Portable Curiosities

by Julie Koh

  ‘Am I losing my mind?’ I ask. ‘Do you understand what I’m saying?’

  ‘Og og quog og,’ she says, adjusting her sari and refreshing her lipstick.

  ‘Shit,’ I say. ‘My life is over.’

  She smiles at me in the mirror. ‘Kidding.’

  I smile back. She has the most beautiful face in the world.

  ‘But,’ she adds, ‘you should stop telling people about Jack and Judy.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘At least Jiao’s real, right?’

  ‘You’re all real.’

  In bed, I watch a documentary on my laptop about women who are extremely fat, and deliberately continue to make themselves bigger. Many have skinny romantic partners who become their ‘feeders’. The feeders enjoy feeding their women to fatten them up.

  Men make appointments to spend time with these women, just so the women will sit on them.

  It’s a smart idea. There are a few people out there whom I’d be happy to crush, especially if they paid for it.

  When the documentary is over, I lie down and look into the very core of my nature. I discover that I am simultaneously extremely ambitious and extremely lazy. It becomes apparent to me that an ambition appropriate to this core nature is to be the fattest person that ever lived, and to achieve this by being too lazy to exercise.

  So I eat. I fatten myself up like a Wagyu cow.

  Each roll of fat gets bigger and bigger until it rolls over the previous roll, grows downwards, and puts down roots.

  My rolls spread out over the front yard and the whole apartment block.

  I work harder at eating and soon the rolls extend across the country. Kangaroos hop across my knees. Black cockatoos make their nests in the crooks of my elbows. Koalas climb up and hug themselves around my pinkie fingers.

  I can see how big I’m getting relative to the people who come around to visit. They lift up my arm fat and pop under it and say hello.

  They’re all so small that I have to squint to see them. Although they start out chatting to me in an upbeat mood, every one of them ends up lamenting my weight. It’s like someone’s died. Their tears form puddles around my ankles. Platypuses paddle in the salt water.

  I continue to expand in ever-multiplying concentric rings of fat, which move outwards across the world. Soon there is no more room for oceans, let alone tears. I am one big beach.

  I begin to grow extra limbs and heads and breasts. Nevertheless, my Paunch to Penis Ratio remains nil.

  I have so many fingers and arms and legs and necks now, that I am able to wear truckloads of statement jewellery. I adorn myself with malachite and onyx, moss agate and lapis lazuli, citrine and smoky quartz. My jewellery becomes beautiful armour.

  I become the face of Fat Chanel, and they send a team of photographers to shoot me from every angle. They do so even though they’re in the middle of a stressful trade mark dispute over the unauthorised use of the Chanel name.

  I wear a backless dress for the key promo shot. The dress is also frontless, shoulderless and arseless.

  They build a white temple to contain me. The walls are made of square panels that interlock in an ingenious way, so that new sections of wall can be added easily as I expand.

  I grow faster than the little people can build the walls.

  Around the temple, under an orange sky, a field of yellow peonies springs up.

  Millions of ant-sized people pick the peonies and bring them to me as offerings. They lay them at my feet. They are here to get my blessing – for their newborns and marriages and assorted happy occasions – because I have become a goddess who doesn’t care about shit, and people really respond to that.

  I gather up all the tiny worshippers and their fragile peonies. I pick up all the people I love and the people I hate – Jack and Judy, and Jiao and the Paunch, and Tom and Eric, and my mother and her vampire, and my friend with the beautiful face, and all the little women with their rattling bangles and words I don’t understand.

  I wrap my fat arms around all of these little people, and hug them to my breast. I drug them with a lullaby, and nurse them all to sleep.

  Snow begins to fall.

  In their dreams, the little people call out to me. They call me the Goddess of Mercy.

  Because I can nurse them or I can crush them, and the power is all mine.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to my parents and sister, unwavering sources of love and support.

  Particular thanks to my kind and incredibly gifted editor, Ian See, who made this book happen. ‘Sight’ is dedicated to him.

  Thanks to Madonna Duffy, Rachel Crawford, Lucille Cruise-Burns and everyone at UQP, for bringing me in from the wilderness. To Josh Durham, for his crazy cool cover design. To Amanda Lohrey, for her generosity and guidance.

  Thanks to the first editors and publishers of stories in this collection, especially Louise Swinn and Zoe Dattner of Sleepers Publishing, who put me on the literary map in Australia. Thanks also to Sam Cooney and Johannes Jakob at The Lifted Brow; Kalinda Ashton; Suzanne Kamata at Kyoto Journal; Emily Stewart, Alice Grundy and David M Henley at Seizure; The Best Australian Stories team at Black Inc.; and Khairani Barokka, Ng Yi-Sheng, Amir Muhammad and the Fixi Novo team. A wink and salute to Matt Huynh and Gee Hale, who illustrated a number of these stories when they were first published.

  If you hate my wild slash bland writing, attribute partial blame to schoolteachers of mine who nurtured it in its infancy – including Greig “Grobbo” Robinson, Annette Wright, Diane Alchin, Matthew Wood, Eleni Tatsis, Jan Roberts and Barbara Stone. Lay some additional blame on my writing teacher, Dr Stephen Carver, to whom ‘Inquiry Regarding the Recent Goings-On in the Woods’ is dedicated.

  My gratitude extends to the following people for their encouragement and support during the transition from law to fiction, and in relation to this book: Jiao Chen, Tara Sarathy, Alexandra Marie Brown, Michael Camilleri, Gary Lo, Brett Millar, Eric Yoshiaki Dando, Andrew McGovern, Jane Chi Hyun Park, HK Tang, Anna Zhu, Alison Cole, Dave Smith, Philip Amos, Grant Scicluna, Bethany Bruce, Donna Chang, Xin Li, Stephanie Han, Tom Cho, Tash Aw, Haline Ly, Jacqui Dent, Vasudha Srinivasan, Suchitra Krishnan, Clem Cairns, Dr Kevin Walton, Geoff Orton, Laurie Steed, Luke Thomas, Daniel Young, John Fenech, Elisabeth Kramer, Tiffany Tsao, Kenny Leck, Renée Ting, Jon Gresham, Karma Chahine, Nicola O’Shea, Natalie Kestecher, Alex Adsett, Bridget Lutherborrow, Tara Cartland, Darby Hudson, Pierz Newton-John, the Betts family, John Bell and Ben Wood, Jack and Judy. I’d also like to thank Andrew and Patricia Su, Hagen Bluhm, Chua Boon Ching, Angie Lee and my extended family, as well as Todd Hodgson, Eronnie Samuels, Oskar Henning, Andrew Nott, Mouse Maroney and the gang at Soundworks Studios.

  Many more people have crossed my path than are listed here. Thanks to those who’ve believed in my writing, and have done their best to help me on my way.

  Publication details

  ‘Sight’, Kyoto Journal, Issue 80, 2014.

  ‘Civility Place’, The Sleepers Almanac No. 9, eds Louise Swinn and Zoe Dattner, Sleepers Publishing, 2014; and The Best Australian Stories 2014, ed. Amanda Lohrey, Black Inc., 2014.

  ‘The Three-Dimensional Yellow Man’, The Lifted Brow Digital Edition, Volume 5 Issue 1, 2014.

  ‘Two’, The Sleepers Almanac No. 8, eds Zoe Dattner and Louise Swinn, Sleepers Publishing, 2013.

  ‘The Procession’, HEAT, eds Khairani Barokka and Ng Yi-Sheng, Fixi Novo, 2016.

  ‘The Sister Company’, Seizure Online: Editions, Edition 1, 2015.

  ‘The Fat Girl in History’, The Sleepers Almanac X, eds Zoe Dattner and Louise Swinn, Sleepers Publishing, 2015.

  First published 2016 by University of Queensland Press

  PO Box 6042, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia

  www.uqp.com.au

  uqp@uqp.uq.edu.au

  © Julie Koh 2016

  This book is copyright. Except for private study, research, criticism or reviews, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this b
ook may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.

  Cover design and illustration by Josh Durham, Design by Committee Author photograph by Hugh Stewart

  Typeset in 11/15 pt Bembo Std Regular by Post Pre-press Group, Brisbane

  The epigraph to ‘Two’ was transcribed by the author from an interview that Michael Cunningham gave at the Sydney Writers’ Festival on 22 May 2011.

  This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication data is available at http://catalogue.nla.gov.au

  ISBN

  9780702254048 (pbk)

  9780702257209 (ePDF)

  9780702257216 (ePub)

  9780702257223 (Kindle)

  University of Queensland Press uses papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The logging and manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.