by S. J. Finn
Review of Australian Fiction, 14:5
Volume Fourteen: Issue Five
SJ Finn & John Jenkins
Zutiste, Inc.
Review of Australian Fiction, 14:5 Copyright © 2015 by Authors.
Contents
Imprint
My Diaspora SJ Finn
Her Ladyship’s Pleasure John Jenkins
Published by Review of Australian Fiction
“My Diaspora” Copyright © 2015 by SJ Finn
“Her Ladyship’s Pleasure” Copyright © 2015 by John Jenkins
www.reviewofaustralianfiction.com
My Diaspora
SJ Finn
In the middle of a football field I am having a panic attack. It is an ugly scene of goggle-eyes and flapping arms, of pursed lips and pasty-white cheeks. Sister Mary Julian runs from the boundary to help. Everyone else plays on. Ms Bradford, the umpire of this ludicrous game, keeps one eye on me and one eye on everything else. I’m making gagging noises, and appear to be choking. It’s not the first time this has happened, and despite my hopes (my scheming and past appeals) it won’t be the last.
‘If only you’d put your hands up,’ Sister Mary Julian says, gripping me, shaking against my donkey sounds. ‘So you could protect yourself.’
Mum says the people who died in Tiananmen Square were stupid. ‘We are lucky,’ she says, her neck extending like the tortoise Cory McNamara brings to school and tortures. ‘Australia is good, peaceful place.’
‘It’s full of ignoramuses,’ I shout in reply. ‘And those students in Tiananmen Square were shot for standing up. The Fallon Gong, the Uyghurs, the Tibetans! China tramples over people and calls it progress. I want to stand up, be at the frontline, rally against all that oppression.’
Today, like always when I’m on the field, I tried to keep away from the ball. But I got distracted, caught up in my thoughts. And the ball…? Well, even when I’m concentrating it’s hard to know which direction to go in to avoid it, not to mention the other players: collisions often happen.
Ms Bradford blows her whistle. ‘Out of bounds!’ Everyone turns to see Sister Mary Julian slap me sharply across the cheek. It sounds like a gunshot. I grab one full breath, and she shuffles me away towards the barrier.
‘Quon!’ she says, breathless herself now. ‘Think!’
I’m not sure what I’m supposed to think, so I watch the way her cheeks redden to match the colour of her lips.
I’m living the wrong story, I want to say. But I feel the brand of her hand hot on my face, and it reminds me of what is at stake. So I concentrate on pulling air into my chest, and I stare into her speckled eyes. Something tells me she wouldn’t understand anyway. The wrong story, dear? I imagine her saying. Whatever do you mean?
I look Chinese, but if you ask me if I feel Chinese it would be like asking me if I feel like a horse.
When I first came to this school I thought I had been transported back into the 1950s. That was when Chinese people were synonymous with lemon chicken. Or, even further back, into the 1850s when the gold rush began, and Chinese people were seen as lackeys, dirty and unworthy, fleas on the planet. Bullies took up both causes. I was spat at, birdied to, verbally abused and drawn on—thick black Texta making round circles over my slits. Once, five oval-faced boys held me against a wall, calling me the hired help and saying they’d drop their laundry off Friday and would appreciate it back—cleaned and folded—Monday. I know their words hurt more than their violence but what haunts me (the image coming back again and again) is the way they pushed my Chinese eyes together, my face squeezed almost into the shape of theirs, up against the wall of the toilet block.
Some of my Australian-Chinese friends, friends who were born in Hong Kong, say they are not Chinese. I tell them to buy a mirror and then a history book. Hong Kong is China and China is Hong Kong.
Sister Mary Julian and I sneak like two refugees into the school buildings. The game rushes on behind us.
‘Heaven help anyone who says anything.’ Sister speaks reassuringly, her warm breath evident in the cold air. ‘They know you’ll bellow back. They know!’
Kids in my class think I’m crabby. I don’t care. I want a reputation that keeps them from biting at my heels. They’ve learnt not to fire me up. It’s only on the football field I crumble, and my lungs fill with concrete.
‘Can I come up to your room?’ I ask, looking crestfallen.
‘You should go to sickbay.’
‘I want to tell you something.’
Sister’s head wobbles, and her tic—as if someone is pulling at her right cheek with a string—starts up. Her face twitches involuntarily.
‘I’ll make you a cup of tea,’ she says. ‘It won’t hurt to break the rules this once.’
When I was three, my father was killed at a level crossing somewhere in country Victoria. A train slammed into the car he was in. The two people he was with died as well. In a way I lost being Chinese then. I became a person of no origin, a person of no future. I would not fit in if I went to live in Shanghai but equally I’m a stranger here. Australia isn’t as cosmopolitan as people think.
I look around Sister Mary Julian’s room. On the walls are posters, pictures of school kids from different countries, smiling and holding hands. Under the pictures there are directions for friendship: ASK IF SOMEONE WOULD LIKE TO JOIN YOUR GROUP. SMILE TO LET SOMEONE KNOW YOU LIKE THEM.
‘Some kids could really use those hints,’ I say, knowing that kids in this school would say I should read those messages, learn from them.
When Nelson Mandela was in jail for twenty-seven years, I wonder what he did with his despair. Surely a person with such conviction would have suffered despair? But then, maybe not, maybe he was always positive, always determined to have good thoughts, even when he was asleep. That’s what I want to be like, calm but wilful.
‘Some kids are immature,’ Sister says. ‘Some kids aren’t worldly or experienced like you.’
‘Where’s my patience?’ I sing. ‘Where’s my equilibrium?’
‘No sign of it.’ Sister Mary Julian lifts her eyebrows, and pulls a face much as if she’s seen an apparition; something surprising like Jesus dressed in a football jumper, a ball in the crook of his arm.
‘There’s a kid in my class,’ I tell her, ‘called Andrew Moro. He has no idea he’s being teased. Cleverest kid in the school, and he smiles at his tormentors like they are throwing chocolate treats to him.’
Sister is settled back now, her eyes glazed over. ‘Brains,’ she says as if everything is already known between us, ‘there’s never one brand!’
‘He’s in another world,’ I say. ‘It’s the same with the teachers. “That’s called the pecking order,” they told me when I spoke to them about Andrew. “He’ll sort it out.” And when I said, “What if he doesn’t?” they said, “You tell him to come to us.”’
I can say things like that to Sister Mary Julian. She thinks I have a special window open to me that is rare among people. For instance, she told me once, ‘Most kids have trouble seeing past their day-to-day lives. But not you! You see the bigger picture.’
‘They have no idea what’s going on in the world,’ I’d added. ‘I should feel compassion for them, but they disgust me with their uninformed remarks.’
Now, though, I say nothing, and look into my cup. There’s a circle of rainbow colours on the top of my tea like an oil spot. I add to my story, In the middle of the football field I am having a panic attack… And then I think of something, something that might be helpful.
‘I doubt the principal will pardon me from sport altogether,’ I tell her, ‘even though I think I have t
he right. But I was wondering, Sister, if you came with me, it might make him more open to the idea. I’m happy to do the talking.’
I say this last thing because I know that Sister’s presence will give credence to my request even if she just stands there wringing her hands and twitching her Godly tic. Her attendance—just doing what she does—would be better than anything she or I could say.
She contemplates this, says, ‘Are you prepared to tell him everything? The whole truth?’
My eyes narrow and I feel my chest tighten. I’m wondering if I’ve missed something. Even the fact that I’m sitting here asking myself this, disturbs me.
I stand up, put my cup on the table. The tea looks thin and weak and unappetising anyway. ‘If you think I should,’ I say. ‘But right now I’m going to go to sickbay and lie down. I feel like I could faint.’ And I guess because it isn’t the first time this sort of meeting has ended in exactly this sort of way, she lets me leave without further words.
I walk past sickbay though, past reception and through the fancy electronic doors at the front of the school. I amble away, down a few streets to the train station to sit on the platform and watch for trains; to contemplate the force one would pack if it hit a car. But my mind wanders, gets back to its mainstay, which is all about what’s going on in China, the way it looks like the future already, the way it jangles with life and the young people seem so at home, so in their own skin and full of what’s to come. And then there are the appalling things, the things they don’t see from the inside, the things they could change if they tried, to make it the best nation in the world, bigger and better than America, more exciting than Dubai. But I’m stuck here; stuck in middle-class mediocrity and ambivalence, in ignorance at the bottom of the world!
And I begin all over again, repeat my whole wrong story silently to myself, stopping and pondering on the bit I’ve just now added…
Sister Mary Julian would like me to tell the whole truth, which is closer to a dissertation than a fact or a piece of actual news. This whole truth entails me expounding on the subject of good and bad crossing paths. And, when they do, when good and bad collide head-on, it doesn’t equate to them cancelling each other out. On the contrary, they often happily stand side by side, laughing at each other, dancing in and out of each other’s way. It’s a bit like a ball that becomes a dangerous missile when it’s meant to be part of a game… Yes, just like that…
Her Ladyship’s Pleasure
John Jenkins
Mr Scrivener sat atop a very high wooden chair, peering down into the light of several candles burning at his capacious writing desk, upon which lay open—and inclined at an angle of forty degrees—an equally capacious, bronze-hinged ledger.
Absorbed in his sums, Mr Scrivener did not see Lady Bamforth, nor hear this beautiful and impressive woman enter his dingy chamber, or he would have ceased talking indiscreetly to himself, all the while blowing dust from the book’s open pages, thus covering his glasses and further obscuring his view, as he fought against astigmatism, insufficient light and his habitual bad humour.
‘I will whip you, my young clerk,’ he muttered now to himself, spying an incorrect entry in another’s hurried hand. ‘Two shillings indeed for a pair of fine leather boots; why I tell you, lad…!’ At which point, Lady Bamforth, becoming somewhat impatient with her old actuary’s deafness, after already coughing discreetly three times, not to mention tiring of hearing him talk to someone who wasn’t there, while clearly insensible to one who was, took up her parasol and was just about to tap it loudly on a pile of cobweb-bound documents, when Mr Scrivener at last glanced up.
His attention thus secured, Lady Bamforth smiled as sweetly as circumstances allowed, and wondered what to say next, though with an annoying realisation that it was out of character for her to be anything less than effortlessly in command of any situation—yet she now stood entirely dumbfounded.
Glancing aside for a second, her singular recourse was to cheat, but only just a little, by consulting a page of text etched in blue light, which immediately displayed, seemingly at her direct will, in the air above the old man’s balding head.
Mr Scrivener, meanwhile—before he was able to address his clearly unexpected visitor with due attention and formality—meanwhile remained frozen in a partial attempt to raise himself from his seat, half leaning forwards into space, as if defiantly challenging gravity, and with a hand poised to return an ink-smeared quill to the commodious inkpot by his side.
Glancing back from the blue-lit prompt, which obligingly disappeared, ‘Lady Bamforth’ once again regained her complete composure.
She had successfully negotiated Chapters One and Two, enjoying the plot developments thus far, and particularly her own elevated role in the somewhat contrived—though still highly absorbing—classic narrative adaptation that had begun to unfold, all the while taking an interest in the elaborate Victorian fashions, and noting too the place of women and the centrality of class in Victorian England… admiring too the genius of author Dickens (here, digitally analysed, reconstructed and extended) for always being able to keep so much lively material in play, including place, time, atmosphere, and his deftly nested stories, not to mention vivid evocations of character.
This particular scene now fell into place for her, and she immediately grasped its import. Just as the clever prompt had outlined for her, Mr Scrivener would very shortly, though somewhat inadvertently, reveal to her a well-hidden family secret: concerning a truly disgraceful episode in the life of her own father, the late Sir Percy Bamforth.
This development would lead to her eventual discovery, in Chapter Four, of the disturbing history of a certain Mr Tipps (stable master lately employed by members of her exclusive London circle, the Pembrokes) a man from the lower orders with whom, despite insurmountable barriers of birth and position, she had unaccountably felt an immediate and curious affinity. This was when Tipps, during a recent visit one beautiful spring morning, had saddled her grey pony for a pleasure ride across the Pembrokes’ country estate.
Her uncanny sense of kinship would, indeed, be revealed to be his noble blood calling out to her own—calling across years of separation—as Tipps was actually her illegitimate brother, though of course unbeknown to him… and with many juicy plot developments besides… all revealed, and with considerable dramatic fanfare, in the chapter she was just about to enter.
Sufficiently apprised and now sure of her ground, she allowed Mr Scrivener to fully re-awaken to animated life, with the old man adjusting his preoccupied face respectfully towards Lady Bamforth.
“Your ladyship…!” he gasped.
But she had already tired of the slow pace of this scene, while lamenting her role-playing lapse. She decided to return to it later, after sampling a completely different world from those on offer.
Walking to the rear of the virtual reality sphere, she flicked a finger across a narrow beam of purple light, which blinked obediently at her touch. She was done with ‘her ladyship’, and with Dickensian London, at least for now.
Immediately, Mr Scrivener and his dingy office dutifully blinked out, as she found herself now with short cropped hair and dressed as Gertrude Stein, the words of Tender Buttons turning intricate loops in her mind via an audio chip earring.
She had selected this alternative scenario, one with historical depth and interest comparable to the Dickens, because of its greater closeness to her own world, separated by a mere century or so.
All around the celebrated avant-gardist, a realistically dense hologram dutifully solidified into the bohemian luxury of a twentieth-century Parisian salon, with Alice B. preparing the whisky sours, and ‘Hem.’ expected at any instant.
Yes, good. But this was still only almost. It was not right. Still not as she wanted. She wanted for nothing, but not this. Not this ‘not being right’, the feeling she now felt. This being not right, she swiped her hand in the air once more, instantly delighted by a silver jumpsuit, one of several from the virtual wa
rdrobe, which now artfully clothed her.
She selected ‘male’ just for a laugh, before deciding that her actual woman’s body better suited the sleek silver costume, as a blast of synthesisers translated remnant blips of the cosmic background radiation into a soaring musical score, the soundtrack to a much-acclaimed new fiction set on Enif, brightest star in the Pegasus constellation.
The opening digital curtain, seemingly attached to portals of the Andromedae binary cluster, rose above a vast cosmic drift of multi-coloured radiance, and two winged unicorns now trailed kilometres of laser bunting, announcing what would soon be, in the language of the critics of several Sol-side planets, a much celebrated production of Deep Cosmos Voyage ‘… a futuristic multi-dimensional feast of delirious fantasy, fashion and science fiction, featuring the very latest in special effects, with a wardrobe of glamorous avatars and exciting story choices…’
Suitably costumed as ‘Astrelle’, she mounted the unicorns, standing astride the legendary beasts. With one foot on the identical back of each, she circled to find her balance, then deftly selected—from the multiple choices available—the option of twin moons rising above a green planet in the greater of the Pegasus spirals, an opening shot wonderfully in keeping with her bold mode of arrival.
With the visible solar wind now streaming in her hair, she looked down at the wheeling stars as her winged beasts flew on, instantly absorbed by her new role, and mentally rehearsing her exchange with the Robot Master ‘Voidtron’, with whom (or with what?) she would soon match wits in Scene One.
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