Mark was still talking to Louise, and he kept saying how wonderful it was that she and I had met up again after so long and we would have to keep in touch, and the friend with the knee took a photo of me hugging Louise and another of Mark and Jacquie drinking champagne out of each other’s glasses. It wasn’t at all the sort of party we usually go to.
Well, I dropped over to Jacquie and Belinda’s a couple of days later with some flowers to say thank you, and Louise was there, sitting at the kitchen table drinking peppermint tea, and I wound up staying and talking for hours. After that it just became a habit. I had an early shift most Wednesdays and Mark was hardly ever at home; he had a private sports physio business as well as the hospital job, so there was nothing much to hurry home for.
I would buy a few Hungarian cakes and then go to Jacquie and Belinda’s. We’d have tea and cakes, and then they’d sit at the kitchen table writing or talking and I’d cook and then we’d all eat. Luisa wasn’t there all that often after the first time, and usually she didn’t stay long if she was. She said she was very busy on a writing project, but Jacquie said that she had been saying that ever since she moved in next door and as far as she knew Luisa had never published anything.
They talked a lot about books. Belinda wrote short stories and reviews and magazine articles, and she always had stacks of creative writing exercises to mark and, of course, both of them read all the time. It was very different from our place; we had a lot of books, too, but they were mostly anatomy textbooks and things like that.
One week, Belinda asked me if I’d read a story she had just had published in a short-story magazine. She’d never shown me anything she’d written before and I was quite flattered to be asked. So I sat there and tried to concentrate while she pottered around the kitchen making a curry.
It was about a physiotherapist called Madeleine who fell in love with a patient, who’s a woman, but the woman’s got this great boyfriend and isn’t interested. At the end, the boyfriend turns out to be the physio’s ex-husband. So the woman she’s become so keen on is the same person as the bitch who stole her husband.
It sounds rather ordinary like that, but it was a lovely story. The physio realises that she’s been feeling sorry for herself, and she’s been blaming the new girlfriend for her own misery, without even knowing her. And she realises it’s time she got on with her own life.
The disturbing thing, though, was that it was about me. Well, not about me; I mean, nothing like that has ever happened to me, but it was me, all the same.
When I’d finished, Belinda turned around from the stove and said, “What do you think?”
I must have looked a bit shocked, because she said, “Oh, no. I’ve upset you, haven’t I?”
I said, “It’s me, isn’t it?”
She said, “Umm ... in a way.”
And I said, “But I’m not like that. I haven’t got a thing about an old boyfriend and ...” and I stopped, because I was going to say I wouldn’t fall in love with a woman, but I couldn’t think of a way to say that to Belinda without sounding rude.
She poured me a drink and said, “But that’s what writing’s all about. You start with something real and you think, what if this happened, or that happened, and it turns into something else. You were telling me once about touching people who were very unattractive and how you coped with it. So I started thinking about how a physio would cope with having to touch someone she found very attractive, and it grew from there.”
I was a bit puzzled. I understood what she meant, all right, but I wasn’t too sure about it. I suppose I’d never thought about where writers got their ideas from. But, of course, what else could they possibly do; they take incidents from other people’s lives and turn them into something else. But when you read something, you don’t think about the friend or whoever started the whole thing, and maybe how they felt about it.
It did feel a bit uncomfortable, but I couldn’t really see what she had done wrong. Anyway, just then Jacquie came in and we wound up having a really interesting talk about writers and how they steal events out of their friends’ lives or things they read in the paper or conversations they overhear on the train.
“That’s what creative writing is all about,” said Jacquie, pouring us all another drink. “Taking things that you hear about and turning them into something different, something that expresses a new truth.” She talked like that sometimes.
I still wasn’t too sure about it all, but when I told Mark later that night, he couldn’t see what the problem was.
“She wrote a story about a physio. You’re not the only physio in the world. What’s the big deal?” he said. “She met you, it made her think about physios, she wrote a story. She’s a writer.” And he turned over and went to sleep.
Put like that, it sounded pretty reasonable. But it wasn’t just a story about physios, it was a story about me. Once I got over the initial shock, though, I decided it was quite flattering. I mean, how many other people have had stories written about them? So the next week I took her a bunch of orchids. To say thank you, or sorry, or something.
And so life went on. Mark was working long hours, and I found myself looking forward more and more to seeing Jacquie and Belinda each Wednesday. Sometimes we’d go out together on a Saturday, too, to big raucous pubs or little jazz clubs. Luisa came along every now and then, but not all that often. I had a feeling that she saw us as a fall-back option, for nights when she didn’t have a date with some man.
Anyway, it was all very settled. Like family, really. So when I came in to the flat one afternoon with my bag of sticky cakes and found the two of them just sitting there, in this awful, oppressive silence, with no books on the table and no drinks or snacks or newspapers or any of the usual clutter, I got this heart-in-my-mouth feeling and stopped in the doorway. At first I thought that somebody must have died, expect that they were both looking angry rather than sad, so then I wondered if they had had a fight.
Jacquie looked up and I could see that she was making a big effort to pretend that everything was okay and that she was just about to offer to put the kettle on or something. But if they were upset about something then as a friend I should ask about it, so I put my bag down and asked what was wrong.
Belinda sort of groaned and ran her hand over her face as if she had to do that to stop herself hitting something, and Jacquie went over and picked up a book that was lying on the floor. That was odd in itself, because they were very careful about books. They certainly never left them on the floor. And there was something about the way this one was lying that gave the distinct impression that it had been thrown.
“What do you think of this?” she asked in a grim sort of voice.
It was a paperback with a sort of mediaeval-looking woodcut of four women dancing together on the cover, done in purple and green and with the two colours printed crookedly, so it was like seeing double. ‘Pretty Maids All In A Row’, it said, ‘by Luisa Mayfield’. And underneath, in smaller writing, ‘The book that lifts the lid on lesbian Sydney’.
“Luisa’s book,” I said, stupidly. “She’s finished it.”
I looked at the two of them, who glared back at me.
“But ...” I persisted, dropping my eyes to the book again. The blurb on the back described it as a rollicking lesbian love story set in the pubs, clubs and back lanes of Paddinghurst. There was a black-and-white photo of Luisa sitting in a cafe wearing a grunge cardigan and smoking, which I had never seen her do, and underneath it said, ‘A witty, fast-paced tour de force’.
I looked back at the two of them. I didn’t know what to say. I suppose I’d expected them to be pleased that Luisa had got her novel published, they were always pleased when their other friends had things published, but obviously there was something terribly wrong.
“Oh, Jane,” said Belinda. “For heaven’s sake. I know you’re naive, but you’re not stupid. Can’t you see how insulting it is? That girl is not a lesbian, she’s got absolutely no understanding of what�
�s important. How dare she write a book about it?”
“But,” I said, and then stopped, because I didn’t know what to say next. Fortunately I had a bottle of wine in my bag, so I pulled it out, opened it, and poured us all a glass. We all drank and I thought they’d both calmed down. Jacquie certainly seemed happier; she got a bowl of olives and feta cheese out of the fridge and things started to feel almost normal again.
“Stupid girl,” she said in a dismissive sort of way, and I had the feeling that whatever it was about, was over. Boy, was I wrong.
“Explain it to me,” I persisted. They usually liked me asking dumb questions. “Why shouldn’t she write about lesbians? I mean, can’t people write about whatever they like?”
Well, that was entirely the wrong thing to say. Or perhaps the right thing, I don’t know. Belinda was still absolutely hopping mad, and I really set her off. The arrogation of the subjective experiences of an oppressed societal group by a member of the oppressors, a woman who spent her entire life chasing men while ridiculing other women, exploiting her few female friendships, using a false voice to give the wider public a distorted view of Luisa Mayfield and a distorted view of lesbian life.
“And the thing that really hurts,” added Jacquie, who had got steamed up again while she was listening to Belinda, “is that there she is, right next door, and did she ever talk to us about it? Did she ever discuss her ideas with us? Did she ever tell us her plans? Did she even have the decency to show us a copy? Oh, no. This just turns up on my desk at work. In the recent-publications-from-rival-publishers heap. That’s the first I knew that our precious Luisa was actually putting pen to paper instead of just talking about it.”
A few months ago I would have been really intimidated by the amount of anger that was flying around in that kitchen, but they were always telling me that society tried to control women by making them afraid of negative emotions and that one had to have the courage to face anger and learn to deal with it. So I gritted my teeth and kept right on going.
“Well,” I said. “I can see you’re both terribly upset.” Jacquie had told me that acknowledging another’s negative feelings was often a good way of neutralising them, so I thought I’d give that a go, too. “And, I know you wouldn’t be upset without good reason. But I don’t understand. Isn’t this what a writer does, taking what she sees and turning it into a story?”
“There’s taking and then there’s taking,” said Belinda. “The thing is, lesbians, genuine lesbians, have fought for the right to have our voice heard. And now, here she is, never had to fight for anything in her life, calmly taking that voice and using it, not in solidarity, but to exploit an oppressed group of women, to use us to further her so-called career as a so-called writer.”
Well. It was one of those nights when we drank and talked until two in the morning. I could sort of see what Belinda was getting at, although I still wasn’t sure how it was different from her writing about a physio when she wasn’t one. Although, of course, physios have never had to pretend to be something else, or been insulted in public. Belinda talked a lot about what it was like, how hard it was, how her parents didn’t understand and that some of her oldest friends wouldn’t even bring their children to visit. I must say I had no idea; I mean, why would anyone care about what other people do at home in private?
Anyway, we wound up deciding that Luisa could do whatever she wanted, why should we care, and I slept the night on the couch. When I got home at about eight the next morning, Mark was hopping mad. He said he’d been really, really worried about me, and how was he to know where I’d been, and he’d been that close to calling the police. So I told him all about it. I suppose it was bad timing more than anything—he must have been really worried and upset and obviously he can’t have slept properly— because he called them a couple of stupid bitches and said he thought they were just jealous that Luisa had written something good enough to get published. Then he grabbed his distressed leather jacket and said he’d be home late, and pushed off.
Well, that wasn’t much help, but it had been a bit stupid of me not to call and let him know where I was, so of course he would have been worried. But I had to get to work, too, so there was no time to think about sorting things out with Mark till later.
And then later that day I heard the news on the radio in the hospital cafeteria. I don’t usually bother too much about the news, but the name Luisa Mayfield caught my attention while I was having lunch.
Louise had won a prize: the Voices of Diversity Award for New Literature.
Well. At least I had some idea what to expect when I got round to Belinda and Jacquie’s this time, but even so it was a bit of a shock. Luisa had also dropped in to see them; she wanted to borrow Jacquie’s ‘Reclaim The Night’ t-shirt for a television interview, and Belinda had screamed at her, and Luisa had screamed right back, and now Belinda was sobbing quietly in a corner and Jacquie was planning some horrid revenge.
I didn’t stay long. I don’t think I could ever get to like that sort of atmosphere, whatever Belinda says about how liberating it is; and anyway, I wanted to be home when Mark got in. Only he didn’t get in until midnight, which meant I wound up seeing Luisa on the television. She was wearing a pink triangle t-shirt, and the interviewer was gushing about her wonderful book and the film rights and the overseas rights. Luisa didn’t get a chance to say much but she was looking pretty pleased with herself.
The next few days I seemed to see Luisa everywhere I looked. The bookshop next to the bus stop had a huge window display of her books, with big photos of her and blow-ups of the cover, and there were articles in the newspapers about her novel, which everyone said was daring and fresh and exciting. I started wondering whether I ought to buy a copy, since it did sound rather good.
I hadn’t seen much of Jacquie and Belinda because I was trying to get things back on a better footing with Mark. He really couldn’t see what Jacquie and Belinda were so upset about. He just kept saying that Luisa could write about lesbians if she wanted to; it was only a novel after all. He actually had a copy of the book, although neither of us read it. It was hidden away in his underwear drawer, which I thought was pretty odd, but I supposed that it was just his way of avoiding even more conflict. And it did seem silly for us to be fighting over something that Luisa had done.
The next thing I knew, there was this huge feature article in the Sydney Morning Herald. ‘Will the Real Luisa Mayfield Please Stand Up. Written by Belinda.’ It was brilliant. All those things she’d said to me about betrayal and dishonesty and bad faith and so on, all turned into this really good argument about how outrageous it was and how nobody should buy the book because it exploited lesbians.
I read the article in the cafeteria at lunchtime, and I went straight over that night to the flat and told Belinda how good it was. She gave me a hug and said, “I’m glad you’re back on our side,” which I wasn’t too sure how to take, but I hugged her back and she cracked some champagne. Quite like old times.
Anyway, as you know, things really heated up after that. Louise just disappeared. The papers said she had gone to the Blue Mountains but of course I found out later that she was still around.
Many other people jumped into the argument. The people who had decided on the prize said that they didn’t care whether she was a lesbian or not; they couldn’t see that it changed the quality of the book, and they thought it was a good book. And a group called the Sydney Attack Lesbians said that this just showed that the judges were a bunch of doddery old heterosexual fools and that lesbian writing should be read only by lesbians. And, some other people said that a novel is fiction; Luisa had the right to write fiction about people who were different from herself if she wanted, and at least it wasn’t a boring, thinly disguised autobiography like most first novels.
A couple of academics wrote articles saying that it was exactly the same issue as with B. Wongar, but since I’d never heard of B. Wongar, it didn’t really shed much light on the situation for me. And, the sal
es of Louise’s book kept going up. They brought out a new edition with ‘The most controversial book of the decade’ spread across the front. I kept dropping in at Belinda and Jacquie’s flat, which had become a sort of a nucleus for the anti-Luisa camp, and then going home to Mark, who kept saying that there was no such thing as bad publicity and that Luisa should dedicate her next book to Belinda, with thanks for all her help, and that Belinda was taking the whole thing far too personally. The book was being read by lots of people who didn’t know Belinda from a bar of soap and didn’t care whether Luisa was a lesbian or not, so what was she worried about? I was pretty confused.
In the mean time I actually read it, and I must say it was really good. Very funny, with lots of action. I didn’t tell Jacquie or Belinda that. But of course that wasn’t what they were upset about, anyway.
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