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ISSUE ONE: DECEMBER 2016

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Tim Winton In ‘The Wait and the Flow’, Tim Winton ponders his fifty-year love affair with a ‘completely pointless exercise’.

PLUS A STUNNING VIRGINIA WOOLF POSTER BY AINO-MAIJA METSOLA

IN THIS ISSUE: ZOË MORRISON | LIAM PIEPER | ROBERT FORSTER | YOTAM OT TOLENGHI

In This Issue Underline Issue One: December 2016 Publisher Penguin Random House Australia Editor / Chief copywriter Samson McDougall Editorial Director Ellie Morrow Publication Design Cathie Glassby Printer Proudly in partnership w ith Adams Print

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The Wait and the Flow An extract from Tim Winton’s The Boy Behind the Curtain

Now and Then Fiona McFarlane on Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Lifetimes of Consequence Zoë Morrison reflects on writing Music and Freedom

Stranger Perspectives Five stories that embrace the extraordinary

Silence Is Deadly How Liam Pieper found inspiration in outrage

The Toymaker An extract from Liam Pieper’s The Toymaker

Inside The Go-Betweens Five surprising facts from Robert Forster’s Grant & I

Home Truths Lee Lin Chin’s guide to real estate

The Bridge A short story by Tegan Bennett Daylight

Recipe 28 A classic summer salad from Ottolenghi End Notes Collected summer reading

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Every quarter, Underline will bring together extracts, interviews, articles, short stories, reflections and much more to celebrate brilliant writing in its many forms. Designed to be dog-eared and devoured at your leisure, this is a chance to pause and delve a little further into some of the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s finest literature, and the minds behind it. We hope you enjoy leafing through these pages as much as we did compiling them.

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EXTRACT THE BOY BEHIND THE CURTAIN

The Wait and the Flow By Tim Winton

On the beach one day, as I was sliding my board back onto the tray of the ute and trying to clear my sinuses of salty water, an old neighbour who was passing by with his dog told me he didn’t know what people like me saw in surfing. He said, ‘I see youse blokes out there day and night. Any time I go past you’re just sittin there, bobbin around like moorin buoys. Tell me, Timmy, what’s the point?’ And I didn’t know how to answer. Almost every day of my life is shaped according to the weather, most acutely to swell, tide and wind direction. After surfing for fifty years, you’d think I’d be able to give a better account of myself. But there wasn’t much to tell him, because there is no point. Surfing is a completely pointless exercise. Perhaps that’s why I’m addicted to it. But he was right, my neighbour, God rest him. We go to the water every day and every hour we can. And most of what we do is wait. I grew up near Scarborough Beach in the sixties where surfing was the local culture. At the age of five, when my teenaged cousins, both girls, pushed me out on a big old longboard, I was more scared than excited. The physical details and sensations are still vivid and fresh in my mind. Like the greeny tint in the board’s resin and the weave of the Volan cloth beneath it. The deck was bumpy with paraffin wax. I remember the stolid symmetry of the three wooden stringers under all that fibreglass. Everything about the trek out to the break was overwhelming: the light and noise, the sheer heft of the board, the nervous anticipation. I wasn’t paddling, I was being ferried out there in my Speedos. Then, without warning, I was spun around. The air roared all about me. Suddenly I was rushing shoreward, flat out. And that was it. I was gone from that moment on. I wanted more. I wanted to be a surfer. I began riding Coolites, the way you did as a beginner in those days. They were stubby styrofoam demons without fins and I skated about on one for a year until someone showed me how to cut a hole in the hull and wax in a bit of plywood for a skeg. The rashes we got from those foam boards were horrendous; it’s a wonder I’ve still got nipples. The best thing you could say about the Coolite is that you could surf it between the flags and keep your mum and those pesky lifesavers happy all at once. They were pigs to ride but you couldn’t kill anybody with one when you fell off and it went bouncing and fluttering beachward through the wading throng. I did a lot of falling off; it was my specialty. These were the primary school years. I surfed for hours at a time, until my face and back were roasted and my little chest was a grated, weeping mess. I’d spend the final hour studiously avoiding eye contact with my poor mum who’d be madly waving me in from the shore. 3

‘It sounds unlikely but I suspect surfing unlocked the artist in me.’ 4

the cultural impact of surfing since it spread from the Islands. Here in Australia it helped shape people’s sense of themselves; since the forties it’s gradually become an identifiable element of our national culture, an expression of youthful vigour, engagement with nature, lust for life. In the fifties surfing became a form of individual expression, too, an act of rebellion. When most Australians seemed anxious about sticking out in a crowd, surfers wanted to distinguish themselves. They weren’t exactly gracious in going their own way, they were brash and selfish, ensnared by a beatnik resistance to conformity that’s easy to ridicule now, but it’s worth bearing in mind just how rigid the social mores were at the time. Surfing and beach life offered an alternative to local orthodoxy – which was to submit to the group, join the club, buy the stuff. In an era of shiny surfaces, new appliances and suburban indoor order, surfers were heretics. And they liked it that way; they celebrated the rebel. While their mums and dads still venerated dominion over nature and separation from it, surfers were, consciously or not, in the vanguard of those who sought to honour the natural world; surfing is done at the mercy of the elements and requires an intimacy with them beyond the ken of a golfer or a tennis player. To surf, a person foregoes timetables and submits to the vagaries of nature. The late sixties and early seventies were surfing’s Romantic era. I came to it at the peak of this period and it had a lasting impact on me. Back then we thought we were special when we were just lucky. We surfed with a sense of kinship with each other and with the sea that marked us out, if only for a while. We spoke a lingo that puzzled our parents and not all of it was hippie nonsense. What we craved was flow. The activity influenced our conceptual framework in ways that aren’t always credited. Nonsurfers, it seemed to me, strove for symmetry, linear order, solid boundaries. Waiting and flowing were anachronistic notions, they’d nearly become foreign concepts, but to me they were part of an imaginative lexicon, feeding something in me that had to do with more than surfing. The child of a pragmatic, philistine and insular culture, I responded to the prospect of something wilder, broader, softer, more fluid and emotional. It sounds unlikely but I suspect surfing unlocked the artist in me. Of course this was all before surfing became yet another occupied territory. By the eighties it had been colonized and pacified by the corporate world, and its language and attitude reflected its captivity. How eager surfers were to surrender their freedom! Suddenly they needed to be respected. Board riders wanted to be sports stars and millionaires. So began the years of dreary contests and sponsor-chasing, the chest-beating and swagger, the brawls in the surf. Surfers distinguished themselves by their machismo and their ultranationalism. The dominant mode was urban, aggressive, localized, greedy, racist and misogynistic. Out with all that touchy-feely shit. Surfers became jocks, defiant morons who trashed beaches and

My first glass board was a 7-foot egg with a radical raked fin. This was 1973. By then the shortboard era had well and truly arrived and this thing was already a relic. It rode like a longboard, and though along with everyone else I soon progressed to shorter and shorter craft, I never forgot the pure, gliding feel of those old-school boards and the graceful way good surfers rode them. These were the guys I watched most, the blokes who’d quickly become uncool in the seventies. The most obvious attraction of surfing is the sheer momentum, the experience of rushing toward the beach. It’s a buzz. And though you might repeat the experience millions of times in thirty or forty or fifty years, the prime thrill never fades. It looks repetitive but no ride is ever the same; it feels like a miracle every time you do it and I’d hate to lose that sense of wonder. Surfing has its origins in Polynesian ritual and play. At one level it was a display of power and caste: kings and princes standing proud and insouciant on their olos, commoners bellying in on alaias. But it was also about grace and beauty. Early illustrations and accounts depict scenes of boisterous celebration and physical prowess. Surfing was fun; it was liberating. It was this spirit of freedom and grace that haoles witnessed in Hawaii, from Cook onwards. They marvelled at it and they wanted to emulate it. Jack London was hardly the first, but he’s a notable convert. You might say that in this instance the missionary impulse was reciprocal. With their aloha spirit, the Hawaiians let the rest of the world in on one of life’s great pleasures and it’s hard to overestimate

scowled at each other on the break. I wonder how many five-year-old boys were introduced to surfing in the eighties by girls. By then women were almost entirely absent from the surf. Driven out by the bellicose mood, they were consigned to the beach. Gidget made way for Puberty Blues. What I knew as something soulful was now the preserve of violent thugs like the Bra Boys. I gave up and walked away for shame. I put on a mask and snorkel. It was quiet and solitary underwater. You weren’t at the mercy of the big swinging dicks. But I missed surfing badly. After a couple of years abroad I moved to a coastal hamlet where there were waves and a few surfers with an attitude mellow enough to suit me. It was a treat to paddle out again, to wait, to glide, to flow. There were others like me, who came back to surfing in the nineties when pure fun was valued again. They were past all the aggro, they’d outgrown their self-consciousness, and they were sick of the belligerent conformity that had overtaken the ‘sport’. They rebelled anew and rode strange craft unseen for decades, glorying in eccentric board shapes and retro designs. Sitting on the break you’d see people smiling, speaking to each other once again. The slit-eyed surf punks were still out there, slashing and snarling and scowling, but they were no longer the only tribe afloat. And the women were back, thank God. Within a decade girls were a constant, active and growing presence in the water.

‘Strange as it might seem, the life of a novelist is often like that of a surfer. I come to the desk every day and mostly I wait.’

To me surfing has always been a matter of beauty and connectedness. Riding a wave to shore can be a meditative activity; you’re walking on water, tapping the sea’s energy, meeting the ocean, not ripping anything out of it. Few other water pursuits are as non-exploitative. Humans exist by creative destruction; there’s no evading that reality. So having some major interactive pleasure in the natural world that comes without mortal cost – that’s precious, something to celebrate. The physical sensation of sliding along a wall of water, vividly awake and alive, is difficult to describe to the non-surfer; it feels even more beautiful than it looks. And for some men – men in particular, whose lives are so often circumscribed by an exclusively utilitarian mindset – surfing is the one pointlessly beautiful activity they engage in. There is no material result from two hours spent surfing. All the benefits are intangible, except perhaps the calibration of mood. Everyone close to me knows that when I come home wet, I’m a happier man than when I left. Think of the Prozac I’ve saved. I credit surfing with getting me through adolescence. When I was lonely, confused and angry, the ocean was always there, a vast salty poultice sucking the poison from my system. If surfing’s addictive, and I’m bound to concede that it is, all I can say is there are so many more destructive addictions to succumb to. Even in my middle age it continues to provide respite. When I get in the water I slow down and reflect. That’s the benefit of all that bobbing and waiting. I wait and wait and then I glide and flow. I process problems without even consciously addressing them. The wider culture expects you to hurl yourself at the future. Surfing offers a chance to inhabit the present. The wait and the glide have become a way of life. Strange as it might seem, the life of a novelist is often like that of a surfer. I come to the desk every day and mostly I wait. I sit for hours, bobbing in a sea of memories, impressions and historical events. The surfer waits for swells, and what are they but the radiating energy of events across the horizon, the leftovers of tempests and turmoils already in the past? The surfer waits for something to turn up from the unseen distance and if he’s vigilant and patient it’ll come to him. He has to be there to meet it. And when it comes he has to be alert and fit and committed enough to turn and ride that precious energy to the beach. When you manage to do this you live for a short while in the eternal present tense. And the feeling is divine. That’s how I experience writing, which is its own com pulsion. I show up. I wait. When some surge of energy finally arrives, I do what I must to match its speed. While I can, I ride its force. For a brief period I’m caught up in something special, where time has no purchase, and my bones don’t ache and my worries fall away. Then it’s all flow. And I’m dancing. ‘The Wait and the Flow’ is extracted from The Boy Behind the Curtain by Tim Winton. Hamish Hamilton, October 2016.

CLASSIC THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE

‘To me, this novel is perfect, and “perfect” is a word I resist, particularly in relation to novels . . .’ Fiona McFarlane

Now and Then READING INTO THE PAST

ILLUSTRATION: CATHIE GLASSBY

Fiona McFarlane’s mesmerising 2013 debut novel, The Night Guest, announced the arrival of a masterful and unconventional talent. Her 2016 short story collection, The High Places, further displayed the emotional insights and wry humour of this singular writer. It’s not surprising, then, that when asked to share a favourite classic book, McFarlane pulled one out of the box. Here’s her take on Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. ‘Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life,’ says Miss Jean Brodie, the glorious, monstrous, devastating woman at the heart of one of my favourite novels, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, by the Scottish writer Muriel Spark. First published in 1961, it tells the story of a charismatic schoolteacher in 1930s Edinburgh and her strange, sad, silly impact on the group of girls she gathers round her: the Brodie Set. There’s scapegoat Mary; mathematical Monica; pretty Jenny, destined for the stage; Rose, who’s famous for sex while never having any; Eunice the gymnast; and most of all there’s small-

eyed Sandy Stranger, who knows why people do the things they do. To me, this novel is perfect, and ‘perfect’ is a word I resist, particularly in relation to novels: the novel is a large, lonely, baggy creature, often at its best when flawed. But The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie feels perfect, feels as if it’s a whole enormous world and time and sensibility caught by a series of beautiful sentences. It’s smart, without showing off about it. It handles time in ways that take my breath away. And it’s unbearably funny. The novel’s cloistered world is made of dark architecture – shadowed by the rise of fascism, of which

Miss Brodie is an enthusiastic supporter – but it performs the most extraordinary sleight of hand: it conjures light and sense and pity, ‘just as dark heavy Edinburgh itself could suddenly be changed into a floating city when the light was a special pearly white and fell upon one of the gracefully fashioned streets.’ I was once asked in an interview to name my favourite hero in literature, and my favourite villain. My answer to both questions was the same: Miss Jean Brodie. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark was first published in 1961. 7

INTERVIEW ZOË MORRISON

Lifetimes of Consequence Musician, Rhodes Scholar, social justice advocate and author Zoë Morrison wrapped a lifetime of experiences into her debut novel Music and Freedom. And her ever-persistent invention – a character named Alice Haywood – gave Morrison a mouthpiece for those living on the margins.

PHOTOS: MATT COLLINS BIRD PAINTING: MARGARET PETCHELL, MARGARETPETCHELLARTIST.COM SHOT ON LOCATION AT: SMITHWARD, FITZROY, VICTORIA

Music was Zoë Morrison’s first love. As a child, the hours before and after school, and on weekends and holidays, were spent practising piano and violin with her siblings. Music lessons, music theory, orchestra, choir, ensembles, string quartets, musicals – it was their creative outlet, their mode of existence, a language they spoke together. As an undergraduate, alongside her academic work, Morrison studied music at the Elder Conservatorium in Adelaide, completing Associate and Licentiate Diplomas in piano. As a postgraduate at Oxford University she performed recitals in the Holywell Music Room, the oldest concert hall in continuous use in Europe. While composing her Doctorate in human geography at Oxford, Morrison discovered a passion for writing. ‘It was supposed to be a horrible process,’ she says, ‘many hated it, but I’d loved it. It was like sitting down at the piano. Like lowering oneself onto a pew.’ The thesis examined social exclusion, and much of her research took place in an Oxford council housing estate. Through the residents there, Morrison learnt about life on the margins, the paucity of government policy, and the power of social connectedness and goodwill.

During this time, she began to question the relevance of playing centuries-old pieces of music. It became difficult to connect music with everything else she was seeing and hearing. ‘I felt impatient with the repertoire,’ she says. ‘The same pieces composed by dead white men played over and over in front of a willing audience. I couldn’t reconcile this with the radical intellectual and political ideas I was engaging with at the time . . . ‘I was also running a children’s choir at a primary school in a very deprived area of Oxford and that, too, was teaching me about the impact different music can have on different people. I now see my extensive training in classical music as a gift. It has given me a beautiful way of being in the world, of expressing feelings, of relating to people, giving to others, and I think it helped me learn how to listen. It was also a daily creative outlet.’ Writing increasingly fulfilled her creative urges. And it was while working through Kate Grenville’s The Writing Book in a café in London that an old woman called Alice Haywood walked onto the page in front of Morrison. ‘I knew that she was close to death, had crippled hands, had once been a pianist, and could hear mysterious music through a wall of her Oxford house, but I knew none of the reasons for these things,’ she continues. ‘Alice was extremely persistent. Sometimes when I was walking around Oxford, where I was living at the time, I thought I could actually feel her presence, just around the next corner, especially after dark on the streets of Jericho where she walked herself. I felt very strongly that her story needed to be told.’ The character became resident in Morrison’s subcons ciousness, and prodded her along a ten-year creative journey which resulted in her debut novel Music and Freedom. During this time, Morrison moved home to

‘Alice was extremely persistent. Sometimes when I was walking around Oxford, where I was living at the time, I thought I could actually feel her presence . . .’

Australia and began working on an independent inves tigation on reporting child sexual abuse and adult sexual assault. ‘Suddenly I was driving around to churches hearing priests and church workers tell me not only about abuse that had happened to others, but the violence some of them had experienced, too,’ she says. Other jobs in the fields of domestic and sexual violence followed. ‘I remember sitting in a women’s shelter on the outskirts of Melbourne, surrounded by ten feet of barbed wire, interviewing women about the atrocities they had experienced,’ she continues. ‘During a break in these interviews I rang my little brother. Pete, I whispered, I’m in a bunker. It seemed to me that there was a war going on, with fatalities, casualties, and refugees, and no one had mentioned it. Except those women. I remember driving home and having to stop on a bridge because I was crying and couldn’t drive safely anymore. It wasn’t just what I’d heard that day, it was everything I’d heard. ‘I felt dedicated to this work, and was driven by it, but in the end it took me over, too much so. I took a break and returned to my old fields of poverty and social exclusion, lecturing to postgraduates, working for an NGO. But those stories stayed with me; they had changed me.’ In daydreams, for many years Morrison kept returning to Alice. As the character’s life took shape in front of her, Alice’s stories and experiences bore similarities to real-life events that had affected Morrison throughout her own life. Because of this, Alice came into the world as a fully-formed, complex and authentic individual – the culmination of a lifetime of experiences and conversations. This allowed Morrison to cover a lot of ground in Music and Freedom, thematically, geographically and chronologically. ‘I wrote about Alice as an old woman,’ says Morrison. ‘I wrote about her as a young girl. I wrote about the early days of her marriage. I wrote about music, about playing a piano brilliantly, about being crippled. I wrote about starving, about supermarket deliveries of food. I wrote about the heat of an Australian summer, the chill of an Oxford winter; driving in a dust storm; walking in a frozen park. None of this happened chronologically, but it all ended up forming a coherent whole . . . ‘Alice is a fiction, but she contains the stories of many people who have been treated as something less than fully human. My grandmothers (to whom the book is dedicated) but many others, too. She is an amalgam of all that suffering and pain, all that strength and hope. Alice dies and comes back to life. Her story shows the consequences of living in a hostile place, and the importance of finding your way home, wherever (or whatever) that may be. Alice has shown me, again and again, that it is never too late to begin again, and to be free.’

Music and Freedom by Zoë Morrison. Vintage, July 2016. 10

COLLECTION WEIRD WORLDS

Stranger Perspectives Five books to inspire you to step back, breathe deeply and look at this strange world from a different perspective.

Fiction writers have the luxury of breaking free from the confines of our everyday experiences. From new perspectives, some authors dare to hold a mirror to humanity and expose the strangeness of our lives. The effects range from enlightening to disturbing. But when handled with ingenuity and a deft hand, even the most peculiar scenarios can be made to feel credible. From the hilarious to the horrifying, here we take a look at some works that embrace the extraordinary to explore the ordinary.

NUTSHELL BY IAN MCEWAN perspective: Unborn baby in womb.

Ian McEwan’s Nutshell is a classic tale of murder and deceit, told from a perspective unlike any other. Trudy has betrayed her husband, John. She’s still in the marital home – a dilapidated, priceless London townhouse – but not with John. Instead, she’s with his brother, the profoundly banal Claude, and the two of them have a plan. But there is a witness to their plot: the inquisitive, ninemonth-old resident of Trudy’s womb. From the opening paragraph, readers are taken somewhere within the realms of every human’s experiences, yet beyond the reaches of memory. So here I am, upside down in a woman. Arms patiently crossed, waiting, waiting and wondering who I’m in, what I’m in for. My eyes close nostalgically when I remember how I once drifted in my translucent body bag, floated dreamily in the bubble of my thoughts through my private ocean in slow-motion somersaults, colliding gently against the transparent bounds of my confinement, the confiding membrane that vibrated 12

with, even as it muffled, the voices of conspirators in a vile enterprise. That was in my careless youth. Now, fully inverted, not an inch of space to myself, knees crammed against belly, my thoughts as well as my head are fully engaged. I’ve no choice, my ear is pressed all day and night against the bloody walls. I listen, make mental notes, and I’m troubled. I’m hearing pillow talk of deadly intent and I’m terrified by what awaits me, by what might draw me in. Washington Post book reviewer Ron Charles described Nutshell as a ‘preposterously weird little novel’, before adding it’s ‘more brilliant than it has any right to be’. In the most uncommon of settings, McEwan toys with the bounds of plausibility and reason. And as the despicable plot becomes clear, and suspense builds, readers brace themselves for the grandest of entrances. THE METAMORPHOSIS BY FRANZ KAFKA perspective: A man transformed

into an insect. An exploration of horrific transformation and alienation, in

The Metamorphosis Franz Kafka breaks away from real-life experiences. When travelling salesman Gregor Samsa awakens to discover he’s become a large insect, his life as he knew it is over. His mind is unchanged, but he can’t even roll over in bed or open a door effectively, and he is forced to rely upon the kindness of his family members to survive. The breadwinner of the household, in his new condition Gregor is unable to work and his family suffer as a consequence. Even as Gregor becomes increasingly insect-like in his needs and desires, his mind holds dear to any remnants of his former self. And as his changes render him physically and emotionally disconnected from his family members, the limits of their sympathies are tested. Whether Gregor’s alienation is brought about by the metamorphosis itself, or his new physical self is just an outward manifestation of existing inner turmoil, is open for discussion. But by presenting commonplace human challenges – like money troubles, communication and family dynamics – from an entirely otherworldly perspective, Kafka reveals some surprising truths about life. ONLY THE ANIMALS BY CERIDWEN DOVEY perspectives: Animal-eye views of

humans. When the souls of ten animals tell their stories of life and death during human conflicts of the past century, they offer observations of us at our brutal worst and our creative best. A blue mussel at Pearl Harbor, a Russian tortoise lost in space, a dolphin who chooses to die during the 2003 war in Iraq – from their unique standpoints these animals tell us what it is to be human. Of the book, Miles Franklin Award-winning author (All That I Am, 2012) Anna Funder commented: ‘Only the Animals is mesmerizing and exhilarating, funny and moving. It has elements of strangeness and greatness, like Kafka. Dovey’s exquisitely drawn creatures grapple nobly with

their animal natures, a genius point of view from which to illuminate how we humans – ostensibly conscious and verbal – are trapped in ours.’ In an added layer of intricacy, each creature also pays homage to a human writer who has written imaginatively about animals – Henry Lawson, Ted Hughes, Kafka, J.M. Coetzee, Colette, Virginia Woolf and more. Dovey explores the symbolic use of animals in literature and asks the question: can fiction really help us to find meaning, or even morality? She notes on her website: ‘As the soul of the tortoise explains, borrowing the words of the poet Czesław Miłosz, “So little of the total suffering, human or animal, can ever make its way into literature in the end. When it does, we should pay attention, and pay our respects.”’ FILTH BY IRVINE WELSH perspective: A gut-dwelling

tapeworm. Suitable only for readers with strong constitutions, Irvine Welsh’s Filth contains drug use, perversion, murder, corruption, sexism, racism, law enforcement and a tapeworm. From the gut, this tapeworm’s sporadic – yet increasingly curious – interruptions play a critical role in unravelling the backstory and motivations of the book’s lowlife protagonist Bruce Robertson. Referring to itself as ‘The Self’, and Robertson ‘The Host’, could this intestinal parasite possibly be the one thing lower than the lowest misanthropic, bigoted, extremely corrupt and sadistic policeman in Edinburgh? Not even close. Here’s a sample of The Self’s revelatory wisdom: . . . This consumption, all this chomping and chewing, it provides me with more evidence of my existence than thought does. This is the only real way I can interact with the environment I am in. My problem is that I seem to have quite a simple biological structure with no mechanism for the transference of all my grand and noble thoughts into fine deeds.

Oh yes, I can conceive of my body as that simple structure: input, process, output. . . but I know for sure that the complexity of my soul doesn’t even start to approximate the basic organism that is my body. I just know this because I feel it, feel it in my essence, which I must trust as much as any limited sense data I acquire from my environment. IF ON A WINTER’S NIGHT A TRAVELLER BY ITALO CALVINO perspective: Yours.

In theatrical performance the concept of self-reference is closely related to the notion of ‘breaking the fourth wall’. But self-reference exists within literature too: reference to a literary work within the work itself. Done well, the effect can be immersive – the reader placed within the narrative. Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream feature enduring historical examples of selfreference in action. Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller is a 20th-century beacon of this mischief, landing you – yes, you – the reader, right in the centre of the action. Calvino’s masterpiece opens with a scene that’s reassuringly commonplace: apparently. Indeed, it’s taking place now. A reader goes into a bookshop to buy a book: not any book, but something by Calvino, perhaps the same book the reader is holding in their hands. Or is it? Are you the reader? Is this the book? Beware. All assumptions are dangerous. The first part of each of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller’s chapters details the process of ‘you’, the reader, reading. The second part of each chapter comprises the seemingly unrelated beginning of a new book you’ve found. Confused? You shouldn’t be. Trust in Calvino’s mastery and at the very least you’ll partake in a reading experience you’ll never forget.

ILLUSTRATION: CATHIE GLASSBY

REFLECTION LIAM PIEPER

Silence Is Deadly Liam Pieper’s debut novel, The Toymaker, is a story about privilege, fear and the great harm we can do when we are afraid of losing what we hold dear. Here Pieper offers some insights into the places, people and events that helped him shape this bold, dark and unflinching examination of society.

The Toymaker is an idea that’s been rattling around in my subconscious since I was a child. Growing up, most of my friends were the grandchildren of Jewish émigrés from Eastern Europe, and I was very aware of the things their grandparents had suffered. I was always a little awed by the idea that these people could endure the evils of the Holocaust, and then just try to start again in a country that was, for the most part, indifferent to your suffering, that had watched it happen and hadn’t tried to stop it until way too late. The hero of my novel, Arkady Kulakov, or at least the person he pretends to be, is a composite of several wise, gentle men I knew growing up. In Europe they had been going about living their lives, and suddenly the world went mad around them, and they lost everything. There was a certain sadness to them, and also a secrecy – they had seen things no human should, done things to survive they would never tell anyone. I struggled for a long time with the ethics of writing about the Holocaust. The last thing I wanted was to be exploitative of past horrors, or to disrespect the memory of the millions of victims or the legacy of the survivors. It is a cheap shot from all sides of politics when one compares the other with the Nazis. Or at least, it was until very recently.

PHOTOS: MATT COLLINS

By Liam Pieper

However, I’ve been watching, ever since the Tampa affair, my own country become increasingly hostile to the suffering of others, long past the point of indifference. As a novelist my intent is not to be political, but I do have a duty to be compassionate, and I worry that a government can get a boost in the polls by treating abused and scared refugees to state-sanctioned cruelty. A nation can be judged by how it treats those from outside who need its help. It’s worth remembering that the USA turned down Anne Frank’s request for asylum. It’s worth remembering how much we forget when it’s convenient to us. The Toymaker was written in bits and pieces across four years, a large part of it in India, where President Modi was orchestrating one of the furthest-right governments India has ever seen. During my time there, my Indian friends had this creeping sense of dread about the direction of society. In towns not far from us, books were being burned. A novelist friend of mine was harassed by a far-right group until he quit writing altogether and went into hiding to save his family. It only really started to take its final shape, though, when I was lucky enough to be invited by UNESCO to come and finish it in Europe as the inaugural creative resident of The City of Literature Prague. It’s impossible to over-emphasise how important this opportunity was to writing The Toymaker. I’d been researching the story my whole life, but it’s a whole different thing to be able to walk the streets I was writing about, to go to Auschwitz, to talk to survivors. While all this was going on, I was in Europe in the middle of the Syrian refugee crisis, and I was watching Europe grow more right-wing by the day. They were stopping international buses and checking everybody’s ID, questioning all the brown people. When I was in Kraków to research, a mob burned an effigy of an Orthodox Jew in the middle of town. But Prague is where The Toymaker took its final shape, when all these disparate threads started to crystallise in 16

my mind. I went to Bubny station, which is where all of Prague’s Jews boarded trains to be taken to their deaths, amongst them, incidentally, Kafka’s family. It’s just an ordinary station, still functioning, with commuter trains rolling through it all day. It was the same on the day of the genocide. Everybody just went to work, and ignored what was happening. There’s a monument there now, the only sign of what happened. The railway tracks the trains to Auschwitz left on have been rerouted and head up towards the sky, to heaven. It’s very striking. The idea is that people on the way to work will see this thing, this railway to the sky which looks fundamentally wrong, and ask what it is, and think about it – the way they didn’t back in 1942. If enough of those commuters had spoken up, things would have been very different. Silence is deadly. The Toymaker is my answer to that monument. I see what is happening in the world right now, and it terrifies me that too few people are thinking about it. This is my attempt at getting people to think about where their society is going, not to be silent about it. There’s that idea coined by someone long dead and much smarter than me, that if we forget history, we are doomed to repeat it. It’s true – if you watch history long enough you’ll see things start to repeat, the same ideas, languages, turns of phrase, movements. The same kinds of crimes. The only things that change are the victims and the persecutors. There was one survivor in particular, a Polish man to whom I owe particular thanks. He told me something that will always be with me. When I was struggling with the ethical ramifications of writing this book, I asked his advice. ‘The only real lesson of the Holocaust,’ he said, ‘is to never let it happen again. Never forget, is what we told each other, and the world. Now, there are so few of us left. But I hope we never forget.’ The Toymaker by Liam Pieper. Hamish Hamilton, July 2016.

‘I’d been researching the story my whole life, but it’s a whole different thing to be able to walk the streets I was writing about, to go to Auschwitz, to talk to survivors.’

EXTRACT

The Toymaker BY LIAM PIEPER

I will not live much longer, Arkady said to himself, and the thought brought a smile to his lips. He did not subscribe to the science, which had been so popular in occupied Prague when he’d lived there, that ascribed racial characteristics to individuals. However, he would admit to a certain Russian fatalism, and he had decided less than a day into the journey that he would not survive it, and if he did, for not much longer after that. Arkady knew he was dead long before the train arrived at his destination; he’d heard whispers of what was happening in Poland, had them confirmed by drunken soldiers on leave in beer gardens. He was surrounded by people who, if apprehensive, did not know what was coming, although they had enough bits and pieces of lost nightmares to speculate. The col lected hypotheticals almost drowned out the rumble of the engine, the scream of sleepers below the carriage, but did little to dampen the whimpering and the wailing from some sections of the cattle car. The assault on his ears was not as bad as that on his nose. An animal smell: metallic blood, acidic vomit, excrement and fear. The smell ran in rivulets from the passengers; it poured in torrents, in rivers, so that everyone was soaked. It pooled on the floor and steamed through the superheated air of the carriage, the condensation on the ceiling forming thick droplets that shook and rained down on them whenever the train shunted or lurched. The people, packed tight as herrings in a jar of brine, swayed and jolted as one, seethed against each other angrily, jostling for a little space, enough to fill tired lungs with air, or wriggle out of a coat. Towards the end of the journey, most wore their shirtsleeves or less, cotton and wool waterlogged with perspiration, skin slick against skin. Arkady had been careful to position himself against a wall when the soldiers had forced them into the train, and he’d been grateful to have one surface to lean against that wasn’t a human being. Then the train stopped, shuddered and stilled. The people stopped with it, held their breath, waiting, waiting, 18

a minute, an hour, and then the carriage doors slid open and the humanity poured out. Arkady stumbled, shaky on legs used to swaying with the carriage, and he gasped icy air gratefully, but only for a moment before the wind threaded bitter fingers through his coat and caressed the soaking cloth underneath. The passengers shuffled forward, slowly at first, then moving faster as soldiers set to them with truncheons and pistols on either side. They were marched down the platform until they reached a sorting station, where a Schutzstaffel soldier waited, neat and surly, with his SS death’s-head logo shining from his black uniform. As waves of arrivals reached him he yelled out the same phrase, like a grocer hawking goods. ‘Men to the left! Women to the right.’ Four bodies up in the line a young father struggled as they took away his wife, and an officer drew his pistol and fired, then waved the stunned widow on with the pistol, his expression bored and businesslike. All at once Arkady felt grateful that he was here alone, that he had nobody to care for, or to care for him, that everyone who would mourn him was a world away in Moscow, or, better yet, dead. He moved to the left. ‘Form fives!’ another soldier barked. ‘Lines of fives!’ Here, the line split into left and right again, the wave of people breaking when it reached a figure who stood eyeing the arrivals. He was striking, handsome in a severe kind of way, sharp in a black SS uniform, with a white doctor’s coat over it. He held a baton, and as the prisoners approached he asked them questions and waved them left or right. When he found himself in front of the German, Arkady stared at the ground, trying to look both non-threatening and useful, as the man looked Arkady up and down. ‘Age?’ ‘Twenty-two.’ ‘Profession?’ ‘Farmer.’ A lie, but why not? If they thought he was a worker, it might keep him alive a little longer, for whatever that was worth. The baton waved to the left.

A long night followed, cold as hell, running from one humiliation to another. He was stripped, his clothes confiscated and discarded, his watch pocketed by a grizzled kapo – one of the prisoners bumped up to overseer who did the Nazi’s dirty work for them – who spotted it shining on his wrist. He was allowed to keep his boots, which he was glad of, because then he was hustled through snow into a long, cold concrete room where he was shaved, head and body, and covered with acrid delousing powder, which crept into the thousand tiny cuts the blunt clippers had torn in his chest so that when a bucket of steaming hot water was thrown at him, it almost felt soothing. He found himself running, now through a long ware house corridor, now through the snow, naked and absurd, and then standing in another room, being handed a pair of striped slacks and shirt by another kapo. Even at arm’s length, the funk of the garments, with months’ worth of fear and labour soaked into the cloth, made his nose wrinkle, which did not escape the attention of the kapo.

‘Then the train stopped, shuddered and stilled. The people stopped with it, held their breath, waiting, waiting, a minute, an hour, and then the carriage doors slid open and the humanity poured out.’

‘Is something wrong,’ he asked Arkady, ‘princess?’ ‘These are dirty,’ he replied, in his ugly but functional German. ‘Do you have clean clothes for me?’ The kapo grinned now and dashed the bundle from his hands. ‘You are too good for our clothes? You are a fancy man! A lawyer? A doctor?’ Arkady shook his head. ‘A farmer.’ The kapo reached out and ran Arkady’s soft hands between his own, the calluses grating on his soft, pink skin. ‘These hands have never touched dirt. You are some kind of professor, maybe? Someone important?’ The kapo’s finger pointed at his own shirt, where a green triangle pointed from his heart to the mud. ‘Do you see this? This means I am a killer. It means I am in charge here. It means the world is upside down. Do you understand what I’m saying, professor? Do you need an interpreter? Here it is.’ The man held up his fist for Arkady to admire, then sunk it into his solar plexus, dropping him. Although he hadn’t eaten in days, he vomited a little, to the delight of the kapo, who walked off laughing. Another kapo, this one a little kinder in the face, helped him up and escorted him to a sorting room. Two SS men prowled through the room, appraising the men, visually measuring their muscles, squeezing biceps, reaching into mouths to check the health of teeth and gums. One of the SS men noticed Arkady, came over to inspect. As the German poked and prodded him, Arkady realised that the muscles he had worked so hard to acquire, putting in endless hours with kettlebells and press-ups and sprints, were the reason he’d caught the attention of the SS. His friends back in Prague had always teased him, when he came back from a run breathless and ruddy, that his vanity was going to kill him one day. He almost smiled at the thought that they were right, but the kapo had already taught him how dangerous anything less than a blank facial expression was in this place. ‘You are strong. Can you work?’ the SS asked him. Arkady nodded. ‘Good,’ the SS said, then yelled over his shoulder in German, ‘one more! One more for the Sonderkommando.’ He was taken to a new room and given a greatcoat to wear over his pyjamas. After checking their papers, he was held still by two kapos who tattooed a number into his left arm and attached a triangle to his shirt, just above his heart. Then they explained to him that he had been chosen for a special work detail – a Sonderkommando made up of the strongest men, where he would be rewarded for extra duties – and that he was very lucky. For a moment, flush with exhaustion and grateful for the coat after running through the snow all night, he almost believed it, until he was marched with the other prisoners into Auschwitz and he passed under the lie fashioned in wrought iron over the entrance, and marvelled at its cold practicality: how perfect the euphemism, how much sense it made when you learned the only freedom you could look forward to. 19

INSIGHTS ROBERT FORSTER

Inside The Go-Betweens The 1980s songwriting partnership of Grant McLennan/Robert Forster was a little like an Australian John Lennon/ Paul McCartney. The pair wrote all The Go-Betweens’ distinctive material and, like their more famous counterparts, shared the credits and alternated on lead vocals; both also played guitar. Grant & I is Forster’s extraordinary portrait of this intense, creative, sometimes fraught friendship – a genuine meeting of artistic minds. Channelled through Forster’s wise, witty, poignant, insightful and selfdeprecating storytelling, Grant & I shines light on all the ups, downs, hits and missteps of life in The GoBetweens. Here are just five of the many insights revealed in the pages of the book. ROBERT DERWENT GARTH FORSTER IS NAMED AFTER SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE’S SON.

Forster only discovered this after reading one of his own early poems 20

aloud at his grandparents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary in 1972. Postpoem, Forster’s Aunt Sibbie took him aside, revealing something of her appreciation for poetry, and the secret of his literary namesake. This is how Forster remembers it: ‘Did you write that?’ she asked me in the garden. ‘Yes I did.’ ‘Have you heard of a poet called Samuel Taylor Coleridge?’ ‘Um . . . yes.’ ‘He wrote a poem called “Kubla Khan” and another one called “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”.’ To hear such words coming from my aunt. She paused to give me a withering look of consideration, then pursing her lips she went on, ‘Samuel Taylor Coleridge had a son and his name was Derwent. And he was a teacher. Before our family came out from England, Derwent Coleridge

PHOTO: STEPHEN BOOTH

Five surprising facts about The Go-Betweens, from Robert Forster’s unforgettable memoir Grant & I.

was our family tutor. He was a good man and our family liked him a great deal. So much that it was decided to name the eldest child of each generation after him.’ I am Robert Derwent Garth Forster. Destiny had tapped, a pat to encourage stirring feelings I had of being someone with a gift for words. ROBERT FORSTER, PROMPTED BY BOB DYLAN, COINED THE PHRASE ‘STRIPED SUNLIGHT SOUND’, ASSOCIATED WITH BRISBANE POP MUSIC.

It was a rare Bob Dylan interview in Playboy magazine that planted the seed. Forster was driving as McLennan read aloud – the two poring over Dylan’s answers. The big-bang moment arrived when Dylan described the sound achieved on his Blonde on Blonde album as: ‘that wild mercury sound’. This description was to leave a subtle mark on Brisbane music for years to come. Here’s how Forster describes what happened next:

Soon a car arrived, a white secondhand Corolla – a gift from his mother. It was strange to see Grant behind the wheel, it just didn’t seem right for him to have so much hands-on engagement with the world; stranger still to be a passenger as he drove me through the western suburbs. We were close to Golding Street one afternoon, not long after the car’s delivery, when the engine began to splutter. Grant managed to guide the vehicle into a ditch. A look at the dashboard showed the problem. No petrol. He didn’t know you had to put it in. He probably thought you could drive the car forever. We walked home, and with my car in repair we had to hitchhike that night, appropriately enough, to a beatnik-themed Tom Waits show at the university. The next morning we returned with a can of petrol to find the car gone. Stolen. Grant never drove again. His life one tank of gas. THE GO-BETWEENS HAVE A BRIDGE NAMED AFTER THEM IN BRISBANE.

[Dylan’s description] got me thinking of descriptions for our music. A few weeks later I came up with ‘that striped sunlight sound’. It was a Brisbane thing, to do with sun slanting in through windows onto objects in a room, and the feelings that evoked. Years before, I’d taken photos of the Suzuki leaning against a wall with the sun on its honey-coloured body, and somehow all of this got linked to the sound The Go-Betweens made. We stuck this description onto the sleeve of our single as an answer to an imagined interview. The phrase endured, and became a term referencing a bright poppy Brisbane sound with winsome or witty lyrics attached, which our first single helped to inspire. GRANT MCLENNAN ONLY EVER DROVE A CAR ONCE.

When McLennan returned from a trip to his family’s country property in 1979, Forster was surprised to learn McLennan now had a driver’s licence. But his driving career was to be short-lived.

Here’s the official spiel from the Queensland Government website: Hale Street Link renamed Go Between is the result of 5800 res ponses from a community vote in August and September 2009. Go Between was short-listed as it reflects the purpose of the bridge; allowing motorists, cyclists and ped estrians to easily go between some of Brisbane’s most popular recreational, cultural, educational and residential precincts . . . The name is also a tribute to The Go-Betweens; an internationally influential band from Brisbane. The bridge was officially named by Forster, and six other members of The Go-Betweens, at a Community Market Day on Sunday, 4 July 2010, the day before the bridge opened to traffic. As it turns out, it’s a fitting tribute to a band whose name was first uttered while crossing the Brisbane River some decades before.

We were driving across the Grey Street Bridge, Grant in the passenger seat, when he turned to ask, ‘Have you thought of a name for the group?’ I knew I had the right name, but I also realised that the band, however long it lasted, would be a contest and configuration of our wills. And be the stronger for it. I drew breath and as evenly as I could said, ‘The Go-Betweens’. He waited a few seconds, letting the name ring in his head. ‘Good,’ he said. Thirty-two years later and five hundred metres downriver, I would open the Go Between Bridge, the first new bridge to span the centre of Brisbane in forty years. ROBERT FORSTER GOT TO MEET THE SUBJECT OF HIS EARLY SONG ‘LEE REMICK’.

And the actress proved to be as charming in real life as on the screen. The meeting took place in Sydney in 1986, nearly a decade after the song was recorded as a single, and that evening Remick was a guest on The Mike Walsh Show. The first verse of the song rang out as she walked onto the set. Walsh explained the context of the music and the name of the group who’d made the record. Then, with a raised eyebrow to the camera and a theatrical clearing of the throat, he read out the lyrics to the second verse. ‘“She was in The Omen with Gregory Peck/ She got killed but what the heck/ Her eyes are like gems/ She’s an actress for Screen Gems.”’ I was being humiliated on national television. Lee smiled coolly; having met the song’s author that day, she knew his sincerity.

Grant & I by Robert Forster. Hamish Hamilton, September 2016. The creation of Grant & I was assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body. 21

LIFE ADVICE ICED BEER AND OTHER TANTALISING TIPS FOR LIFE

Home Truths LEE LIN CHIN’S GUIDE TO REAL ESTATE

Lee Lin Chin: fashionista, newsreader, Gold Logie loser and social media superstar. In her book, Iced Beer and Other Tantalising Tips for Life, she blows the froth off all the important topics. From careers to cocktails, renovations to relationships, you’ll find Chinspiration to lead a transcendent life. Whether you’re renting or looking to buy, here’s Chin’s real estate tips for young and old.

ILLUSTRATION: GRACE WEST

RENTING

If you’re young, it seems like this is your only option – renting a subpar property from, statistically, a non-caring old white slumlord who owns three other domiciles just like it but who would never himself live in such squalor. The rental market is an aggressive one. It’s like a UFC match, but instead of winning fame, money and a shiny belt, you win the most basic of human necessities – shelter – and you’re competing with an entire city instead of just one person. When looking for a rental property you may feel that the quality shown is beneath you. Well, you’re correct. They all are. Do you really think you’ll find the perfect house? No one rents out the perfect house; they live in the perfect house and make it even more perfect by renting out their garbage flat. Bring your hopes down. It’s going to suck. Once you’ve found a property you don’t completely hate, you merely resent, it’s time to apply and lie through your teeth. Make your referee a celebrity who is bound to impress the landlord, preferably a sexually experimental newsreader beloved by all. You have my permission to use me. But Lee Lin, you may be thinking, wouldn’t they check that my reference is real?

Of course they will, and that’s where you get creative. Download my news broadcasts and sketches from the SBS website. There’s days’ worth of footage and thus plenty of dialogue to steal. Cut it together on your computer – which is a thing I assume is possible – and buy a second phone. Give the real estate agent that number and then answer it using my audio clips. Simple. Or you could bribe the real estate agent. Whichever takes less time, I guess. BUYING A HOME TO THE OLD:

STOP BUYING HOUSES! YOU DON’T NEED EIGHT INVESTMENT PROPERTIES! WHAT ARE YOU EVEN INVESTING IN? YOUR FUTURE? I’LL TELL YOU WHAT’S IN YOUR FUTURE! DEATH! Sorry if I was a tad aggressive there, but can’t you see that you’re the problem? Just leave the kids alone and stop making their lives worse. BUYING A HOME TO THE YOUTH:

Well, I feel for you, I really do, but it is possible to get into the housing market. You just need to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and, as Joe Hockey says, ‘get a better job’. I myself started with nothing, just a small $1 million loan from my father.

Wait, sorry, that’s Donald Trump. Sometimes I get confused, we’re both egomaniacs who find it hard to relate to . . . well, everyone. Him because he’s a monster and me because I’m a god. I really did start with nothing, though. As one of seven children there was no way my family could help me out. But when I bought my apartment fifteen years ago, it was a different time. Money went further and I’d been working for a long time. After researching the current state of property it seems that my experiences are irrelevant in this day and age. That’s infuriating for me so I can’t even imagine how infuriating it is for the youth. For once, I am at a loss, I have no advice for you other than to take to the streets. Protest this injustice. The government can only ignore your voice for so long and if enough people speak out they’ll have to change things. I’m truly sorry that I have no other advice to give. I guess you could take Malcolm Turnbull’s and have your rich parents buy you a house, but how many people actually have rich parents? I should be Prime Chinister.

Iced Beer and Other Tantalising Tips for Life by Lee Lin Chin and Chris Leben. Penguin, December 2016. 23

SHORT STORY

The Bridge BY TEGAN BENNETT DAYLIGHT

I’d heard the boys at school say you needed to run after your first drink, to get the alcohol working. It got you drunk faster. I didn’t bother with that. I was drinking Brandivino, a foul, sultana-flavoured brew. I took a painful gulp of it, and watched as a possum came gripping along the wire of a telegraph pole, not knowing the death humming along beside it. Its eyes were filmed with light as it reached the safety of wood, and then it went down face first like a lizard. I was at the house of a girl named Rosanna. I had not been invited. My best friend Judy had, and I’d persuaded her to bring me. Judy had been moved from our school for Year 12, to a school where she could spend more time on her music, and these were her new friends. We’d neither of us broached the idea that she had been moved because of me. I didn’t understand that I was someone she might need to leave behind. I had been to every kind of party now. This was one of the more humiliating ones. We girls waited in the kitchen, our haunches against the counter, while Rosanna’s parents arranged circles of vegetables and dishes of dip. We eyed the single bowl of Cheezels. There was apple juice in plastic wineglasses, because Rosanna was still a year from drinking age. ‘Take these into the den,’ said the mother, smiling at us, and handed Rosanna a plate of vegetables. We all followed Rosanna through a curtained doorway. The den had lounges of brown corduroy, and two of the walls had the brick exposed, rough and varicoloured, like brawn. Tall, cream-coloured curtains hid any windows. There was a portrait of the family done in pastels, the father and mother with their hands on the shoulders of Rosanna and her round-cheeked brother, who held a violin. Made some time ago, I guessed. I had seen the brother in the hall when we came in. He was tall now. He’d dodged into the crack of a doorway like a frightened spider. All the food was put on a dark wood coffee table, and then the parents withdrew, pulling the curtain across 24

behind them. I kept close to Judy, my bag against my stomach, one hand feeling the shape of the bottle inside it. The room was like a den, the den of a family of pipesmoking bears. Who lived in the woods. I put my hand on the brick wall and it shed fragments of itself on to the white pile carpet. There were no boys, only these seven girls who sat in a circle on the carpet, passing the bowl of Cheezels around. I put one on the finger and thumb of each hand and clicked them together, and then I ate them, cracking each between my tongue and the roof of my mouth. Rosanna got up and took a record from beside the stereo. ‘Look,’ she said, showing us the sleeve. It was the first Eurythmics album, now a few years old. It was lucky that I had nothing to say, because I was not expected to talk, as we sat in our circle and listened to the music. ‘She trained in opera,’ said Rosanna, and they all nodded reverently at each other. Even Judy. I nudged Judy in the side with my elbow, and opened the mouth of my bag to show her the bottle. She shook her head hard and looked away. I listened to two songs, tonguing the paste of Cheezels out of my teeth. Then I stood up, annoying the girl beside me, and used the top of Judy’s head as a pivot to get me out of the circle. She looked up at me and I mouthed, Toilet, and then added in a whisper, for her amusement, my mother’s word. Lavatory. The kitchen was chilly after the snug den. Snug. Snuggly. Cute. I used all these forbidden words to myself as I fiddled with the deadlock on the kitchen door and stepped out into the cold night. On to the patio. Off the patio and into the rock garden, under the false warmth of a street light. There was a rock that looked like a tortoise; I kneeled down to put my hand on it. But it was just a rock. I got to my feet again, and looked up, and saw at an upstairs window the face of Rosanna’s younger brother. I took my bottle out of my bag and waved it at him. I drank, the possum leapt off the telegraph pole and bolted across the empty street, and then the kitchen door

split open, and there was the brother. He was wearing an army trench coat over his clothes, of the sort favoured at that time by boys who thought to show that they would not wear the uniform of their class. Though two years younger, he was nearly a foot taller than I was. He was the skinniest boy I had ever seen, with flimsy orange hair like his sister’s. At home my mother was reading poetry. I know this because when I finally got there, stepping into the dawn light that yawned across the chairs and table of the kitchen, there was a book, flat-backed, open. Of course a glass and a bottle. Underlined was this: The City’s fiery parcels all undone. I had been driven back over the bridge by Judy’s mother, who was too furious to speak to me. We had a real tortoise at home. It was mine, I found it, just after my older brother moved out. I was eight. It was women’s group and I was at home pretending to be sick, but I had climbed out of my window and gone up the street. I had my matches with me, thinking to light a small fire. I loved the street in the day, when all the children had gone to school. So empty, all movement hidden behind fences, in houses. A river of silence. I went up to the little reserve and the long grass. Rupert, the stupid red setter from the Lewises’ house, was there before me. He had something in the grass. He was circling it, barking at it, rushing in to bite it then leaping away again. I whooshed him away with my arms as I reached him, and knelt down to see what it was.

‘. . . he drank some of the Brandivino and took off, trench coat flying behind him, carrying my bottle. I had to run after him.’

It looked like an upturned soup dish, and it had parts of its shell bitten off, lying in flakes around it. It was inside itself; it had gone in, and Rupert the dog was looking at me expectantly, as though I might join the attack, now that I understood the enemy. I whacked Rupert on the side, shouted at him, and picked the tortoise up. It was quite heavy, the shell a mottled army green, more pieces falling off in my hands. I felt it struggle inside itself when I turned it over to look at its underside, polished and worn, and then I turned it back. In the hole where its head should have been I could just see its blunt snout. The dog whined and jumped and I stood up, holding the tortoise out of its way, high in my arms – and immediately, although I couldn’t see this, the tortoise pushed out its head and fitted its beak on to the lobe of my right ear. A circlet, a little half-bracelet of pain, as though it had zipped its mouth shut on my ear. It wouldn’t let go. I tried to pull it off and it felt as though my ear was tearing. The dog was around my legs, pawing at me, panting, yelping. I kicked out at it, and turned in circles, trying to get the tortoise off me, but I could not. So I hefted it against my shoulder, my head tilted sideways to accommodate it, and turned towards home. It was a bottle to two bottles each night, if you count night as beginning when the dinner is being made. During the day I don’t know. The glass was a part of her hand, coming with her from bedroom to kitchen to living room. However much she had drunk, plus a sleeping pill, was enough so that she could not be woken by the repeatedly ringing phone. It was Judy’s mother who was ringing, who had herself been phoned by Rosanna’s parents. First, that brother had been infected by the idea, the same as the boys from school, that you had to run to make alcohol work. So he drank some of the Brandivino and took off, trench coat flying behind him, carrying my bottle. I had to run after him. He ran to the bottom of the street, down a hill. I remember looking back to make sure I knew where the house was. I snatched the bottle back and then he wanted to put an arm round me. He did the thing of pretending to stretch, even as we were walking, and bringing his arm down around my shoulders. I skipped ahead of him. We walked a long way, and sometimes I let him have the bottle. He would drink and then stage little choking fits, which began with sucking the breath between the teeth, like a man in a western after he has tossed back his shot. He even tried one of my cigarettes, but then was forced to throw it away, after a real choking fit. I liked the look of cigarette smoke in the cold air. His breath was thin, insubstantial. Mine came out in a stream in front of me, whipped over my shoulder as we walked. We crossed the bridge over the river, the cars flying and clunking past us. He talked and talked. He was telling me about the other time he had got drunk, how drunk he 25

ARTICLE

had been, how his friends couldn’t believe it. It was heroic SUBJECT stuff. I wanted to push him into the traffic. He’d heard that kids from the public school – forgetting that I went to the public school, that I was part of that fearsome pack – used to go under the bridge and climb up into the girders, and from there make their way into the centre, above the river. If the tide was high you could drop into the water without being hurt. Under the bridge the rush-bump of cars was much louder. It looked surprisingly easy to climb up into the girders; there was a ladder. From there you had to inch along on your stomach, the road just above your head, on a piece of metal about two bodies wide. By this time the brother was seriously drunk, and I did encourage him. I was sick of him, and wanted him gone. I held the trench coat, and my bag with the bottle, and the cigarettes. After a while I put the trench coat on and sat down with my back against the concrete wall under the bridge, where it swelled up to meet the road. The coat stank of sweat. I think I fell asleep. I woke up to hear shouting, and the empty bottle was leaning over in my hand. The brother was still on the girders, in the middle of the river, calling to me.

‘He might have been crying; it was hard to tell. The siren peeled away. I could hear the wind and its rush through the distance between the bridge and the water.’ 26

‘Come back,’ I shouted. ‘I can’t,’ he called back, out of the darkness. ‘What do you mean?’ Bump-bump, cars passing overhead. There was a silence, and then the brother shouted, ‘I suffer from vertigo.’ I waited a moment, taking this in. Then I called, ‘You’ll be okay. Come on.’ ‘I can’t.’ The air under the bridge had a different quality. A sort of inky cold. I shouted, ‘I’ll wait for you.’ I had no way of telling the time, and I did not know how long I had been asleep. There were fewer cars now. I waited, saying nothing, listening for the sound of him dragging himself back. Then I shouted, ‘Hurry up.’ ‘I can’t.’ The party would surely be over. We had walked a long way. Judy would be angry with me. I wondered when they had noticed I was gone. ‘Take it slowly. Bit by bit.’ ‘I can’t. I’ll fall!’ I couldn’t see him at all. Another car passed overhead, and then a siren started up. ‘They might be looking for us,’ I shouted. ‘Maybe your mum and dad are worried.’ He might have been crying; it was hard to tell. The siren peeled away. I could hear the wind and its rush through the distance between the bridge and the water. The lights were off in the houses on either side of the bridge. I felt sick from the Brandivino. I smoked a cigarette, felt sicker, and sat down for a while. Then I stood up and shouted, ‘I’ll go and get help.’ This produced a kind of shriek from the brother: ‘Don’t go!’ ‘I won’t go far – just to a house. We can call the police.’ ‘Don’t! Please!’ ‘All right, all right.’ I went back to my spot against the concrete wall and slid down till I was sitting. ‘Are you there?’ ‘Of course I am!’ I probably fell asleep again, and then I heard screaming. Thin at first, and broken up, but soon louder. Then he was screaming without pause, at the top of his voice. I looked up at the bridge, at the cars, listened for a change in the traffic. He sounded like a woman. I put my hands over my ears. It took ten minutes, perhaps more. A light went on in a house that overlooked the river. A figure appeared on the verandah of the house, stood still a minute, disappeared back into the house. Before long the police arrived. The birds were waking up, and the book and the bottle and the glass on the table were in that stretch of new light. It was as though somebody had wanted to paint a still life and had been in there during the night, quietly arranging. I could hear the sound of the house, a silence with something at its edges.

I went to bed. I was so tired but charged, switched on like a torch. I lay down and I could still hear the thump of cars overhead, the screaming across the water. I could feel the pull towards the boy stuck in the middle of the river. I closed my eyes and saw the fluorescent light in the police station. Judy’s mother had grounded her, which seemed unfair, and also pointless, as she rarely went anywhere. Judy cried when she saw me, and hugged me, which was something we didn’t do, the same way we didn’t say cute, and we didn’t say that we loved each other. Later I understood that because she was grounded I would never see her, at all. Rosanna cried too, and threw herself at her brother, all bosoms and hair, saying, ‘We were so worried about you!’ Nobody looked at me except the sergeant whose desk I’d been sitting at for all those hours. His face went stiff when I met his eye. My mother woke me in the afternoon. My mouth was dry. I sat up and took the glass of water she was offering me. For a moment I thought she was going to sit on the edge of the bed, but she stayed standing, looking at me. ‘I didn’t hear the phone,’ she said. I was not going to help her make excuses for herself. But it would have been reckless to try to get her to take all the blame. The water was cool and soft in my mouth. ‘Who are these people, anyway?’ she said. ‘Friends of Judy’s. New friends.’ ‘That mother is a nitwit.’ ‘Did she come here?’ ‘They all came. The mother wants you to write a letter of apology to the boy. Also to the police, for bringing them out.’ She turned, and I thought she was going to leave, but it was only to pick up a wrapped bundle from beside the door. Now she did come to the bed and sit down, the bundle on her lap. ‘I brought the tortoise in,’ she said, and opened the tea towel. For years now she had been bringing the tortoise in when things went wrong. It was offering, apology, comfort. Later I would understand that my mother trusted me to speak her language, that perhaps I was the only person who did. The tortoise brought its old man’s head out, its legs, and began the solemn march across the covers towards me. If I lay down it would use its claws to try to climb on to my chest, but it had never bitten me again. That day in the street there had also been no one to help. I’d carried the tortoise, still attached, back to our house under the silent trees, across our garden and in through the open front door. As I came into the living room, my mother was talking. She was saying, ‘It’s different with every child. You throw a word at Tasha, she’ll spell it.’ She had her back to me, and the hand that held her glass of wine hanging over the arm of the chair. The women

she was talking to stood up as one, flooding at me, one of them, perhaps Judy’s mother, lightly screaming. But I advanced towards Mum’s chair and stood next to her. I had tears in my eyes by then. She turned around. ‘Good God,’ she said, finishing what was in the glass and putting it on the floor. She hooked an arm around my bottom and pulled me towards her. A hand went up towards the women, holding them off. She turned me so that she could see the tortoise, my ear. She met my eyes, and nodded. She put a finger up to my ear; I could feel her trying to insert it in the tortoise’s mouth, between its sharp ridge of beak and the soft meat of me. ‘Bring me some water,’ she said, not looking away from me, and someone ran into the kitchen and came back, handing her a glass. ‘Stand still,’ she said, and poured it over the side of my head, my ear, the tortoise’s face, and it let go immediately. Pain rushed into where its mouth had been, and she took the tortoise from me, put it on the carpet, and hugged me while I wept. Then she did what she always did and took me to the bathroom to look at myself. Once I had slipped on the wooden floor and been carried to the mirror with my mouth full of blood, whereupon my shrieking became uncontrollable. This time I was calm. We both stared at me. My dark fringe of hair, tear-stained face. My whole ear was flushed red. There was no blood, only that little half-bracelet, the dark stamp of the beak on the sweet flesh of the lobe. In the background I could hear the women exclaiming, the sound of a cork being taken from a bottle. I picked the tortoise up, its legs paddling. I still had the mark of its beak on my ear. We kept it in the old aviary that my father had built before I was born, and that had no birds. I brought the tortoise on to my lap, handing my mother my empty glass. She took it away and came back with her book of poems, and sat on the end of my bed. I lay back and allowed the tortoise to scramble further up my body until it was balanced on the cage of my ribs, and stayed there, eyes closing, panting gently. My mother did not read aloud. She took one of my feet in her hands and twiddled the toes back and forth as she read to herself, and we stayed like that, each dreaming, as the autumn afternoon slowed into gold. I knew she would not make me write those letters.

‘The Bridge’ is extracted from Six Bedrooms by Tegan Bennett Daylight. Vintage, July 2015. 27

RECIPE OTTOLENGHI: THE COOKBOOK

Summer Salad Recipe from Ottolenghi FENNEL AND FETA WITH POMEGRANATE SEEDS AND SUMAC

INGREDIENTS ½ pomegranate

METHOD

2 medium fennel heads

Start by releasing the pomegranate seeds. The best way to do it is to halve the pomegranate along its ‘belly’ (you only need half a pomegranate here), then hold the half firmly in your hand with the seeds facing your palm. Over a large bowl, start bashing the back of the fruit with a wooden spoon. Don’t hit too hard or you’ll bruise the seeds and break the skin. Magically, the seeds will just fall out. Pick out any white skin that falls in. Remove the leaves of the fennel, keeping a few to garnish later, and trim the base, making sure you leave enough of it still attached to hold the slices together. Slice very thinly lengthwise (a mandolin would come in handy here). In a bowl, mix the olive oil, sumac, lemon juice, herbs and some salt and pepper. Add the fennel and toss well. Taste for seasoning but remember, the feta will add saltiness. Layer the fennel, then the feta and then the pomegranate seeds in individual serving dishes. Garnish with fennel leaves, sprinkle over some sumac and serve immediately.

1½ tsp olive oil 2 tsp sumac, plus extra to garnish juice of 1 lemon 10 g picked tarragon leaves 10 g parsley, roughly chopped 70 g Greek feta cheese, sliced Salt and black pepper

Recipe extracted from Ottolenghi: The Cookbook by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi. Ebury Press, October 2016. 28

PHOTO: MATT COLLINS

SERVES 4

This salad has all the little ‘bursts of flavour’ we look for in a dish. The little explosions of sweetness from the pomegranate seeds, for example, along with the tart astringency of the sumac. It’s lovely to eat as it is, or else served alongside some grilled fish or roasted meat. If you’re looking for a substitute to the pomegranate but want to keep the colour and sweetness, dried cranberries or sour cherries also work well.

COLLECTION SUMMER READING

End Notes Zadie Smith, Dave Eggers, Deborah Levy, Jonathan Safran Foer and Emma Cline: five energetic, inventive, zeitgeist-capturing authors who’ve carried the ‘it’ label and found success at a young age. Five writers known for the emotional resonance and scope of their stories; and for their powerful examinations of people, relationships and being human. Five superb summer reads that will leave lasting impressions. SWING TIME BY ZADIE SMITH

ILLUSTRATION: ZOË CARACATSANOUDIS

Two brown girls dream of being dancers – but only one has talent. The other has ideas: about rhythm and time, about black bodies and black music, what constitutes a tribe, or makes a person truly free. It’s a close but complicated childhood friendship that ends abruptly in their early twenties, never to be revisited, but never quite forgotten, either. Moving from north-west London to West Africa, Swing Time explores ideas of race, talent and identity, and how the origins of profound inequality are not a matter of distant history, but a present dance to the music of time. HEROES OF THE FRONTIER BY DAVE EGGERS

A mother and her two young children set out on a journey through the Alaskan wilderness. Travelling in a battered old RV, the trip starts off like a vacation: they spot animals, build bonfires, enjoy

the scenery. But though Josie drives ever deeper into the forest, she cannot outrun her memories of the life she is trying to escape. HOT MILK BY DEBORAH LEVY

Sofia and her mother, hypochondriac Rose, arrive in Almeria seeking help. Rose’s legs have stopped working and no one can tell her why. Simmering with hope and longing, Sofia has come seeking solutions, but the answers she finds are always to questions she had not thought to ask. Both women are desperate for a certain truth, straining the ragged boundaries of their relationship and testing the bonds of family to breaking point. HERE I AM BY JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Jacob and Julia Bloch have a problem . . . several problems, in fact. While they’ve been coaxing Jacob’s grandfather into a retirement home, bracing themselves for a family

reunion and struggling to keep their eldest son from being expelled, a discovery is made that risks destroying their marriage. As domestic crises multiply in the foreground, a global disaster looms on the horizon. The Bloch family is collapsing and so is the Middle East, where a catastrophic earthquake sets in motion a quickly escalating conflict. THE GIRLS BY EMMA CLINE

Evie Boyd is desperate to be noticed. In the summer of 1969, empty days stretch out under the California sun. The smell of honeysuckle thickens the air and the sidewalks radiate heat. Until she sees them. The snatch of cold laughter. Hair, long and uncombed. Dirty dresses skimming the tops of thighs. The girls. And at the centre, Russell. Russell and the ranch, down a long dirt track and deep in the hills. Rumours of sex, frenzied gatherings, teen runaways . . . 29

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