Underline Issue 8

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ISSUE EIGHT: SPRING 2018

For the love of reading

Yuval Noah Harari In 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Yuval Noah Harari explores how we can prepare our children for a world of unprecedented uncertainty and radical change.

IN THIS ISSUE: MAJOK TULBA | ALICE NELSON | SOPHIE MACKINTOSH | GREGORY P. SMITH

In This Issue

Publisher Penguin Random House Australia

21 Lessons for the 21st Century An extract from Yuval Noah Harari’s thrilling exploration of today’s most urgent issues

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Think Big Collected books by some of the world’s great explainers

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When Elephants Fight An extract from Majok Tulba’s haunting new novel

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The Long Shadow of Loss Alice Nelson offers insights into the creation of her breakthrough novel, The Children’s House

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The Children’s House An extract from Alice Nelson’s meditation on the legacy of trauma

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Into the Wild Gregory P. Smith finds solace within a ‘cathedral of trees’

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The Water Cure An extract from Sophie Mackintosh’s blazing literary debut

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Killing Them with Kindness In Loose Units, Paul F. Verhoeven uncovers the real stories behind his hero-cop dad

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End Notes Collected spring reading

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Editor / Chief Copywriter Samson McDougall Editorial Director Ellie Morrow 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 ILLUSTRATION: CATHIE GLASSBY

Underline Issue Eight: Spring 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

EXTRACT YUVAL NOAH HARARI

21 Lessons for the 21st Century In 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Yuval Noah Harari takes readers on a thrilling journey through 21 of today’s most urgent issues. In doing so, he asks: how do we maintain our collective and individual focus in the face of constant and disorienting change? In this passage on education he ponders the skills we should be learning today in order to flourish in the future.

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ILLUSTRATION: CATHIE GLASSBY

CHANGE IS THE ONLY CONSTANT

Humankind is facing unprecedented revolutions, all our old stories are crumbling, and no new story has so far emerged to replace them. How can we prepare ourselves and our children for a world of such unprecedented transformations and radical uncertainties? A baby born today will be thirty-something in 2050. If all goes well, that baby will still be around in 2100, and might even be an active citizen of the twenty-second century. What should we teach that baby that will help him or her survive and flourish in the world of 2050 or of the twenty-second century? What kind of skills will he or she need in order to get a job, understand what is happening around them, and navigate the maze of life?

Unfortunately, since nobody knows how the world will look in 2050 – not to mention 2100 – we don’t know

the answer to these questions. Of course, humans could never predict the future with accuracy. But today it is more difficult than ever before, because once technology enables us to engineer bodies, brains and minds, we can no longer be certain about anything – including things that previously seemed fixed and eternal.

A thousand years ago, in 1018, there were many things people didn’t know about the future, but they were nevertheless convinced that the basic features of human society were not going to change. If you lived in China in 1018, you knew that by 1050 the Song Empire might collapse, the Khitans might invade from the north, and plagues might kill millions. However, it was clear to you that even in 1050 most people would still work as farmers and weavers, rulers would still rely on humans to staff 3

their armies and bureaucracies, men would still dominate women, life expectancy would still be about forty, and the human body would be exactly the same. Hence in 1018, poor Chinese parents taught their children how to plant rice or weave silk, and wealthier parents taught their boys how to read the Confucian classics, write calligraphy, or fight on horseback – and taught their girls to be modest and obedient housewives. It was obvious these skills would still be needed in 1050.

In contrast, today we have no idea how China or the rest of the world will look in 2050. We don’t know what people will do for a living, we don’t know how armies or bureaucracies will function, and we don’t know what gender relations will be like. Some people will probably live much longer than today, and the human body itself might undergo an unprecedented revolution thanks to bioengineering and direct brain–computer interfaces.

Much of what kids learn today will likely be irrelevant by 2050.

At present, too many schools focus on cramming information. In the past this made sense, because information was scarce, and even the slow trickle of existing information was repeatedly blocked by censorship. If you lived, say, in a small provincial town in Mexico in 1800, it was difficult for you to know much about the wider world. There was no radio, television, daily newspapers or public libraries.

Even if you were literate and had access to a private library, there was not much to read other than novels and religious tracts. The Spanish Empire heavily censored all texts printed locally, and allowed only a dribble of vetted publications to be imported from outside. Much the same was true if you lived in some provincial town in Russia, India, Turkey or China. When modern schools came along, teaching every child to read and write and imparting the basic facts of geography, history and biology, they represented an immense improvement.

In contrast, in the twenty-first century we are flooded by enormous amounts of information, and even the censors don’t try to block it. Instead, they are busy spreading misinformation or distracting us with irrelevancies.

If you live in some provincial Mexican town and you have a smartphone, you can spend many lifetimes just reading Wikipedia, watching TED talks, and taking free online courses. No government can hope to conceal all 4

the information it doesn’t like. On the other hand, it is alarmingly easy to inundate the public with conflicting reports and red herrings. People all over the world are but a click away from the latest accounts of the bombardment of Aleppo or of melting ice caps in the Arctic, but there are so many contradictory accounts that it is hard to know what to believe. Besides, countless other things are just a click away, making it difficult to focus, and when politics or science look too complicated it is tempting to switch to some funny cat videos, celebrity gossip, or porn.

In such a world, the last thing a teacher needs to give her pupils is more information. They already have far too much of it. Instead, people need the ability to make sense of information, to tell the difference between what is important and what is unimportant, and above all to combine many bits of information into a broad picture of the world.

In truth, this has been the ideal of Western liberal education for centuries, but up till now even many Western schools have been rather slack in fulfilling it.

Teachers allowed themselves to focus on shoving data while encouraging pupils ‘to think for themselves’. Due to their fear of authoritarianism, liberal schools had a particular horror of grand narratives. They assumed that as long as we give students lots of data and a modicum of freedom, the students will create their own picture of the world, and even if this generation fails to synthesise all the data into a coherent and meaningful story of the world, there will be plenty of time to construct a good synthesis in the future. We have now run out of time. The decisions we will take in the next few decades will shape the future of life itself, and we can take these decisions based only on our present world view. If this generation lacks a comprehensive view of the cosmos, the future of life will be decided at random.

The heat is on

Besides information, most schools also focus too much on providing pupils with a set of predetermined skills such as solving differential equations, writing computer code in C++, identifying chemicals in a test tube, or conversing in Chinese. Yet since we have no idea how the world and the job market will look in 2050, we don’t really know what particular skills people will need. We might invest a lot of effort teaching kids how to write in C++ or how

‘If this generation lacks a comprehensive view of the cosmos, the future of life will be decided at random.’

to speak Chinese, only to discover that by 2050 AI can code software far better than humans, and a new Google Translate app enables you to conduct a conversation in almost flawless Mandarin, Cantonese or Hakka, even though you only know how to say ‘Ni hao.’

So what should we be teaching? Many pedagogical experts argue that schools should switch to teaching ‘the four Cs’ – critical thinking, communication, collaboration and creativity. More broadly, schools should downplay technical skills and emphasise general-purpose life skills.

Most important of all will be the ability to deal with change, to learn new things, and to preserve your mental balance in unfamiliar situations. In order to keep up with the world of 2050, you will need not merely to invent new ideas and products – you will above all need to reinvent yourself again and again.

For as the pace of change increases, not just the economy, but the very meaning of ‘being human’ is likely to mutate.

Already in 1848 the Communist Manifesto declared that ‘all that is solid melts into air’. Marx and Engels, however, were thinking mainly about social and economic structures.

By 2048, physical and cognitive structures will also melt into air, or into a cloud of data bits.

In 1848 millions of people were losing their jobs on village farms, and were going to the big cities to work in factories. But upon reaching the big city, they were unlikely to change their gender or to add a sixth sense.

And if they found a job in some textile factory, they could expect to remain in that profession for the rest of their working lives.

By 2048, people might have to cope with migrations to cyberspace, with fluid gender identities, and with new sensory experiences generated by computer implants. If they find both work and meaning in designing up-to-theminute fashions for a 3-D virtual reality game, within a decade not just this particular profession, but all jobs demanding this level of artistic creation might be taken over by AI. So at twenty-five you introduce yourself on a dating site as ‘a twenty-five-year-old heterosexual woman who lives in London and works in a fashion shop’. At thirty-five you say you are ‘a gender-non-specific person undergoing age-adjustment, whose neocortical activity takes place mainly in the NewCosmos virtual world, and whose life mission is to go where no fashion designer

has gone before’. At forty-five both dating and selfdefinitions are so passé. You just wait for an algorithm to find (or create) the perfect match for you. As for drawing meaning from the art of fashion design, you are so irrevocably outclassed by the algorithms, that looking at your crowning achievements from the previous decade fills you with embarrassment rather than pride. And at forty-five you still have many decades of radical change ahead of you.

Please don’t take this scenario literally. Nobody can really predict the specific changes we will witness. Any particular scenario is likely to be far from the truth. If somebody describes to you the world of the mid twentyfirst century and it sounds like science fiction, it is probably false. But then if somebody describes to you the world of the mid twenty-first century and it doesn’t sound like science fiction – it is certainly false. We cannot be sure of the specifics, but change itself is the only certainty.

Such profound change may well transform the basic structure of life, making discontinuity its most salient feature. From time immemorial life was divided into two complementary parts: a period of learning followed by a period of working. In the first part of life you accumulated information, developed skills, constructed a world view, and built a stable identity. Even if at fifteen you spent most of your day working in the family’s rice field (rather than in a formal school), the most important thing you were doing was learning: how to cultivate rice, how to conduct negotiations with the greedy rice merchants from the big city, and how to resolve conflicts over land and water with the other villagers. In the second part of life you relied on your accumulated skills to navigate the world, earn a living, and contribute to society. Of course even at fifty you continued to learn new things about rice, about merchants, and about conflicts, but these were just small tweaks to well-honed abilities.

By the middle of the twenty-first century, accelerating change plus longer lifespans will make this traditional model obsolete. Life will come apart at the seams, and there will be less and less continuity between different periods of life. ‘Who am I?’ will be a more urgent and complicated question than ever before.

This is likely to involve immense levels of stress. For change is almost always stressful, and after a certain 5

age most people just don’t like to change. When you are fifteen, your entire life is change. Your body is growing, your mind is developing, your relationships are deepening. Everything is in flux, and everything is new.

You are busy inventing yourself. Most teenagers find it frightening, but at the same time, it is also exciting. New vistas are opening before you, and you have an entire world to conquer.

By the time you are fifty, you don’t want change, and most people have given up on conquering the world.

Been there, done that, got the T-shirt. You much prefer stability. You have invested so much in your skills, your career, your identity and your world view that you don’t want to start all over again. The harder you’ve worked on building something, the more difficult it is to let go of it and make room for something new. You might still cherish new experiences and minor adjustments, but most people in their fifties aren’t ready to overhaul the deep structures of their identity and personality.

There are neurological reasons for this. Though the adult brain is more flexible and volatile than was once thought, it is still less malleable than the teenage brain.

Reconnecting neurons and rewiring synapses is damned hard work. But in the twenty-first century, you can hardly afford stability. If you try to hold on to some stable identity, job or world view, you risk being left behind as the world flies by you with a whooooosh. Given that life expectancy is likely to increase, you might subsequently have to spend many decades as a clueless fossil. To stay relevant – not just economically, but above all socially – you will need the ability to constantly learn and to reinvent yourself, certainly at a young age like fifty.

As strangeness becomes the new normal, your past experiences, as well as the past experiences of the whole of humanity, will become less reliable guides. Humans as individuals and humankind as a whole will increasingly have to deal with things nobody ever encountered before, such as super-intelligent machines, engineered bodies, algorithms that can manipulate your emotions with uncanny precision, rapid man-made climate cataclysms, and the need to change your profession every decade.

What is the right thing to do when confronting a completely unprecedented situation? How should you act 6

when you are flooded by enormous amounts of information and there is absolutely no way you can absorb and analyse it all? How to live in a world where profound uncertainty is not a bug, but a feature?

To survive and flourish in such a world, you will need a lot of mental flexibility and great reserves of emotional balance.

You will have to repeatedly let go of some of what you know best, and feel at home with the unknown. Unfortunately, teaching kids to embrace the unknown and to keep their mental balance is far more difficult than teaching them an equation in physics or the causes of the First World War. You cannot learn resilience by reading a book or listening to a lecture. The teachers themselves usually lack the mental flexibility that the twenty-first century demands, for they themselves are the product of the old educational system.

The Industrial Revolution has bequeathed us the production-line theory of education. In the middle of town there is a large concrete building divided into many identical rooms, each room equipped with rows of desks and chairs.

At the sound of a bell, you go to one of these rooms together with thirty other kids who were all born the same year as you. Every hour some grown-up walks in, and starts talking. They are all paid to do so by the government. One of them tells you about the shape of the earth, another tells you about the human past, and a third tells you about the human body. It is easy to laugh at this model, and almost everybody agrees that no matter its past achievements, it is now bankrupt. But so far we haven’t created a viable alternative. Certainly not a scaleable alternative that can be implemented in rural Mexico rather than just in upmarket California suburbs.

Hacking humans

So the best advice I could give a fifteen-year-old stuck in an outdated school somewhere in Mexico, India or Alabama is: don’t rely on the adults too much. Most of them mean well, but they just don’t understand the world. In the past, it was a relatively safe bet to follow the adults, because they knew the world quite well, and the world changed slowly.

But the twenty-first century is going to be different. Due to the growing pace of change you can never be certain whether what the adults are telling you is timeless wisdom or outdated bias.

‘If somebody describes to you the world of the mid twenty-first century and it sounds like science fiction, it is probably false. But then if somebody describes to you the world of the mid twenty-first century and it doesn’t sound like science fiction – it is certainly false.’

So on what can you rely instead? Perhaps on technology?

That’s an even riskier gamble. Technology can help you a lot, but if technology gains too much power over your life, you might become a hostage to its agenda.

Thousands of years ago humans invented agriculture, but this technology enriched just a tiny elite, while enslaving the majority of humans. Most people found themselves working from sunrise till sunset plucking weeds, carrying water-buckets and harvesting corn under a blazing sun. It can happen to you too.

Technology isn’t bad. If you know what you want in life, technology can help you get it. But if you don’t know what you want in life, it will be all too easy for technology to shape your aims for you and take control of your life.

Especially as technology gets better at understanding humans, you might increasingly find yourself serving it, instead of it serving you. Have you seen those zombies who roam the streets with their faces glued to their smartphones? Do you think they control the technology, or does the technology control them?

Should you rely on yourself, then? That sounds great on Sesame Street or in an old-fashioned Disney film, but in real life it doesn’t work so well. Even Disney is coming to realise it. Just like Riley Andersen, most people hardly know themselves, and when they try to ‘listen to themselves’ they easily become prey to external manipulations. The voice we hear inside our heads was never trustworthy, because it always reflected state propaganda, ideological brainwashing and commercial advertisement, not to mention biochemical bugs.

As biotechnology and machine learning improve, it will become easier to manipulate people’s deepest emotions and desires, and it will become more dangerous than ever to just follow your heart. When Coca-Cola, Amazon, Baidu or the government knows how to pull the strings of your heart and press the buttons of your brain, could you still tell the difference between your self and their marketing experts?

To succeed in such a daunting task, you will need to work very hard on getting to know your operating system better. To know what you are, and what you want from life. This is, of course, the oldest advice in the book: know thyself. For thousands of years philosophers and

prophets have urged people to know themselves. But this advice was never more urgent than in the twenty-first century, because unlike in the days of Laozi or Socrates, now you have serious competition. Coca-Cola, Amazon, Baidu and the government are all racing to hack you. Not your smartphone, not your computer, and not your bank account – they are in a race to hack you and your organic operating system. You might have heard that we are living in the era of hacking computers, but that’s hardly half the truth. In fact, we are living in the era of hacking humans.

The algorithms are watching you right now. They are watching where you go, what you buy, who you meet.

Soon they will monitor all your steps, all your breaths, all your heartbeats. They are relying on Big Data and machine learning to get to know you better and better.

And once these algorithms know you better than you know yourself, they could control and manipulate you, and you won’t be able to do much about it. You will live in the matrix, or in The Truman Show. In the end, it’s a simple empirical matter: if the algorithms indeed understand what’s happening within you better than you understand it, authority will shift to them.

Of course, you might be perfectly happy ceding all authority to the algorithms and trusting them to decide things for you and for the rest of the world. If so, just relax and enjoy the ride. You don’t need to do anything about it. The algorithms will take care of everything.

If, however, you want to retain some control of your personal existence and of the future of life, you have to run faster than the algorithms, faster than Amazon and the government, and get to know yourself before they do.

To run fast, don’t take much luggage with you. Leave all your illusions behind. They are very heavy.

Extracted from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari.

Jonathan Cape, September 2018.

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COLLECTION GREAT EXPLAINERS

Think Big We live in complex times. This is a world where Big Data is used to influence elections, info- and biotech are threatening our livelihoods, we’re seeing a resurgence of ultra-nationalism in response to refugees fleeing warzones,our reliance on petrochemicals is destroying the planet, terrorism is a constant threat, supermassive black holes are gobbling up the universe, and on it goes…

Thankfully, there are plenty of independent thinkers, academics, experts and explainers who not only understand the labyrinthine pushes and pulls operating around us, but are also able to unravel complex webs into threads we can grasp. From current sociopolitical challenges to the origins of life, the lessons of human history to the mysteries of the cosmos – here are five incredible books that help explain little bits of everything.

21 LESSONS FOR THE 21ST CENTURY

BY YUVAL NOAH HARARI

Sapiens showed us where we came from, Homo Deus looked to the future, and now Yuval Noah Harari’s 21 Lessons for the 21st Century explores today’s world. In twenty-one bite-sized lessons, he asks what it means to be human in an age of bewilderment, and whether we’re even capable of understanding the world we’ve created. From disillusionment to religion, immigration to science fiction, terrorism to meditation to meaning – by untangling the fundamental questions of our times, Harari creates entry points for each of us to join our most important global conversations.

‘In a world deluged by irrelevant information, clarity is power,’ he writes. ‘In theory, anybody can join the debate about the future of 8

humanity, but it is so hard to maintain a clear vision. Frequently, we don’t even notice that a debate is going on, or what the key questions are. Billions of us can hardly afford the luxury of investigating, because we have more pressing things to do: we have to go to work, take care of the kids, or look after elderly parents. Unfortunately, history gives no discounts. If the future of humanity is decided in your absence, because you are too busy feeding and clothing your kids – you and they will not be exempt from the consequences.’

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING

BY NAOMI KLEIN

The bestselling author of The Shock Doctrine and No Logo tackles the most profound threat humanity has ever faced: the war our economic model is waging against life on Earth.

Forget everything you think you know about global warming. It’s not about carbon – it’s about capitalism.

You have been told the market will save us, when in fact the addiction to profit and growth is digging us in deeper every day. You have been told it’s impossible to get off fossil fuels, when in fact we know exactly how to do it – it just requires breaking every rule in the ‘free-market’ playbook. You have also been told that humanity is too greedy and selfish to rise to this challenge. In fact, all around the world, the fight back is already succeeding. According to Naomi Klein, the even better news is that we can seize this crisis to transform our failed economic system and build something radically better.

‘I am convinced that climate change represents a historic opportunity,’ she writes. ‘As part of the project of getting our emissions down to the levels many scientists recommend, we once again have the chance to advance policies that dramatically improve lives, close the gap between rich and poor, create huge numbers of good jobs, and reinvigorate democracy from the ground up… But before any of these changes can happen – before we can believe that climate change can change us – we first have to stop looking away.’

A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME

BY STEPHEN HAWKING

Was there a beginning of time? Could time run backwards? Is the universe infinite or does it have boundaries?

These are just some of the questions considered by Stephen Hawking in his internationally acclaimed masterpiece, which begins by reviewing the great theories of the cosmos from

Newton to Einstein, before delving into the secrets that still lie at the heart of space and time. And, as Hawking takes us on his personal tour of our universe, guided by cryptic cosmic signposts, we discover intersections between hard science and the elusive philosophical questions at the basis of our very existence.

‘The idea that space and time may form a closed surface without boundary also has profound implications for the role of God in the affairs of the universe,’ he writes.

‘With the success of scientific theories in describing events, most people have come to believe that God allows the universe to evolve according to a set of laws and does not intervene in the universe to break these laws.

However, the laws do not tell us what the universe should have looked like when it started – it would still be up to God to wind up the clockwork and choose how to start it off. So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be.

What place, then, for a creator?’

origins to the first stars, our solar system, life on Earth, dinosaurs, homo sapiens, agriculture, an ice age, empires, fossil fuels, a Moon landing and mass globalisation – history opens doors of understanding about our place in the universe and how we can take lessons from what preceded us. Origin Story: A Big History of Everything explores what we can learn about human existence when we consider it from a universal scale.

‘We arrive in this universe through no choice of our own, at a time and place that is not of our choosing,’ he writes. ‘For a few moments, like cosmic fireflies, we will travel with other humans, with our parents, with our sisters and brothers, with our children, with friends and enemies.

We will travel, too, with other life forms, from bacteria to baboons, with rocks and oceans and aurorae, with moons and meteorites, planets and stars, with quarks and photons and supernovae and black holes, with slugs and cell phones, and with lots and lots of empty space. The cavalcade is rich, colorful, cacophonous and mysterious, and, though we humans will eventually leave it, the cavalcade will move on...’

ORIGIN STORY

BY DAVID CHRISTIAN

THE YEAR EVERYTHING CHANGED

BY PHILLIPA McGUINNESS

How did we get from the Big Bang to today’s staggering complexity, in which seven billion humans are connected into networks powerful enough to transform the planet?

According to historian and author David Christian, the answers to our most enormous questions lie in the threshold moments of the last 13.8 billion years. From the universe’s

If 2001 were a movie its tagline might be ‘The year that changed everything’.

And that change is not over. It’s the only year where you can mention a day and a month using only numbers and everyone knows what you mean.

But 9/11 wasn’t the only momentous event that year.

Phillipa McGuinness, in the grips of a personal tragedy, didn’t watch

any of the ‘2001: Year in Review’ TV wrap-ups. But, as she writes in The Year Everything Changed, if she was to create a sizzle reel in words of the year that was, this is how it might look and sound.

‘Kylie Minogue, all in white, sashays to her classic pop song, the one you truly can’t get out of your head, la la la/la la lalala. Here comes Dido thanking you for giving her the best day of her life. But wait, I hear bhangra, and it’s Missy Elliott, gettin’ her freak on. A voice declaims, “I am Maximus Decimus Meridius, father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife, and I will have my vengeance.” Russell Crowe’s mellifluousness fades to George W. Bush mouthing words about evildoers, John Howard declaring we will decide who comes to this country, a stricken Tony Blair and Britain standing shoulder to shoulder with our American friends in their hour of tragedy. The images blur into each other. A US spy plane down on a Chinese island, G8 protests in Genoa, Slobodan Milošević captured, Steve Jobs holding an iPod, Kofi Annan speaking about the AIDS crisis, asylum seekers in orange life jackets on the deck of a Norwegian container ship.

Mount Etna is exploding. Enron is collapsing. George Harrison is dead.

The pictures speed up. You know what’s coming; your sense of dread rises. The planes, the Towers, the Pentagon, a blurry video of Osama bin Laden. Put on gloves to open your mail. B-52s. Flags, flags, flags.

Suicide bombers in Israel, farewell to the Taliban in Afghanistan. Oh my God, what next?’

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EXTRACT

When Elephants Fight

BY MAJOK TULBA

The school bell rings. We take our bags into the classroom and come back outside to sweep the compound. The yellow and orange disk of the rising sun is brightening over the sky. Miss Ayen is supervising. She’s wearing her rainbow-coloured shoes today. I don’t know how many pairs of shoes she owns. Sometimes she comes in with shoes that make her look as if she’s walking on her toes, and I wonder how she can be comfortable in them.

Many students stop work when she looks away or goes over to the other side of the yard. Some of the kids have brooms that are too big for them. They chase each other around, dragging the brooms behind them, kicking up dust, making even more of a mess. Dust wafts into my throat, my nose, my eyes.

‘It’s sad when you have to have a girl stick up for you.’ Bol’s voice comes from right behind me. I turn and immediately feel his hands on my chest, shoving me backwards.

‘Are you growing any balls yet?’ he snarls. ‘Let me check.’

He moves to grab my genitals and when I push his hand away he slaps my hand and squeezes my balls hard. I gasp for air.

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‘Do you think your balls are big enough?’ Bol’s face looks so ugly right now.

‘No,’ I whimper. ‘My balls are small.’ I glance around, trying to see if anyone is looking. Miss Ayen is nowhere in sight.

‘Good,’ he hisses. ‘I don’t want to see them grow.’

‘Okay,’ I squeak.

He loosens his grip and I swallow air as he strolls off.

My legs are wobbling. I feel like I’m about to crumple to the ground but I steady myself. I don’t want anyone to see me on my knees because of Bol, even if the pain is excruciating. I’m already ashamed of letting him play with my balls like marbles.

The muscles around my groin strain and pull as if they’re trying to move my balls to a safer location. Maybe I should scream. I open my mouth but stop myself, letting the air out and gritting my teeth instead. The pain might go away if I stop thinking about it.

I go back to sweeping. My muscles start to relax and the sun feels good. I close my eyes and let the rays bathe my face, but then suddenly Bol is back.

‘We didn’t finish our conversation,’ he says.

‘I don’t have anything to say to you,’ I tell him and he

shoves me again, hard enough this time to make me lose my footing.

A satisfied look flashes across his face. This is what he wanted, to prove he was stronger than me.

‘I don’t care if you have nothing to say to me. I have something to say to you. And that is to leave Thiko alone.

I don’t want you talking to her anymore. Understand?’

I get to my feet. ‘I understand you want to bother me for no reason at all.’

‘Are you stupid? Just stop talking to Thiko. Stop liking her.’

So that’s it.

‘I don’t like her like that,’ I say. This isn’t quite true, but what business is it of his? ‘She’s a friend,’ I add.

‘Sure. That’s why you’re always following her around like a dog. Because you’re her friend.’

I try to ignore the way my heart is thudding against my ribs. I remember Deng telling me once that it doesn’t matter how much bigger your opponent is, you must be brave and stand up to him. But I don’t know what it means to be brave. How many times can I tell Bol to leave me alone? And how can I tell Thiko I don’t want to be friends with her anymore because Bol ordered me to?

‘If Thiko doesn’t want me to talk to her,’ I say, ‘she can tell me herself.’

‘Ha!’ Then he appears to consider something. ‘I’ll tell you what, Juba. If you want me to leave you alone, beat me in a game.’

This is a surprise turn. ‘A game? What game?’

‘Wrestling.’

‘I don’t know how to wrestle,’ I say. Chieng, Majok and I have messed around a bit but there’s no way I could beat Bol at wrestling.

‘Then whatever, any game. That’s how much confidence I have that I’ll be able to crush you into the ground.

Doesn’t matter what game it is.’

The only thing I can think of at this moment is a foot race, and seeing as I’m the fastest boy in school, I should win. But I wouldn’t be surprised if Bol tried something dirty, like tripping me up or taking a short cut. Before I

can even suggest a race, though, he shoves me so hard I go sprawling.

He’s on top of me before I have time to move. I put my arms up to cover my face and deflect the blows from his fists. It’s all I can do. If I try to get a hit or two of my own in, it will leave my head vulnerable, and Bol wants nothing more than to break my nose and give me two black eyes. He sits on my middle and punches me in the throat. I stop breathing for a second.

Over the sound of Bol’s heavy breathing, I hear other noises. And then a loud voice, Miss Ayen’s.

‘Stop this now!’

The punches cease. My mouth is salty. There’s dust in my eyes and all over my face. My arms throb. Majok and Chieng are pulling Bol off me, and Miss Ayen is yelling at him. A crowd has gathered around us.

‘This type of behaviour will not be tolerated,’ Miss Ayen says. ‘Bol, I’m sending you home for the rest of the day. I’ll come later to talk to your parents. I don’t think your father will be pleased to hear you’ve been causing trouble.’

Bol scowls in a fury but says nothing.

I stand up, brushing myself off. In the crowd I see Thiko looking worried. I’m glad she didn’t rush over to help me.

I’m glad I at least got up on my own. Miss Ayen is looking at me too, and for a second I think she will send me home as well, but instead she tells me to go and clean myself up.

The students return to their sweeping as Bol heads one way and I go the other. I do my best to clean the blood and dust off my face using the pail of water by the entrance to our classroom. The inside of my cheek stings when I touch it with my tongue. I can feel a small hole there. I must have bitten it when I fell.

Some days I think it might be better if I didn’t come to school at all, but I like being here and I like learning. I don’t even mind maths that much, I’m just not any good at it. But knowing there’s someone out to get me makes it a lot harder to enjoy school. I’m not sure what I can do.

I’m not a skilled enough fighter to beat Bol. And he’s been in so many fights before. Most boys just do what he says.

11

‘Miss Ayen yells, “It’s an Antonov!” and before we can blink there’s a rapid boom boom boom and the earth groans as if suppressing pain.’

I can’t imagine having to hide every time he turns up, and I don’t want to live in constant fear that he’ll try to hurt me.

I take an extra long time washing. I don’t feel like talking to anyone, even if they want to tell me Bol is a bully and deserves to get sent home. At least I won’t have to worry about running into him for the rest of today.

When I’m done I go back to sweeping. Most of the girls have abandoned their brooms completely and gathered in groups, arms linked. They’re making faces, whispering one second and laughing out loud the next. They act like they’re at a party. Part of their conversation drifts over towards me with the dust – they’re talking about the boys they think are cute. I hear my name, followed by shrieks of laughter. I don’t know if the laughter is a good sign or not.

But I have little time to think about it because there’s suddenly another sound, a deep rumbling in the air like a plane. A flock of birds flies from a tree, moving as one mass, first this way then that. The rumbling grows louder and I scan the sky for the plane, hoping it’s one of those that leave white trails behind like a ribbon unfurling.

I imagine the passengers on such a plane. People going someplace where they will spend their days relaxing, having fun. I can’t really picture what that would be like, but I’ve heard that’s what some people do.

There is no plane, or at least none that I can see, only the clouds. I look around, but no one else seems to have noticed the sound. Chieng is talking with Akol. Aliens from outer space could land right next to him and if Chieng was with Akol he would barely notice. Thiko is nowhere in sight. The sound is buzzing in my head. How is it that no one else has heard? I want to scream at them.

And I do. It’s bloodcurdling, the scream of someone who’s lost a limb. When I run out of breath and stop, my throat feels raw. Everyone is staring at me as though I’ve gone mad.

Then two things happen at once. Miss Ayen appears on the far side of the yard with a ruler in her hand, and my schoolmates look up at the sky as they finally hear the noise. It’s right above us now, and there’s a new sound too, 12

a whistling, whooshing sound I’ve never heard before.

Miss Ayen yells, ‘It’s an Antonov!’ and before we can blink there’s a rapid boom boom boom and the earth groans as if suppressing pain.

The ground heaves beneath me, a bucking zebra trying to throw me off. Another explosion follows quickly, a high buzzing sound, and I drop to the dust under a tree and wrap an arm around the trunk, anchoring myself as best I can and biting down on my lip until I taste blood. I remain there, eyes closed, my fingers gripping a root, until I feel brave enough to open one eye.

I can’t believe what I see. The school buildings are in rags of fire and smoke. Trees have become pillars of leaping red, and flames gust out of the ground ahead of me. Dust boils towards the heavens. Everywhere there is noise and panic, students howling, feet stampeding. Not far from me, two boys lie curled on the ground, covering their ears with their hands.

My whole body feels like it will explode. I want to run as far away from this as possible, but fear paralyses me.

I cannot move. Then I see Thiko. She’s out in the middle of the compound, in the smoke and flying debris, just standing there like a living ghost, immune to danger.

That’s enough to make my limbs move. I get up and run, dodging airborne objects. I trip and fall, spit out dirt, and when I get back up Thiko is gone. I call out to her and get no response.

I turn to keep searching and my eyes land on a body lying on the ground in a pool of blood. God, no, I can’t be seeing this, I’m imagining it. I blink and look again.

It’s Akol. Her eyes are open but she’s not seeing anything.

Oh God, please. This is a bad dream, it will end, like all bad dreams eventually do. I close my eyes. When I open them again everything will be as it was. The bombing will not have happened, we will be sweeping the compound, Miss Ayen will be on duty.

But when I open my eyes Akol is still there. Motionless.

As if she’s playing a prank on me and will get up any minute, laughing at the look on my face.

I am about to go to her when someone rushes past me.

It’s Chieng. He collapses at her side. Screams louder than I’ve ever heard anyone scream. Then he shakes her, gently at first, but when she doesn’t move, when her eyes don’t lose that blank stare, he shakes her harder.

‘Akol!’ he sobs. He has her blood all over him.

‘Chieng.’ I take his arm. I want to talk to him to stop him losing his mind, I want to pull him away in case there’s another bomb, but he pushes me with a force that nearly knocks me over.

I grab him again, tighter this time, and manage to get him to face me. ‘Chieng, listen to me, she’s gone. We have to get out of here, it’s not safe. She’s gone, Chieng.’

‘I can’t leave her,’ he cries, but his body goes slack and he allows me to pull him away and through the compound. I try not to hear the screams all around us. I try not to look.

I don’t want to see any more dead bodies. I want to find Thiko and go home to Grandpa and Mama.

Then, miraculously, as Chieng and I round the corner of a deserted hut behind the school compound, we run straight into Thiko. Relief floods her face when she sees me. She’s covered in dirt and dust but there’s no blood.

She’s okay. She is here, dirty and scared and okay.

‘Thiko,’ is all I can manage to say, and she grabs my hand, the one that’s not holding Chieng, and tugs me away, out through the low shrubs bordering this edge of the compound.

There’s a body here, another there, and another.

Students who a short time ago were laughing, sweeping the yard, playing around. I don’t understand how this is possible. I can’t wrap my mind around how everything has so suddenly changed, how the air that was clean and fresh is now full of smoke and chaos and terror. I step on something warm and wet and almost trip over something harder. I want to believe it’s a log. I feel dizzy. I would have fallen if I wasn’t holding Thiko’s hand.

A boy I don’t know lurches up to us, a wild look in his eyes.

‘Please help me,’ he sobs. There’s a gaping hole in his shoulder where his right arm should be.

I grimace. If those white nurses were here they’d know what to do. But there’s no one here to help us, and before Thiko or Chieng or I can do or say anything, the boy collapses. His eyes roll back in his head and his body twitches. I look away.

Then, something even worse. We come across Miss Ayen’s shoes. They’re not rainbow-coloured anymore, they’re stained dark with blood. A few yards beyond them are two long legs, unconnected to a body. The bright white of the leg bones shines through the charred flesh. I try to look away again but I’m not quick enough.

My entire body goes rigid. I keep walking but I don’t feel as if I’m walking. The image is seared in my mind.

My lungs seem to be filling with water, there’s no space for air. I can’t feel my legs at all now. I want to cry and I don’t want to. I don’t know what to do. A part of me is trying to get away from my body, trying to escape to where the trees are tall and the grass is soft. I can’t tell if I’m stepping on solid ground or off the top of a mountain.

Everything around me is a blur of red and noise.

And then, the part of me that wants to get away does. The screaming stops. The pain stops. The whole world stops.

Extracted from When Elephants Fight

by Majok Tulba. Hamish Hamilton, July 2018.

13

14

BY SAMSON McDOUGALL

In her breakthrough novel, The Children’s House, Alice Nelson weaves together stories of displacement and trauma to explore the conflicts that divide families, and the love and hope that creates them.

PHOTOS: NICOLE BOENIG McGRADE

The Long Shadow of Loss

INTERVIEW

ALICE NELSON

While Alice Nelson was working on her novel The Children’s House, an East African woman she knew asked her to be present for the birth of her baby. A refugee recently resettled in the USA, the woman had no one else to turn to and didn’t want to go through the birth alone. ‘When the baby was born, the mother was very unwell and wasn’t able to hold her, so I sat there in the hospital with this tiny, minutes-old little girl in my arms, feeling the press of her skin against mine,’ says Nelson. ‘This baby didn’t belong to me, yet the surge of protective love I felt for her was overwhelming. The experience left a deep impression on me.’

The possibility of feeling pure, blinding love for the children of others is one of many themes explored in The Children’s House. At the story’s heart is two-yearold Gabriel and his refugee mother, Constance, who are struggling to begin a new life in New York City after fleeing the Rwandan genocide of the mid-1990s. Writer and academic Marina encounters mother and son on the street outside her Harlem home, and over time the three form an unusual friendship. Carrying the profound emotional scars of her experiences during the war, Constance’s ability to show her child love has been deeply impaired. Marina, sensing echoes of her own loveless childhood within the boy, is drawn to protect him.

‘The two women exist together in this strange, uneasy space, never really knowing or understanding each other, and yet there is enormous feeling between them,’ says

Nelson. ‘They have both experienced different kinds of grief and loss but they have no way of translating their experience to each other. Marina wants to rescue Gabriel in a way that others failed to rescue her. But these kinds of rescues are never straightforward and they are never without unpredictable consequences for everyone involved.’

Initially, the book’s various narrative strands emerged from a cluster of unanswerable questions – of memory, loss, motherhood, inheritance and the possibilities of restoration and solace. Nelson says the painstaking novelwriting process enabled the deep immersion required to discover the shape of her thoughts on these issues. On a more tangible level, she was also able to draw upon her experiences living in Harlem and working with newly arrived refugees and asylum seekers in the USA, and later with Holocaust survivors in Australia, to shape Constance’s character.

‘I have known many men and women who have emerged from some of history’s most obscene catastrophes, been transplanted to new countries and new lives, and yet can never escape the shadow of the traumatic events they have experienced,’ she says. ‘For many people, that shadow – the long afterlife of trauma – disfigures the existence that comes after the calamity.’

Though he does not remember the horrors of the Rwandan genocide, Gabriel inherited his mother’s catastrophic history. And Constance’s suffering has immeasurable implications on the boy’s life. ‘I’m very interested in the ways that the individual life is shaped and sometimes disfigured by larger historical circumstances,’ Nelson continues, ‘and the ways that children absorb the sadnesses and ghosts of their parents. In many ways, we live out their unresolved lives, and sometimes that 15

burden can be very heavy. When those parents’ lives have been marked by profound trauma or great loss, the inheritances of the children who come afterwards are incredibly complex.’

Kindness and goodwill can be potent forces for those attempting to reassemble their lives after tragedy and displacement. In the book Nelson explores the impacts these acts of grace, empathy, generosity and compassion can have on individuals and communities. The characters in the novel are all grappling with what it means to be ‘good’, and with the limits of their own generosity.

Nelson hopes the book provokes readers to consider some of these questions. ‘There are all sorts of kindnesses extended in the novel, often at great cost and sometimes with unexpected repercussions,’ she says. ‘It’s not entirely fashionable to talk about concepts such as goodness, but I do believe that it is vital for us to examine and re-examine the ways that we live, to consider our actions and our inaction. Fiction can create a special kind of place for that sort of deep thinking.’

Because Nelson’s realm of experience most closely resembles Marina’s – ‘the things she knows are things that I have come to learn too’ – she found this character the easiest to write. Writing an emotionally mute Rwandan refugee with an obliterated backstory and limited English, however, posed great ethical and technical challenges.

‘Constance is a mystery and an absence; a woman whose inner life has been so profoundly damaged that it is inaccessible even to her,’ she says. ‘She coasts through her days like some sort of ghost, unable to engage with others, including her own child. When you understand a little of her history and the circle of flames that she has miraculously stepped out of, I think that her removal from the world is comprehensible.’

Resisting the temptation to ‘explain’ Constance, Nelson had to learn to embrace the silences as an essential element of her characterisation. The challenge was then to find a way to bring all the broken story threads together to form a coherent narrative. ‘Gaps, ellipses and absences of various kinds are central to the characters’ experiences of the world,’ she says. ‘I was conscious that, in many ways, this is a novel about what it is to have an unfinished life, to find ways of existing in the shadow of absence and loss, so I didn’t want all the elements of the novel to be too neatly resolved.’

A piano player and lover of classical music, Nelson says she found answers to some of the book’s structural challenges while studying the music of Bach, a master of interweaving several voices into harmonious wholes.

16

And inch by inch, as the novel slowly took shape, she found herself writing towards greater understanding of the story’s central questions.

‘I believe that the long, slow work of writing a novel is also in a way a process of educating the heart,’ she says. ‘The act of writing for me, even when I’m taking on difficult subjects, comes from a place of enormous inner hopefulness, and I like to think that this pervades the book and that the reader feels this sense of hope. The characters in The Children’s House have all experienced different kinds of loss and grief, but they also find unexpected forms of consolation. Shattered families reform in new configurations, acts of grace and benevolence thread through difficult lives and new homes are found in the world... It’s not possible to live painlessly, but doubt and sorrow don’t have to be the whole story.’

17

EXTRACT

The Children’s House

BY ALICE NELSON

Feed my lambs, Jesus said. She murmurs it to herself as she holds the bottle to the child’s mouth, trying for the lilt she remembers in the voice of a long-ago pastor. My lamb. The wind at the glass takes the sound of her voice and tosses it away like a scrap of fabric. Winter in the sky, the cold a tiny stab in her bones. Outside, these strange trees that throw their leaves away. A flock of birds rises up above the marsh, a dark arrow pointing the way.

The child’s eyes are on her as she lifts the end of the bottle higher. Wary, watching, drooping now with the rhythmic suck of his mouth against soft plastic. They told her that he was past the time of milk-drinking, that she should stop now with these bottles. Those soft lips.

Never at her breast since that first day when someone’s hands had placed him, shuddering with blood and breath, against her, guided his gaping mouth to the right place.

She had wailed then, in a way she never has since. No nourishment for him there. Hard to believe that she was able to sustain him inside her for so long. To bear the jab and turn of him against her ribs as she lay awake in a narrow bed in the refugee camp in Gisenyi. A foreign creature, she had felt him to be, a slippery lake fish swelling her body.

She sits beside the child for a moment. The marsh fills the window behind her. The old glass wavers the shifting fields. Flooded ground, this house was built on. Truro, Cape Cod. Even the name of the place sounds strange to her. A long way from Rwanda, though there were marshes in her country too. And birds, with their songs of praise at dawn. Soon it will be light enough to leave the house. She has her coat on already, encased in the heavy puffiness of it. Her canvas bag is tucked under the bed. It is Christmas Day; still very early in the morning.

The child will not close his eyes. He is always fighting sleep and she knows no ways to coax him into it. No song, no whispered words. His hand is curled in a fist against his cheek like a small shell. Gabriel, he is called.

It is not a name from her country. A Congolese pastor in the camp gave it to him. She had another name under her tongue, but the pastor said that the child needed the name 18

of an angel. That it was a good name for a boy who would grow in America. So she said nothing and let him choose the name he wanted. The last name was wrong, too. They did not know, the people who had written on the papers to come to America, that in Rwanda each child had its own last name. A name from their language, chosen with a special meaning for that child, not something shared with others in the family. On the papers for the baby they wrote her own last name, the one her mother had chosen for her alone. Nsengimana. ‘I pray to God’, it meant.

An answered prayer, a child of faith, she was, the first to live after two born dead. She had been sure that her own baby would be born dead too, or would be something monstrous.

She had not seen that they had written the wrong name for the child until the two of them were in America and she lined up the plastic cards she had been given – one to buy food in the stores, one to show to the doctor at the clinic. It was too late then, to change it. It was easier, they had told her. Easier for them both to have the same last name. It was the way it was done in this country. Families were knitted together with the same name.

The child is sleeping at last, his head making a shallow dent on the white pillow. In the city, before they had met Marina, the little boy had cried and cried. She didn’t know where he found the energy for so much crying. If she stepped into the other room and shut the door against him, the noise would eventually become a low whimper.

Other times he would wail until he fell asleep, and she would find him curled up under the table, his cheek against the floor. If it was cold she would put her winter coat over him and in the morning he would be wrapped in it, like some small bird in a nest, staring up at her as she moved around the kitchen. As though he were afraid of her, that look. As though she were something to cause him fear.

‘She cannot look at him. Slides her eyes away.

“Utabazi” was the lost name she chose for him.

It means “he belongs to them”.’

It still surprises her sometimes, when she looks at him sleeping, that he could have come from her. That he could really exist in the world. And yet here he is. All the times she took him to the clinic in the city to be poked and touched and measured, to be given medicine or needles, it was in her mind that they would not give him back to her. That they would say it was enough now, would know she was not to be trusted with him. But they did not.

Just gave her a bottle of medicine or a bright candy for the child and that was it, a smile and the door opening, someone else walking through as she lifted him on to her back in the waiting room and tied the wrap under her breasts. That was one thing she had remembered, after all – the folding and tying of fabric. The way to carry a child.

She places the empty bottle on the nightstand and presses the blanket in around his chin. Always watching her, this child, following her from room to room as soon as he could pull himself across the floor. And yet she cannot look at him. Slides her eyes away. ‘Utabazi’ was the lost name she chose for him. It means ‘he belongs to them’.

So small he looks, folded under the heavy blankets.

She knows the weight of him, has carried him tied to her back through the streets of the city. But now he will grow without her. How long until her body forgets the heft of him against her, the damp heat of his cheek through the fabric of her wrap? Soon he will be too heavy to carry, he will walk holding someone’s hand. She bends to pick up her bag from under the bed. She needs to be far from the house before the others return.

On the blanket beside the child she places the two plastic cards with his name on them, the little booklet from the health clinic, the travel paper with the stapledon picture. In the photograph he is only a tiny baby and his face is all wail and tears. Her hands are there in the frame, holding him up into the flash of the camera, her fingers against the white of his too-big shirt.

At the door she looks back at the bed for a moment, then steps out into the hallway, turning the latch softly.

The house is still and dim, all the curtains left open to

let in the light when it comes. There is nothing else she has to leave behind for the child. She cannot write a letter, does not own a string of beads to place around his neck. Better that there is no memory of her. Better to let herself dissolve in him without a trace. He is too small for remembering.

The morning is pungent, rain-wet. A stand of trees leaning over the path. Beyond them, the shapes of the town shimmer mistily, as if under waves. She walks away from the house, past the covered bins and the wooden letterbox to the road. More light will be in the sky soon. She stands still, staring at the rows of silvered fences, the gardens smoky with fine rain. Then she sets off along the side of the road, her feet leaving dark shapes on the wet grass.

Extracted from The Children’s House

by Alice Nelson. Vintage, October 2018.

19

INSIGHTS OUT OF THE FOREST

Into the Wild ‘I woke up on my back with a large snake on my chest. Surely it was going to sink its fangs into my throat and leave me to die in the ferns and the dirt.’ So begins Out of the Forest, Gregory P. Smith’s deeply affecting reflection on a life of homelessness, isolation and, ultimately, redemption.

He’d slept in enough roadside ditches to understand the gravity of this reptilian situation. But as the (fortunately) harmless diamond python slithered off his body, he was to make one of too many decisions he would live to regret.

For ten years Smith, aka Will Power, lived alone on a rocky shelf in the northern New South Wales bush, foraging for food, eating bats and occasionally trading for produce.

When he finally emerged from the forest, emaciated and close to death, after a lifetime of shunning society he was determined to reclaim his real name and give ‘normality’ a chance.

Remarkably, Smith, who’d left school at fourteen, now has a PhD and teaches in the Social Sciences at Southern Cross University. Out of the Forest is his story of the forces that compelled him to leave civilisation behind, and the discovery of the lifeforce within himself that enabled his return. From a harrowing childhood of cruelty and neglect, through the depths of drug and alcohol abuse, violence, fear and self-loathing, to the 20

enlightenment he discovered upon leaving his mountain, his profound and touching memoir offers unique insights into how far off track a life can go, and reminds us that we can all find our way back.

Before entering the Goonengerry National Park, Smith’s natural inclination was to turn his heels at the slightest whiff of comfort or familiarity. But upon his accidental arrival in the forest, he finally encountered a feeling of secure isolation. At this moment, for the very first time, spiritually and emotionally, he had arrived home. In this passage Smith details the events and thought processes leading up to his decision to put down roots far away from the beaten track.

I’d always enjoyed travelling through the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales, where the steep, green farmland of lushly carpeted fields was skirted by neat crops of sugarcane and rambling rainforests. The climate was magic all year round and echoes of alternative culture still hung in the townships and country lanes.

When I arrived in Mullumbimby in the summer of 1989–90 I was chuffed not only to find it was a pretty little town, but the things I’d heard about it appeared to be true. There was

music, crystals, incense, colourful clothes, dreadlocks and even the whiff of dope on the warm breeze.

I scored half an ounce of pot which immediately came in useful in helping me get to sleep on a fairly decent park bench I found by a creek. Despite the loose vibe and the peace and love, to me Mullumbimby was just another park bench on another leg of another trek to nowhere. After a few days I’d had enough.

It was humid and overcast when I picked up my pack and walked south out of town towards darkening clouds. It was a typical northern New South Wales country road that twisted through hilly fields dotted with homesteads, cows, rusty sheds and the odd forlorn-looking horse. I trudged past a golf course and a farm where a bloke was completely oblivious to me as he cut his grass atop a ride-on mower. I remember thinking with a touch of envy how perfectly contented he looked.

After a few hours the road started snaking uphill. On my right a modest, thickly forested mountain range loomed larger and larger in my peripheral vision. The closer I got, the more dramatic the cliffs looked. ‘What,’ I wondered, ‘is at the top of that?’ I paused intermittently along the way to puff on some pot in my hash pipe and take a few lukewarm slugs from the nozzle of

ILLUSTRATION: MADELINE TINDALL

Deep in the northern New South Wales forest, Gregory P. Smith finally discovered the shelter of solitude he’d sought his whole life.

the ‘silver pillow’ wine bladder that was sloshing about inside my pack.

Sustained only by booze, drugs and a handful of nuts, I trudged on until sunset, when I came to a comfortable place to sleep. I smoked some more pot, drank some wine and passed out.

In the morning I had a couple of pipes and a few swigs of wine to wake myself up, and hit the toe again. It was harder going as the road gained altitude up the side of the mountain.

I had to dodge a couple of cars on the hairpin bends but I finally reached the top in the afternoon. A sign at a T-intersection said a left turn would take me back down to the Pacific Highway while the right promised to take me to a place called Crystal Castle. It was a no-brainer; castles beat highways hands down. I was disappointed, though, when a few kilometres down the road the Crystal Castle turned out to be a tourist attraction. I walked straight past it.

I followed the heavily tree-lined road along the mountaintop until I arrived at another intersection. This time the choice wasn’t written on a sign, it was laid out by the fact that one option – going left – led up a dirt road compared to the bitumen on the right.

‘Dirt road warrants a look,’ I decided.

I passed a couple of large orchards and some cottages and shacks hidden among the trees and vines. The further I went the narrower the road became

and the taller, and strangely more present, the trees appeared to be. It was getting late.

As dusk fell, a battered, vinewrapped weatherboard house came into view. I felt perfectly comfortable approaching the place because it was in disrepair and deserted, a little like me. It was dark, shabby and the roof on the veranda was falling down. I found the gate and stepped into the overgrown yard – straight into a cowpat. There was no front door so I invited myself in, had a couple of pipes and a drink and fell asleep on the timber floor.

When birdsong woke me early the next morning I was desperately hungry, so I plotted a raid on one of the orchards I’d passed the previous afternoon. I slipped over the fence and helped myself to a pawpaw and a couple of kiwifruit. After my pathetic diet of wine, nicotine, nuts and gritty pieces of dope ash in my mouth, the fruit tasted incredible. I felt so good and energised that I celebrated by smoking more pot and guzzling the last of the vino.

I stayed in the orchard for hours, just looking at the fruit trees and the insects that teemed all over them. I had no plans, so about midday I figured I’d keep exploring the mountaintop.

I walked back past the abandoned house and after a while the road turned into a trail and, finally, a narrow track.

I found myself being drawn deeper and deeper into a cathedral of trees.

The air inside the forest was still, sweet and moist, and towards the late afternoon dark clouds slid overhead and the light faded to grey. In between distant rumbles of thunder I could hear every bird in every tree. I could also hear rustling leaves and fast movement in the thick tangles of bush that lined the track. The darkening day and these mystery noises made me apprehensive. Fear of the unknown rose up and stomped on my mood.

I sat on the track and reflected on the hopelessness of my situation. I felt rejected, inadequate and full of guilt about my long list of sins and failures. Everything I did was sinful.

The fact that I couldn’t make connections with people was a sin. The fact I was homeless was a sin. Unemployed – sin. Alcoholic – sin. Addict – sin.

Abused – sin. Divorced – sin. The guilt may have been a hangover from the Catholic orphanage but it had also been reinforced in society. ‘Even out here,’ I thought. I’d dragged myself to the top of that mountain only to have my place in the world confirmed. I was an outcast. Human refuse. I was immensely sad that my life had ended up that way. As if my spirits weren’t low enough, the heavens opened up.

As rain soaked me through I was completely vulnerable and without a shred of hope.

21

When I left Mullumbimby I’d been wearing jeans, a T-shirt, a pair of shin-high GP army boots and an Akubra hat. In my green army haversack I had a full-length Driza-Bone raincoat, a packet of Drum tobacco, matches, a candle, my trusty pocket knife, a three-foot-long piece of blue and yellow nylon rope, a water bottle, some nuts, a couple of packets of Tally-Ho cigarette papers, my little hash pipe, a briar pipe and about half an ounce of pot. The sum total of my possessions after thirty-five years on the planet.

These belongings may have been modest but each fulfilled an important role – not least the Driza-Bone.

This quintessential Australian raincoat plus fancy hat had come to me a year or two earlier when I’d done a brief stint at a horse stud in Tamworth. John Parkes, a prominent figure in the racing industry at the time, had been looking for a gardener to help with the upkeep so I’d put my case forward. Somehow, as if by miracle, I wound up getting hired. As part of the induction, John took all of his new workers into town and kitted them out with a nice Akubra and a top-of-the-line, full-length DrizaBone. He was a very decent guy.

Just a couple of weeks after John spent that money welcoming me into the fold I repaid him by leaving town.

I didn’t so much resign as stop turning up for work. It didn’t trouble me one bit to leave John in the lurch and keep the expensive gear he’d given me. I just had to go, and the next thing anyone knew there was a homeless man wandering around Kings Cross dressed like The Man From Snowy River.

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As raindrops the size of sultanas pelted through the forest canopy I was glad of John’s generosity. I quickly dragged the Driza-Bone out of my pack, sat on my haunches and pulled it over my head. I had never been rained on so hard in my life. The water droplets felt more like bits of gravel and the storm showed no sign of relenting. I cowered in the slush and mud, miserable beyond words.

Cramps gnawed at my muscles and pain shot up my spine.

Whenever I found myself in a particularly tough spot my mind would drift to my younger days when I’d been locked in concrete cells or under the stairs. That was where I’d first learned to separate mind from body. I could dissociate to the point where my physical self would absorb whatever punishment was being meted out while I protected my innerself, to a degree.

I was just crawling into my mindcave to escape the storm when I felt an itch inside my trouser leg. I reached down to scratch it and felt a sticky warmth on my fingers. I looked at my hand and it was covered in blood.

As I pulled up the cuff of my jeans I was horrified to see five or six leeches on my leg. Then the same on the other! In the gloaming I made out fifteen or so more sliding purposefully towards me across the sodden forest floor. The slimy raiders must have been able to sense my body heat, or whatever evil powers of detection leeches can call on to ruin a human being’s day.

It was time for a big decision: either move forward or go back. Going

back was out of the question and the status quo down there in the mud and the blood wasn’t too appealing.

But where could I go? I was already ‘gone’. I rationalised that I could deal with the leeches and the wet, I just needed to find a better place inside the forest. I thought about looking for a hollowed-out tree or maybe digging a little cave – a real one. I was clutching at straws but deep down I was confident I’d be OK. I just needed some time to get organised.

Despite the pitch black and the rain it struck me that I was feeling strangely positive about the situation.

Something was different in the forest, and I liked it. Then it dawned on me.

‘There’s no one else here!’ Still, I was fearful to a degree and nervous about the creatures and the strange noises.

‘Do I keep going or do I go back?’

All that was behind me was guilt, pain, depression, misunderstanding, disappointment, anger and the fear of ending up in gaol. I was happier squatting in the rain, plucking parasites off my legs.

‘I’m staying right here.’

Out of the Forest by Gregory P. Smith.

William Heinemann, June 2018.

EXTRACT

The Water Cure

BY SOPHIE MACKINTOSH

LIA

Strong feelings weaken you, open up your body like a wound. It takes vigilance and regular therapies to hold them at bay. Over the years we have learned how to dampen them down, how to practise and release emotion under strict conditions only, how to own our pain. I can cough it into muslin, trap it as bubbles under the water, let it from my very blood.

Some of the early therapies fell out of favour, and the fainting sack was one of these. King disdained it as archaic.

Also, we turned off the sauna years ago to preserve electricity and without the sauna it didn’t work. That was a shame in some ways. I enjoyed the dizziness, the rush of my uncooperative body dissolving into nothing.

We use electricity so carefully these days because of the blackouts. They happen most often in the height of summer; the rooms become cavernous after sundown, dotted here and there with the light of candles. I thought this might be a clue to what was happening beyond our borders, but Mother said that she and King orchestrated it themselves, that it was just another part of their plan to keep us safe.

Our fainting sacks were made of a heavy weave, not

muslin but not quite burlap. They had once held flour or rice, Mother unstitching the fabric then re-stitching it into the right shape, carefully embroidering our names on to the front. On therapy days she would lead us out in single file, through the kitchen door to the old sauna hut at the edge of the forest, its panels splintering amid flourishing weeds. We held out our arms, naked except for our underwear, and stood motionless while Mother guided our limbs through holes in the rough fabric. She sewed us into the sacks right up to the top of the neck.

Then we were carried into the sauna, locked in, and given a small glass bottle of water each that quickly became warm as blood.

Soon the sacks were soaked through with our sweat, our own personal salt water. We grew dizzy and lay down on the benches lining the walls. I finished my water first, because I had ‘poor self- control’, as diagnosed repeatedly and sadly by Mother and King. As I sweated out the bad feelings, a lightness came over me. I would allow myself to lick the skin of my forearm once, twice; a reluctance to let my pain go.

Gradually, one by one, we each lost consciousness.

When Mother came to rouse us, splashing water on our 23

faces, we shuffled unsteadily on to the lawn together. We were glistening, our hair wet. We lay on our fronts on the grass, the damp fabric chafing at us. She took a pair of scissors to each sack, cutting right down to the bottom along the seams. When we were well enough to stand, we shed the stiff, cooling fabrics to our feet like a skin.

GRACE, LIA, SKY

Some of the beds in the abandoned rooms are arranged strangely, left by women long gone. Women who preferred to sleep by windows, or who wanted to keep their eyes trained on the door at all times. Women who were plagued by visions, whose hearts pained them in the night.

We are lucky, because we have been exposed to minimal damage. We remember what those women looked like when they came to us. But we also remember the effect the therapies had on them. How their bodies strengthened until they were finally ready to undergo the water cure.

We only bother to make up our own beds now, stripping the sheets and blankets from the others for our use, so the mattresses lie naked and fleshy on their frames.

‘Do you miss the women?’ Mother asked us once. To her we answered, ‘No.’ Only later, alone, admitting to ourselves, Yes, maybe a little.

GRACE

In the lengthening time after your death, I think about the other people who have left us. All women, sickened and damaged when they arrived, cured when they departed.

There is a different quality to your absence. A heaviness to it, a shock at its centre. The house is emptier than it has ever been before.

As far back as I can remember, these damaged women drifted through our lives. They arrived with possessions wrapped in sacking, plastic bags, large leather cases that cracked at the seams. Mother would greet their boats at the jetty, looping rope around the moorings.

In reception the women wrote their names and reasons for coming in the Welcome Book while Mother found 24

them a bed. They rarely stayed longer than a month.

They ran their hands over the front desk, fake marble but still cold to the touch, in what I now see was a kind of disbelief. At the time we waited in the dark, high up on the stairs, balling dust from the carpet between our fingertips. We weren’t supposed to go near the women when they were newly arrived from the mainland with their toxic breath and skin and hair. We fought the urge to make a commotion, to make them turn around and look up at us with their red-rimmed eyes.

You, too, stayed far away from the women, at least at the start. Acclimatization was necessary. They sat waiting with their hands pressed between their knees and their eyes on the floor. They had been through so much, though we had no comprehension of what.

The work started at once. There was no use in letting the body falter longer than necessary. In the dining room Mother laid out two rows of glasses on one of the polished circular tables. Buckets on the floor. We were not supposed to watch.

The women drank the salt water first, their faces pained.

They threw up repeatedly into the buckets. Their bodies convulsed. They lay on the floor but Mother helped them up, insistent. They rinsed their mouths, spat. Then they drank from the second row, glass after glass of our good and pure water, the water that came from our taps like a miracle, the water that the sprinklers cast out in the early dusk like a veil across the garden. The water we ourselves drank by the pint first thing every morning, Mother watching our throats as we swallowed. The women took it into themselves. It was a start. The water flamed their cells and blood. Soon the glasses were all empty.

Once Lia and I saw a damaged woman run down the shore towards the jetty. We watched her from the window, waiting for Mother to follow, the way we knew she would if we tried to escape. The woman had bare feet and her hair was the bloom of a dandelion, whipping in the sea wind as she moved her head from side to side.

I never knew her name, but something within me now thinks it might have been Anna or Lanna, a soft sound,

‘As far back as I can remember, these damaged women drifted through our lives. They arrived with possessions wrapped in sacking, plastic bags, large leather cases that cracked at the seams.’

a name ending with a kind of call. She found her own boat and we saw her get in, we saw her fumble with the motor-string, we saw her leave. She sailed in a curved line across the bay, soon out of our sight. We waved, pressed our hot hands against the glass. We did not know much, yet somewhere we knew that we were watching the beginning of the end.

LIA

Grace’s stomach grows, filling with blood or air. I notice it first when she is in her swimsuit, sunbathing next to me. I stare at her through my sunglasses until she realizes, bunches a towel across her body despite the heat. At first I think it is a disease, that she is dying. The stomach swelling comes with a deep exhaustion, Grace falling asleep where she sits, circles imprinted under her eyes.

It affects me. For once I am able to keep my distance, she doesn’t have to push me away when I get too close to her. I hurt myself more often in an attempt to make some unspoken bargain, line up strands of my hair on the white linen of my pillowcase as votive offerings, but her body still changes. I send out small pleas when I am drowning myself, when I am sponging the blood from my legs. Save my sister! Take me instead!

‘Thinking yourself uniquely terrible is its own form of narcissism,’ King had always reminded me, when I went to him crying because nobody loved me any more.

I will probably do anything, I tentatively promise the sea, the sky, the dirt.

‘Fetch Grace a glass of water,’ Mother tells me. ‘You make the dinner tonight.’

I go out to harvest herbs from the garden, spot a small black snake sunning itself on a patch of scrubbed earth.

Normally I would scream, but this time I find a branch that has fallen, hit the snake until it’s burst open like something cooked too long. I throw salt on its pulp and wash my hands in bleach solution. The skin of my two

index fingers peels, both hands. Good enough yet? I ask nobody.

After we eat, my sister retches in the corner of the lounge. She runs out of the room and down the corridor towards the bathroom, her bare feet an urgent slap on the parquet. When she comes back, her face is like the moon.

She lies down right there on the floor, choosing the rug with the tassels in front of the empty fireplace.

I worry that my biceps aren’t strong enough to dig her grave and if not me, who will? I worry that I will catch it.

I pinch my nose and gargle salt water until my eyes run.

Extracted from The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh. Hamish Hamilton, June 2018.

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INSIGHTS LOOSE UNITS

Killing Them with Kindness Paul F. Verhoeven saw his first dead body when he was seven years old. It was in a box of old crime-scene photographs his policeman father, John, kept in a closet. The next morning his parents told him that he’d been screaming all night in his sleep.

In his mid-thirties, Paul received a bundle of photographs from his mother. Poring over pictures of his policeman father, resplendent in uniform, Verhoeven questioned why he’d turned out so differently from the man? Why was his aversion to adventure so strong? As the son of a hero cop, why had he turned out a genteel hipster fop? The nightmares had come back, and he realised why: that crime-scene photo. It was time to level with his dad.

John was surprised his son hadn’t approached him sooner, and it turned out he had a plan. Saturation therapy.

By sharing some of the darkest, most tangled, horrifying and strange stories of his police career, John hoped Paul’s nightmares would seem barely a whisper by comparison.

The conversations that followed were true-crime goldmines. The crims, the car chases, the frequent brushes with death and violence, and the grey zone between what’s ethical and what’s effective: finally Paul had real insights into what had formed his father’s character. And he also had 26

great material with which to work his artsy magic. So Paul crafted John’s dramatic (and sometimes dodgy) stories of the underbelly of Sydney in the 1980s into a book, Loose Units.

In this passage Paul reveals one of John’s hidden talents.

John was a sucker for a mentor.

After growing up with a strict, often disapproving father, and after being raised on a diet of novels filled with hard-boiled detectives, strong men with square jaws who busted up drug rings, John began to cobble together a composite sketch of a real-life hero he could admire. He’d grown up with loveable weirdos, though, so he wanted to make sure this mentor was a little off-kilter, too. Just to stop things getting boring.

He planned on chopping and choosing, taking an inspirational quote here, a life lesson there, to create in his mind the perfect role model upon whom he could lean in times of trouble. With Julian he found an offsider, sure, and one who complemented him. But Julian also… encouraged him. So while his police career was peppered with fellow units, Julian was one in whose presence he would become… well, looser.

The academy was, however, full

of people who almost steadfastly refused to complement, or compliment, John. In one particularly gruelling class helmed by Sergeant Sweats, a diminutive, angry man with a shock of ginger hair who resembled a ’roided-up Hobbit, John was learning self-defence. For weeks on end the entire class was taken through the finer points of how to disarm an opponent using a baton, how to escape a stranglehold, and how to attempt to use an adversary’s weight and strength against them. On this particular day, Sweats had the cadets doing aikido flips on other, less fortunate recruits. Now in this class, there was an unfathomably beautiful officer-in-training named Sue. Sue used to be an air hostess. Because of her looks, she was objectified beyond belief at every turn, though none of this affected her grades, which were exemplary. She conducted herself with dignity and was highly capable, and Sweats had a crush of biblical proportions on her.

Sweats also happened to hate John, for no reason John could ascertain – although to be fair, Sweats was often in charge of supervising the marching, so all things considered, perhaps his hatred was well-founded. Regardless, Sweats viewed this particular class as something truly delicious: he could achieve either of two desirable goals

ILLUSTRATION: CEOL RYDER | IMAGES USED UNDER LICENCE FROM SHUTTERSTOCK.COM

In Loose Units, Paul F. Verhoeven explores the exploits of the father to help explain the peculiarities of the son.

in one swift stroke. He could emasculate and humiliate John, accusing him of gender discrimination for refusing to flip and pin the object of Sweats’ affections. Or, if John did relent and proceed with the brutal but necessary lesson, he would have made John look monstrous in front of his peers. Win-win. Kismet. Pure, uncut douchebaggery, to be sure, but a brilliant plan.

What Sweats hadn’t counted on was John calling his bluff. He watched John nodding at Sue from across the mat, bowing, and swiftly flipping her through the air and onto the ground, pinning her successfully.

The entire class applauded. And in a mad frenzy at his plans having gone lightly awry, Sweats did the only thing his lizard brain could think of.

He charged across the room, and sent his fist flying into John’s face. John hit the floor with a sickening crunch, and everyone gasped, stiffening and staring at Sweats, who stood there, glaring, pale and wide-eyed. John slowly stood, nose bloodied, and before heading back to his spot with the rest of the cadets, he helped Sue to her feet.

Much later, after everybody else had left, John went back to the class to shake hands with Sweats, as a gesture of goodwill. It never even occurred to him to report the man, or

complain; he figured that if he could be the bigger man – quite literally, in this case – he could set in place a pattern that would do him credit.

Regrettably Sweats told him to ‘get fucked’, but, oddly, after this a switch flicked on in John’s brain: if anyone like Sweats took a run at him during his time at the academy, he would kill them with kindness. Even if they did flatten him for his efforts.

A week or so later, this new attitude of John’s had well and truly taken up residence. A guest speaker was in attendance, giving a lecture on dealing with explosives. The speaker, a large man with an even larger moustache, had spent the better part of an hour being sarcastic, flippant and generally unpleasant, so at the end of the lecture John took it upon himself to stand and thank said guest speaker on behalf of the class.

The man, worn down by the rigours of trying to inspire people who had no interest in being inspired, smiled warily, shook John’s hand, and thanked him with a genuine gleam in his eye. From that point on during his first three months at Redfern Police Academy, John became the unofficial spokesman for all of the cadets in F-Troop and would perform his little thank-you ritual. He took pride in it, and so did everyone else. It was like the police equivalent of that creepy

song sung by the von Trapp children on the stairs before they headed off to bed.

Maurice Green was one senior man in particular whom John had to really work at. He was a tall, thoroughly muscular, grizzled sergeant with auburn hair and a matching, prodigious moustache, who was in charge of protocol at state level funerals.

White gloves, solemn, slow marches, the whole shebang. Diplomats, heroes, politicians, cops who’d been shot in the line of duty, you name it, he protocoled the hell out of it.

Whenever a funeral demanded streets to be shut off and an honour guard, a hand-picked group of very senior police would take point. Sergeant Green took his job seriously, and he towed an air of solemnity about him like a hot, hard fog. Everyone at the academy shat themselves whenever he came within spitting distance.

Maurice Green had the demeanour of a three-metre statue tasked with guarding a cursed tomb.

If a mountain fucked a Viking, their offspring would be Maurice Green.

One day John’s class was gathered up, bundled into a bus, and driven out to Long Bay Gaol. Maurice greeted the busload of incandescently green police cadets and aggressively corralled them to a training course 27

for target practice with the riot squad. Every prison has a riot squad on the premises, just in case the residents take umbrage with the state of their lodgings in a less than civil manner. And the harder the jail, the harder the squad.

This squad proceeded to perform lightning-quick mock takedowns for the cadets, firing off shots at targets and kicking down doors with such vehemence locksmiths a continent away felt an odd, fervent tingle in their nether regions. Maurice led them, taking part with grim, emotionless gusto. The man was proficient at everything but showing any feeling other than pure, sharpened rage. At one point, he demonstrated how, with two shots from a mini-14 rifle, he could puncture a double-brick wall.

When it came time for the visitors to get involved, any whimper, any flicker of emotion from the cadets was met with bellowing roars from Maurice, delivered with the kind of velocity that could permanently part one’s hair. Young officers in the making were shaken to their core by this man. He strode from person to person, dredging up minor character flaws and crafting bespoke, handmade insults hewn from the very finest uncut contempt. He strode around, clutching a baseball bat (presumably from home – police don’t typically issue sporting equipment as ordnance), informing the cadets that if while firing live ammunition at their targets they so much as glanced away from their rifle sights in the direction of another student, he’d stove their heads in.

Over the course of that afternoon, his fusillade of insults intensified.

Cadets began to listen to what he was saying, even if the volume at which he was saying it was making their hair bleed. John, during his shooting 28

exercises, began firing straighter, reacting faster. Maurice strode up, eyeballed him with what could only be described as apparent white-hot madness, then, after a horrendously long pause, gave him a curt nod of approval, and carried on down the line. John figured ‘fuming’ was Maurice’s resting state.

The half-day of weapons training on the dunes near the jail was coming to a close. The wind was whipping up waves of fine sand, and everyone was assembling to get back onto the bus, shaken but invigorated. Green had got through to them. Why had he threatened to beat them to death with a Louisville slugger if they glanced away during target practice? Because if they did so while under fire, with adrenaline pumping, they might accidentally fire live ammunition into a nearby officer or civilian. Every piece of cruelty was a tool to focus the cadets. One could dwell on the symbolism of all this, given that Maurice Green was a tool, but regardless of his demeanour, he’d earned a modicum of quiet, unspoken, trembling respect from the class.

Unspoken, that is, until John slipped into his regular role as unofficial spokesperson. He cleared his throat, stepped right in front of Maurice Green and, eclipsed by the looming monolith before him, he began to talk.

‘Sergeant Green, my fellow cadets and I would like to thank you for an incredible day. Your insights have been invaluable, and we’ve all learned a great deal from you. Thanks for your time and effort, Sergeant, I think I speak for everyone here when I say you scared the hell out of us, but it was worth it. Anyway… thanks.

Thanks very much. Sir.’ John hadn’t really planned this far ahead, so he panicked, and began to clap awkwardly. After a moment,

everyone else joined in, relieved at first, then genuinely. And from his current vantage point, John watched as tears began to pool in Maurice’s eyes. Maurice’s bottom lip trembled almost imperceptibly. He then pumped John’s hand, almost breaking his wrist. They headed back onto the bus, and John didn’t see Maurice Green again.

That is until fifteen years later, when John and his wife were running a small funeral home on the northern beaches of Sydney. There was a large service for a dead police officer, and as John was finishing a phone call outside the main building, an enormous man with a shock of grey hair and an equally shocking grey moustache approached him. Maurice Green shook John’s hand warmly, and they easily talked for a half-hour straight. About Maurice’s ex-partner who’d died. About how Maurice regretted that his dead friend hadn’t warranted a funeral that required marching, or white gloves. And about how, all those years ago, a skinny, scared young cadet had been the first and only member of the academy to thank him for anything, ever.

Maurice also informed John that he’d once seen him march from across the yard at the academy.

‘It was like seeing a fucking puppet get electrocuted, mate.’

Loose Units by Paul F. Verhoeven.

Viking, August 2018.

COLLECTION SPRING READING

CLOCK DANCE

BY ANNE TYLER

Every one of the defining moments of Willa Drake’s life set her off down paths laid out by others. So when she receives a phone call telling her that her son’s ex-girlfriend has been shot and needs her help, she drops everything and flies across the country. The spur-of-the-moment decision to look after this woman – and her nine-year-old daughter, and her dog – finally leads Willa into uncharted territory.

WARLIGHT

BY MICHAEL ONDAATJE

End Notes

ILLUSTRATION: MADELINE TINDALL

Hit ‘refresh’ this spring with new fiction from some of literature’s luminaries and brightest new stars. From a sweeping tale of heartbreak to a Greek epic retold, an everyday life tipped on its head to memories of an extraordinary childhood and a year of narcotic hibernation – here are five novels to astonish and delight.

SO MUCH LIFE LEFT OVER

BY LOUIS DE BERNIÈRES

THE SILENCE OF THE GIRLS

BY PAT BARKER

By turns humorous and tragic, gripping and touching, So Much Life Left Over follows Daniel, Rosie and their little daughter as they start a new life in Ceylon at the dawn of the 1920s, attempting to put the trauma of the First World War behind them, and to rekindle a marriage that gets colder every day. However, even in the lush plantation hills it is hard for them to escape the ties of home and the yearning for fulfilment that threatens their marriage.

The legend of The Iliad retold from the perspective of a woman: queen turned war prize, witness to history.

The great city of Troy is under siege as Greek heroes Achilles and Agamemnon wage bloody war over a stolen woman. In the Greek camp, another woman is watching and waiting: Briseis. She was a queen of this land until Achilles sacked her city and murdered her husband and sons.

But when Achilles is killed and Troy finally falls, she will bear witness.

In 1945 London is still reeling from years of war. Fourteen-year-old Nathaniel and his sister, Rachel, are abandoned by their parents, left in the care of an enigmatic figure named The Moth. They suspect he might be a criminal, and grow both more convinced and less concerned as they get to know his eccentric crew of friends. A dozen years later, Nathaniel begins to uncover – through reality, recollection and imagination – all he didn’t know or understand in that time.

MY YEAR OF REST AND RELAXATION

BY OTTESSA MOSHFEGH

A shocking, hilarious and strangely tender novel about a young woman’s experiment in narcotic hibernation, aided and abetted by one of the worst psychiatrists in the annals of literature. Our narrator has many advantages in life: young, pretty, a Columbia graduate, all expenses covered by her inheritance. But there is a vacuum at the heart of things, and it isn’t just the loss of her parents, or the way her boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her alleged best friend. It’s the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong?

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