First published in 2020 by
UWA Publishing
Crawley, Western Australia 6009
www.uwap.uwa.edu.au
UWAP is an imprint of UWA Publishing,
a division of The University of Western Australia.
This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.
Copyright © Meaghan Delahunt 2020
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
ISBN: 978-1-76080-126-7
Design by Alissa Dinallo
Printed by McPherson’s Printing Group
Permissions to quote from the following are gratefully acknowledged:
Le Guin, Ursula, K. (1983) A Left-Handed Commencement Address, Mills College 1983
https://www.ursulakleguin.com/speeches
Rankine, Claudia, (2015) Citizen: An American Lyric, enguin Books, London, UK
Also by Meaghan Delahunt
IN THE BLUE HOUSE
THE RED BOOK
TO THE ISLAND
GRETA GARBO’S FEET & OTHER STORIES
Non-Fiction
THE ARTIST & NATIONALITY
Meaghan Delahunt was born in Melbourne. Since 1992 she has lived in Edinburgh, Scotland. In 1997 she won the Flamingo/HQ National Short Story Prize ( Australia). Her work has attracted critical acclaim and been widely translated and anthologised. Awards for her work include: a regional Commonwealth Prize; a Saltire Award, a Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award and a nomination for the Orange Prize. She has also been shortlisted for the Christina Stead Award and the NSW Premier’s Award.
For Francis
I
1
The days drew in and the men fell hard.
Not all of them fell, to be sure, not nearly enough. It was a log-roll of men down a long river and you stood on the banks, waiting, watching, taking note as they jostled for space in the water, seeming to steady, seeming to right themselves until – as sudden as it was unexpected – the plunge to the rocks below.
After this, who could go on as before? Certainly, you were changed. And what of the story? At first, you thought of a fugitive, a woman running from her past. A woman tracking the roads her life has taken. The woman is still a fugitive. But in this Time of the Felled Men she steps forward, she speaks up and this has consequences.
In this, you realise she is just like you.
There is the man who suffers and the man who writes, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot. Lucky Mr Eliot, striding to the bank, writing poems in between the ledgers. The suffering man kept separate from the writing man and in any case, there was always at least one Mrs Eliot to watch over him. But what about the woman who suffers and the woman who writes? At this particular moment, the one bleeds into the other. You’re not blessed with a stiff upper lip, cojones, or a gift for compartmentalisation. Art is not life and life is not art, but now everything starts to blur and you’ve arrived at the point where the woman who writes and the woman who suffers are not so separate. You front up to the page to confront the woman writing and the woman being written. You are living through night in your country and trying to fend off the night. Perhaps you should become a male poet? A male bank manager? Perhaps you are in need of a wife?
After W, the first man, floods past, you believe that things will be different, even in your own small life. You rake over the years. What happened back then? You listen to these other women, some famous and others not famous at all and see that it’s no longer about the one woman. No. The one voice now harmonises with the many to form a strange music. Those who hear it for the first time shake their heads and ask themselves, as if woken from a trance – why did we not hear this before? For this music is not new, it’s been playing for centuries. But it was women who sang this lament for the fallen, the outcast, the bruised – a lament for themselves – and who, down the centuries, could listen to that?
✳
2
It’s the week after The Fall of W and you’re adrift in your own memory-flood.
You write about your time in The Party: a left-wing cult. You were recruited at nineteen, in the second year of an Arts degree. The man who recruited you was a decade older and staffed the Left bookstall in the student union. At the end of third year you dropped out of the honours programme to work as a car detailer at General Motors Holden. It was the 1980s. The Party forecast a decade of revolutionary change. Party members who were students or white-collar workers were urged to go ‘deep’ into heavy industry. The industrial working class would soon take centre stage. This was the decree of Ernest Mandel – a Belgian Marxist and occasional crime novelist. Mandel was also an economist and influential within the Fourth International, to which The Party was linked. Leon Trotsky set up the Fourth International in the 1920s while in exile from Stalinist Russia, uniting all the small sects which aligned with his thinking on revolution – ‘Trotskyism’ – around the world.
You once heard Mandel give a talk when he came to town, and you remember a hippy woman in the audience – long purple skirt, hair in braids, her child on her lap. You remember that she challenged Mandel – What about women? – she asked. What about the Patriarchy? and you recall his laugh which was not a laugh and his acid response: Women’s interests are not separate from class interests. You remember all the comrades, open-mouthed, slack-jawed, outraged by her outburst – the Patriarchy, for god’s sake! – more embarrassed by the hippy woman than by Mandel’s answer and his flawed economics. Back then, as far as Party members were concerned, only man-hating radical feminists believed in the Patriarchy. It was essentially a bourgeois concept. In the socialist view, Patriarchy was emphatically not a separate system of structures and beliefs which upheld the dominance of men. Patriarchy did not cut across class, race and sexual orientation; such a system didn’t really exist. Capitalism was the enemy, not the men who benefit from it, even though it’s a Patriarchal system from which all men benefit to some degree. For sure, the benefits are not equally distributed. White, wealthy, able-bodied men were/are at the top of the pyramid. You had more in common with a working-class man than a wealthy woman, this fact was often repeated. Back then, you identified as a socialist feminist and sat through numerous talks and lectures – often delivered by socialist men – on this very topic.
Today, it is this blinkered response from The Party comrades to the hippy woman which embarrasses you. You feel that you’ve only now just taken off your own blindfold, woken up to the way the world works, the way power is distributed, the way Patriarchal dominance and racism are their own systems of oppression, which then intersect with class and other forms of power to benefit men – white men in particular. You can no longer put the blindfold back on. You keep going back to a quote you once read, but can no longer remember where you found it. The haiku simplicity of it:
once you see Patriarchy
you can’t un-see it,
for it is everywhere.
After The Fall of W, decades after the fact, in that first essay you name The Leader of The Party as a predator. He is long dead, unfortunately, but with the weight of years there’s now new language to describe old behaviours. New thinking to torch on dark subjects. A term once used to describe personal hygiene or the maintenance of pets is now applied to the slow, intentional lead-up to the abuse of women and children. This term – grooming – calls everything into question. From the minute you passed that bookstall at the university until the day you leave The Party eight years later – all of it now comes under scrutiny. You look back at your time on the Le
ft, and think that perhaps you were also groomed at a certain level. Perhaps all the young women were. And this is a new realisation and it comes as a shock. It comes as a body-blow. This term – grooming – betrays your youthful idealism. It makes it all wrong, somehow. You feel stupid, naïve, duped. You feel bad for your teenage self. You feel bad that your youthful hopes of revolutionary change, and the hopes of young women like you, were of secondary importance to certain men, who used it as a cover for access to, and abuse of, young women.
As journalist Eva Wiseman writes in the Guardian, this moment of reframing and re-evaluation is one that many women are now coming to: They look back at their experiences through this new clean lens. But inevitably that adds to a current feeling of instability and oddness …
In this same essay you write of the assault which propelled you out of The Party. It is the assault which now returns, night after night, in this Time of the Felled Men. These dreams play out on a violent loop. After the essay is published, you become highly anxious. Sleep eludes you. The grip at the throat, the head, the shoulders: the body memory of what happened. You ache in all those places again, as if time hasn’t passed and you’re back there, explaining to the police, to the doctor, to those in The Party who would listen, exactly what was done to you. The attack came from the front, you write. Something you’d never expect. After writing about this you’re adrenalised for days. You’ve sent a link to this article to several women from your past. They are ex-comrades and they do not respond.
For weeks there is no response and you find this difficult. This silence mirrors the original silence after the attack. Decades collapse inside you, as if the assault is happening now and not then. A permanent present continuous; the distinction between then and now no longer exists. It’s as if the circuits in your body have been rewired; you feel the nerves firing different colours beneath the skin. You’re alert to all physical sensations. Hypersensitive to noise and sudden movement. You are clearly not yourself. You’re slipping back into something dark, something black-iced and dangerous, and trying hard not to slip. It’s an enormous effort just to stay upright. How one thing leads to another: you find yourself back there on the street, the man standing over. The driver waiting, the engine on idle. And the fear remains of what could’ve happened. If it can happen to the I, it can certainly happen to the you. Perhaps it already has. Perhaps it will happen again. How do we stop it happening? And with the return of these dreams – the jagged, monotint dreams – you’re like a soldier reliving an ambush; an explosion which changed her life. On a nightly basis the dreams go off, rending your night sky. Thirty years after the fact you are once again a woman on a dark street with no-one to hear her.
You wait for the former comrades, the women, to respond to your essay. You resist the temptation to force agreement with your new-found view of The Party Leader, of the men involved, as if you’re all still mired in Leninism, as if the rules of democratic centralism still hold. Your desire is strong for such agreement from the women and the irony is all too clear. The desire to force agreement. You could smile at this, laugh at yourself, this dictatorial remnant from the hard Left past lying dormant in your reptilian brain, but you’re now beyond smiling or laughing. After days without sleep, all you long for is that these women from the past agree with your version of it, validate it, and save you from its fist: toe your Party line, so to speak.
During this period of waiting, you read other things. You write other things – in your journal, at the kitchen table, on the sofa, in bed before sleep. The weeks trickle past. You cannot get back to the draft on your desk because it always leads to this, always the same image: a young woman on a dark street, a car, a man running towards her.
After The Fall of W, you have what can only be described as a burst of epiphanic moments. You now realise that the men in power corralled women for The Party Leader, whether overtly or covertly, consciously or unconsciously, over an extended period of time. The Party Leader with his gold Amex card for prostitutes; the fifteen-year-old girl who once told you he tried to abuse her; it all seems so clear to you now. There is always more than one woman. And most of the women you used to know from The Party are still quiet. You understand that they must be in the midst of their own re-evaluations. It is a long and painful process, you understand that too well. You stand at the foot of the Walk, at the lights, and suddenly notice that you’re surrounded by women limping, even if they’re not physically limping, it feels as if they all bear sticks, that they all need something to lean on at this moment. The metaphorical walking wounded. But what you don’t quite understand is that the women from your past, the now-silent women from The Party must be limping too, nursing their own hurts, and that, somehow, it’s you they blame for re-opening the wound.
Two months later, eventually, one of the women, an old friend from The Party days, emails back:
But no, she protests, you could not call it grooming. They were good men, most of them, she is adamant. They did their best.
Not all of them, you counter, and not at the top.
Some of the women don’t agree with you, she writes.
Of course not, you write back. They’re still involved with those men, married to them, even.
After this exchange, you both step back, retreat, the silence deepens behind your screens, and the old friend, the ex-comrade, does not contact you again.
It must feel good to write about all this, another friend says. But, actually, you find that it doesn’t feel good. It feels the opposite of good. A catharsis implies a release. Yes, you put pen to paper. Yes, the word is out. But there is no release. You’re impatient. You’re still fucking waiting. Where is the release? The situation is this: the lines of sight are clear. The lens is wiped clean. But it feels like too much, as if looking into the noonday sun. You feel it pierce the retina and it hurts. It pains you to excavate the past like this. You feel under attack, still. People can’t respond quickly enough. No-one understands enough. You’re prickly and upset. Your mind trapezes between extremes; the I becomes you and the you becomes I and the you-I both fracture and fall. The pronouns slide. The pronouns elide. You are not being lax. I am not being lax. This is what happens. The book you’ve been writing collapses. Your mind fizzes and cannot focus. There’s a fault line which runs down the years – and not only your years – and cracks into something bigger. It sets off seismic waves beneath your feet.
This is the way the world works.
This is the way the world works.
This is the way the world works.
It does not work for women and children.
And once you see this fact, truly appreciate this, you can never un-see it. Now you see it everywhere and it is blinding, too hard to look at, the eye is burnt by such looking. Why did you not fully see it before? What shielded this fact from view? And now you’re like a small creature forced up from the deep, caught in the tsunami that follows: a creature blinking in the new light. A creature which has lost its shell.
✳
3
In the week after The Fall of W, and after your first essay is published, you meet up with several different women. Some are good friends. Some you don’t know very well. There is only one topic of conversation: The Time of the Felled Men. Because you’ve spoken up, because some have read your essay, because they know you, they feel they can confide. You become witness to a torrent of stories and at the end of that week, you tally up. These seven women are from different class, religious and ethnic backgrounds. Out of the seven, five women were abused by a family member. One was assaulted by a stranger. Your own story can be added to this list. One is a survivor of domestic violence. It’s a dark week for stories: harassment, assault, rape. A torrent of shame and guilt and anger from survivors. And it finally, fully, dawns on you: this is the majority experience. This is what it means to be a woman. The culture treats W and abusive behaviour as the exception. Each woman feels isolated within her own story.
But now, sitting around a v
ast global campfire, with the story stick passed around, women know different. These experiences are not the exception. From Sydney to Samarkand, we now know they are the rule.
You receive an email: Please know that you are not alone, the woman writes. Last year I was at a club in Edinburgh. It was in the Old Town. I’d had a few drinks and went outside for a smoke. I was dressed in a vest, a short skirt, platform heels. A bouncer came up and grabbed me, forced me up against a wall. I pushed him away, called him an arsehole, and he punched me in the face. When I hit the ground, he kicked me in the head. He kept kicking. Later, I took him to court. I appeared in court with the mark of his boot on my face, my head covered in stitches, a black eye. I had the police photos and CCTV footage to prove it, but none of it mattered. He appeared in court, grinning. He was fined £500 to be paid over three years. He is still out there. She was drunk and dressed like that, the bouncer said in his defence. You should’ve seen her.
In this climate, you decide that writing about your own past is not enough. It barely scratches the surface. You need to dig deeper.
You’ve been triggered, and yes, certainly, you want to pull the trigger. You are perhaps trigger-happy. And now, in this new period, where the light streams into corners once unlit, there is the more recent past to think about. It’s been weighing heavy. That man, X, who came to The Institution where you once worked: the Hollywood director and scriptwriter. He played a lot of golf and had friends in high places. Friends in the town. That’s how he came to The Institution, through these connections. He conducts masterclasses over the summer break. You’re informed of his hiring when you come back in the autumn. Months later, a student of yours tells you that X had a complaint against him from a fellow student. She also says, But he’s a good man, he’s been good to me, and anyway, it was only one woman. You ask a male colleague, The Professor, about all this. He says that, yes, there was an allegation, and that X will never work here again. You wonder why you had to find out this way and why none of the men you work with chose to inform you – the only woman on the writing staff that term. Not for the first time, you think that The Institution is an unsafe place for female students and staff. The Institution does not promote or protect women. He will never work here again, The Professor assures you. But that is not quite the case. A year or so later you see X’s name again. X has set up a drama workshop – a joint venture between the local theatre and The Institution. Over 70 students from The Institution and numerous schoolchildren have contact with X over a period of three or four years. By the time you find out this fact, especially about the schoolchildren, seven years have passed, you are long gone from The Institution and you think it is all too late.
The Nightside of the Country Page 1