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ISSUE SEVEN: WINTER 2018
For the love of reading
Tim Winton A rifle-shot of a novel, Tim Winton’s The Shepherd’s Hut takes readers through unforgiving territory, and into the treacherous topography of youth.
IN THIS ISSUE: SOFIJA STEFANOVIC | FRANCISCO CANTÚ | MORRIS GLEITZMAN | LAUREN GROFF
In This Issue
Publisher Penguin Random House Australia
No Man’s Land Tim Winton on the toxic masculinity that’s poisoning us all
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Editor / Chief Copywriter Samson McDougall
The Shepherd’s Hut An extract from Tim Winton’s urgent masterpiece
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Editorial Director Ellie Morrow
Princess of Disaster In Miss Ex-Yugoslavia, Sofija Stefanovic reflects on life as a perpetual outsider
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The Line Becomes a River An extract from Francisco Cantú’s electrifying memoir from the US–Mexico border
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Super Laurie Morris Gleitzman wears his underpants on the outside as Children’s Laureate
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Life in Short A selection of unforgettable contemporary short story collections
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Snake Stories A startling tale from Lauren Groff’s homage to her adopted home, Florida
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In the Shadow of the Mountain Tara Westover describes a childhood universe narrowed to a single Idaho valley
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No One Is Coming to Save Us An extract from Stephanie Powell Watts’ riff on The Great Gatsby for Trump’s America
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End Notes Collected winter reading
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Production Manager Lulu Mason Publication Design Cathie Glassby Printer Proudly in partnership with Adams Print
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If you have any questions or comments, write to us at underline@penguinrandomhouse.com.au penguin.com.au
COVER PHOTO: LYNN WEBB
Underline Issue Seven: Winter 2018
underline For the love of reading
Every quarter, Underline brings 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 world’s finest literature, and the minds behind it. We hope you enjoy leafing through these pages as much as we did compiling them.
BOOKS FEATURED IN UNDERLINE ARE AVAILABLE AT ALL GOOD BOOKSTORES
INTERVIEW TIM WINTON
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No Man’s Land
By Samson McDougall As our boys become men they’re increasingly vulnerable to toxic perceptions of masculinity. Tim Winton’s The Shepherd’s Hut explores what it takes to keep love and hope alive in a parched and brutal world. PHOTO: LYNN WEBB
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PHOTO: LYNN WEBB
‘The process of writing is potent and mysterious, but when something feels hot and real you go with it. I guess someone unlike me would say they “honour it”. But I just follow it, muttering mutinously.’
When foul-mouthed teenaged timebomb Jaxie Clackton arrived ‘uninvited, unwashed and uncouth’ in Tim Winton’s mind, the author was working on another novel entirely. But such was the impact of the boy’s arrival, and the urgency of his predicament, that Winton opened his door to this least charming of house guests and began what he describes as a ‘process of surrender’. ‘The early scene in the shed where the ute’s fallen off the jack onto Jaxie’s dad – it was just there in my head, almost fully formed, and Jaxie’s hoarse little voice came with it, fully formed and freaky,’ Winton says. ‘I felt like I was stuck with him... He felt very real to me and still does.’ Jaxie remained an uncomfortable daily presence in Winton’s life for two years – an experience he says he would not recommend. His new book The Shepherd’s Hut is the harrowing outcome of this intrusion. And as readers follow Jaxie as he runs from an unthinkable incident in a horrible home across an inhospitable landscape towards an impossible dream, they are invited into this boy’s trial by inferno. From the outset we’re thrust into a world thankfully few of us will ever know; our tour guide that kid we’ve each encountered at some point and likely crossed the street to avoid. Marinated in violence and hardened by a lifetime of abuse, Jaxie is a racist, misogynistic, opinionated and coarse misanthrope with an inclination to aggression and a fondness for knives and guns. But through the strange poetry of his language Jaxie’s shocking narrative comes to life: And I drive like that, just under the limit, with a chop in one hand and the wheel in the other. Laughing hard enough to choke. For the first time in me life I know what I want and I have what it takes to get me there. If you never experienced that I feel sorry for you. But it wasn’t always like this. I been through fire to get here. I seen things and done things and had shit done to me you couldn’t barely credit. So be happy for me. And for fucksake don’t get in my way. ‘I’m not sure how you harness something like [Jaxie’s voice],’ Winton says. ‘The process of writing is potent and mysterious, but when something feels hot and real you go with it. I guess someone unlike me would say they “honour it”. But I just follow it, muttering mutinously.’ It’s through Jaxie’s eyes and words that we come to know him, but this limited viewpoint and vocabulary presented Winton with challenges in trying to explain his world. During the writing process he says he experimented with telling the story from multiple perspectives, which didn’t work. Ultimately, as uncomfortable as it was, he had to front up to telling Jaxie’s story in Jaxie’s way. Via his internal monologue, actions and sparse interactions with others, a picture gradually emerges of the different aspects of, and contributing factors to, Jaxie’s personality. By humanising this kid we might
otherwise pigeonhole as a no-hoper, readers are asked to contemplate the circumstances of the ‘bad’ kids in all our neighbourhoods and our pasts. ‘He’s a dangerous person,’ Winton says. ‘I guess it’s the rage in him, the simmering violence, the ways in which his home life has distorted him. Even if he yearns for something better within himself, he’s drawing on a pretty poisonous reservoir of experience. ‘I certainly knew kids like Jaxie when I was a boy – they scared the hell out of me – but my life was very different, because there was no violence in our home and my dad was the polar opposite of Jaxie’s… To some extent you really are at the mercy of circumstances.’ Central to Jaxie’s internal torment is the fear of his bloodline – that the same toxicity of his wife- and child-bashing father will inevitably be manifested in himself. It’s the blood that makes me worry. It carries things you don’t even know you got. Sometimes I wonder if that nasty mean shit is in me too, like he’s passed it on. But with role models in short supply, Jaxie’s perception of manhood is shaped by men who are emotional infants, enemies of empathy, imagination and contemplation. And because of this he lacks the basic qualities, language and emotional intelligence required to break free from the poisonous misogyny and neglect that’s scarred him. ‘I think we need to give boys licence to express things,’ Winton says. ‘Often they’re afraid to stray beyond the heavily policed boundaries of what’s acceptable for a boy. The models of masculinity are like shackles… This is a profound and enduring injustice. We’re all deformed by it. Just as slavery deforms the slave-owner and slave alike.’ Break through Jaxie’s armour, and he’s no longer just the dumb bully son of the violent, alcoholic butcher; he’s a multifaceted individual – a survivor, a problem solver, a romantic, a loyal friend. Every molecule of tenderness has been squeezed or beaten out of him, but there is still hope. ‘I think such hope is necessary,’ Winton says. ‘But feeling hope is one thing; creating the conditions for hope to flourish in, that’s something else entirely. I don’t think this is something we can just observe at a distance. We need to change the conditions for young people. That means systemic changes, legislation, an evolution of mores… ‘I see a difference between wildness and savagery,’ he continues. ‘I’ve always celebrated wildness in children, as much as in nature. There’s a kind of purity there I love, something headlong and unself-conscious in kids. That’s not to suggest they’re utterly innocent or blank. But I think to some extent savagery is learnt. It’s observed and internalised and reinforced. All of us, from infancy, are capable of cruelty and bastardry, but we only get good at it with practice.’ 5
EXTRACT
The Shepherd’s Hut BY TIM WINTON
The day the old life ended I sat up under the grandstand nursing me bung eye and hating on old Wankbag till the sun went down. Mum always went crook when I called him that behind his back. Captain Wankbag. The Captain. Or just Cap for short. Said that was no way to talk about your father, but it was no odds to me. That bucket of dog sick was a bastard to both of us, I wished he was dead. And right then I was praying for it. Me hands stunk of meat. I made fists of them, hard and flat as sawed beef shanks. I stared at them till there wasn’t any light left to see them by but it didn’t matter because in me throbbing head I could see a cleaver in one and a boner in the other, feel them there real as money. Sat gripping them imaginary things so long me arms cramped up and I had to come out in the night air before I keeled over again. It was cooler in the open. Couldn’t see nothing but the lights of town. Some blokes kicked a ball way down the other end in the dark, just voices and hard thumps that gimme the yips. I didn’t know what to do, where to go. Had no money. Some ice would of been good. Like frozen water ice, I mean. For the eye that was half closed over. Fucking hell, it was like something growing out the side of me head. The sky was blank, I seen more stars when he clocked me, and I started trying to figure the time. Before this, back in the shop, I come to in the bone crate. Woke up arse over and half stupid in that slimy pile of shins and knuckles and chook frames, and for a 6
sec I didn’t know where I was or how I got there. But I copped on soon enough. Where was I? Work of course. And how did I end up poleaxed in a bin? The usual way, that’s how. He wouldn’t give you the sweat off his balls, the old Captain, but when it come to dishing out a bit of biff when you weren’t looking, well, then he was like fucking Santa. I heard the radio going out front. And that lemony detergent stink was in the air. So it had to be after closeup. And now he’s having to wipe out the trays and slush the floor on his own, the dense prick. Bitches all afternoon about what a lazy bludger I am and then makes sure he can’t get any work out of me when there’s most to be doing. No wonder he’s such a big success in business. I looked out through me knees and tried to get to me feet, but Christ, that took some doing. Would of made a nice old picture, that. Jaxie Clackton, hardarse the kids run clear of all over the shire. Trying to spaz up out of that greasy nest of bones like a poisoned fly. Talk about laugh. But I done it in the end. Grabbed onto the bench. Pushed off the muck-specky wall. And stood there a mo with me head spinning. Probably gobbing and gawping like a goldfish. And all the time, just the other side of the partition, through the door and the skanky flystrips, the mop’s slopping and the bucket’s getting kicked across the floor, and he’s wheezing and snorting and going on some mumblefuck about how bloody useless I am and how he’s gunna flog some morals into me. And in me mind right then I was already gone. Up the street and shot through
‘Woke up arse over and half stupid in that slimy pile of shins and knuckles and chook frames, and for a sec I didn’t know where I was or how I got there. But I copped on soon enough. Where was I? Work of course. And how did I end up poleaxed in a bin? The usual way, that’s how.’
clean. But it’s like I was doing everything half speed, pissing off in slow motion. And any second he’s gunna come through the door and get me by the ear and give me a couple more to be going on with. So I told meself to harden up and get a wriggle on, to get me apron undone and kick off them stupid butcher boots. Not real easy, any of that, not with a woozy head and sausage fingers. But I got them off and grabbed me Vans and the skateboard by the back door and sleazed away quiet. Outside the air was warm and the day nearly done. I peered up the street through the shadows and just to squint that tiniest bit hurt to the living fuck. When I touched me face it felt like a punkin full of razor blades. And I shoulda been relieved I was out and away but I had nowhere to go. All I wanted was a bag of peas on me face and a bed to lay on. But it wouldn’t be safe to go home till Wankbag was fully rummed up. Which took some doing. He was pissed all day at work, that was just him regular. Getting himself totally off his tits, that was a few hours’ hard relaxing. After a shit and maybe a shower. Rip his eye patch off and just sit there in his jocks. His empty socket sucked into a cat’s arse squint. Grab a two-litre bottle of Coke from the fridge, tip half down the sink and fill it back up with Bundaberg rum. No point me going home till he got his medicine down. He’d stagger round a bit. Park himself here and there. In the shed. Or out the patio looking at the paddocks and the train tracks. Mostly he ended up in that big rocking TV chair passed out blind, lights on, curtains open.
Snoring hard enough to rattle the glass. Made it simple to figure when to make your move. Pull up outside in the dark street. Suss him through the window. Watch to see he’s out properly. Then go in the back way. Take your chance in the kitchen. And get to your bedroom fast. Lock the door. Shove the desk in front. And let him sleep it off. Tomorrow’ll be a new day. Which is really the same miserable fucking day all over again. Till then there’s nowhere to go but the footy oval. That’s why I was up there, hiding like a girl. The roadhouse was iffy and the pub was plain trouble so I had to hole up under the grandstand. That was it. And that’s what I done. I took a breath of air and snuck back up under the joists where it was all chip boxes and old frangers and Beam cans. I waited past dark and then a few hours more. I didn’t dare look at me phone to check the time or see if there was messages, the light’s a dead giveaway, you don’t make that mistake twice. So there was nothing else to do but hang on and guts it out. In me mind I saw him going drink for drink with himself, like he was in some kind of dipshit competition to get written off faster than anyone else in town. Sid Clackton, Bundy rum champion of the world. Captain Wankbag, master butcher, roadkill specialist, drunker than any man alive. Monkton’s finest, what a mighty hero! I imagined the slobby prick frying himself a pan of bangers and yelling at the telly. Look at this fuckwit, shut your mouth, who’s this ugly moll, this is bullshit. On and on. You didn’t even have to be there to hear it. 7
‘A shadow doesn’t search for a drain like that. Shadows don’t have blowflies drowning in them. But I spose for two seconds I let meself think it was just oil. Like he’d dropped the bung out of the sump, too pissed to remember to slide a drain pan under it.’
And I thought if only it could all be poison. The rum, the beer, the meat, the bloody air he snorted. If only he could fucking die and leave me be. If there’s a God out there why can’t he do the righty for a change and kill this cunt off once and for all. Because all a person wants is feeling safe. Peace, that’s all I’m after. Well that’s what I told meself. But that idea got old. Pretty soon what I really wanted was a few bangers of me own. Fucking peace could wait. I was hungry as a shark. And now I thought about it I didn’t want to still be out there at closing time when half the front bar spilled into the park for more. I sure as hell didn’t want to get into it with any goon-drinking darkies or the apprentices from the John Deere. I had no fight left in me, so I figured enough was enough. I come out from under the old wood grandstand and listened for anyone out there on the oval. But it was quiet. So I stuck the skateboard under me arm and snuck across to the trees round the boundary and stayed under them till there was a streetlight and some bitumen. Then I rolled home the back way.
It was all pretty chill up our street. A couple of windows with tellies flashing in them but nobody outside that I could see, no porch-smoking Paxtons, no Mrs Mahood standing there with the hose the way she does all day. Our place was dark mostly but I could see light spilling 8
out from the open doors of the shed and I heard the radio going. And I stood there a sec on the drive where the light didn’t reach and tried to steel up for it, figuring better to go in now than have him come and find me standing in front of the fridge. It’s always best to be ready. I headed for the shed and then I stopped. And I dunno why really. Just peered inside. All I saw was his ute. That shelf against the back wall piled with camping gear. The big globe hanging off the truss with a few moths clattering about it. I thought maybe he was in there tapping a drum of homebrew. But it was a weeknight. And whenever he pulled the pin on a batch the whole street give off the sour reek of beer and he got suddenly popular. It sure as hell wouldn’t be this quiet. Even if it was only him and the copper drinking it, they’d fill the place with all their bloke noise, ya-ya-ya, mate, yeah fark orf, and there wouldn’t be that meaty smell I was whiffing right now. I knew he still took sly beef from blokes passing through and he had a chiller room off the side to keep it all clear of the shop, but the doors were wide open and he wasn’t so thick he’d leave it like this, not even if he was expecting someone. And there was something funny about his ute parked in the shed. From out on the drive I could see the Hilux was way too high in the arse, like the tray was all angled up. I flipped the board a couple of times and let it fall to the cement to show him I was there. I guess I could of called out something or coughed the way people do but he’d of heard me already. For sure. If he was in there, that is. Odds were he was waiting, foxing, messing with me. Like it’s his
fucking hobby, giving a dude a nervous breakdown. So I went in careful, with the deck of the board like a shield in front. And I thought, I’m not seeing right. Because of the swollen eye. Maybe that’s why I didn’t cop on straight away. Because the front wheels of the Hilux were fully off. Both of them was laying flat on the floor, one against the other. The nuts in a pile next to the wheelbrace. And the hubs. Fuck me, the bare hubs were down hard on the concrete. And the ute was casting a shadow that no light was ever gunna make. A shadow doesn’t search for a drain like that. Shadows don’t have blowflies drowning in them. But I spose for two seconds I let meself think it was just oil. Like he’d dropped the bung out of the sump, too pissed to remember to slide a drain pan under it. From the corner of me good eye I could see the half empty bottle on the bench. No bubbles left in the Coke. Something sucking at the open neck, a wasp maybe. But I still didn’t really know what I was looking at. Until I crept up past the driver’s side door and peeped over the bonnet and saw his hairy legs and his bare feet stuck out from under the roo bar. I dropped the skateboard and it scooted away and hit something with a clang and then I saw the high-lift slumped away from the vehicle. It was laying across rags and a tarry puddle on the cement. I saw tracks where some lizard run through the mess on his way out the door. And then it was plain as dog’s balls. I didn’t even get down
on me knees and check. Maybe I should of to make sure and take some satisfaction from it, but I already knew the old turd was cactus. And it’s not as if I was crying any tears but it knocked me. I had to lean against the Hilux to keep meself up. Me head was everywhere and nowhere. I mean, Jesus. But after a bit I started having proper thoughts. Like, the doors are wide open. And by eight in the morning the Cap won’t be at the shop and by nine someone’s gunna want to know why they can’t get a porterhouse and the bag of snags they ordered. I sure as hell wasn’t stopping round to have half the town point the finger at me, saying I come in and caught him when I finally had the jump on him. People knew I had good reason, it was no secret in Monkton how he was and what he done to us. They’ll say I kicked the jack out from under the roo bar and crushed his head like a pig melon. It all points to me.
Extracted from The Shepherd’s Hut by Tim Winton. Hamish Hamilton, March 2018. 9
REFLECTION SOFIJA STEFANOVIC
Princess of Disaster In Miss Ex-Yugoslavia, Sofija Stefanovic weighs the significance of carrying historical baggage to new lands.
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was turned upside down all over again. Surrounded by conflict and uncertainty, it’s no wonder that Stefanovic had so many questions as she grew up: Which Disney movie would her life mirror? How did Yugo rock songs compare with the Tin Lids? And can you become the centre of attention when English is your second language? Her memoir, Miss Ex-Yugoslavia, is a funny, dark and tender reflection on growing up between the lunacy of Yugoslavia’s civil war and suburban Australia. Moving, hilarious and beautifully candid, it’s a story that captures the experience of being a perpetual outsider – and learning, in the end, that perhaps you prefer it that way.
In this passage Stefanovic offers a glimpse of the strangeness that exists within a community of expats from a country that no longer does.
I wouldn’t normally enter a beauty pageant, but this one is special. It’s a battle for the title of Miss Ex-Yugoslavia, beauty queen of a country that no longer exists. It is due to the country being ‘no more’ that our shoddy little contest is happening in Australia, over 12,000 kilometres from where Yugoslavia once stood. My fellow competitors and I are immigrants and refugees, coming from different sides of the conflict that split Yugoslavia up. It’s a weird
ILLUSTRATION: MADELINE TINDALL
Sofija Stefanovic was born into a country destined to collapse. With Yugoslavia on the brink of war, her family was torn between the socialist existence they’d always known and the stability on offer in Australia. As a result, they spent many years moving back and forth between the two countries, unable to settle in one home. When the war started to rage, the pain and madness it caused stretched all the way to Melbourne, where the Stefanovics found themselves part of a disjointed community of ex-Yugoslavians. Then, as the Yugoslav Wars moved towards their brutal conclusion, the family was forced to face its own private and desperate battle. Suddenly the world
‘For weeks I’ve been preparing myself to stand almost naked in front of everyone I know, and the day of the big reveal has come around quickly.’
idea for a competition – bringing young women from a war-torn country together to be objectified – but, in our little diaspora, we’re used to contradictions. It’s 2005, I’m twenty-two, and I’ve been living in Australia for most of my life. I’m at Joy, an empty Melbourne nightclub that smells of stale smoke and is located above a fruit and vegetable market. I open the door to the dressing room, and when my eyes adjust to the fluorescent lights I see that young women are rubbing olive oil on each other’s thighs. Apparently, this is a trick used in ‘real’ competitions, one we’ve hijacked for our amateur version. For weeks I’ve been preparing myself to stand almost naked in front of everyone I know, and the day of the big reveal has come around quickly. As I scan the shiny bodies for my friend Nina, I’m dismayed to see that all the other girls have deadstraight hair, while mine, thanks to an overzealous hairdresser with a curling wand, looks like a wig made of sausages. ‘Dođi, lutko,’ Nina says as she emerges from the crowd of girls. Come here, doll. ‘Maybe we can straighten it.’ She brings her hand up to my hair cautiously, as if petting a startled lamb. Nina is a Bosnian refugee in a miniskirt. As a contestant she is technically my competitor, but we’ve become close in the rehearsals leading up to the pageant. Under Nina’s tentative pets, the
hair doesn’t give. It’s been sprayed to stay like this, possibly forever. I shift uncomfortably and tug on the hem of my skirt, trying to pull it lower. Just like the hair, it doesn’t budge. In my language, such micro-skirts have earned their own graphic term: dopičnjak, which literally means ‘to the pussy’ – a precise term that distinguishes the dopičnjak from its more conservative sub-genital cousin, the miniskirt. Though several of us barely speak our mother tongue, for better or worse all of us competitors are ex-Yugos; we come from Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia. I join a conversation in which Yugo girls are yelling over each other in slangriddled English, recalling munching on the salty peanut snack Smoki when they were little, agreeing that it was the bomb and totally sick, superior to anything one might find in our adopted home. The idea of a beauty pageant freaks me out, and ex-Yugoslavia as a country is itself an oxymoron – but the combination of the two makes the deliciously weird Miss Ex-Yugoslavia competition the ideal subject for my documentary filmmaking class. I feel like a double-agent. Yes, I’m a part of the ex-Yugo community, but also I’m a cynical, story-hungry, Western-schooled film student, and so I’ve gone undercover among my own people. I know my community
is strange, and I want to get top marks for this exclusive glimpse within. Though I’ve been deriding the competition to my film friends, rolling my eyes at the ironies, I have to admit that this pageant, and its resurrection of my zombie country, is actually poking at something deep. If I’m honest with myself, I’m not just a filmmaker seeking a good story. This is my community. I want outsiders to see the human face of exYugoslavia – because it’s my face and the face of these girls. We’re more than news reports about war and ethnic cleansing. ‘Who prefers to speak English to the camera?’ I ask the room in English, whipping my sausagecurled head around as my university classmate Maggie points the camera at the other contestants backstage. ‘Me!’ most of the girls say in chorus. ‘What’s your opinion of ex-Yugoslavia?’ I ask Zora, the seventeen-yearold from Montenegro. ‘Um, I don’t know,’ she says. ‘It’s complicated!’ someone else calls out. As a filmmaker, I want a neat soundbite, but ex-Yugoslavia is unwieldy. Most of my fellow contestants are confused about the turbulent history of the region, and it’s not easy to explain in a nutshell. At the very least, I want viewers to understand what brought us here: the wars that consumed the 1990s and their main players Serbia, Croatia, 11
and Bosnia and Herzegovina, which were the three largest republics within the Yugoslav Federation. Like many families, mine left when the wars began, and like the rest of the Miss Ex-Yugoslavia competitors, I was only a kid. Despite the passage of time, however, being part of an immigrant minority in Australia, speaking Serbian at home, being all-too familiar with dopičnjaks, I’m embedded in the community. Yugoslavia and its tiny-skirt-wearing, war-prone people have weighed upon me my whole life. Most of these young women moved here either as immigrants seeking a better life (like my family, who came from Serbia) or as refugees fleeing the effects of war (like the Croatian and Bosnian girls). ‘Why are you competing for Miss Ex-Yugoslavia?’ I prod Zora. ‘That’s where I come from,’ she says, looking down, like I’m a demanding schoolteacher. ‘And my parents want me to.’ In the film I will contextualise the footage of the Miss Ex-Yugoslavia competition with my own story. I’ve put together some home-video footage of me in Belgrade, before we moved to Australia. The footage shows me aged two, in a blue terrytowelling romper suit handed down from my cousins. I’m in front of our scruffy building on the Boulevard of Revolution, posing proudly on the hood of my parents’ tiny red Fiat with my little legs crossed like a glamorous grown-up. To accompany these scenes I’ve inserted voice-over narration, which says, The Belgrade I left is still my home. I was born there and I plan to die there. But really, though I like the dramatic way this sounds, I’m not sure it’s true. Would I really go back to that poor, corrupt, dirty place now that English comes easier to me than Serbian? I am quick to tell anyone who asks that I find beauty pageants stupid and that I’m competing for the sake of journalism. However, I am still a human living in the world, and I would like to look hot. I’ve had my 12
body waxed, I’ve been taught how to walk down a runway, and I’ve eaten nothing except celery and tuna for the last few weeks in the desperate hope that it will reduce my cellulite. I’ve replaced my nerdy glasses with contacts and I’m the fittest I’ve been in my life. A secret, embarrassed little part of me that always wanted to be a princess is fluttering with hope. I’ve reverted to childhood habits of craving attention and, for a second, I forget all the things I dislike about my appearance. As I observe my shiny, fake-tanned body in the backstage mirror and smile with my whitened teeth, I think, What if somehow, some way, I actually win Miss Ex-Yugoslavia? I allow myself to dream for a moment about being the crowned princess, like the ones in the Disney tapes my dad would get for me on the black market back in Serbia.
This highly amateur competition is the brainchild of a man named Sasha, who organises social events for the ex-Yugoslavian community in Melbourne. He has managed to gather nine competitors aged between sixteen and twenty-three who found out about the event on the ex-Yugo grapevine: a poster at the Montenegrin doctor’s surgery, an advertisement in the Serbian Voice local newspaper, via their parents, or the chatter in the Yugo clubs. Sasha is Serbian, like me. Earlier today I found him bustling around the nightclub with his slicked-back hair and leather jacket, ordering people to set up the runway. I pointed a camera at him and, like a hard-hitting journalist glistening with recently applied spray tan that left orange marks on the wall asked, in our language, why he decided to stage a Miss Ex-Yugoslavia competition. Sasha turned to the camera with a practised smile and said, ‘I’m simply trying to bring these girls together.
What happened to Yugoslavia is, unfortunately, a wound that remains in our minds and in our hearts. But now we’re here, on another planet, so let’s treat it that way. Let’s be friends.’ ‘Do you think we will all get along?’ I asked, hoping he’d address the wars he was tiptoeing around. ‘I don’t know, but I’m willing to try. I am only interested in business, not in politics.’ He looked directly into the camera to reiterate, to make sure he wasn’t getting any disgruntled parties offside, ‘I say that for the record. I am only interested in business and nothing else.’ His interest in business is so keen, in fact, that he’s planning to make a DVD of the pageant, separate from my documentary but using the footage that I have to give him after tonight. Unlike my film, with which I hope to encapsulate the troubled history of Yugoslavia in under ten minutes, he intends to skip the politics altogether. Instead, he will pair footage of us girls in skimpy outfits with dance music and then sell the DVD back to us and our families for fifty dollars. Now it’s eight o’clock, and the peace Sasha was hoping for reigns in the dressing room. Here, girls help each other with their hair, they attach safety pins to hemlines and share bandaids to stop blisters. The event was supposed to begin an hour ago, but we are still waiting for audience members to be seated. There’s a security guard downstairs who is searching each guest with a handheld metal detector, and I suspect it’s taking so long because all the gold chains are setting it off.
Miss Ex-Yugoslavia by Sofija Stefanovic. Viking, May 2018.
EXTRACT
The Line Becomes a River BY FRANCISCO CANTÚ
The modern-day boundary between the United States and Mexico was defined largely by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, signed after nearly two years of warfare between neighboring republics. The newly agreed-upon borderline was to begin “on the coast of the Pacific Ocean, distant one marine league due south of the southernmost point of the port of San Diego,” and run east “following the division line between Upper and Lower California” until it reached the Colorado River at the town of Yuma. The treaty dictated that the line would then follow the course of the Gila River from its intersection with the Colorado until it reached the border of New Mexico, at which point the boundary would leave the waters of the Gila in a straight line until it intersected the Rio Grande north of El Paso, where the line would again become fluid “following the deepest channel” of the river until it emptied into the Gulf of Mexico, to be forgotten in the waters of the ocean at a point “three leagues from land, opposite the mouth of the Rio Grande.” Article V of the treaty mandated that “in order to designate the boundary line with due precision, upon authoritative maps, and to establish upon the ground landmarks which shall show the limits of both Republics… the two Governments shall each appoint a commissioner and a surveyor, who… shall meet at the port of San Diego, and proceed to run and mark the said boundary in its whole course to the mouth of the Rio Bravo del Norte.” It added that “the boundary line established by this article shall be religiously respected by each of the two Republics.” Following the ratification of the treaty, both countries appointed commissioners and surveyors to mark the new boundary. The surveying was initially carried out under
the questionable supervision of John Russell Bartlett, a well-connected and adventure-hungry bookseller living in New York. After many fits and starts, the commission established the initial point of the boundary on the Pacific coast and marked it with a “substantial monument,” and made a similar determination “at the junction of the Gila and Colorado rivers, where another monument was placed.” Between these two points, the commission marked the boundary with five intermediate monuments. Several years later, in 1853, the boundary line was modified by the Treaty of La Mesilla, commonly known in the United States as the Gadsden Purchase. Instead of following the natural course of the Gila River across Arizona to the edge of New Mexico, the new agreement stipulated that a rigid and pivoting line would dip south from Yuma and run east to the Rio Grande, adding nearly thirty thousand square miles of territory to the southern edges of Arizona and New Mexico. In the first article of the new agreement, it was stated that each government would again nominate a commissioner whose duty it would be “to survey and mark out upon the land the dividing line stipulated by this article, where it shall not have already been surveyed and established.” Over the course of three years following the treaty’s ratification, a new survey was undertaken that included many personnel from the original commission. The newly appointed commissioner, William H. Emory, brought great conviction to his work, deeming it “fortunate that two nations, which differ so much in laws, religion, customs, and physical wants, should be separated by lines.” While he regretted that the new boundary should limit the “inevitable expansive force” of the United States, he nevertheless declared with characteristic zeal that “no 13
‘By the time of rescue, one of the men had already met his death. Of the survivors, one was quickly treated and discharged from the hospital, while another remained in intensive care, recently awoken from a coma, unable to remember his own name.’
line traversing the continent could probably be found which is better suited to the purpose.” In the course of their work along the international boundary, Emory’s surveying parties erected, in addition to the six still-suitable monuments previously established along California’s border with Mexico, the placement of forty-seven monuments along the newly traced line from the Colorado River to the Rio Grande, asserting, for the very first time, the entirety of a boundary that had hitherto existed only on paper and in the furious minds of politicians.
Agents found Martin Ubalde de la Vega and his three companions on the bombing range more than fifty miles north of the border. The four men had been in the desert for six days and had wandered in the July heat for over forty-eight hours without food or water. By the time of rescue, one of the men had already met his death. Of the survivors, one was quickly treated and discharged from the hospital, while another remained in intensive care, recently awoken from a coma, unable to remember his own name. When I arrived at the hospital asking for the third survivor, nurses explained that he was recovering from kidney failure and guided me to his room, where he lay hidden like a dark stone in white sheets. I had been charged with watching over de la Vega until his condition was stable, at which point I would transport him to the station to be processed for deportation. I settled in a chair next to him, and after several minutes of silence, I asked him to tell me about himself. He answered timidly, as if unsure of what to say or even how to speak. 14
He apologized for his Spanish, explaining that he knew only what they had taught him in school. He came from the jungles of Guerrero, he told me, and in his village they spoke Mixtec and farmed the green earth. He was the father of seven children, he said, five girls and two boys. His eldest daughter lived in California and he had crossed the border with plans to go there, to live with her and find work. We spent the following hours watching telenovelas and occasionally he would turn to ask me about the women in America, wondering if they were like the ones on TV. He began to tell me about his youngest daughter, still in Mexico. She’s just turned eighteen, he said. You could marry her. Later that afternoon, de la Vega was cleared for release. The nurse brought in his belongings – a pair of blue jeans and sneakers with holes worn through the soles. I asked what had happened to his shirt. I don’t know, he answered. I looked at the nurse and she shrugged, telling me he had come in that way. We’ve got no clothes here, she added, only hospital gowns. As we exited through the hospital lobby, I watched the way eyes fell across his shirtless body. I imagined him alone and half naked in the days to come as he was ferried through alien territory, booked and transferred between government processing centers and finally bused to the border to reenter his country. In the parking lot I placed him in the passenger seat of my patrol vehicle and popped the trunk. At the back of the cruiser I unbuckled my gun belt, unbuttoned my uniform shirt, and removed my white V neck. I reassembled my uniform and returned to the passenger door to offer him my undershirt.
Before leaving town, I asked him if he was hungry. You should eat something now, I told him, at the station there’s only juice and crackers. I asked what he was hungry for. What do Americans eat? he asked. I laughed. Here we eat mostly Mexican food. He looked at me unbelievingly. But we also eat hamburgers, I said. We pulled into a McDonald’s and at the drive-through window de la Vega turned to me and told me he didn’t have any money. Yo te invito, I said. As we drove south along the open highway, I tuned in to a Mexican radio station and we listened to the sounds of norteño as he ate his meal. After finishing he sat silently next to me, watching the passing desert. Then, as if whispering to me or to someone else, he began to speak of the rains in Guerrero, of the wet and green jungle, and I wondered if he could ever have been made to imagine a place like this – a place where one of his companions would meet his death and another would be made to forget his own name, a landscape where the earth still seethed with volcanic heat.
A woman on the south side of the pedestrian fence flagged me down as I passed her on the border road. I stopped my vehicle and went over to her. With panic in her voice she asked me if I knew about her son – he had crossed days ago, she said, or maybe it was a week ago, she wasn’t sure. She hadn’t heard anything from him, no one had, and she didn’t know if he had been caught or if he was lost somewhere in the desert or if he was even still alive. Estamos desesperados, she told me, her voice quivering, with one hand clawing at her chest and the other trembling against the fence. I don’t remember what I told her, if I took down the man’s name or if I gave her the phone number to some faraway office or hotline, but I remember thinking later about de la Vega, about his dead and delirious companions, about all the questions I should have asked the woman. I arrived home that evening and threw my gun belt and uniform across the couch. Standing alone in my empty living room, I called my mother. I’m safe, I told her, I’m home.
As I cut for sign along the border road, I watched a Sonoran coachwhip snake try to find its way into Mexico through the pedestrian fence. The animal slithered along the length of the mesh looking for a way south, hitting its head against the rusted metal again and again until finally I guided it over to the wide opening of a wash grate. After the snake had made its way across the adjacent road, I stood for a while looking through the mesh, staring at the undulating tracks left in the dirt.
Extracted from The Line Becomes a River by Francisco Cantú. Bodley Head, February 2018. 15
INSIGHT MORRIS GLEITZMAN
Super Laurie Acclaimed author Morris Gleitzman comes to terms with his new role as Australian Children’s Laureate.
From a germ named Aristotle who just wants to be happy, to the adventures of a slightly squashed cane toad, to the life of a young Jewish boy named Felix during World War II, Morris Gleitzman’s books cover broad territory. And his ability to explore serious themes with his trademark humour sets his writing apart. A former TV scriptwriter, Gleitzman’s 1987 debut novel, The Other Facts of Life, started out as a screenplay, before becoming a book, then becoming an award-winning TV show. He says making the transition from the screen to the page was a lifechanging experience. ‘With a book you can go into the thoughts and feelings of a character and write about 16
them directly,’ he says. ‘You can see the events of the story through the eyes of one character. In all sorts of ways, readers (and writers) can be the character, to a degree that is much harder to achieve in a movie.’ Dozens of books for younger readers later – including prizewinners Blabber Mouth, Bumface, Toad Rage and Soon – Gleitzman’s contribution has been recognised by the Australian Children’s Literature Alliance, announcing in February his appointment as Children’s Laureate. Here he touches on the importance of storytelling for the development of young minds.
The question I’ve been asked most over the past few weeks (apart from how do you spell laureate and do you get robes) is, ‘OK Morris, congratulations and all that, but what exactly will you be doing as children’s laureate?’ A good question, and one which I’m grateful to be able to answer in the cultured and economically friendly pages of this fine magazine. Please picture, if you will, the following: a child reading, curled up comfortably, engrossed in a book. A parent enters, slightly frazzled after a demanding day, carrying a phone, staring at it, perplexed. ‘Come on, love,’ says the parent. ‘Time to get your head out of that
book and do something useful. I need help here. I think Siri’s selling my personal data to the Russians.’ The child sighs sadly. I am doing something useful, she thinks. Useful beyond compare. Useful in countless precious ways. If only my dear frazzled parent could appreciate just how useful to my developmental processes me reading this story is. The parent takes the book and closes it. The child turns away, bereft. She stares out the window, as if beseeching the night sky for assistance. And there, silhouetted against the moon, appears the figure of a paunchy bald man in glasses with the word Laurie emblazoned on his lycra bodysuit. ‘My laureate,’ breathes the child. ‘My laureate has come.’ OK, I have slightly exaggerated that bit, because I’ll be travelling mostly by bus and wearing a sensible raincoat. But as I go in to bat for misunderstood young readers, my resolve will be as lycra-clad as I can make it without voiding my travel insurance. ‘She reckons reading stories is developmental,’ the frazzled parent might say. ‘But that doesn’t help with the household chores. Our smartfridge has been trying to make soufflé again.’ ‘Actually,’ I say, ‘reading good stories is developmental in more ways than even your smart-fridge might think.’ ‘Really?’ says the parent. ‘Well, sit down and tell us about it then. You look a total idiot standing on the kitchen table with your arm in the air.’ Once seated, I gently remind the parent that stories for young people are some of the most gloriously varied and imaginative filaments in the literary lightbulbs that illuminate our lives. And that amidst their innovation and luminescence, most have certain traditional elements, tropes and plot points. A young main character, for example, confronted by a problem bigger and more threatening than any they’ve faced before. To solve or
survive the problem, the character must develop skills and qualities beyond their previous experience or homework. They must think bravely and honestly about themselves and the problem. They must hone their research skills to better understand what they’re up against. Big problems require teamwork, so the character needs to form friendships and alliances. Understanding enemies is a help too. All of which requires development of interpersonal skills, in particular empathy. Creative thinking is a must because the young character needs to develop problem-solving strategies, and resilience is essential because big problems never get solved first time round, particularly when an author is contracted to write 250 pages. Which gives the young character plenty of opportunities to experience just how useful mistakes are. My hope is that when I talk about this classic character journey with even the most frazzled parents, their eyes will light up. They’ll spot how many of these key elements are also crucial stages in a young person’s education and personal development. They’ll remember that every young person has to begin, at some stage in their primary school years, the most important and challenging journey of their life: the journey from somebody else’s world to their own world; from the world that belongs to the adults who have nurtured them to the world of their own dreaming and their own making. And they’ll know that rarely in our human history have young people had to contemplate a more anxious and angry global nervous system. Rarely have they had a greater need for stories that will help them embrace an often dark and uncertain world with optimism, resolve and creativity. Stories that look unflinchingly at the past mistakes of humankind, and that celebrate the potential of every young person to do better. And to find happiness, love and fulfilment in the process. It’s at this point, I hope, the parent
will turn tearfully to the child. ‘Keep reading, darling,’ the parent will say. ‘Read like the wind. Read like a mountain lion. Don’t ever stop reading. I’ll do your chores. Siri and the fridge will help.’ ‘Thank you, Laurie,’ the child will say, her eyes already slipping back to the life-transforming squiggles of ink (or pixels) and through them to realms that her imagination has already helped create. Actually, I’ve exaggerated that bit too. Sadly I’m not allowed to visit individual homes. It’s a contractual thing to do with a couple of kitchen tables that may have been damaged in the past. But I will be meeting huge numbers of young readers, sometimes, I hope, with their parents and rellies; in schools, libraries, festival venues, community halls, sports ovals with good PA systems and amphitheatres at wineries (hint). I’ll also be having conversations with a range of adults in their non-parenting capacities – policymakers, purse-string holders, curriculum assemblers, architects of our economics and productivity, would-be managers of our social contexts and psyches – reminding them that stories don’t just make us as individuals. They help make our relationships, our communities, our nations and the future of human society. I know what you’re thinking: grand ambitions for a bloke in a sensible raincoat. Well, you’re right. But the characters in my books have taught me that when the stakes are high, you don’t hold back. You’re probably also thinking that this laureate caper sounds like a demanding and busy couple of years. You’re right again. But I’m resolute. As a very smart fridge said to me recently, ‘You’ve been given a rare opportunity. Don’t get cold feet.’ I won’t.
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COLLECTION SHORT STORIES
Life in Short In the words of author Neil Gaiman, ‘A short story is the ultimate close-up magic trick – a couple of thousand words to take you around the universe or break your heart.’ But as with most magic tricks, there’s a lot happening behind the smokescreen to ensure a satisfying experience. And what appears to the reader to be a simple, self-contained narrative can be for the writer the most 18
gruelling exercise in brevity and restraint. Kafka, Munro, Carver, Dahl, Jackson, Poe, Hemingway, Christie, Chekhov, Kipling – many of history’s greatest literary magicians have left their mark on the short story form. And today, the next generation of conjurers keeps the craft alive. A life-changing minute, a fleeting feeling, a conversation in passing,
a single mood – this is where life’s minutiae are magnified into startling focus. And as we navigate the microcosms created, readers negotiate every twist while interpreting revelations, complexities and themes at full speed, racing towards story’s end. Here we introduce six contemporary short story collections to spellbind, astonish and delight.
‘A short story is the ultimate close-up magic trick – a couple of thousand words to take you around the universe or break your heart.’ Neil Gaiman
FLORIDA BY LAUREN GROFF
HOT LITTLE HANDS BY ABIGAIL ULMAN
THE SHORE BY SARA TAYLOR
The stories in this collection span characters, towns, decades, even centuries, but Groff’s adopted home state of Florida – its landscape, climate, history and state of mind – becomes their gravitational centre. Storms, snakes and sinkholes lurk at the edge of everyday life. Even greater threats and mysteries are of a human, emotional and psychological nature. The evocative storytelling first transports the reader. Then we’re jolted alert with a crackle of wit, a wave of sadness, a flash of cruelty, as Groff explores loneliness, rage, family and the passage of time. With shocking accuracy and effect, she pinpoints the decisions and connections behind human pleasure and pain, hope and despair, love and fury – the moments that make us alive.
Strikingly wry and fresh, Ulman’s debut collection contains nine funny, confronting and pitch-perfect stories about stumbling on the fringes of innocence, and the marks desire can leave. These are tales about now – about first encounters with lasting impressions, and break-ups that last longer than the relationships themselves; about a time when latenight text messages are considered a courtship, and the most personal secrets get casually revealed online. Wince-inducing celebrations of the treacherous messiness of life, these stories thread a mesmerising line between humour, honesty and hurt.
This collection of small Atlantic Ocean islands has been home to generations of fierce and resilient women. Sanctuary to some but nightmare to others, it’s a place they’ve inhabited, fled, and returned to for hundreds of years. The women are united by both small miracles and miseries: from a brave girl’s determination to protect her younger sister as methamphetamine ravages their family, to a lesson in summoning storm clouds to help end a drought. Their interconnected stories form a deeply affecting legacy of two island families bound not just by blood, but by fate.
ILLUSTRATION: CATHIE GLASSBY
YOU THINK IT, I’LL SAY IT BY CURTIS SITTENFELD
The theme that unites the stories collected here is how even the cleverest people tend to misread others, and how much we all deceive ourselves. In ‘The World Has Many Butterflies’ a married woman plays an intimate game with a man she meets at parties. ‘The Nominee’ sees Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail, confessing her surprising feelings about a woman journalist she has sparred with over the years. In ‘Bad Latch’ a new mother is forced to cast aside her assumptions about a recurring antagonist. Insightful, funny and wise, via her uncannily authentic characters Sittenfeld takes a knife to contemporary mores, highlighting the haphazard nature of life.
THE BOAT BY NAM LE
In 1979, Le’s family left Vietnam for Australia, an experience that inspires the first and last stories in his multiaward-winning story collection. In between, however, his imagination lays claim to the world. From a tourist in Tehran to a teenage hitman in Colombia; from an ageing New York artist to a boy coming of age in a provincial Australian fishing town; from Hiroshima moments before the bomb to the South China Sea in the wake of another war – Le’s imagination knows no geographical bounds. And as readers are emotionally transported in his Boat, each absorbing, astonishing story uncovers a raw human truth.
HOMESICK FOR ANOTHER WORLD BY OTTESSA MOSHFEGH
The flesh is weak; the timber is crooked; people are cruel to each other, and stupid, and hurtful, but beauty comes from strange sources, and the dark surging energy captured here is powerfully invigorating. Moshfegh’s characters are all unsteady on their feet; all yearning for connection and betterment, in very different ways, but each of them seems destined to be tripped up by their own baser impulses. Eerie, unsettling, dangerous, delightful and often even weirdly hilarious, through these stories we’re shown uncomfortable things. And when we examine these things closely enough, suddenly we realise that we are really looking at ourselves.
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SHORT STORY
Snake Stories BY LAUREN GROFF
Babe, when Satan tempted Adam and Eve, there’s a pretty good reason he didn’t transform into a talking clam. It was my husband who said this to me.
This statement of his has begun to seem both ludicrous and dangerous, like the three-foot rat snake my younger son almost stepped on in the street yesterday, thinking it a stick.
Walk outside in Florida, and a snake will be watching you: snakes in mulch, snakes in scrub, snakes waiting from the lawn for you to leave the pool so they can drown themselves in it, snakes gazing at your mousy ankle and wondering what it would feel like to sink their fangs in deep.
All around us, since the fall, from the same time other terrible things happened in the world at large, marriages have been ending, either in a sort of quiet drifting away or in flames. The night my husband explicated original sin to me, we were drunk and walking home very early in the morning from a New Year’s Eve party. Our host, Omar Varones, had made a bonfire out of the couch upon which his wife had cuckolded him. It was a vintage midcentury modern, and he could have sold it for thousands, but it’s equally true that the flames were a stunning and unexpected soft green.
I feel like a traitor to my own when I say this, but it’s wonderful to walk beside a man who is so large that nobody would mess with him, toward your own bed, at a time when everybody is sleeping save for the tree frogs and the sinners. I have missed my walks late at night, my 20
dawn runs. Even though my neighborhood is a gem, there have been three rapes in three months within a few blocks of my house. Nights when I can’t sleep, when my nerves jangle me from one son’s bed to the other’s, then back to my own and then out to the couch, I can even feel in my bloodstream the new venom that has entered the world, a venom that somehow acts only on men, hardening what had once been bad thoughts into new, worse actions.
It is strange to me, an alien in this place, an ambivalent northerner, to see how my Florida sons take snakes for granted. My husband, digging out a peach tree that had died from climate change, brought into the house a shovel full of poisonous baby coral snakes, brightly enameled and writhing. Cool! said my little boys, but I woke from frantic sleep that night, slapping at my sheets, sure their light pressure on my body was the twining of many snakes that had slipped from the shovel and searched until they found my warmth. Other nights, my old malaria dream returns: the ceiling a twitching pale belly, sensitive to my hand. All night scales fall on me like tissue paper.
I can’t get away from them, snakes. Even my kindergartener has been strangely transfixed by them all year. Every project he brings home: snakes. The pet project: i thnk a kobra wud be a bad pet becus it wud bit me, picture of him being eaten by a cobra. The poetry project: snakes eat mise thy slithr slithr slithr thy jump otof tres thy hissssssssssssssssss, picture of a snake jumping out of a tree and onto a screaming him. Or so I assume: my child is in a minimalist period, his art all wobbly sticks and circles. Why, of all beautiful creatures on this planet of ours, do you keep writing about snakes? I ask him. Becus i lik them and thy lik me, he tells me.
As we walked home on New Year’s morning, the night of the flaming couch, I was saying I hated the word cuckold, that cuckolding takes the woman out of the adultery and turns it into a wrestling match between the husband and the lover. A giant cockfight, if you will. Giant cockfight! my husband laughed, because there is no situation in which that phrase would not be funny to him. My husband is an almost entirely good person, and I say this as someone who believes that our better angels are matched by our bitterest devils, and there’s a constant battle happening inside all of us: a giant cockfight. My husband is overrun with angels, but even he struggles with things that appeal. For instance, Omar’s wife, Olivia, was the kind of shining blonde who always wore workout clothes, and my husband always gravitated toward her at parties, and they’d stand there joking and laughing into their cups for a far longer time than was conventionally acceptable between two good-looking people who were married to other people. Sometimes, when I caught his eye, my husband would wink guiltily at me while still laughing with her. After the divorce and a few uncomfortable meetings, I only ever see Olivia driving through the neighborhood while I walk the dog, and half the time I pretend I don’t recognize her; I just look down and murmur something to the dog, who understands me all too well.
In February, one day, I found myself sad to the bone. A man had been appointed to take care of the environment even though his only desire was to squash the environment like a cockroach. I was thinking about the world my children will inherit, the clouds of monarchs they won’t ever see, the underwater sound of the mouths of small fish chewing the living coral reefs that they will never hear. I stood for a long time at the duck pond with my dog, who sensed she should be still and patient. The swans were on their island with the geese, and a great blue
heron legged through the shallow water. I watched as the heron became a statue, then as it whipped its head down and speared something. When it lifted its beak, it held a long, thin water snake. We watched, transfixed, as the bird cracked its head down so hard three times that the snake separated in half, spilling blood. And the heron swallowed one half, which was still so alive that I could see it thrashing down that long and elegant throat.
This reminded me of the Iliad: For a bird had come upon [the Greeks], as they were eager to cross over, an eagle of lofty flight, skirting the host on the left, and in its talons it bore a blood-red monstrous snake, still alive as if struggling, nor was it yet forgetful of combat, it writhed backward, and smote him that held it on the breast beside the neck, till the eagle, stung with pain, cast it from him to the ground and let it fall in the midst of the throng, and himself with a loud cry sped away down the blasts of the wind. This was an omen, clear and bright. The Greeks did not heed it, and they suffered.
But wait. You know that the moral of Adam and Eve is that woman gets pegged with all of human sin, I told my husband that night we walked home through the dark. We were jaywalking against a red light, but there were no cars anywhere around, our own minor sin unseen. Yet another trick of the serpent’s, my husband agreed sadly.
On the day I found the girl, the robins were migrating and the crape myrtles flashed with red. Clouds rested their bellies atop the buildings. I went out for my run fast, because I knew rain was coming, and 21
‘Nights when I can’t sleep, when my nerves jangle me from one son’s bed to the other’s, then back to my own and then out to the couch, I can even feel in my bloodstream the new venom that has entered the world, a venom that somehow acts only on men, hardening what had once been bad thoughts into new, worse actions.’
for a long time I have been sure that I will die one day by lightning strike. I have known this since the day when I was running across the parking lot at my older son’s Montessori preschool and I leapt up the wooden steps to the door and turned around and saw a lightning bolt crash and sizzle across the slick wet blacktop where I’d just been. I turned back when the rain crashed down and made the shadows of the woods on both sides boil. There was a shortcut behind the bed-and-breakfast district, a narrow alley with overgrown rosebushes that snatch at your clothes. I didn’t see the girl until the last minute, when I had to jump her outstretched legs, and came down slantwise on the cinders, and hit my hip and shoulder and knew immediately that they were bleeding. I rolled over, and crawled back to the girl. She stared at me darkly, and twitched her legs. She was alive, then. I saw the rip in her T‑shirt. I saw her bleeding hands, the swelling already beginning on the side of her face. And the cold place in me that I’ve always had, that I have carried through many dark streets in many cities, knew. Wait here, I said, thinking I would run to a bed-andbreakfast and call the police, an ambulance, but the girl said hoarsely, No, with such panic that I looked around and saw how dark the overgrown alley was, and thick with twining vines, how a person could be hiding in many places there. Let me take you with me, and we can call the cops, I said, and she said ferociously, No fucking cops. No ambulance. Okay, I said, and my brain had emptied out, and I said, I’ll take you to my house. I’m only a few blocks away. She closed her eyes, and I took it for assent, and I helped her stand and saw the blood dissolving from her thighs in the rain. The water was ankle deep in the roads already; the drivers had pulled off, waiting to be able to see. She was light. The side of her face next to mine was beautiful, long eyelashes, full lips, perfect skin, a sore-looking nose piercing. I helped her inside and rushed around to get towels and draped them over her and tenderly dabbed the 22
shining drops of rain from her hair. She would not take tea. She would not let me call for help. She would not let me make her food. She just snapped, Fuck off, lady. I fucked off. I let her sit and sat beside her in my kitchen. And when, after she stopped shaking I asked if I could please take her to the hospital, she barely spoke when she said, No. Home. I put a towel on the passenger seat, and we drove through the empty wet streets with their dripping oaks and palms, and we came into the neighborhood between La Pasadita Grille and the Spanish church, and she said, Left, Right, Left, and Here. After a storm, the sunlight in this town pours upward as though radiating from the ground, and the sudden beauty of the stucco and Spanish moss is a hard punch at the center of the heart. I looked at the small green cabin in its yard of sandspurs and neglected orange trees and rotted fruit shimmering with wasps, and everything caught the sun and shined like blessed objects. Then I saw the broken windows and the black garbage bag on the porch spilling its guts and felt the bottom drop out of my stomach. Please let me help you, I said. She said, Don’t fucking say a word to anybody. And she got out of the car, slammed the door, and shuffled up the path and into the cabin. My boys and husband were already at home. He was making dinner. That’s a lot of blood, my older son said, pointing at the piles of towels on the chair. My husband was looking at me with worry in his face. I picked the towels up and backed out the door and took them with me to the police department where I described the girl, between sixteen and twenty, probably Latina, but they could or would do nothing, until one officer succumbed to my white-woman insistence and drove to the cabin with me. It was dark by then. I watched his flashlight go up the path, the circle of light on the door growing smaller and clearer as he neared. He knocked and knocked. Then he tried the doorknob and went in. When he came to the car, he said, Looks like she had you take her to an abandoned
place. And later, dropping me off at my car, he put his hand on my shoulder and said, Those people, they’re like children, they have no— But I shot him a look of death and he stopped. But when I couldn’t stop crying, at last in frustration he said, Listen, maybe immigration was an issue, I don’t know. But lady, you can’t help people who don’t want your help.
On New Year’s morning, my husband and I reached our house when the sky had lightened to gray in the corner. We went in. Our children were at their grandparents’, but we were so tired and had been married too long to make much use of that fact. He went straight to bed without brushing his teeth. I peed in the dark, thinking about the one time Olivia and I had met up after the divorce for awkward drinks and she’d said she’d known her marriage was over when she found a snake in the toilet bowl. I know myself enough to understand that even if I suspected something, I would never look. I stripped off my clothes and took a shower. Under the warm water, I thought about how, before I met my husband, I’d dated a nice man for a summer in Boston. He was good-looking, cried at movies, played ultimate, was a socialist, a nice guy, everyone said. One night we came home when the bars closed and both of us were drunk and I thought it was funny to shout, Help, help! I don’t know this man! but it made him so angry that he stalked home ahead of me and was already in bed by the time I came into his apartment. I smelled like sweat and spilled beer and cigarette smoke, and decided to take a shower that night, too. Halfway through, I heard the curtain open and only had time to say, Wait, before he’d pushed himself into me, and I pressed my cheek against the tile and let the soap sting my eyes and breathed and counted by fives until he was done. He left. I washed myself slowly until the water went cold. He was snoring when I came into his bedroom. I stood naked and shivering for a very long time, so tired that I couldn’t think, then moved and
touched his dresser and opened a drawer and found a T‑shirt that smelled like him and crawled under the covers to get warm enough to think again, to get it together, to go back to my own place. Instead, I fell asleep. What had happened seemed so distant when we woke up in the morning. We never talked about it. I never told anyone, not even my husband. When we broke up in a few weeks, that man dumped me. When I came out of the bathroom, the birds were singing in the magnolia out the window and my husband was snoring. I put my wet head on his chest, and he woke up, and because he is a kind man, he hugged it and stroked my nape. My eyes were closed and I was almost asleep when I said, Tell me. You think there are still good people in the world? Oh, yes, he said. Billions. It’s just that the bad ones make so much more noise. Hope you’re right, I said, then fell asleep. But in the middle of the night, I woke and stood and checked all the windows and all the doors, I closed all the toilet lids, because, even though I was naked and the night was freezing, in this world of ours you can never really know.
Extracted from Florida by Lauren Groff. William Heinemann, June 2018. 23
REFLECTION TARA WESTOVER
In the Shadow of the Mountain Tara Westover grew up preparing for the End of Days, planning ahead so that when society collapsed, her family would continue unscathed. She hadn’t been registered for a birth certificate, she’d never been to school and she had no medical records. According to the government, she didn’t exist. As Westover grew older, her father’s ideologies became more radical, and her brother, more violent. At sixteen she decided to educate herself. This thirst for knowledge would take her far from her home in the Idaho mountains, and to some of the world’s most prestigious universities. Educated is Westover’s account of a struggle for self-invention. It is a tale of fierce family loyalty, and of the grief that comes with the severing of the closest of ties. From her singular experience she has crafted a story that gets to the heart of what an education is and what it offers: the opportunity 24
to see one’s life through new eyes, and the will to change it. In this passage she paints a picture of the ‘jagged little patch of Idaho’ that for sixteen years represented everything she knew.
I’m standing on the red railway car that sits abandoned next to the barn. The wind soars, whipping my hair across my face and pushing a chill down the open neck of my shirt. The gales are strong this close to the mountain, as if the peak itself is exhaling. Down below, the valley is peaceful, undisturbed. Meanwhile our farm dances: the heavy conifer trees sway slowly, while the sagebrush and thistles quiver, bowing before every puff and pocket of air. Behind me a gentle hill slopes upward and stitches itself to the mountain base. If I look up, I can see the dark form of the Indian Princess.
The hill is paved with wild wheat. If the conifers and sagebrush are soloists, the wheat field is a corps de ballet, each stem following all the rest in bursts of movement, a million ballerinas bending, one after the other, as great gales dent their golden heads. The shape of that dent lasts only a moment, and is as close as anyone gets to seeing wind. Turning toward our house on the hillside, I see movements of a different kind, tall shadows stiffly pushing through the currents. My brothers are awake, testing the weather. I imagine my mother at the stove, hovering over bran pancakes. I picture my father hunched by the back door, lacing his steel-toed boots and threading his callused hands into welding gloves. On the highway below, the school bus rolls past without stopping. I am only seven, but I understand that it is this fact, more than any
ILLUSTRATION: CATHIE GLASSBY
Tara Westover’s Educated details one woman’s transformation through knowledge, and the price she ultimately pays for it.
‘I am only seven, but I understand that it is this fact, more than any other, that makes my family different: we don’t go to school.’
other, that makes my family different: we don’t go to school. Dad worries that the Government will force us to go but it can’t, because it doesn’t know about us. Four of my parents’ seven children don’t have birth certificates. We have no medical records because we were born at home and have never seen a doctor or nurse.1 We have no school records because we’ve never set foot in a classroom. When I am nine, I will be issued a Delayed Certificate of Birth, but at this moment, according to the state of Idaho and the federal government, I do not exist. Of course I did exist. I had grown up preparing for the Days of Abomination, watching for the sun to darken, for the moon to drip as if with blood. I spent my summers bottling peaches and my winters rotating supplies. When the World of Men failed, my family would continue on, unaffected. I had been educated in the rhythms of the mountain, rhythms in which change was never fundamental, only cyclical. The same sun appeared each morning, swept over the valley
and dropped behind the peak. The snows that fell in winter always melted in the spring. Our lives were a cycle – the cycle of the day, the cycle of the seasons – circles of perpetual change that, when complete, meant nothing had changed at all. I believed my family was a part of this immortal pattern, that we were, in some sense, eternal. But eternity belonged only to the mountain. There’s a story my father used to tell about the peak. She was a grand old thing, a cathedral of a mountain. The range had other mountains, taller, more imposing, but Buck’s Peak was the most finely crafted. Its base spanned a mile, its dark form swelling out of the earth and rising into a flawless spire. From a distance, you could see the impression of a woman’s body on the mountain face: her legs formed of huge ravines, her hair a spray of pines fanning over the northern ridge. Her stance was commanding, one leg thrust forward in a powerful movement, more stride than step. My father called her the Indian Princess. She emerged each year
when the snows began to melt, facing south, watching the buffalo return to the valley. Dad said the nomadic Indians had watched for her appearance as a sign of spring, a signal the mountain was thawing, winter was over, and it was time to come home. All my father’s stories were about our mountain, our valley, our jagged little patch of Idaho. He never told me what to do if I left the mountain, if I crossed oceans and continents and found myself in strange terrain, where I could no longer search the horizon for the Princess. He never told me how I’d know when it was time to come home. 1. Except for my sister Audrey, who broke an arm and a leg when she was young. She was taken to get a cast.
Educated by Tara Westover. Hutchinson, March 2018. 25
EXTRACT
No One Is Coming to Save Us BY STEPHANIE POWELL WATTS
The house he’s building is done mostly. All that’s missing now is the prettying, stain on the sprawling deck, final finishing inside. At least that’s what they say. This house has been the talk around our small town. Not much happens here but the same, same: a thirteen-year-old girl waiting for the baby her mother’s sorry boyfriend gave her; the husband we wanted to believe was one of the good ones found out to be the worst kind of cheater with a whole other family two towns over. The same stupid surprises, the usual sadnesses. But this thing is strange. The boy we all saw grow up came back to us slim and hungry-gaunt like a coal miner. With money. JJ Ferguson made it. The poor child who lived with his grandmother, dead for years now, the ordinary boy we all fed when he wouldn’t leave at dinnertime, looking like he was waiting for somebody to ask him to play. We had no idea. JJ was the newest resident on Brushy Mountain Road. The car they say is his was parked on the long driveway most mornings until evening while JJ worked alongside the Mexican men he hired. Every town has a section where the people are rich and their lives so far from yours you almost expect them to speak another tongue. Brushy Mountain Road is that place for us. You can’t help but get quiet driving on that road, like even your noisy breathing might disturb the beauty or rupture the holy calm that order and clean create. When we were young we used to love to see the houses, all lit up with their curtains and blinds open, glowing yellow like sails of ships in the black faraway on the ocean. If we went slow enough we could see the brilliant colors of their decorated rooms, their floor-to26
ceiling bookcases and fine furniture, the floral designs with wallpaper you couldn’t get at the regular hardware store festooning the entryways. We might even get a glimpse of one of them sipping from a mug or snuggled into a chair staring out into the darkness. Though we knew they lived among us, bought white bread and radial tires like the rest of us, we loved the proof of them. I see him. I see him with my own eyes. We breathed in the houses, dreamed about the ones that would have been ours if our lives had run in different directions, if we’d had different faces, if we’d made all the right choices. When they were young Sylvia and her husband, Don, would drive the road that curled like a potato peel all the way up to the almost top to experience some of what those people had. Don pretended he didn’t want to do it, who gives a shit how them people live, he’d say, but he was as interested as Sylvia. He was careful not to be staring if a body stood in the yard or looked out at him from the window. You can’t let people know what you dream – especially if you can’t get it. You knowing that they know opens a wound in you, an embarrassing naked space that you can’t let just anybody witness. If the rich see a woman looking, fine. A woman can want. But nobody alive could claim to have seen longing on Don’s face. You got to be immune, Mr. Antibiotic or else you hurt all the time. Why they looked at those places, neither of them could exactly say, since when they came down from the mountain to their own dark little house that they’d fought hard to have and harder to keep, their space felt smaller, meeker, and as tear-filled as a broken promise. Habit is one
‘You can’t let people know what you dream – especially if you can’t get it. You knowing that they know opens a wound in you, an embarrassing naked space that you can’t let just anybody witness.’
explanation. Sundays, when they were apt to get lazy and the last thing you need is boredom, a slowed mind, the leisure to think about the man you love-hate, the face that won’t stop looking tired no matter how much you sleep, that thing you do, whatever it is – the driving, the crying, the sinning – calls to you, begs to you to keep getting it done, keep at it, don’t think, keep at it. But habit is only part of it. The sting of not having or not having enough bores a pain black hole that sucks all the other of life’s injuries into one sharp stinging gap that you don’t need a scientist to remind you may be bottomless. Returning to their house means returning from those mountain drives to their sagging furniture that was old when they got it twenty years before and to a yard that looked even smaller than they remembered. That beautiful house is just a street away, but as out of reach as the moon. But that house-pain is just one lack, and everybody knows one pain is far better than a hundred. That is the mercy. That is the relief – the ache of one singular pain. It was hard not to believe that we, the black people in town in dog trots and shotgun houses at the bottom of the mountain, houses stuck in the sides of hills scattered like chicken feed, weren’t the ugly children. What a relief that in our hearts we knew that no coloreds, no Negroes, no blacks, were welcome, even if they could afford to buy there. At least we didn’t have to believe that we’d done everything wrong and were not the ones that God had chosen. So much has changed since we were just starting out. The furniture plants that built the town are all but empty. The jobs on the line turning yellow pinewood into the tables and
beds for the world are mostly gone. Without the factories there is little work to do. What a difference a few years can make. The jobs that everybody knew as the last resort or the safety net are the jobs nobody can get anymore. Used to be at 3:30 P.M. the roads from Bernhardt, Hammary, Broyhill, and Bassett were hot with cars, bumper to bumper, the convenience stores full of mostly men, but women too with cold ones (Coke or stronger) in one hand, Nabs or Little Debbie cakes in the other for the ride home. These days, go anywhere you please at 3:30 with no trouble. Here’s a math problem for you. How many casinos does it take to make a town? Are you calculating? Got it? No, sorry that’s a trick question. No number of casinos make a town. But if you want a stopover, a place to throw your balled-up trash out the window as you float by in your car, you just need one good casino. Don’t get me wrong, we love a casino and wish for one like the last vial of antidote. We believe despite all experience to the contrary in easy money and our own fortunes changing in an instant like the magician’s card from the sleeve. If one quarter came miraculously from behind the ear, we would milk that ear for days for the rent money. We believe. We hope for the town to morph into an all-resort slick tourist trap, looking like no real person had ever lived here. We are full of the fevered hope of the newly come to Jesus. We can reinvent. We can survive. At least some of us think so. What choice do we have? Still the rich have moved from the center of town and the near hills to other places in the county. Their homes are estates where their windows look onto the rolling acres 27
‘Brushy Mountain Road loomed in our thinking, in our childhood imaginings. You think you forget those dreams? You get old, but the dreams remain, spry and vigorous. Swat them and they come back like gnats, like plague. You can’t kill them. They can’t die.’
of kings. The houses, the once mansions in town that they and their kind left behind, belong to the flippers to turn into cramped and oddly configured apartments or raze altogether. The message was clear as day, the richest person doesn’t live in our midst anymore and what the rich had now, we couldn’t ever see it for ourselves, couldn’t even pass by it and let the images settle in our dreams. Even so, even though we know all that, Brushy Mountain Road loomed in our thinking, in our childhood imaginings. You think you forget those dreams? You get old, but the dreams remain, spry and vigorous. Swat them and they come back like gnats, like plague. You can’t kill them. They can’t die. The first thing JJ did on that mountain was cut out a whole new road up to his house. Heavy machines of industry, Kubotas and Deeres, used to make the path dotted the hills for weeks, like kids’ toys abandoned in the weeds. Men in town speculated about the tons of gravel and the weight of red clay they had to shift from one place to another to level the hills. The women didn’t care about the road. They knew from their own yards how difficult it was to make a way to get from there to here. They’d dug their own paths, moved their own dirt and rocks in the stubborn Carolina soil. What excited the women was the river rock foundation, the big beautiful windows, the walls rising up like raptured dead. Most days, JJ would be up there himself, walking around the site, talking to the Mexican men or working hard himself judging by the reports of his sweat-soaked clothes, his close-cropped hair grayed with sawdust. Living in a small town means knowing the news, the broad strokes as well as the lurid minutiae of your neighbor’s life. Your dirty kitchen, cancer treatments, drugged-out child all on the sandwich board of your back, swirled around the body with a stink you could not outrun. JJ was from another small town and did not have nearby family. Few people knew JJ to give out too many details. We are not surprised. We knew too little about him when he lived in Pinewood as a young man. But soon he would show his face. When that house was done, Sylvia knew JJ would be knocking at her door. Years ago that boy had spent too much time in her kitchen, on her back porch and staring at her beautiful child Ava. That JJ had loved Ava was obvious. That Sylvia loved JJ too, like a son, like Devon, her own son, was just as clear. Her son was Devon pronounced like Levon from 28
the Elton John song, though Sylvia was embarrassed to admit that fact to anybody. Devon was her firstborn baby, the baby she wasn’t supposed to have. She never had any romance about being a mother and knew that having a baby was easy if your body was willing. Girls, hardly older than the ones Sylvia passed at the school bus stop at the end of the road every morning, became mothers. But Sylvia’s body had been unwilling until Devon came. She was almost thirty, old in those days and sure that her baby days were long past. It wasn’t that Sylvia loved Devon any more than her daughter, Ava, but Devon was the child that changed her status, the child that made her look at the ordinary world as a big and dangerous paradise. JJ was so like her Devon: both calm boys, funny children with soft voices, with the same warm puddled eyes like they’d been caught crying and they were trying to recover. Almost a generation had passed, a long time any way you look at it, but Sylvia knew that the feelings were just there under the pancake makeup of the surface. JJ felt them too, how could he not? He had left them, but he was back. That counted. Of course it counted. They used to say if you love something set it free. Don’t you believe it! Love means never letting anything go, never seeing it stride on long confident legs away from you. You think love leaves? You think you are ever free? Then you are a child or a fool. Flee in the dark, spend a lifetime away, never say its name, never say its name, but one day, or if you are very unlucky, every day, it will whisper yours. And, you know you want to hear your name. Say it, love. Please say it.
Extracted from No One Is Coming to Save Us by Stephanie Powell Watts. Viking, January 2018.
COLLECTION WINTER READING
WHISTLE IN THE DARK BY EMMA HEALEY
Jen’s 15-year-old daughter goes missing for four agonising days. When Lana is found, unharmed, in the middle of the desolate countryside, everyone thinks the worst is over. But Lana refuses to tell anyone what happened, and the police draw a blank. The once-happy, loving family returns to London, where things start to fall apart… Four missing days. Could you cope with not knowing? THE HONEY FARM BY HARRIET ALIDA LYE
End Notes
ILLUSTRATION: CEOL RYDER
From the safety of familiar surrounds, books can allow us to step into the shadows of the human experience. Internal torment, childhood trauma, dangerous associations, societal malaise – here are five winter reads where disquiet lies uncomfortably close to home.
ONE BY ANDREW HUTCHINSON
WINTER BY ALI SMITH
Love can rule your life, change your personality. Your everyday existence can be shaped by the opinion of one person. It seems crazy – and sometimes it is… Since his heart was broken, he sees no way forward. Having alienated himself from his family and friends, he works nights and shuns normal society. Then strangeness descends one unassuming night, when he returns home to find a woman asleep in his driveway. Waiting.
In Ali Smith’s Winter, the second novel in her acclaimed Seasonal cycle, lifeforce matches up to the toughest of the seasons. Winter? Bleak. Frosty wind, earth as iron, water as stone, so the old song goes. The shortest days, the longest nights. The trees are bare and shivering. The summer’s leaves? Dead litter. The world shrinks; the sap sinks. But winter makes things visible. It’s the season that teaches us survival. And if there’s ice, there’ll be fire.
For would-be poet Silvia, a summer farm-stay escape proves irresistible – as does Ibrahim, a painter she meets there. But the honey farm is plagued with ominous signs. Taps run red, scalps itch with lice, frogs swarm the pond. The constant drone of bees builds like thunder in the air. One by one the other residents leave, until only Silvia and Ibrahim remain – under the ever-watchful eye of owner Cynthia. As summer shifts into autumn, Silvia becomes increasingly paranoid that they are in danger... And the bees are restless. NOTHING BUT THE NIGHT BY JOHN WILLIAMS
This January’s Vintage Classics reissue of Williams’ 1948 debut novel pays tribute to the astonishing career of one of North America’s largely unsung innovators of fiction. Arthur Maxley is a tense and listless young man. One day he receives a letter from his long-estranged father. Arthur’s fear of and aversion to the man are powerful, yet his compulsion to see his father is irresistible. After their meeting, Arthur is propelled into a night of drinking and spontaneous intimacy with a beautiful young woman. But as the memories of childhood trauma surface and disorientate, his night out rises towards the pitch of disaster. 29
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