Turn Left at Venus
Page 21
‘I saw the movie when I was a kid,’ a Twin says, ‘and I had no idea what it really was meant to make me feel but I loved that feeling. It still does that. I’m a movie person.’
‘I was dating someone who always said they came from Lueshira,’ the other Twin says. Not quite voiced but a few of them breathe in ways that are like chuckling or amused recognition of those who claim to be from Lueshira. ‘I learned the truth of, a relationship will never work if you aren’t ready to become someone else.’
‘I had to read When I Was A Woman in my Culture and Society course, and first I was like, what, and then I was like, Oh. Em. Gee.’ Sola, this must be. ‘And it changed the entire way I think, and I learned how the text creates the reader.’
Brix: ‘Someone gave me Space Traveler when I was inside. Once I got out, I became a Ligeti completist and started writing Space Traveler fanfiction. I was one of the first posters at Ligeti 21st Century.’
‘I helped produce the first podcast of Turn Left At Venus.’ Doc Diagonal in the room while in Norway. ‘I’d done my Masters on unreliable narrators, so. I was honoured to be invited to write the introduction for the ReTreat edition.’
Kay Dee: ‘When we read A. L. we think the way A. L. thinks and it makes us feel something we want more of. We honour the vision of what would happen in a world with more freedom, compassion, joy.’
A moment’s silence.
Jay now seems to be reading, someone prepared this script. ‘It’s the business of humans to treasure their makers and ancestors.
‘A. L. is one of our godparents and creators. Some might say that A. L. can’t tell us right now what their wishes are, but A. L. has always told us. A. L. trusts us to act with the right feeling in our hearts. A. L. is among our esteemed Elders and we honour them.’
Jay goes on, not reading now. ‘I didn’t know the author’s name back then. But I knew the story of The Stranger. I surely did not know that all these many years later, not saying how many, A. L. would be entrusted to my care. I think it is no coincidence and an honour.
‘We are staying we are not going with you but we are giving you the send-off you wanted.’
There is a dizzying silence as they gaze upon Ada’s still, silent body.
For the duration of some breaths
‘And now, parteee-ee-ee!’ comes the joyous call, whoops and applause, someone performing a click upon a device and with a blast of exultant noise the dance music begins to blare.
It’s their world now.
ACKNOWLDGEMENTS
These novels especially inspired and/or were the models for Ada’s novels: The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin, Memoirs of a Spacewoman by Naomi Mitchison, and The Female Man by Joanna Russ. I certainly borrowed ideas from other works, including Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke, and found useful the anthology A Woman’s Liberation: A choice of futures by and about women, edited by Connie Willis and Sheila Williams.
The following phrases from Memoirs of a Spacewoman by Naomi Mitchison (2011, Great Britain, Kennedy & Boyd, originally published in 1962) are used in Chapter Three: ‘people felt that they were being interfered with, simply because those strangers were there, observing; practiced in detachment in the face of discomfiting events, practiced in taking bizarre points of view; such a pleasure to find genuine consciousness that one does not grudge the extra time; How happy if one’s death coincides with one’s death choice!; humiliation was a necessary stage in exploration.’
A lot of this novel was written while I was employed in the Department of Western Languages and Literature at Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University, Turkey, 2014–2017.
I began work on it while staying in Antwerp at the house of Ingrid Van der Veken and Paul Goris in 2014. In 2014 and 2017, Sue Howe and Daniel de Rudder in Nîmes also provided pleasant working conditions along with the finest of company. My warmest thanks to them.
My thanks to the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation for the Sozopol Fiction Seminar 2016 (Bulgaria), where the novel’s tone and shape became clear. Thanks to all the participants and advisers there.
Thanks to the wonderful International Writers’ and Translators’ House, Ventspils, Latvia, where I could finally write very close to a complete draft in 2017.
When I returned to Australia in late 2017, various friends provided housing until I found a place of my own, and while I kept revising sentences. My thanks to Wendy Bacon and Chris Nash; Ingrid Hoffmann; David Spiller; Gina Ward and Ika Willis; Chris Woodrow; Susanne Gannon; Sharyn Brown; Michelle Rickerby and Michael Watson; Janet Reinhardt. Thanks for useful and generous readings of early drafts to Daniel Stephensen, Ika Willis and Gina Ward.
Thanks to Barry Scott at Transit Lounge, the publisher I most wanted, and to editor Kate Goldsworthy for her fine, invaluable work in the final stages.
Australian citizenship, immigrant background, transnational culture, cosmopolitan temperament. Inez Baranay was born in Naples, Italy, grew up in Sydney, Australia. She has published twelve books of fiction and non-fiction, and has lived in and taught creative writing in countries including India, Indonesia and the United States. Most recently Inez taught at the university in Canakkale, Turkey, on the shore of the Dardanelles. She now lives in Sydney.
www.inezbaranay.com