Three words. Three tiny, banal words that had somehow – among the tens of thousands of others spilt in the cafe that morning – made their way through the clashing of voices, of cups and coffee spoons, and tugged at the sleeve of her thoughts.

‘Are you happy?’

All her instincts were to swing about and look. The voice, a man’s, had come from behind her, somewhere close behind and to her left. The next table perhaps, or the one over from that. She slowly adjusted the angle of her head until two figures – still blurry and amorphous – were trapped in the corner of her eye. She knew she mustn’t turn her head. Not just for the sake of good manners, but because she knew that any further movement would alert the pair of them to the fact that she’d heard. And spoil everything.

She continued to sit, rigid with attention, poised to catch the woman’s response when it came.

While across the table from her, Jane sat equally poised. Having apparently asked some question of her own.

‘I must say,’ Jane said when Charlotte still hadn’t answered, ‘you don’t seem very surprised.’

‘I’m sorry?’ Charlotte said back. Though in fact her only regret at that moment was at being interrupted. At losing the fleeting echo of the man’s question. She’d been playing his words over inside her head, trying to gauge the source of the strange calm with which he’d spoken. Was it merely a routine question between them, one to which he already knew the answer? Did he even care what it was? Or was it the reverse? Was this the gambler’s ultimate bluff, and his question the most extravagant bid he’d ever made?

‘Are you telling me,’ Jane’s voice and features had sharpened by now, ‘that you knew? That you already knew?’

Jane’s face, normally so pretty, so elfin and blue-eyed, was positively ugly when she was like this. All het-up and inquisitorial like this. Charlotte wondered whether she didn’t actually hate this woman – this lifelong friend who didn’t know when or how to shut up. Because right then, while Jane was carrying on about something that Charlotte, her best friend, was apparently supposed to have known and should have told her,  another woman was beginning to speak – but so softly and, like the man, so inexplicably calmly that Charlotte almost missed it.

‘I’m always happy,’ the woman’s voice, much younger than the man’s, claimed, ‘when I’m with you.’

Charlotte did almost turn then, in pure frustration, only at the last moment managing to check the movement of her head and shoulders. She raised a hand instead to signal their waiter for fresh coffee. But the gesture still allowed enough time for first impressions – a young woman’s pale cheek in profile, the redness of her lips, the black office suit, regulation fall of straight blonde hair. And opposite her the man, mid-forties, already greying, white business shirt, immaculately ironed – not by her, Charlotte guessed. Insurance, real estate, banking, retail management, something like that.

As she turned back to Jane, the sketch of an apology on her lips, she found that  it was the girl’s voice that now wouldn’t leave her. I’m always happy. That small pause. When I’m with you. So young, and yet so assured, so knowing. Assuming, that is, that the girl was just being playful, just teasing him with these clichés. Because the only other possible explanation, given the uninflected calmness her voice, was that she was perfectly serious. She was speaking from the heart.

‘You knew all along?’ Jane said in disbelief. ‘And you said nothing?’

‘Jane, I’m sorry,’ she said again. ‘I seem to have missed something . . .’

But by then the waiter was already beside them, checking on their order. Which, now that she’d summoned him, Charlotte found that she was incapable of giving. Found she could only refer him with a gesture of her open hand towards Jane, because the words reverberating at that moment in her head would have made no sense to him at all. Do you really mean that? the man had just said, Or are you only saying it to please me?

Which told Charlotte that the girl hadn’t been teasing after all, or not in a way that the man understood as teasing. And that therefore either she was speaking from the heart, or she didn’t care for him at all. And was merely mocking him. And that somehow the man sensed all this, and was desperate to know which it was.

Just as Charlotte – listening in – was.

‘Of course not . . .’ the girl began, but her next words were drowned out by the chatter of the waiter, as he gathered up their plates, their cold coffee cups. By the time he’d gone, the girl had finished. So that all Charlotte was left with were those three words, Of course not, and the mystery of whether it was the first or the second of the man’s questions she was answering.

‘That couple . . .’ Charlotte bent across the table towards Jane and whispered.

Jane looked at her. ‘What?’ she said, as if she hadn’t heard properly. Or had, but could make no sense of it. ‘What couple?’

‘The two just behind me, on my left,’ Charlotte hissed a warning. Hearing, even as she did, the squeak and scuffle of chair legs and shoes on the tile-and-matted floor of the cafe. They were getting ready to leave.

‘What about them?’ Jane whispered back. Obviously missing something herself this time.

‘What do you think?’

‘About what?’ Jane’s attention was having to be dragged. But at least she was now looking. Then looking away.

‘It’s pathetic,’ the words came spitting out. And just as abruptly dried. ‘All this . . .’

Charlotte sensed rather than saw the man and girl leaving. The withdrawal, the sudden  empty space at her back.

‘This hole and corner business . . .’ she heard Jane say, and regretted that she’d drawn attention to the couple in the first place. To the girl especially, whom in some odd way she felt she’d let down. Betrayed, even.

Of course you can never be sure, Charlotte was about to say. They could be anything, father and daughter for all we know.

But she didn’t say it, thrown off course by the hissing intensity of Jane’s words, and then by the sudden appearance of the couple in the street outside, framed in the cafe window at Jane’s back. The girl, looking a little older in the sunlight now, thirty at least, the man a little younger, less jowly than in the shadowy cafe, some of the heavy flesh pared from his cheeks by the bright blade of the sun. Almost an ordinary couple, she thought as she watched them pause on the pavement beyond the glass, the girl idly swinging one of the man’s hands between both of hers, the man bending down and kissing her on the lips before stepping out onto the road and making off. The girl stood for a short while perhaps waiting for him to turn and wave, but when he didn’t, turning herself and making her way, head thoughtfully down, off along the pavement towards wherever she was headed.

Not father and daughter anyway, Charlotte was about to smile and say to Jane. But then realised that this would make no sense either.

Besides, Jane herself had something she still wanted to say. And this time Charlotte understood that she really would have to pay attention. In view of what was happening right before her eyes. Jane’s face was crumpling, her lips trembling, the contours of her cheeks folding in on themselves,

‘Was I really . . .’ Her face was brave, smiling one last time through its tears. ‘Am I really the last to find out?’

Review by Lucy Alexander

Jill Jones once confessed that there was a time when she wanted to be a rock-star[1], and there is something of this in the flavor of the poems here.  Not simply are the poems sprinkled with references (‘Fine Young Cannibals’ the title of a poetic pastiche lovingly woven from ‘The Best of the 80s’ mix-tape) but her lyric impulse, her formative influences, edginess and attitude.

The poems come in fast – they swerve, they flash you with the scent of ‘Blood Bones & Diamonds’ they catch you, distracted by their songful voice and plunge you among the lanes and backstreets of the city.  They turn your eyes to the graffiti on the walls and make it meaningful, then up to the ‘ghost moon bitten apple’.  Jones writes better lyrics than those pretty boys with guitars strapped to their groins.  But there are also poems here that move at walking pace: that grieve and grieve again for that ‘you’ that puts the poet in perspective. The ‘you’ that allows poems such as ‘I Must Be With You in the Cold Time’ such depth and symmetry.

I’ve lost my sensitivity, you say.
That was always possible
Along with a fear of breathing.

If Jones were a celebrated rocker she would not be among the ‘faultless popstars in cocktail shoes’.  She would insist on shoes she could walk in all day and night if necessary, to hunt down the poem, to transcribe ‘A Moon Song’: ‘The moon’s white eye closes on the horizon’. 

The book – Ash is here, So are Stars – bears witness to these tendencies.  The glimmering sheer brightness of the stars is tempered with the inevitable ash or guano – the granulation of time and memory.  The book is divided into two unequal parts: ‘In Fire City’ is a love-song to Sydney it seems – and to some form of ending.  It takes up three-quarters of the collection and the rhythm of the poems is tight, the poet’s eye is cynical, her voice versatile, convincing.  But there is also a sense of dissension from the common or expected – that ability to take a song and slice it open to see it then dispersed everywhere.  To make the poem an antidote to that jingle tune that revolves in the mind for days.   To use the poem as a scalpel that cuts into the belly of badly written song lyrics; or the over reliance on technology; of detectives and cops and hookers; catastrophic world events, or, indeed bureaucracy:

You can read tides, bovine reports
each guesstimate is its own shining
its own howl, its moment of
rock and roll sunshine.

And in this dissension – in this very self-awareness, which is central for most of the poems in In Fire City – Jones dissents from herself.   Being incredibly culturally aware there is a sense in which the poems interrupt themselves and take tangents mid-song.  Something Fine Young Cannibals never did.  For instance in ‘There are No Extras’:

It’s all busy
even at ground level
hello cellophane, hello ants
days beget days
that’s the charming
the little songs
jumping out of backpacks
and while koalas
fall from trees
and offer us their thirst
that’s past cute

There is so much here – too much, overload.  And maybe that’s the point.  The tourists who are introduced halfway through the poem – the extras for whom this overload is the norm and who are not needed as extras – put this process in perspective.   But then, in Blue Lines:

It’s not the birds that are the spectres
they come in the afternoon, true,
swing by the air song filled, passes
that branches come to ground, falling
with dryness and shadows, remembering
midnights rather than afternoons,
declining drugs rather than passing shots…

The birds representing the free spirits, the transient if not spooky, singing and destructive of the native flora suddenly – maybe with one nod in the direction of T.S Eliot with his coffee spoons – refuse drugs?  The opening is enticing and evocative, the leap of association requires a special sort of brain gymnastic typical of this part of the book.  It seems there is no pause between the actual and the imagined, the spectres and their bird-shadows.  This type of playfulness keeps the reader guessing well into each poem, and shows why Jones would not have been satisfied as a rock icon.  ‘enjoying the acrobat music/needing to move, ‘to do nothing’.

The ‘In Fire City’ book opens with a small haiku-like poem wedged into the left-hand corner of the page.  There is no title, no explanation – it stands alone down there at the bottom of the page, and reads:

after the weight
of eleven dreams
the dog shadow

It feels like something of a little gift puzzle – what does this mean, is it a preface to the book? Is it a message for reviewers? Is it a reference to the Danish band Mercenary (I don’t put it past Jones to love her melodic death-metal)? Is it to do with the Aesop fable: the dog and his shadow? Jones’ reference points are varied and unpredictable, but this poem is still a mystery.  Perhaps it is there to even out the pages after the title?  There are others like it among the book – inscrutable but enjoyable.

Jones moves over themes she has touched on before in earlier and prize-winning books.  The balance of city and relationship with the spaces it creates for dialogue, how this affects the self, the other, the way these two merge and transgress boundaries and barriers.  This is perhaps where the references to music and pop culture come in – they are the zeitgeist of the alleyways, they are the placard advertisements, they are the songs on the radio.  There is no avoiding them, but here ‘In Fire City’ Jones takes them and burns them and transforms them into words packed with emotions – anger, grief, love, longing.

This is the wide city
it has accumulated me
along each stage
the clarinet, the needle
and abraded bone.

In ‘Altars’ she grieves at the loss of lives and the change in the landscape of the city – metaphoric and cultural, when she writes:

Ticking
machine heat
time changes sky

culpable
persistent graceful
my sad answer

white
towers came
distance to ground

Her tone is so measured, her pitch so perfect that it take a second to notice the ‘caved human/trapped into night’ is the death that stalks the cityscape.  She negotiates the persistent unutterable possibility that it could have been me, us, our family, our towers.

The last quarter of the book is called ‘Hang the ash!’ and is made up of three longer poems that have a new distinctive style and though they play with the same word repetition some of the same syntactical dancing, they have more space to breathe – are sung to a slower beat.  ‘My Fugitive Votive’ Jones allows her strong lyrical streak out for a while, and explores her own poetic.  She remembers the book, almost as relic:

‘There’s nothing in the master narrative
that beats death’, but somewhere, the old rectangle
of my book is porous and words feather in the rewrite.

Perhaps it was the imagery I was missing in earlier poems when Jones was acerbic and academic.  Here she allows ‘time goes flaccid’ and:

I’m needing horizons, vistas beyond these pages.
Trees topple but we keep printing.

Here is the environmental political heart – the poem printed in this book rails against the printed word! (Thank goodness Verity La uses very little paper!)

But perhaps my own favorite line comes straight after the title line:

Its ash is here but so are stars
And my crackhand singsong runs glooms voodoo down.

There’s the old songstress, the rock’n'roll guru.  Maybe there’s still time, Jill Jones, to get that album up and those backing vocalists organised?

Ash is Here, So are Stars
Jill Jones
Walleah Press 2012
82 pages, $20

listening to doof doof cyberpunk music

and I saw you cry for the first time,

at four in the morning

bottle of ice tea and vodka in hand

I saw your real face and something changed.

Back in Melbourne some strange anxiety

compelled me to walk to your house

returning your books Equus, and

Diary of a Schizophrenic Girl,

and a men’s jacket I once borrowed

to walk home in. You said:

‘You can stay here tonight.’

Offered me Lipton and McCain’s fish fingers

and lying on separate single beds,

we shared sleep noises in the night.

In the morning, you said:

‘I have a lion mask for you,’

fetching it out of the cupboard

placing it on the back of my head:

‘Mine is the pig mask, yours is the lion mask.’

As if now some animal pact is made.

INTERVIEWER

Tell us about how the Southern Highlands Writers’ Festival came about?

BOLZAN

I was a Sydney-sider for my entire life until my parents retired to the Southern Highlands of New South Wales about four years ago. Their move really introduced me to the region as I would come and visit them on weekends. As I started to explore the Highlands I became aware that not only is it a little patch of paradise, there are many creative people living here: writers, musicians, heaps of painters and more. My ‘day job’ is a producer, and so I started to think about creating a platform in which these creatives could come together and do their stuff.  I’ve loved the concept of ‘festivals’ since my university days and always thought I would eventually produce them. For me, bringing a community together in celebration of ‘something’, whether it be writing, the arts, music, food, wine or whatever, is what really lights my fire. I love hearing creative people discuss their creative process, and I thought other people may enjoy listening to this too. So I decided that I would pack up my city office and apartment and I move to the Highlands to produce my first festival. I decided on a writers’ festival, because I could see that there were a number of bookshops in the region and I thought maybe, just maybe people might turn up to listen to some great authors. My hunch was right and we staged our inaugural SHWF last year… and yes, people turned up to listen!

INTERVIEWER

It’s great to see writers festivals start to pop up outside the big cities. How do you see the regional festivals being different to the more established, urban festivals?

BOLZAN

I agree, it is great seeing more regional towns establishing their own unique writers festivals – the more the merrier, I say!

There’s no denying the major capital city festivals, like the Sydney Writers’ Festival, are sensational. They can attract big-name authors and have travel budgets to accommodate authors from around the world. They also have larger production crews and more volunteers to share the massive volume of work required to put on festivals. We certainly don’t have those little luxuries, and as a result wear multiple hats.  However, the one aspect of the larger festival that isn’t so great is the sense of physical – and sometimes emotional – separation the audience has with the authors and vice versa. At our festival, and I’m sure like many other regional festivals, there isn’t the massive crowds and so it’s a lot more personal and intimate. I actually received a great deal of positive feedback last year from festival-goers who loved the fact that their favourite author was staying at the same hotel, and so could actually share a meal together and talk. I also had a number of our authors write to me afterwards and comment on this, from their perspective. After working in isolation on their books for months at a time, they found the personal interaction and networking opportunities a welcome relief. I recently learnt that one of our gardening authors from last year’s festival was commissioned by a local family to design their new Aussie native garden, and he stays with them every few months to supervise the construction. Nearly 12 months on, they recently invited me over for breakfast to see the results. Not only is the garden beautiful, an amazing friendship has developed between these people. It was magic to see. I’m really keen to develop this platform that allows for creative interaction between people.

INTERVIEWER

I love the idea of regional literary festivals being personal and intimate. Can you tell us a little more about the format of the Southern Highlands’ Writers Festival – what can attendees expect?

BOLZAN

The 2013 Southern Highlands Writers’ Festival will be a three-day event this year. The bulk of the events will take place at the Gibraltar Hotel in Bowral, so once you get there, you can easily wander from one session to the next, get an excellent coffee at the festival cafe and by some books in Berkelouw Books ‘pop-up’ book shop, all under one roof, keeping warm and dry, which very important in the Highlands in the middle of winter!

We kick off on Friday 12th July, which is the last day of the school holidays, with a fantastic Kids’ Day program. There will be three amazing, award-winning of kids authors reading from their latest books, a magician, and the Sydney Story Factory will be running creative writing workshops. And it’s all free!

Then, over the weekend, we switch to adults and are offering 19 one-hour sessions that are a mix of panel discussions with several authors and ‘in conversation’ events with one author. I’ve tried to cover a wide range of genres and topics to make sure there is something for everyone. We’ve got some ‘big’ names such as Richard Glover and Anne Summers, who I know our festival-goers are going to want to see. But I’m so excited about all of the sessions as we are covering some fascinating areas of writing including romance, vice, and the massive growth of young adult fiction, to name a few.

On the Saturday night there will be two festival events that I’m hoping people struggle to decide which one they will attend! The first option is a sensational Literary Dinner at Berkelouw’s Barn in Berrima with guest chef Giovanni Pilu. Giovanni will be cooking from his latest book, A Sardinian Cookbook, so bring your appetites. The Barn is oozing in atmosphere and we’ll be sitting surrounded by literally thousands of books! And back at the Gibraltar Hotel, we will be staging option two, which will be the Southern Highlands’ first ever talent quest called Fest Factor (as in X Factor) hosted by comedian Anthony Ackroyd! It will be a wonderful opportunity for poets, singer song-writers, comedians, or anyone who just want to get up and read or perform their latest work. And we’ll be awarding some great prices, so make sure you register your interest on our website, if you want to participate.

INTERVIEWER

A sense of community is clearly important to the Southern Highlands Writers’ Festival – how do you go about making a feature of this?

BOLZAN

From when I first decided that I wanted to produce a writers’ festival in the Highlands, I knew it had to be for, and about, our local community. And as the new gal in town, I have tried my hardest over the past 18 months to meet and talk to as many of the local writers and readers, local businesses and tourism ventures, and potential festival-goers, to better understand their needs and wants. I believe a successful festival needs to accommodate so many different agendas from around the community, but I hope as people get to know me and how I work, they realise that I am trying to unite us in really creative and positive ways. There are so many wonderful examples of towns around the world that benefit from having a successful festival based there, from the Elvis Festival in Parkes, NSW, to the Spoleto Arts Festival in Spoleto, Italy. In many ways it’s far more effective to stage a festival in a smaller community, rather than a huge city – you can in fact have a bigger impact.

INTERVIEWER

It must be an almost super-human amount of work. What do you get out of organising such a complex event?

BOLZAN

There is no denying that I’ve been working around the clock to produce this event for months and months. And when I say ‘around the clock’ it’s often between 4.30am and 9am and then again after 5pm; of course, I need to keep working full time to fund it.

Let’s just say I am consuming a lot of multi-vitamins at the moment!

I have to be honest in saying there are some days where it definitely feels TOO much and I dream of running away to a tropical island; but that only lasts for a moment and I snap back to reality. But then I find myself in an absolutely wonderful meeting with some sensational, like-minded creative people and I become totally inspired and excited by what I am hearing. And then I remember that this is why I am producing this Festival: to have experiences like that.

A year ago, at my first festival, I only had one friend living in the Highlands, who I use to work with in Sydney. Now as I go into my second festival, my address-book is full of amazing new friends, and it’s totally due to the Festival. People say it’s often hard to make new friends as you get older.  I tell you what, produce a festival and you won’t be short of invitations to new friends’ art shows, birthday parties and drinks.

It’s been worth it.

INTERVIEWER

What do literature and books and writing mean to you personally?

BOLZAN

There’s no denying that books mean different things to different people. For some people, it’s a form of escapism, whether that be getting involved in a saucy romance or finding yourself in some far flung country. It’s a chance to meet new characters, who in real life you might not get the chance.  For me, I love the fact that books and literature and poetry, make me think a little bit more about myself and the world we live in.

I belong to a book club here in the Highlands and I love it when we all read the same book and yet there can be so many different opinions and thoughts about it. I find myself then learning even more when I hear the various gals’ perspectives and that then shifts my thoughts a little too.

On our website we use that great Tom Stoppard quote: Words are sacred… If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.  I really like this quote – it’s so true.

There’d never come a newly-minted, indignant crimson-kissed day in this place which didn’t evoke some dark, frost-sorry memories to that time when we still had water. I can’t speak for the voiceless million, though I’ll wager in the heady grape-marinaded days of my youth when I was mobilising for political and societal allegiance as a thatch-faced environmentalist, I’d still have believed with penitent fury that it was possible, but now I possess no discord that for most survivors today water’s just some chimerical element of a bygone age. I mean, it’s a spine-decalcifying realisation as bitter as Parisian coffee grounds to yearn for something you know now doesn’t exist. And sometimes when I face the unnavigable lunar-blue badlands with their buffeting vitriolic spray of skin-scorching sand, pocked by the smelters, enrichment plants and innumerable rhinoceros-like vehicular abominations which drink up the land, all cogwheel and corrugated iron salvaged from foresworn farmstead housing, I can only glimpse at recalling what it was like to know the surcease of a parched tongue. But as with all quixotic and unforgivable reveries, I have to relegate such innermost musing to the dry dead carbuncled heart’s omnivorous furnace. Sadness breeds madness, of course.

In the synthetic, flesh-twined fibre of my Vernian hydrosuit I can feel the heat lambasting my haggard shoulders like dreamily punctual vultures, and I have to retreat back to my thirty-six floor InsulFlat to decompress the moisture-free carbon monopolising my lungs and follow it up with a fistful of mean reds. Then perhaps a windwash to rid the yellowcake trapped beneath fingernails and embedding the crow’s feet pinching my eyes, read some more Tennessee Williams, feed the echidna the termites I’d combed for and managed to successfully collect. Maybe masturbate over Cadence. Maybe not. The gloried pirouetting epiphany you’re privy to when you have no-one to count on and nothing to aspire towards is that it doesn’t particularly matter how you while away your remaining hours. Therein is something no system or agent or auspice can take or shake from you. Even after the Reef Bleach of 2024 and the final dead loggerhead turtle was discovered in a disused second-hand car lot seeking the mouth of the sea, you can still go unsung for your efforts. And that’s a freedom I’m glad we won.

*

I woke at 0300 hours and watched the somnambulist creatures dictating the flipbook of my dreams scuttle away into their sleep-sullied solipsist pages and dart off behind my blearied eyes once more. One of them had looked kind of like Cadence. But others had looked like mutations of carburettor engines, conveyor belts and bird-eating tarantula, so I couldn’t claim to be the swiftest exponent of Freudian analysis in the Brisbane Vertical County.

I knew this, at least, because I knew everyone by their name, face, phosphorescent visor and catalogued sorrow living in my building, and as it was the only building with organic occupants within the establishments of the recovered nation-state, I also had a reasonably comprehensive lore and understanding of each individual’s politics and affectations. Not a great many citizens still dreamed, to be frank, insofar that I was lead to learn, because, as turned out, dreams had an inextricable subconscious relationship with water. Something to do with the humour and temperature of cerebrospinal fluid, not that I can grasp the science of it. Anyway, I guess I hadn’t dreamed about Cadence. I guess it had merely been a signifying example of a strain of human ground-dwelling malaise. The French used to call it tristesse, I’ve heard. The cruelty of the human memory is its tenacious fondness for replaying, in ininhibitive minutiae of detail, all the time, the dagger of heartbreak, the treason of a lost lover, and the forbidden taste of loathsome lips. If the bitch wasn’t dead already, I’d have accursed and willed her to get that way, and fast.

Berate the starless, moonless, dusk-smogged sky above!

I missed her. I missed her like the full complement of my bones had become divisive, like a newborn calf expelled from its foetal sac misses the tonic of night, like a dehydrating turtle misses the roar and sugarwhite seethe of a cascading ocean swell.

*

Today I was going to embark out to the silica dunes beyond the newly-burgeoning fields of GM meat in their ripening, empurpled fury, picketing the cartographic demarcations of the Brisbane Vertical County. My vellum-bonded foot thongs inscribed their game-legged haikus in the unconquerable white paper trail of the dunes’ unending ranges, and terns turned and wuthered while I set about to digging up her grave.

Toiling away took most of the day — albeit I’m wary that, after the face of the last clock was publicly fractured, such a lineal word is now arbitrary — by which time my spade’s gavelled mean metal head was hitting the ironbark lid to her coffin, and sweat was beading off the septum of my angular Irish nose in a sticky string of malformed pearls.

I slunk to my haunches, permitting the blessed cool of the photovoltaic shade-panels’ deflected breezes near the ore-mining hutment to slake my unquenched, raspy thirst for unrecycled air. This reminded me, somehow, of when I was once corralled into sharing a 4WD hire-car with some fellow freak fundraisers stinking of patchouli and beeswax shampoo, back when I was still handsome and impressionable, and I’d been compelled to endure an air-conditioning unit which regurgitated monstrous vegan farts at me for three pitiless hours while landscape warped and wept outside electric glass windows. We ran down a big red roo later that day. I watched its eyes make vehement persecuting demands of all of us, before its crushed and shallow ribcage rattled its last exhaustive, torturous breath. Its body smelled just like stale vegan farts. I decided to never digest another vegetable again.

The lid of the coffin slid off, unyielding and vacuum-sealed, with little apparent ease. Inside, after the mandrake squeal of brass and wood had subsided, and beyond the miasma of released, pollen-frenzying dust motes lay her frayed, sickly corpse. I placed my swarthy palm against the prickle-steeled green hide of her flesh. She was still warm to touch, surprisingly. The air — what was present of it and not stagnating and pustulant — stunk rich with the pall of her recent vegetative, antediluvian demise.

I unsheathed my patented Swiss Army blade and cut deep and merciless into the mescaline pulp of her acrid cadaver. After ten minutes of industrious and sadistic surgery I’d divined my redemption, I’d found it. At the dark brackish hollow of her cacti centre had collected a diaphanous pool of secreted dew, as true and unadulterated as the cobalt pummel of my rotten salad days. I lowered myself to my knees and submerged my head into Cadence’s ruptured innards. I don’t remember what happened next. The most beneficial and virtuous thing about days of blazing, unfaltering sunlight is that there’s no longer any watch that exists to record moments in seconds. I held my breath for centuries, millennia, night.

Review by Robert Goodman

Timothy Mo had a brilliant early career: three books in a row shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1982, 1986 and 1991 showed a prodigious range. Sour Sweet chronicled the struggles of a Chinese migrant family setting up a restaurant in London in the 1960s, An Insular Possession explored the opium wars in mid-19^thC Hong Kong, and A Redundancy of Courage shone a light on the Indonesian occupation of East Timor in 1975 and the Timorese resistance.

And then Mo disappeared. After falling out with his publishers, Mo left the UK and self-published a couple of books in the mid- to late-nineties (Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard (1995) and Renegade or Halo² (2000). After more than a decade, Mo returns with Pure, a novel which explores a number of his previous themes.

Pure is predominantly the story of Snooky, a Thai ladyboy (or katoey) who lives the Bangkok highlife of drugs and parties with a group of fellow transgenders, and writes movie reviews for local newspapers. Snooky is blackmailed by the Thai police into joining a Muslim fundamentalist cell that has been established in a school near his old hometown in Southern Thailand (or Siam as Snooky insists on calling it). The story then follows Snooky’s (now Ahmed’s) interaction with the cause and a growing fundamentalist awakening.

Mo frames Snooky’s gen-Y, streetwise narration with short interludes narrated by the three members of the older generation – Victor, an ageing Oxford don and recruiter for MI6, the Shaykh, charismatic leader of the cell that Snooky has been sent to infiltrate, and Imam Umar, its spiritual leader. In doing this, Mo is able to import all of the baggage of history, from the partition of India and the creation of modern Thailand, through to recent events such as 9/11 and the Bali bombings. These perspectives also allow the reader to reflect on how much the experiences and ideologies of these ageing warriors is driving the current conflict. Through an exploration of their characters and methods, however brief, the novel is also able to explore how, through pressures brought to bear by the conflict between these men, even a character like Snooky could be radicalised

There are moments of quite graphic and confronting violence, but Mo uses his various narrative styles to lighten the story. He effortlessly shifts gears between the various characters and manages to layer what is often an unreliable first-person narrative. Snooky’s narration is littered with diverse pop-culture references, which range from Casablanca to Star Trek and beyond, while the Shaykh’s narratives infused by grandiose plans, malapropisms and misunderstandings of the West.

The plot itself is embedded with sometimes subtle, sometimes not-so-subtle satire. One of the more laugh-out-loud sections has reality TV butting up against Jihadism.  Snooky promotes the idea to the Shaykh of using reality TV formats to assist in training at the multinational fundamentalist camp they have retreated to in the Philippines. Arguing on the basis that ‘the format is neutral’, Snooky comes up with such classics as ‘Big Brotherhood House’, ‘Mad versus Mild’ and the ultimate ‘Maguindanao’s Next Top Mujahid’. The balance between satire and horror is often a precarious one – Snooky’s attempt to outdo Bergman and film the historical re-enactment of the massacre of a village of Muslims by US troops starts as broad farce but when the production ends up using real, emaciated Western captives to play the Americans, ends violently.

While interesting as purely a character study, Pure has larger concerns. Mo seeks to understand how ordinary, and not so ordinary, non-practicing Muslims can get caught up in the fundamentalist machine. How the efforts of the West to infiltrate or control fundamentalist groups often serves to further radicalise them. And how outdated thinking and historical forces are driving the current day campaigns of both the fundamentalists and their adversaries.

Pure is in turns sassy, camp, confrontingly violent, erudite and satirical. Its range of styles can be jarring at times and the plot meanders, particularly in the Philippines section. But it is a brave, insightful and often disturbing novel that signposts a welcome return for Timothy Mo.

Pure
Timothy Mo
Turnaround Press, 2012
388 pages

Over the next few weeks you’ll find them everywhere, these strands of fine blond hair. Sometimes they’re in unlikely places: resting on a window sill, caught under a chair leg. But most often they’re entwined in your clothes. You open your wardrobe, pick out something to wear, and there one is, snagged around a shirt button, snarled in a sock. Of course you don’t keep them, but it feels wrong to put them in the bin. You end up opening the window and letting the wind take them from your fingers.

Your flat is three rooms at the top of a large Edwardian house. It’s made up of a kitchen, a sitting room, and a bedroom, flanked by a long corridor. The toilet is out on the landing. You rent the place from Frank and Karen, a middle-aged couple who live in the rest of the building. They’ve been project officers for the local council all their working lives, and are model landlords: they never make you feel like a tenant. You like your flat. It’s pleasantly shabby and reasonably functional and, up there on the third floor, the windows are always full of sky. With its high white walls and black-painted floorboards, it feels like one of those contemporary art spaces that shifts from rundown building to rundown building until they either go mainstream or fizzle out.

The place has one major quirk. There’s no bathroom, so the bathtub is in the kitchen. And the bathtub is a quirk in itself. It’s short, squat and very deep with a moulded step that you sit on, the enamel worn thin by successive tenants. The kitchen is quite small, and fat from the cooker – not stove, cooker, you’re in London – collects on the bathtub’s rim. You’re continually wiping it away, this spray of fatty droplets from chops, sausages, bacon, and whatever else you cook. You hate the constant mix of substances: bread crumbs in the soap caddy, specks of dry shampoo on the oven door. It never fails to remind you how broke you are, how you don’t even have enough money to get back to Australia. In six months your visa will run out, and there’s no hope of an extension.

You’re broke because you’re unemployed, and you’re unemployed because of the impending war in the Gulf. Two weeks ago a tense-looking Sue, the head teacher of the English Language School you worked at, asked you into her office. You weren’t surprised when she told you that projected enrolments weren’t looking good, and that it wouldn’t be possible to keep you on. She began to give the obvious explanation, but you told her there was no need. You didn’t need to be reminded that ever since Bush and Thatcher had vowed to throw Saddam out of Kuwait, students had stopped coming in droves. The recent announcement of the UN Resolution authorising ‘all means necessary’, accompanied by the mobilisation of a global army ready to attack Iraq, hadn’t helped matters: it looked certain to be a winter of empty classrooms.

When you collect your last pay you find it fattened out with a two-week bonus, which at least softens the blow. Still, things are looking grim. You’re a foreigner in this country, so you can’t go on the dole. But even if you had the money for a ticket home, you don’t want to go just yet. A dose of self-reliance will be character building, you tell yourself. Just what the Lady ordered.

You spend your days hammering out job applications on the portable Remington a friend lent you. Your typing isn’t very good. It’s fast but not accurate, so you waste what seems like hours in stationery stores finding the best value paper, weighing up the pros and cons of correction ribbon over liquid paper. In your covering letters you don’t take any risks and are always careful to obey British conventions. You never ‘apply for a position’, you always ‘seek a post’.

It comes back to you again and again, the final incident that triggered Christina’s departure. You banged your shoe up against the rusting iron picture frame she’d left in the corridor, and sliced a large piece of leather off the toe. Your shoes weren’t exactly new, they weren’t even all that comfortable, but they were your Bond Street brogues, the only good pair you had. You’d always hated that stupid frame. God knows where she’d found it; it was so far gone it looked like it had been trawled up from the seabed. It had been standing in the narrow corridor for weeks, shedding huge flakes of rust, generally making a nuisance of itself. The sight of it, and the sight of your wounded shoe, filled you with rage. You kicked the stupid thing twice, three times, hoping it would collapse. It was surprisingly strong and each kick damaged your shoe even more. With a great effort of will you stopped, then stared down at the mess you’d made. The gouges in the leather were flesh-coloured against the black shoe polish. Then suddenly, something inside you snapped.

You kept very calm, walked down the corridor and opened the door to the bedroom. Positioned at the back of the flat, it had windows on three sides. In the clear winter light Christina was sitting at her worktable, gazing out the window. She was working on her sky diary, a large sheet of gridded paper whose squares she filled in everyday with a different colour, a colour that never actually resembled the sky, but, as she had told you, her particular interpretation of it. You started shouting at her, my shoe, look what you’ve done to my shoe, it’s ruined, it’s fucking ruined, that stupid frame, I told you not to leave it in the corridor, you know I’m clumsy, and now look at my shoe. She looks up at you, silent, waiting for you to stop, and as her ears flinch, as her eyes lose their dreamy lustre and brace themselves against your anger, you know that you have lost her.

In three weeks she’s gone. Until she leaves you continue to share the bed, an enormous, lumpy monster that stands on claw-like wooden legs and pushes you up towards the ceiling. You make love like you’ve never made love before, every touch your last. She’s never seemed more precious, more beautiful. One night when you’re fucking doggie style, her cheek pressed into the pillow, she weeps and starts to tear at her hair. You have to stop her ripping out great handfuls. Afterwards you know it’s better not to mention it. This is her only lapse, and for the rest of the time she’s completely calm, nearly serene, biding her time until she steps on the plane, wanting to make it as good as it can be.

The day of her departure arrives. It’s a late evening flight, which gives you time to have an early dinner. You make roast chicken with all the trimmings, her favourite. You don’t talk much during the meal, so it’s all over much too quickly, and when she offers to wash up you tell her not to be silly, you’ll do it later. You lug her suitcase through the quiet suburban evening, first to British Rail, and then onto the Piccadilly Line for the long haul to Heathrow.

Terminal Four is a madhouse of queues and security guards. It swallows you both alive, but you’re determined to see her off like any ardent lover. She checks in and you follow her across the squiggle-patterned carpet, the roar of the terminal making it impossible for you to really feel her presence for the last time. In front of the international departure gate you kiss and embrace and dissolve into tears, surrounded by a United Nations of different races toting the latest cabin baggage. You’ve been together for seven years. You are 29, she is 26. Three years age difference, a kind of golden mean, a comforting statistical average because we all know that men are less mature than women and need to be a little older to sustain any kind of relationship. She’s wearing her leopard-skin coat. It’s the last thing you see, the spots on the back of her leopard-skin coat, as she disappears through the metal detector. You don’t stay to watch the plane leave.

You catch the Tube home. It’s around 11.30 p.m. and the train is nearly empty. Without its usual crush of passengers, the carriage feels as light as an empty drink can. It shakes wildly as it hurls itself between the outer stations. You sit swaying in the clatter and din, staring at the line map stuck on the curve towards the ceiling. You randomly count down the stations: Hatton Cross, Hounslow West, Osterly, Chiswick Park, Stamford Brook, Hammersmith, Knightsbridge, Green Park, Piccadilly Circus, Leicester Square, Covent Garden.

You’ve never been able to imagine, riding in that glinting carriage light, the boroughs of London pressing down above you. You can only ever imagine a blank space, an empty plain stretching in all directions, and you are always amazed when you step off the escalator and find yourself in the busy high streets.

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This is an excerpt from Great Western Highway, the second novel by Anthony Macris in the Capital series. It was published by University of Western Australia Press in 2012; read the Verity La review here. A revised edition of the first novel in the series, Capital, Volume One, will be published by UWAP mid-2013.

It all comes down to this question: why ‘Verity La’?

Most regular readers will know that it’s an abbreviation of ‘Verity Lane’, a very dodgy back-alley in Canberra, Australia’s national capital (which turns 100 this year, just by the way), where the journal was born.

More importantly, however, we’ve received a very special email, telling us that the name now given to the lane also commemorates the birth there, in 1938, of Verity Hewitt’s, Canberra’s first serious bookshop:

In that pre-electronic age, this bookshop and its owner encouraged the distribution and intelligent discussion of literature in the otherwise bleak cultural environment of 1930s Canberra, perhaps comparable in some ways to your use today of the online journal. From a wider perspective, Verity was a remarkable example of mid-twentieth-century woman, independent, brave, and with a deep and creative interest in literature and people.

You may not want to take my word for this and instead look at the entry for Verity Fitzhardinge in the Australian Dictionary of Biography.

Please do check out the ADB entry, but a summary follows, and I’m paraphrasing from that source, which was researched and written by Suzanne Edgar.

Hope Verity Fitzhardinge, teacher and bookseller, was born on 12 December 1908 at Glen Innes, New South Wales, the eldest of seven children.  As an adult, married and unhappy, loathing housework (who can blame her?), Verity opened a bookshop in East Row on 1 April 1938. From second-hand books, it expanded to sell new books, prints and artefacts, and to hold art exhibitions. Unsuccessful financially, it became a ‘pool of light’ for the book-starved community, reflecting the friendliness of its owner, who delivered library books by sulky. Her sister June took over when the Fitzhardinges returned to Sydney in 1945.

Hope Verity Fitzhardinge, 1972; photo supplied by one of Verity’s sons, courtesy of The Land/Fairfax Media

Diverse cultures intrigued Verity and in Sydney she studied Russian.  Secretary of the Russian Social Club, she hosted Pushkin Circle meetings at her Pymble home. Unworldly and generous, she took in the homeless; two such, migrants, informed the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation that she was a communist. This rumour persisted but was not substantiated. She called herself a ‘fellow traveller’, a ‘romantic’.

In 1948 Verity travelled to Russia. In 1951 she and her husband resettled in Canberra. Helped by Russian migrants, she ran an orchard at Narrabundah while caring for family. ASIO kept both Fitzhardinges under surveillance. Undeterred, Verity learned Russian from, and taught English to, numerous officials, including Evdokia Petrov, at the Embassy of the Soviet Union. She also worked as a relief teacher. When her Canberra Grammar School pupils locked her in a cupboard, she was encouraged to resign. Her appearance grew weather-beaten and eccentric.

In 1963 Verity revisited Russia. At the Australian National University she investigated Russian contacts with colonial Australia and, later, the Anglo-Russian construction in the 1880s of the border between Afghanistan and the Russian Empire. There, in 1966, she walked the entire border, alone.

Verity died on 23 June 1986 in Canberra. An agnostic, she was cremated.

Who wrote the email mentioned above?  One of Verity’s sons.  And he concludes with this: Verity would have been sympathetic with your aims and pleased with your work.

So, Hope Verity Fitzhardinge: we honour you, and the collective hard work of us is dedicated to you.  And it always will be.

Nigel Featherstone
Editor
Verity La

One thing is clear: we live in strange times. The influence of the market has seeped into every facet – every wrinkle – of our existence, leaving the individual spliced and atomised and spliced again. But, if who we are indeed so fragmented, how do we love and be loved back? Forget about connecting with someone else, how do you connect with yourself? The reach of market forces of course extends to the manufacture of art and, indeed, the production of literature; how, then, do you go about writing a novel on these ideas?

Anthony Macris attempts to answer these questions with his second novel, Great Western Highway: A Love Story. The sequel to Macris’s 1997 novel Capital, Volume One, Part One, Great Western Highway looks at a day in the lives of two people who are curious to understand how, and if, there can be love when the external, market-driven world intrudes on and tangles with the internal world, and the individual is left riven.

The novel opens with Nick, the story’s protagonist, standing in line to get cash out of an ATM on Parramatta Road, one of the busiest and most built-up stretches of the Great Western Highway. Nick – thirty-something, unambitious and uncommitted – is in fact on the way to see Penny, his ex-girlfriend who he can’t get over even though they broke up because he couldn’t get over Christina, his girlfriend before Penny. While he waits, the bank’s ads about homes and loans and images of perfect people with perfect lives beam down on him, forcing him to reflect on the gulf between this life – successful and even, brimming with optimism and hope – and his own.

Though it is only down the road, it’s some time before Nick actually reaches Penny’s house for what is shaping up to be a lugubrious night in front of the television. We follow as he walks along the Great Western Highway, and advertising and the rush of traffic and music and noise washes over him. All of these things, everything from Thai restaurants to squashed Coke cans, hold personal meaning for him: ‘Nick looked up at the giant mobile that leaned over the highway and tried to fight off the sudden memory of the phone call it was determined to trigger off, a Brisbane-based Christina had said “no” to a London-based Nick.’

The setting is not made up of landmarks in the traditional sense but is instead populated with businesses and brand names which create a sense of place in their own way: a landscape of signs, pregnant with memories and meaning. This barrage of messages about what to buy, how to live and how to find happiness creates a feeling of claustrophobia, something that we are more or less superficially desensitised to in reality but which the novel succeeds in evoking.

While Nick is very much the conduit through which we engage with this world, before he reaches his destination the narrative’s point of view switches to shadowing Penny at JobClub, an agency for the unemployed where she works offering employment advice. The themes that rise out of the first chapter are here elaborated on and formalised – happiness versus unhappiness, success versus failure, the tide of employment due to market forces, the structure of power. Penny must navigate her way through these obstacles to the end of the workday and a meeting with Nick, where she must then try to find a way to reconcile her private wants and needs, whatever they are, with those of her former boyfriend’s.

At the novel’s literal and metaphorical core is a Modernist stream-of-consciousness monologue from former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The chapter, titled ‘Lateline’, is an examination of the Thatcherite free market from the point of view of the woman herself, with Thatcher’s thoughts filling the space between her answers to Lateline presenter Kerry O’Brien’s questions. ‘No you may not finish,’ she thinks as O’Brien pleads to be heard. Even if he manages to finish his question, he is drowned out, all but voiceless in the deluge. Maggie Thatcher as free market mouthpiece – it’s an extraordinary piece of literature.

After the Thatcher monologue, the narrative pivots again, going back to Nick’s time in post-Christina London. The narrative style undergoes a further transition, with this part of the story being told in second person, as if from the point of view of a patient old friend. Alone in a city of millions, Nick turns to the television for comfort. His breakup happens to coincide with the Gulf War, and as he wallows, the war plays out in 24 hour-news cycles on the TV screen. Rather than intruding, the televised war distracts, plotting the trajectory of Nick’s feelings for him, acting as a substitute for the lost lover: ‘You lie in bed or sit at the kitchen bench and watch the spectacle… Your whole nervous system is tuned to imminent chemical attack, imminent ground invasion, imminent scorched earth.’ This is the novel’s highest point.

The story concludes at one of the few places it can: outside Rick Damelian’s, the iconic car dealership that once spanned entire blocks of Parramatta Road. But the key word here is once – like many of the real-world businesses and brands that populate the novel, Rick Damelian’s is no more. Today the lots are empty, one day soon they will be ugly, over-priced high rises, the market economy’s cycle of success and failure continuing to spin.

Herein lies the problem that is central to Great Western Highway. While setting this kind of story in a concrete time and place is conceptually sound, it also puts it at risk of becoming anachronistic the moment it’s published. The risk becomes that much larger when the time it interrogates and philosophically engages with has already passed, if only just. Put another way, images of George Bush Sr.’s Gulf War and the Lateline Thatcher interview might be fresh in Nick’s mind, but not as fresh in the reader’s, having been overshadowed by more recent and, arguably, equally relevant events.

There is evidence that a sequel to Capital, Volume One, Part One has existed for over a decade, with extracts of it having appeared in all of Australia’s major literary journals. Macris himself makes this fact clear in the ‘Author’s note’. With its knotted publishing history only having been untangled following the 2011 release of When Horse Became Saw, Macris’s moving story of his family’s struggle with his son’s autism, perhaps it’s grimly fitting that market forces kept Great Western Highway off bookshelves until now. However, the problem of a disconnect created by a delayed publication has a simple solution: respond again. A Volume One surely demands a Volume Two.

Great Western Highway is ambitious, experimental literature. While Macris’s use of the commercial twilight zone that is the highway, carving through the novel in the way that it carves through the lives of so many, is just a little bit brilliant, this occasionally disjointed novel won’t be for everyone. It’s for this reason that UWA Publishing should be commended for taking a chance with this unconventional story of modern love.

Great Western Highway: A Love Story (Capital, Volume One, Part Two)
Anthony Macris
The University of Western Australia Publishing, 2012
368 pages

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Read an extract from Great Western Highway here.