My god, she thought, you’re not even middle-aged! Sometimes when you catch the look of someone on the train you even dare to think you are still young. You’ve been a good wife, mother; nothing yet has come along to knock you off the straight and narrow. When you watch the news it is not to despair at the state of the world and get all upset but to congratulate yourself on living as you do where such things can never happen. You care, of course you care—truth be told, caring’s made you what you are. But you prefer to care about the things you can change, not those remote and alien you can’t. And let’s not forget that what you do care about you care about deeply, maybe too deeply—in fact, you’re not beyond worrying yourself sick. So if you are to be judged, and maybe you are, then let the judgment happen with this in mind.
The letter lay beside her; she reached for the phone and dialled. A young woman answered. Beth told her how she wasn’t able to get in to her usual doctor so her husband had rung the locum. The locum had come and written a referral. Beth Own? said the woman. Yes, said Beth. We’re expecting you, said the woman, you should be here by now.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Peter Cochrane’s Simpson and the Donkey: The Making of a Legend (MUP, 1992) was an initial inspiration for, and an important resource during, the writing of this book.
Thanks to Kevin Pearson at Black Pepper for his early support and to Melanie Ostell for her help in guiding the text to its final incarnation. An earlier, much shorter version of this story appeared in Westerly, Vol. 46, November 2001.
Also by Wayne Macauley
The Cook
Blueprints for a Barbed-Wire Canoe
Caravan Story
Some Tests
Simpson Returns
Wayne Macauley is the author of the acclaimed novels Some Tests, Demons, The Cook, Caravan Story and Blueprints for a Barbed-Wire Canoe. He has been shortlisted for a Victorian Premier’s Literary Award (twice), a Western Australian Premier’s Book Award, a Queensland Premier’s Literary Award, the Melbourne Prize for Literature’s Best Writing Award and an Adelaide Festival Award for Literature. He lives in Melbourne.
waynemacauley.com
‘Wayne Macauley is an Australian original. He writes in a tradition of dystopian satire—associated most famously with George Orwell’s 1984 or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World—but in a stripped-back and absurdist style. His work is a mixture of Jonathan Swift, Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka and J. M. Coetzee (in allegorical mode), though Macauley’s fictional worlds are always set in Melbourne or greater Victoria. The meaning or relevance of his dystopian satires are to be found locally too, in our country’s follies.’
Saturday Paper
‘Macauley has published some of the most memorable fiction going in this country. His books and stories are satirical fables in which the properties are recognisably contemporary and Australian…His narratives [can] take off into the bizarre without ever losing their cool.’
Age
‘He makes readers feel uncomfortable, unsettled in the everyday; one emerges from his books freshly uncertain.’
Lifted Brow
‘Macauley has a nose for exposing the zeitgeist.’
Australian
‘A writer always worth reading.’
Sydney Morning Herald
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Copyright © Wayne Macauley, 2019
The moral right of Wayne Macauley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.
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Published by The Text Publishing Company, 2019
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ISBN: 9781925773507 (paperback)
ISBN: 9781925774313 (ebook)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia.
Simpson Returns Page 10