferably of low value, and ideally belonging to a friend, or no one at all.

A couple of brawls had erupted in the crowd among the shirtless men. These did not appear to be good-spirited fights - the blows landed with impact and no part of the body was off-limits - but people watched with a strange, languid calm, if only out of a sense of duty.

Jenny pointed through the chaos towards a man jeering a group of wrestling boys, a tin of some or other alcohol in his fist. It was Steve Sanders.

Now would be a good opportunity to get the bashing over with, she said. It would be sensible because fights at the town’s day were more likely to be light-hearted. I might even get off with just a few hard punches to the gut.

There were too many other people-and she waved at the drunks-eager to put up a solid fight. Steve Sanders would quickly get fed up with me and go for someone stronger and more combative. He might even respect me for wanting to get involved in the fights. She added that she would call an ambulance if he made a mess of me.

I could not make out his face from that distance, and his clothing or posture didn’t stand out among the other men of the town. He wore a blue shirt, presumably with a national flag on its front like so many others, and a pair of blue jeans.

I

knew it was inevitable that Steve Sanders would bash me if I approached him. Though I was about to go seek out the bashing, I secretly knew that I could hide among the patrons at the Railway Hotel if I lost my nerve. As I pushed through the queue and out of the cordoned-off drinking area, Rob tried to approach me. I ignored him, fixing my stare on the man Steve Sanders.

As I reached the wrestling boys a large tattooed man picked another up and dropped him on his head, prompting horrible jeers from the crowd. The band stopped, leaving a shameful silence. Those who had witnessed this act of violence levelled accusations at one another, shifting the blame, and the mirth turned ugly.

Four policemen emerged from nowhere and started to corral the drinkers who were closest to the incident.

Someone always has to go too far, Rob said, but did not seem very drunk. He told me things went too far every year, each time in a different way. The year before someone had thrown a broken bottle at the band. Before that, someone had set a tree on fire. Ten years ago, someone had tossed a dog onto the roof of the petrol station. Rob waved towards the closest petrol station.

Destruction and chaos is in their blood, he said as I took a sip from his beer. But mostly they’rea tranquil bunch.

Soon enough the park was deserted, save for those in the cordoned-off drinking area.

.

47

BLACK PEARLS BASTIAN FOX PHELAN

I

stood before the bathroom mirror in the morning light.

Every new dark hair on my chin was shining. I washed my face, looked at it from different angles. My pretty mouth glistening, handsome brow dripping. Soft skin and coarse, black hairs. I caught myself tugging at the roots with my fingers. How they longed for a pair of tweezers, to be back in the Mamie pink bathroom of my family home, plucking until the skin turned chicken raw.

But I’d promised myself, when I moved alone to this town that didn’t know me, that I would let myself change.

I’d called a truce with my body, laid down my weapons.

Liberated, the hair sprang up all over my face. People had begun to stare. In shopping centres, small children stage-whispered to their mothers: “Is that a boy or a girl?”

I couldn’t answer. I thought to myself: I should write a zine about this.

Looking at my reflection, I knew it made no sense.

My beard was ugly-beautiful. I wanted it, and I had no choice. My extraordinary form, enlarged in the mirror.

I was behind the examination room curtain, naked from the waist down, sitting on a paper sheet. The doctor spread the swab on a glass slide, sealed it in a tube, and washed her hands. “You’re very hairy,” she said.

I looked at my legs. A covering, a warm mammalian coat.

That was just the hair I hadn’t removed yet; there was more that grew all over my body, my face - hair that I had disappeared.

“How regular are your periods?”

She was at her computer now, rat-a-tat on the keyboard.

“They’ve never been great,” I said, pulling on my jeans. I drew back the curtain.

“I’m going to send you for an ultrasound, see what your ovaries are doing.”

I touched my belly, in the place where I imagined they were. Doing, or not doing, something. The doctor handed me a letter addressed to the Women’s Imaging Suite.

On the street, I opened the envelope. Please see patient for pelvic ultrasound. Medical conditions: oligomenorrhea and hirsutism.

I wanted to shred it.

I put the letter in my bag.

If I’d known my body hair would be an issue, I would have done things the other way around - I was booked in for a leg wax after the pap smear.

At the salon I lay on another plastic bed. The beautician - a hairless, natural blonde - put on a CD of whale sounds

48

while the smell of warming wax filled the room. With a spatula, she smothered my shins in the sticky substance.

Then, as it cooled, her fingers grasped the edge of the strip, pulled my skin taut, and ripped. My follicles were in shock, the skin singing. I closed my eyes and thought of the beach, of short skirts, and changing rooms.

The beautician stopped at one point to take a breather.

She told me that it required a great deal of strength to do professional waxing, especially when people have a lot of hair. I noted her arms, so toned and supple, and felt myself lying there, soft bodied, like a jellyfish.

“It must hurt,” she said.

“I’m used to it,” I smiled. “It’s not an issue.”

The waiting room of the Imaging Suite was lined with vinyl chairs, a row occupied by women in various stages of gestation, a living infographic. I sat away from them, near the door. When my name was called, a sonographer ushered me into a small, dark room. I disrobed again.

Another paper sheet, another curtain.

The sonographer produced what looked like a long, thin dildo.

“It’s okay, you won’t feel much.”

She covered the probe in a plastic sheath, applied gel, and pushed it inside me. The gel was cold, the pressure from the probe uncomfortable but not painful. As the sonographer guided the foreign body, sound waves rebounded off my organs.

“Your ovaries are covered in them!”

She swung the monitor around. I gazed at the grainy black-and-white image on the monitor - a moonscape with black craters. My little miracle.

“Those dark spots are ovarian cysts.”

She clicked on the machine, taking pictures.

“What are they?”

“It’s what happens when you ovulate but the egg doesn’t mature. If the follicle can’t release the egg, it doesn’t get re-absorbed. It sticks on the ovary and turns into a fluidfilled sac.”

The word ‘egg’ triggered a surge of nausea. My body, the egg factory. There was a problem on the production line. The eggs were backed up, but the line kept moving.

They were piling up, rotten, blocking the whole system.

“It could make it harder to get pregnant,” she said. “But don’t worry, when you want to have children, they’ll give you a drug to make you hyperovulate.”

This was my destiny: to be the mass-production egg

factory of the future. Back in the waiting room, the lady “Don’t you dare say that.” at the desk gave me the scans in an envelope address to In bed, he slept while I lay awake, running a finger over my doctor. the hair on my upper lip. Feeling the stubble on my neck Together, we looked at the pictures. A pair of twins in and chin. He liked the moustache, thought it was sexy. the shadows, their oval-shaped faces moonlit, each one But what about the beard I had been hiding, how would draped in a string of black pearls. They hoarded their he feel about that? Some women had moustaches; I didn’t treasures; their chambers were cluttered with these know any with beards. If I grew out my chin hairs, would useless things.

I still be his girlfriend? Would I still be a girl?

“Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome,” my doctor said.

I snuck out to his computer and launched the browser.

She pointed at the row of cysts on the ultrasound of my Images slid by: rose-coloured razors, a pastel pink tape, ovaries. She reminded me of my body hair, my irregular coral strips of birth control pills. This website presented cycles. She referred to my bloodwork - my hormones, my pathway to feminine health. I clicked on a link about pushing at the edges of normalcy. She mentioned hair and got stuck on the first word: ‘excess’. my moustache. I had a set of symptoms.

I was always too much. As soon as I could Strung together, they adorned me with walk, I ran. I couldn’t be contained: this condition. It wasn’t rare - about four years old, a teacup-sized storm, fifteen per cent of women had it, I had thrown myself against my she told me. I wondered why I’d bedroom door while my mother never heard of it. sat on the other side. Then I “Long-term, it is associated found a window. I climbed onto I scrolled down the page, seeing with diabetes, heart disease, the roof of our terrace house each word that snagged on the high blood pressure, anxiety, on Enmore Road and reached way: ’unwanted’, ’unfeminine’, depression, and infertility.” for the setting sun before I ’wrong’ ... I had tried everything, I felt the familiar pang in was yanked back through. but nothing could stop the cells my stomach. I knew anxiety.

I scrolled down the page, dividing, building new hairs to “Is there medication?” seeing each word that snagged replace the ones I’d defeated.

“We could give something for on the way: ‘wrong’, ‘unwanted’, the hair, but it has side effects.” ‘unfeminine’. The article listed I thought about the money my all the ways you could deal with mother had already spent on my laser hair: wax, pluck, shave, electrocute, hair removal. The sting of the laser, the dissolve with chemicals, zap with lasers, numbing block of ice rolled over my face after permanently damage the follicle. I had tried each session, and the hair that just kept growing back. everything, but nothing could stop the cells dividing, I’d come to see these hairs as part of the reflection, not building new hairs to replace the ones I’d defeated. a dirty mark on the mirror.

The computer went to sleep as I sat, thinking. I’d had “The hair doesn’t bother me. How do I manage the a moustache since I started high school. I’d lived through other stuff?” high school with a moustache. I thought about the “Don’t get fat,” the doctor said. She gave me back the tough-looking woman on the cover of the library book ultrasounds. The twins in the shadows smiled. had been reading, how my boyfriend had called her A black pearl is born from a flaw of nature. unattractive. Female Masculinity described girls like me: In the fecund waters of the ocean, a grain of sand enters how we were told to shave and behave. The book also the parted lips of a mollusc and embeds itself in the flesh. opened a window onto what we could be: androgynous, Pinctada margaritifera, the black-lip oyster, is protected transgressive, powerful. My abundant hair wasn’t a by a strong mother: nacre, the inner shell layer. symptom; it was a sign.

She finds the intruder - the grain, the irritating seed A hair is born from a root buried deep in the follicle, and smothers it within the folds of her gown. Entombed under the skin. within the shell, encysted. Nacre shields, and the oyster In the dermis, the living tissue of the true skin, nerve remains open, its gills filtering food and phosphates, endings coil around blood vessels while sweat glands sorting sustenance from detritus. With each nacreous snakeup to the epidermis, the outer surface. Hair is layer, the seed grows-in size, and in value. The oyster’s built from a tough protein, keratin, but the hair itself survival is the oyster’s art. When the oyster is opened, is layered: the cuticle, or covering; the cortex, which the gem is offered: the black pearl, born from a black lip. provides strength and pigment; and the innermost layer: the soft, fragile marrow called the medulla. aybe I wasn’t meant to be a girl.”

The hair root, sheathed in a protective double coat, is Walking beside the highway, cars streaked nourished by blood, the groundwater of the dermis, and past in bursts of sound, streetlights burned in the night. hormones, the chemical messengers that fertilise growth.

“I should become a boy, since I suck at being a girl.”

As the hair awakens in the growing phase, it pushes up My boyfriend tighened his grip on my hand. through the skin, breaking the surface. Then the follicle

“M

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BASTIAN FOX PHELAN

shrinks, and the hair detaches from the root. While old hairs are resting, new hairs begin to form. In the final stages, the hair is gradually loosened and cast off.

I

was making a new zine. I typed it on my red Valentine typewriter. Rat-a-tat on the keys. Each letter embedding the pigment in the soft, cream paper. Over the years, I had progressed from making fanzines about cats to zines that were more personal, but this one felt different. As I typed, made mistakes and I didn’t cover them up.

The words had formed within me. They wrapped around memories that scratched, ingrained. The boy in primary school who had pointed out my monobrow, right before school photos. The high school kid who saw my beard hairs and exposed me, yelling across the playground. All the names I’d been called: hairy, ugly, dyke.

I arranged the pages in order. In between, I glued images of bearded ladies cut from a book about the circus. It hurt to look at them. Was that me, now? Spectacle, curiosity.

Or would I become something else? I stroked my beard, the hairs now long and thick. It was almost ready to photocopy. I had envelopes to send my zine to the shops and distros that would circulate it, dispersing it like a seed. Unlike my past zines, this one wasn’t cute - it was a declaration of difference. Now, I had to give my zine a name. I called it Ladybeard.

The words encased the old irritants in a lustrous cloak.

Transmuted, diagnosis had become distinction. I opened my hands, and offered the pearl.

.

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51

TRIPTYCHS IN TIME ALICE ROBINSON

I

am small. Five. Dark fringe, large eyes. “You’ll be a heartbreaker,” an uncle says, a devastating destiny, but he seems certain. Now I peer through the hexagonal wire fence between school and the road. Dust and chalk; sticky fingers. Kathryn and I have shoved green glass, broken bottle, into the big tree, thinking about The Wizard of Oz. We are dreamy and uncool, cloistered in our lovely neighbourhood, in a bubble of our own design, childhood dreaming that we are never made to pop. But there is Kathryn’s mother at the gate with the little brother and the baby in a stroller. This mother is athletic, strong calved, white skirt swishing.

Magpie song; so much of the day left for playing. Cobbled lanes, cats in squares of sunlight, pink and red geraniums brushing our legs through cast-iron fences as we pass.

The tick, tick, tick of pedestrian lights: we cross Lygon Street putting the clatter of trams at our backs. It is my first visit to their house; my mother will come lifetimes later, after dinner, to deliver me back into quiet. But right now I am captivated by the pram laden with school bags, watching as Kathryn and the little brother each take ahold of the pram, one a side, to cross the road safely, so that standing behind them, Kathryn’s mother is made the captain of their boat, steering her cargo through perilous waters.

O

nly the length of an exhale since her birth, just a single beat of the heart from the moment she was lifted high into the air, streamers of blood trailing, is what it seems. Yet, when I look back at the photos of my daughter Etta, I find years have gone and I am sliding toward forty with a child. With two children. Rope burn of days and weeks and months. The bald babies, sweet toddlers. So many meals and games and sleepless nights; I remember them all, now that I am looking. My long hair cut short then grown grey; body softened, stretched from inside out. Avoid the mirror, I tell myself, and you can still wear what you like. But without the photos to take me back, I’ve been in this self same long afternoon forever, waiting for my husband to return, craning down the street for his car. Some of the pictures were snapped months ago. Only yesterday. But already, even the most recent among them invokes some other historical time; images from this morning already belong to the gallery of black and white family photographs hanging in our hall. I stare into my father’s eyes in Etta’s face, and into my own eyes, trying to locate the answer to a question that plagues me in spite of our twin smiles: Was she happy in that moment? Was I? Intuiting, even as I agonise, that to focus on happiness is moot. We lived.

W

hen I am shuffling to the park and the children each take the side of the stroller to cross the road they are now too large to be wheeled; too little to walk far, their bodies at once infant-plump and rangy, caught in a process of ageing that means they are never static - I experience a pain, only faintly unpleasant, like tears behind the nose. I look around for someone to express this to, the uncanny sense that I am treading on my own shadow, but there is never anyone there. The children - but in this they do not count. My only responsibilities are to keep them alive and to police the boundary between what will happily broaden their view of the world and what will shunt them into adulthood too quickly. So I am quiet in my thoughts, slugging along behind the empty pram, unable to shake the feeling that the lurid green parkland and unrelenting summer sky and ruddy cheeks are a photograph overlaid by a negative of this same scene from another era. I’ve stepped into my own history; but I am the mother now. Knowing, even as this thought occurs, that it is exhaustingly immaterial. For all this work, living, I too will become platitude. “What was your mum like?” my grandchildren enquire of my children. likely: silence.

W

hen she returns from my grandmother’s funeral in the States, my mother brings me a peach-coloured cardigan, bellsleeved. Tiny hooks of wool like curls in a sheep’s pelt. From a distance, the cardigan resembles a fur coat made from some mythic pink animal.

My mother explains that years ago she bought the cardigan for my grandmother in Castlemaine and had it shipped back home to Lowell.

“It’s handmade, see?” she says, turning the cardigan over so that I can fully appreciate its beauty. Like her mother, my mother believes in quality, which she equates with expense. Even as this irks me (I am just clearing a long convalescence: adolescence), I understand that she is telling me how much the cardigan once cost. “But Mum never even wore it!” she goes on disapprovingly, a little hurt, gesturing at the original tissue paper. My mother is a daughter of a mother of a daughter, I think with a pang, having always known but never really understood. So I take the cardigan and hang it in my own closet: a wardrobe transported from my childhood to the weatherboard cottage I am renting with Kathryn while we finish our degrees. The cardigan moves with me to all the closets in the houses that come after.

A

nd suddenly I find myself somewhere I’ve never been before, this town south-east of Melbourne. Tucked so deep into domesticity I wake sweating. Brick house, garden, vegetables and flowers, all of it growing or dying by my hand. I’m waiting for the morning I am so sure is coming, when I wake to find it dust, evidence, finally, of my failings. So many rooms (to vacuum). Visitors crow heartily of getting lost, trying to be kind, to tell me we’ve done well here. But on long afternoons when no visitors arrive, I trail through, fretting. This empire: all mine. Old women in the street exclaim that the children are just gorgeous, but behind doors my kids bite and scratch, feral cats.

I can’t help but feel things have darkened, turned serious, gotten away from me somehow. Ants stream like water flowing backward up the legs of the old timber fort in the garden, marching on lunches the children abandon knowing She, who is me, will come along to clean them up. And I do, dutiful, scaling the too-small slide for crusts and cordial. Back in the kitchen, scraping into the bin, I know it is all ashes.

Soon another girl-turned woman will stand in the shade looking up at the fort, children silhouetted against shards of sky, blue stained glass, voice of the little daughter calling, joyous abandon! Mum! Come see!

T

hough I often take grandmother’s cardigan out to admire it, I can’t bring myself to wear it for more than a few minutes. I love the way it looks on the hanger, but every time I shrug it on and turn to the mirror, I recoil.

Fat. Such a dull objection (I was still young). So it goes to the op shop in a quick fire purge, things tossed before they can be snatched back. Moving boxes, a first mortgage, I think the new flat is too small to store it all.

(But it’s me; I’m too shallow. Still waiting for adulthood to hollow me out). Some time later, standing on the corner of Bourke and Swanston Streets, I see the cardigan go past, its distinctive bulk and pattern, the lovely blushing wool. My heart skitters. I long to leap at the striking, tall girl who is parading it over white singlet and black jeans, impossibly chic, whereas I had resembled a child in a bear costume. I want to give chase, to take her arm and reveal the cardigan’s story: speak of Castlemaine and Lowell, my mother and grandmother, how far the jumper has travelled, and without ever being worn. But instead I stand silent, rooted. Mutely watching as the girl, the cardigan, steps onto a tram and slides away. For how to avoid seeming creepy? To put into words all the heavy, misfired love?

ALICE ROBINSON

I

read our history online, archived: Patricia Pancini, thirteen, injured fatally Friday night when a station wagon containing ten young persons plunged into a ditch near Lowell. My mother wasn’t in the car when her little sister died, but she saw the accident a way down the street as she was coming home from school, ambulance and police, sirens and lights, not knowing what it meant: everything had shifted. That’s my memory of her memory, anyway, I dare not ask for clarification.

When trauma occurs, a child buried, decades before one is born, the sorrow is passed down, never mentioned but ever-present. Patty’s photograph on my grandmother’s dresser; her clothes preserved in plastic in a basement trunk; my mother gripping me hard as we cross Lygon Street, flinching at traffic, and me already a teenager, thirteen, angrily shrugging her off, “I don’t need you to hold my hand anymore, Mum!” Now I feel my pulse quicken approaching the curb with my toddler son, hearing how my voice rises to unpleasant octaves under the strain of safekeeping, “You hold my hand right this instant! We are crossing the road!” Artie glances down the empty street; doesn’t like to be barked at. I take the sticky fingers reluctantly offered. They were formed inside my body. But they are outside of me now.

T

he dirt road appears freshly cut into the side of the mountain, jungle lush and wet. Ten hours into the bus ride; grubby fisherman pants. My friends nap, play cards.

Sit stoned; dope smoked a while back, bus refuelling, water buffalo, middle of nowhere. The man I’m now in love with has a ukulele and a beard. He is not my sweet boyfriend, but older and worldlier, a Dean Moriarty type I’ve decided, not yet perceiving that the invisibility of women in On The Road is something to resent. I’m only pretending to look out of the window, attuned not to this stunning landscape but to the frisson of proximity, my body to the man. Then it happens. Sound arrives first: shrill wailing from outside the bus. A group of women screaming.

A word I’ll learn later: keening. I am white, lucky. My brain snaps to the only point of reference it possesses: recordings of The Beatles, the roar of their crowd, fans before fainting.

We round a bend; here is a village.

Homes of sticks and straw. Chickens, pigs. A rock band, I think. Here? The bus flashes past. But I see. A truck just ahead, stalled. Mother and sister and aunties and friends rushing roadside. A toddler on the ground.

Head split, bloody. I know he is dead; has died, just now, seconds before we passed by, while I lusted.

“C

ar crash story, Grandpa!” the children clamour even before my greyhaired dad removes his hat.

(It’s a Panama. The rest of his outfit: op shop.) An enthusiastic driver, family of ’petrolheads’, he has many a good yarn about almost being killed.

The children, just free of babyhood, know all the stories, wounds and near misses: the time you stepped off the motorbike; the spider inside your helmet; sliding under a truck; the Landie crashing into a tree. The worst accidents make the best tales. My father animates with matchbooks, one for each car, showing how it unfolded. I was only three, high in the passenger seat of our Kombi.

A country intersection, another driver failing to give way. “Coming home from golf,” my father clarifies.

“Busy gabbing.” He makes a splitsecond decision (the climax!) to floor the accelerator, to speed instead of slamming on the breaks. “We almost made it!” He still can’t believe it.

“But the front of her car just barely caught the back of ours, and that was it.” We flipped, flying down the highway, roof to road. Sparks. My father’s head punched through glass.

I was safe, but he couldn’t be sure until he climbed out to check. “I was so worried!” he wails. My children, rapt. So I tell it again,their bedtime story, until my throat is raw with crunching metal.

.

SANE NICOLE MCKENZIE

W

ith no ability to sharpen the blurry line between grief and depression, I am in my doctor’s office.

“My dad had depression and my mum has anxiety.”

“See, that just sounds normal to me,” my doctor replies while filling in the government-enforced form required for my referral to a psychologist. “... Well my father took his own life.”

In the most caring voice imaginable she says, “You know, you are the second person this week to tell me that.” She pauses. “How old was he?”

“Forty-four.”

I have already told her that my grandfather has recently passed away and it brought up thoughts of my father’s death; it’s the reason I’m here. I have not told her my grandfather also took his own life.

Suicide plagues my family.

I can’t help returning to the question that if I am the third generation following two generational deaths by suicide, how can I possibly be sane?

“It’s funny, grief. It can be months, even years, and then something happens and it brings it right back up. The feeling can be just as strong, even years later.” My doctor’s words are comforting, justifying my emotional reaction.

She continues, “Mourning over the loss of a person or a relationship is one of the most difficult things we do in life, but it’s what makes us human.”

Human. I am human. This is normal. I am normal. I am an only child so I have no brothers or sisters to confirm this. If I had siblings I might know whether or not it’s appropriate to lose two family members to suicide and be this positive, this sad, this ... crazy? Paranoid. I mean paranoid. I dream of asking these fictitious siblings, How many bad days do you have in a year? Do you still cry about it? Are there days where you forget what his smile looked like, days you don’t think of him at all? But there is no one to ask; it’s just me. The sole member in the third generation of this hopefully breakable chain. I’m crying uncontrollably on the phone as I explain the details of my grandfather’s death to a friend. She asks if I have someone I could see - a psychologist, a psychiatrist - I tell her I have never seen one. “I can’t believe you have never seen someone, Nicole... ” she continues, her exact words lost before I can take them in, something like, “You of all people...”

Yes: me of all people. In fact, I almost pride myself on it - I have never seen a psychologist so I can’t possibly

be mentally ill, right? There are two reasons for my psychologist-free life - a fear of diagnosis and generally feeling okay.

To imagine a psychologist saying the words ‘depression’, or possibly ‘bipolar,’ crushes me. I see the word in cursive - depression - it stretches out until the letters are almost unrecognisable and then wraps itself around my lungs, pulling tighter and tighter, until I can no longer breathe; no longer get out of bed. You knew it was coming, the voice in my head will tell me.

“I have not yet seen the case in which a ‘diagnosis’ led to a ‘cure,’ or in fact to any outcome other than a confirmed, and therefore an enforced, debility,” writes Joan Didion of her daughter in Blue Nights. It is this enforced debility that I fear.

T

he referral sits in my top desk drawer, surrounded by many unrelated items: pieces of writing, uni readings, a spare car key, a stapler, condoms, receipts, a hard drive. Scrap paper, iron tablets, matches and an itty bittys plush Ariel toy with a handwritten note from a friend. Ariel: Intrigued by the unknown and constantly looking for the most unique things in life. “I just don’t see how a world that makes such wonderful things could be bad.” A ‘junk drawer’ full of important things. After one particularly difficult day when I had convinced myself of my mental instability, I pull the referral out and google the clinic, ready to choose a psychologist. But the internet is slow and I am exhausted so I close my laptop and go to sleep. I awake feeling okay again.

The next time I see my doctor she asks if I have used the referral and I tell her that I didn’t.

“Sometimes just talking to someone can make you feel better, it’s called transference.”

Genetic predisposition to depression. Many times in my life, after my father’s death, these words have replayed themselves in my head. Nobody has said them to me but surely the statement remains true. I like to think that I am working against this susceptibility. I am careful. I make time for myself. I write, I do things I love and I selfreflect. I eat well. I don’t take recreational drugs, apart from drinking on occasion, and I surround myself with strong support networks: friends with beautiful hearts, powerful women. I breathe.

I know you can’t cure depression with journals and friends - that smiling isn’t the answer - but I can’t stop

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NICOLE MCKENZIE myself from wondering if you can prevent it? Delay it? you’ve heard the details... ” she begins.

Can you beat a predisposition?

“No.” But the existence of the details tells me all I need to I google is depression preventable? I open a new tab to know; I’ve filled these gaps before. hide the search as someone walks by. They are going to “He fell over in the bathroom and cut his leg and then he think I’m crazy, but maybe I am crazy. On goodtherapy. bandaged it up. But he didn’t want to go to a home so he org, a website claiming it “Helps people find therapists, went to his shed and got a gun-” advocates for ethical therapy” I find an article titled “Is I sob. When we lose that sense of the possible we lose it fast.

Depression a Preventable Condition?” Perhaps, it claims.

I hang up the phone and sit it down. I walk to the toilet One commenter, Dylan, writes: and collapse in tears. I feel like I have lost my father all “Preventable? Are you kidding me? [ ... ] Keep yourself over again. After going to the bathroom and washing my healthy, happy, engaged, and stimulated. But often that still face, I text my housemate: Are you awake? cannot prevent that wave of depression that so many of us Yep! have felt in our lives from time to time. I think it could She comes downstairs and sits next me on the couch. In even be seen as unethical to even suggest that it could be.” broken fragments I explain my father’s death, then my Unethical. He thinks my thoughts are unethical, that grandfather’s. This is one interesting way to get to know they are stupid. But if there is no prevention is it just a your new housemate. matter of days? Am I just a textbook ticking time bomb?

“I’m sorry, you must think I’m crazy.” I take a deep breath I read Dylan’s comment again and come back to the but hot tears continue to roll down my cheeks. phrase “wave of depression.” I’ve felt that, surely anyone Grieving is simultaneously one of the most selfless and who has experienced grief has. Noticing how much the most selfish acts imaginable. Grieving my grandfather, heavier your clothes have become as you put them on or rather grieving the circumstances in which I lost my in the morning, no longer caring if you look like you grandfather, was, in my opinion, undeniably selfish. I haven’t slept, haven’t eaten: you haven’t after all. The remember thinking, People get old. Old people die. I can inability to get out of bed, not being able to call accept this; this is a part of life. I cannot accept your friends because you can’t remember someone choosing to end their life before who they are. Of course waves pass nature follows its course, not someone that’s the difference between grief who understands the way suicide and depression. But when you are rips apart a family. Not him. underwater, helplessly tumbling “You must be so angry at him,” with the force of the wave and my best friend exclaims, sitting To imagine a psychologist reaching for something stable in the passenger seat of my car saying the words ’depression’, to grasp, it is impossible to after I pulled over, unable to or possibly ’bipolar,’ crushes know if you will ever breathe drive through the tears. me. I see the word in cursive air again. I find the journal I I know you can’t be angry at - depression - it ... wraps itself wrote in after Pa’s death - yet someone who takes their own around my lungs, pulling tighter another journal I have given life, it’s an unwritten rule; they and tighter, until I can no longer up on - where, in scrawled blue lost a fighting battle and for breathe; no longer get out of bed. pen, I had written: I feel awful. that you may feel sadness, pity, Just icky and bleh and helpless. I frustration, confusion, but not have three essays to write and I just anger - never anger. can’t do it. I’m still in bed. I’m just a mess “Yeah... How could he do it? He knows and I know I should be doing better. exactly what it feels like.” In this moment Wonky scribbled lines fill the middle of the I am not sympathetic, I am angry. Angry. For page, as if writing were too much, or not enough. The last putting me through this again. For making me question line reads, Thought about ringing Tilly & explaining but life, death, mental health, mental stability, and genetics.

Angry that he couldn’t just fade like other grandparents, he next entry is ten days later, when I claim to be to die of natural causes. I have no right to be angry, I am feeling better. breaking the rules, but at this moment I don’t care. I don’t Joan Didion writes, “When we lose that sense of the have the energy to fight off emotions and replace them possible we lose it fast. One day we are absorbed by with logic. dressing well, following the news, keeping up, coping, “Any childhood traumas?” My doctor asks, reading from what we might call staying alive; the next day we are not.” the questions on the form. “I would say losing your father When I first hear of my grandfather’s death I do not was a childhood trauma, wouldn’t you?” know the details. My mother had not heard the full story, “Yeah.” Until this moment I hadn’t thought of it as such. so in her 10pm phone call she told me only what she knew: Trauma may well be diagnosable - written on a piece of Pa had died that day. The next day I will go to uni as usual; paper and signed by a professional - but, in my opinion, I will tell my friend the news casually over pasta. it is not curable.

That night, I call my cousin Brennagh. “I don’t know if The death of my father was akin to the sudden removal

T

56

SANE of a vital organ. Almost immediately I was patched up reassurance has been able to convince me otherwise. as though nothing was missing, and told to keep going; After Pa’s funeral, my mum, my uncle Bob, and myself that he would want me to keep going. I couldn’t breathe sit on the balcony of my uncle Alec’s place on the main but I had to get up in the morning. At very least I had to street of Colac. “A Colac penthouse” as Bob describes it. wake up in the morning. Over time I began to “Do you want any of his guns?” Bob asks. adjust, but occasionally I remember that “No.” How morbid. something is different, that I wasn’t “I didn’t think so, just thought I’d always this way. I am forever check. Paddy wants one, he wants to changed by the loss of my father. own land someday, so he’ll need Some may say damaged. I it, sometimes you need to put tend to claim stronger, but I animals down, things like that.”

Grieving is simultaneously one fear a psychologist may say “Yeah... that’s fair enough,” of the most selfless and the most diagnosable. ‘Diagnosable’ Mum responds. selfish acts imaginable. Grieving is okay, it’s a little too hot Bob’s going to go to the gun over my grandfather, or rather to hold for longer than a shop tomorrow to return grieving the circumstances in few seconds, but okay. them.

Or sell them, or leave which I lost my grandfather, was, ‘Diagnosed’ would, however, them there...

I’m not really in my opinion, undeniably selfish. be scalding. If diagnosed, I fear sure. I couldn’t think of a more that I would be forced to view awful post-death task. Bob my mental illness as an inevitable drinks his coke and I take a sip path towards darkness, something of water. We stare at the street I could not recover from. below us.

T

here are no clear statistics on the risk of developing depression following a family history of the disorder There is, however, a proven genetic basis for depression. The genetic component of depression in women is generally estimated to be around 40 per cent. One study showed that children who have a parent who attempts suicide are more likely to attempt suicide themselves. An article reporting on this research ends by reassuring those with parents who have attempted suicide not to be “overly concerned about the study’s finding of increased risk to them.” Researcher Dr David Brent (1) says, “I think it’s just a wakeup call... Just like if you have a family history of breast cancer or colon cancer. You’d be vigilant of that.”

My higher risk of developing a mental illness makes me all the more determined to circumvent it. I understand the ridiculousness of this; my grandmother died of breast cancer yet I have never once asserted my determination to prevent it from happening to me.

The best description I have found for my feelings comes from a scene in The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants.

Bridget, who lost her mum to suicide, is sitting on her bedroom floor with her friends when she grows upset over her loss. Carmen says, “It’s okay to miss her Bee. I mean, as hard as it is to be sad about it, don’t you think maybe it’s harder not to be?”

“You don’t understand ... ” “Bridge,” Tibby brushes Bridget’s hair behind her ear.

“I can’t, it hurts too much.”

“I know,” Carmen offers.

“No you don’t know, I just want to feel good and happy and alive. Because... if I feel alive then, it doesn’t seem like she’s dead. And, if I’m not sad, then, it proves that I’m not like her.”

If I’m happy it proves that I am not like my father. No

.

References: 1. Brent, David A., et al. “Familial Pathways to Early-Onset Suicide Attempt: A 5.6-Year Prospective Study.”

Jama Psychiatry 2 (2015) 2. Rusby, James S. M ., Fiona Tasker, and Lynn Cherkas. “Genetic and Environmental Components of Female Depression as a Function of the Severity of the Disorder.” Brain and Behaviour 10 (2016).

3. Seaman, Andrew M. “If Parents Attempt Suicide, Children Are More Likely To Attempt It Too” Huffington Post. 02 Mar 2015.

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58

JACKPOT BEN WALTER

W

hen Eddie McGuire started insulting me everyone had finally had enough. “Jason,” he said, “is a real piece of shit.” I was washing my windscreen at the time and noticed a tiny crack near the top of the car; an eyelid barely closed.My first thought was: he’s right. I felt tears in my eyes and the microfibre cloth slowed right down as though the battery needed a charge. I wanted to grab a handful of dirt from near the daffodils and smudge it all over the bonnet. Then Samantha rushed from the house.

“Did you hear what Eddie said?” she asked me. “Cunt! He doesn’t even know you.” The radio barked on, soiling the driveway. Water fanned across the concrete like the shadow of a more expensive car. “What’ll everyone think?”

I asked, dropping my clothonthe lawn. We waited for the hate mail, the online abuse. But his slanders rebounded.

There was outcry, editorials in all the major newspapers.

He was fired from his radio show, lost his remaining endorsements. Someone left a gutted catfish at his door; this may have been a coincidence. Would Eddie apologise?

He gave no sign of remorse in any interview.

About a week later there was a knock at my door. It was Eddie. “Do you want to grab a beer?” he asked. “Sure,” I said. We went down to the local and sat at a table near a fern. Eddie eyed off the pokies. “Look,” he said. “It wasn’t personal. Still, it wasn’t exactly a brain snap.” “I get it,” I said. “You knew my brother?” Eddie wandered off with his drink and started fiddling with a Queen of the Nile.

He searched through his pockets, frowned. “Do you have any change?” he asked me. “No,” I said. “Did you know my brother?” Eddie started digging around on the carpet for a coin. He looked at me a little furtively. The knees

of his trousers seemed worn; he leaned back against the pokie machine and sighed. “Okay,” he said. “Yeah, I knew your brother.” Over at the bar two older men with faces like gulls were looking in our direction. One took a long, lasting gulp of his drink. “What did he do?” I asked. “Tell me, what happened?” But as Eddie picked up his beer and started to speak, the pokie above him lit up, trumpeted and danced, and even though he hadn’t slotted any coins the cash just kept rolling out over him like it had been slit in the gut, thousands and thousands of dollars that covered his body and filled up the pub with glimmering light.

.

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PUBLIC SPACES: THINK OF A DINOSAUR CHLOE REESON

T

hink of a dinosaur, Elizabeth says. Or a sabre-toothed tiger, or a woolly mammoth. There are the threats your mind has evolved to defend itself against. In the two weeks before I am booked to go to Europe, I have appointments with Elizabeth, a therapist my mum had been seeing and recommended in the wake of my diagnosis. The year before, I had been treated for a serious illness. Over the two weeks, I have two scheduled hours with Elizabeth.

Her office is on the bottom floor of her Queensland home in Toowong and while we talk I can sometimes hear her son practising piano upstairs. I tell her about my fixation on the lack of closure I feel. That I can’t stop looking for reasons for it to have happened and when I come up with none, I feel angry and untrusting.

Elizabeth speaks to me calmly and in analogies. We are problem-solving creatures, she says. Your prehistoric brain is constantly on the lookout for the next sabre-toothed tiger, it’s constantly preparing itself for threats. This is natural but it gets in the way.

She asks me to imagine myself coming out of my cave and sitting next to a river. In the river there are leaves floating by, and each time an obtrusive thought occurs to me I should imagine taking it out of my head and placing it on a leaf and watching it float away. Earlier in the week I had read a news story about a product called edible water.

Thick globs of water that could be chewed for hydration.

As ridiculous as this concept was, it looked cool, and so I would sit in Elizabeth’s home office with my eyes closed, imagining myself pulling these round, transparent globs from my head with memories of myself reflected in their centre. I’d place each one on the leaf, sticky as honey, and watch it float away. Sometimes I would pull a thought out once and that would be it; other times I’d have to drag the same image from my head over and over. I’d keep a lingering eye on them as they floated all the way down the river and disappeared.

I went to Europe because it was only a few months prior that I had finished having chemo for the breast cancer that had sprouted a few days before my twenty-second birthday. It was an extremely unexpected diagnosis and something that upended my sense of self, and - in the simplest terms - it really scared me.

It took me a while to settle into the trip. For the first week I had the familiar travel anxieties of being unsure if I was doing it ‘right’. Was I seeing the best things or meeting enough people? Eventually I accepted that

60

I was too exhausted to care anymore and I relaxed into the fact that all I wanted from this trip was to be alone in beautiful places. I was lucky just to have the opportunity and means to travel but lucky wasn’t a term I had felt capable of applying to myself for a long time. I walked around cities and read books and sat in train carriages with people speaking languages I couldn’t understand.

It was this uniquely comforting sort of quiet - a gentle, incomprehensible noise.

Soon, emerging out of this, I began to notice a series of coincidences. In a Stockholm restaurant I was seated next to a petite, older woman in her sixties. When I started talking to her I learned that she was a retired American ballerina who was in Sweden to give a public lecture. As I wandered back to my hostel that night, I passed a dance museum advertising her lecture. In Berlin I met a family at random in a flea market whom my friend at home had au paired for. I would read something in a book about an artist I had never heard of and the next day I would find myself in a gallery showing a retrospective of their work.

These were small coincidences but they forced me to start noticing things again, to look for more patterns and strange order.

While I was travelling I knew that Carrie Brownstein’s memoir, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, would be coming out. Maybe even more than arriving in the cities I was visiting, the release of this book was the event I was most excited about. Carrie has been the guitarist for bands like Excuse 17, Wild Flag, and most famously SleaterKinney, who emerged in the mid-nineties out of Olympia, Washington just after the riot grrrl movement. In the early days of SleaterKinney, Carrie and lead singer Corin Tucker’s brief relationship was unexpectedly ’outed’ by a journalist for Spin Magazine. Following this, Carrie remained exceptionally private about her personal life.

I’ve never felt very certain or fixed on any aspect of my identity. When I was younger and first discovered SleaterKinney’s loud unapologetic music, my biggest uncertainty was about who I wanted to date. I couldn’t tell if my crushes on girls and boys were about wanting to be with them or be them. Carrie never talked about her sexuality in interviews. She was feminine and boyish and seemed to prefer the uncertainties and indefinites in her public persona. I think I connected to her in this way because my identity never felt determinately expressible either.

I was in Brussels the day her book was released and as soon as the e-book version started downloading I let

out a little whoop of excitement. I was finally going to get to spend some intimate time with this notoriously private idol of mine. I went to a cafe at the end of my street. It was small and bright and fitted with blonde pine furniture.

A sign behind the barista advertised that they served ‘Australian flat-whites’. I ordered a coffee and began to read.

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arrie opens her memoir with a scene backstage at a venue in Brussels called Le Botanique. Exhausted from touring, anxiety, and a bout of shingles, Carrie is breaking down and lashing out at herself. She slaps herself in an unhinged frenzy. She doesn’t want to go on. The band is the thing she loves most in the world but she can’t do it anymore. Something’s changed. She needs a break. I stopped reading and looked up and out the window of the cafe. Across the road was a concrete facade with French graffiti scribbled across its columns. Atop these columns was a large sign: Le Botanique. The venue that Carrie was writing about was directly opposite the cafe I was sitting in.

I felt electric. My body was energised again, not just in a physical sense, but as though the profound disbelief that I had been steeped in for the past year had finally lifted. I had the tingly assurance that I was in the exact right spot I needed to be. This coincidence, like everything on the trip, was small, easily explainable - but after the big, random, terrible surprise that was cancer, these tiny coincidences gave me momentum, like a monkey swinging between vines. The more chances I could grab onto, the more confident I felt that life was on the right track again, that the bad part was over.

While I was having chemo, the Sleater-Kinney box set of records came out and I bought it. When I opened it though, one of the records was missing - a final cruelty at the time - and I was too tired to go back to the store to ask for a replacement. Still, I listened to the other six LPs all the time. They were intense, emotional songs, and it was a fitting soundtrack to six months of lying on my bed, thinking “Why me?”

The title of Carrie’s autobiography comes from the song ‘Modern Girl’ off the album The Woods, their final studio album before hiatus, and the one that was left out of my box set. As I had spent my chemo months listening only to the vinyl, I hadn’t played The Woods in its entirety in a long time. After hours sitting in the cafe across from Le Botanique, I went back to my Airbnb apartment and played it from start to finish on Spotify.

‘Modern Girl’ is the fifth song on a ten-track album.

Coming after ‘Jumpers’, a fraught song inspired by Golden Gate Bridge suicides, ‘Modern Girl’ stands out all the more.

It’s the only happy sounding song on the record, even though the lyrics are sarcastic anddry. Carrie sings “My baby loves me / I’m so happy” and “My baby left me / I’m so angry” in the same unimpressed voice. This balancing act between pessimism and optimism was deeply recognisable to me. When she sings “Took my money and bought a doughnut / The hole’s the size of this entire world,” it was the tension I felt. How could something so tiny change so much? It felt like this record had been held from me until this moment when I could really listen to it.

When I asked my surgeon whether I was going to live, she told me she couldn’t say. I could put the details of your diagnosis into a computer program and get a statistic, she said, but that wouldn’t mean much to you because you’re younger than all of the women they study for these things.

Even within the already senseless disease of cancer, I was an anomaly. Breast cancer shouldn’t have happened to me. As the doctors and nurses who cared for me kept saying, “I was too young.” Their disbelief, as well meaning and appreciated as it was, never helped me. I just wanted someone to tell me why it had happened.

Humans spend so much time looking for patterns or systems. They help us predict what’s coming next. They help us prepare for the next threat to pass by our cave.

When we see the pieces falling into place the way we’d expected, it’s reassuring. I went to the other side of the world and, in a cafe with a book and a song, in this really quiet way, I found a sense of relief in their surprising connections. As Carrie sings, “My whole life / Was like a picture of a sunny day.” Or at least it was until it suddenly wasn’t. I don’t believe in fate or destiny but I think these coincidences, like listening to a song at the exact moment you need to hear it, can often be the vines between which we swing, and with which we make meaning for ourselves.

Listening to ‘Modern Girl’ that night, I lay back and thought about where I was, my whole world the size of a hole in a doughnut or a tiny apartment in Brussels, as the case may be. I didn’t have to find a way to be okay with what had happened - it was an objectively shit time - but it was over. I could sink into the momentum and rhythms of my life. I could let the leaves float down the stream, messy but oddly habitual.

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COMMON GROUND A conversation between BRUCE PASCOE & KIM MAHOOD moderated by SARAH SCHLADO

Bruce Pascoe, Dark Emu

Sarah Schladow:

One of the most fundamental differences between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people is knowing the relationship between people and land. Earth is the mother. Aboriginal people are born of the earth and individuals within the clan had responsibility for particular streams, grasslands, trees, crops, animals, and even seasons. The life of the clan was devoted to continuance and still is.

The intensifying of resource use, language development and social organisation were in the curve of great change prior to the colonial period because Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were on the same cognitive trajectory as the rest of the human family, albeit in a different stream and a unique channel in that stream.

Perhaps the most significant difference was the attitude to land ownership and resource use. Instead of privately operated small holdings, clans were co-operating to prepare large areas of land for production with burning and tilling methods. There was an underlying conservatism in this approach, a concern for people they might never meet, and a respect for the prey species embedded in the spiritual and cultural fibres.

On the surface, we have potentially opposite poles of Australian culture: Bruce is a Bunurong and Yuin man, and Kim is a sixth-generation white Australian AngloCeltic woman. But from reading their books, we can feel and see how they come together.

First of all, they both experienced a remote upbringing: Bruce, on an island in Bass Strait in Tasmania; Kim, on a Tanami Desert cattle station in far north-western Australia. They’ve both won literary awards: Dark Emu, Bruce’s book, won the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards’ Book of the Year and the Indigenous Writer’s Prize in 2016; Kim has also won the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for non-fiction, and her artwork is held in state, territory and regional collections.

The final way I’ve seen that they come together is in their love and respect for the spiritual and cultural basis of our country. So I’d like to start with a question that struck me after reading both books, Dark Emu and Position Doubtful: I’m curious to know whether you see any difference, semantic or other, between the terms ‘land’ and ‘country’?

Kim Mahood, Position Doubtful How many of us still feel the grip of place - the long span of a life traced out in the growth of trees planted by someone you knew, a family history measured in memory and change, the sudden clutch of knowing that it will end, life and memory both, that love and sorrow cannot be separated? To learn the names of trees and grasses, the times of their seeding and flowering, the glimpse they offer into the grand slow cycles of nature, is to see your own life written there, and passing. To know the geography of a place is to know why we have always made stories in which our own human stuff is indivisible from the stones and creeks and hills and growing things.

This is a kind of love story. It is an unrequited love story, because it is between a person and a place, and a place doesn’t love you back. But perhaps that isn’t entirely true.

Perhaps it’s like loving God, and what you get back is a reflection of what you put in. Apart from the deep and unequivocal love I have for my family and close friends, there has been no other love in my life as sustained as the one I have felt for a remote pocket of inland Australia.

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Bruce Pascoe: I don’t really care. I don’t care for the difference between ‘Aboriginal’ or ‘Indigenous’ or ‘First Nation’, because Aboriginal people want to be referred to by their country.

I feel most comfortable aligned with my Yuin connection, where my family are from. I live on that land currently and that is the culture I know best. It’s all semantics, really.

We can argue a case - and I’m happy to argue a case - but Yuin people say “Bingyadyan ngallu birrung nudjarn jungarung,” and that means, “We arise from the mother’s heartbeat, and the mother is the land.” We have no other affiliation or responsibility other than to the land. So what you call that doesn’t matter because your responsibility is to ensure the land is looked after, that everything we do to it can be justified and sustained.

Kim Mahood: In our conversation earlier, you were looking at the way some of us use the word ‘country’ to describe Australia as in, this is my country - and that there’s something nationalistic about that usage. That hadn’t occurred to me previously. To my school friends - the boarders, the country kids and the day girls - country meant people who grew up on the farms. Then, of course, country became very

much the term Aboriginal people began to use to discern from ‘land’, ‘landscape’ or whatever. Like Bruce I think it’s semantics, but quite an interesting semantics to tease out.

As a painter, the notion of landscape became derogatory; it meant you were looking at rather than being in. The notion was landscape was something you looked at and had this sort of colonial notion of, whereas country was something you were in. I think they’re interesting terms.

across them, he daren’t take a horse on them.

That sort of ignores the fact that he’d already drowned all his horses, but you know what I mean.

At some point in our history, some minister, politician, parliamentarian, educator, scientist, historian decided that his children didn’t need to know these things. I’d love to find that person today. You know, not for any great act of violence, but I’d like to have the conversation: why?

Why did you decide this wasn’t interesting?

SS: Bruce, you discuss that our early landscape painters When I tried to study Australian History at Melbourne weren’t expressing their nostalgic memory of the English University I was told that they didn’t study it there because landscape, which is what I was taught at school, but that nothing had happened. There had been no Guy Fawkes, they were accurately depicting what the settlers found. no one had their head chopped off in Parliament house nothing had happened.

BP: It was actually Bill Gammage who brought that to my And yet there were these 80,000 years of history where attention in his great book The Biggest Estate on Earth: plenty happened - and that included the domestication of How Aborigines Made Australia. I’d grown up with an plants that are very important for us today because they Australian education; I was told Aboriginal people were sequester carbon, they’re gluten-free, they produce their incapable of building, didn’t have clothes, only walked crop with only the available water the continent can around aimlessly, picking a grub here and a fruit there, provide, they don’t need fertiliser or pesticide... and that they couldn’t build any structures at all. During Many things Aboriginal people knew about how to care that education I was also told that the colonial painters for the land are not being used today, but we can bring were Romantics and Illusionists: they’d come out here and them back. Farmers are going to be paid to grow the old they couldn’t paint a gum tree, so the feathery tops of Aboriginal domesticated grains simply because of their these trees the colonial painters were painting carbon-friendly qualities. Farmers will be paid were said to be some kind of Romantic to re-sow their grounds for these plants. extraction from Britain.

You’ll never have to plough that land Gammage pointed out that that again; never have to run a tractor wasn’t true - the widely spaced across it again, except to harvest massive trees, which in fact did the seed; you can graze animals have feathery tops, were there. on it - whether those animals When I tried to study Australian He could take us back to the are kangaroos or cattle or sheep, History at Melbourne University site where the colonial artists that’s another question we’re I was told that they didn’t study like von Guerard etc. had going to have to face. We can it there because nothing had painted, and he took photos do these things as a country, happened. There had been no of several of those sites. There together, but we mustn’t forget Guy Fawkes, no one had their was the rock, and there in the this information again. head chopped off in Parliament distance was the tree, or its Down in New South Wales and house - nothing had happened. stump. Gammage showed that Victoria, we’ve been trialling the colonial artists were actually methods to harvest kangaroo grass painting what they could see! What and Panicum decompositum, which artist with any pride in their bones we know Aboriginal people were using. would do anything else?

We have to reinvent those methods because knowledge disappears so quickly, even if it’s in a SS: In a similar way, the journals and diaries of the film or written down. There’s only one film I can see of the first explorers and colonisers show just how advanced people in central Australia harvesting grain. It’s called Aboriginal development and husbandry was back then, People of the Australian Western Desert, it’s fantastic. But building a very different picture of land management [to knowledge just disappears, even in today’s age. We think how we commonly perceive it to have been]. everything’s safe with Google but we have to treasure information, especially information about looking after BP: It’s amazing to me that some of our most famous the land.

Australians - Sir Thomas Mitchell, Charles Sturt, people That’s what really hurts: when I look at what was known like that - witnessed Aboriginal people harvesting grain and how quickly it dropped out of our conversation. and converting it into seed. Mitchell came across a yam We can regret that people chose to ignore Aboriginal pasture that went from Gariwerd, the Grampians in knowledge, because ackowledging Aboriginal excellence Victoria, and that yam field stretched to the horizon. He or achievement was also to acknowledge Aboriginal called it Australia Felix. Lieutenant Grey saw several of ownership of the land. It’s terrible to think that was the these fields; they were so deeply tilled that he couldn’t walk reason all of that [knowledge] was dismissed. Two hundred

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A CONVERSATION BETWEEN BRUCE PASCOE AND KIM MAHOOD BP: The term ‘hunting and gathering’ is one that was invented by Europeans to describe the various levels of human development. You progressed through the stages, and hunting and gathering was one of the most primitive.

There are Aboriginal people in myown country who say, “When we were kids we were still going out picking berries, we were still going getting cockles and bimbula off the beach, that’s gathering.”

KM: The areas where I spend the most time are much Yeah, it is, but my objection to the word ‘hunters and more desert - the edge of anywhere with cattle stations, gatherers’ is that it’s been used so politically. It’s a corrupted certainly way outside the agricultural zone and there, term; it’s like nigger, it’s as dynamic as that word, so I fire is obviously the management technique that’s been refuse to use it. used forever.

And I want Australians to realise that Aboriginal people It’s pretty interesting. In the middle of the Great Sandy were doing something else in a much more organised Desert, with the Martu people, they came out of the fashion of living off the land. In that film I mentioned desert in the sixties and were pretty much back in their before, People of the Australian Western Desert, the country by the end of the seventies, so there was only old girls go out with these big coolamon, and they just walk a fifteen-year period of displacement. When they went up to one of these seed plants and husk it all into the back, they continued to go out and burn and hunt and so coolamon, and then they’re making bread. They’ve got a on as they had always done. massive amount of seed in that simple operation. As they It’s mostly spinifex country, so the burning regime out knead the dough, you can see its plasticity, you can see there is about six- or seven-year cycles between when the rise. They’ve been adding things to it - the camera can’t country will burn very strongly again. The Martu have show you what it is but they’ve used a raising agent, they’ve five seasons of burning: the first, the fresh burn, is when got that bread to rise. you torch the country, and it brings the goannas up to the We’ve got five hundred cooking shows in Australia: surface. Somewhere that’s been burned a year number one, we don’t know what that seed is; or two earlier creates a natural limit in number two, we don’t know what makes spinifex country that won’t burn, it rise; number three, we don’t know so there are boundaries where what it tastes like. Charles Sturt was the burning stops. I’ve headed saved in the centre of Australia by out with a couple of old ladies people who fed him a bread that after a fresh burn and they get he said was the lightest and I thought, what if we made a terribly excited. It’s napalmed sweetest cake he’d ever eaten, really big map and we took it to the horizon by the rangers, and commercially in this around and we visited those and you can see everything: country we wouldn’t know overlay sites and we painted where the fresh tracks are, where to find that seed if we as much as we could on the where the fresh holes are. Off were paid. But it’s about time map, all the knowledge people they went. A couple of hours, the people who are paid to know had about certain locations. and they’ve come back with these things went out and found twenty-five goannas tucked in it. And when they find it I hope their belts. they recognise the Aboriginal Your second burn is what starts to sovereignty, the intellectual copygenerate a lot of plants, particularly the right, in those plants. solanums, which are the different kinds of bush tomatoes, and that’s a very important desert SS: Kim, we’re talking about the east coast of food. Then it moves on to the wild potatoes, the yams.

Australia in Bruce’s book and the lushness there, but you Then by about the fourth year, the spinifex is starting to grew up in the Tanami Desert country. How does what grow back and can be burned again. By year six or seven, you knew about the area and the people develop into your you’re walking out with people and they’ll be twitching. mapping projects, because those bring a necessary So out in that country, I think you can say these people complexity to the general view of Australian landscape. are hunters and gatherers, but the notion of what a hunter and gatherer is needs to be revised, because this is people KM: [The mapping] came about by accident, really. I had who will know, “We burned that country last year, these been talking to a woman who lives in Paruku, or Lake things will be growing, it’s been a good season, there’ll be Gregory is the whitefella name. It’s an arid-zone wetland water, let’s go there.” that was cut off about three hundred thousand years What Bruce’s talking about - what the early explorers ago and became this astonishing wetlands system in the witnessed - those systems of land management are still desert. The people who lived there, they weren’t so much very visible in the desert. displaced as rather the cattle country came down and and twenty years later, our Department of Agriculture has started to wonder whether the sorghum that grows in the Bega Valley of its own accord with a seed the size of wheat might be a commercial crop. How many agricultural scientists have we had in this country in the last two hundred and twenty years, and suddenly someone says, “Oh, sorghum, might be able to eat that?”

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COMMON GROUND

they became cattle people for a while. Then in the eighties it was re-purchased for them and now it’s an Indigenous Protected Area, so there are very interesting overlays of land use.

But it’s also like a living version of Lake Mungo, which became the iconic site where the first Indigenous burials were discovered. That suddenly pushed the antiquity, in whitefellas’ minds, back to forty thousand years or so.

[Geologist] Jim Bowler was involved in that and he saw this system at Paruku as an equivalent site, where it hadn’t dried up and people had continued to live. I was talking to one of the Aboriginal women out there and she said, “Let’s ask him back.” So I rang him up, “Hey Jim, do you wanna come back up north and do some work with the mob up here?” He said yes, and then the whole thing expanded to “so we’ll travel round the lake, we’ll collect the stories.”

[The mapping] was about the overlay of Western science and Indigenous knowledge. It became obvious to me that we needed a sort of recording device. I’d seen lots of scientists and educators and so on come out, and everyone would sit down together and talk at cross-purposes for a week, and then the scientists and educators would leave and the local mob would scratch their heads and say, “What was that all about?” and everything would go back to the way things were. But as soon as you got out a map, especially a satellite map, everybody got it. As long as the Aboriginal people couldidentify one location, they would immediately orient themselves.

I thought, what if we made a really big map and we took it around and we visited those overlay sites and we painted as much as we could on the map, all the knowledge people had about certain locations. And everything else we would record, so oral histories became a part of it too. It created this astonishing... As soon as people sat down together, memory starts to kick in. One old fella, he was like “I know the name of that place, I know the name of that place,” but he just could not remember. And then we were camping out, and about four o’clock the next morning, there was that classic, “I can remember! You come and put that down on the map!” It became this fantastic process to record knowledge that was cross-cultural, and that whitefellas could come and immediately interpret the information in a way they couldn’t with a painting.

The next year, we went up to Sturt Creek. There was a massacre site that had never made it into the history written down of the area but that was very much in the oral history,

so that became the focus of that map. We then moved on to looking at fire regimes, vegetation, and it’s just multiplied.

It continues to this day with me flying by the seat of my pants. I’m not trained for any of this stuff apart from I’m really, really good at taking a small version of a very large piece of country and blowing it up, you know, gridding it and making it twenty times larger and onto a canvas. But other than that, I’ve learned all of my skills on the ground.

And, of course, in that process I have learned so much.

It’s like combining the country I knew as a kid and as a young woman going out in the stock camps, from the white pastoralists’ point of view. It’s become like binocular vision.

We have this incredibly multi-layered story about a part of the country that most people think is empty and that there’s nothing out there. So for me, that’s been an ongoing...

Well, it kind of took over my life. I haven’t got away since.

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This is an edited transcript of a conversation that took place at the 2017 Perth Writers Festival, on the traditional lands of the Noongar people.

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PUBLIC SPACES: THE BEACH SUSANA MOREIRA MARQUES

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he beach, in those days, had no surfers, no swimmers, no tourists, no cafes with lounge chairs and music, no luxury flats, no smooth sidewalks, no runners.

We go to public places to see and be seen, but in those days maybe I wasn’t aware of the people around me, the movements and expressions of strangers, their looks as they looked at me.

I spent part of my childhood and teenage years in a town with a large port, constantly filled with containers of metallic red, blue or yellow. There was also a lot of fishing, and many factories produced canned sardines, and tuna.

I went to a public school. It was a large, sober, impersonal building, built during the period of the dictatorship. In its grounds, kids could run fast and free, play, date, pretend to smoke. And there we could all mix - though it rarely happened. Middle-class kids, the children of doctors, engineers and lawyers, would stick together. The poorer kids, many the sons and daughters of fishermen, did the same. I was never invited to play at a fisherman’s house.

I have a vague memory of one thin kid with a pretty but tired face, the kind of face that never seemed to truly transform with laughter. I remember the whispers that went round about how he must find it hard to do his homework because his parents couldn’t help him and were often absent, that in the house there wasn’t even a decent table for him to work on.

Perhaps I remember him because of his weary, adult-like face, which I guess means I must have had been paying some attention after all.

A jogger runs past. A grandfather leads his granddaughter to the small playground on the sand. Young people sit outside a cafe with their laptops. A girl walks alone looking at her phone.

It’s spring. No one is sunbathing but the beach walkway is full. People rarely stop at the far end of the beach to look

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at the four statues standing there: two women raise their hands to the sky; one child carries a toddler; a third woman kneels in the sand.

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n 1st December 1947, 103 fishing boats left the port.

The weather changed quickly. In the evening, the fishermen were still at sea. Their wives and children - as well as their neighbours, other fisherman, friends and curious people - started to come down to the beach, hoping for a glimpse of a boat making its entry back to the port.

They stayed camped on the beach throughout the night, the women anticipating disaster, holding their youngest tight. On 2nd December 1947, the news arrived of a largescale disappearance: four boats had sunk and 152 men died, leaving behind around seventy widowers, and more than a hundred orphans.

The statues were put up not that many years ago, and it was as I was walking casually at the beach, one day, that I saw for the first time the four figures, and learned of the disaster, and realised that my colleagues from school might have had photos of lost grandfathers at home. I sat for quite some time by the figure of the kneeling woman.

In those days, I hid in plain sight on the beach, kissing my first love. It was an empty, polluted beach with no history and few visitors. It was ugly, ending abruptly in a grey quay, behind the silhouette of the industrial port. But, viewed from afar, it seemed beautiful - a long, white, sandy beach - and in those days, I could maintain a distance, an illusion, even as I approached it, for this was before a series of small tragedies had changed me, before I became attuned to the presence of people crossing my path in public spaces, including ghosts.

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SUNDROPS ON DIGITAL TOMATOES MICHAEL DULANEY

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or as long as most locals could remember, Port Augusta had been a coal town. At least once a week the little black rocks would arrive on trains travelling south from the outback mines that fed the power plant on the mangrove tip of the Spencer Gulf. The hard blue desert sky would sparkle with carbon spewed out from its chimney, and the salt lakes below were filled with water passed through its turbines. When the locals returned from holiday, they would see the grubby scaffolding like a ship on the horizon and finally feel they were home. But when the power plant was shut down for good earlier this year, the residents were forced to ask difficult questions about what was next for Port Augusta. With its roots in electricity generation, it made sense to mostpeoplethatrenewable energy was the answer, especially since the area has an abundance of sunshine - 300 days per year to be exact - and is often referred to as the premier solar resource in Australia. This is hard scrabble land tuned for extreme temperatures and decades of drought, covered by a saltbush pasture fit for robust animals like Dorper sheep but little else. So it was strange when dreamy scientists and mad European capitalists, operating under the trading name Sundrop Farms, began plotting on the fringes of town and building the agriculture’s future in the shadow of the power industry.

Few could have predicted their slice of desert Australia would one day host the world’s first solar-thermal powered greenhouse, a gleaming mini-city on the saltpans turning sunlight and seawater into millions of ripened tomatoes.

What started six years ago as a zero-energy, hand-built pet project that used wind and evaporation to grow a small conventional crop has become a high-tech hundredmillion-dollar commercial venture now delivering twiceweekly to supermarkets across the country.

This one operation will eventually supply forty per cent of Coles’s truss tomatoes (or, put another way, fifteen per cent of all the tomatoes in Australia) and it will do this without using pesticides, freshwater reserves or fossil fuel. It is powered by 24,000 parabolic mirrors that follow the sun and direct its energy towards the tip of a 127-metre solar thermal tower which glows like the Eye of Sauron when fully heated. Seawater pumped into the tower from the nearby Spencer Gulf is heated for several purposes: to climate control four vast greenhouses, power an on-site desalination plant and generate electricity for the site.

The twenty-hectare growing space is filled with rows of nutrient troughs supporting the year-round growth of

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440,000 hydroponic tomato plants. Pests and disease are kept in check because the plants are isolated from the surrounding ecosystem, and every variable temperature, humidity, pH and nutrients - can be tightly measured and controlled. If any invaders happen to find their way inside, ‘friendly’ insects are periodically introduced to combat the nasty ones. When the project first started, bees were brought in every few months to pollinate the plants, but this is now done by human hands. If they weren’t grown hydroponically, the tomatoes could be considered organic.

This hydroponic farm is a shiny beacon on the side of the highway, an embassy from the future that heralds the coming green economy. The investment group that committed one hundred million dollars to the project is looking to set up similar operations in Portugal and the USA, anticipating a world where tomatoes, cucumbers, capsicums, lettuce, berries and perhaps even fish could all one day be farmed using solar power and seawater. If Sundrop is indeed a preview of a new food system, it is a milestone for the development of a sustainable planet; one where more food is produced with far less impact on the environment and finite resources. Driving north towards Port Augusta now provokes a kind of speculative awe, especially in the moment of parallax just outside town when the Sundrop solar tower aligns with the coal plant’s chimney, a little bit of symmetry between past and future meeting on the horizon.

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omething often lost in the discussion of the Sundrop model is that its revolutionary promise for the planet does not necessarily guarantee a future with fairer jobs and fairer food. As with most correspondence from the frontiers of technology, mainstream reports about Sundrop have focused on the wonders of capital and avoided a discussion of its potential effect on labour. A system where ninety per cent of Australia’s tomatoes could conceivable be produced by just six farms will fundamentally change not just the possibilities for horticulture, but also the relationship of workers to their product. The recent history of Sundrop contains subtle reminders that even the most promising renewable projects are still rooted in the messy system of employee relations which define modern capitalism.

One such reminder occurred in February 2016, when a 29-year-old vandal from the Netherlands received a twomonth suspended jail sentence for marking graffiti on a public memorial. He had landed in court shortly after going

on a late night ‘bombing’ run through Port Augusta, tagging Ranges seems to shrink under the sun’s intensity. Without “Scheme 015 never gives up” and “Skaffa” in black spray the cooling systems that now regulate the climate, heat paint on corrugated fences, street signs and rusted utilities inside the greenhouse occasionally exceeded sixty degrees around town. But it was his tagging of a decommissioned at the peak of the day and VDH labourers sweltered inside Army tank at the Port Augusta RSL that really landed him to meet the tight deadlines for the project. One worker was in hot water. Violating this space of the war veterans rumoured to have been found in his underwear, having perhaps the only sacrosanct tradition remaining in secular stripped off the long sleeve shirts and other PPE gear Australia brought the Dutch vandal to the attention of the required of Australian construction workers in favour of local media, as well as the private ‘rant and rave’ Facebook the casual gear preferred back home. That this was during groups which thrive on this sort of thing. Angry online the construction phase for the third and fourth greenmobs were soon dreaming up creative punishments and houses of one of the most advanced farms in the world is a suggesting humiliations like public floggings and tar-andreminder of the vexed industrial relations that underpin feathers, with a running theme of having veterans impart even the most sustainable green projects. unspecified (but presumably violent) lessons about “respect,” This is not to suggest that Sundrop exploits its workers, such as the graffiti being scrubbed off with a cotton bud by or treats them unfairly. By all accounts, it is a good corporate the so-called artist while having “a sar-major (sic) citizen whose stated goal is to have alocal workforce trained screaming insults into his ear.” specifically for the operation and paid award wages.

With their attention firmly focused on revenge, the mob Although there are currently some backpackers and overlooked another of the Dutch vandal’s tags, a biographical seasonal staff employed in the greenhouse, most employees clue sprayed on a concrete bridge which read: “Fuck VDH/ commute to work from the three nearby Iron Triangle Sundrop!” It’s the one piece that begins to explain how towns of Port Augusta, Whyalla and Port Pirie. fragments of the Dutch graffiti scene became etched across The critical milestone in securing investment for the a blank desert canvas sixteen thousand kilometres away project and its long term workforce was the successful in outback South Australia. negotiation of a ten-year supply agreement with Coles, a Skaffa, as the vandal is known back home, was brought to deal which commits the supermarket giant to purchasing Australia on a working visa as a labourer for Van der Sundrop’s entire crop-seventeen million kilograms - each Hoeven, the Dutch company subcontracted by Sundrop for year at a fixed price. The contract allows Sundrop to employ its expertise in greenhouse construction. Before he arrived a stable workforce to meet its year-round production and in Port Augusta, Skaffa was a key figure in the Dutch rap thereby avoid the labour hire arrangements that have seen underground, where he was an MC and tattooist to the exploitation of seasonal workers and disgraced representing the Scheme 015 crew - a ‘creative the horticulture industry in the past. This is an collective’ from the streets of Delft, a industry where labour costs comprise pottery and university town south of sixteen per cent of total cash costs, by The Hague. The crew is reasonably far the highest of any agricultural famous, both collectively and as sector, and lobby groups tell the individuals, and their rise to Productivity Commission that relative fame is recorded on “red tape around labour” is the This one operation will eventually social media, where grainy #1 issue for businesses. supply forty per cent of Coles’s photos in alleyways over Down in the Barossa, about a truss tomatoes (or, put another time become performances two-hour drive south of Port way, fifteen per cent of all the in white-walled studios Augusta, premium wine growers tomatoes in Australia) and it will surrounded by luxury cars still rely on labour hire firms do this without using pesticides, and interviews with Vice in Adelaide to fill their needs at freshwater reserves or fossil fuel.

Netherlands. This plays out certain points in the production in the style of some of the crew, cycle, particularly pruning and particularly its most famous harvesting. Most pruners come from member, Matarr, whose amateur Cambodia, but also Syria and Iraq, and rapping career has blossomed into one are part of teams that travel around South that demands warm smiling and glossy Australia following the agricultural calendar, fashion shoots for popular music magazines. which goes from apples and pears in the Adelaide Skaffa, in contrast, has retained the grit of urban DelftHills to oranges and apricots in the Riverland. Speaking often appearing shirtless to display his many tattoos, and about the practice at a pruning competition in the Clare flashing either a gold-toothed smile or sneer, in a defiant Valley, one vineyard manager mentioned she knew of stance where his wiry muscles look primed for violence. instances where her counterparts had discovered, to their surprise, that they were underpaying their workers. She kaffa had been working with VDH for just over a month expressed regret that language barriers and the transient when he went on his late night bombing spree around nature of the job prevented more overseas workers from town. His disgruntled stint on the project was at the peak of being trained for other tasks in the vineyard. But this summer, a time of year when even the mighty Flinders arrangement was shrugged off as necessary, especially

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MICHAEL DULANEY since Australian workers were generally considered lazy joining up from farm to farm, coming together distinctly and reluctant to engage in the gruelling, monotonous tasks so the townsfolk in their beds would be woken by it. required. It was clear that such precarious employment And that everyone would know, instantly, that the pattern was considered necessary to produce premium wine that of our days was about to change from growing to harvest. ends up on crisp tablecloths in some of the most expensive But to live and work in a farming region like South restaurants in the world.

Australia’s mid-north is to confront both the complexity Having a sustained and full-time workforce removed from and scale of the modern agribusiness, where the broad-acre the seasonal production cycle, like the one at Sundrop, is a crops could never be grown in a greenhouse. An averagebig change to this model. But it also introduces new sized property here uses GPS-guided machinery to harvest questions about the future role of labour in the industry. thousands of hectares, employing industrial-scale On Sundrop’s greenhouse floor, fruit pickers tending to the fertilisers and herbicides along with advanced farmhydroponic tomatoes enter their employee code in consoles management software just to make a profitable enterprise. at the end of each row, allowing the company to calculate Economies of scale and the land-intensive needs of staple their efficiency far more accurately than, say, managers crops means that wheat, canola and corn farming of the in the nearby Riverland citrus groves. It is conceivable that future is going to improve thanks to advances in genetic this time-consuming labour will be squeezed for every last modification, information systems and machinery. We bit of productivity and profit as the technology develops. predate a system where a small group of workers - ten, Or that another less benevolent company than Sundrop maybe twenty people - could oversee a tract of farming might take such measures. land tended by robots growing enough wheat to feed In some ways this is to be expected. The history of farming an entire nation. Sundrop’s model for horticulture is is intertwined with the history of technology, from another step in our move further away from a connection mechanisation prior to WWII through to the green to the land and the concerns of traditional agriculture into revolution of the seventies and the introduction of new the realm of food production modelled on the conditions crop varieties and agricultural chemicals, all of which of a factory. have played a part in the steady increases in food production Automation here brings to mind a sterile environment over the past century. But every gain has also accompanied under soft white light, where propellered drones drift a decline in employment - in just 100 years, the percentage quietly through the aisles of produce, inorganic agents of the American workforce employed in agriculture has tending to organic ones. Food coming to the table from fallen from fifty per cent to four per cent, with a similar plants whose roots never touch soil and leaves grow three per cent working in Australian agriculture today. without sunshine, bearing fruit that never touches human In June, the Economist published The Future of Agriculture’, hands until it reaches the kitchen. Maybe this is the end a lengthy essay on the latest technological leaps and bounds game: we go from being in thrall to the land to owning it, sweeping across the sector - like survey drones, dominating it and reshaping it to our whims, then satellite imaging and fruit-picking robots finally moving off and delivering it to the robots. which would one day contribute to the Androids walking through Walt Whitman’s ultimate goal of ruthless efficiency: orchard of spheres, looking at quintillions the removal of workers entirely. ripened and quintillions green.

Why not automate, when having “Sometimes you forget you’re an army of drones and robots working with a living thing,” capable of tending to the needs remarked one long-time Sundrop of your crop can cut out oneemployee. “If you don’t feed it In just 100 years, the percentage of fifth of your operating costs? and keep it warm it can die. If the American workforce employed Yet, as the Economist article you cut them the wrong way in agriculture has fallen from fifty notes, “a truly automated, they get disease. We talk about per cent to four per cent, with a factory-like farm, however, leaving agriculture behind, kind similar three per cent working in would have to cut people out of growing them in a lab, but it’s Australian agriculture today. of the loop.” not like we’re beyond the living plant yet.” arming carries powerful After he was deported back to the associations with honest work Netherlands, Skaffa returned to his and a connection to the land; of men place as a leading figure of the hip-hop running their business with an ear to the underground. His Instagram account shows ground, like the farmers in Carrie Tiffany’s novel his journey from the grey concrete and urban grit Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living who walk into their of Delft to the drudgery of manual labour in the Australian paddocks each day near harvest time and listen for “a clean outback and back again. In one photo he’s throwing up dryness” in the breaking wheat stems: the westside hand sign in front of Port Augusta’s bicycles I thought of all of the men of the Mallee alone in the early and ammo store. Another shows his lily-white skin and morning listening to the sound of a stem snapping - the tattoos at the local pool, theharsh sunshinereflecting off a sharp dry sound of it amplified across the paddocks, gold AK-47 pendant necklace while three Aboriginal kids

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SUNDROPS ON DIGITAL TOMATOES

swim in the background. Then Skaffa posts a selfie captioned: “It is what it is. Bye bye Australia.”

A few months later he turned up with some of the Scheme 015 crew in a stylish fashion shoot for Franzel Amsterdam, a street clothing company based in The Hague. Skaffa’s brush with the law and deportation seemed to have added to his rebel mystique, a story of defiance to tell the boys back home.

Around this time, bags of tomatoes started landing on kitchen counters across Port Augusta courtesy of friends or partners bringing home samples from the final test crop before Sundrop entered commercial production. They were soft on the teeth, with floury flesh yielding too easily to the bite. A strange taste: the essence of tomato but somehow muted, not real. Digital tomatoes.

Then, in early August, the first stack of tomatoes appeared on display in the fresh produce section of the local Coles.

They were distinguished by their completely smooth surface, unblemished to a degree that seemed unnatural even by the stringent quality controls of the supermarket duopoly. The tomatoes were unlabelled, but their luminous red skin stood out from the previous crop. Where those tomatoes had been pale and anaemic, the new batch sat shining; elevator blood-red droplets connected by green branches. Shoppers weighed them on digital scales, the synthesis of centuries of selective breeding and human ingenuity, knowledge and conquest priced at $5.99 a kilo.

Ninety-nine cents: the cost of a few tomatoes and the title of Skaffa’s latest single. The energetic slice of Delft rap was shared widely on Dutch music blogs and has so far racked up 120,000 views on YouTube. The lyrics deal with the

petty drug trade and the intricacies of dealing MDMA and weed, a life where nights can end in a cell and being paid your due occasionally demands conflict.

In a hierarchy where risk flows down and profits flow upwards, Skaffa paints himself as an independent man, beholden to no-one: “I work for myself for half the price, you get twice as much, bet on it.”

“But if you tell me the way to the money, then everything is gone, even the last ninety-nine cents.”

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THE WOLF’S WEDDING HOUYEM FERCHICHI

Translated from the Arabic (Tunisia) by Ali Znaidi

I

suddenly felt the need to write down memories that resurfaced in my dreams. People and customs that had disappeared, gnawed away by time, and bygone village ceremonies that I witnessed as a child now inhabited my grandparent’s place; night after night, they broke into the house to visit me in my sleep, apparitions that steered me from bewilderment towards remembering.

A girl born in the capital, who during the holidays goes back to the village to spend a few days with her grandparents.

I look at a photo of me when I was that girl.

Now I stand outside the front door of that house. I can’t find my grandfather. Nor can I find my grandmother, who went to Mecca for the pilgrimage and never came back.

The familiar faces have left the old house, but it is filled again with childhood smells: lumps of leaven fermented dough lying beneath a cloth before being stuck flat against the inner walls of the tabouna and coming out ghanai bread; fresh milk as it is squeezed from the cow’s udder; hens scratching at the soil and laying eggs; and the house crammed with villagers coming to visit, morning and afternoon. A story had been crouching between the four walls of this house and in my head since childhood, hidden in the unlit corners of my memory.

I open every door, looking for the people called up by my latest dreams, who are part of the village surrounding me.

There are scents of henna, of hair dying and tattooing herbs and potions. I remember the widow’s daughter, whose wedding-eve celebrations the villagers agreed to fund. She was to be married to a man who lived abroad.

Caught up as he was in his overseas trade, he wouldn’t arrive until the day of the wedding, just in time to sign the marriage papers. Then he would whisk her away from the village and its people, and from their infatuation with the story of the wolf man. He would take her to the city of light.

Every villager knew about the wolf man who abducted young virgins. The men who guarded the fields held guns at the ready but never managed to aim a shot at him. He was too cautious. He took his prey by surprise and dragged her to a high place. So said the old women, making all those who heard their words shiver. The wolf man would appear in the guise of a handsome man dressed in a fur coat, a French colonist killed by Fellagha combatants whose spirit had stayed behind. The sheep never tempted him; he howled and seduced the young village women. Then his howls

faded, and he grew hungry for forbidden flesh. The villagers worried not for their cattle and fields but for their young women, who fell pregnant and gave birth to wolf-like babies.

They never dared mention the name of the wolf man who still roamed the slopes of the mountain, hunting for young women on their way back from a day’s work in the fields or crossing the mountain road.

The young girl remembers the sweet seller who surprised the village children on rare visits. He came on that colourful carriage, filling children’s dreams with the taste of dollshaped sweets. They melted, sticky on the children’s lips.

She bought a piece as the others had. Then she went into the guest room in her grandparents’ house where a visitor was nursing her baby. Sugar melted in the girl’s mouth and milk flowed into the baby as he clutched at his mother’s breast. Dreams embroidered with poppies and wild herbs flowed without pause, colouring her lips with the flower of childhood.

A girl haunted by the spectre of that man, who appeared whenever the children gathered around the sweets seller.

In their innocence, the children failed to grasp what his piercing gaze concealed, and the reason he bought sweets as they did. The taste of sugar still lingers on his tongue.

The baby still clutches at his mother’s breast, suckling the warm milk. The breast seduces him. And my pen steams with the pleasure of suckling on language, which lures me with its hidden secrets.

I see in his gaze the wolf man that old people describe. No sooner does a young woman cross a mountain slope than he attacks her and holds her down until she goes limp. He devours what is delightful in her, then runs to the heights and howls like an ever-hungry man.

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hen the sweets seller moved on, the children turned to snatching pieces of the sugar and lemon wax that the women prepared, before it was soiled by unwanted hair. We were too young to understand the salacious henna woman, who spoke of the wolf man’s pleasure in tasting the sweetness of a desirable female body, and of every girl’s wish for a husband like the wolf man, a newcomer with dashing ways and silken hair slick like a film star’s.

The village women escorted the bride to the hammam.

The children trailed them, jostling and clutching at their mothers’ dresses. There was a sun shower - a “wolf ’s wedding” as they call it. A rainbow appeared, reminding the children of the colourful sweets. But they found

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HOUYEM FERCHICHI themselves inside the hammam, where one can freely peek at women’s bodies, some of them old, tattooed, and flabby.

The green tattoos grow like herbs along the folds of the flesh, spreading almost everywhere, carved into the belly, knees, legs, back, shoulders, or under the arms. The children overhear the henna woman tell the bride in a whisper that these tattoos are relics left by a man on a woman’s body. The bride smiles shyly, and the garrulous and salacious henna woman repeats that tattoos on an aging body are relics of the vanished past. But only soft female bodies, adorned with henna and harkous, shortlived arabesques, seduce the wolf man.

The girl gazes at the harkous: dots, curved lines, strokes stretching upwards and sideways. Nothing like the tattoos drawn between the eyebrows and on the cheeks and chin.

The henna woman walks over to an old woman, pointing out maliciously that all these tattoos have been carved on her flesh to arouse desire. The older woman blushes, longing for the days of her youth.

to send her back alone. The henna woman promises she can play with her grandchildren’s plastic dolls. “But,” she adds wryly, “plastic dolls don’t wear clothes, so I’ll give you cloth, scissors and a needle and thread to cover them.” Signs of relief appear on the bride’s face.

When they reached the courtyard of the henna woman’s house, a shadow was lurking in one of the windows. The girl recognised the man who had sent the note to the henna woman. The henna woman said to the bride, “Time to undo the spell.” The bride winked at the henna woman and nudged her with an elbow, and the girl realised the two were plotting something to do with the man.

Inside the house, the henna woman gave the girl a couple of black and orange plastic dolls, a sack of cloth, a sewing kit, and a sweet. Then she went to the kitchen to prepare food while the bride entered the room where the man’s shadow had appeared against the curtain. Moments later, the girl heard giggles and moans coming from the room.

She dropped the pieces of cloth, went to the closed door and crouched at the keyhole. The man - the same one who he bride bathes, the women bathe, the children bathe. had watched the children as they crowded around the They move to the larger, private room reserved for the sweets seller - was hunting for what remained of that sugar bride, who is now dressed in lace lingerie. One of the flavour. The girl savoured the henna woman’s sweet, village women is helping her put on her shiny jewellery, which smelled like the flowers and herbs that children an anklet, a thick bracelet, and a gold necklace. Their eyes gather in jars before they throw in bees collected from the shine, attracted by bright lights outside the hammam. fields. But soon her gaze was stained by what she saw. She The children are drawing bows of fire in the air, playing licked her lips and moved away from the keyhole. Then in the courtyard of the house already crowded with guests she ran to the henna woman to ask for a stick to set alight for the long eve of the wedding. The henna woman yells at so she could draw circles of fire. The henna woman went them to go play elsewhere: “I want the lot of you out of my outside to where wood and kindling were piled near the sight!” The girl who just discovered the game is holding the barn, muttering angrily, “This wood’s for the tabouna, burning stick, moving it in circles to see the not games. Make sure the sparks don’t get you.” light patterns it leaves in its wake. Other The girl was not afraid of fire. Sometimes children grab a soft wire, shaped into she grabbed iron wires and threw them a wheel, and start pushing it along up towards the overhead electricity with another wire bent at its end. lines. When they collided, sparks The girl watches the circles shot out and the wires broke. But light up the village; she sees watching the sparks was always The children trailed [the women], the baby clutching at his magic. Sounds were still coming jostling and clutching at their mother’s breast inside the from inside the bedroom and mothers’ dresses. There was a sun circle; suddenly, all the the girl continued to draw her shower - a “wolf ’s wedding” as circles revolve around fire circles, which grew larger they call it. A rainbow appeared, the breast. And the girl and larger as the stick burned reminding the children of the sees the man who has been and glowed blood red. The colourful sweets. watching the children give one moonlight shone as the wolf man of them a note and a coin and prepared for his evening banquet. whisper something in his ear.

And by the time dawn broke, he had The boy smiles, runs to the henna devoured his prey, leaving her body woman, slips her the money and then to the cries of the villagers; the wolf that goes back to playing with his fire stick. howls on the mountain peak, sending chills The girl is watching the scene and observing the to the bone, had performed his beastly ritual on henna woman, who walks over to the bride and whispers one of their daughters, on the eve of her wedding. to her. Then she tells the bride’s mother that at nightfall she Only a few moments elapsed before the village men will undo her daughter’s spell and allow her deflowering. gathered around the henna woman’s house, vowing to kill The mother smiles. The bride covers herself with a the wolf man upon discovering who he was. They were traditional sefsari scarf and sets out with the henna woman shocked when they found him out, for the village women for her house. The girl follows in silence. When the bride had felt safe in his presence. He had grown up on Sheikh notices the girl clutching at her sefsari, they are too far away Massoud’s farm, and when he reached adolescence and

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THE WOLF’S WEDDING his muscles developed, he started throwing punches at the other young village men. So they left him to his violent ways and avoided him altogether. But soon, he stopped talking to the villagers, and spent his days watching the labourers who worked on the land he had inherited from Sheikh Massoud. They worked tirelessly, taking no more than an hour’s break at lunchtime to eat and drink tea.

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ust grew amid the scents of rosemary, thyme, and juniper; in the moonlight, the wolf man left his den to attend the village weddings and funerals. His voracious gaze scoured the contours of the young girls’ bodies as they danced at weddings, intoxicated with music and movement. And when a husband passed away prematurely, he eased the burden of the new widow and expressed his condolences, just like the other villagers; he squeezed her shoulder and her hands and wished her well, pretending to be a shoulder to cry on if need be.

The widow’s daughter had agreed to lure the wolf man to her bed. Now he had to marry her. He realised that there was no groom coming from overseas, that he was the husband to be - the man who, in marrying the widow’s daughter, would atone for his sins.

Sheikh Abdullah said to him mockingly, “The greyhound is more cunning than the wolf.”

And an educated young man from the village recited: “Wolves rush upon he who has no dogs, and dread the rage of the fierce one.”

In the middle of my grandparents’ house - where the wolf man signed the marriage papers and wedded the widow’s daughter - memories of the festivities come back to me.

The elderly and the men dancing in the village to the drummer’s beats; the veins in the musician’s neck swelling as they blew into the mizwad; the women pulling the curtains aside on the windows and doors to watch the scene; and the children stamping the ground in joy.

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Translator’s note Tunisian author Houyem Ferchichi has a fondness for short stories, which she often enriches with poetry, drawing, and cinema. She gives her fictional characters her confusion and existential questions, and explores her relationship with places and the way they live on in memory and are transformed by it.

Her work departs from both Arabic and Tunisian feminist writing traditions in her choice not to write about isolation and fear of patriarchal society. Instead, her female characters have the courage to intrude into the realm of males. She gives us character studies that express social and political concerns in a unique style and have an intimate engagement with place.

What strikes me in this story is the way Ferchichi incorporates Tunisian ancestral traditions and folktales, exemplified in the folkloric name of “Or’s A’Dib” or “The Wolf ’s Wedding”, an expression used to denote a sun shower. Shifting between the present and the past, the story is a work of erasure and collage, and a mixture of iction and metafiction. This startling melange works to highlight the role of memory both in real life and in crafting fiction. It also exemplifies the central dichotomy around which Ferchichi’s work revolves, that of reality/dreams.

An interesting part of this story is the deception at its heart: we think we are reading about a typical wedding, but instead it is a farce, a trap laid for the wolf man to put an end to his wolfish ways. The sun shower reference early on hints at trickery: You think rain is falling, but, in fact, there are only a few raindrops glittering with colours, while the sun is still shining.

When translating this story, I sought to capture Ferchichi’s play on these dichotomies. I also wanted to capture the story’s intricate flow. I have done my best to show the uniqueness of Ferchichi’s story and her style, exemplified in her rich diction and the dancing words she uses to evoke joy, something like the children who stamp the ground to express their mirth.

Permissions note This story first published as “Or’s A’Dib” in Almothaqaf Newspaper on 18th Jan 2014 ( http://almothaqaf.com /index.php/ nesos2014/83324.html). It also appeared in Adab Fan on 18th November 2015 (http://www.adabfan.com/magazine/6148).

Special thanks to our bilingual proofreading extraordinaire, Frances Meyer, for her careful attention and suggestions.

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ach issue, Benjamin Law and his mother Jenny give advice on sex and relationships.

Please address your questions to: lawschool@theliftedbrow.com Dear Law School, I’ve recently started a new relationship and while it’s still early days, we’re very optimistic about a future together. Sadly, my partner’s father is terminally ill, and has deteriorated rapidly in the last couple of months. I want to support my boyfriend and his family, but I don’t want to overstep my mark as I haven’t known his family for long. How can I do this, now and when his dad passes?

Yours sincerely Unsure

Jenny:

Benjamin:

My answer is very short and sweet. Just be there for your boyfriend all the time and don’t be too opinionated about anything. Ask your boyfriend before doing anything to help. This is his father, and hopefully he’s close to his father, so he’d know him inside out. When my father was dying, I was in Australia and he was in Hong Kong - my big sister called and said to come see him for the last time. I travelled with my daughter Tammy (she was still in nappies) - the last trip I travelled with a toddler. Ten days after I came back, he died. I didn’t get support from my now ex-husband, so I had to be a really strong woman. Looking back now, I just wanted emotional support, someone being there 24/7, a very good listener. You don’t know these people well, so help in other ways: drive them places, cook for them, clean up. Practical stuff.

First of all, I’m sorry about your boyfriend’s dad. And secondly, I want to reassure you. You’re asking exactly the right questions - “What can I do?” and “What constitutes overstepping the mark?” - which suggests to me that you’re decent, thoughtful and accommodating - exactly the kind of person any of us would want around if a family member was seriously ill. You’re keenly aware you haven’t known your boyfriend for long and that his family is even less familiar to you. That’s fine. No one in his family expects you to be a pillar of emotional support. When my boyfriend’s father was dying, I did what I could: drove my boyfriend to and from hospital; ran errands; brought over DVDs; covered the housework. Like me, you’ll probably do similar tasks and still feel inadequate. No matter how you try, you can’t make people happier. Don’t make this your aim. Focus instead on making people’s days easier. Ask your boyfriend what has to be done and follow his lead. It might be making cups of tea. Dropping off magazines. Collecting mail.

Offering coffee runs. And in all this, gently check in with: “Shall I leave you to it?” You might feel your lack of familiarity is a liability for now, but over the next few months I think you’ll occasionally discover that distance can be an asset too.

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Dear Law School, My boyfriend and I have killed a total of fourteen house plants between us. Last week I told him that I want to get a dog - not because I particularly want or need a dog but because I’ve been told by a number of people that it’s a good indication of whether or not you should have kids with someone, and I’m hoping that being responsible for some kind of sentient being might bring out our inner guardians. Do you think this is true? Can I really draw parallels between raising a dog and a child?

Is this totally idiotic?

Yours truly Fur Baby Fretter

Jenny:

Benjamin:

In Jenny’s book, this is a crazy question - a ‘white people’ question - because Asians wouldn’t think this way. Comparing having a dog to raising a child? Hello? A dog has four legs; humans only have two. One is a dog; one is a human. With a dog, you just pick up their shit and put it in a bag. With a baby, you have to wipe their shit and vomit - so many things to wipe, never-ending wiping. Trust Jenny. I had the experience of raising five babies and it was so draining (Maybe I’d rather have a pet, actually, hahahaha). My question is: can you multitask? With dogs, you do not need to multitask much. Dogs sort of feed themselves. But babies need you to feed them, especially if you’re breastfeeding.

Some women enjoy it, but I never did, and I didn’t have much milk anyway. (My Benjamin didn’t get one drop and my Michelle didn’t even see my tits.) And it’s very demanding with a human when they’re sick. When my Michelle was a baby and had a cold, she wouldn’t go to sleep. Once I put her down, her nose was blocked, so I had to hold her up all night. Will you hold your dog to sleep? Maybe. I don’t know.

I’ve never had a dog.

Now I’ve hit my thirties - prime breeding age - I’m surrounded by friends’ kids: newborns, toddlers and soonto-be primary schoolers. As a gay uncle, I’d never presume to speak on behalf of my beloved breeder mates. But I can tell you that none of my friends who had dogs, cats, goats or whatever prior to having kids have seemed any more equipped for parenthood by virtue of have kept an animal happy and alive beforehand. Pet owners’ most intense experiences might involve driving a diarrhoea-soaked dog to the vet or the trauma of euthanising a cat after an illness or accident. Sad, but manageable. Parenting, on the other hand, forces you to change your entire approach to life, induces sleep deprivation to levels that violate UN conventions, and can cause gastroenteritis outbreaks so severe, one friend had to wear one of his daughter’s nappies as a pad in case his arse exploded en route to hospital as his kid screamed “MY BUM HURTING” from the back seat, over and over again, until it broke his brain. So sure, getting a pet increases your sense of responsibility.

But ask a busy parent whether an animal preps you for actual human parenthood. And if they have time to talk to you in sentences beyond, “JAIDEN, THIS IS YOUR LAST WARNING, GET IN THE CAR,” I’d place fifty bucks they’ll tell you you’re dreaming.

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LAW SCHOOL

Dear Law School, I really don’t care who sees me naked, so I regularly get around the house without clothes on. My housemates and their partners are all really open-minded, and I don’t think they’re bothered. However, is it possible that they’re uncomfortable and just don’t want to say anything to me for fear of seeming prudish? And if that’s the case, should my enjoyment of my nakedness be curtailed by their insecurities with their own flesh?

Thanks in advance Ever Nude

Jenny:

Benjamin:

Oh this is a funny one. If you’re a woman, I hope you have a pair of perky, firm breasts. If you are a man, I hope you have a well-built body and good package ‘down there’. Also: are you still naked around the house during freezing winter days? Imagine if you are a man! All shrunk up! Okay: personally I think your housemates are just being polite.

Not to offend you - since you love your body so much - but they might be disgusted and offended. They are also sharing a house with you, so what are they meant to do? Scream and shout in your face? “I’m sick of your flesh, especially down there!” Still, it’s up to you. It sounds like you’re pretty proud of your flesh so just do whatever you’re comfortable with.

Hilarious. I would never walk around my house naked; my dad would turn in his grave. And I couldn’t share a house with someone who was naked all the time. Sorry, I’m old fashioned. Maybe at least cover up like Adam and Eve, with a leaf. Then again, I’ve got my own bush and so do you.

Either way, I hope you put some clothes on now that it’s getting colder. I’m always thinking like someone’s mother.

My friends on Facebook sometimes claim they see more photos of my butt online than they’ve seen of their own in real life. I’m not going to apologise; it’s an excellent arse and it’s not always going to look like this. At some stage - in my twenties - I just really loved letting it hang out. Show me an onsen or a nudie beach and I’ll literally show you my balls.

But in all of this, there’s implied permission and consent: I’ve only gotten naked in public and during activities where it’s expected. I’m not going to flash my nuts when a courier arrives or when I’m picking up milk, and I don’t expect to see my mates’ labia or scrote during a dinner party unless it’s been specified on the invite. The fact you’ve written in with this question suggests that as much as you’re comfortable with nudity, part of you suspects it might make others uncomfortable. To walk between the bathroom and bedroom with your norks out is one thing. To have your vulva on display while everyone is watching Masterchef together on a weeknight is another. Being naked around mates is one form of open-mindedness; another form is accommodating the idea that other people’s boundaries might be different to yours. You’re bold enough to go naked? Great. Now get bold enough to ask the people you live with whether they’re okay with it.

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CONTRIBUTORS CAREN BEILIN is the author of the forthcoming nonfiction SPAIN, a

BRUCE PASCOE is a Bunurong man. His latest book Dark Emu shared

novel The University of Pennsylvania, and a collection of short fiction, Americans, Guests, or Us.

the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for Indigenous Writing, and won the NSW Premier’s Book of the Year Award in 2016.

ANNE BOYER is a Kansas City-based poet and essayist, and a professor

JANA PERKOVIC is a theatre nerd. Her writings on theatre and dance

at the Kansas City Art Institute. Her works include The Romance of Happy Workers, My Common Heart, and Garments Against Women.

appear in The Guardian, RealTime, and The Conversation.

JENNY PHANG was born in Ipoh, Malaysia, and is the mother of five SIMONA CASTRICUM is a musician and DJ. She is a freelance writer,

children, including Lifted Brow writer Benjamin Law.

broadcaster and architecture academic at the University of Melbourne.

STEPHEN PHAM is an original member of SWEATSHOP Writers MICHAEL DULANEY is a writer and journalist based in South Australia.

His work has been published by Griffith Review and The Monthly.

Collective from Cabramatta. His work has appeared in The Lifted Brow, Overland, and Seizure.

HOUYEM FERCHICHI is a Tunisian writer. She is the author of several

PETER POLITES is a member of SWEATSHOP. His first book is called

short story collections The Scene and the Shadow, and Secret Tattoos.

Down the Hume and is published by Hachette.

ELIZABETH FLUX is a freelance writer, the editor of Writers Bloc and

SHAUN PRESCOTT is a writer based in the Blue Mountains in New

a past editor of Voiceworks and On Dit.

South Wales. His debut novel The Town will be published in August by Brow Books.

BASTIAN FOX PHELAN is a genderfluid writer, musician and zinemaker living in Sydney. They are the author of zines Ladybeard and How to Be Alone.

RICHARD M HANSON is a writer from Melbourne. He is interested

JOSE QUINTANAR is an artist working in contemporary drawing, storytelling and comics. His work has been featured in The New York Times, Esquire, Vice and Editions Misma.

in the representation of illness, as well as narrative and form.

CHLOE REESON is the co-creator and screenwriter of Homecoming

REBECCA HARKINS-CROSS is a Melbourne-based writer and critic.

Queens, a web-series in development, and the comics editor of online magazine Scum.

She is the film editor at The Big Issue and a PhD candidate.

ANUSHKA JASRAJ is a writer from Bombay. She currently lives in Austin, Texas.

BENJAMIN LAW is the author of The Family Law and Gaysia, and created/co-writes the AACTA-nominated SBS series The Family Law.

KIM MAHOOD is a writer and artist based in Wamboin, near Canberra.

Her latest book Position Doubtful was published in 2016.

SUSANA MOREIRA MARQUES is a writer and journalist living in Lisbon. She is the author of Now and at the Hour of our Death.

ALICE ROBINSON’S debut novel, Anchor Point, was longlisted for the 2016 Stella Prize and the 2016 Indie Book Awards.

HAYLEY SINGER earned her PhD in creative writing from the University of Melbourne. Her work engages with ecological and feminist theories of flesh and fiction.

Every time NICK TARAS finishes a paragraph - usually about space, aliens, God, comedy or American football - he plays “This Is How We Do It” and takes a bath.

BEN WALTER is a Tasmanian writer of lyrical fiction and poetry.

He was the runner-up in the 2016 VU Short Story Prize.

NICOLE MCKENZIE is a Melbourne based writer and performer. @Nikoletaaa_M

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