New Australian Stories 2

by Aviva Tuffield

  ‘Sorry, petal. All this has to go. Clean sweep. Mummy’s gotta write.’

  ‘So you got the book deal?’ Curtis appeared in the doorway.

  ‘Yeah. Well, I signed something.’ I pulled Rosie’s finger out of her mouth.

  Over the next few weeks I learned that the greatest impediment to writing was not the children, not the television, not even the lure of the refrigerator, but the telephone. The phone calls anywhere between three and eight-thirty, from telemarketers, consumer researchers and someone offering me a free holiday if I attended their investment seminar. I couldn’t unplug the phone and I couldn’t ignore it. Sometimes I did ignore it. But after five or six rings I would give in then, after I’d growled into the phone and returned to my desk, forget what I was going to write. If Jay had been a few years older I’d have asked him to take messages. Curtis had not a clue what I was going through.

  ‘You try being creative at home,’ I told him. ‘You try pulling an entire story together and keeping the household running. And that bloody phone. What do we need one for anyway?’

  But I knew why. The third week back, still no contact.

  ‘Haven’t you already written it? Isn’t that manuscript what they contracted?’

  The ignorance of some people. ‘Duh. As if I won’t be pressured for the next one. Gotta have that ready when they want it. Besides’ — I gestured at the dog-eared folder — ‘this needs a complete rewrite.’

  One afternoon I was staring at the blank space on the screen where I had just deleted two paragraphs. They had to go but then I panicked at the sight of this big hole which needed filling in. My head felt as empty as the page before me. If I stared at it long enough maybe the words would bore through to the screen from my pupils.

  When the phone rang, for once I was grateful. Though I quickly regretted agreeing to take part in the survey.

  ‘How much of your weekly income is spent on takeaway food?’

  Instead of answering, I asked, ‘What are you reading right now?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘What book are you reading? You are reading one, aren’t you?’

  She mentioned a title I had never heard of. The author’s name sounded fake. Edwina Montgomery. Either that or she died in 1939.

  ‘Name her other titles,’ I demanded.

  ‘Return to Galaxy Red. Journey to the Edge of Time. The Starship Propheticus,’ she said. ‘Science fiction.’

  ‘Speculative fiction,’ I hissed into the phone. That much I’d learned from the conference.

  What I did not learn from the conference was why so many of these authors were stuck in the old millenniums. All those books about medieval travellers, the taming of dragons, the quests for sacred swords and magic stones and shimmering portals that transported unlikely heroes to other worlds … What did this have to do with the new millennium? When someone mentioned adult fantasy I examined these titles in the book display and, no, they were not sealed and black with R-rating stickers, though I couldn’t help imagining leather bras and purple glow-in-the-dark dildos. They were fat and colourful, the covers embossed in gold. The blurbs mentioned battles, lost jewels and magic talismans. Fiery hearts and pure minds and kingdoms and keys and ravens. I wondered what the difference was between adult fantasy and children’s. I flipped through each one, scanning the storylines. No sex. Chaste embraces. Kisses on rings or hands, when warlords met or wise men bestowed blessings. Adult fantasy seemed very innocent.

  I became obsessed with organising my time. I spent so much time planning my days I did not have time to write. I was stuck between ten (or twelve) years and six weeks. I alternately despised both Thin Nervous Poet-Novelist and Code Six, but then I knew that Thin Nervous had won two literary awards while Code Six had sold over 80,000 copies of his book.

  In ten years Thin Nervous had devoted herself to writing 26,000 words. (While at the book display I had counted them — it was easier than reading them.) That was exactly fifty words a week. But fifty words a week divided into 7.12 words each day, and how could you write a fraction of a word? And she must have written half or quarter sentences since some of her sentences were much longer than that. At what point did you divide words into fractions?

  As for Code Six, I imagined him sitting there with the clock set like Trollope and laughing at us all while running off just under three thousand words every evening after dinner. Probably all before eleven p.m., the bastard. Well, of course, being in finance he wouldn’t have to muck around with the washing-up or the kitchen floors after dinner; he could just disappear into his study. But I still wanted to know how he did it. Six weeks. Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying in six weeks, but then he cheated. One of his chapters was only five words long. My mother is a fish. If only I could write chapters like that and win the Nobel Prize.

  The phone rang. There was the familiar lag and crackle before a voice said, ‘Good morning, madam, how are you?’ but it was not a Bombay accent.

  ‘It’s afternoon.’

  ‘Oh sorry, ma’am. How are you this afternoon?’

  ‘Who is calling, please?’

  ‘I am calling from Mordern.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Mordern. Have you heard of Mordern, ma’am?’

  ‘No. Where is it?’ It sounded like a place in a fantasy saga. Perhaps Annals created it. Or Code Six. I didn’t mind, I would have liked to go there.

  But Mordern was not a place, it was a company that made roller-shutter blinds, and I said not interested, thanks, and placed the phone down as the guy was asking me to reconsider.

  How hard could it be? They were only words, after all. Not anything difficult like microbes or atomic particles. And it was not like developing a vaccine for testicular cancer or isolating the gene that causes Down syndrome. I was not meant to solve any of Fermat’s remaining theorems or even understand them. Writing a thesis on the Brahmagupta– Fibonacci identity or completing the Gold Coast triathlon or interviewing Tom Cruise or discovering a way to reverse baldness — all those things were really hard.

  What about those people who engraved pictures on grains of rice, or built entire sailing ships inside bottles? If they could do that, then I could write a second children’s story of under 30,000 words by the end of the year.

  ‘What book are you reading?’ I demanded of the person who called to sell me tickets in an art-union lottery.

  ‘Tom Clancy’s The Archimedes Effect,’ he said as if it were right beside him.

  Even so, I was a step ahead. ‘Incorrect. Are you aware that Tom Clancy did not write this book? That his name is a brand for the Net Force series?’

  ‘Ah … no.’

  ‘And that the real authors of this novel are writing under sub-licensing agreements?’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. Their names are Steve Perry and Larry Segriff.’

  ‘Oh, okay.’

  ‘Can I help you with anything else today?’

  ‘Er, no.’

  ‘Thank you for calling,’ I said before I hung up.

  I began to see my target audience. They were lashed to a frame by the ankles and wrists, while my story arrowed its way right through a bullseye painted on their chest. Shoot, shoot, shoot. I reached my target audience again and again, until they slumped on the frame, blood leaking down to pool at their feet.

  You are not a writer, said the convenor of Professionalising the Creative, if you don’t write every single day of your life. If you don’t wake up and write your dreams or make notes or plan your day’s work. I ensured that I had a notebook and sharp pencil beside the bed. When I woke up I grabbed them — but before I fixed my glasses and stopped yawning, Jay raced in and jumped on the bed, and my dream vanished like water out of a bathtub.

  PB was right. Writing sucks. Words were sly, mendacious, untrustworthy, treacherous, dirty, rotten, scheming BASTARDS OF THINGS! I hated them more than anything. I wrote and wrote and these slippery words, these stinking lousy mongrel BASTARDS, disappeared from the page si
deways, upwards, anyways. Anything but stay in place on the line, forming nice tidy sentences, one after the other. Pinning them down on the computer screen was like trying to pick up mercury with chopsticks. They rolled and slid away from me whenever I got close. I yelled at the screen. ‘I hate you I hate you I hate you I hate you!’ Why couldn’t I write my story with numbers instead?

  ‘I hate words so much!’ I told them one night, slamming the keyboard up and down on the desk. Rosie was doing well with books up until that point. I grabbed The Very Hungry Caterpillar from her hands and tossed it aside. ‘Forget it, they’ll only turn around and betray you when you’re older! Look at me, all these words around and do you think I can get a single one to make any sense?’

  She started to cry. Curtis hissed at me, ‘Grow up, why don’t you! You’re only trying to write, for god’s sake, not trying to solve the riddle of the fucking phoenix.’

  ‘But I have a deadline,’ I wailed as he slammed the door to the kids’ room in my face.

  ‘Whatever.’

  ‘And it’s sphinx,’ I said. ‘It’s the riddle of the sphinx.’

  Thank you for attending the Writing the Millennium Conference. Please note the conditions for the submission of manuscripts:

  The date of final submission is not negotiable.

  Manuscripts received after this date will not be considered.

  Manuscripts must be hard copy and not emailed.

  Please indicate by return email if you will be complying with these conditions.

  No, it didn’t sound like a contract. Curtis used the same email address. I printed the email out, then deleted it, then hid the printed email between the pages of a second-hand copy of Gone with the Wind.

  ‘No distractions!’ I announced. ‘No distractions until I’ve finished my final draft.’ I listed all the things I wouldn’t do: the ironing, picking up toys, making beds, changing the sheets unless it was absolutely essential. Within a week I refined my list: no more washing, shopping, cooking anything. I looked in the cupboards. There was plenty of tinned food, cereal, rice, instant noodles, packets of biscuits. We had enough food to last for months. Millions of people in other countries lived off barley soup and plain rice; so could we.

  One evening Curtis came home to find Jay feeding Rosie peanut butter on stale Mini-Toasts while I gazed at the computer screen and scratched at my dandruff.

  ‘I’m going to the supermarket for fresh food,’ he said, picking Rosie up as if she needed an emergency infusion of green vegetables. As an afterthought he asked if I needed anything.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, deleting the ninth sentence for the last half-hour. ‘I need adjectives. Bring me some nice fresh adjectives.’

  He shut the door.

  ‘No, make that verbs,’ I called out.

  I had a deadline.

  ‘You make it sound like something bad,’ said Curtis, he heard it so much.

  But it was bad. How could something called deadline be good? Pages and pages of prose, and what for but a deadline. As if their fate was to be killed, victims of some distant war. All those words, tens of thousands of them. The infantry of prose, the front line. How could I have hated them so much? Poor little soldiers, lying flat and lifeless on the line, their letters dripping off the pages, clotting and staining everything beneath. I would have felt more sorry for them if I hadn’t been so worried about my manuscript. Maybe those dead lines could join my target audience, shot through the head, the heart, left to bleed out there somewhere, under the pitiless sun. In the mud. On the beach.

  ‘What an imagination,’ he said.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘It’s not a compliment.’

  One day Annals materialised beside me at the washbasins in the women’s toilets. We rinsed and shook our hands in unison. She leaned over the basin to inspect her perfect face in front of the mirror. Her hair fell forward in a silent swoosh then rippled over her shoulders and down her back when she stood straight again. The water wound down the plughole, as if reluctant to leave her.

  Please note the following additional conditions:

  Authors whose work is accepted will be contacted by telephone.

  We are unable to provide feedback to unsuccessful authors.

  The editorial team’s decision will be final.

  No correspondence will be entered into.

  Curtis would never think to open the pages of Gone with the Wind.

  Reckless, Susceptible

  A.G. MCNEIL

  Years ago, when I was a young boy, I went through this phase during which I was fascinated by animals. I insisted on having animal-themed bedsheets and pyjamas. My room was filled with stacks of books about animals, photographs of me in front of various enclosures at the zoo, rubber birds strung from the roof in formations, that sort of thing.

  I cherished a collection of plastic animals — sixty-two at last count — which I would arrange on the dining-room table. I imagined them in congress, discussing the fate of their kingdom.

  My older brother, James, tried to paint a kind of jungle scene on the ceiling just above my bed. He lacked basic technique and understanding of colour. None of his creatures was recognisable. Still, I knew that science was always discovering new species, so I thought of those strange, deformed beasts as inhabitants of some exotic island. They talked among themselves as well, I fancied.

  One day I overheard James talking to my mother in the next room. His voice was muted by the walls and so mostly indistinct, but I was able to make out a few sentences.

  ‘You are right though,’ he said. ‘The animal thing is a bit weird. Childish.’

  Mixed with my distress, I think, was the unsettling realisation that my brother was an adult. And that adults had meetings of their own, in which my fate was discussed.

  The following day — this is the most vivid of my early memories — I took my collection out to the swimming pool in the backyard. Ribbons of sunlight played in the water, forming spirals and separating.

  I set about the business of drowning my animals. I was systematic. Their deaths were unspectacular. I wouldn’t have them struggle. Instead I held each one just below the water’s surface, counted to ten, then added it to the terrible little pile beside me, as if I was flash-frying them. Their expressions didn’t change. Tigers and sheep alike went to death without protest. It occurred to me that they might have been prepared for this day. I thought them noble.

  I had all of this in mind as I was running a bath recently. I was examining a small, four-legged wooden carving that had just arrived by express post. I turned it in my fingers.

  The hot water coming from the tap was a flawless white column. Steam was starting to cloud the mirror by imperceptible degrees.

  I’d woken up late in the afternoon, having slept for only a few hours, and was feeling the residual effects of a bottle of wine as a sort of thready, nauseous guilt. I’d fallen asleep watching an old horror film, and at some point the disc had reverted to the menu screen, so it was looping one brutish soundbite. I set the carving down beside the sink and went into the lounge room to switch off the television.

  There was a newspaper dismembered on the coffee table. The cryptic crossword had been solved. The solutions were written in my handwriting. I read the first clue, then my answer, but was unable to follow the logic. On the floor beside the couch was an empty wine bottle. It wasn’t the bottle I remembered opening. It was much nicer. I stared at it for a while, reasoning with the thing.

  At length a sequence of images came to mind, none fully formed. I remembered being down in the garage and struggling to unlock the lattice door that leads into the space below the house, then crawling past stacks of firewood and rusted bicycle parts, over to the boxes of wine that my girlfriend’s father had stored there years ago.

  My girlfriend, Jess, she’d been in Bangkok for several weeks. She was studying aquaculture, conducting experiments with barramundi.

  Back in the bathroom, as the water pooled at one end of the old bat
htub, two or three chips of paint came away from the metal and drifted to the edge like snowflakes.

  That my short-term memory was poor was no revelation. It had been steadily worsening.

  Also beside the sink was the portable phone and a book of poetry by Aleksandr Pushkin, the Russian poet. For four years I’d been writing a thesis on Russian literature. I was still a long way from finishing. I gazed momentarily at the frosted-glass window and could just discern the outline of the garden outside — some plants animated by the wind, some melted colours.

  I undressed. Then, as I eased into the water, the phone rang. It was Jess.

  The line was pretty bad. Her voice had an ethereal quality. ‘They’re dead,’ she said.

  ‘Who?’ I slid down in the tub so that everything but my face and hands was submerged. I always pictured her there in long rubber boots, a numb choir of industrial filters going in the background.

  ‘My fish.’ She sighed loudly.

  I frowned and held the phone away from my ear. She was probably pressing her palm against her forehead.

  ‘… just such a waste of time,’ she said.

  The line was cutting out intermittently. I reached for my book, trying to open it and hold it at a reasonable angle with my free hand. She was waiting for me to say something.

  ‘So, you didn’t get any results or whatever?’

  She sniffed. I decided against asking her to hold the phone away from her face when making those kinds of noises. ‘We didn’t even get that far,’ she said. ‘It’s only a few days since we’ve even been able to see them.’

  I waited before saying: ‘What?’

  ‘It isn’t important now. They’re basically invisible until the fourth week. The larvae. They’re less than one millimetre long and they’re translucent. We don’t really even know if they’ve spawned or not. But we still have to feed them.’