The Best Australian Essays 2017

by Anna Goldsworthy

  I tell myself quietly so nobody can hear – Floraville choreographed the day. I would have liked to choreograph dances but my feet got in the way. I have a slight lameness that trips me up when I walk, and sends me flying when I dance. It’s an awkwardness B. is rather fond of, but I guess it gets in the way of other forms of imagining. Floraville didn’t have this problem. She had long, elegant, yellow toes, and always landed on her feet. She and her sisters performed the prettiest ballet when the pot of white begonias standing at the kitchen door came into flower. They could hear music, I’m sure, as they rhythmically rose and fell, as one by one each chook lifted her bottom from the ground, feet falling away below her, as she plucked a single flower from the stem, and then the elegance of that feathery plummet, a single white begonia in the beak. Always in turn, always in time, until the plant had lost all its flowers, and the dance was done.

  I could tell many stories about Floraville but I doubt the world has heart enough to allow a chook much narrativisation, unless, of course, it is a chook in a children’s story: then it is allowed a certain goosiness. Goosy, I think, is the right word. Even now, as I march towards sixty, I still have that same goosy look, that same goosy walk, calling out for a fox to sniff me out.

  Florrie has had enough of the melodrama of the dead chooks and wants to get back to packing. I have to be at the airport in three hours, she says, as I fuss over what to do with the feathers. There are so many of them milling around the garden, and the neighbour’s dog is sniffing out bits that B. has missed.

  *

  There was nothing goosy about the doll Fleurville. Finely coiffed, her floral dress trimmed with a fine lace petticoat, she was as elegant as the red and gold books that gave her her name. Hachette’s La Bibliothèque rose illustrée with their red covers and gold lettering – how children must have loved to line them up on the mantelpiece.

  Fleurville the doll always belonged in a story, belonged to story, for hundreds of pages have been written on the world of Fleurville and the unnamed doll that begins the Comtesse de Ségur’s (1799–1874) famous and much loved trilogy. Book One of La trilogie de Fleurville, Les malheurs de Sophie, begins with the doll’s arrival, a gift to Sophie from her father. The doll is beautiful – la plus jolie poupée qu’elle eût jamais vue. And, as one might expect of a doll whose beauty cries out for a smacking, she ends up in pieces in a box. Perhaps if I had given more thought to the fate of the doll in The Fleurville Trilogy (the doll starts to decompose from the moment she falls into Sophie’s clutches), I might have named my Fleurville differently, or even left her in peace, in pieces in her box. But I’m forgetting how it was back then, my belly blossoming with Florence and salvation in reach, something I could arrive at, if only I stared down the nursery world and its demons.

  On the first day of her new life in the world of Fleurville, Sophie leaves the wax doll in the sun and her sparkling blue eyes are lost inside her head. Putting things to rights, Sophie’s mother decapitates the doll, plucks out the missing eyes with a long pair of tweezers, and then glues them back into the doll’s head with molten wax. Then Sophie gives her a bath, scouring her so furiously that she scrubs off her face. The doll’s hair is lost to a hot iron and curling wraps. Hung from a tree, her arms become disjointed and deformed, one permanently shorter than the other. Next, in yet more maternal solicitude, Sophie boils her feet off, until beauty disarmed, the doll becomes simply ridiculous. Only death can release her from further humiliation, and this arrives blessedly in a coup de grâce that leaves her shattered in pieces at the foot of a tree. But it’s not over. The children bury her at the bottom of the garden in a box dressed in pink ribbons, watering her in along with two lilacs planted on her grave. Down in the dark soil, the broken doll in the pretty sateen box is becoming mud. If only they had another doll to break, the children lament, then they could have another funeral.

  One can’t imagine, when you read those first pages of The Fleurville Trilogy, that Sophie the doll killer will end up sharing the doll’s fate. She slices up goldfish, feeds her pet chicken to a vulture, drowns a turtle, decapitates bees, bludgeons a squirrel to death, spikes a pin through a donkey’s hoof and then beats it with a holly branch. Readers – they number in their millions – have adored these antics for generations.

  First Sophie tortures the doll, then the stepmother tortures Sophie. First Sophie decapitates, bludgeons and perforates small animals, then she is starved, stripped, striped and humiliated by her stepmother. Ségur slips it in so you barely notice. One minute the Fleurville girls are trying to rescue a family of hedgehogs from a gamekeeper, who has shot the mother and thrown the babies into a pond; the next minute Sophie is whacking one of the hedgehogs on its head to help it die faster, only to tumble into the pond herself, and then it’s her stepmother who is doing the whacking. Amid remonstrations from the good Madame de Fleurville, Sophie is beaten so furiously that the switch finally breaks, and then, with more remonstrations, she is smacked out the door. These alternations and altercations of kindness and cruelty occur with such rapidity that the reader becomes quite benumbed to them. What is at first astonishing – the slicing up of goldfish by a little girl – becomes the quite normal situation of the same girl being whipped till she bleeds.

  People imagine whipping as something significant, something of such moment that there must be at least a pause after the act, but families accommodate whipping just as they do an awkward family member. Events flow. A child is opening a present, a shoe flies through the air and hits the child, the child picks herself up, and the party goes on.

  Ségur’s noir nursery world earned her the title of Sade en Jupes, although critics leapt to her defense. Some say that first the Comtesse de Ségur’s mother tortured her daughter, and then her daughter created The Fleurville Trilogy as a form of witness to the brutality of her own childhood. Others counter that Ségur’s fascination with the spectacle of children being smacked is repeated with such excess that Ségur was clearly enthralled by the spectacle of her own childhood beatings. The bared bottom, the raised switch, the loving hand that strikes and stripes had become a fantasy she couldn’t help repeating. In one of her tales, Jacques Laurent counts nineteen cases of beating and whipping in thirty pages chosen at random. Ségur never spoke of what her mother had done to her, but she recreated the humiliation again and again, and as the good Madame de Fleurville remonstrates, she ushers Sophie and all the Fleurville girls along the path of goodness. By the end of the trilogy, Sophie is truly chastened. She has left the wild girl behind and become – as all good girls must – sized down for matrimony and maternity, but she’s also left all her millions of readers with the lingering memory, as Freud wrote, of a child being beaten. Among his patients, he wrote, it was almost always the same books ‘whose contents gave a new stimulus to beating fantasies: those accessible to young people such as what was known as the “Bibliothèque Rose”’.

  That old fox Sade would have loved this oscillation between sermonising and smacking, and he would have known exactly what was afoot in the Chateau de Fleurville. Every little detail would have made him smirk, especially the poked-out doll’s eyes that are soldered back into place with melted wax. After he’d cut up the beggar woman Rose Keller, he filled the incisions he’d made in her body with Spanish wax, and then claimed in court that it was just a balm to help her heal. Sade knew how to dress up dirty acts, but he let slip his outrage that a court would pay such heed ‘to a swished tart’s backside’. In Florville et Courvalle, Sade created his own Florville, a girl of uncommon beauty who never gets swished but is torn up just the same. Sade compares Florville’s skin to a lily, her mouth to a springtime rose. This sweetness of beauty and temperament makes her ruin more delectable. She is a good girl, too, in every way, and her goodness leads her step by step into monstrosity. By the end of his tale she will have stabbed her child, slept with her brother, married her father, instigated her mother’s death, and then, on learning of her crimes, shot herself in the head without, a
s Sade writes, saying another word.

  Flesh was the old fox’s passion, and all the things he could do to it if hatred was unhooked, but he subdued his more malevolent obsessions in Florville et Courval in the hope of staying out of prison. Perhaps that is why this story is more a Sadeian nursery tale than a fully fledged Sadeian bacchanal. Unlike poor Justine in Les malheurs de la virtu, Florville is not cut up, and she keeps her identity intact until the very end of the story, where she is shattered by the revelation that every step she has taken on the path of goodness has led her deeper into the mire. In Sade’s moral universe, to be small, innocent, pretty or good is to give yourself to the strong. As Angela Carter writes of Justine, ‘when she offers her innocence to others as shyly as if she were offering a bunch of flowers, it is tramped in the mud’. Sade likes to play with flowers, awarding garlands to the vicious as he crushes the petals of gentle things. Madame de Verquin, the woman whose great joy is to lead Florville into catastrophe, dies ‘on a voluptuous bed whose lilac-coloured silk curtains were pleasantly set off by garlands of natural flowers. Every corner was adorned with bouquets of carnations, jasmine, tuberoses and roses.’ She goes to her grave happily knowing that she will be buried in a grove of jasmine and her disintegrating body will nourish the flowers she has loved. Florville dies in the throes of despair, her body contorting in a pool of her own blood.

  *

  Floraville. Fleurville. Florville. That is what I’m thinking about as I stare into the devastation of my mother’s skin blossoming crimson as she lies in a room overrun with flowers. Mum was born into a house of flowers. They were her father’s gift to her. He was a florist. As a young girl she would accompany him to the markets to buy flowers for the shop, or work with him in the back garden tending the flowers that he would cut and sell. In the Depression she walked the streets selling posies of violets to anyone with a penny to spare. She never had many stories to tell. Story belonged to Dad, who filled the house with grand tales that roamed from the Knights of the Round Table to the warlords of our ancestors to the pitched battles of our people making a stand for labour against capital. Enthralled by a story of struggle that found its verity in the daily news, I barely noticed Mum’s untold stories as they unfolded in the garden beds that ringed the house, in the earth she turned from clay to soil, in the azaleas and camellias that flowered under the windowsill, in the wisteria that crept over the front doorway, and in the embankments of grevillea, maidenhair and bush orchid that wound down the garden to the creek bed. Mum’s photograph album was a bouquet of flowers. When she came to visit me in France she collected the gardens of Europe. France was geraniums spilling over black wrought iron; England, the girl pink and boy blue of foxgloves and delphiniums; Amsterdam, a doorstep of purple roses in a green pot. By then, the garden of my childhood had been replaced by a succession of gardens, each smaller than the last, until finally my mother’s house was an apartment with a small balcony. This too she transformed into a rosary that would have honoured Flora. When I visited her, always after a long absence, she would bring me first to see the large vases standing in the hallway, then the small pots on the balcony, and finally the posies Dad gave her, which stood on her bedside table or clustered on the dressers that filled the apartment. Her news was the bouquets she had placed in the churchyard to commemorate friends passing, or the flowers she had arranged for the Sunday church service, or flowers friends brought, or the postcards of flowers they had sent. But … I am telling a story. My mother raised five children, taught generation after generation of children to read, sewed for the poor, read for the blind. In every way, she was a good woman. But still, the fox got in.

  B. is disheartened by the task of picking up the dismembered remnants of chook and he gives up on digging a grave in the hard January ground. He puts Floraville and her sisters in a plastic bag in the bin, alongside the carcass of a chicken we had eaten the night before. I fear we are all foxes, cutting up and devouring the bodies of chooks that are kept for our pleasure – from theirs. But sometimes, no matter how you circle an idea, you can’t seize it, not properly. I collect Floraville’s feathers and stand them up along the fence posts, and leave the last of the eggs in the garden commemorating her secret places. They won’t last long. Foxes like eggs and sniff them out. In time, I will find traces of her, turn up a scurf of feathers and remember our Sadeian heroine who became. I hope she stood her ground when the fox came for her, although headless, there was not much she could do as the fox rounded on her sisters. Maybe she ran around for a while as headless chooks do, but I suspect not. I hope that as her life leaked out of her in the dirt of the chook yard, she saw the fox dispatch her undefended sisters and knew him for what he was. A fox and a foe.

  But I digress. It’s time to go to the airport. Florence and I drive down the hill and wend our way through the city. I try not to let her see my devastation but I keep running out of air, my words faltering before they reach her. I don’t know how I could have imagined that Flores might be allowed her freedom. But now I have to leave it to Florence to keep us on track. Turn right! she says. That’s the road. No! That way. I do what I am told. At the departure gate, she turns to me and says, it’s as if you think the worst thing that’s happened is the death of the chooks. And then she leaves me – once again in the daisy chain of mothers and daughters.

  Salt Blood

  Michael Adams

  There are no words that fit tragedy. Nothing we can say. We do not want to be told everything is all right. It is not.

  —Patrick Holland, ‘Silent Plains’ (2014)

  Its constituents are – everything.

  —Victor Hugo, Toilers of the Sea (1866)

  It is quiet and cool and dark blue. At this depth the pressure on my body is double what it is at the surface: my heartbeat has slowed, blood has started to withdraw from my extremities and move into the space my compressed lungs have created. I am ten metres underwater on a breath-hold dive, suspended at the point of neutral buoyancy where the weight of the water above cancels my body’s natural flotation. I turn head down, straighten my body, kick gently, and begin to fall with the unimpeded gravitational pull to the heart of the earth.

  Freediving, or breath-hold diving, forms a relationship at once common and unique between humans and oceans. Commonplace because we can do it from the moment we are born (having already floated in amniotic fluid for nine months), and because many native and local cultures in coastal areas around the world have long practised breath-hold diving. But also unique because ‘extreme sport’ competitive divers are now exceeding depths of two hundred metres on a single breath, and there are divers able to hold their breath underwater for more than eleven minutes. Freediving is both liminal and transgressive, taking place in a zone where few humans venture, and subverting norms about perceived natural boundaries. The practice of freediving mobilises what has been called the most powerful autonomic reflex known in the human body: the mammalian dive response.

  While I have been a casual spearfisher for many years, I have only recently engaged with freediving in its contemporary expression. My first time freediving, I trained with divers from a centre in Bali. A small group of us spent the mornings alternating between dive theory and yoga practice, and the afternoons diving and talking. My instructors were Matt and Patrick, and my diving partner was Yvonne, young, German-born, with degrees in journalism and American studies, and working locally as a scuba instructor. She had clearly spent a lot of time in the ocean, whereas for me it was never a profession or even an intense hobby.

  On the north-east coast of Bali, Jemeluk Bay is wide and peaceful, sheltered from prevailing weather patterns, and lined with small fishing villages. The volcano Gunung Agung, the most sacred mountain in Bali, rises above the bay. The bathymetric chart highlights the continuity of the volcano’s slope deep into the ocean, depth falling away quickly from shore. We dive among the moored fishing boats, using a system of buoys and weights to establish guide lines into the depths. In the water, with one
hand loosely on the line to keep myself oriented, I ‘breathe up’, building the oxygen stores in my body. Visibility is about ten metres, then light disappears into milky blue darkness as I turn and dive. The white guide rope drifts past my mask until I reach the depth plate and pause, consciously relaxing my body, emptying my mind. I watch this world, bubbles float slowly upwards, jellyfish drift past, the sun is a diffuse white ball on the surface. It is distinctly different – thicker, darker, slower, heavier, more silent, and here I do not breathe.

  As I fin back up, there is a burst of flickering light as a shoal of tiny blue fish hurtle through sunbeams at the surface. Head above water, there are distant sounds of the ubiquitous Balinese cocks, faint sounds from motor scooters. Diving again, my hearing transitions from airborne sound to waterborne sound. There is an intense crackle of snapping shrimp, fading as I go deeper. Faint sounds of women singing and the thrum of an outboard motor indicate a fishing boat passing nearby. After a few dives I start to close my eyes, removing the usual visual dominance to instead just listen and feel.

  Two key aspects in freediving are equalisation, adjusting the pressure inside your ears to compensate for the increased pressure outside the eardrum that the water exerts with increasing depth; and responding to the urge to breathe, your body telling you insistently that you should breathe again, very soon, followed by involuntary spasms of your diaphragm, trying to make you breathe. Yvonne and I are both good at dealing with the urge to breathe, but we are not successfully equalising, and repeatedly have to turn back at ten metres, unable to eliminate the pain in our ears. I find this incredibly frustrating, and my diving ability declines as I become more tired and tense. Equalising is psychological as well as physical – taking down the walls of protection is difficult.