THE QUIET NOISE

&

‘QUICKEN, SHINE, FOLD’: JOUISSANCE ÉMUE AND THE

EROTICS OF READING QUEERLY

ANNA WESTBROOK

A THESIS SUBMITTED IN TOTAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE

DEGREE OF

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

SCHOOL OF THE ARTS & MEDIA

FACULTY OF ARTS & SOCIAL SCIENCES

AUGUST 2013

ABSTRACT

This thesis comprises two components. ‘The Quiet Noise’ is a historical novel set in post-WWII Sydney. It draws upon a 1946 unsolved murder of a young girl and the accompanying local legend to stage an imaginative recuperation of the dead and their impact on the living by working from archive and diminishing living memory for historical verisimilitude. The story follows a community of outsiders embroiled in sly grog and sex catering to thousands of returned servicemen displaced in the mercurial city recovering from war.

Whilst violence, speculation, and vendetta frame the narrative, through the arc of the adolescent character Templeton Luckett, the novel is also a bildungsroman of queer desire which attempts to speak to the lacuna of queer

Australian historical fiction through an affective engagement with occluded histories.

The dissertation, ‘Quicken, Shine, Fold: Jouissance Émue and the Erotics of

Reading Queerly’, contends that the emotional dimension of jouissance - jouissance émue - provides a new way of considering the affective encounter with the text that intervenes in contemporary debates about queer relationality. It argues that by dislodging jouissance from its phallic model, a dialogue on erotics outside of a heteronormative paradigm can be reinvigorated. Jouissance émue provides an opening into intransigent debates on queer sociality and a potential line of flight from a paranoid reading position. The first chapter charts Jane Gallop’s ‘Precocious Jouissance’ essay and takes her findings on émue to a rereading of Roland Barthes’s own jouissance and an inquiry into the place of the phallus in economies of pleasure. The second chapter examines the antisocial thesis of queer theory and the possibility of a relational jouissance involving connection rather than

2 self-shattering. It explores the queer relationships with negativity, abjection, and the death drive, and asserts the possibility of feeling, through the text, the uncanny erotic presence of the dead author, posing the aesthetic concept of duende as an analogue. The final chapter situates an erotics of reading within the greater affective turn in literary studies and braids the lesbian-feminist erotic tradition into understandings of future possibilities for reading queerly.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thank you to Kaylee Hazell, Charlotte Farrell, Billie Muchmore, Carmen

Huehn, Emma Thomas, Georgia Anderson, Amber Jones, S.A. Jones, Justine

Doidge, Holly Zwalf, and Tamryn Bennett.

To my patient and generous supervisor, Dr. Paul Dawson, cheers.

Indescribable gratitude to my family, Fiona Smith and Fred Westbrook,

Barbara and Clive Peterson, thanks for seeing me through.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE

THE QUIET NOISE 6

PART ONE 8

PART TWO 127

QUICKEN, SHINE, FOLD 256

INTRODUCTION 258

CHAPTER ONE 281

CHAPTER TWO 306

CHAPTER THREE 332

CONCLUSION 358

BIBLIOGRAPHY 367

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The Quiet Noise

6

Part One

So night, like earth, receives this poisoned city,

Charging its air with beauty, coasting its lanterns

With mains of darkness, till the leprous clay

Dissolves, and pavements drift away,

And there is only the quiet noise of planets feeding.

- Kenneth Slessor ‘City Nightfall’

7

June 1946

Sydney, Australia

1

Templeton tilted his chin to the sky and let the smoke leak from his mouth.

Rain had outfoxed the canopy of the ancient Moreton Bay he stood beneath. It rolled down his face and he breathed in the mulchy smell as water pooled in the tree roots clavicular basins. He flicked at a spent match with a grubby fingernail. Twelve he’d struck against the matchbook before a damned one would light.

“Bollocks to this!”

The afternoon drizzle leached his spirits as it glanced off the harbour in vitreous sheets. The fishing boats roiled against their moorings, timbers grumbling. Men scrambled to tie up the tarred ropes as thick as their arms, shouting as they went.

He, only a boy and small for his age at that, sheltered his tiny ember and sucked the limp cig down to the bottom of his guts. At least it wasn’t him out there toiling in the rain. A magpie stalked past. He watched it dip its beak for worm. One marbled orange eye regarded him coolly.

“Skkk,” the bird hissed.

“Git!” He stamped his boot in the mud spattering his already dirty trousers. The magpie heaved itself from the ground with a flap of piebald wings and banked up the immense shelf of gunmetal cloud. He looked out after it. Glebe Point was far enough away from his sister to do as he pleased.

8 “Get out from under our feet and go and flog the papers,” she’d told him that morning. “If you want your tea why don’t you go out and earn a bob for once? A bit of honest work. Ha! Do ya good,” Annie had snapped as she wriggled into her best dress – the blue one with the wide bib collar.

“Help me with this would ya?” She looked from Dot to Sally to

Margot; her arms twisted behind her plucking into space for the buttons and then looked in the mirror and frowned, pulling a missed roller from her butter-coloured hair. Templeton caught her gaze in the glass, eyes that could snare blokes soon as look at them; they narrowed. Dot did Annie up as she broadened her lips with pencil and dabbed more powder over her skin where it was red and dry around the nose from last night’s boozing.

“Bugger me. I’m so blotchy I look like a Dalmatian.”

“Nah. You can’t see it,” Margot squinted.

“I’ve got bags under my eyes the size of plums!”

“But I don’t want honest work. I want to come with you!” Templeton grumbled. “Where you going looking so fine anyway? Why you putting all them nice things on?”

Annie straightened Sally’s blouse and moved up to her hairpins:

“Stand still Sal.”

“Templeton keeps banging into me,” Sally complained, pouting into the mirror. Templeton was oscillating on his feet like a mechanical wind-up toy. He could never be still.

“Well just pinch him then,” Annie advised. “Lucky, get out of the way.

Unless you want some of this?” She pointed the lip pencil at him.

“Are you going shopping? Are you going into town?” He was still talking as they gradually hustled to the door and talking still as he was swept

9 along in their midst: “Are you catching the tram? David Jones. You’re going to David Jones, aren’t you? I knew it!”

“Here’s a shilling. Be good. Don’t get into trouble,” Dot patted him on the cheek. He coloured at the touch of her finger on the light downiness that had sprung up there in the last months and waited for the wisecrack. Instead she smiled at him and tossed him the salute that was their code with each other that meant everything was right-o.

“Quit whingeing like a bloody girl and get going,” Annie pushed him off the kerb and almost smack dab into an iceman plodding up the gutter, epaulet of hessian sacking over his shoulder the plinth for his gleaming delivery.

He knew their game. He had sat on the Glebe tram picturing them in the Ladies Department at David Jones, or Mark Foy’s, Grace Brothers even.

Annie would hold her hands tightly clasped so the holes in her gloves couldn’t be seen. She would muster a long breath and pause, then enter with chin cocked and face serene, like Daddy owned a shipping company. The others would be waiting nearby. He knew their game. Annie would return with stockings and ribbons mostly, and the occasional fancy hat. She liked the ones with the ostrich feathers, the ones that were the hardest to smuggle.

“Where do you hide a hat?” He’d asked.

“I like a challenge,” she’d winked.

“What’s an ostrich?” Sally had lazily fingered one of the newest prizes.

“It’s like… a big parrot, I think…” Margot had replied.

“No it’s not. You pair of dolts!” Dot scorned. “It’s like an emu, only from Africa.”

“Surely not. Is that right, Annie?”

10 “Darned if I know.”

Annie could look like a real lady if she tried, one off to the spring races at

Randwick. He could imagine her as through he were peering through the arched windows trying things on. She would sashay and twirl asking the salesman this and that and jabbering all kinds of nonsense whilst the other girls snuck in and put their deep-pocketed dustcoats to use. The salesman would be an old bloke, or a nancy, or a fellow who was a bit odd with a finger off or a leg brace or thick, Coca-Cola bottle spectacles. It had been that way since the start of the war with schoolteachers, tram drivers, you name it. All the other men had left.

Templeton knew she’d cuff him that evening for shirking, but all he had thought of was the breeze peeling off the sea and salting his nostrils. Milk vans splashed through the puddles flecking passersby with brown water. He hated the job at Railway Square and always felt the hot stares of the other paperboys and the sharpness of their unfriendly smiles.

“No money to be made on a day like this anyway,” he muttered to himself.

He had watched the oystermen for most of the afternoon and walked about before defiantly spending Dot’s shilling on smokes. Annie Luckett could go to

Hell. The boys at the railway teased him to blazes. People knew them by their surnames – Smith, Martin, White and Ryan. They were tough and feral with quick fists. They stole his papers come end of day and his takings sometimes too, and stomped him for good measure.

Until last year the Yanks on their R & R used to put the boot in too whenever that were leaning about, hot and bored, talking to the shop girls. Suddenly they’d want a bit of fun and get the boys to gang up and call him a fairy.

11 “Are you a boy or a girl?”

“Does your Momma know you’re out, sweet cheeks?”

He was glad their mob had finally cleared off, mostly; there was still the odd one about. The diggers just back, de-mobbed trickle by trickle; could be just as bad and he daren’t tell his sister. Annie would beat the tar out of anyone, even a US marine, but he didn’t know which humiliation was worse. He didn’t know what fairy really meant even, although he could guess, and it didn’t have much to do with the one in Pinocchio, or maybe it did. Annie and her girls liked call him darling and sugar, honeychild (one they’d heard from the Negroes), and sometimes he let them when they were alone, but never on the street. He put up with much more in their place on Enmore road where they slept together like bundles of kittens when the nights grew longer and colder, it wasn’t so bad then. He’d even admit he liked it, but not out loud, when Sally had dressed him in one of the pinched fur coats and trussed him in her glass and paste jewels and he had pretended he was one of them, rouging up and having a beer before receiving the first of the gents for the night.

Four years back their mother had died birthing a girl. 1942 and everyone was already sick of the war. He remembered that, not that war had touched them much, but more from the stories in the papers and the news on the wireless.

But it wasn’t phony any longer, not since the Japs had come in and looked about to march on the Top End. It wasn’t phony when blokes started dying.

They’d lived out on the Parramatta River then, in a timber shack with a trench yards away for a shitter. His mother had died white as plaster on a bed stained with an arc of black blood. There was no doctor. Their father was in

12 Long Bay for a smash and grab, armed robbery was what was written on the letter, not that they’d heard tale of him since ‘39. They had no other family and no one to call. Botany seemed as far away as Tobruk.

Annie had done her best, knuckle-deep inside her mother trying to turn the baby but it was blue when it came out. He remembered Annie’s mouth set firm, her fingers shaking bad as an old drunk. She said she’d seen it done once on a horse. The baby had some bloody cord around its neck and Annie cut it with sewing scissors and put the child to their mother’s chest. Their mother cooed to it as she shut her eyes and didn’t open them again. Annie washed the blood and slime off the baby with water heated on the stove.

Templeton had been banished to the kitchen. In the dark he had cried and cried until he vomited up his porridge – what his mother had made for breakfast – and then he cried some more until he lay down and slept next to the sour-smelling oats. He had gotten up eventually, quaking, and Annie made him milk Sissy, but his leaden fingers squirted most of it onto himself rather than the pail.

“Damned useless bugger of a goat!”

He’d run the warm bucket into the house but it was no good. The baby wouldn’t drink. The milk slipped down her tiny chin, filling her mouth up till it ran over. She couldn’t swallow. Her eyes rolled back and she spluttered.

She was only as big as Annie’s two fists together. They stopped for fear they’d choke her.

“Annie, where’s Mum?” Templeton had asked. Annie looked at the ceiling but didn’t focus.

“You stink, Lucky,” was all she said.

“I’m sorry,” he started to cry again.

13 “Go out and bathe in the dam. Wash your shirt too.” Annie sat down on the dirt floor.

The water sucked him under like there were stones in his pockets.

When the crown of his head broke the surface he gulped lungfuls of air but tasted mud. The dam was low. No rain in months. He staggered out and a soft keening rocked his frame as he crouched on the bank.

Mr. O’Riordan held the next stead, an hour’s walk away. He walked fast.

Dumb and snot smeared. The fields stretched interchangeably and the thickset orange sun scorched his arms and brow. They returned on Mr.

O’Riordan’s horse. He could remember the smell of the oiled saddle, tart and grassy, mixed with the ripeness of Mr. O’Riordan underarms.

“Hold on to me. I don’t want you falling off.”

Annie sat in the rocker on the verandah, the baby soldered in her arms still warm and soft. She yielded mutely when Mr. O’Riordan took the wrapped bundle from her, like she was giving over an apron full of potatoes.

Mr. O’Riordan went to the bedroom. He didn’t say anything. Templeton wanted to go in to his mother but he dared not. He was no fool. He knew what dead things looked like, how they pissed and shat themselves. His father had taken his rifle to Amos, Templeton’s blue heeler, after he went for

Mr. O’Riordan’s lambs. His father made Templeton watch. The first shot hadn’t killed him.

Annie and Mr. O’Riordan dug a six by six in the brown roasted grass. The dirt on the shovels sounded like fingernails. They wrapped their mother in a bed sheet. Annie shook when she had to help lift her. She dropped her end of the sheet and their mother slid into the hole gracelessly.

14 “It’s alright love,” Mr. O’Riordan nodded. “By Thy resurrection from the dead, O Christ, death no longer hath dominion over those who die in holiness.”

They were at the station headed for Sydney that evening. Templeton could only wish they were on the other side of the platform. The westbound train passed them by, on through the barren Emu Plains and up into the Blue

Mountains, like a shining silver caterpillar. He had taken the westbound with his mother the winter just gone and when they disembarked in Katoomba he had yelped. His breath had spun out like hot yarn on an icy spindle.

They had walked to a great precipice and looked out. The three towers of naked rock made him feel dry tongued and tight in the throat. He wanted to lick his lips and hum or shout. He wanted to throw rocks into the great eventless abyss.

“Why are they called that? They look like mountains not ladies,” he’d asked, chatty and pleading. His mother had stood quietly beside him.

“The Three Sisters?” She said surprised to remember he was there.

“When I was a little girl I heard the story that the Blacks tell about them.

Would you like to hear it?”

“Yes!”

“Well then…” She pushed her sun-streaked hair back. Annie had the same warm honey eyes. He didn’t. His were green.

“They say that once upon a time there were three sisters who wanted to marry men from another tribe. There was a big fight. A battle. When the men came to take them. Because their families, their mob, didn’t want to let them go.”

“Why? Why didn’t they let them?”

15 “Because they weren’t who they were supposed to marry.”

“Who were they s’posed to marry?”

“Someone else! Who their parents chose, I imagine, but that doesn’t matter, it’s not the point.”

“But – ”

“Do you want to hear the rest of the story or not?”

“Yes,” he stared, chastised, down at her feet. Sitting on a boulder she’d cast off her shoes, even though it was bitingly cold, and was rubbing her toes, red as mince and swollen.

“So the men took up their fighting spears and they all had a right go at each other. A big blue with yelling and screaming.”

“Was there blood?”

“I would assume so. And then, in the chaos, a magic man took the sisters away. He hustled them down here right to this cliff and he turned them into stone.”

“Why? Was he bad?”

“No. He did it to protect them from being hurt in the fight. Or maybe they were trying to run off. Anyway, I can’t remember,” she continued. “But then when it was all over and the dust cleared, the sisters’ tribe saw that the magic man had been killed on his way back!”

“But how do they get changed back if they were stoned?”

“Nobody knew how to change them back,” she smiled but it was weak and thin.

“So they have to stay stone forever?”

“I suppose so.”

“What did the ones who’d wanted to marry them do? Were they sad?”

16 “I don’t know,” his mother sighed. “Yes. I’m sure the men were sad.

But I can’t see how it’d be all that bad for the sisters.” She turned back to look at them with an unreadable expression.

“I think it’s sad…” He thought about all the things you wouldn’t be able to do if you were turned into a rock. “Can we go now?” He pulled at his mother’s sleeve.

She had treated them to a high tea at the Paragon café before they set off home. He remembered the taste of clotted cream and the viscid blackberry jam that coated his fingers. It was the fanciest place he’d ever been. His mother took out a novel from her pocketbook and read it with an index finger keeping the page as she delicately picked up and put down the scone on her plate, taking the tiniest of nibbles. She dabbed the teaspoon in and out of the pot. Clusters of dark purple berries stuck to the curve of the silver. He ate his scone all in one go.

“I want to make it last,” she’d told him.

When the train arrived to collect him and his sister it snaked off eastward to the city. Templeton had held on to Annie close as a tick. He’d breathed in her talcum powder and jasmine scent. She allowed him to stay like that, although she held him slackly. It was like something had pulled too hard on a rubber band and it had snapped.

Templeton walked to the harbour’s edge and slung his butt into the churlish slurry that licked the seawall. He would take his time going home, walking instead of hopping the tram, and amble by the flicks. When he got back Annie would be caught up in cards perhaps. She would have had a few to drink by then and that might have softened her, or it mightn’t have, who could say? It

17 was Jackie’s fast mouth that was the real danger. Jack Tooth had been Annie’s bloke for nearly six months now – a long time for her – and Templeton hated the sight of him. A scant handful of years older than the rest of them yet he had a crop of gingery stubble at five o’clock again after a morning shave. He didn’t live with them in Enmore but he had a key. Not that it mattered; he could pick the lock in a snap if he wanted. He said he’d been manpowered to the coalmines during the war and that’s why he didn’t serve. Dot privately reckoned it was the white feather but she didn’t say it in front of Annie.

“He’s a chicken-hearted bastard,” she’d growled one night thickened by whisky after Jack had taken the back of his hand to Annie. Templeton liked Dot best out of all the girls. They’d met Margot and Sally at Central

Station the day they arrived from the country. All had been wandering about with no place to go. As they’d left the railway the sirens went off and all the lights in the city went out. Templeton remembered the darkness like a sooty scarf over his face. Men screamed at each other and honked their horns trying to drive without their headlights and not collide. They had spent that night in an air raid shelter that smelled of tinned beef and old men’s scalps.

The next day they found a place, and that had lasted a few months, and then another and another after that. Now the five of them shared a flat strewn with rugs and old coats to cover the rotting boards.

“Like too much blush on an old tart,” Annie had appraised the place dismally. But three years had passed for them to get used to the stained mattresses dominoed on the floor, the yellowing pictures of Flynn and Gable pinned to the wall, and hanging tenaciously to a nail above them the old crucifix put up by the last occupants, too high for any of them to reach. They slept amidst their trunks that spilled tatty rabbit stoles. A Chinaman’s lantern

18 some Yank had given Sally sagged over the jaundiced bulb spattered with dead insects. They had been in worse places. At least the bed bugs here were kept at a dull roar. He’d been bitten scarlet at the last hovel and Annie had to paint him pink once a week with calamine lotion to stop him scratching his skin off.

Jackie and his mates lived in a Surry Hills flophouse but spent most of his time mooching around Newtown. The sly bastard had a lipless, freckle- peppered face and kept the roughhousing out of Annie’s sight. Roughhousing and then some, and Templeton knew it would do him no good to squeal because the next kicking would be all the worse for it. Jackie was small but underestimated. He carried a razor everywhere that had been his father’s.

“The one good thing that bastard ever gave me,” Jackie liked to say.

Templeton thought it had class – a real beauty – not like the cheap disposable things blokes used these days. Jackie’s razor was mostly for show, Annie had told him, although he had used it once on Bob Newham from the Rocks mob and taken his eye, all for some row about a girl. Clean lost it, the eye had made a sickly pop on coming out, they said, like a plum thumbed from a pudding.

It was around seven o’clock by the time he turned off King Street and on to

Enmore Road, his hunger nettlesome. What he would give for a mixed grill or a plate of steak and eggs, but he was as like to find a bob in his pocket as a diamond. He chewed on the end of his cig. Maybe the girls would have some cherry brandy. The liquor might placate his growling belly.

“Oi,” he heard Dot’s raspy but tender shout. “Hey! Where you been, sugar?”

19 “You’re in trouble, Lucky,” Sally called out.

“Annie’s gonna have your guts for garters.”

“Awwww, fuck off why don’t ya? Templeton hated it when they called him Lucky. “I’m not a bloody cocker spaniel alright?”

Dot and Sally were sitting on the wall near Newtown train station. The cops didn’t like them hanging about there, being Ladies of a Certain Description.

Last time the constable had told them that they’d better eff off or they’d get a bit of what for and how’d they like a night in the cells?

Dot chuckled at his attempt to walk past blithely, her gaze weighted on him.

She didn’t wear any of the powders the rest of Annie’s girls fancied, just kohl, and the effect made her dark eyes look sooty and bottomless. Templeton thought she was handsome. She wore her hair unfashionably short and lacquered, like the women in the old films. She smoked constantly and waved her hands using the burning tip of the cigarette like a blackboard pointer when she spoke. A reffo, but she’d gotten out before you couldn’t, before it all really kicked off, when Chamberlain had still been banging on about peace in our time. Well he’d feel a right ass now, wouldn’t he!

No one knew where she came from and she didn’t talk about it. Jackie had bet a pound one night, when she’d been entertaining a chap upstairs and out of earshot, that she was a Jew. Templeton didn’t know why but everybody had stopped talking about it after that. She sounded like an Australian to him.

No accent, save a faint corrosion on some vowels. Although he had seen her pa once and he looked the part – long overcoat, beard, funny hat. He’d been to their house in Bondi and Dot had slipped him a feed, a piece of buttered toast and a cup of tea. Normal food. He’d eaten it in the garden, dunking the bread and licking it off his fingers whilst he spied on her grandmother

20 hanging up sausages to dry in the shed. Her brawny arms slapped against her black dress. She wore spectacles and her stockings bagged at the ankles like elephant skin.

Templeton didn’t know where Dot’s mother was – if she had come out with them on the boat or if she was even alive. Dot had this way of hinging shut.

Every room of the house had musty books along the walls. Templeton had never seen so many in his life. He knew the alphabet and the teacher had said he was no fool and he read above his age, yet trying to make out the titles his eyes swam. It was like the letters were backwards and upside down.

“What’s all the books for, Dot?” He’d asked.

“A whole load of trouble, that’s what.”

“What are they about?”

“I don’t know! I haven’t read them! All pa’s Commie hoo-ha,” she’d pursed her lips testily.

Templeton had nearly burst with thrill. A real live Red! He’d never seen one in the flesh. He swallowed his questions like tablespoons of castor oil, knowing Dot would speak no further. These past six months there’d been nothing in the news but the Soviet threat, perhaps even in Australia. Canberra was on high alert.

“Are you a spy?” He’d asked through a mouthful of toast.

“Why would the Russians bother to send anyone to this godforsaken arsehole of the world?” She’d laughed. Nevertheless a few weeks after their conversation the government put her father in one of the internment camps and Dot had left Bondi.

21 Templeton sidled up with his hands planted in his pockets. Dot passed Sally a bottle of Advocaat. He checked up and down the street. The cops would be along soon now for sure.

“Where’ve you been? Annie went by the Square in the afternoon and said you weren’t there.”

“Yeah?” He shifted from foot to foot. “So what? I don’t care. What’s

Annie gonna do? I’m not scared of her.” His big toe was starting to push a hole through one boot the leather was thin as an eyelid now. His sock was wet.

“She wanted to send Jackie out for you,” said Dot.

“I don’t see why!” Templeton flailed, puce. “The papers’ not even worth the trouble! You lot can make ten times that in a day.”

“It’s not about that,” Dot began sternly. “You know we all chip in for each other.”

“It’s about earning your keep,” Sally drew out the word keep with a smack of her lips. She sucked on the bottle, liquid spilling down her chin. She was pretty, the best looking in the group next to Annie, plump with dimples when she smiled and a bottom lip like a moist peach.

“Here, give us some!” Templeton grabbed the liquour. They tussled until he wrested it into his mouth triumphant.

The last six months or so had been far better for grog. He could never get a taste of the good bootlegged stuff during the war. Annie and Dot kept themselves on the down low of who had what whilst he and Sally and sometimes Margot usually made do with four-penny dark or foul Barbera gutrot or Red Ned from Lorenzini’s down on Elizabeth Street – raw red

22 flogged to the rich dumb Yanks. The grog he got was normally so bulled you might as well neck a drunk’s piss.

“Where’d you disappear to anyway?” Sally pouted. “You got a girl or something?”

“No!” He pushed her. Sally jumped off the wall to jab at him, tickling and smirking. At that moment Dot caught sight of the police marching down towards them.

“Quick sticks,” she propelled them both across the road by their elbows. Once they were out of sight Templeton dropped behind. Dot and

Sally swished in front.

“Looking for company for the night, love?” Sally asked a soldier loitering out front of the Duke of Edinburgh. His face split into a gummy grin where he’d lost his two front teeth. It was past six o’clock and the hotels had loosed the punters out onto the street like pockets clearing out spare change.

“Aw! Give it a rest, Sal!” Dot snatched her arm before the bloke could respond. “Let’s pack it in for the night, eh?”

“Oh, jeez, alright. I s’pose we already made a packet today between us,” she cheerfully reached into her blouse and pulled out a clutch of notes.

“Go on!” Templeton cocked his head and made eyes at her. “Lend us a couple a’ bob.”

“Piss off! Turning into a right bludger aren’t you?” Dot chided. “Poor role models, that’s your problem.”

“I won’t get any tea from Annie and I’ve got Buckley’s of a feed,” he lifted his grimy shirt and sucked in his belly.

“All prick and ribs like a drover’s dog, ain’t ya? What happened to what I gave you this morning? Hmm?” Dot lifted an eyebrow.

23 “I spent it,” he tapped out a cigarette and lit it with a flourish.

“Well serves you right don’t it!” Sally sighed and laughed. “Serves me right for waving it around, I suppose,” she dropped a few shiny coins into his hands. “Here you go then.”

Templeton pecked her on the cheek and skipped backwards: “Thanks darl. I’ll be off now!”

“You’re soft in the head, you are,” Dot rolled her eyes at Sally. “And you!” She yelled at Templeton. “Stay right there. And tell me, where did you sneak away to today?”

“Nowhere much,” he held one arm up, his back turned, their salute.

“All I wanted was a bit of peace and quiet, y’know?”

“Yeah alright Lucky, I know,” she said with the ghost of a smile on her face. He didn’t see. He’d taken off up the road.

24 2

Frances rested her head against a pockmarked cherub whose stony touch was cool on her skin. She liked the statue’s pretty stone lips and lichen freckles.

The air in the cemetery sagged with deep stillness but for faraway dog barks that nipped at the calm afternoon.

A fat-bellied lizard blinked at her from beneath a thatch of shrub. Leaves crunched under the toe of her boot, dry as pork crackling. Frances’ breath corked in her mouth – she wanted to reach out to the creature and offer her hand to pet it. The scaly thing slid mercurial from its perch in the winter sun and vanished beneath the serrated tentacles of a blooming couch honeypot.

She had not closed her eyes as Nancy had ordered. Instead she just pretended, pressing her brow against the soft lemon custard coloured wool of her new cardigan. Her mother, Mrs. Peggy Reed, had worked on that cardigan for a month, burying it beneath her darning whenever Frances looked to catch her at it. The jacarandas had dropped purple Turkish carpets on her birthday and now the same trees were bare. That day the creases at her mother’s mouth had pressed smooth as Frances undid the string around her parcel and slipped her arms in the sleeves.

“Stand up and let’s see it on then,” her mother put Thomas down on the floor to pinch at the seams and fuss. She had a good eye and a steady hand for sewing and had taken to doing piecework for one of the factories up in Marrickville. The box of garments she worked on by greasy lamplight every night was tucked beneath her chair. Mr. Langby sidled up in the doorframe on Fridays to collect it.

25 Frances did not think much of Mr. Langby. He had a rat-grey moustache and his slouch made her picture Victor Hugo’s Quasimodo. She’d said as much to her mother and been smacked with the wooden spoon.

“It’s just like the ones in the windows at Grace Brothers!” Frances admired.

“Well look at you!” Her mother said. “La-di-da. Aren’t you Lady

Muck? Can’t let you run around looking like a little ragamuffin anymore now that you’re getting so grown up.”

Frances dropped the cardigan back into the butcher’s paper and went to poke the contents of the pot on the stove.

“Lamb?” She asked hopefully.

“Rabbit. Mr. Langby brought a brace for our tea. Isn’t that kind of him?”

She didn’t answer. The waft of gravy and potatoes made her ravenous. She was always hungry these days, even if it was just stew for tea, and when wasn’t it?

“Eleven years old and as tall as me,” her mother turned to the King

James on the dining table. Out of one eye she watched disapprovingly as

Frances licked juices off the ladle.

“Do not give in to appetite, Frances.”

“Yes Mum,” she dropped the spoon and turned to her in stale, grim duty.

“Each one is tempted,” her mother cleared her throat and read aloud a finger tracing the words on the page. “When he is carried away and enticed by his own lusts. Then when lust has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and

26 when sin is accomplished, it brings forth death. Remember that, Frances.

That’s God’s lesson.”

“Count to one hundred and don’t you go sneaking any looks,” Nancy had ordered Frances before she took off through the long grass. There were many places to hide in the overgrown cemetery. Indeed, sometimes Frances felt she had stepped into a cave at the bottom of the sea walking through those wrought-iron gates, their spears rooted in the sandstone like King

Neptune’s trident. A reading primer they’d loved best at Enmore Primary had been entitled The Myths and Legends of Antiquity. The little cover drawing of Neptune had shown a bearded, bare-chested man emerging from the sea.

Scandalously clad mermaids lolled about on rocks nearby.

“He looks like Jesus,” Nancy had whispered to Frances.

“Do you think he’s wearing any trousers?” Frances gurgled amidst giggles.

“Don’t be silly!” Nancy paused, thinking. “Anyway, he wouldn’t need to. Jesus didn’t have a thingy.”

“He’s a merman, stupid! He’s got a fish’s thingy. ‘Ang on, do fish have thingies?” They laughed until Mr. Cameron had thrown the blackboard duster at them.

In the dwindling light Nancy dropped and shrunk into a tight ball behind the rusted H.M.S. Dunbar’s anchor that was wrecked off Port Jackson before her nana was born. She was very good at hiding; the hide ‘n’ seek champion of Newtown. Once she had folded herself into her mother’s haberdashery trunk and stayed there for four hours, well after the other girls had tired of playing and gone home.

27 “That Durand child can disappear quicker than vermin down the storm drain,” Peggy Reed liked to say. “Shows you where her kin’s from…”

Frances was counting the bees languidly losing track and starting again, with no real inclination to go searching for Nancy. The busy insects rose and fell like tiny glamorous airmen in their flimsy planes. Planes that had fierce names like Spitfires and Hurricanes for things that seemed held together by glue and spit and prayers.

“Men shouldn’t be flying around up there in the sky,” her mother often commented gravely: “It’s not God’s will.”

Nevertheless boys made games of it in the street, bracing cardboard boxes around their waists, holding The Sun or The Mirror fanned out like Icarus wings.

“Shoot down the Luftwaffe,” they yelled.

“Get those Messerschmitts!”

She knew the taste of the hard German syllables. The littler boys and the occasional dirty-faced girl crouched in the gutter and made the ack-ack sound of the anti-artillery guns as they pointed their clasped hands up into the air.

“Yeeeeoooow, yeeeeooow,” a boy would twirl on the spot mimicking the ear-bleeding air-raid siren.

“Brrrrm-pow! Rat-tat-tat-tat-bang!”

And they would burst from the newsreels at the flicks, knocking over the alleyway milk bottles, wild and flushed. Last year in September Frances had come upon a bunch of lads playing in Enmore Park who had set their collections of old painted tin soldiers up in a dustbowl around an M-80.

Frances only identified the red tube because she had seen Americans lighting

28 them for their Independence Day. She knew they were Americans because of their sunglasses. She backed away as she noticed the rivulets of kerosene the boys were pouring down into the basin.

“It’s the Bomb!” One shouted punching the sky as he watched his friend, a hare-lipped, black-headed scoundrel kneel and drop the match.

“Burn those Japs!” They laughed and whooped. The blast scorched the immediate surrounds, incinerating the soldiers, and foul-smelling ash settled in the boys’ hair. They ran off yawping and jumping in search of more trouble. She went to pick up a half-melted tin torso she saw sticking in the dirt but threw it down again when it singed her thumb. She had a blister for days.

Frances was in no hurry in the graveyard knowing that she would never find

Nancy in any case. The two had been friends since before either could remember, playing in their gardens amongst the chooks, too little even to walk whilst their mothers hung out the washing on the line. Amidst the billowing rigging of Long Johns and blouses, pinafores and brassieres, the girls tumbled like pups.

Their fathers had gotten friendly from working together down at the wharves. Nancy’s pa was Frances’ pa’s boss. John Durand had come from a good old family that had made their money from dirt out in W.A. fifty years ago. Frances often heard her parents talking in the kitchen when she was shut out and the saccharine smell of sherry and acrid smoke crept under the door.

“The crash of ’29 had ripped the lining right out of his cloud,” Mr.

Reed liked to say about Durand in the pub after a few, leaving a pause afterwards and grinning around daftly. “Am I right? Huh? Am I right?”

29 Mr. Durand had packed up and gone to Sydney with nothing but a silk tie and a pigskin case. He met a Tipperary girl by the name of Katherine and three years later he was married. Overhasty some said, perhaps even with

Nancy on the way. Mrs. Durand had undergone the passage from Belfast in

1919, alone, at the age of fourteen. Peggy Reed was deeply suspicious of the kind of girl picks up and moves to the other side of the world.

“Don’t let that family ever give you charity,” Mrs. Reed would say to

Frances. “Papists. Opportunists.”

The Durand’s had a Ford and once Mr. Durand even let the women sit in it outside the Town Hall Hotel on King Street whilst he brought them shandies.

Nancy rode with them and said her Dad leapt onto the runner-board to pass the drinks into the back seat just like in a film. Mrs. Reed had come home seething and thrown her coat and handbag at the wall before storming off to bed to row with Mr. Reed behind the door.

Mr. Durand died in Sumatra and Mrs. Durand had sold the Ford. He had been a steel-spring kind of man with a tilted smile and a chuckle that welled from his boot soles. Mrs. Roberts, a plump widow with a bosom as imposing as a throw pillow (an incorrigible floozy according to Mrs. Reed), who leaned out her pie-shop window appreciatively (on heat) whenever Mr. Durand walked past, was not the only woman who watched as he walked by. Nobody gave a rat’s when Mr. Reed walked by and flat feet and myopia kept him from going off to fight.

“I’ll be damned if I’ll sit in the parlour with women all bloody war,” he seethed at his chop as he pushed it around his plate. “Are we supposed to eat this garbage?”

30 He had left on a train the morning after before Frances had even gone to collect the eggs.

“News to me he couldn’t see,” Mrs. Reed had said. “Just thought he couldn’t read because he was thick as two short planks. Don’t you be bothering your head over that cranky rooster.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“He’ll be back,” Mrs. Reed shrugged and dropped a knob of lard into the skillet. “Or he won’t. Lord knows.”

Mr. Reed had gone to the cane fields or the mines or some such occupation, so dull and removed from Frances she barely bothered to remember and they’d not heard from him since. A few months later and her mother had taken to bringing up her breakfast. Bent over the washing bucket in the garden, she’d turn abruptly to heave violently onto the grass, wet shirt twisting forgotten in her sudsy grasp. Frances offered to run for Mrs. Durand down the road. She’d heard Mrs. Roberts and other women discussing what they called her mother’s ‘condition’ in the pie-shop the other day, their voices dropping to whispers when she and Nancy had come in to buy a pasty.

“Certainly not,” Mrs. Reed had snapped when she’d asked. “It’s nothing but indigestion and I won’t have her coming over to poke her nose in it. Tattie-eating bitch with her ridiculous furniture and airs and graces, who does she think she is?”

Frances was convinced the whole thing would come to nothing until little

Thomas arrived. After the initial novelty had withered her baby brother seemed to be no more of a hindrance to her day-to-day existence, nor her mother’s, than another chook or puppy. His mewling was fast plugged up with a dollop of mush, or a suck at the teat, or, when he was cutting his teeth,

31 a spoonful of brandy in milk. Frances had far more interesting things to concern herself with, and Mrs. Durand was high on the list. Kate Durand was a fascinating creature. Last summer she had gone with Nancy to watch her mother perform in an amateur theatrical performance of Much Ado About

Nothing by William Shakespeare. There on the playbill, right at the top it read

‘Starring Mrs. Katherine Durand as Beatrice.’

Mrs. Durand’s raven locks glistened in the footlights, prompting Frances to fantasise about one day sporting raven locks of her own, even though she knew that Mrs. Durand’s hair was actually red as a rosella just like Nancy’s under her wig. Emerging later into the ripe evening redolent with frangipani and outdoor privies, Frances could tell shamefully little about the plot and could barely recall a single detail other than the fact that Mrs. Durand did, indeed, kiss someone called Benedict at the end, and it was on the lips!

Frances picked her way through the cemetery. Hide ‘n’ seek had seemed rather dull since the end of summer when she had exchanged silly street games for the new season fashion catalogue from London.

“I don’t see why you’re so keen on all those pictures of them boring ladies’ dresses,” Nancy huffed munching on a biscuit.

“You wouldn’t understand, Nan,” Frances said airily although she didn’t quite understand herself. She knew it had something to do with the mysterious new rules her mother had laid in place: not to talk to the boys down at the brick pit, to watch herself around the tram-men and see that she kept to herself if ever she went off on an errand after dark.

She was playing with Nan now only so as she would come to the picture theatre with her that evening although it was not the flick playing that she

32 cared for, but rather the chance to watch the soldiers with their girls. The

Americans used to holler out to Frances from their Chevrolets and stretch out a packet of chewing gum. A Negro in his Ike Jacket had once called her little lady. He’d given her a drag of his Lucky Strike as she sat swinging her feet on the wall of the train station and told her he was from Baltimore.

Frances had once overheard Mrs. Roberts talking about a certain house on

Myrtle Street that was known to entertain the Negros. Frances wondered if they all sat down and played Gin Rummy like her parents did when they used to entertain. One day, Frances knew, she was going to get her hair set in curls just like the pretty woman with the red lips she had seen holding the

Negro’s arm as they strolled down King Street. The woman threw her hip out with each step, her shoulders flung back. People stopped to watch them go by. Her lips were so red they seemed like a beautiful wound. Frances felt ashamed that the woman might have thought her staring was like every other person’s, ugly and mean. But it wasn’t. She wanted to be her, on her way to jitterbug at the Booker T. Washington.

She had asked her mother to do her curls one night after Thomas had been put down, describing the woman’s hair and what she had been wearing perfectly, sparing no detail of what she had seen.

“Heavens, Frances!” Her mother swallowed and smacked her hard.

“What? What did I do?”

“You will never speak such nonsense again. You will never, ever! Do you hear?”

This made her secret mutinous dreaming all the sweeter. What would it be like to kiss a coloured Yankee soldier, not just on the swarthy cheek but even on the lips like Beatrice kissed Benedict? The sacrilege of this idea made her

33 quiver. She hoped the Yanks would still be here when she was a year or two older so they could take her to the flicks. What a sight she would be that glorious day – that would poke all those old biddies in the eye! Who sat in the tearooms and the ladies lounges endlessly yammering about other peoples’ lives and licking their lipless toad mouths.

The bride ships had been cramming the shores of the Quay on their way out to Great Britain and America and everybody had a sister, a daughter, a niece or a friend on one. Some of them already with a baby and deserting our boys, the biddies would grouch.

How she detested their inexhaustible whingeing, their inedible fruitcakes, and their eggless rationing recipes that always tasted limp and gristly. She would plot her future escape as she choked down a butterless cucumber sandwich in the glare of their liver spots and sun-ruined faces as they huddled around her mother courting the attention in her nicest printed frock, tits still swollen from Thomas and brassiere padded to stop from leaking.

My life will be grand, thought Frances. I’ll never be like you. I will never be like you.

She shivered and counted: “Ninety-eight, ninety-nine, one hundred –

I’m coming to get you Nan!”

The most fantastic spider web weaved between two graves. The Harbour

Bridge paled in comparison to such a feat of engineering. Suddenly she felt very small. She cursed, crossing her arms and rubbing them. She wondered if anyone else was there. A cold wind lifted the arms of the trees and let them settle again. There shadows inched back and forward on the ground. Where was Nan?

34 She could see a boy hovering a short way off. He appeared to be pretending he wasn’t watching her with his back against a tree smoking cigarettes. His chaotic fair hair stuck up like a scarecrow. She knew the sight of him but not his name and remembered his skittish eyes and those tatty peacock Enmore girls. He’d come in off Federation Street. She knew the hole in the palings and barbwire where someone had pried the fence apart to force a gap wide enough for a grown man.

“Hello!” She called out to him. “Oi! Hey, you? Over here!”

The boy hurried away. Frances sighed deflated. She’d only wanted to talk to him. Now she was alone again in the quiet paddock of scabrous graves.

Nancy was nowhere to be seen. She walked to the tree she’d always disliked.

It was squat and dark and imposing. Maybe the tree had been struck by lightning. Her Uncle Stanley had taken her rock fishing in the harbour years ago Frances remembered. The day had been punctured by huge booms from the artillery batteries on the foreshore in gunnery practice that made the air vibrate. Uncle Stanley pulled something from the carrion-blue water. It was stumpy with thick deformed limbs. Curiously it reminded her of the graveyard tree.

“That there’s a squid. Isn’t he a big fellah?”

Frances was horrified. She was sure nothing on God’s earth could look so alien. He’d slopped it out from the pail onto the bleached wood of the jetty.

The little ragged boys who hung around the docks ran up and prodded it with a stick. It had ejected a lot of watery black stuff.

“Whoa! Look at it!”

“Yuck!”

“It did a shit!”

35 Uncle Stanley belted the squid with the handle of his gutting knife. Frances screamed. He’d held up the rubbery monster by its beaky head and waggled it at her.

“Those Eye-talians would eat this. Wog food. Me? I wouldn’t feed it to me dog. Ha! Would I mate?” He’d grunted at Rusty, a red kelpie sprawled panting by the bait bucket. Uncle Stanley had been one of the mob that smashed the windows of the Cellini fruit shop on King Street back in ’41. He had even pissed in the till drawer, he would tell people after a couple of beers. Frances was only six at the time and yet knew every word of the story.

Frances had dreamt that night of the squid, that a crowd of Banksia Men had gathered in the graveyard to see the Devil. The children of the neighbourhood used to tell stories that the Devil lived in St. Stephen’s. Bad things happened in there, everyone knew. Yankee soldiers took girls in to fool around. Tramps got into punch-ups and men wagered on which could beat the other near to death bare-fisted. A bloke had died, she’d heard. They’d found him the next morning with his face beaten in lying in his own puke.

And then there was the story about the mad old Abo moved between the cemetery and the brick pits down in St. Peter’s, flashing his cock to little girls in a pair of trousers that had more holes than a trawl-net. And even more sinister: that sometime early on in the war, a dog’s head had been found near the gate stuck on a post. Some people said that it was a warning, but against what and directed at whom no one seemed to know. They never found the rest of the dog.

“Silly!” Frances chided herself. What was she – a baby? Who knew if any of those tales were anything more than a sorry load of rubbish! Today her head was full of curls and ribbons, not ghost stories. She willed back the

36 memory of that Lucky Strike and the Negro’s smile and a hoarse excitement took her like a strong hand lifting her by her lungs. She smoothed her yellow cardigan and fixed the bow of the ribbon in her plait.

“Nancy!” she called, “Nancy?”

37 3

Nancy’s two closest friends were Frances and Lily. She had quickly learned that other people could not see Lily. As she grew, her mother told her not to talk so much about Lily, else people start to think her simple-minded, and to keep their games a secret. Slowly she stopped talking about Lily, but that did not make her go away.

Lily had shown herself to Nancy before Nancy was old enough to possess words to describe her, had she even wanted to. Lily was made out of the wind and lived in the walls of their house. You couldn’t look directly at her.

She’d skip away and glance off edges like light beams through the surface of a creek. Nancy had grown to know how to look around her, to trust that Lily was there by the air outlining her.

Their favourite games were all about England. That was where Lily came from. Nancy had picture books all about the place. She liked to roll the fancy words like London and Wimbledon around in her mouth as if they were bright little marbles along with Dover, Bristol, Kent. She loved the grand, gay

British sounds of ticklish, envelope and liquorice. Nancy and Lily played milkmaids in the street, filling their pails up with puddle water and manhandling the udders of imaginary cows.

“Who on Earth are you talking to?” Frances would often appear and demand.

“No one,” Nancy would cast a look at Lily, which made her drift off like steam from a cup of tea. “Just talking to myself.”

Frances would stare at Nancy as if she were a curio – a shrunken head from the cannibals in the Amazon or P.T. Barnum’s Fiji mermaid.

38 “You’re crackers!”

Lily was good at getting Nancy in to trouble. One day she suggested that they make up a game called Fox Hunt.

“These will make perfect reins,” Lily held aloft a pair of real silk stockings.

“Uh – I don’t know,” Nancy scuffed her shoe on the floor. “They’re mum’s special ones.”

“We’ll be careful,” Lily promised. “Here, put that little cap on. You can be the grand old gentleman.” Nancy carefully trussed her red wagon with the stockings, tying it up like a bridle.

“Perfect! Although, wait, you don’t look quite like a boy yet,” Lily cast an eye around the room.

“Aha! Look!” She seized upon a kohl pencil lying on her mother’s dressing table.

“Lily, Mum will be awfully cross,” Nancy trembled as she allowed Lily to draw a handsome moustache on her face, then some adventurous muttonchops.

“Tally-ho!” Lily shouted. “Pip pip, old chap.”

Lily was the fox, swift and sly, and Nancy the jockey hot on her trail, upturning the kitchen table and out through the back door. The chooks in the yard erupted into the air like canon shot.

Katherine Durand stood in the doorway. Nancy’s aunt Josephine beat the chickens off enraged.

“You cheeky little scoundrel! Just look at you! What do you think you are doing?” Aunt Jo growled at just the same pitch as her lapdog, Pinky, a

39 fluffy thing, rather like the winter coat trimmings the ladies wore down on

Pitt Street. His eyes leaked tracks of muck down his muzzle. Aunt Jo had been spending more and more time looking after them since Katherine had received the telegram that day, and had knelt ripping it into smaller and smaller pieces until Nancy had run for Mrs. Roberts next door.

Aunt Jo had been Nancy’s father’s elder sister by fifteen or sixteen years, and seemed old enough to be his mother. Some said she was, and those things were done secretly and commonly enough without anyone the wiser. She had come from Tuggeranong and taken an apartment in Chippendale so she could keep an eye on the family. Kate humoured her sister-in-law’s charity with all the clenched tolerance she could muster.

“Nan!” Her mother put her theatre voice on. “What in Heaven’s name is all over your face? Is that my eye pencil?”

“Kate, just you look!” Aunt Jo quivered, pointing: “The beggar has got your stockings.”

“Nancy!” This time Katherine’s voice registered genuine annoyance.

“You put those back right this minute. They are precious. You know better.

And go and wash up. I don’t know what you could have been thinking.”

“I’m sorry, Mum. It was – it was…” Nancy caught her tongue before she could blame Lily. That would land her in it all the more.

“And there’ll be no tea for you tonight. That’ll teach you to be more respectful of people’s property,” Aunt Jo said.

“Jo,” her mother hesitated. “I really don’t think…”

“Now, Kate, you just listen to me. You really do spoil that child rotten.

If John were here I can’t imagine he would let…”

40 “Well he’s not here, is he?” Katherine snapped. “Nancy, go to your room. I shall speak to you later,” she folded into a chair.

Nancy had a lump in her throat like she had swallowed a penny sucker. She hated upsetting her mother, especially in the past months when the tears did not seem to stop. Often whole days went by without her stirring from the darkened bedroom, dampening the pillows wearing only her kimono, not eating or talking.

“Look what you did, Lily,” Nancy sat in her room, arms crossed, scowling.

“You did it too,” Lily said nonplussed.

“Go away. I don’t want to play with you anymore.”

“Tally-ho! Pip! Pip!” Lily shrugged. She started humming energetically.

“Shut it!” Nancy reached out to give Lily a pinch but she was gone in a blink. In frustration, she pinched herself instead. A great livid welt rose on her inner arm.

Nancy remembered she had been off school sick with the chickenpox and seated cross-legged on the floor at Mrs. Roberts’ house gluing pictures into her scrapbook when Chifley had come on the wireless to deliver the news they had known for some months now was coming.

“Fellow citizens, the war is over.”

Mrs. Roberts had given a strangled cry in the next room and run to turn up the volume knob, wiping her hands on her apron.

“The Japanese government has accepted the terms of surrender imposed by the Allied Nations and hostilities will now cease.”

41 Nancy felt a queer sense of grey mist instead of what she suspected should be joy. Mrs. Roberts by then was clapping and clenching her raised fists. She even broke out into a little jig, coaxing Nancy up to join in.

“Oh Lord! Oh God be praised!” She danced about the kitchen.

Nancy tried to remember what life was like before the war started but it was like groping in the shadows for a black button.

“At this moment, let us offer thanks to God,” the radio continued. “Let us remember those whose lives were given that we may enjoy this glorious moment and may look forward to a peace which they have won for us. Let us remember those whose thoughts, with proud sorrow, turn towards gallant loved ones who will not come back…”

At once, all the industrial sirens started blowing, great loud honking sounds like giant monsters. Nancy jumped. She could hear yelling and singing outside.

“I hav’ta go! Bye Mrs. Roberts!”

In her scramble to get home she was nearly knocked down in Martin Place by a woman vigorously banging a wooden spoon against a cake tin. This was the beat for people in a conga line. It was like someone had punched open a bag of diamonds and they were raining on everybody, their glisten getting inside people and lighting them up. Confetti snowed from the high windows of the office buildings and papered the streets white.

At home it was different. The gate stuck in her hand and she’d kicked it.

Weeds were forcing the walkway pavestones apart and mail was piled up on the front step. Her mother knocked a vase off the kitchen table startled as

Nancy burst through the door. The roaring of aircraft passing over in victory intruded upon the house. The fast tick of the mantelpiece clock sounded as

42 loud as the planes. Katherine drew the curtains and fixed herself a whisky.

Nancy tried hard to clean up the flowers and broken glass.

“Leave it,” said Katherine. The water pooled and the petals floated like dirty boats. Nancy went again for the dishrag to mop it up but her mother’s hand caught her wrist.

“Oh please, Mum. Just let me clean it,” she started to sob. “Won’t you come outside and see the parade? It’s a grand day out there. All the factories have shut. The ladies look so beautiful! There’s kissing and dancing and everyone is yelling and laughing. Everyone is kissing everyone! Black, white, brindle – you’d scarce believe it!” The words poured out on top of one another. Her mother turned her head away and reached for her glass. Pinky padded into the room and started licking up the vase water.

“The war’s over! The Japs are licked!” Nancy waited a long time. Her mother still had said nothing so she said it again. She wanted the words to be magic spells.

“So?” Her mother asked baldly, looking through her at something else.

The widow’s broach she wore on her collar glinted cheaply. There were so many nowadays. The silence stretched like a piece of chewed gum.

“Go outside. Go on then. Celebrate. Please yourself. Get out in the sun,” she said.

“Won’t you come?” Nancy stood, unsure. She was yearning for the paper flags and the pandemonium and the mad women banging cake tins.

“Please?”

Whisky slid down her throat, the tears clinging to her lip mixed in, making it salty. “Why would I want to go, Nancy? And see that?”

43 “But there’s not going to be any more fighting,” Nancy murmured.

“No one else needs to die.”

“What do you mean?” Her mother eyed her dangerously.

“All the soldiers get to come home.”

“The war ended months ago. In a jungle, with plenty of men dying in their own blood as it went spilling out in the mud, crying for their mothers.

For nothing, you understand me? They could only finish the damn thing by dropping bombs that wiped out whole cities full of Japanese. Burned them alive. Whole cities! What next? Who do the damn Americans think they are?

Bloody Flash Gordons the lot of ‘em. Those Japs weren’t soldiers, they were mums and old people and little ones. They should be ashamed.”

Nancy held her tongue aghast. She had never heard her mother, or anyone, speak like that before. The Yanks were here for our own good, to help protect us, Australia looks to America, and all that. She’d it heard so many times she’d lost count.

Her mother’s eyes creased shut. She held them like that for a long time and then they blinked open. “Godammit I need a drink.”

44 4

It was a drizzling afternoon at Enmore Primary, the sky greasy and Stygian.

They had spent the morning dully reciting My Country and Frances had already been told off twice for mucking up.

“All I’m saying is it sure isn’t sunburnt outside and I’ve never seen any open plains in my life,” she sank into her chair complaining.

“That is enough, Frances!” Mr. Cameron exclaimed.

“Dorothea MacKellar can kiss Stalin’s hairy arse.”

“What did you say?” Mr. Cameron thundered.

“Nothing,” Frances had piped down grumpily and ignored her

European history primer, watching the rain streak the window until she was struck with a strange and alarming sensation.

“Mr. Cameron! Oh, excuse me. Mr. Cameron – ” her arm in the air straight as a soldier.

“What’s the matter? Shh. You’ll get a hiding, ” said Nancy, from the next row over. An inky squirt from her pen spoiled her clean page.

“Crumbs!”

“Sir! Sir?” Frances flapped like a seagull.

“Shut it! What’s got in to you?” Nancy warned her.

Mr. Cameron, a small man with prominent front teeth, turned from the board testily. His flop of white hair made the children call him Peter Rabbit behind his back.

“What is it, Frances?” He said with threadbare patience.

“Oh! Oh. Can I be excused? Please, it’s real desperate.”

“What for?”

45 “Uh – I have to go to the dunny,” she said urgently and a ripple of giggles passed over the class.

“Certainly you may not,” Mr. Cameron pronounced. “You should have gone at luncheon.”

“But Mr. Cameron – ”

“And it is referred to as the lavatory, Frances.”

“Mr. Cameron!” She squirmed. “I have to go to the lavatory then. Right.

Now.”

She was on her feet. One of the boys whistled noisily and his friends drummed their desktops with sweaty hands.

“Sit down!” He jabbed the air with his chalk, puce and sweaty.

“I’m going to the dunny and just you try and stop me.”

Mr. Cameron kept roaring but she was off out of the classroom, down the corridor. When she reached the toilets she pulled the door closed and slammed her back against it to stop anyone from coming in. She yanked down her scanties.

“Bugger me!”

There was a splotch of rusty blood on the white cotton. Crumpling against the wall she crammed her fist into her mouth. She bit down on her knuckles and slumped to the grimy floor.

“Oh Hell. It’s just like Mrs. Jenkins!” She thought of the handkerchief the woman clutched to her lips as she picked over the chops in the butcher’s or the cabbages in the greengrocer’s. Frances had been in line at a shop counter with her mother, waiting for the man to take the butter out of its glass crock and slice off their half pound with the wire guillotine when behind them Mrs. Jenkins had dropped a potato. Frances had picked it up to save the

46 elderly lady the stoop. As she leant to take it, beaming gratefully, her bloody handkerchief slipped to the floor.

“Keep your filthy hands off my daughter,” Peggy Reed had said and

Mrs. Jenkins narrowed her eyes to gimlets as she dragged Frances out of the shop by her elbow and proceeded along the street at a Melbourne Cup clip.

“Why’s Mrs. Jenkins got blood on her hanky, Mum?” Frances had enquired later that day when she’d finally judged it safe. They were walking to the factory to pick up the weekly load as Mr. Langby had been inconvenienced by ill health and prevented from delivering.

“Had she got a busted lip? It didn’t look it.”

“Because she’s going to Hell, that’s why.”

Frances mulled on this a while. Mrs. Jenkins seemed to her a perfectly nice woman. She liked to see her walking the streets trailing plumes of cigarette smoke like she was a locomotive engine. In fact Frances relished the sight of her; face painted so gay, rings winking in the sunlight, fox-furs hugging her shoulders. Murderers, abortionists, Nazis, Japs, and pacifists were the only ones going to Hell that she’d heard about.

“But why?” Frances dared, already wincing for a smack. Mrs. Reed was not one to mince words, but she took a cautious look about her to see if other people were in earshot.

“Because Dolly Jenkins is a whore, that’s why. She’s a clapped-out tart and a bludger,” she continued. “Do you know what that means, hmm? Well,

I’ll tell you what! She plucks young girls – just like you, Frances – from out their mothers’ laps, and puts them to work in her two-bob vice-dens. I’ve seen her standing around Central waiting to pick off poor little lost country girls with my own two eyes. Like a vulture.”

47 Frances’s mouth gaped open like a busted screen door.

“Oh yes! Mark my words!”

Frances had not the foggiest idea what two-bob vice-dens were, but they sounded flat-out brilliant.

“What does she make them do?” she prompted.

“Dolly Jenkins lives nice off their sweat,” her mother added, stressing the woman’s name as if it dripped with evil frippery. “And blood is on her handkerchief because God has seen fit to strike her down with just punishment.”

Frances shivered. She watched her mother’s jaw clench like she was grinding flour on her back molars.

“An infernal infliction that wastes the body. As those sinning whores have wasted their souls.” Her arm swiped the air to emphasise her own homiletic gravity. “Almighty God will punish her. He will wreak His

Vengeance upon her.”

Frances felt her body go loose and spindly. If she concentrated hard enough she could almost pretend she was somewhere else.

Sitting in the school dunnies she dug her nails into her palm. She’d caught the infernal affliction! She was not quite sure of what this meant. But how was it possible? She had not even clapped eyes on Mrs. Jenkins in months. Frances could feel her own cold perspiration. Was it because she liked to spy on the fast girls? The gorgeous, jukebox-dancing, laughing girls with their black lines drawn straight on their legs’ tan flesh; which fooled nobody was the seam up a silk stocking yet still they took the trouble.

48 Is this how All-mighty God meant to punish her? It was true: she did covet their Yank Catchers and their heady, swoony clouds of Evening In Paris. Or was it, even darker and more secret still, that glistening new shame? Oh, such a silken joy that could not even own a name. She had discovered it by happy accident a mere month or so ago when instructed before her weekly bath by her mother to make sure then her ‘down there’ was clean as a whistle. She’d blush to say it but ever since that her down there had been shiner than the windows in Mark Foys arcade.

“Bugger,” she cursed again, distraught.

“Frannie! Let me in. It’s me. What’s wrong?” A thud against the other side of the door was Nancy. Frances wailed even harder.

“You’ve got me scared half to death. Are you crook? Cameron sure is doing his block.”

“Go away, Nan,” Frances wept with her forehead against the flimsy wood.

“He’s going to cane your backside off!” Nancy wedged the door open.

“Golly! Why are you sitting down there on the ground like that? You’re going to get muck all over your dress!”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“What do you mean it doesn’t matter? Your Mum’s going to knock you from here to Sunday when she sees the state of that.”

“Suits me,” she fluttered her eyelids, forlorn. “I’m not for this world much longer anyway.”

“Aw! Quit it! What are you on about? Tell me?”

“No. Now go away.”

49 “Go on! You don’t look crook, except with your face all wet and puffed up like that.”

Frances scowled at her. “Thanks!”

“Tell me!”

“Well,” Frances swallowed. “I’m dying.”

“Ha! No you’re not!”

“I’ve got the affliction.”

“What? What in Heaven’s are you on about?”

“I daren’t say.”

“Go on!” Nancy’s eyes widened. Frances solemnly told her about Mrs.

Jenkins.

“Blood? Down there? Can I – Can I see?” Nancy gaped.

“No!” Frances shouted.

“I won’t tell anyone. Promise.”

Frances decided that she might need a second opinion. Nancy gravely inspected.

“It’s not the affliction, you featherhead! I bet if we go see my Mum, she’ll know what to do.”

“Really?” Frances blinked the moist despair from her eyes. “So, so – you don’t think I’m going to Hell?”

“Ha! Not bloody likely!”

“Thanks!” Frances winced.

“Oh, sorry,” Nancy said and a smirk shimmied up her face and the two of them fell about like a pair of galahs.

50 “What are you doing home from school this early?” Mrs. Durand looked up from her magazine as she lay on an arterial-red velveteen chaise longue nursing her glass. Frances had heard her correct Nancy whenever she referred to it as a chair and not the ‘shays-long’.

“Mumma!” Nancy spluttered, the words spilling out all at once.

“Frances thinks she’s dying although only she’s not and you’re the only one can tell her she’s alright!”

“Nan, what are you talking about?” Kate Durand pulled her nightgown closer, squinting at the girls. It was a funny sort of nightgown, one that Frances had never seen the like of before.

“A kimono,” Nancy has once told her matter-of-factly. Whatever it was it seemed wickedly glamorous, sable silk with elegant whey-coloured birds against a vista of trees.

Usually Mrs. Durand at least bothered to get dressed to greet her daughter coming home. No matter if she’d lain about all day, which she did often if

Aunt Jo wasn’t about to needle her with questions: When was she going to pick herself up? When was she going to get back on her feet? Didn’t she know she had the wellbeing of an impressionable little girl to think about? What would the neighbours think if she hung the clothes out in that piece of

Chinaman harlotry (as she called the kimono)? What would John think if he could see her now?

Mrs. Durand cared about what the little Reed girl would think of her, or, more importantly, what she would go and tell her God-fearing mother with the stick up her backside. However Frances was barely looking at the state of disarray, too busy staring fixedly at her own toe kicking at the wall mouldings in the corner of the parlour.

51 “Does Mr. Cameron know that you’re on the lam from school?”

“No, Mrs. Durand,” Frances scuffed her shoe still unable to look up.

“Come here, Frannie, you don’t have to call me Mrs. Durand. At least when no one’s around,” she smiled, her anxieties dissolving. She took another sip of her drink. That helped also. “Call me Kate,” she said and as the girl neared shyly she lifted her hand to comb her fingers through the child’s hair.

“Forgive me, we’re very informal here, aren’t we Nan?”

Nan said nothing, waiting breathlessly for her mother to get down to business.

“Mustn’t be like this at your place, is it Frances?” Frances shrugged.

“How old are you, Frannie? Twelve?”

“In October.”

“Come and sit here by me,” Mrs. Durand patted a place on the couch.

“She’s not dying. Is she Mum?”

“Nancy run in to the kitchen and fix me a drink,” Mrs. Durand said breezily, finishing her half-full tumbler in one luxurious mouthful.

“Get the bottle from out of the butter cooler. And get Frances a glass of milk.”

“Aw, but Mum!” Nancy grumbled.

“Now, or you can forget about tea!”

Nancy did as she was bidden, cross that she was going to have to wait to hear this piece of grown-up arcana secondhand.

Frances, relieved that she was not doomed, went off home. She could hear

Thomas crying from the street. It was earlier than she normally returned from school and she hadn’t expected anyone to be home. The front fence had fallen

52 down two years ago when a Yank snub-nosed Chevrolet had taken the bend too hard and plowed it to the ground.

“Mum?” She called as she pushed open the unlatched door of their house. Hers was the front bedroom, she passed it shuffling up the corridor which was tight as a broom closet, toward the kitchen then the back door with paved passageway to the dunny and laundry in the yard. The floor they occupied had only three rooms and they shared the dunny with a Greek family from the upper level, which Mrs. Reed was always complaining about.

They knew they were Greeks because they’d told everyone who’d listen in the early years of the war that they weren’t Italian, even writing a sign to put up in the window of their shop.

“To think that those heathens will never get to meet God in Heaven,” she would mutter to herself whilst looking at the ceiling. Frances had tried to tell her that she had seen crucifixes on their walls when she’d peeked in one day, so they must be Christians.

“Not the right kind,” her mother had replied. “They believe more in magic and hocus pocus then they do in the Lord.

“Mum?” She called again. There was no answer. Thomas was flushed as a beet and furious on the kitchen floor. She picked him up and shushed him, planting him on her hip. A strange sound emanated from her mother’s room.

“Oh, Peggy,” she could hear a man’s voice moan, low and queer.

“Mum?” She tried again softly.

She nudged the door. There on the mattress was her mother with her skirt drawn up round her waist. On top of her was Mr. Langby buck-naked.

53 Frances screamed, smacking her hands over her mouth, nearly dropping the baby.

“Christ!” Mr. Langby roared, hurtling backwards.

“Get out! What are you doing here? Get out!” Mrs. Reed yelled.

Frances, unfrozen, catapulted out of the house and up the road. She ran on, hot-cheeked, not even noticing that she still carried Thomas. The child was howling so hard he looked near to asphyxiation. She finally paused to catch her own breath and set her brother on the ground. He clenched his fists into tiny white cauliflowers. Frances ignored him. She slumped down by him in the gutter, wiping her leaking nose along her forearm, confounded and alone.

Ada Reed served up a face that could curdle milk when her niece knocked on her door sometime after tea: “What do you want then?”

Grubby-mouthed little ones strained at Ada’s legs wanting to spill out onto the street. Frances was wrung red from crying. She’d walked the backstreets of Enmore until dark fell, feet blistered and the baby bawled non-stop. Oh, did he howl for his country! She longed and dreaded to put her hands over his little mouth for one moment’s peace and yet she knew of a lady in

Chippendale who’d killed a baby doing just that only last year. She thought of the swift, stiff silence. The papers had called the woman a fiend and said she should hang.

“I’m sorry Aunt Ada, but Mum says can you take Thommo for the night?”

“What’s happened to you? What’s the matter with your Mum?” Ada stood firmly in the doorway. Frances held Thomas out under his chubby arms like an over-stuffed parcel.

54 “No,” said Ada. “I’ve enough bother with my own tonight!” She shook her head, eyelids drooped weighted down by bags and dry skin flaked her brow.

“Take him,” Frances pleaded. And then, with Ada still gawping uncompromisingly at the child, she thrust him on to her. “Please! I can’t!”

“God Almighty. Well, come in then, and have some toast at least. Have you had your tea? You look scrawny as a stray cat. Hasn’t your Mum been feeding you?” Ada sagged back holding Thomas and the children pushed past her jabbering and grasping at Frances’s legs. She wiped them off like burrs.

“No. No, I’m alright,” Frances called at her frayed aunt from over her shoulder. She was already running down the street. She couldn’t stand to hear Ada’s griping. The toast wasn’t worth it, although she was hungry, as

Ada would likely march her back home after a feed then let them stay the night.

She reached King Street at the corner of Missenden Road and stopped. A chill caught her in the evening air and her skin stood to attention in rows of goose pimples. She had nowhere to go. Sucking at her lower lip she started to cry again.

“Where you going, little miss?” Two men in Zoot Suits and bunged-on

Yank accents shouted from across the street, slowing down. “What’s wrong?

Where you going? We’ll take you. You lost?”

Their accents were rubbish, they were about as American as she was!

Frances bolted her eyes to her feet and walked faster. If girls fell for that they were dumb as a bag of hair. She waded along the road as if the air was

55 glutinous. The men still observed her with casual menace. One hooted and made gestures. She slapped herself on the arm and swallowed.

“Quit being a sissy,” she told herself. She could hear the men’s jagged laughter fading behind her. She yearned to get off the road but she daren’t go home or to Nancy’s. Even though Mrs. Durand had been so kind, even with her heavy lidded eyes and liquour-dipped breath, even with the kimono that gaped a touch letting a lunar sliver of bosom escape. Mrs. Durand, Kate, who had given her the belt she now wore made of a kind of elastic pajama cord tied to a towel like a baby’s nappy. Frances had held it between thumb and forefinger in disbelief. What on earth was she supposed to do with this? Why hadn’t her mother ever told her? Did women really have to wear this once a month?

“Fasten it into your scanties and wash it out when it gets soiled.”

A leaden fist turned slowly deep in her guts. The contraption, the thing, felt lumpy between her legs and its string itched her waist and her belly ached. It was most definitely soiled. She wondered if the men could smell her, like dogs.

If she went back she would have to explain to Nan and Kate what she had seen her mother and Mr. Langby doing, but she didn’t think she could even find the words. What’s more, she was already anticipating the scolding when eventually she went home, and given her mother’s opinion of Kate Durand, knowing she had spent the night there would mean she could be sure she’d get the tar beaten out of her.

It was sliding towards ten o’clock. She pinched and twisted at her sleeve.

King Street was empty but for tomcats yowling in the alleys. She sidestepped a pool of frothy vomit outside the Shakespeare Hotel. Her hands quivered

56 and there was a nervous but excited tremble to her stride. She thought of seeing her own blood earlier in the day and felt a blushing pride like she had suddenly been admitted to a club. The feeling was like a bright, smooth

Lightning Ridge opal. She stopped crying. It was silly and girlish to bawl on like that. Instead she remembered with fascinated horror the empurpled Mr.

Langby and his little potbelly jiggling above his pale legs. An involuntary giggle slipped out. Is that really how people did it? She had imagined something different, something less… comical. She thought with delight what the look on Nancy’s face would be when she described it.

Mr. Langby was nothing at all like Neptune in her schoolbook’s illustration: pelagic and supple, sliding around those slippery salty mermaids without their clothes on. Although come to think of it, her mother was a far cry from a mermaid.

An idea began to foment. The school would be a fair safe place to sleep the night. What a good lark! She could crawl in through the busted window near the infants’ school and sleep under her very own desk. If she went home in the morning her mother might have softened up a little if she’d had a little scare that she might’ve run away for good. What would people say? Surely the storm would blow over. She went on with fresh purpose and a spit- polished excitement.

57 5

“Go on, piss off,” Annie snapped at Jackie, pushing him off as he tried to drape a rough arm around her shoulders. He was half-drunk, cocksure, and swayed like a man trying to keep his balance on a boat in an unkind sea.

“Aw, come on darlin’,” Jackie tried to insinuate his tongue behind her ear. “£5, that’s all I ask. Me and the boys need to get out of here until something blows over,” his hand spanned her waist and drew her close. He whispered words that his mates couldn’t hear and kissed her neck.

“What have you done this time?” Sally inquired as she struck a match.

The sulfur smell flitted across the street up into the sky. Templeton sat to the side. He lit another cig mechanically although he already had a furry, ashy taste in his mouth from smoking too much.

“You! Shut it,” snapped Will Worthington at Sally. The veins on his neck stuck out thick as little fingers. He was beef to the ankles, as they’d say down the pub. He passed a handsome silver flask to Frank Roache after tipping it up into his own mouth. Stolen from some poor mug, most likely.

Quite the collection of fancy knick-knacks they’d procured.

Will had been the only one of the three to go to the war. He went off in ’41 and fought the Italians at Benghazi as a gunner. Crack shot he’d been too.

Done a whole bunch he liked to brag. Somehow he’d managed to get out of the army and didn’t have to serve again. The boys had a big party for him when he got home and were on the piss for days. Dot said that the seven of them had drunk his whole back pay in two weeks.

“I told you, I don’t have a bob,” Annie wriggled from Jackie’s touch but twirled playfully. “It’s been a bodgy night. I’d give it to you if I had it.”

58 Jackie grinned toothily although his eyes were frigid.

“Dot’s with a bloke now,” Sally said, cocking her head at the upstairs.

“Although she ain’t likely to want to pass her takings on to you lot.”

“That’s the first one we’ve had yet,” Annie shrugged. “Don’t know what’s up. Normally this time of night it’s like Central station.”

“When will she be out?” Jackie demanded.

“Gosh! I don’t know! You tell me. When the bastard’s good and done I reckon!”

Will and Frank sniggered. Time passed and the men grumbled and smoked and swigged from the hip flask. A fox ran across the road, its fur quilled against the grain in patches like a scruffy delinquent. Frank kept hacking and spitting wads of pearly phlegm on the road with his hands dug deep in his pockets.

“The coppers have been ‘round twice in two hours. As if they don’t have better things to do! What are you blokes doing? Going out for one? I’m thinking of packing it in,” Margot said. At the mention of the police Frank and Will’s eyes darted.

“Jackie, give it up, let’s go. We’ve got a hot crate waiting for us at

Dolly’s,” said Frank, showing off for the girls. He took another deep swallow,

Adam’s apple bobbing.

“We can drive it up to the mountains and be in Lithgow by morning but we gotta leave now,” Will’s hand in his jacket fingered what looked to

Templeton like the outline of a revolver stuck in the waistband of his trousers.

“Fuck off why don’t ya?” Jackie turned. “The car can wait there! We need a couple of quid first, don’t we? Otherwise we won’t bloody get very far. And I said I’m dealing with it,” he seemed annoyed at his own

59 drunkenness. He leant an arm against the brick wall and set his head against it and muttered gruffly under his breath and gave himself a slap on the face.

He kicked the wall hard. Annie used the moment to slink away closer to her girls.

“Come here,” he said to her when he’d recovered himself. “Come here, darlin’,” Jackie cooed, grabbing for her, swaying over. Reaching her, thumbs resting on her cheeks, he forced Annie to look into his eyes – pale blue and flat and shallow as an ocean baths at low tide. “Who’s my girl, eh? Now, don’t you have a pound to give a man, at least?” He smiled lopsidedly.

Nobody moved. Everyone looked away with studied embarrassment. “I’ll take it,” he made a walking motion with two fingers along his forearm. “And we’ll be outta your hair.”

The corners of Annie’s mouth hardened, and she planted a hand on her hip.

She looked over at Templeton who was doing his best to stay inconspicuous.

“Stop pissing in my pocket, Jack. You’re wasting your breath.” Annie stepped back. “I said we haven’t made nothin’ yet tonight. So however much you stand over us you’re not going to find a penny.”

Annie’s stroppy tone made Templeton fidget. Jackie regarded the scene, scanning the group coolly one by one.

“Now, what the Hell you all gone and done?” Annie kept on, bravely.

“If you don’t tell me what’s happened, how am I supposed to help you?

Frank? Come on. How ‘bout you William?”

Jackie’s lips pursed as if he was actually weighing up just telling her. His brow knitted. He let out a long, slow breath.

Annie reached out to him and stroked his face: “What happened darl’?”

60 Oh Jesus, Templeton panicked. He knew Jackie wouldn’t tell simply because

Jack Tooth was a stinking, evil, rat-bag, and he wouldn’t tell anyone shit unless they forced him, and then he could still be trusted about as far as you could kick him. Templeton sat on the doorstep and was resuscitating his failing cigarette when Jackie struck her, his backhand hard against her cheek.

Frank and Will stood up but he swiveled to let them know her would put their lights out if they moved.

Annie didn’t flinch. Her skin went white like boiled mutton then slowly bloomed crimson. Margot and Sally rushed over but Annie’s hand told them to stay put.

“You’re a sow’s cunt Jackie…” Templeton spat. He’d leapt to his feet and shook with feeling.

“What did you say to me?” Jack asked him, low in the back of his throat. He left Annie and walked toward him. Templeton’s chest thumped.

Annie looked at the ground. He wanted to repeat it but he daren’t and cursed himself.

“That’s right. Bet you sit down to piss don’t ya?” Jack laughed.

“Jesus, Jackie,” Will pointed at Annie with the flask still to his lips. The liquor spilt on his shirt and he wiped it with wide, clumsy swipes. “Did you have to go and do that? Look what you did to her face!”

“How you expect her to make any money if you bust her up like that?

Huh?” Frank added.

“Yeah. Nobody wants a whore with a beat-up face,” said Will.

“Happy?” Annie asked flintily and barely audible, she brushed the hair off her face and pulled her shoulders back.

61 “I don’t need your bloody help,” Jackie looked at her with contempt. “I can get the money. Who said I couldn’t get the money?” He sloped over to his pals and snatched the flask. “Fuck all a’ you anyway. Try makin’ it on your own then. See if I care.”

“Nah. Nah. Hang about. It’s not like that,” Frank backtracked, looking anxiously at Will.

“Isn’t it? No. Go on then. Fuck off then. See how far you get,” said

Jackie.

“Come on now. We didn’t mean nothing,” Will smiled tightly. “Tell us what to do. Tell us the plan.”

“We’ll ‘ang on till Dot comes out,” Jackie rubbed his hands together.

“She still owes us for the snow. That’ll be a start. Unless one of you geniuses has a better fucking idea.”

The doorway of the shop lit up. A gentleman stumbled out buttoning his trousers with a smirk. He tipped his hat to the women and went on his way up the street.

“Alright, mate?” Jackie said. The man paused and amiably turned.

“What are you looking at?” Will snarled at him, blowing smoke.

Jackie’s razor snicked out from his pocket, the ivory handle winking, he angled it against his thigh to slide out the blade. The bloke sensibly quickened to a jog.

Dot appeared in silhouette on the step. “Annie? What happened?” She was at her friend’s side in two swift steps. Annie smiled at her gamely. The two women touched palms and Dot took her by the waist.

62 “What are you lot all doing standing around here scaring off the trade?

Bunch of soft cocks!” Dot flared. “It’s been a slow enough night as is, without you lot hanging about like flies. Don’t you have better things to do?”

“Have a nice knee-trembler, did we?” Frank leered.

“Why don’t you go home and give one to your mother?” Dot laughed at him.

“Well don’t you just have more hide than Jessie tonight?” Jackie put his hand on Frank’s chest.

“What did she do this time, Jackie, huh?” Dot looked at Annie. “Tell me. What did she do? Yeah, you’re a real tough guy.”

The margarine-yellow headlights of a car dipped around the corner, the tyres slow and passing over the road like sandpaper.

“We were just going – ” Will began but Jackie told him to shut his ugly face. Jackie was staring after the car, craning his neck to get a better look and squinting in the reflected light. Dot took the cigarette Margot had rolled for her. She lit it and sucked the smoke in. It came back out her nose like a dragon in a picture book. Her dark, somber, European eyes blinked before they alighted on Templeton. A firefly of affinity passed between them. He felt a hot gush of love.

“Why don’t we all go on over to Dolly’s, huh? Play some cards. Have a drink,” Annie suggested brightly, breaking the tectonic silence. “You boys can hide out there. No one’s going to mess with you at Dolly’s.”

“Snowy Thompson will see to that,” Sally said walking over to Frank and stroking a hand down his perspiring chest. “Make your silly get-away in the morning,” Sally flicked Frank on the nose with her little finger. Frank

63 deferred to Jackie for the official decision. Jackie looked at his sorry pair of mates both the worse for drink.

“That’s not a bad idea,” he said finally. “With the two of you full as a boot.” He chucked his cigarette at them scornfully. “Bloody useless.”

“Good. It’s decided then,” said Margot, a flurry of relief flushing her thin, hard face. The men were often cruel about Margot, saying she was about as good-looking as a knackery mare so lucky for her that she knew how to bend over and take a good hard fuck. Templeton hated it when they talked like that. Margot had always been sweet to him.

Dot locked up the shop and they started walking back to King Street in pairs.

Jackie and Annie, Sally and Frank, Margot and Will, followed a few yards behind by Templeton and Dot. They passed the liquor back and forth between them merrily enough although Templeton could feel Dot’s trapped anger in the press of her curled fingers about his upper arm and in how forcefully she threw her cigarette butt on the ground.

Jackie took Annie’s waist and steered her along lifting and tickling her. All seemed forgiven for now. Templeton and Dot exchanged wordless glances as

Dot struck the head of a new match against the rough edge of the box.

The whole troupe was just entering Hordern Lane when they heard the squeal of a car accelerating and wheels spinning hard against the asphalt and then the blinding supernova of the high beams.

“Christ!” Jackie hollered. “Get down!”

They crumpled to the ground a second before the shots. The window of the house opposite split and shattered glass confetti over their heads. The automobile turned awkwardly and a man’s face hung out of the passenger window. His one good eye Vesuvian – a puckered scar in place of the other.

64 “That’s for you, Jack Tooth, you cock-sucking bastard,” he shouted as the car sped away.

Templeton gulped oxygen as if he’d been pinned underwater. A bullet had passed waspishly by his ear.

“What the bloody Hell was that?” Margot yelled, trying to pick herself up, but no one answered. “Who was that?” She screamed. “Oh Jesus, oh Jesus

Christ.”

Panting and grappling each other and standing up and falling down, sliding against the tenement walls, they all lurched back around the corner, drunk and chaotic.

“I knew it. I knew it,” Jackie yelled, pumping his arms. He pushed up his shirtsleeves, the front of him soaked with sweat. “Bob Newham! Bloody

Bob Newham – I knew the bastard would be after me the second he got outta

Long Bay.”

“Cool it,” Annie went to him with her arms outstretched. “Calm down.

It’s alright now. They’re gone now,” she murmured but Jackie wasn’t listening. He lit a cigarette and drew on it like a madman, swearing and trembling.

“Bob Newham! Pffft! He couldn’t hit the dags off a dead dingo,” yelled

Will holding on to someone’s front fence.

The others stopped, looking behind him, through him. Their gazes were drawn suddenly as one to a thing out of place, like a mouse in a larder. There was a girl crouched in the road. How could no one have seen her until now?

Templeton wondered. As though she had materialised from the ether! She was young and skinny, her face obscured by her hair. One skinned knee bled down her leg into her hand-me-down shoes.

65 “Oh, Christ All Mighty. Oh, this is brilliant, isn’t it? How much did this little bitch see, huh?” Jack kicked an empty bottle and it spun noisily down the street and smashed against a gutter. A dog barked. The girl wailed in terror.

“What the Hell are you doing here? What did you see? What? Huh?”

Frank yelled at the girl, standing over her. It didn’t do much good. She was insensible, quaking like a sparrow.

Jackie squatted to question her. He was not as stupid as Frank. He asked her name, where she lived. All he got was disconsolate blubbing in response.

“Shhh! For God’s sake, let’s just call the police ourselves, shall we?”

Dot whispered hoarsely. House lights had started to switch on and there was a rustle of inquisitiveness behind closed doors. The neighbours knew better however then to come right out and gawp. The corner of a curtain lifted here, the chink of two splayed fingers through a shutter there.

“Clear off!” Annie implored the prone girl. “Get up. You’re alright. Go home.”

“Jesus Christ, help me, you pair of duffers!” Dot motioned to Sally and

Margot to help her pick the child up.

They took off back to the flat and carted her inside and laid her out on a mattress. Annie yanked her up by her collar upturning a hefty slug of brandy into her mouth. Some of it got onto her dress but Annie just kept angling the bottle. The girl spluttered.

“Shit. Don’t bloody choke her!” Dot pushed it away. “We don’t want to kill her.”

66 If she weren’t dead to the world for shock the spirit would make short work of it. The men waited outside. The stickybeaks had seen Jackie and extinguished their lights.

“I think you’d better go now,” Dot came out and said to Jackie, wedging the front door between her and them. “We’ll take care of this.”

“Or what?” Jackie asked dangerously. “And what if we don’t go?”

“I’m just saying… You lot had better clear out,” Dot met his glare.

“What if that little bitch saw the whole lot, huh?”

“And so what? You’d shoot a little girl? Beat her? You’d be a real big man then wouldn’t you?” She teetered, feeling dizzy and ill. She needed a drink.

“Come on. Let’s get out of here,” Jackie said to Will and Frank.

“Whore,” he aimed softly at Dot but still deliberately loud enough for her to catch it. “We’ll be back.”

She tried to shut the door but he whipped around and jammed it open with one stringy forearm.

“You tell Annie I’ll be round here tomorrow afternoon. I want that money you owe me. I’ll hold you all for it. Tell her she better get some cash together,” he tapped Dot’s cheek. His face filled the gap of the frame. He laughed as she turned her head from his ferrous breath.

“If she has to sell you molls from here to bloody Goulburn. You tell her she’d better have some ready,” he pinched the butt of his half smoked cigarette and threw it like a dart catching her on her bare neck just above her collarbone.

67 “Spread your legs, bitch. You’re gonna be sore by morning if you know what’s good for you. You better get to work. I’ll be coming,” he rubbed his thumb and forefinger together.

“Go to Hell, Jackie”, Dot slammed the door and stood in the airless corridor her breath like a bird wedged in a chimney beating its wings against the stone. “I’ll piss on your grave one day,” she vowed.

Upstairs lay an unknown, shell-shocked girl and three others, not to mention

Templeton, waiting for her, and she couldn’t expect Annie to come up with any half-decent plan, not after getting the stuffing knocked out of her.

Memories of Kraków poured in as she fretted. Memories she hadn’t had since she was a hip-high child coming to this country, via many others, on the vast, crowded boat. She remembered the pitted buildings of her old city, like the faces of the people, haunted and hopelessly antediluvian, ground between the old and the new. Painfully she realised that she missed the sour-tempered solidness of her Babcia, who smelt always of paprika and pepper and her reliable industrious occupation of the cottage garden. She thought of her father’s scent – old paper and shoe polish and tobacco, and felt her chest catch, as though in one of those flower-presses which girls of a certain class had toyed with during her early school days. She felt the twin wooden boards compress her heart and lungs, the elegant iron screws twisting, flattening downwards. She tried to catch her breath as her groping hands opened the cupboard above the sink and pulled down the bottle she kept there behind the beans. The hours till dawn could use some lubrication.

Templeton couldn’t sleep. He padded barefoot downstairs in the early hours of the morning and found Dot still up with two packets of Lucky Strike and a

68 bottle of whisky for company. She was sitting at the table in the small backroom downstairs that once was part of the shop and he sat down with her. Dot had been saving that whisky, hiding it in a hat behind a ragged row of tins, along with her grandmother’s necklace, and the girls all knew not to touch it. She poured him a chipped teacupful without saying anything.

The spirit scorched his nose and throat. He noticed a small angry burn on her neck. He tried a few times to get her to talk with no avail and after a while sitting in silence and concentrating on the drink, he began to feel sleepy.

“Stay down here,” Dot took another drink without explanation.

“What are you on about?” Templeton slurred.

“Stay down here, I reckon we’ll be out quick in the morning,” she said.

“We should all clear off. First light,” she muttered distractedly.

“What?” Templeton tried to wade through the fug in his head. The events of the night played through his head like a motion picture: the car, the shots, the girl.

“Rotten night to come home, if you ask me,” Dot said, looking careworn and sloppy. Templeton had the sudden urge to curl up in her lap and kiss her fingers.

“What?” He asked confusedly. “Dot, I’ve been here the whole time!”

“I don’t know who she is,” Dot half-hiccup, half-laughed. “What should we do with her? Fucked if I know. God, they could’ve killed her. Who would know? Dump her in a gutter somewhere. Bob’s your uncle.”

“I know, Dot. I was there,” he repeated, confused.

“We had to keep her here after we –” she stopped, as if choosing her words. “Well, after that bastard Jackie frightened the wits out of her.”

69 “Dot! I know. Remember?” Templeton tried to stand up using the chair as a crutch but fell heavily back into his seat. “I have to go to bed. This whisky works,” he concluded happily. “We should write a congratulatory letter to the manufacturer.”

“Better if you stay here. I’ll sleep down with you. Don’t you go up there and wake your sister. She’s had a rough night,” Dolly waved clumsily at the stairs, hitting her palm on the table.

“I saw!” He said and the anger resurged, rushed up like indigestion.

“He did it again. Jackie! That bastard! I’ll kill him. He always does it again.

No matter what he promises. And she just lets him!”

“Shh. Come here. Go to sleep,” she scraped him up like a rag doll and heaved him down to the mattress on the floor with her. Templeton protested weakly.

“Why?” He flailed. “Why does she do it?”

“Darling,” she said. “Hush. Serduszko,” she cooed, breathing hot sleepy whisky breath on his cheek.

“Tell me – why does she let him – ” He choked on the words.

“Your sister is fine. She – ” Dot stopped, her voice taut. “She’ll be alright. She’s strong.” She stopped to drink. “Just another kicking that’s all, and she’s had a few of those. This one wasn’t so bad. Trust me, if I could do something, anything at all… I’d kill him if I could.”

She arranged Templeton so his head was in her lap and her cup on the floor beside her and the bottle close at hand. She stroked his hair and purred foreign words to him.

“Babisu. Aniolku. Kocham Cie.”

70 The night was soundless but for her soft crying. He felt the warmth of her knee as she raked his curls so softly with her fingers. He slept. He dreamt he was in a lion’s lair. The lion’s paws were heavy as cudgels on his back. The beast turned him over and licked his face. He could smell its tannery breath hot on his skin.

“Dot, I love you,” he murmured at some point from the depths of his restless, troubled sleep, and woke himself startled. The regular, gentle touch persisted. He shifted so his face was concealed, pressing into the fabric of her dress against her thigh, relieved that in the glimmer she would not see his tears.

71 6

Dot, Annie and Margot were talking in the kitchen. Their voices woke

Templeton who raised himself from the crusty mattress. Annie’s cheek was swollen. He stood and tried to weasel his hand into hers but she squeezed it and then dropped it. She sat in the corner and spoke quietly to Dot. Margot fried some bread in the residue of old bacon fat and shared two eggs between the four of them. Sally was still sleeping.

“If Lady Muck wants to lie in all morning then she misses her breakfast, doesn’t she?” Annie said.

“She can have some of mine,” Templeton left a morsel of toast and a bit of egg white on the side of his plate.

“Suit yourself.”

“What about the girl?”

“Go up and check on her then. See she hasn’t died of shock.”

Templeton went worriedly up and found the unconscious girl on his pile of coats and rags. He recognised her to his surprise, as he had not been able to get a good look at her last night her face all messed up from crying. She was one of the ones he liked to follow sometimes. She often played with her friend in the cemetery. He liked her face. Still plump and round but he could see the grownup bones underneath. He noticed the small buds of her chest lifting and falling with her breath. She looked like a foal. She sighed and murmured in her sleep and he shot back down the stairs before she might wake and see him gawking at her. Dot and Annie were arguing.

“Fine,” Dot said bitterly. “If that’s what you want – fine. Just don’t expect me to come along – ”

72 “That girl’s alive. She’s out to the world though. How much brandy did you give her?” Templeton announced. Nobody replied. Annie conferred with Margot. Dot sat picking at her crust, holding it limply before letting it drop back onto her plate as though it were sordid.

“We’re going out. We can work later on, when the place starts turning.

Or come back here this afternoon it doesn’t matter.”

“What about what’s-her-name?” Margot asked. “Should we just leave her here – what if she runs straight to the police? And what about Sal?”

“She won’t do that. She was scared witless,” Annie shrugged. “Sally can do as she likes. If she wants to stay in bed all day she can come find us later.”

“But what about Jackie?” Dot riled at Annie.

“Jackie will realize it’s not worth it. He’s not that stupid. She’s just a kid. What’s she going to do?” Annie blasé lit a cigarette. “Who’s she going to tell about what she thinks she saw?” Her fingers shook only slightly. “She doesn’t know our names. After the drink we gave her I doubt she’ll be able to remember our faces. She doesn’t know us from a bar of soap!”

“If you say so,” Dot said, scowling.

“I do say so,” Annie puffed. “He’s not going to waste time looking for some little girl. Not with Bob Newham’s lot after him,” Annie exhaled a long pennant of smoke.

“So, we leave her here. Now let’s go already. Are you coming Lucky?”

“Uh – no, I don’t reckon on it,” Templeton said, surprised to be asked.

“Well then you get out of here. Don’t look for trouble. You hear me?”

Annie grabbed him and kissed his head with rough lips.

“I won’t,” he promised.

73

It had taken him more than an hour to reach the beach. The trams were slow and noisy, chatting men still in uniform squashed him up against the handrail and hit him with their kit bags. Alighting had been a blessed relief. He made his way along the cliffs from Bondi and until he came to a cave half-concealed by a snarl of brush and scrub. He squatted beneath the lip of the sandstone overhang and carefully lifted a wooden box from the cave’s gritty floor. Forty feet below him the Tamarama high tide worked the cliff-face like boxer’s fists, sending whipped jets of spray upward on the wind. His face was misted with salt, his eyes liquidly content in his sanctuary. It was private here and he didn’t have to fight for any patch of it. He had arranged a lot of wooden boxes, some fifteen or so in parallel lines, taken from laneway trash. It had been a while since his last visit. Weeks needed to pass for it to be right. He couldn’t abide the sight or the smell if he came too soon. It was much better in wintertime and so he came more often. He would stroke his impatience during the long nights at home.

Uncovered on the ground was a dead rat. Very dead, Dot or Annie might have quipped, for it was stiff as the jerky the Yanks chewed on.

“You’re pulling my leg! You’ll be on the dunny all night if you eat that!” Annie had said when the soldiers had first offered it to her.

Templeton looked in admiration at how the flesh had retracted over the thin white needles of ribcage. It did smell, but faintly of dried apples; not like his mother had smelled when they buried her.

He smoked a cigarette and checked on the rest of his collection. Mostly rats, but he also had a magpie, a ring-tailed possum, a rainbow lorikeet, and some other small birds whose names he did not know. He didn’t like to look at the

74 possum. He’d considered throwing it away. It was the only creature he had killed and not found dead already. Some boys had hit it with a rock up one of the fig trees near the beach and he’d found it bleeding and panting with its tongue stuck out. He had tried to strangle it but the damned thing had struggled and screeched and ripped a chunk out of his finger so he’d had to snap its neck. It had sounded like cracking a stick over a knee. He replaced the box and sat for a while in his crude mausoleum.

Frances had woken up forgetting where she was on a coat that reeked of smoke and old sweat next to a softly snoring girl. It was at least mid-morning from the height of the sun trying to pry through the thick tatty curtains. Her head was a jumble of ugly pictures: her mother naked underneath Mr.

Langby; the gunshots from the car; the bleeding between her legs. She leapt up, lacing her shoes and pulling on her cardigan; there were marks on the yellow wool from falling down in the filthy street, another thing to cop it over! She daren’t go home. Her mother would’ve checked at Ada’s for her by now and found Thomas and be mad as a bee-stung bear.

Frances looked around the room. There were pictures of Clark Gable and some others stuck on the wall. She had the same up in her bedroom, pulled out of Life and Picture Post. There were pretty coloured perfume bottles on a dressing table along with various tubes and pots. She checked over her shoulder to see if the girl was still sleeping. She could see the steady rise and fall of the curve of her back. She sat down in front of the mirror and began to stick her fingers in the make up, just small amounts, just to try it. She rubbed the colours into her skin. Pink on her cheeks and lips, coal-dust-black on her eyes. Her mother didn’t have any of this stuff.

75 “Why would I waste hard-earned money on nonsense like that?”

Peggy Reed would say, her face was plain and tough as a boilermaker’s elbow.

“Shit,” Frances cursed quietly letting the compact slip from her fingers in a gust of powder. She looked down at her lap. There was a little dark red stain beneath her on the chair. Sanguine beads trickled a thin line down her thigh. She banged drawers open and shut looking for another one of those thingamajigs like Mrs. Durand had given her. Finally she found a pile of them in a chest. For a moment she stood stricken, it was too dangerous to venture out into the backyard to the dunny – anyone could be downstairs in the kitchen. She had no telling who these people were or what they were capable of! She shivered and nipped over to the landing to listen. Only silence greeted her, but she couldn’t take the chance. She checked to see if the girl stirred.

Unclipping the belt she bundled up the thing in her fist, thoroughly disgusted. She hooked up the fresh one stumbling about on one leg. Panicked she sought somewhere to shove the used one, and could find only the pocket of the coat she had slept on.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she whispered. They had been nice to her, in their own peculiar way. That pretty blonde one who had brought her up here and the dark featured foreign one who had given her the drink, she’d seen that they’d done their best to stop those blokes from giving it to her.

The girl made a noise in her sleep and shifted position. Frances bolted leaving the house and colliding with the bare, bright day. She walked without thinking up Church Street and then she was in St. Stephen’s before she could take her bearings. Sitting down on the patchy grass she thrust divots in the earth with the heels of her shoes and started to cry. Her hands kneaded dirt.

76 Roots from the scraggly bushes spooled roughly between her fingers and a slater made its way over her knuckles. She cried so hard, it hurt her in the chest. It was like her jaw couldn’t close and her eyes couldn’t open. Sniffling, her face covered in snot, she decided that a whipping was going to be better than a night outside in the dark. The squid-tree shook its branches in a gust of gelid wind. Rainclouds rolled in from the Blue Mountains, violet and immense, spreading Indian ink bruises across the sky.

Frances was gone when Templeton got back later in the afternoon. He found

Sally sitting alone on the step of the house, picking her fingernails, a record blaring inside.

“What are you doing?” He asked.

“Nothing.”

“Did she talk to you at all?”

“Who?” Sally asked, not looking up.

“That girl,” he said exasperated. “Who stayed here? Frances. Is she still upstairs?”

“I don’t know,” Sally hissed crankily. “Shhh!” The muted trumpet of

Fats Waller crackled.

“Did Jackie come? Did he come back for her?” He shouted above the music.

Just for a thrill you pulled the sun from the sky

Just for a thrill you put rain in my eye

“Did she say anything?” He tried again but Sally’s hand shot out and smacked him.

“I said shut up!”

77 He rubbed his arm, glaring at her: “Ow! What’d you do that for?”

“Shh! Go away Lucky! I don’t feel like talking to you right now.”

“What’s wrong with you, then?” He asked, annoyed and confused.

“I don’t care about her. I don’t care about you. Leave me alone.”

“Fuck you then,” he barged past her into the house. The upstairs room was empty. He came back down and saw her bent over like a corpse folded in a bog nodding in time to the music.

I held your heart for just a day

But when you left and snatched it away

You made my heart stand still

Just for a thrill

The half-drunk brandy was on the dresser. He picked up the bottle and sat on the step near her and held it out. She ignored it.

“Here. I’m sorry. Have a drink.”

“Don’t want one. My head hurts from last night.”

“Well it’ll do you good then. Hair of the dog that bit ya.” She still demurred so he helped himself. “Don’t mind if I do then.”

She watched him drink heartily and light a cigarette. The music stopped and the sound of blank rotations bookended the caesura in conversation. “Give me some then. I’ll have a smoke as well. I’m out,” she nudged an empty packet with her shoe.

“Nah,” he held the bottle and the cigarettes above his head. “Not unless you tell me what you’re sore about.”

She kicked him in the shin and put a palm against his face and took them out of his hand.

“That’s not fair! I can’t hit you back. You’re a girl.”

78 “Since when’s that stopped you?” She swallowed, inhaled and laughed.

“I’m too big now. I’d hurt you.”

“Oh yeah? Show me your muscles.”

“No,” he frowned, crossing his arms.

“Go on then. I reckon I could still take ya.”

“Piss off.”

Sally grappled with him, trying to roll up his shirtsleeves. In the tussle her cigarette fell out of her mouth onto her lap. She swore. “Careful, you tit!

Look what you made me do,” she smiled crookedly brushing ash off her lap.

“You started it.”

“Did not! So, you’re a man now, are you? Been with a girl yet?” She drank some brandy.

“Yes,” he shoved her and took the bottle back.

“Who?”

“You wouldn’t know her.”

“I know everyone. Who? Come on. What’s her name?”

“I forget,” he shrugged.

“Right,” Sally raised her eyebrows and made a sound like a horse. She stood up.

“Where are you going?”

“I’ve got to put another record on, silly.”

He followed her inside. A fleet of shadows darkened the street as only the sun’s prow still remained above the deepening night. He closed the door to the wind.

“What do you want, Mario Lanza or Tommy Dorsey?”

79 “Neither. I’ve heard both of those a hundred times.”

“Well what do you want to do then?”

“I don’t know. We got anything else to drink?”

“I have gin upstairs.”

“How’d you get that?” He asked, impressed.

“Fingered it from some idiot when he was on top of me,” she said matter-of-factly. “Do you want some?” He nodded and she fetched it, returning with cups and her hair loose and free. She poured some out. Sally put Mario Lanza on and Templeton didn’t complain. He drank and watched as she began to sway her hips to the music, dancing on her tiptoes with her hands cupped and outstretched as though holding the shoulders of an invisible partner.

“Come dance with me.”

“Naw,” he stared into his cup.

“Go on. It’s alright if you don’t know how. I can teach you.”

He resisted but she dragged him up on his feet and placed his palms on her waist and rested hers on the nape of his neck.

“You have to get closer, stupid!” She stepped in so her face was only and inch from his. “You can’t do it properly bent over with your arse poking out.”

She laughed and he felt his cheeks turn uncomfortably hot. He could smell her musky unwashed hair and the liqoury spittle on her pink bottom lip where she had run her tongue. He focused on the steps and followed her feet about the floor with a furrowed brow.

“You dance like a girl,” she said and threw up her hands. “I give up!”

“I do not!” He said crossly and sat down on the chair furthest away.

80 “Blokes are meant to lead. Not the other way round.”

“I was just about to! I was getting the hang of the steps.”

“Sure,” she rolled her eyes. “Did the girl have to do all the work when you were doing it too?”

“Fuck off,” he said sharply. The gin swashed in his gut and he felt sick from exertion and irritation.

“You’ve never done it. Have you? Come on. You wouldn’t have the first clue. Probably wouldn’t even know what to do with it”

“Shut up, Sal!” A lump climbed his throat and he swallowed.

“I knew it! I knew it,” she said, sitting down with satisfaction.

“Yeah, well, you don’t have to go and tell everyone.”

“Ha! I’m going to tell that you tried to make up some mystery girl –

I’m gonna…” She stopped when she saw the seasick look on his face. “Aw,

Lucky, I’m just messing with you. I won’t tell. I swear. Hey now, I’m sorry.”

She touched a finger to his face.

“Does it hurt?” He asked, sniffing and wiping his nose on his cuff.

“Does what hurt?”

“When they’re doing it to you,” he coughed into his gin.

“No. Sometimes. Not really. Only the first few times.”

“Do you shut your eyes?”

“Ha! Only for the really ugly blokes.”

“Yuck,” he shivered.

“What? It’s not so terrible. Better money than I’d get in a shop – not that anyone would give the likes of me a job like that. And what else am I supposed to do? Factory work? And blow myself up tinkering about with munitions or come out dyed yellow like some girls what I’ve heard from all

81 them chemicals. No thank you. Those jobs are all gone now anyway. And I don’t see you coming up with any better ideas.”

“I didn’t mean to – ” he began but she cut him off.

“Well don’t start. You’re not me dad. Annie takes care of us. I’d never had it so good until she came along.”

“Pffft,” he snorted. “She doesn’t do a very good job at taking care of herself.”

“Don’t talk about your own kin like that,” Sally slapped him on the arm lightly. “She does the best she can with what she’s got. And besides, she has Dot to look after her.”

“What can Dot do up against Jack Tooth?”

“Probably a lot more than you or I might think. She’s tough as boot soles and if anyone crosses Annie, Lord help them.”

“She cried herself to sleep last night. It was just me and her and a bottle and I think she thought I was off in the Land of Nod. I could hear her crying, quiet so as not to wake anyone,” he regretted this as soon as it had passed his lips, suddenly he felt as though he was betraying Dot and some secret closeness they had held between them.

“Over Annie,” Sally nodded as if unsurprised. “That’d be right.”

“She was angry that Jackie bloody well clobbered her again!”

Templeton said defensively.

“It’s that, and more,” Sally took his hand and turned her round, doll- like, blue eyes on him. “Dot loves Annie.”

“And?” Templeton sat woodenly. Sally fidgeted but kept gazing at him. Her pupils flicked as though reading his face until eventually she sighed and dropped his hand. This perturbed him. “What? And what?”

82 “Hiya!” Margot hollered brightly as she entered.

“Never mind,” Sally said quickly and stood up. “Where’re the others?”

“Annie went to the Tradesman’s to rustle up an emergency fund in case those bastards come a’ knocking. Dot went for a drink. I’ll tell you, was she in a mood. They said they would be back before dark. Annie was talking about holing up at Dolly’s, that’s what her and Dot got fighting over.”

“Want a gin?” Templeton offered.

“Why thank you Little Lord Fauntleroy. I’m thinking that’s not yours to give but alright then,” she winked. “Put a different record on, Sal. I’m tired of this garbage!”

83 7

“Step on a crack, break Hitler’s back,” Nancy bounced down the hopscotch chalked on the street, which bled milkily in the light drizzle.

Rainclouds hang in the west ripe and low as mulberries.

“One, two, three,” she stamped on the numbers. She like this game; it was nice, uncomplicated, and the rules never changed. She had gone that morning to call on Frances, but Mrs. Reed had said she wasn’t in.

“Oh. Do you know where she’s gone?”

“No, I do not. And she’s in a damn sight of trouble. You tell her that if you see her,” Mrs. Reed said and curtly shut the door. Surprised, Nancy had wandered around King Street until the afternoon to catch a glimpse of

Frances’ plait bobbing along the street in that dreamy, aimless way of hers.

Tired of hopscotch and watchful of the burgeoning rain Nancy decided to cut across the graveyard from Lennox Street but coming upon it she had tensed, her mouth dry. Her sandal took a tenuous hold in the broken fence palings as she hoisted herself up and caught the smell of moist compost. A lump of unease stuck in her throat like cold crumbed lamb’s brains and she chose the other route.

As she walked back to her house she saw a group of older girls leaning in the open doorway of a boarded-up old shop. They had a phonograph inside and she could hear the tune.

Last night as I lay on my pillow

Last night as I lay on my bed

Nancy dawdled but did not want to attract attention, pretending to do up her shoe buckle, then feigning reading a billposter about soap pasted on a nearby

84 fence. Her mother used to listen to records. She used to share the ritual, lifting one from her collection and sliding it ever so carefully from its envelope and placing it on the turntable. The scrunch-crackle noise of the first rotation; how greedily she loved the sound! Those waxy, shiny 78s, and the trapped souls their black flimsy sheen contained. Her pa had loved them. They didn’t listen to records anymore at the Durand’s house.

Last night as I lay on my pillow

I dreamt that my bonny was dead

“Girl! Hey, you! Come over here!” One of the girls yelled. The other three fixed their cold eyes on her. They all wore nylons, real ones – Nancy stared, shifting her gaze from their record player to their legs. The two younger wore that peach-coloured pancake stuff on their faces and lipstick, the Max Factor kind her ma still had on her dresser that she hadn’t worn in months. The elder two had bare faces save some shadow around the eyes.

Nancy approached still poised as if at any moment she might run away.

Their smell traveled to her on the late afternoon air: Pond’s cold cream, tobacco, sweet liquor, female sweat and that rich woody jasmine stink of Tabu that the soldiers brought back from Europe. She bit down on her lower lip.

Why would they want to talk to her? She stood dumbly, one foot on the pavement and the other in the gutter, and waited.

“What’s your name?” The original girl asked. She was fair and handsome but wild looking like a feral cat.

“What’s it to you?” Wincing, she wondered what would happen if she came home with a shiner, but then again, it would be a shock if her mother even noticed. To Nancy’s immense surprise the girl fell about chuckling and then they all started laughing.

85 “Well, quite a little scrapper aren’t you?” The girl took a step towards her. Nancy could see that around her eyes the skin was like a crunched up ball of paper smoothed back out. Her eyes seemed ten years older than her face.

“No,” Nancy kicked the gutter. Were they taking the Mickey out of her? A dark haired girl held out a cigarette and a bottle of beer with a smirk and asked Nancy to sit down.

“No thank you,” Nancy replied aghast.

“Get off of that chair Sally, and let her sit down,” the dark one ordered.

Sally grumblingly did as she was told.

“Bet you’ve never taken a drink in your life!” The dark girl shrugged and swigged the longneck and sucked on the cig.

“Hold up,” the blonde said, seeing that Nancy looked about to bolt.

“She might know the other girl, Dot.”

“How old are you?” The one called Dot looked her up and down.

“Eleven.”

“Hmm,” said Dot to Annie, shaking her head. “The other one looked older.”

“What ‘other one’?” Nancy asked, confused.

“They’re friends. I’ve seen ‘em together,” a boy interjected. “In the graveyard.” A boy, whom Nancy had not even noticed, draped on the glassless windowsill.

“Crumbs! Where did you come from?”

The girls snickered. The boy jumped down not meeting her gaze. He came closer and she could see three crimson pimples on his chin – he must have

86 been about fourteen or fifteen. He could easily have been taken for one of the girls with hair that long, that was sure, and he was pale, almost like an albino, or a white rabbit.

“I’ve seen them mucking about,” he said to the blonde girl and Nancy noticed the unmistakable resemblance.

“How would you know? Have you been following us or something?

What are you, some sort of weirdo?” She said in irritation, and then it dawned on her. “Hold on. You mentioned a girl. You don’t mean Frances?”

“Was that her name?” Sally asked nonchalantly. “I thought it was more like Susie or something.”

“You could have asked her,” the boy said rudely. “If you didn’t spend the whole morning lying about sleeping!”

“What the Hell have you lot done with her?” Nancy put her fists up and waved them gamely even though they were all at least a foot taller.

“Ooooh! Look at this little pissant!” Margot crowed.

“You tell me!” Nancy cried. “Where is she? What have you done with

Frances?”

“Shut your trap, Margot. You’ve upset her,” the boy’s sister said.

“Aw… Annie,” Margot complained. But Annie wasn’t listening.

“What’s her name, Templeton?”

“I think it’s Nancy,” he told her.

“If you want to ask me something I’m standing right here,” Nancy said bravely but her lip trembled. The girls all seemed unsure of what to say. Then the record stuck.

I dreamt that my bonny was dead – was dead – was dead

87 Margot leapt up to take the needle off and in her hurry sent the thing tumbling. There was a horrible rip of the needle and then a violent smash. All their heads snapped towards it but their bodies stayed frozen. In the silence

Nancy launched herself at Templeton and knocked him to the ground. She fell down too on top of him and started punching and slapping as hard as she could.

“What have you done with Frances?” Rage mangled her voice. “What do you want with her? She’s just a girl!” She felt nauseous. These questions she knew somehow, madly, were linked to Frances’ obsession with the blasted Yankee G.Is and that stupid book of London frock patterns.

“Oi! Get off him!” Dot and Annie plucked her by her shoulders and she dangled limp as a puppet.

Templeton scrambled up, blood streaming from his nostrils. Margot was fussing with the broken pieces of record player like a hopeless jigsaw.

“Leave that be!” Annie commanded, she had noticed the beady stares of neighbours out of their windows. “Come on, let’s go inside.”

“No! I’m not coming with you. I’m not going anywhere with you!”

“Sal, shut her up would you,” Annie nodded and Sally put a firm hand over her mouth as they crossed the threshold and climbed the rotting stairs to the apartment. There they nudged Nancy, not un-gently, down on a mattress where she fell exhausted.

Templeton gingerly put his hand to his bleeding nose. He stared at Nancy’s oval face and her red, Irish hair and feverish little eyes that looked at him with such fury.

“We didn’t do anything to her,” he said to her, shriller then he intended.

88 “That’s right,” said Annie. “So shut up or you’ll get the bloody coppers out on us! Christ All Mighty. Half of Newtown was having a stickybeak at that!”

We found the girl,” Dot said, then corrected herself: “Frances – we found Frances wandering the street last night with no place to go and we let her sleep here.”

“She wandered right in to the middle of a – ” Sally trailed off suddenly aware of the sharp looks pointed her way. “What? I just mean that Jackie – ”

Margot pinched her. “Ow! Hell. What was that for?”

Nancy stroked the mattress she lay on, which was stained and smelled like a drain, and wondered if her friend had slept on that very one. She flinched as

Annie leant in to her.

“Frances had real nice manners. Not like you, you little moll. Belt my brother like that, I oughta teach you a lesson.”

“It’s alright,” Templeton reached out generously. “She didn’t mean it.”

“Sorry,” Nancy mumbled, grateful. “Sorry about your nose.” She sat up and looked about her. A greasy plate sat by one bed. A spilt bottle of wine lay on its side over near the wall. The place stank.

“Do you actually live here?”

“That’s it,” Annie wheeled about to deal her a backhand.

“No! She’s just a child,” Dot grabbed her wrist.

“What? And you didn’t get a smack now and then when you were a kid? I can tell you I did. And I’m not the worse for it,” Annie hissed and yet she bowed to Dot’s will and stepped over to the corner to smoke and cool down.

“Where did Fran go?” Nancy asked finally.

89 “She slept here,” Sally replied. “But I don’t know where she went. We worked it ‘til midnight. She was gone before I got up. Late. The others had left. Don’t know when. I don’t get up before noon mostly,” she said with a toss of her long hair.

“What do you mean, working?” Nancy was confused. “Night shift? I thought they stopped the late shift at the factories… Now the war’s done and all…”

The girls laughed. Nancy blushed. She hadn’t a clue what they meant but she sensed she sounded a right idiot.

“Working. You know, like, entertaining,” Sally said.

“Singing?” Nancy tried doubtfully.

“No, you duffer! Hardly!” Sally looked around in amusement.

“Wouldn’t make a penny if we let her sing!” Annie snorted.

“Not unless we made them pay her to stop,” said Templeton.

“But why – why did she come here? She doesn’t know you. Why would Frances come here of all places?” Nancy demanded.

“Something about a blue with her Mum. We wanted to take her back but she couldn’t go back there,” Dot stroked the girl’s shoulder.

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” said Annie. “She’ll go home safe when the mood takes her. You go see a bit later on, she’ll be home safe and sound.”

Annie lit a cigarette and exhaled thickly. “We did her no harm. You bet your life on it. Now I think it’s about time you were going.”

“Mum?” Nancy called as she let herself in to the house. The door was locked but she knew that the key could always be found hidden on the plinth

90 of the weathered dryad statue her mother had placed in the shadow of the blackbutt long ago: “It’s the spirit of our garden!” She’d liked to say.

“Mum?” She called again. “Aunt Jo?” She tried reluctantly but there was no reply. She went to the kitchen as it was well past teatime and she had an ache in her belly. No one had been to the store. An untouched chop still wrapped in butcher’s paper was going moldy on the bench. She retched a little when she unwrapped it. Still, there were powdered eggs in the cupboard and she spread what was left of the margarine onto some stale bread. Gas sputtered to life and she lit a match and chucked it at the ring. It caught aflame with a potent whoof! There was some Bovril that she heated and drank sitting down on the floor. Nancy had searched for cutlery but found them lying in a fetid tub, untouched for days, so she ate with her fingers.

The house was dark and she could hear the mice scratching in the walls and

Pinky carrying on upstairs. Perhaps both her mother and her aunt were asleep. She had experienced the impulse, as she returned, to demand her mother take her to walk the streets looking for Frances. Yet now, forcing the food down her throat all she could conjure in her mind was the feel of her warm, yielding bed beneath her. Frances could be home asleep too as far as she knew. Nancy told herself there was nothing to worry about, and if there were then Mrs. Reed would be out taking care of it. She was her mother after all.

Nancy walked down the corridor and opened the doors to the sitting room.

At the foot of the bookshelf her mother lay on her back on the cold floor, the fire in the hearth had smoldered and died hours before. A burned down butt perched on a trunk of ash in a bowl beside her, next to a matchbook and a tumbler of whisky. Nancy got down on her knees. She crouched over her

91 mother’s prone body. She lowered her ear close to her lips straining to hear her breath.

“What on earth!” Mrs. Durand eyes bulged at Nancy’s levitating face.

“Uh – Sorry! Sorry Mum,” Nancy leapt up.

“What in God’s name are you doing?” Mrs. Durand grappled trying to drag herself up into a sitting position. She took her daughter by the shoulders and briskly shook the girl.

“I’m alright, you goose! Is that what you needed to know? What? Did you think I’d gone and done myself in?” She laughed unmusically. Nancy, not knowing what to say, said nothing. “Well, not quite yet, my love!” Mrs.

Durand lit a cigarette and drew her kimono around her.

Without warning Nancy’s face burst its banks. She sagged to the floor gripping her mother’s thighs, the impression of her tear-splattered face on the silk of her skirt, like a saint’s shroud. Her mother smoked lifted her daughter’s chin with the palm of her pale, long-fingered hand and stared at it queerly, as if she wasn’t sure it belonged to her any longer.

“What is it, biscuit?” She asked. “What’s wrong?”

Nancy couldn’t form a sentence in her mind let alone enunciate what was wrong. Her mother hadn’t called her biscuit since she was in nappies. She looked up and saw Lily sitting on top of the mantelpiece.

“Go away, Lily,” she focused, making each syllable behind her eyes and shoving them outwards through her forehead.

“Where’s Frances?” Lily intoned from the mantel, emotionless as a clock.

“Shh!” Nancy scowled and felt queasy. “Why? What do you know about it?”

92 “What is it, love?” Her mother’s face twisted towards the fireplace.

“Aunt Jo’s home,” Lily told Nancy and nodded to the stairs.

“Get. Out. Now,” Nancy ordered. The headache that always happened when Lily was bothering her felt like a clamp pressing on her skull.

Mrs. Durand tried to haul herself up but paused midway and then sank back down as if the effort had been overwhelming.

“Oh goodness me, you look like John,” she said faintly, reaching up and gripping Nancy’s shirt. “While you’re alive your father will never be dead.”

Nancy tried to disengage her mother’s stubborn fingers. Talk like this made her wild-eyed and skittish. She often thought about him too, daily even, and yet it was not a subject she wanted to converse with her mother about, not when she had so much else on her mind. It was tricky for the smallest thing could set her off; a particular teacup in the cabinet, a song on the wireless, the kookaburra that sometimes came into the yard because her father once gave it some giblets.

“Get me another,” her mother told Nancy who obediently picked up the tumbler and took it to the kitchen. She stared at the perfect lipstick print that stood out on the rim of the glass. She wondered why her mother bothered with that rubbish today when there was no one to see, when she was clearly just going to drink herself to sleep on the lounge room floor.

She went back into the sitting room and held the drink out. Her mother didn’t reach for it. She was humming vacantly, lying on her back. Nancy set it down beside her. Lily had vanished, or couldn’t be seen at least. She liked to play tricks like that.

93 Nancy could hear Pinky still whining and scratching and so she went upstairs to hush him. She walked past her mother’s bedroom where her frocks lay strewn on the floor; if Nancy didn’t know better she’d think a burglar had ransacked the place. Photographs blew about like leaves in the breeze from the open window. She didn’t normally go in to her mother’s room. She knew she had to ask permission. Yet tonight she did not feel her mother was in any condition to reprimand so she crossed the floor and gently shut the window. She knelt and swept up the pictures; one of her father holding her as a baby on the threshold of their house, one of her mother squinting and smiling at the camera with friends at a beach in their bathing costumes, and a photo of her parents together at the opening of the Harbour

Bridge, at least she thought it was them, the photographer had stood so far back to get the bridge in shot that the figures were tiny dark smudges.

The door to Aunt Jo’s room creaked loudly and the dog pushed his way through the gap and ran to her. She tidied the photos away and shut up her mother’s room. Across the corridor she saw Josephine in her rocking chair and jumped fearing that the woman if woken would come at her with the wooden spoon again. But Josephine didn’t move.

Nancy moved closer, flinching. She knew that Aunt Jo was deaf as an old shoe but there was a kind of peculiar frozenness to her face; mouth slightly open, tongue and gums papery and dry, knuckles white and bluish folded together in her lap. Nancy touched an arm stiff and cold as wood. Pinky barked, making Nancy lift off the ground. He tried to jump up onto Aunt Jo but couldn’t get its footing and skidded off. She wondered briefly if she should bother going to tell her mother that Aunt Jo had expired or if she should wait for the morning.

94 She padded slowly down the hall to her own chilly bedroom and lit the lamp drawing her knees to her chest on the thin mattress. She fell asleep with the weak light next to her and let it burn through the night.

95 8

A black police van mounted on the kerb outside Dolly Jenkins’ place on

Darlinghurst Road made Annie and the girls, with Templeton in tow, slink about on the corner a safe distance away to warily eye the drama.

“Look at that,” Sally pointed. “I hope it’s a murder.”

“Shush,” Dot slapped the younger girl on the thigh. “What a thing to say!” She had been snappy to everyone and fought outright with Annie since the Nancy child left them, on the tram into town and then every step of the long walk from Hyde Park to Dolly’s, caustic with bottled sarcasm, belittling

Annie’s plan.

“What? I just – I just mean it’d be exciting if it was,” Sally muttered.

“Don’t worry. Don’t listen to her,” Annie said.

Police were tear-arsing around like rats on a garbage heap. They had crates of beer under their arms as they exited the house and an almighty ruckus was going on inside.

“Get out ya mongrels!” A woman’s voice rag and then Dolly appeared on the street in her robe and nightgown with curlers hanging from her animated head. “They’re taking all me grog! You filthy bastards.” She spat on the road in a luminescent arc.

Two burly blokes stuck their heads out and Templeton recognised them as

Snowy Thompson and his mate Errol Boyd. Snowy had a face you could sharpen a knife on and Errol was the kind of man that mothers made their children cross the street to avoid. The cops stood back. A pimply constable squared up to them.

96 “Now listen here,” he began hoarsely, the chinstrap of his hat pushing the loose flesh of his throat into a double chin.

Girls had poured on to the balcony overlooking the scene. They taunted and whistled at the police. Annie motioned at Templeton, who had started shuffling backward.

“No let’s just stay and wait,” Annie whispered. “I know!” She pre- empted Dot’s objections: “The last thing we need is a run in. But let’s just hang on and see how it pans out.” They loitered against the side of the building opposite trying to look disinterested.

“Now listen,” the constable tried again. “This is illegal alcohol. And we have an order to confiscate – ”

His voice was smothered in uproar. Dolly Jenkins wrestled a crate out of a hapless cop’s grasp as if it weighed no more than a feather pillow. Her jowls wobbled over her ropes of pearls. Templeton wondered if she ever took her jewels off. She probably wore them to bed. People said she had been a good- looking woman back in the day; a Pom who married an Aussie after the Great

War and came out barely seventeen on the wives’ boat. She was currently turning the air blue with her gin-seasoned, throaty Cockney.

“Oh, wouldn’t I like to put an axe into you? Confiscate my arse! Take it on back to the station and have a right old knees-up! Well I’ll be damned if I’ll have the likes of you drinking my best beer.”

“That is outrageous!” The constable said, a flush creeping up his neck.

He gestured to a subordinate to pass him a bottle of beer. With some difficulty he succeeded in knocking the top off. He emptied the lot into the gutter with a smug flourish.

97 “You bastard!” Errol lunged but Snowy contained him with an arm thick as a leg of lamb across his chest. The girls on the balcony squealed.

“What a waste!”

“That there is premium quality!”

“Go on,” the constable said officiously to his hesitant men. “Dispose of it. Dispose of it all. Don’t worry about taking the tops off. Smash them! Come on. Smash the lot.”

He took out his truncheon and laid into a crate, brown glass and froth flew everywhere. Errol and Snowy stood with veins standing out in their necks.

The balcony began to throw things down at the cops: rubbish, loose roof tiles, whatever lay around. One girl clobbered a policeman with a Chinese slipper, right on the nose, sending him staggering.

“Awww! Wish it’d been a boot,” she complained.

“Enough!” The constable yelled up at them. “I’ll have you all nicked for vagrancy! For riot! Assaulting a police officer! Just try me, you bunch of worthless tarts.”

The hail of missiles slowed and the girls fell silent. They looked on grimly as the police continued to upturn bottle after bottle. Beer flowed into the storm drain like a huge stream of foaming horse piss.

“Those cops have all got their brains in back to front,” Dot sneered.

“What a waste! They could have made a packet slinging that lot off themselves. Bloody wasteful!”

“She’s getting old.” Annie said. “Not as sharp as she once was. Not buying off the right people anymore.” Dolly disappeared inside as the police finally slammed their car doors primly and drove off. She reemerged

98 swearing in the doorway, blocking it with her bulk with a shotgun in the crook of her arm.

“Holy Moses! Look at that!” Templeton said bug-eyed. “They’ll put her away for that.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure,” Dot’s lip curled. “Notice how she only brought it out after they were well clear. She’s all bark and no bite.”

There was an explosion and they all jumped. Dolly had let a shot off in the air.

“Bet on that would you?” Annie said under her breath and waved when she saw Dolly coming towards them, relatively nimbly for a woman of her stature.

“Oi! Catch the show did you?” Dolly smiled indulgently, displaying her brilliant gold teeth

“That’s a travesty. A disgrace! To waste that beer when there are starving children in Africa,” Dot condoled. “And probably could do with a drink, too.”

“And thirsty people in this part of the Commonwealth! Ha! Well come in. I’ll get you all a drink. I bet that you’re parched.”

They followed her inside and watched as she heaved a bureau from against the wall with a grunt, revealing a hidden panel. The door sprang back and three shelves glistening with an arsenal of all manner of bottles emerged.

“Will brandy do you? It’ll have to. Top shelves for the gents; the paying customers. Ha! They took all the rest.”

She lined up eight crystal glasses for them, taking them out and rubbing them down with a rag of off-cut velvet. She then poured one for herself and two for Snowy and Errol who had settled down to play rummy at a table in

99 the corner grumbling. The men cast an appraising eye over the girls. No one had asked yet as to their business.

“Thanks for the drink Dolly,” Annie cleared her throat. She felt around in the deep pocket of her dustcoat for a cigarette and found one a bit ratty and damp but snapped the broken bit off and lit up. “To tell the truth we’re actually after Jackie. He been around today?” She exhaled raggedly.

Dolly sat down in an old-fashioned Edwardian parlour chair and closed her eyes. She withdrew a little wooden pipe from a leather pouch, stuffed it expertly from a tin of tobacco, struck a match and started puffing away. After a while her eyes opened, green as the patina on old bronze, and she looked at the younger woman.

“In trouble is he?”

“Would it be Jack Tooth you’re after?” Errol twisted around suddenly interested.

“No, not – ” Annie began but she was interrupted.

“Bob Newham’s out of Long Bay. You might have heard,” Dot said.

“They had a bit of a run in the other night. Bob took a couple of shots driving by.”

“Bob Newham? That’d be old Robert Newham’s boy,” Snowy surmised. “Wouldn’t think Jackie would want to get mixed up with that lot.

Bob senior and me were kept for nearly a month in some bloody dog pound when we got back from France. Couldn’t let us all out in one go, they said, some rubbish about floodin’ the labour market. Then we had to be seen by a bloody reffo doctor to get me coupons for tobacco and me deferred pay.

Mister Thompson he called me. Some bloody Balt or Eye-talian, swarthy as an

100 Arab. We liberated your country, y’know mate? Mister Thompson! That’s me dad, I said! How’s that for a laugh?”

“Right pack of bastards,” Errol said, leaning back in his chair, one foot up on the table.

Templeton took a big swallow of his brandy and wondered why Dolly was looking at Annie so intently, like a slaughterman sizing up a steer. Dolly had nearly controlled this whole city, the grog, the clubs, and the girls, once upon a time. Snowy was the muscle but everyone knew that she was the one who had the nous. But the war came along and upturned the whole table.

Annie chose her words very carefully: “Jackie needs to take off. Get out of the city for a while till it blows over. I’ve got to get a bit of cash together to give him. Help him out.”

“Well ain’t you sweet?” Dolly looked as though the pieces were locking together and gave a contented cluck. “That’s why he was in my ear about getting a car then.”

“Bob Newham’s not likely to forget he wears an eye patch thanks to

Jackie, is he?” Snowy snorted. He downed his glass and gestured to Dolly for another one.

“Get it yourself, you big lump,” she said.

He heaved himself up muttering as he rattled the bottles. Sitting back down heavily he resumed his conversation with Errol about yesterday’s horses.

Sally and Margot shifted from foot to foot, flicking glances at each other.

There weren’t enough chairs for them or Templeton to sit down, but nobody seemed keen to do anything to rectify it. Dot and Annie smoked in silence.

The air was loaded. Dolly emptied her pipe out in a half eaten plate of sausage and mash, the ash sat like slag on the hillock of potato.

101 “Alright. Here’s how it is. I can help you out,” Dolly stretched her legs.

Make you some money and leave you a few pounds more to put back in the pot for a rainy day, hey? I know how it is, love.”

“What are you suggesting?” Dot asked.

“That’s kind of you, but I think it’s alright. I –” Annie stuttered. “Well, um, no disrespect meant, but we only came here to see if you’d seen him. We can come up with the money on our own.”

Errol had his gaze on her, his bottom lip hanging slightly, showing his cluttered, greyish teeth.

“We heard Bob down the Tradesman’s Arms just yesterday telling everyone who’d listen that Jackie was a dead man,” Snowy said.

“What I’m saying,” Dolly said, slowly and clearly. “Is that I can make the problem go away.”

“Go on,” said Annie edgily.

“You need to tell me what happened. Who saw it, and who saw them see it.” The loose skin of Dolly’s arms, peppered with sunspots, wobbled as she lit another bowl and sucked deeply at her pipe.

“We had nothing to do with it. With whatever happened. We were just finishing up, just knocking off when they showed up,” Annie replied.

“Who? Jackie? And who else?” Dot asked.

“Will Worthington and Frank Roache,” Templeton spoke up. The two men looked at him and back at each other.

“Hello. I’m sorry. I didn’t realise Annie had a younger sister!” Errol grinned.

“Leave him alone,” Annie flared. “Why do you care? Fancy him do you? You one of them rear-gunners?”

102 Errol stood flaring and knocked against the drinks on the table that sent brandy down the front of his trousers.

“Sit down, melon head,” Dolly ordered.

“Get this bitch out of here,” Errol ordered, cursing Annie and wiping his crotch. “She’s got a tongue on her. Goddamnit.”

“Alright!” Dolly stood up. “Sit down Errol! That’s enough. Letting her get you all worked up like that. She is my guest.”

“Awww si’down. Blind Freddie could see she’s just tryin’ to rile you up!” Snowy was chortling heartily as he clapped Errol on the back. He slid back down into his seat scowling.

“What do you want in return?” Annie asked Dolly at last.

“Ah, now you’re talking,” Dolly clapped her hands delighted. “Well, you finish answering my question. And I’ll tell you what I want. How’s that sound?” Her pipe punctuated her sentences with little damp puckered sounds.

“Alright. Well. It was the four of us,” Annie said. “My brother wasn’t there,” she looked at Errol crisply. “But there was a little girl who saw. No one else but her. And she’s just a bairn.”

“Who? What did she see? How much?”

“Nobody. A runaway. We looked after her. It’s taken care of. She was scared round the twist. There’s no way she’d talk.”

“This is what will happen. I want you girls here for one week. Working in my house. The boy can stay too,” Dolly said, gesturing at Templeton. “I’ll find a way to make some use of him.” She stretched out her hand to him as if to a shy dog. “I’ll feed you and keep you in drink. But that’s it. Wages stay in the till. I’ll pay off Jackie. And I’ll see that no one else hassles you.”

103 Dot looked at Annie who looked back at her. They had little choice, considering their options.

“Alright,” Annie offered her hand to shake. Dolly thumped her hefty rings against the tabletop then shook Annie’s hand. Snowy refilled everybody’s glass.

“Your good health,” he toasted.

“You’ll start tonight,” Dolly announced. “The other girls will be back later so you can take your things upstairs and get ready for the doorbell.”

Sally and Margot looked apprehensive. Errol’s eyes were red-rimmed and glassy as he tossed the deck of cards from hand to hand in violent surges.

Templeton swallowed, eyes fixed on the fluttering procession of suites, reds and blacks – hearts, spades, clubs, diamonds – blurring in a trompe l’oeil. A week here was unthinkable! How would Dolly make him earn his keep? He wished he were somewhere, anywhere, else. He followed the others up the airless stairs to the second-floor. There was no chatter; the girls seemed too beat to talk and the silence was monolithic.

At about a quarter after six the first blokes started to come in and the girls went upstairs one by one leaving Templeton acutely self-conscious. Dolly was counting money under a harsh little green table lamp that illuminated the deep creases in her face beneath her powder. She sent him off to replace the beer the police had destroyed giving him the key to one of the three cars she had parked around out back. She delivered her instructions tersely and did not repeat them, as if challenging him to ask.

“Come off it, his feet won’t reach the bloody pedals!” Snowy had wiped his eyes laughing.

104 He was to drive up to a place on Foveaux St. and knock four times, then twice more on the side door. Running high on nervous energy he clung to the steering wheel and backed the thing fitfully out of the yard almost scraping it on the wall, then trying to figure out what to do with the clutch as the engine stalled and belched. Eventually he’d limped and hopped there and back, quivering with triumph, cases in his arms as he crossed the threshold on return. Snowy looked at him sourly.

“Good boy. You help yourself to one,” Dolly tossed him a bottle, which, to his great relief, he caught.

The way it was set up upstairs meant that there was little in the way of privacy only sheets strung up between the mattresses, so you couldn’t see what was going on next to you but you could hear it sure as Hell. The fellah would knock and Snowy or Errol would open the door, then he’d sit in the lounge and whilst he was having his beer the girls would come down and he’d pick one out. Then he’d pay Dolly and get to it and if he hadn’t finished in twenty minutes Errol would go and holler at him to hurry up.

“Errol does it so come up and have a good perv I reckon,” Dot said to

Templeton as she sat with him for a smoke during a quiet spell around nine.

Margot joined them, paint smudged under her tired eyes.

Dolly’s girls traipsed into the sitting room eyeing the newcomers like territorial cats. Annie drummed her fingers on the table ignoring them, smoking cigarette after cigarette saving matches by lighting each one off the last. There was a cool miasmic silence.

Templeton was fixated on one girl. She sat with a doe-eyed, fawn-haired friend and a blonde with a wide gap between her front teeth a pea could get stuck in. The girl who captured his attention wore an old fashioned cream

105 dress. Her brandy-coloured eyes were very far apart, her nose prominent above fleshy lips. Some people might say that she had a touch of the tar brush. He watched her drink and smoke and talk. Everything she did seemed to be tinged with an indecent loll. Her pink tongue nipped the corners of her mouth. She smoothed the wrinkles of her frock and his gaze followed her fingers down to where they stroked at her lap. She shook her head at something and her knotty hair fell over her face then tossed it back as though stepping naked out of the sea. He glanced at Dot only to see her eyes hooked too. She was sitting on an embroidered cushion on the floor with her head leant against the wall watching.

“Roberta,” she girl said.

“Pardon?” Dot seemed ruffled.

“It’s Roberta,” she repeated with a smile. “My name. Roberta French.

How d’you do?”

“Nice to meet you… Uh. I’m Dot. Dorothea. Dorothy, you say here,” she stumbled on her words, rising and offering her hand, wiping her palm first on her thigh. “Dorothy Kajac.”

Annie was looking Roberta over as if on military inspection. She introduced herself regally and then the others.

“Pleased to meet you,” Roberta said.

“What kind of a name is Kajac?” The blonde girl demanded.

“Watch your manners, Lorraine,” Roberta looked at her warningly.

“I’m Hazel,” said the dark-haired one. “Nice to meet you all. How long will you be staying?”

Dolly looked up from her incessant money counting: “Very polite, ladies. Oh, very polite,” she tittered.

106 “We’re not staying,” Annie finally answered. “This is a…” she searched for the right word. “A temporary arrangement.”

“I see,” Roberta nodded amiably and then looked to the door for there was a loud barrage of knocks and a crookedly tall, flushed man entered in somewhat of a hurry.

“Mack!” Dolly boomed leaning back in her chair and creating a geometric castle in her lap with the tips of her fingers. “What can we do for you?”

“There’s been a bit of trouble. Think you oughta send someone to come sort it out,” he said.

“Alright Mack. Cool down. Have a seat. Have a drink,” Dolly said unruffled. “Upstairs girls.”

“What’s happened?” Lorraine asked

“Shut it,” Roberta shot at her.

“Come on,” said Hazel eased herself up like a stretching tabby. He’d only seen calm like that on the faces of the Chinamen down in the dens on the bad part of Sussex St.

“Upstairs. Now!” Errol shouted. They started to move, Lorraine protesting and Sally and Margot standing around brainlessly. Dot shooed them up seeing the look in Dolly’s eyes. She wasn’t mucking around.

Upstairs, Annie lay on the landing with her ear to the floor but couldn’t hear much, just muffled voices in animated exchange.

“Anything?” Templeton asked.

“I can’t tell. I thought I recognised that bloke, but I can’t place him.”

107 “I don’t know why you’re bothering,” said Lorraine with a cigarette fixed to her lower lip. “It’s not as though it concerns you anyway. Why do you want to go and get yourself mixed up in it?”

“Shh,” said Dot crossly. “Do you reckon it’s about the boys?” Dot asked Annie.

“Can’t tell. Could be. Doesn’t sound good whatever it is.”

“It’ll be better by morning,” Roberta reassured. “Dolly will set it right.”

Templeton fiddled with his shirt cuffs. He chewed on his ragged nails. He bit them so frequently into the quick that they bled. Annie finally stood up defeated. He lit a smoke and held it out to her. She took it and smiled at him.

“He your brother?” Lorraine jerked her thumb.

“Yeah,” said Annie. So what?”

“What is he? Is he workin’ here too now?”

“Didn’t think this was that kind of establishment,” Annie tensed and her fingers crushed the butt of the cig on the tin ashtray.

“Why’s he here then? With you? Don’t you have a mother? How old is he anyway, thirteen?”

“I’m sixteen! And she’s dead,” Templeton blurted. A spasm upon

Annie’s face and Templeton regretted he’d spoken so harshly. Everybody was silent.

“Sorry,” Hazel intoned.

“Lorraine doesn’t mean to be impolite,” Roberta said. “She doesn’t have any tact.”

Lorraine snorted and huffed over to her bed.

“It was a long time ago,” said Annie.

108 “Well what does Dolly want with him?” Lorraine needled. “If I wanted to work in a molly house I’d go over to Dulcie Tipper’s. Once you start letting that sort in there’s no telling what’s next.”

“She doesn’t want nothing. Who cares?” Dot said.

“Dolly doesn’t do anything for anyone unless she thinks there’s something in it for her, that’s what,” Lorraine answered.

“He’s here ‘cause I’m here. Dolly’s barely even looked twice at him,”

Annie said cautiously.

“Fresh young meat like that could fetch a high price in certain circles,”

Lorraine laughed viciously.

“You look at him!” Dot ordered Lorraine. “He’s quiet as a bloody mouse. He’s not causing any trouble. Leave him alone.”

Templeton just blinked at them, smoking and toying with a bit of string in his pocket. Lorraine’s flat, broad face resembled an enraged lizard.

“We had a girl here once, not that long ago, name of Edith,” she began.

“Well, Dolly got wind that she was lifting from the till.”

“Was she?” asked Margot.

“Don’t know. Might have been. Any case that’s not important. Thing was that Dolly thought she was getting swindled,” Lorraine said.

“Lorraine, you don’t know what really happened,” Roberta said tartly.

“Yes I do, and you do too!” Lorraine jumped down her throat. “It’s just not commonly spoken about.” She continued, playing to her audience: “Now

Edie was a vain little thing, pretty as anything and didn’t she know it and the blokes did too, right?”

“Yeah? And?” Annie asked impatient.

109 “So one evening Edie come in and Dolly was standing in the kitchen and she was fixing drinks,” Lorraine started to slow down, realizing she had everyone’s attention and Templeton suffered a shiver of twisted anticipation.

“Dolly started saying, not asking, saying that Edie had been taking her for granted and that she oughta know better and so on and so forth. Well –

Edie tries to stick up for herself, makes up some piss-poor excuse about getting in a bother and needing the money to sort it out down on Murphy

Street,” she continued.

“But Dolly you see, knows that for a girl in a bother she needs £10 to get it fixed, right?” In a stage whisper she added: “As you would have been told when you signed up? Or did you know it already?”

Dot gave her a long, hard eyeballing.

“And she also knows that we’d go to her if we were in a sticky situation and she’d see we got taken care of and treated right and all that jazz.

So it seems that Dolly isn’t buying a word of this and so without wasting another second she’s got Edie by the throat and put her in a headlock,”

Lorraine said with relish.

“Next thing you know she’s smashed the bottle she was pouring from on the counter, knocked the bottom off and given the sharp end to Edie right in the face. Goes open slather on her. Blood everywhere. All over the wall! All over Dolly!”

Sal squealed and covered her mouth with her hands.

“And Dolly’s yelling I’ll cut her fucking guts out, the bitch!” Lorraine continued in a half-whisper, eyes skating at the stairs.

“Hold the bitch there, Snowy, while I get my fucking Gat.”

“What’s a Gat?” Templeton squeaked.

110 “A big fuck-off gun, that’s what! A Gatling. Jesus haven’t you seen the news reels?” Lorraine guffawed then she went on with the story.

“So off runs Edie, she gets clear of Snowy, and off she runs with a busted-up face, out into the street. And Dolly’s screaming from the house: I’ll put a hole in you if you ever come back here!”

“God in Heaven,” Margot crossed herself.

“Hey presto! There go her looks! She’ll never work again. And all

Dolly can say is that she’s ruined her bloody shoes! Ha ha ha ha!” She sagged back, spent. Roberta looked vexed and even Annie seemed impressed.

“Oh yeah. And you saw this, did you?” Dot sniffed.

“You bet I did!”

“Just as I’m standing here seeing you now?”

“Yes, I did. Are you calling me a liar?”

“No. I’m just saying that it’s a real good story.”

“Listen here, you dirty Jew – ”

“Shut it Lorraine!” Roberta yelled, shifting herself up.

Lorraine and Dot were inches away from each other, breathing in each other’s face, although Dot had half a head on the blonde.

“So what kind of bottle was it?” Dot demanded.

“What?”

“What was the bottle Dolly hit her with?”

“What? I don’t know!” Lorraine snapped.

“I thought you said you saw it!”

“I bloody well did. I just don’t know what bottle it was. Brandy.

Whisky. What does it matter?”

“I’d say it matters a whole lot because I think you’re full of shit!”

111 At that Lorraine sprang and punched Dot right in the mouth. Annie grabbed

Lorraine by the arm, hoisting it up behind her the way police do. Lorraine grunted and went lily-white.

“If you’ve knocked my tooth out you’ll be sorry,” Dot moved to the other side of the room cradling her face. Annie pulled on Lorraine’s arm hard.

“Apologise,” Annie demanded.

“Are you alright?” Templeton said, bristling, reaching for Dot.

“Yes, pal. I’ll be fine,” Dot said, touching him gently on the collar.

Roberta had her arms around her and was trying to stop the bleeding with a handkerchief. Annie dropped Lorraine and went to Dot, ousting Roberta and cupping her chin to look her in the eye.

“Tell me. Are you alright?” Annie spoke softly so only Dot could hear.

Dot nodded, took her hand and pressed her lips against it. She shook herself and stood tall again.

“Filthy Jew,” Lorraine said. “You bloody Polack Jew. Christ! Just trying to tell a story. Dolly! I’m coming down,” she hollered. “I’m going out.

Leaving this hell hole.” She seized her coat and tramped off.

“Well!” said Sally when she was sure Lorraine was safely gone. “Isn’t she a pill?”

“I’m really sorry about that,” Roberta said and reached to smooth the disruption of Dot’s curls.

“Don’t worry,” Dot said pulling away but keeping her hand in

Roberta’s. Blood still oozed from her cut lip. “It didn’t hurt.”

“I’ll thump her so hard,” Annie blazed, furious. “My oath! If she ever touches you – ”

112 Roberta pulled out a bottle of four-penny dark. Hazel and Margot and Sal crowded around the little broken looking glass to redo their makeup.

“Give me some of that pancake,” Dot said and briskly set about cleaning up her face. The night was far from over. She spat watery blood onto the floor and delicately sponged her busted lip. Dolly appeared at the top of the stairs.

“What’s going on ‘ere, then?” She hoisted herself up the final step. “Why did Lorraine go off screaming like a banshee about something?”

The six women looked at each other and said nothing, all intently busy at their occupations. Dolly’s wily eyes passed over Dot’s injury.

“Mmm-hmm,” she raised her eyebrow. The doorbell rang at the front door. She sighed and looked heavenward. “Never bloody ends! Fix up, all of you, and get your scrawny little arses downstairs. And you,” she scowled. “Let me tell you something.” She moved in so she could put her finger right in Dot’s face. “This house, my house, works because everyone gets along, right-o? That means that I make the rules and you follow them. And if you don’t like that well then you come and talk to me. If you think you can go upsetting the finely tuned balance, after being here, oh, all of three hours, then I think you and me are going to have a problem. Are we going to have a problem?” Her finger floated half an inch from the bridge of Dot’s nose.

“No, ma’am,” Dot dropped her gaze.

“Now, I don’t mind a bit of healthy competition between my girls, but they’re not to go round smacking each other up. Why? Because I lose money, so whatever row you’re having sort it out. Or you’re both out on your ear. Is that clear? You, boy!” she shouted. “Go down and answer the door. Snow and

113 Errol have had to step out a while. The rest of you get your face on. Quick sticks!”

Templeton opened the door to four sailors, so drunk they were gripping each other to stand. When he’d seen them in and fetched them beers he slipped his coat on and stole out. It was chilly in the street and the trams would have stopped. Still, he was getting out of here. His skin felt too small and on too tight, itching like he could peel himself like an orange. He lit a cigarette that he didn’t even want just for something else to do with his hands and threw the match into a pitch-dark alley, the flame a tiny falling star.

114 9

Frances pushed open the front door and stepped into the living room. The crib next to the fireplace that Thomas slept in during the day was empty. The basket of piecework that her mother laboured over sat on the rocking chair.

Mrs. Reed could be out on errands till at least five o’clock before she’d come home and start making their tea.

There was a shuffle and a bump as if someone was in the bedroom and

Frances moved slowly toward the sound, a trifle alarmed. They’d been burgled more than once. Frances wondered if Thomas was in there although it was unusual for her mother to leave him by himself. She nudged around the jamb hesitantly and saw Mr. Langby was sitting on the rumpled quilt with his trousers around his ankles. He noticed her. She ricocheted backwards. Hiding behind the door she waited. He said nothing. She peered in again slowly and what she saw made her flushed and breathless.

“Hey Frannie. Where’s your pa?” Mr. Langby asked raggedly, his hand pulling away in his lap. She didn’t understand: Mr. Langby knew that Mr.

Reed didn’t live there anymore.

“I don’t know,” she answered him truthfully.

“Come here. I can see you,” He stretched out an arm to her. “I can see you,” he repeated. “You’re just like your mother. Aren’t you?” His top lip peeled back dryly, exposing his teeth. His tongue flicked in and out. “Come here.”

Frances drew away behind the door. She thought he might come after her but instead he stayed where he was on the bed. Instead of running she stayed, intrigued and appalled by what he was doing, and looked in again.

115 “That’s right, you want it. I know where you want it. I’ll give it to you,” he murmured, hand clenched. “I’ll bend you so your knees are up around you ears. I’m going to show you how a real bloke can do you,” he gasped. “Come here,” he beckoned. “Put your hand on it,” he stood and moved toward her and leant and put a heavy paw on her shoulder. She could feel the heat of his breath on her forehead and felt like she was watching herself from far away. There was a rustling noise outside the room.

“Stop, stop,” he muttered and hurriedly started buttoning up his trousers. At that moment she heard the noise of the front door open. Frances ran out of the bedroom as Mrs. Reed waddled in, arms full of the baby and packages. It was not until she set them down that she saw Frances and she stopped in her tracks bug-eyed with rage.

“And just where in God’s name have you been?”

Frances looked at her mother not knowing what to say. Mr. Langby called out hoarsely from the bedroom

“Uh – hello” he came loping out. Her mother twitched confusedly. Mr.

Langby stared at Frances intently, his eyes two bright, hard bullets.

“Oh! Hello, Mr. Langby. I wasn’t expecting you,” Mrs. Reed looked perturbed.

“Uh, just come to, erm, pick up the basket,” he said still without taking his eyes off Frances.

“Forgive me!” Mrs. Reed said putting Thomas down in his crib. “It isn’t finished! You see I’ve been sick to death with worry about Frannie, here,” she said to him grabbing a good pinch of flesh of Frances’ upper arm.

“Where have you been? Hmm? Answer me!” Mrs. Reed’s hair was loose of its bun and her skin blotchy as though she hadn’t slept. Thomas started to wail.

116 “I, uh – I – ” Frances stammered.

“I am going to beat you sorry, young lady! Teach you to go off like that. Anything could have happened!”

Mr. Langby put his hand up like a priest: “No, no. I don’t think that’s necessary,” he said. “The girl’s home now, safe and sound. She’s learnt her lesson. Can’t have had a nice night out in the cold. She got a shock from walking in on that – uh – that…” He trailed off flushed and tongue-tied. Mrs.

Reed gaped at him, mortified.

“Since we all had that little misunderstanding,” Mr. Langby recovered.

He cleared his throat wetly. “What I’m saying is – she won’t run off like that again. Will you, Frances?”

Frances didn’t look at him but instead at a spot of dried baby’s milky vomit on the floorboards.

“Answer Mr. Langby! Look at you, you’re filthy!”

“Sorry Mum,” Frances mouthed glumly.

“Getting about the neighbourhood like that. What must people think?”

Her mother rubbed her knuckles and fretted. “Who saw you? Where have you been?”

“I slept at the school,” she lied smoothly. “Then I just sat in the St.

Stephen’s all day.”

“The cemetery!” Her mother exclaimed. “I told you to stay out of there.

That place is a tip. You’d never know what’s in there. I won’t have you playing in it. You’ll get bit by a wild dog and get rabies, or fall down and cut yourself! You can play on the street where I can see you.”

“Sorry Mum,” she mumbled. Mr. Langby shifted about. He picked up his hat from the stand and seized his moment.

117 “Alright, well then. Good, good,” he said.

“Oh Mr. Langby!” Mrs. Reed remembered him and implored: “Would you like to stay for tea?”

She picked up the baby and shushed it. Thomas was teething and his mouth leaked like a running tap. Mrs. Reed mopped the spittle off herself absently. A look of distaste passed over Mr. Langby.

“Frances go and see what we have in the cupboard.”

“Oh, no, no. Thank you,” he demurred. “I’d best be off.”

“There’s no bread,” Frances announced. “No milk either.”

“Are you sure you won’t stay? I can send Frances out to the store.”

“No, that’s very kind of you. But I have to leave. Have to be getting back,” he said not looking Frances in the eye as she came back into the room.

“Have to go home to Mrs. Langby?” Frances said. He cleared his throat again and ignored her. Mrs. Reed eyed her furiously.

“I’ll be back Monday to pick up that lot,” Mr. Langby said and nodded over at the basket. He put his hat on firmly, said goodbye and then shuffled off on to the street leaving mother and daughter in a taut, igneous silence.

“I’ve had a gutful of you, Frances. A gutful,” Mrs. Reed hissed. She ferreted in her pocketbook and ground some money into Frances’s hand.

“Here’s a shilling. Don’t look at me like that,” she snapped. “Go to the store.”

Frances took it dumbly.

“Bread and milk!”

“Murray’s will be shut,” Frances hesitated. “It’s half past five.”

“Well go up to King Street!” Mrs. Reed exploded. “Go to Wheeler’s! Or stop in at your Aunt Ada’s.” She picked Thomas up and bounced him on her hip.

118 “Alright,” Frances sighed, there was little use in arguing.

“And mind you come straight on home, do you hear? Do not dawdle.”

“Yes Mum.”

“I want tea on the table by six o’clock, or you’re not getting any.”

It was a blue dusk when Frances set out and the streetlights were lit against the failing sun. The green and yellow trams trundled past each other like electric caterpillars. She rubbed some feeling into her goose-pimpled arms.

The stars above her were frostily remote and crisp but the pubs were rowdy and sweaty and King Street was throbbing with people. Older girls walked three and four abreast, arms linked, their hair rolled elegantly and skirts swishing against their stockings. The hotels would close and the men would shortly join them, tipsy and cheeky. She walked past stray cats stretching in alleys like midnight shadows and overheard a man waving westwards tell his wife from a doorway it’ll be snowing in the mountains tonight.

Murray’s, the corner store’s door was shut and the lights switched off. A peeling advertisement of a smiling woman drinking Bushell’s dwarfed her small frame in the street from the billboard many feet above. She thought of

Ada’s miserable face and her screaming brats and shuddered. In her pocket she held on to the sweaty shilling and decided to keep walking. One shop further up King St. would be open, she told herself, surely, one.

119 10

His breath was a Bren gun unloading dead shells in the night, five hundred rounds a minute as he ran until he met the wall with his face. Looking behind him he had seen it too late. Templeton made a wet, tearing sound like a clogged drain and sagged against the side of the house. Grit from the bricks and blood from his split cheek stuck to his tears.

Church Street was empty, the paling fence edging the cemetery a dark paper cut. He peered down Australia Street. Where were they? Were they waiting somewhere? Those bastard sons of bitches, were they coming after him? He didn’t like the graveyard. He could see the tips of headstones in the field like a mouthful of crooked, yellowed teeth.

He felt where they’d cut his hair. It stung in places where they’d nicked the skin. Jackie and his boys had hacked most of it with his ivory-handled cutthroat. They had pinned him down to the card table. He had been afraid they were going to beat him until he forgot his own name. He’d blubbered, not from the pain, but from the sight of his hair trodden into the ground, pale as lamb’s wool under their boots. His mother used to comb it.

“Angel hair,” she used to whisper into the soft nautilus of his ear.

He’d normally just cop a back-hander, but tonight Jackie had a crazed look in his eyes.

“Shear the little bastard,” he ordered and his mates hauled Templeton up by the armpits.

“You bent bugger,” said Frank. “Son of a dead moll.”

“No! Please!”

120 “What did you hear? Were you listening behind the bloody door?” Bill demanded.

“Where’s your sister now, huh? Who’s going save you this time?

Annie’s not going to stop me,” Jackie hissed.

“Nothin’! I didn’t hear anything. Honest!” Templeton squirmed.

“Aw yeah?” said Bill.

“Pig’s arse!”

“Don’t you try and get over us, you hear?” Frank warned. “Or we’ll roof your face in!”

Their beer spittle spattered his neck as they struggled to hold him. It was

Frank’s fat hand that pushed him to the table, gripping him by the jaw as if he wanted to snap it off. Will Worthington’s knee planted on his guts. Jackie held the razor.

“Shh. Shh,” he hushed. “We’re just gonna give you a haircut. Can’t tell you apart from Annie’s bloody tarts. You oughta thank us.”

Templeton cursed himself for walking in to it tonight. A light-fingered in- and-out was all he’d been after. He had wanted simply to roll some cigs for a smoke-oh from the girls and if he was lucky make off with some booze and then out again, cinch. He planned to dig himself a couple of toeholds in the sand at Bondi and drink himself stupid, happy as a clam, as the Yanks would say. They’d only just taken down the barbed wire to keep out the Japs. Ha!

Turned out that had been about as necessary as a screen door on a submarine.

“Fair go, Jackie, come on now, I didn’t hear nothin’ and I won’t tell

Annie,” Templeton bargained. “We’re all pals, just lemme go alright?”

“Shut up,” said Jackie.

“We’re not your pal, pal,” sneered Will.

121 “Look at his pretty teeth, Jackie. Surely he doesn’t need all those, eh?”

Frank’s grip twisted his lip upwards.

Jackie paused: “Were you spying on us in there, huh?” A fistful of

Templeton’s hair fluttered slowly to the floor. “Spying for Annie?”

“No! I swear.”

“Well,” he considered. “What the bloody Hell was you doing?”

“Just looking for her!”

“Aw, bullshit! You know where she is you little pissant,” Jackie said, taking Templeton’s ear and twisting it.

“Alright! Ow! Ow. Ok, don’t tell her, but I was just trying to pinch some of her drink, please don’t tell her. I didn’t hear anything, honest.”

Jackie was sweating. Templeton watched it slide down his face. The man looked ill, he could see that much. Two half-moons stained his shirt under his arms and he stank like cabbage.

“I don’t care about what you’re doing, alright? I couldn’t give a rat’s!”

Templeton noticed Frank and Will were little better, pacing around about to do their block. Jackie looked at him quietly, eyes envenomed like a brown snake.

“We’ve got other things to take care of tonight,” he snapped finally.

“Let the little bastard go,” he shoved Templeton away towards the door.

Frank opened and shut his mouth but Jackie’s hand flashed up in the air.

“I said let the bugger go.”

Templeton had run out of there blind. He glanced over at the gravestones.

Jackie could just as easy change his mind. He’d chew down his fear and hide out in there. It seemed a safe bet, just possums scrapping and three-legged cats and crusted tramps stinking of White Lady. He darted across the road

122 and reached the grass. Spots rose in his vision like a penny ginger ale. The blood was still flowing from his head. He would have to lie down soon or he’d fall down. The graveyard sat submerged in its own dark bath and no one would find him. He’d been moving in deeper when a voice startled him.

“This here’s my spot. Get your own.”

He sprang back. Peering into the pall he realised it was only Merv. Even so he flinched, heart tympanic against his sternum. Merv was a de-mobbed drunkard who’d started off an alright bloke before the grog, they said, but the war had unseated part of his brain and he’d been in Kenmore – the mental hospital in Goulburn. He’d served in Europe and seen things, hellish things.

Or so it was in the talk down the pub. Right now Merv probably had the tremors so bad he couldn’t bat a fly as near throw a punch. Delirium tremens was how they wrote it in the papers: a common affliction of returned servicemen.

“I’m sorry,’ Templeton stammered. The man disgusted and terrified him to the core. He was barely a step up from animal.

“Keep goin’ ya little bastard,’ the growl pursued Templeton as he kept on through the graves stumbling down the ragged paths scarcely more than goat-tracks. When he judged he was far enough away from the road he allowed his legs to give and he dropped like a shot deer, pressed his cheek to the cold side of a tomb, curled onto his side and finally slept.

Women’s voices woke him, three or four of them, rousing him from a strange dream in which he had no hands and no tongue. In the dream he had not known this until he tried to cry out and could not, and then tried to feel his mouth and found that his arms ended at the wrists.

123 Somewhere, in the distance, there was a long, low wailing, like an animal with its foot caught in a trap. It was dark, but he could make out a ring of trees hunched as though whispering to each other. Until, suddenly, it was dark no longer. It was bright day and bees landed on him, tickling his ears and his lips as if he was a blossom. Bees swarmed over him buzzing like the filaments in electric bulbs, hot little wicks.

“Let’s go! It’s almost light,” said a voice heavy like thick black scribble on a whitewashed wall.

“I won’t have a bar of this,” said another.

“No. We have to check. We don’t know if she – if she’s…” said someone else.

He sat up silently straining to hear. He knew the voices, but somehow in the dark he could not place them. It was true; the sun was bleaching out the long night. He shivered. He did not know what they were doing but the edge in their tones was like a butcher through bone. He heard the owners of the voices moving. He heard their clumsy feet snapping twigs.

“Oh, Jesus, Jesus bloody Christ in Heaven.”

“Crumbs,” the owner of the voice sounded much younger, girlish suddenly.

“Do you think-?”

“She couldn’t still be-”

“No. Not a chance.”

“I can’t see!”

“Maybe if we just pick her up –”

“Don’t touch her! They might know, somehow. They might see we was here.”

124 “How they going to know that?”

“I don’t know! Fingerprints and all that.”

There was a long pause and Templeton struggled to make out what was going on. The footsteps were moving around.

“Just a scrap she was. So tiny, really.”

“Let’s get out of here. Before the sun’s up and they might see us anywhere near. There ain’t much we can do now anyway.”

“That mongrel bastard messed her up bad. She didn’t have a chance.”

He waited until they had gone, and then a good while longer until the sun was remote albumen. Trams rattled up and down Enmore Road. Sick in the gut he crept out.

He saw her fingers first. They were brown and smooth but bent unnatural, like a fork driven into a rock. Her arms were tied behind her back with something yellow, a dress or a coat. Her cardigan, his guts spasmed. It was her naked and lying dead in a wet June dawn.

He must have slept barely ten feet away. He hoped she had been dead. He thought of the crying he had heard in his dream and drew a cross on himself like he had been taught to do in church although he had never believed. He doubted his parents had believed; they’d never said so. If God existed then he was a god of evil and darkness that was proven now. He hoped she had been dead before he fell down so close to her. He hoped she had not been breathing as he had slept there. He didn’t think he could bear that.

“Oh God,” he sank heavily to his haunches and keened like a dog.

Fine brown hair spilled over the girl’s shoulders, covering her face, getting dirty on the ground. Funny he should think of that, he thought. Dirty hair. As if it mattered now. Beside her was a pile of women’s clothes. Not hers: they

125 looked too big, and on the headstone she had fallen next to were a pair of men’s white underpants. There were empty bottles everywhere and assorted other rubbish. Browned newspapers, cow bones, and dying flowers that people had left on graves. The air smelt stale, as if he had thrust his head into some cave or burrow, and disturbed the quiet, private settling in of rot.

It took him a long time to notice the bees. They came from a crack in the tomb he’d slept beside. He could see them busily disappearing and reemerging from its black yawn. They landed on the girl’s bare shoulders, on her soiled hair come free of its plait, on the backs of her brown legs and on the arches of her mud-stained feet. He stood and watched them. It was a calm winter day and the pale-bellied gums whispered softly to each other. The leviathan fig near the church seemed to shift and sigh tiredly with the slight wind as he passed beneath its branches. He dragged the broken gate shut behind him, its carbuncular paint flaking off in his hand and staining his skin with underlying rust. A van was delivering the milk, the man whistling as he unloaded the bottles with their cheerful red tops. Templeton could hear a lone wattlebird calling chok chok to the sunrise; yac a yac it sang. He almost thought to follow it. He did not know where else to go or what to do.

126

Part Two

The dark fires shall burn in many rooms;

will they sometimes miss me with my tangled hair –

still girls in dark uniforms

crouching in winter with their cold hands trembling,

still voices echoing as our voices echoed…

- Dorothy Hewett ‘The Dark Fires’

127 1

Templeton walked away from the body in the grass and out into the perfect stillness of Church Street. He regretted not taking off his torn, dirty jacket to cover her lower half, and it slit his heart thinking he left her exposed. He moved like a dreamer, his breath shallow and quick. Could people see it on his face, he wondered, or smell the taint exuding from his pores – his hair’s breadth to death? The morning unrolled the milkman and the bread cart, which passed him heedlessly and then a ragged bunch of little boys that followed behind, nearly bowling him over as they swooped to scrape the steaming horse manure from the road and into their pails. The iceman slapped his cargo on the rough burlap sack he shouldered and strode from his van.

Why weren’t people hollering already? He was confused. Why weren’t women screaming, whistles being blown, men looming like rugby tacklers?

Stop! You! Boy! Catching him by his underarms and dragging him off. Had he encountered such things he knew he’d put up no resistance. They could have him. He’d go out like a stone-cold drunk. He knew the inside of a courtroom.

What if it was the Boys’ Home this time? He shuddered at the taste in his mouth, his guts cramped and he needed to shit. His face was raw and stung from his beating. A Great War veteran with a folded empty trouser leg spat a wet brown wad near his feet and Templeton stepped down into the gutter. He then made a giddy left turn into the swell of King Street as though he were descending stairs into the tidal sea. Gusts from the St. Peter’s brewery breached his nostrils and the air felt thick with yeast. Suited men jostled each other as they swarmed for the city-bound tram and truculent students on

128 their way to school kicked a tin can up the road. This was the dumb-mute lull before the storm. It felt like a V2 was going to come blasting out of the sky or a Jap torpedo knock down half of Woollahra – and only he knew about it.

Wake up you fools! You stupid bastards! He wanted to scream till he was hoarse and his voice stuck in his throat like an orange.

He thought of his cave at Tamarama and his collection waiting for him and he yearned to be calm and safe among the neatness of his boxes. His secret place had little in the way of shelter and the wind was arctic, even with his back to the rock wrapped in his coat he’d be blue by morning with no food and no money. The pickings were slim around the beaches, the people cheeseparing, with no love for a snot-faced stray that was not their own.

Abruptly, he turned. Instead of heading up towards the University of

Sydney he now headed back west toward Enmore. It was the one place, he figured, that he was dead cert Jackie would not be anywhere near. Increasing his pace over the railway bridge and back to the flat he reached around through the bashed-out window glass and lifted the spring latch on the inside of the door. To do this one needed a relatively slender arm. As he shut the door behind him and looked at his shorn hair trodden into the floor he was stabbed with a sudden dawning. He’d never seen Jackie sweat like that, not even after he’d just been shot at. Templeton felt the liverish twinge of unease thinking why his sister, Dot, and the others happened to be in the cemetery,

God help them. If it wasn’t Jackie, who was it? Unlucky coincidence, brutish misfortune, that the girl had met her end at the hands of some mad pervert lurking in the dark?

He clawed opened the pantry. A half-full bottle of brandy was stowed sideways behind a few tins of beef and a bag of onions. He thumbed the cap

129 off, retching a little after the first couple of gulps but then his throat relaxed and he kept on swallowing until it was drained. He felt his mind skidding wildly across a slope of loose gravel. Would Jackie really have killed her?

There wasn’t enough reason, surely. And if Annie knew, would she do nothing? Dot, he consoled himself, would not have a bar of it, whatever had happened. But she wouldn’t go to the coppers. She would far more likely kill

Jackie herself. He stretched out trembling on the bare floor, feeling the liquour numbing his jaw and warming his blood and shut his eyes to a terrible squall.

“All this fuss over one dead girl,” said Errol sprawled on Dolly’s sofa in Darlinghurst, his gnarled index finger idly stroking the posies of English roses embossed on the wallpaper above his head. He sipped from a longneck, boots on the table, relishing the passive attention he appeared to command in the room. The girls were sitting about playing bridge with little concentration.

Lorraine had declined and was as she mentioned more than once, writing a letter to her sweetheart still serving in London.

“Hope he tear-arses back and takes her away then,” murmured Dot as she stocked the stove in the corner with more wood and shut the levered door, blowing on her chilled hands.

“It’s cold as a nun’s cunt in here,” Errol continued. He hadn’t shaven for a day or two and he was in his shirtsleeves, the buttons undone to mid chest, exposing a grayish Bonds singlet and a snarl of chest chair. On the outer side of his right bicep he boasted a roughhewn heart with a dagger buried in it, and on his left forearm an outline of a buxom woman with red lips and nipples.

“Well put some more clothes on, you daft bugger,” Dot snapped.

130 Snowy folded his meaty arms and drank deeply from his tall brown bottle and Templeton watched the rise and fall of his powerful chest. Snowy looked at Errol and popped his knuckles one by one. They were all still recovering from Dolly’s reaction to the news. She’d let out a loud cry when she’d read of it and sat silent and lugubrious for hours, sucking on her pipe, a funny old thing she’d traded with a Negro. Templeton was fascinated every time she took it out of its special-made case. It was a cork and wood number he thought coupled with her gold teeth made her look like a cartoon pirate.

“It’s a bloomin’ shame! Bloody dog that did that! If I get my hands on him I’d cut his knackers off! I’d make him wish he never…” she puffed and ranted.

No one mentioned that they had known the girl except Templeton and he kicked himself now, for he had told Dolly in a faltering voice whilst scanning

Dot and Annie’s faces for reaction. Questions turned over in his gut like a sick beast. He did not know how to even begin to tell them that he had been there, that he had heard them, and he could not bear the never-ending skirl of headlines. The girls were acting odd that was sure, but would not talk in front of him. Twice now he’d been playing possum where they all slept and had spied as Annie and Dot rose, put their coats on and slunk downstairs together into the night like a pair of thieves.

“Poor boy. What’s the world coming to?” Dolly gently cupped his chin in her hand. “So handsome… Just as pretty as your sister…” She cooed as she fussed with his hair, stroked his collar and petted him. He could feel the slit- eyed mistrust from the men and Lorraine directed toward him as he sat placidly sponging her favour. Even Annie looked disdainful. Templeton drew his back up straight in the chair, calculating.

131 “Do you think the coppers will catch who did it?” He asked. Dot studied her cards, Annie the bottom of her glass.

“Ha!” Dolly snorted. “Most of them couldn’t catch the clap in a

Shanghai whorehouse.”

“I’m dreadful at this game. Let’s play something else,” Sally huffed and threw down her hand.

“Stop talking nonsense, Sal,” said Margot.

“One dead girl,” Errol began again. “And the whole world’s fussin’,” he slurred. His ‘over-imbibing’, as people said in polite company, ensured that it was not uncommon for Errol to be pissing up the wall by one in the afternoon. The clock’s hands were scarcely at two fifteen on the mantelpiece next to the framed photograph of a younger Snowy in his uniform before he fought at Ypres. He had his arm around a radiant incarnation of Dolly; her face tilted upwards smiling at the cameraman, eyes looking fixedly at a mark in the future.

“I mean,” Errol’s boots shot out and their heels grappled with the floor as he spoke. “Not to mention all me mates that got mown down in North

Africa – or their heads blown off in New Guinea by Jap bastards – little four- eyed, yellow monkeys! Who’s makin’ a fuss? Who’s bangin’ a drum, raising a hullaballoo about them? Oh no! But one dead girl and suddenly the whole place’s up in arms!”

Dolly looked at him, her keen-edged gaze shaving the block of silence that menaced the room. Snowy put a hand on Errol’s shoulder. Templeton felt crabbed and flushed. He stood and moved to a seat further from the fire.

Errol mumbled on to himself.

132 “Come on now,” cautioned Snowy. “That’s enough, mate,” he said with beery resignation.

“One dead girl, violated, taken advantage of, whatever she was. Heh heh, fucked – that’s what those newsmen mean, heh heh,” Errol snicked a match off the book. He stabbed a passage in the paper with his thick, blunt finger. “How’d they put it? Here it is. Ahem. The child, ravished and strangled, was found in a disused cemetery at Newtown early Wednesday morning.”

He eyed them, itching for a fight. “What about all tens of thousand of men, eh? Dead. Dead as bloody doornails.”

“Shut up Errol! That’s different. Goodness knows you’re a stupid bastard,” Dot spat scattering her cards on the tabletop. Annie placed a palm on her wrist.

“No! No, I won’t shut up. To Hell with you all!” Errol slammed the dregs of his longneck down his throat and whacked the cap off another bottle on his belt buckle in one lubricated movement.

“That man is uglier than a hatful of arseholes,” Roberta shook her head, moving her chair closer to Dot.

“One of my best friends, a best mate of mine, eh? Just back from

Changi. Released from Singapore. Well he got his car. Brand new. And y’know what he did? Do you? I bet you’ll never guess! Well I’ll tell you. He put a hose in it from the tail pipe in through the front window and wadded up the gap with tape and rags, then he got in and sat down, closed the doors, started the engine. Bob’s your Uncle. Left his missus and his newborn son,”

Errol burped and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth.

“Right there in their Kingsford driveway. Blue as an Auschwitz Jew he was, when they pulled him out,” his voice cracked. “I ask you: Why would

133 you starve and slave through that Hell just to top yourself when you got home? I ask you? Now why the fuck would you do that?”

They all sat frozen not wanting to meet Errol’s gaze in the excruciating hush.

“And another one, a bloke I knew from me old work. He was top brass, a lieutenant commander, or something or other, and I heard – just the other day – that he hanged himself from a tree in some bush out near

Epping.”

“Alright mate, that’s enough,” said Snowy. “The pubs are full enough of this kind of talk. Yer don’t need to bring it home.”

“And a pal of a pal – ” Errol kept on. “He just crawled on under his mother’s house and cut his own throat. Just a young bloke when he came outta the war, 23, 24. Cripes! I could of been his dad!

Dolly exhaled and percussed her fingernails on the wooden arm of her chair.

Roberta had started crying without making sounds. Templeton only noticed because her cheeks were wet. Snowy, whose face was always red, had started to look like there was a scrunched handkerchief was in the back of his throat obstructing his breath.

“I’d give ten of you rotters for a little innocent girl-baby like that,”

Dolly dumped her pipe-bowl into an empty saucer and ground the smoking ash. She stood up abruptly. Templeton could see the years folded into the corners of her eyes. He wondered if she’d had babies, and if they themselves had had children. He’d never known his grandmothers. They hadn’t been

English; he remembered that much from his mother’s stories. One came from

Shotts, a coalmine town near Edinburgh, and the other, Templeton’s dead mother’s mother, from Galway. One of his grandfathers had been a German,

134 and that was not spoken about. Sometimes he liked to daydream he had a real family like in the Worth Fighting For posters with the pretty blonde woman in the apron clutching her soldier husband and her two children. In some of the posters a Japanese octopus stretched its tentacles toward Darwin and Cairns.

He’d heard Sally talk about her friends in Taree at the start of the war saying they’d rather take cyanide than get raped by a Jap if they invaded. Those days seemed long gone now.

“Take him upstairs and put him to bed,” Dolly ordered Snowy.

“Come on! Up we go mate,” Snowy said, disinclined to argue, hefting

Errol and half-carrying him.

“They’ll never catch ‘im,” Errol called down the stairs. “Bastard’s got off scot free.”

His words rang in the air. Templeton stood up and struck a match for Dolly as she fumbled for one. She smiled at him, her eyes crinkling, pulling her whole face into her smile. The smell exuded from her newly opened tobacco was a heady blend of hickory and tar. American. Dolly always had the best of the best. It must cost her a packet, he thought.

“He’s right. Whoever killed Frances Reed is long gone,” Dolly said, leaning back and sucking confidently. “Only a fool would stick around.”

Templeton hovered, his hands quivering as he lit a cigarette for himself.

Roberta brushed her face against the sleeve of her dress and sniffed, stood up.

“Excuse me,” her chair made a scraping honk as she pushed it along the floor. She padded upstairs. Dot looked after Roberta, her dark eyes swollen with feeling. Hazel, Sally and Margot sat sullenly. The bridge game had clearly been abandoned. Annie was holding the tip of her tongue

135 between her fine white teeth. She didn’t seem to be looking particularly at anyone, just staring, through a looking glass into another world.

“But I’ll find him. I’ll find who done it,” Dolly looked kindly at each of them.

Templeton dropped his cigarette, bent to pick it up and put it back in his mouth but didn’t smoke it. He let the ash build up in a drooping turret. He opened his mouth to ask Dolly how she’d do that but realised Lorraine had stopped writing her letter and was looking at him. She laid her pencil down and smiled, showing her long gums.

“Don’t you worry pets,” Dolly intoned like a gypsy fortune-teller through her pipe-smoke curtain. “I’ll find the bastard.”

So will I… Templeton thought. I will, and I will first. Devil take me.

136 2

It was a windless morning and the June frost clawed at the exposed skin of the paltry group standing huddled at the grave mouth deep in the Catholic side of Rookwood. Nancy had left her mittens on the train, daydreaming as usual, and she tried now as she gazed down at the austere mahogany lid of

Aunt Josephine’s coffin, to bury her hands in the sleeves of her coat for what little warmth that might bring.

“You look like a dancing Cossack thistle from Fantasia,” Lily teased.

She was playing marbles on the other side of the cleft ground. She had never like Aunt Josephine. She had never liked Pinky either. She was pleased when

Kate Durand had said she was going to let the Sisters of Mercy find a home for the little dog out on a farm somewhere.

“That means drown it in a bucket of water,” Lily had told Nancy cheerfully.

“Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine,” said Father Eoin, his palms moving up and down mechanically. He inflected upwards on the odd syllables of the liturgy, as if he was asking God questions. He was in his dotage and Nancy wondered if he was a little touched, having seen him muddle the gender, and even the name of the deceased during the proceedings of other funerals.

Kate Durand was dressed in the expensive mourning clothes she had worn to her husband’s funeral in absentia. Nancy saw that she wasn’t listening to

Father Eoin but was looking through the veil of her hat into the canopy of furled gum trees. A friend kept a supportive hand on the crook of her elbow.

She too was dressed a la mode. All her mother’s friends from the thespian

137 society looked alike to Nancy, with their loud headscarves and drawn on eyebrows.

“Requiescat in pace. Amen.”

“Amen,” they echoed.

After a few moments, when the priest had opened his eyes, they dispersed like dazed pigeons and the diggers who had been leaning on their shovels waiting off to the side, moved in to their task at hand. As Nancy walked away she could hear the sound of moist earth yielding to the spades.

“What are you going to do now, love?” Her mother’s friend fretted, clutching Kate’s arm and petting it hard, as if this were a scene from another of their infernal plays.

Her mother made a murmuring deferral and strode onwards, a little unstable on her feet. Nancy wondered if she’d already had a drink today, or if it was the fault of her high heels sticking in the turf.

“Well, I just think that the best thing for it is for you to come and live with me,” she carried on, her blonde finger-waved hair bobbing earnestly about her chin, which she turned remembering Nancy trudging along behind.

“The two of you, of course! How would you like that, hon?”

Nancy shrugged.

“Oh, poor little darling, you must be upset about your Aunt, hmmm?”

A musky arm dripped around Nancy’s shoulders. “She was in the winter of her life.”

“I s’pose,” Nancy mumbled.

“For the company. Just for a little while. ‘Till the dust settles, what do you think?”

138 “Izzy, we couldn’t possibly. That is too kind,” Kate fluttered her gloved hand in front of her face.

“Nonsense! It will get you both out of the doldrums.”

Nancy turned her mind hazily to the details of Izzy’s biography, bits and pieces she’d filched together from bored gossipy afternoons when it had been raining or she’d been too naughty to play outside. Izzy Hickey, if she remembered correctly, had an English chap during the war who’d thrown her over for an American nurse. She’d been beside herself when she found out – almost a danger to herself – she recalled her mother had said.

“That’s lovely of you, but really, Nan and I will be quite comfortable for the meantime. What with John’s pension, and the rest of it… Until I, oh, well, who knows? Until I’m not feeling so out of sorts. Maybe we’ll move back to the old country. I’ve still got family there you know. Nothing to keep me here these days,” she cast her eyes about her as if daring the cemetery to prove her wrong. “I miss the culture, you understand.”

Nancy started at this news. What about Frances? What about her life here?

She couldn’t let her mother go off on a harebrained plan to take them back to

Tipperary. She watched the dismay clench in Izzy as well. Good, she thought

– an ally.

“Of course, of course,” Izzy grinned reassuringly up at Kate. “Let’s not mention it again until you’re feeling better.”

“No,” Kate took her arm. “No, you’re quite right. I’ve not been myself since John…” she said with a strange, shellacked calm in her eyes.

They walked in silence in the direction of the train station passing other funeral processions much grander then their party with little boys dressed in the old style; black suits and white bows around their necks, and they carried

139 wreaths of white lilies that dwarfed them as the vanguard of a grandiose horse-drawn coffin.

Nancy thought glumly about the spread back at home that Mrs. Roberts from next door would have prepared; inescapable raisin scones, ham sandwiches and pies. She hoped if she was seen to gag down a suet pudding and fetch and carry some of the cups and plates she might be allowed out to play. She was itching to shake the sour milk fug of death and religion that clung to her skin.

Mrs. Roberts, almost unhinging her front door upon hearing them coming up the path, trundled two covered baskets over and deposited them on the step.

A dish of cold veal slithered out of the wicker and came to rest next to

Nancy’s shoe. Mrs. Roberts’ face was almost the same colour.

“Oh my precious doves, have you heard the news?” She cried, falling forward onto Kate Durand and clasping a pair of plump hands around her shoulders.

“Heavens no! What could be the matter? Are we at war with the

Soviets?” Kate asked, reaching to disentangle Mrs. Roberts and step around her to get the key into the lock and open the door. “Oh well, bound to happen. Let’s go inside. It’s too chilly out.”

“No, no, no. You don’t understand!” Mrs. Roberts despaired.

“But tell us! What has happened?” Izzy asked, darting forward to take

Mrs. Roberts’ palms in her own. “You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Nan, why don’t you help with the baskets and get the food inside,”

Kate said, clearly having no patience for theatrics.

140 “Miss Hickey,” began Mrs. Roberts. “Oh, Mrs. Durand! I dare not even start to tell you whilst this blessed child is in the room. Such horrors will give her night terrors for years.” She took Nancy’s face and stroked her beefy thumb over the child’s temple, sweeping her ginger hair behind the pale conch shell of her ear.

“Mrs. Roberts! Do be serious,” said Kate. “Now tell us what is the matter at once. Nancy is a very mature girl. I’m sure she has heard worse in her life.”

“No, Lord have mercy! You’d be mistaken,” Mrs. Roberts swooned into the parlour and down onto the over-stuffed lounge. She pressed her stippled cheek against the pink and yellow embroidery and her greying curls escaped from their pin and obscured her face. She groped blindly for the newspaper in the inner pocket of her overcoat, her eyes cataracted with tears, and stretched it toward them.

“What is it?” Kate took the paper into hand, and as Nancy watched her eyes skim the tiny print her face too dissolved like melting sugar.

“Oh, Nan. Oh, my poor girl. Come here, come here my darling,” she gasped wetly, beckoning, but Nancy hung back; viscous fear gushed through her.

“What has happened?” Izzy took the corner of the paper to turn the cramped headline toward her and then, when she’d read it, put her fist to her lips. “How awful!”

“Come here, Nancy,” her mother said again. But she would not. Like a roosting swan, Kate put her head down on her shoulder and shielded it with her arm and a flutter of weeping listed her body.

141 “It’s Frances, isn’t it,” Nancy said in a voice she did not recognise. She grasped into the fuzzy corners of what she saw for some comfort, beyond her mother and Mrs. Roberts and Miss Hickey, for Lily to come forward and say that it had all been a silly lark, that she’d fooled the grown-ups and none of it was true. But she could not. The room began to go black as coal but for the pinprick of her mother in the eye of the telescope.

“She’s dead isn’t she?” The words fell like a stone into still water. “Isn’t

it? That’s what is in the paper. Isn’t it?” She barked.

She remembered what Lily had said the night she had come home to find

Josephine cold in her chair with Pinky gone berserk and her mother useless.

Where’s Frances? Lily had asked, but not in a way that made it a question.

“Honey, I’m so sorry,” said her mother. “She’s been killed. They just found her…”

“No!” Nancy slammed her hands to her ears. “No. No. No. No.”

“Nancy, come here, come with me, child. Come and have a sandwich,”

Mrs. Roberts rose from the couch. “The news of a tragedy is always better on a full stomach.” The mature widow’s pink face loomed, her liquid eyes pleading.

“I don’t want a fucking sandwich,” Nancy hacked. “Show me.” No one spoke. Mrs. Roberts opened her mouth in a shocked oh. “Show me the paper.

I want to see what it says.”

“No, baby. It’s not a good idea,” her mother shook her head, the paper crumpling in her fist. “You don’t want to read it.”

“Give it to me!” Nancy snatched it, tearing a corner from the broadsheet and darted to the corner. Nobody followed her or moved in any

142 way to stop her. “The child –” her hand shot to her face and she choked on the next words, feeling them burn as they slid back down her clamped throat.

“Frances Margaret Reed, aged 11, ravished and strangled, was found in a disused cemetery at Newtown early Wednesday morning.”

It was Thursday. Frances had been dead since Tuesday night. Why hadn’t she known? Why hadn’t she been told? The room seemed to shudder and tip sideways.

“More than 50 men have been questioned,” Nancy read on. “Police have no suspects as yet, although some men questioned have been charged for vagrancy.”

“Stop now baby, that’s enough,” Kate stood, holding on to the wooden slatted back of the kitchen chair like she needed it to keep her upright.

“Who did this?” Nancy’s whippet-thin body quaked and she could feel her face turn beet-red. “Who would want to kill Frances?” There was a splinter of savagery in her voice. She looked at her mother with feral accusation.

“We don’t yet. The police are doing all they can, luvvie,” Mrs. Roberts said.

“Don’t call me that!” Nancy shouted. “And how do you know? If they were doing all they can they would have caught him already. He’s had two whole days to get away – he could be in Melbourne by now!”

“I’m sorry Mrs. Roberts. She gets her temper from John,” Kate said.

“Of course. Little lass doesn’t know what she’s saying. It’s the shock,”

Mrs. Roberts nodded.

“I wish father were here. He would know what to do. He would find who did this. And he’d kill him,” Nancy looked at them with undisguised

143 disgust. Her mother started crying again. Izzy and Mrs. Roberts glanced at each other with nervous dismay.

“The paper says: ‘She had – she had been struck savage blows on the mouth, strangled’,” Nancy’s voice was climbing octaves as she read on.

“Strangled with strips torn from her singlet. And then – and then outraged.”

“No, no, no, honey. That’s enough. That’s enough now baby,” Kate somehow found the power, wrenching it from her marrow to cross the room and take her child in her arms. She pressed her hands to Nancy’s ears and rocked her. Words had disintegrated to an unintelligible mush.

Baby, no, enough, no more, repeated in a sludgy gibberish of cooing and tear-soaked caresses.

“Her body had been mutilated,” Nancy read the five solid black printed words on the unyielding page as if in a foreign language. The sentence made no sense. It could not be real. In the stunned hush Nancy wriggled away and bolted upstairs leaving behind her mother, squatting on the floor frozen there, and Miss Hickey holding the sink fiercely with her back to the room, and Mrs. Roberts sitting at the kitchen table eating something and crying, the crumbs littering her blouse and her rouge rubbed down her cheeks.

Nancy tripped on the landing bruising her shins. She turned and sat, ripping her black polished dress shoes off, bursting one of the little brass buckles and hurling them down with loud clunks as they hit the floorboards at the bottom of the stairs. She ran up the next set of steps, her bare feet slapping on them, screaming and pounding on the sideboards until they skinned her knuckles.

She threw open the door to her room and skidded along her hard mattress headlong, her face ploughing the pillow with winding force.

144 “Oh Frances,” she whimpered, her whole body capsized, the shards of grief splitting her as though a bowsprit through her lungs. “Frances!”

For a few seconds when she awoke there was an untroubled greyness where the events of the previous afternoon had yet to surge into the foreground of her mind. When they did she jerked upright with her hands to her throat.

Frances.

Her mother was dozing on a chair in the corner still dressed in her funeral clothes. She must have sat there all night. Wisps of hair had straggled from her neat waves and the creases that bracketed her mouth looked deep. Nancy lay rigid in the bed and wished she were dead. She had dreamed that Frances was walking ahead of her through the graveyard. The dream-light was sticky like glue. She had tried calling her name but Frances would not turn around.

As fast as Nancy tried to run she could not catch up. Frances had looked just as the newspapers described; dark hair, olive skin, pink rayon frock, lemon- coloured cardigan, blue-grey overcoat, black shoes, short blue socks. Nancy’s voice calling her name was like dropping a penny down a bottomless well.

The door opened and Mrs. Roberts entered behind a tray of tea and toast, wearing a grim, warm, entreating, and wretchedly breakable expression all at once. Nancy clamped her eyes shut. She heard a throat being cleared gently and the chair shift and creak as her mother roused.

“Oh. That’s kind of you,” Kate said but made no move to take the tray.

Mrs. Roberts set it awkwardly on the foot of the bed.

“Still sleeping? Poor lamb.”

“Yes. She tossed and cried all night.” Nancy felt a warm palm stroke her forehead.

145 “There’s more news! Paper’s just come,” Miss Hickey’s voice carried up the stairs. “Lord!” She exhaled, reading as she walked. “They’ve got the mother’s statement.”

“Peggy! Oh my goodness. She must be beside herself,” Kate gasped.

“Should I?” Miss Hickey glanced meaningfully at Nancy who had opened her eyes.

“Oh yes, Izzy. Do. It’s too late for that. She knows it all now.”

“I suppose,” Izzy said grimly. “When she did not return in reasonable time,” she read aloud. “After I had sent her for a loaf of bread I had a presentiment that she had been murdered.”

“Bugger me,” Mrs. Roberts said with a low whistle. Everyone turned to her shocked. “Well, what a jolly strange thing to say!”

“If I can continue – ”

“Why would she say that Mum? Why would Mrs. Reed say something like that?”

“I don’t know, Nan. I just don’t know,” Kate shook her head.

“If I may! Ahem. Frances loved to mind babies, and she was popular among her classmates at Enmore Public School and around the neighbourhood.”

“That’s a lie!” Nancy burst out. “Frances hated babies!”

“She was a big, well-developed girl for 11 years. If I could only get my hands for two minutes on the fiend who killed her there would be no need for a court to deal with him.”

Kate sighed and stood up, smoothing the wrinkles from her dress and setting her face with a cheerless resolution.

146 “Get up, Nan. Put your Sunday clothes on. We must go and pay our respects. The woman is a friend, well – an acquaintance really – but nevertheless.”

“I don’t want to,” Nancy shook her head.

“It’s not a choice. That is what is to be done.”

“I have a pound cake you can take. I’ll put it in a tin,” said Mrs.

Roberts and then reconsidered: “Or perhaps a cake’s not appropriate. Oh no.

What do you think? Maybe the lamb stew instead,” she went off with Izzy to the kitchen fretting.

“I’m not going.”

“Stand up,” Kate firmly pulled the covers off her daughter’s bed. “And put on your blue dress.”

“I don’t want to go. You can’t make me,” Nancy’s lip trembled.

Kate wrenched the dress off the coat hanger and laid it out. She put white socks and brown leather shoes on the floor and stood in the middle of the room, arms slack, and neck stiff.

“You’ll go because it is the right thing to do,” she said simply.

“It’s Mrs. Reed’s fault!” Nancy said and threw the pillow she was holding violently away from her.

“Nancy! That’s a horrible thing to say!”

“It is her fault. She’s horrible to Frances. Always just banging on about

Jesus! Frances never would have – ”

“That’s enough. Mrs. Reed is not to blame. And we are going to go over there and pay our respects and bring that poor woman some stew. It’s the least we can do. What with her husband gone…”

“Mr. Reed’s not dead he’s working in Queensland!”

147 “Regardless, Nancy. Where’s your charitableness? The woman is alone with a baby and her daughter has just been found dead in a field.”

“A cemetery,” Nancy corrected.

“That’s quite enough,” her mother said with starched finality.

Wordlessly Nancy began to dress. She allowed her mother to comb and plait her hair. She put her arms out and accepted the cold white china pot of stew to carry and obediently set out into the cold bright day. Her mother’s heels clicked along the street ahead. Weeping red boils on men’s necks peeked from their grubby collars. She looked hard at each fellow as though he might be her killer. Skinny, ragged children played in the gutter; rivers of green snot clinging to their upper lips unstaunched. A soldier with no bottom half sat on a wheeled board by the Town Hall Hotel with a coinless begging tin. Her mother passed them all by. They walked the familiar route to Frances’ house but nothing seemed familiar about it today. Nancy’s Sunday shoes blistered her feet and the broken buckle made the left strap flap loosely. When they reached the house they saw a clutter of casseroles untouched on the stoop.

Kate knocked loudly on the door. There was no answer. The curtains twitched. She knocked again, even more forcefully this time. A baby cried inside.

“Mrs. Reed? Peggy? Are you there?”

Nancy stood witlessly holding the pot. She leant to put it with the others but her mother halted her.

“It’s Kate Durand. Peggy? Open the door.”

Minutes passed and passers-by were slowing down to gawk. Nancy felt her face burning. How dare they all stand around gaping? Her mother drew her close. Just as Nancy felt the determination sapping a shuffle and a turning key

148 was heard. Mrs. Reed’s face emerged, painstakingly made up and her upswept hair tightly tucked into a spotted kerchief. If Kate was surprised she masked it well.

“Oh Peggy. I am so, so deeply sorry,” she said and took one of Mrs.

Reed’s stringy, freckled hands. Nancy knew that her mother was using her special acting voice.

“Mrs. Durand. Good of you to come,” Mrs. Reed said crisply. “Nancy.”

No one seemed to know what next to say. A man across the street pulling weeds from his fence had been watching on his hands and knees, a clump of dandelion root scattering loose dirt on his trousers.

“Won’t you come in?” Mrs. Reed finally offered and snicked the door shut behind them. Instead of standing in the road they now milled in the living room. Nancy handed her the stew and she regarded it with confusion.

Kate took it back and set it down in the pantry. Nancy did not like the way

Mrs. Reed was looking at her.

“Would you – ” Mrs. Reed began but faltered. She ran a scaly tongue over dry lips. Her lipstick was peeling. She tried again, this time addressing

Kate. “Would Nancy like to go and choose something?” Nancy and her mother hesitated, unsure of what she meant. “Choose something. To take, like a keepsake.”

“Oh!” Kate exclaimed. “Of course. How generous. Off you go, Nan.”

“But – ” Nancy felt a flutter of panic.

“Go on now.”

Her feet propelled her down the corridor and into Frances’ room that was cramped and messy and the sight made her well up with longing and grief.

The only window stared out at the redbrick flank of the neighbouring house.

149 Old copies of Pix were strewn on the floor and Frances’ bed was made up and unslept in, the pillows drowned in the throw cushions her mother liked to embroider with bible verses. When they came here after school Frances would sweep them all up and shove them under the bed. But Mrs. Reed would only replace them all, just as they were, like a forest of toadstools that grew magically overnight. Nancy picked one up. It was cream with pale pink stitching that read:

Foolishness is bound in the heart of a child,

but the rod of correction shall drive it far from him

- Proverbs 22:15

She let it drop back onto the covers. On the wall above her were cutouts and covers Frances had stuck there. The face of a beautiful girl lying back on a picnic rug, hands tucked behind her perfect hair, smiled dopily in black and white, the date late in 1944. She recognized it from the cover girl competition in Pix that Fran followed slavishly. Women posed on beaches, hanging from yachts, in Physical Culture outfits, the rows of white teeth, red lips, and wide coquettish eyes made Nancy feel dizzy. She sat down on the bed. It smelt harsh, cleansed, like laundry soap and not at all of Frances.

Frances’s brown cotton first aid sack was propped in the corner. Nancy picked it up and emptied it; they had not had to carry these for years now.

The government had issued them to all schoolchildren. She touched the roll of bandages, the safety pins, earplugs and the mouth-guard made of foul-tasting tubing. With a laugh she remembered how Frances had slipped this in during assembly once and scared the daylights out of Mr. Cameron coming up to accept a certificate and grimacing at him with a mouthful of orange rubber.

She inspected the little bottle of Sal Volatile, which you waggled under

150 peoples’ noses if they fainted, and found the ripped open package of glucose jellybeans that obviously Frances had not preserved for emergencies.

She opened the drawer of the beechwood bedside table and peered in.

Behind the King James was a small treasure trove. She wiped her flowing nose with the back of her hand and stifled a cry. There folded immaculately were all the letters Nancy had wrote her when she had been forced to visit

Aunt Jo for nine weeks last summer. She cradled the papers, reading over her drivel about the horses she’d ridden in Tuggeranong, and long tracts detailing the interminable boredom of endless, flyblown, sun-bleached days.

She had had only one reply, and it had been so flighty and vague she had assumed that Frances had barely read what had come to mean so much to her; if only for the daily hour of escape the correspondence afforded, where she would take herself to the coolest corner of the garden and pen them.

Beneath those lay a photograph of the two of them taken the night they had gone to see her mother in Much Ado About Nothing. Both were in their Sunday dresses, Frances in yellow and Nancy blue, cheeks touching. The ribbon that had tied up her ponytail was looped in a bow around the picture, wrapping it crossways like a present. Nancy slipped it into the pocket of her pinafore. On the top of the table lay a stack of books. She read the titles along the spines.

The bottom volume was The Magic Faraway Tree; she had the same copy at home and it had been their favourite until earlier this year when Frances had declared it was for babies. She’d uttered a similar dismissal of The Complete

Adventures of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie, the next in the tower. On top of that sat the newly beloved The Naughtiest Girl in the School from which she often subjected Nancy to passages read aloud.

151 She shifted from the bed and crouched to look underneath. The floor was bare save for a macaroni necklace Frances had made at the Newtown Play

Centre. Of course, that was too obvious a hiding place. Mrs. Reed was cannier than that. She lifted the mattress from the bedframe and slid a palm into the crack, scanning. Again, nothing, yet she would not be defeated. She walked to the cupboard and felt a hot surge from the sight of Frances’ few clothes hanging there, bodiless. She ran her fingers across the sleeves and hems before shutting the door. There was no other furniture besides a chair, which

Nancy pushed until it touched the side of the cupboard and then clambered up on it. There, out of reach, on the top of the cupboard nestled in the depression of the wood was a cake tin. She carefully lifted it down and closed the bedroom door so she would not be disturbed.

Prizing off the lid she found tear-outs from Man magazine filched from her father, she speculated, how else was Frances likely to get hold of such things?

There were at least fifteen pages in the tin, creased infinitely, as though they had been folded, opened and re-folded innumerable times. Most of the etudes des femmes, as they were labeled were harmless enough; drawings of women talking into telephones languid on a bed in sheer nightdress, or standing leg- cocked, their fulsome curves of breast and buttocks cartoonish. Then, at the bottom, she found one of two pilots in full aviator gear; one had a naked girl in his lap, arms clasped about his neck. She had devilish red hair and large pert nipples. The caption read The Gremlin.

The rest of the tin contained two hand-rolled, filterless cigarettes, 2 / 6d, an empty gold locket, a man’s broken pocket watch, and a little locked diary. She startled hearing her mother and Mrs. Reed in the hallway and hastily swiped the diary too, stroking it through the cotton of her pocket. She glanced for

152 something to take out as the memento mori she could safely present to them.

Frances’ old teddy bear Winston lay at the foot of the bed. She grasped him by a balding paw.

“I’ve got something!” She yelled. “I’m coming.” She squashed the contents of the tin back in and jammed the top on, almost stumbling as she climbed to put it as she’d found it. No doubt Mrs. Reed would find it sooner or later. When she rejoined them in the kitchen the air was fraught.

“Oh Peggy, you can’t mean that,” Kate was repeating herself but Mrs.

Reed was nodding vigorously. She had a scourer in her hand and was busy at the grout between the kitchen tiles, down on all fours. It seemed particularly odd that she would clean with company present. Nancy didn’t know what to do so she paused in the doorway.

“What did you choose, darling?” Kate said, in welcome relief upon seeing her daughter. Nancy held Winston limply.

“Oh, that old thing. Her father bought that. It’s cheap. Is that really what you want to take, dear?” Mrs. Reed said, hardly looking up. Nancy shrugged. Her mother had Thomas on her lap, jiggling him, allowing him a crook of a knuckle to suckle on. The baby looked like a big greedy white grub.

“Speaking of Mr. Reed, have you – ah – have you notified him? Um. I mean – has word been sent – to – ah – where he might be?” Kate cleared her throat.

“S’pose he can read it in the papers like everybody else seems to have.

Whole world knows about it, seems like.”

“Oh… well, perhaps I can talk to the police, about getting word sent,”

Kate groped. “If that would be a help to you.” She seemed flummoxed as

153 Mrs. Reed continued at her scrubbing. “Perhaps if you could provide me with an address…”

“Don’t have any address,” Mrs. Reed grimaced and her words bounced metallically around the cold room.

“Well, um, perhaps, his last known whereabouts? Was he in the service…?” Kate faltered.

“Who wants to know?” Mrs. Reed paused and put both hands on her knees staring suspiciously.

“It’s just that, as a father, he would – ah – want to… be there at the memorial service, and…”

“If I get word from him I’ll tell him then,” came the tart reply.

“Why don’t you stop that now, Peg? What do you say? Shall I fix us both a drink? You look like you sure could use one,” Kate said exasperated.

“I don’t keep liquour in this house,” Mrs. Reed stood and turned, dropping the scourer in the sink.

“Of course. Silly me.”

Nancy watched as her mother rose and placed the baby delicately down. He started blubbering. Mrs. Reed did not go to pick him up. She remained with her back turned and her shoulders tautly knitted.

“Right-o then.”

Nancy knew that Mrs. Reed was not telling the truth because there was liquour in the house. Frances had shown her where it was one Sunday when she had stayed home from church pretending to be sick. She knew that there was a bottle of crème de menthe behind the porridge oats. They’d fished it out and tasted the luminous contents.

“Ugh – squid juice,” Nancy had gagged.

154 “Mmm, no, it tastes like fairy cordial. This is what Oberon and Titania would drink,” Frances had stuck her green tongue out in delight.

“Our deepest condolences,” Kate was saying. “Peggy, please reconsider. Please think about it,” she said, and then into the brittleness above the child’s wailing: “We’ll show ourselves out.”

“Wait!” Mrs. Reed spun around. She walked over to the hall cupboard and opened a drawer. In her hands were some letters. She spread them on the table before Kate. Nancy saw her mother’s lips move over the words of the first one but no sound came.

“Read them aloud,” Mrs. Reed said. She was trembling.

“I’d rather not.”

“Read them, if you please. And then tell me what you make of the bloody things.”

“Nan,” Kate swiveled to look at her. “Nan, hon, go back to Frances’ room.”

“But I don’t want to.”

“Now!” Kate said in a voice that rumbled.

Nancy pretended to walk back up the corridor. She made sure to step heavily and then she slipped her shoes off and crept back down the passageway in only her socks.

“Dear Missus Reed,” Kate cleared her throat and continued hoarsely.

“I know who killed your daughter. He has killed others too and he will do again. Put £50 in an envelope and leave it on the bench in a paper bag at St.

Peter’s Station. DO NOT CONTACT THE POLICE. I will write again with his name. To prove this is true; the girl had one shilling in the pocket of her

155 cardigan when she died. Do not ignore this letter. Be it on your head.” There was a long silence.

“Peggy you can’t believe this. It’s a load of rubbish. Anyone could have read in the papers she’d been sent on an errand. Have you shown the police?”

There was another pause. Nancy wished she could see what was happening.

“Well you should take it to them at once!” Her mother said. “You shouldn’t have to bear being pestered by fraudsters and lunatics. After all you’ve been through!”

“Keep going,” Mrs. Reed said. The resin that held her voice together was wearing out.

“There are more of these? I don’t think I need to. You don’t need to subject yourself to anymore of this nonsense.”

“Go on.”

“Really I must insist – ”

“Go on!” Her voice was almost a shout.

“Very well. But I don’t know what you think this will achieve.”

Nancy could hear the slick slip of paper pulled from paper and unfolded.

“Deer Misters Reed, yor little girl got what was coming to her – oh my!

The spelling of this one is just atrocious!”

“You haven’t finished it yet,” said Mrs. Reed in a faraway voice.

“We stuck it to her and she loved it. She screamed and screamed,” Kate gasped and moaned like an animal. “She wanted to play and we showed her just how a soldier does it.”

“There’s one more.”

“Oh no! Oh no I can’t. Oh Peggy. Oh God!”

156 Kate was crying thickly. There was a crumpling sound like she was throttling the papers.

“Read the last one.”

Nancy had to lean almost into the room to hear, her mother was crying so loud. She was terrified they would see her and there would be Hell to pay.

The words came dripping and wheezing in spurts like a wrung out dishrag.

“Dear Missus Reed, your daughter did not know she was in the company of a man up until the last.”

“Make what you will of that one.”

“What in Heavens can that mean?”

Nancy waited, the moments dragged infinitely. Thomas was wailing. She dared to peep around the corner. Kate was hugging Mrs. Reed, wiping her wet face all over the other woman’s apron. Mrs. Reed wasn’t hugging back, just standing with her hands limp at her sides.

“The handwriting is all different. Like they’re by three different men.

When did these arrive?”

“These past few days.”

“You need to take them down to the station.”

“And what will they do about it? Police can’t seem to catch a fly with their mouths hanging open.”

“Peggy! It’s the only chance. These could be clues! They could find that monster! Who knows? They have – they have,” she stumbled on the sentence.

“Special people who work these things out. Special detectives.”

Mrs. Reed extracted herself. She picked up the baby. Kate stood shell- shocked. Nancy came out from her hiding spot and went to her mother.

157 “Good afternoon, Mrs. Durand,” Mrs. Reed nodded at them both with torpefied formality. “Thank you for your visit. I’ll let you know if there’s anything further you can do to help.”

158 3

Dot and Roberta and Templeton were in the park off Enmore Road the day of the Reed girl’s funeral. They were drunk, nestled under a horse blanket amidst their debris of empty longnecks by the time the feeble sun finally relinquished the sky to a dark-robed gibbous moon and the crested pigeons preening on the grass had long since retreated to their evening roosts. The night air smelled of damp, squashed figs and nicotine. Gossip under the flimsy masquerade of news had been humming through Sydney and

Newtown was feverish. More than one hundred men had been questioned.

And yet still no one had been charged with anything more than vagrancy.

People said the dead girl’s mother had fainted at the graveside and had to be carried to a car. The crowd had been so dense the police closed off the roads.

Premier McKell had offered a £500 reward. Templeton necked the warmish bubbles of his beer and re-read the paper.

“A woman caller said she saw the girl with a man on the corner of

King and Georgina Streets near 8:30 p.m. and heard the man say: ‘Come on, we’ll go down there now’, and her reply: “We can’t go to the party yet, I haven’t got the bread’.”

“Why would the little nincompoop go to a party at nighttime with a man she never met?” Roberta propped herself up on her elbows and took the newssheet. “The Chief of the C.I.B., Superintendent Malcolm gave the man’s description.” Her face was illuminated eerily in submarine glow of the streetlight as she sounded out the words with some effort. “About 27 or 28,

5ft 8in, medium build; fair, suntanned complexion; dark or brown hair; full

159 face; wearing a military overcoat, dirty grey trousers, open neck shirt, and a grey felt hat.”

“Well fuck me if that isn’t about every bloke in Newtown,” Dot said.

“They’re never going to catch him. They’ll have to interview the entire bloody service forces.”

“Dirty grey trousers? They’d only have said that if they were real dirty, not just regular dirty. Must ‘a been a tramp, don’t you think, Dot?” Roberta looked at her. Dot’s draped a goose-pimpled arm around her friend.

“They want us to think it was a tramp,” Dot said, striking up a smoke, its tail pluming a wispy banderole.

“What do you mean?” Templeton regarded her upturned face; she looked sloe-eyed like Dietrich in Morocco.

“They don’t want us to think that such a thing could be done by an ordinary fellah, a soldier, a brother, or somebody’s son. Whoever he was. Not one of us.”

“Surely it couldn’t have been,” Roberta pressed her full bottom lip against Dot’s collarbone in horror. Dot caught her fingers and kissed them, rubbing them against the cold. She slipped them under her coat and they disappeared beneath her clothes. Roberta pupils were inky saucers.

“Surely it could, Babisu,” Dot breathed out, keeping the smoking ember of her cigarette clear of Roberta’s loose hair.

“But she was just a child… And it was so… savage. Who could do that? It must have been a stranger passing through. Maybe one of the last

Yanks.”

“I’ll bet you it’s not. I’ll bet it’s just your regular, run-of-the-mill rat bastard.”

160 “What makes you say that?” Templeton asked, the hairs on the nape of his neck erect. His hands twitched in his lap. “Dot,” he said softly, swigging a third of the bottle before he continued. “When you say it could be a local bloke… Do you know who done it?” He felt her stiffen. She pushed her face into Roberta’s curls and breathed in.

“Templeton!” Roberta admonished him. “What would make you ask such a thing?”

“No reason,” he fell quiet. Dot said nothing and wouldn’t look at him.

“Well you hush your mouth. Mother of Mary, what a thing to say!”

They spread the blanket out and lay down on it, piling their overcoats on top of them, and looked up at the sky.

“Do you see that bright one up there?” Dot took Roberta’s hand out from her coat and lifted it in the air. “That’s Alpha Centauri.”

“Which one? There’s millions,” Roberta laughed.

“At the top. Do you see? It’s like a diamond tipped over on its side.

Alpha Centauri’s the top, then Beta Centauri,” she pointed with Roberta’s finger and drew a long kite shape. “Acrux at the bottom.”

“That’s the Southern Cross,” Templeton said.

“Oh yes. Smarty pants. And how do you know that?” Dot propped herself up on her elbow and poked him.

“Our father taught us. Weren’t much to do at nighttime on the farm,” he said and a memory surfaced like a driftwood on a beach. He remembered the sweet, thick stink of the wattle on a muggy night, as he looked up at his tall sister and his taller father reciting constellations.

“It was your sister that told me,” Dot said. She let go of Roberta and lay back down, her eyes glassy and distant. “The sky looks different here to

161 where I was a girl. All the stars are in the wrong place – like a shaken kaleidoscope.”

“Did Annie tell you the others?” Roberta wriggled so she could snuggle closer.

“Yes she did, on our first night together. She told me the names of lots of them. So many I thought she must be making it up,” Dot smiled and raked her fingers through Templeton’s hair. “Now I know she wasn’t.”

“I wish my father told me things like that,” Roberta said.

“What did he teach you?” Dot asked.

“I’m from up North. My dad taught me how to ride a horse without falling off. He taught me how to build a solid fence and tie a good knot. He taught me how to cut a piece of sugarcane so you could suck out the raw juice. He showed me where to kick a bloke who was messing with you so he wouldn’t be able to keep messing with you. Ha!” She smiled at the memory.

“But haven’t seen him for a while. I came down here ’42. After Darwin got bombed. Been working for Dolly since I was seventeen.”

“What do you think of her?” Dot asked, turning so she could see the girl’s face.

“Who? Dolly? Don’t think much of nothing.”

“Oh, come on now. Is she as bad as Lorraine made out? I think she’s alright. It’s the bloody great mean-eyed bastard I’m worried about.”

“Errol? He’s just Dolly’s attack dog. He does what she and Snowy bid.”

“I don’t know if they’ve got the muzzle on tight enough then.”

162 “He won’t mess with you unless you give him cause,” Roberta smiled.

Her wide brown eyes blinked their thick lashes lazily. “Oh, that’s right. You can’t seem to help it.”

“The man’s trouble. I wouldn’t trust him far as I could kick him.”

“You don’t have to trust him, just stay out of his way. Stay out of

Lorraine’s way too for that matter. She don’t like you much either by the looks of it.”

Dot huffed. She sat up indignantly and took a large gulp of beer, wiping her mouth on her sleeve.

“But don’t worry,” Roberta reached up and tugged on her wrist. She slipped her hand into Dot’s. “I do.”

Dot and Roberta had dozed off cupped like spoons tight against each other’s bodies. Templeton looked at his empty beer. He wasn’t tired. His mind twitched and turned over like an awakening animal; he wanted to find something to do, it was still early. Roberta murmured from somewhere deep beneath the tides of her sleep’s disquiet and nuzzled into Dot’s neck. How nice it must be, to moor against another warm, breathing body. He lit a cigarette and leant against the stone archway aware of the possums scrabbling through the branches overhead, fighting and rutting. He wanted another drink; he wanted to make something happen.

An hour later he was in town, and had bought another beer from a tramp drinking with soldiers on the fringes of Eddy Avenue. Their fire flared gaseous in a scorched steel drum. Belmore Park looked still and slumbering, but as his eyes adjusted to the gloom he could see ruffles and flickers of movement in the trees on the gentle rises and in the basin. Men, and a few

163 women, were everywhere. Lean-tos and nests of soiled coats and mattresses filled every arbour and hollow. A group of fellows in slouch hats sharked him as he picked his way through, the whites of their eyes dicey and menacing.

Templeton walked faster, hoping they could not smell his fear, not knowing whether they wanted his beer or his life. When he hit Elizabeth Street he gasped in relief.

He drained his beer in Hyde Park and sat now at the Archibald trying to remember the whereabouts of a gin place he’d followed Annie to once off

College St. He dipped his hand into the water from the granite fountain edge leaning back looking up at the Minotaur. He’d splashed the seat of his trousers and he had a beery stain down the breast of his coat. The streetlights bounced off the water and played upon the wide musculature of the monster’s torso. Its sinewy human arms strained against Theseus who had the bull’s horn in his mighty grasp. Sculpted turtles sprayed glistening hemispheres of water from their mouths and Apollo crowned the monument naked and resplendent.

So caught up was he in marvel that he did not notice the man who had taken a seat nearby regarding him intently. He in a sharp suit with a cinnabar silk waistcoat, and the flash of his cufflinks caught Templeton’s glance. His hat was pulled low, angled over his left eye.

“Do you have a light?” He slid over to Templeton and outstretched a hand with clean, trimmed nails. His voice was gravelly although not coarse, with perhaps a tint of an English accent.

Templeton nodded and fumbled through his pockets. He took a cigarette out for himself too and as he did so let the matchbook flit from his fingers and

164 land with a plop in the fountain. His cheeks warmed and he shrugged defensively and began to turn back around.

“Sorry.”

“Never mind,” the man reached into his pocket and withdrew his own matches. He struck one ablaze and held it out. Confused, Templeton leant into the flame. He could see the man smile as he exhaled a long jetstream of smoke and seemed to wink. Templeton turned his head to survey the park.

The bald, paved court around the Archibald was strewn with knots of men, in pairs or clusters, smoking and talking, entering and exiting from the underground St. James station. Outside of the lit circle the gloaming bushes seemed to ripple like virescent anemones.

“Fancy going some place for a drink?” The man stood expectantly and smoothed himself down.

“Do you know somewhere?” Templeton scowled. He was dead keen on another but he was also mistrustful. He’d seen shysters and conmen dressed up fine before.

“Sure,” he rocked back on his heels and swept his arms wide. His teeth were large and white.

“Well alright then,” Templeton heaved himself up and threw his ember down and stamped it out. He figured that if the fellow wanted to rob him he would soon find he was wasting his time. As they walked into the trees there was a murmur of harbour salt in the air mixed with the smell of mulch and cologne. He followed a pace behind his new companion. When they had walked a hundred yards or so to where the Moreton Bay figs huddled densely they stopped. The man left the path and went behind a tree,

165 where he unbuttoned his trousers and proceeded to urinate. It was too dark for Templeton to see but he heard the bullish stream against the trunk.

“Come here,” the disembodied voice, lower and thicker than it had been at the fountain.

“I thought we’re gettin’ a drink – ”

“I’ve got a quart of brandy right here.”

Templeton ventured into the shadows. The man had his back pressed against the vast fig. He gestured with a bottle and pressed it into Templeton’s greedy hand.

“Have as much as you like.”

He didn’t answer but unscrewed the cap. The brandy tasted hot and cloying.

He wiped his moist lips. The man didn’t reach to take it back; he had his hand on his crotch, rubbing unhurriedly. He’d slipped off his hat and was pulling at his tie loosening it so Templeton could see the black chest hair spreading to his collarbones. Templeton gulped the brandy again. The man moved toward him and he could feel the gust of heated breath on his neck, then fingers groping at his buttons. His soft cock was taken in a cool palm and pulled out.

The man started to slide his hand up to the head and then moved it rapidly.

“Get off,” Templeton reached for his collar and pushed him. The man’s chest felt like marble beneath the cotton of his shirt.

He pushed the heel of his hand into Templeton’s protesting mouth and pulled harder on Templeton’s stiffening cock. It only took a moment. He didn’t know if it was the husky pant in his ear, the vigour of the strokes, or the solidness of the flesh pressing into him. His first push had been half- hearted and he did not try to shrug him off again. He gasped so violently it

166 was as though he was winded and he grabbed a fistful of the man’s hair and twisted.

He sagged but the man caught him. After a minute or two he sensed the pressure on his shoulders and a soft grunt forcing him down onto his knees.

He tried to struggle but the liquour had befuddled him. The man maneuvered him so his head was roughly smacking the fig. He felt the hard cock against his chin, his cheek, trying to find the entrance of his mouth. He started to panic. He tried to knock it away with his hand but the man moved it back again with greater insistence. He felt a hand drawing him in and on to it. It was pitch dark but he closed his eyes. Then the man was in his mouth, further then his mouth, hitting the back of his skull hard, angled down fucking his face and he was pinned against the tree. There were wiry hairs getting caught in his teeth and hips were bucking against his nose, smashing it flat.

“Suck it.”

He choked a bit and gagged loudly. The man backed off, allowing him some slack. The trouser material bunched under the man’s testicles. The man convulsed and shoved it deep in his throat one final time and a salty, creamy bitterness coated his tongue. He released him.

“Towards your next drink…” The man pushed a pound note into his coat pocket and grinned. Templeton pulled up his own trousers and fumbled back towards the path stopping only to spit onto the dirt and wipe his mouth.

The lights guided him back to College Street like beacons along a lonely coast. He stood and faced the forbidding façade of the museum and the

Grecian pillars of the posh boys’ Grammar school. An armada of bats launched from the canopy behind him, keening demonically. He watched as they swept over the William Street dip and on up the hill to Kings Cross.

167 Would they turn west and skim the hulking silhouette of the Bridge, or go east and flock out over the brine, past the dark headlands, a fleet ribbon shadowing the Pacific coast? He took the pound from his jacket, looking at the King’s head as though for the first time, and folded it, creasing it neatly into quarters and returned it with the tickle of a smile on his lips.

168 4

Nellie Brandon was ensconced in the front parlour of Dolly’s establishment whipping records from their delicate paper sleeves. She popped them on rotation hooting at each new tune. The music was unlike anything Templeton had heard before: foreign, raucous, vulgar, exciting. Nellie chasséd from left to right, her hips making tight revolutions. Her flesh roiled against her periwinkle dress like fishes’ backs beneath the skin of the sea. He thought it was spellbinding.

“What’s this God awful noise?” Errol shouted, tilting his chair forward, neck scarlet.

“Jive, baby! It’s jive,” Nellie tickled his chin.

“Nigger music,” snorted Snowy leaning on the mantelpiece. Dolly was counting out money at her table under the green light again, as was her nightly habit. Her deft hands moved so quickly the portraits of King George seemed to animate like a Disney cartoon. She laid a Colt .45 out before she began. Templeton wondered if it was to warn Nellie Brandon from getting any ideas.

“Come up and dance with me honey,” Nellie cajoled the room.

“No! No, I’m right here just as I am. Ain’t going to do no savage dance,” Errol said and puffed on a cigarette. “Anyway, I got the best view from here, now don’t I?” He looked her up and down lasciviously.

“I heard that it once was a Red Indian war dance,” Lorraine disapproved, sour-mouthed from the corner where she was sitting with her arms folded.

169 “I think it’s marvelous,” said Annie, springing from her perch on the stairs and trying to copy Nellie’s gyrations. Sally and Margot were quick to follow. “Won’t you show me how to do it?” She said with her face pink and her hair wild.

“You be the boy!” Sally ordered Margot.

“No. You.”

“Oh hang it all!” Sally said exasperated after they had wiggled and shuffled a few bars. “You’re treading on my feet.”

“Templeton, come up here,” his sister grinned, her brow already sheeny with perspiration and cheeks turning red. She looked beautiful.

“Not me!” He put up his palms. He and Dot, and Hazel and Roberta were engaged in a game of whist, although neither pair had been paying much attention to their hands since Nellie and Errol had come back from the pub and started their carousing.

“Do as you’re told,” Dot laughingly shoved him up from his seat.

Giddily he bobbed around the four dancing women, trying to compliment their movements and at the same time stay out of their way. Errol alternated from clapping in time to the music and slapping the armrest of the lounge like a tom-tom. The needle finally came to a ripping halt and Nellie flopped onto an empty chair.

“Oh my! I’ll teach you gals how to really boogie. Just you wait,” she eyed them wickedly. Then she reached into her purse and pulled out a small folded square. She went to the flat surface of the bureau against the wall and tipped out the envelope’s contents. Powder clumped in a dune on the dark wood. “You ever been to the Fifty-Fifty Club? Oh boy, you’ll just adore it!”

Nellie gasped as she groped around in the purse again and produced a straw.

170 “The one that Jew runs?” Snowy huffed.

“Here you go, lovies,” she grinned long and wide, unfazed. She bent over the makeshift table and executed a long, deep, elegant huff. “Come and get a taste of some real top-quality snow.” She wiped her nostril with a handkerchief and put another record on.

Dot left her neglected cards and approached the bureau. Her eyes turned to

Nellie.

“Of course, sweet thing,” Nell leant an elbow on the table and held the straw. Dot bent and inhaled her line, their heads pressed close. Templeton noticed that the room was watching. Nellie wasn’t pretty in a typical way; too hard-faced and a tad plump, he decided, but there was something alluring about her. She was glamorous, to be sure, but that didn’t explain why so many people lost their heads.

Dot cupped her chin and kissed her cheek and the two started dancing, hips and chests fused, stepping effortlessly back and forth without colliding. He tried to read the faces of Annie and Roberta but found them inscrutable.

Eventually Errol clambered jealously to his feet and intervened.

“Show me how it’s done then,” he said in his deep, gruff voice. Dot retired to the perimeter.

“Oh you great big oaf! You’ll never get it. You’ve got two left feet,”

Nellie flirted, twirling under his hand.

“You look like a bloody Yank!” Snowy guffawed at his friend.

Dolly let a chuckle rip as she tucked the pile of cash into her strongbox and lit her pipe in enjoyment.

Templeton moved near the remnants of the snow. He didn’t know how to do it and feared he’d look a fool. Finally Roberta joined him. Nellie paused her

171 dance instruction to hand over the straw. Roberta sucked hers up first and then he leant over trying to mimic her. On his first try he forgot to hold the other nostril shut and so no powder came rushing up the straw. He looked about him embarrassed, but everyone was distracted by the dancing so he tried again. This time it worked and the caustic rush glittered in his sinuses and his jaw went numb like it had been mounted on brilliant ice. Roberta had slipped out the front hallway and he followed.

“Who is she?” He asked as they sat on the lip of the gutter smoking, eyes ferally brightened, chewing on the insides of their cheeks.

“Nellie Brandon!” She looked at him incredulous.

“Who’s that?”

“Hell’s teeth! Don’t you know anything?”

He shrugged. He could hear the sounds of the nighttime street with more clarity and distinction than ever before. He heard the puling infants, the hacking of old drinkers walking the streets, husbands yelling at wives, mongrel dogs singing to the moon.

“Nellie Brandon goes around with Dulcie Tipper.”

He raised his shoulders in dumb oblivion. The name Dulcie Tipper had a strangely familiar ring to it, as had Dolly Jenkins in the first years they were in this city, but he could not place who she was or what she was renowned for.

“Dulcie Tipper is who you do not want to meet late at night in a dark alley. She’s Dolly’s sworn enemy and she’s one mad, bad, rough as bags old bitch.”

“What do you mean ‘goes around with’? Nellie’s one of her girls? She works for her, like you and Annie for Dolly?”

172 “No you daft bugger! Goes around with. Like, she’s her girl. If you know what I mean. In the old days they used to call ‘em Smoking Ginnies.

Don’t know what the word is now. I’m sure there’s something rude for it.”

“But – but – what could they do together?”

Roberta cackled and slapped him softly on the side of his head. She slid a bit on the cold stone and righted herself, her eyes blazing strangely. He wondered if he had the same uncanny stare pasted on his face.

“What do you think they do?” She teased, pouting at him.

“I don’t know!” He coloured.

“Well they don’t just lie down with each other and kiss and cuddle, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

Templeton looked at her, the static had started to recede from the forefront of his consciousness and all he could think about was going back in for some more.

“Tell me then,” he grabbed her wrist, harder than he’d meant to.

“I mean that there are plenty of things you can do in bed without a cock,” she flexed her eyebrows and her tongue ran over her bottom lip. “Just because it’s two women doesn’t mean they can’t fuck each other.”

“That’s not allowed! Surely that’s, that’s… illegal,” he faltered. Roberta just shrugged.

“What’s Nellie doing here with Errol then?”

“Haven’t the foggiest. But I think she’s a damn fool if anything I’ve heard about Dulcie is even half true.”

His eyes felt dry and hot. “How do you know?” He nudged her.

“About what two girls do together?”

173 “Never you mind. Let’s go back inside,” she smiled mysteriously and got to her feet. “I want another snort.”

Dolly had risen that Sunday demanding to attend service at St. John’s.

Templeton woke and rubbed the sandman from his eyes bemused as he came down to the parlour. Dot was asleep slumped in a high-backed dining chair next to a precarious towering ashtray, empty bottles and a mirror covered in white residue. He poured himself some cold tea from the pot and swished it around his foul-tasting mouth.

“What is she talking about?” He whispered as he slid his chair up beside her.

“Who knows, hen. Who knows?” Dot opened one eye groggily. They listened to the pandemonium upstairs. Lorraine was protesting that she had a bad back and couldn’t possibly manage the walk and the hard pews. Hazel and Errol were trying to persuade her but she wouldn’t budge. The other girls trooped downstairs dutifully behind Dolly who was dressed in her best like a galleon in full sail.

“Uh, I thought I’d get up and do the gutters today. Like you asked me,” Templeton groped hopefully; even a cold, wet hour clinging to the roof squelching out the clogged gum leaves with a rake seemed preferable to a sermon.

“Alright. I want to see it shining like the clock face of the Central tower when I get back,” she smiled cannily. “Snowy? Snowy!” She bellowed.

“Where is that bloody useless lump of a man?”

“He went out before daybreak,” said Roberta. “He was talking last night about needing to go and sort out a bookie that done him over.”

174 Dolly pursed her lips and said nothing; instead she rose and left. Annie brushed a palm over Dot’s hair and stroked her shoulder then she followed

Dolly out onto the street with Margot and Sally after her. Templeton sat for a while waiting to see if Dot wanted to talk but she rested her elbows on the kitchen table and clutched her head wincing.

“Why didn’t you go with them?”

“I’m not invited,” she said in a tone that meant to quash questions.

“Why does she want to go to church?”

“What do you think she is? The Antichrist?” Dot fixed her eyes on him fathomless.

“No…” He lit a cigarette. “Just maybe the Whore of Babylon,” he looked up to see if he could catch a smile.

“That’s not funny.”

“What crawled up your arse and died today?” He shot at her but he was hurt underneath. He sat there until his smoke burnt out then he went looking for the rake in the cupboard under the stairs, resenting his pledge to the gutters.

Dot began to gather up the glasses left scattered around the room, moving automatically. She filled the washing tub with water from the tap, the blast of it loud against the tin, and slipped the glasses into the suds. Her wet hand slipped and a tumbler fell against the kitchen tiles exploding into jagged pieces. Templeton leant the rake against the closet and went to help her but when he approached he found that she was sobbing.

“It’s just a glass.”

She didn’t answer for the front door opened and Snowy blustered in. He had a cut on his cheek that was oozing blood. Dot stood gaping.

175 “It’s nothing,” Snowy flinched and glanced around, wired and sweating. “Who else is here? Has Dolly left?” Without waiting he started calling. “Is Lorraine here? Lorraine! Lorraine?”

“Snowy? That you? I’m coming,” Lorraine’s voice reverberated down the stairs.

“What are you looking at like a bloody stunned mullet? Ain’t either of you seen a little scrape before?” He swung wildly to catch them both with his glare. “Uh, go out and get me a bottle of whisky would ya?” He scrubbed around in the pocket of his trousers for money. He waved a smeared note at

Templeton.

“They might not sell it to me,” Templeton mumbled.

“You go with him then!” Snowy barked waving a hand at Dot.

“I’ll just clean up this mess,” she gestured at the rubble of glass.

“No. Now,” he said. “Lorraine can take care of that.” He stepped around her to access the sink which he bent over and splashed water on his injury. Templeton snorted faintly. He was in no mood to argue. Out in the chirping day he stood uncertain on the side of the road.

“Good. Bloody idiot’s given us twice what we need,” Dot plucked the money out of his hand and giggled spitefully. “That’s one bottle for him and one for me. Na zdrowie!”

Dot sent Templeton back with the whisky. She would not say where she was going.

“I won’t be that bludger’s beck and call girl,” she said and took off.

Templeton pushed open the back door. There was no sound from the belly of the house so he unscrewed Snowy’s bottle and filled a tumbler and then

176 knocked his head back and generously filled his mouth. The spirit made him pleasingly hot-cheeked. He set off tipsily up the stairs. Before he turned at the landing he paused upon the sound of voices.

“What happened?” Lorraine was saying.

“Well they did what they did. Now it’s a matter of time,” Snowy answered.

Templeton could hear heavy steps on the floorboards and the scrape of a chair pushed back as someone stood. He figured they were talking about the rumble Snowy had landed in that morning that left him all cut up.

“Was it just ‘im or the lot of ‘em?” Lorraine asked.

“Don’t know for sure. Word is he was the ringleader.”

“She had it coming though,” Lorraine replied.

“It’s low though. Sure as Hell low, even for a dog like him.”

“Oh, you’re getting soft in your old age,” she cooed.

“Get on with you!”

“Sure you and your mates done worse in your time.”

“Naaaaww. Come here and I’ll show you what I’m capable of.”

Templeton heard squealing and Snowy growling and barking.

“Come off it! What is it you like to say? They gets what’s comin’ and all that?”

“I never did nothing like that. That’s savage. Only fuckin’ Japs or Huns would’ve been capable of something like that.”

“I think you need to let me put something on that bleeding slice on your ugly mug,” her voice became soft and coercive. “You come on over here.”

177 The glass Templeton had been holding had tilted perilously and slipped from his hand. He froze.

“What was that?”

“I don’t know!” Lorraine sounded panicked. “Everyone went to church.”

“Oh Christ, it’s Dot – or that little faggot – I asked them to go get me some whisky,” Snowy shouted. Templeton could here him crashing over to the stairwell. “Oi! You come up here. Dot! Boy! You come here now or I’ll fucking bury you!”

Templeton hurtled down to the kitchen and out the door hitting his shoulder hard as he hairpin turned the corner knowing he’d be bruised black and yellow the next day although that was the furthest thing from his mind as he ran and ran to get out, get as far from there as he possibly could.

178 5

Nancy smuggled Frances’ diary to the cemetery in the pocket of her cardigan.

In the other pocket was a small hacksaw that she had found in her father’s toolbox rusting next to the chook pen in the backyard. She saw the encrustation of offerings; the notes and flowers and cards left near Federation

St. and ignored them. She set a course for a place further from the church where they often used to play. Her head was swimming with what she’d overheard in the corridor – the memory of her mother’s wretched voice reading those hateful letters to Mrs. Reed.

The saw against the lock was a struggle. She tried many positions until she found that if she lay the diary on the horizontal face of a grave slab and pinned it down with her knee she could achieve the grip needed to run the serrated teeth of the tool hard enough across the tin to pop it open. She pages yielded in a flutter. The first entry was dated 3rd of September 1945:

Dear diary,

The war ended yesterday. I asked Mum if that meant father would be coming home.

She said God knows, and told me to go play outside. I couldn’t find Nan so I took the tram to Martin Place but it stopped because there were too many people everywhere kissing and yelling in the street. Men in the pubs were hugging each other and some were even crying! Some soldiers talked to me. One lifted me onto his shoulders and said I had a pretty smile and we all walked up George Street through the crowds past the Queen Victoria Building. I was so high up I could see everyone and they all looked happy and beautiful. I tried champagne for the first time from a bottle that was being passed around. I was taking a little sip and then Pete, (the soldier who carried me), tipped it up and I swallowed lots! He laughed and said not to worry because it was a

179 special occasion and there’d never be another excuse like this one. All the others laughed and we danced and even had a conga line. It was just like a movie.

Afterwards I felt ill but Pete looked after me.

Nancy turned the page but the next was blank. She continued to flick through and found slips of magazines tucked between the leaves, all cutouts of movie stars. Then she found the next entry, dated months later: 19th of

December 1945.

Dear diary,

I’m sorry I haven’t written in you! I have been very lazy. Mum says that sloth is the second worst sin. The worst is lust. I would have written in you but I’ve been scared that you will be found and I will get into trouble. Mum got so angry the last time I took the bible cushions off and hid them under the bed she made me take the music box father gave me when I was born (that’s the only present from him, besides Winston, and now he’s probably dead) into the yard and hit it with a hammer until it was broken. Then she said don’t look a gifthorse in the mouth. I don’t know what that means but I was sad about the music box. It had a ballerina on it that twirled around.

I have also been sad because most of the Americans have gone home and it is almost

Christmas and there won’t be any presents because Mum says we can’t make ends meat meet. There still isn’t any butter or any nice fabric for dresses and we still have coupons. I liked it better when the war was on. Now it’s back to boring old normal.

14th of February 1946

Today was St. Valentine’s Day and I kissed a boy. Oh! I’m so excited I forgot to write dear diary. I’ll start again.

Dear diary,

180 R. kissed me in the cemetery today. My knees trembled. He put his tongue in my mouth. It was wet like a slippery fish. I don’t know if I liked it.

3rd of April 1946

Dear diary,

I hate Mr. Cameron! I hope he gets a boil on his nose and it grows so big it gets infected and has to be lanced and pus goes all over his face. Today he made me sit in the corner at the back of the room with a paper bag on my head because I brushed my hair during scripture. He said it was vanity and quoted Jeremiah and something about gold ornaments. I said I don’t own any and he pinched my arm really hard. I still have a mark. I hope his hair falls out and his thingy drops off and he dies.

5th of April 1946

Dear diary,

R. says that there is a ghost in the cemetery. I said he was pulling my leg but he swore he saw it one night and it was dressed like a soldier although from the olden days in red regimentals like the pictures of the First Fleet. He says it sits on Major Mitchell (a grave) and looks through a telescope at the sky. He hollered at it and tried to go closer but the ghost looked right at him and then he said it just disappeared! I want to go and see for myself. One night I will sneak out and try and spot it. I think he is fibbing, but what if he’s not!!

10th of April 1946

Dear diary,

I followed the boy with the long yellow hair today. He used to go to my school. I don’t think he has any parents. Sometimes I catch him spying on me. He’s in the cemetery a

181 lot. I’ve seen him feeding all the cats in there. He seems nicer than other boys. Other boys throw rocks at the cats. I know where he lives – with the fast girls on Enmore

Rd. No one talks to them. Mum says there, their, they’re not well bred. They are really pretty though and they have nice coats and furs. I want to talk to them but they would think I was just an annoying baby like Nancy. She doesn’t understand anything. She doesn’t even want to talk to boys. I wish she would grow up quicker so she could come with me when I go to see R. He is always asking me to bring a friend for one of his friends. But I don’t have anyone to ask!

P.s. I still have a big bruise from where horrid Mr. Cameron pinched me. It’s been a week.

Nancy recoiled. The next few pages were blank. Doodles filled twenty or so more, rough sketches of horses, hats, and soldiers. Then the diary began again.

27th of May 1945

Dear diary,

I broke it off with R. Good riddance. I saw Pete at the flicks. He’s not in the army anymore. I almost didn’t recognise him in civvies. He bought me an icecream.

Afterwards we had a cigarette together. He said he’d had a girl in England but she’d chucked him when her fiancée came back from the Front. He says he never thought he’d live through the war. Now he’s come back he wants to run a hardware store. He is very handsome and tan.

Nancy sat for a long time. She knew who the boy with the long yellow hair was and his slut sister and her friends and the bludgers who hung around

182 them. She knew that Frances had been with them the night before she died.

She had known in her bones that they were lying. If they weren’t to blame themselves they must know what had happened. She allowed the lump that had hijacked her throat to rise and she cried in the bleak solitude of the graves. She could not recall Frances talking about a boy whose name started with R, and the soldier; who was he? She herself had cut through Martin

Place on that golden day last year. Why had she not seen Frances and taken her home, taken her from those men, perhaps if she had been five minutes later, or earlier, the course of this fate could have been altered.

It’s my fault. She crouched down on the earth and lay her forehead against the worms and leaf mulch and stunted weeds and wished with all her might to be swallowed.

“Oh darling you’re here!” Kate said as Nancy came into the lounge.

She was half-sodden and incognizant to her daughter’s swollen eyes and ashen face. “I don’t want you going out by yourself. I need to know where you are, every minute. There’s a maniac out there. Do you understand me?”

Nancy nodded but she regarded her mother with reproach.

“I have some good news.”

“Have they found him?” Nancy said instantly.

“What?”

“Him. Have they found him?”

“What are you talking about biscuit?” Her mother floated over to the chaise longue and arranged herself. Izzy was draped over the imitation Louis

XIV chair.

“The maniac. The one who killed her!”

183 “No! Oh Nan. I didn’t mean that. Goodness!” Kate exhaled.

“Well, then I don’t know what other good news there could be,” Nancy went sullenly toward the stairs.

“Don’t go to bed. Come down here. Stay with us. I’ve seen so little of you these past weeks. I know you’re hurting my love, but you’ve got to let her go.”

Nancy looked at her mother as if she had just squatted and relieved herself on the lounge room floor.

“Come here Nan, your mama misses you,” Izzy said.

“There’s something else, too.”

“What is it?” Nancy sighed as she walked over and sat with her arms folded.

“Would you like a little wine with water? You’re old enough. The

French give it to their children from when they can walk. They say it’s good for the blood,” Kate went to pour a glass.

“No.”

Her mother pressed one into her hand regardless. For a moment Nancy wished she had a mother who was normal, not a former Catholic, poor Irish atheist bohemian who could never avoid being the subject of ridicule. She sipped the watered wine. It tasted like Ipecac.

“I’ve booked passage,” Kate said firmly.

“No!” Izzy started, stricken. “When?”

“Passage to what?” Nancy shrugged.

“We’re going home baby,” her mother smiled.

“When?” Izzy choked.

“What do you mean?” Nancy asked. “We are home.”

184 “Our real home, silly!” Kate laughed. Her eyes were filmy and unfocused. “I paid for the tickets this morning. We leave on the 15th of

August.”

“I – I don’t understand,” Nancy said, feeling sick, because in fact she did.

“Ireland! We’re going back. My old mam is there – your grandmamma!

You’ll learn about where you come from a stóirín, a ghrá. Oh it’s beautiful country. Always green and the soft, soft rain on your face… There’s nothing like it.”

“I hate the rain! No! No, Mum. I don’t want to go!” Nancy went hoarse.

“But darling, I thought, after this tragedy… There’s nothing keeping us here. Let’s get away. Make a fresh start!”

“But we can’t just pack up and leave!”

“Sometimes, baby, that’s the best thing to do. You’ll understand when you’re older.”

“You just said I’m old enough to have wine.”

“That’s different,” Kate sighed impatiently.

“Well if you liked it so much there why’d you leave in the first place?”

“Times were different then. There was no work. No food. There was a war going on. Everybody was leaving. There were no opportunities for families like ours. My two elder brothers went to Canada. I came here. And then… then I met your father,” she trailed off.

“But this is our home now. I was born here,” Nancy’s voice was climbing. “We’re Australian.”

“Oh Nan, I’ve never really been an Australian.”

185 “Why not? What’s so bad about it?” Nancy cried stroppily.

“You’ll understand when you’re older.”

“Stop saying that!” Nancy was shouting now. “Tell me what’s wrong with it. Tell me why we have to leave. I like it here!”

“There’s no culture. Everything closes at 5. You can’t get a drink after 6.

The people are Luddites or Puritans. There’s no theatre, no opera, no concerts

– ”

“There’s the local amateur theatrical…” Izzy began.

“I’m sorry Izzy, but really! It just doesn’t compare. The women are prudish and uneducated, the men are boorish – ”

“Dad was not boorish!” Nancy yelled.

“No, well not John,” she conceded. “But he was a diamond in the rough.”

“I don’t care. I don’t care about any of that. Those are the most stupid reasons I ever heard. I wish Dad was still alive! You’d never make us leave if he was here.” Nancy saw the tears make quiet, wet lines down her mother’s face but she forced herself not to care. She went to her room and slammed the door, determined never to speak to her again.

186 6

Dolly’s mood was predictably rancid the morning she had been scheduled to appear in court for keeping a disorderly house and selling liquor without a license. Snowy and Errol put on their best suits and disappeared from the house to pace about and smoke in the street out front. Templeton could hear the lickspittle platitudes from the girls attending her and the crisp delivery of her barked commands.

He sat at the table finishing his breakfast of sausage and toast. Nothing had been said since he had been sprung eavesdropping when delivering the whisky, but he had barely said a word since then in terror at what Snowy might do.

“Lorraine, take the key to my trunk and fetch the ermine stole. Hazel, go into the second largest hatbox in the cupboard and bring me the Sunday hat with the ostrich feathers, not the black rooster plume.”

“You look lovely,” Roberta told her.

“I know that!” Dolly clasped her throat and wheezed histrionically.

“Get out. There’s no air in here. I can’t breathe.”

“Yes Dolly,” Sally said. She hovered in the doorway with Margot.

“No! Idiot girl. The ermine is white! That is the fox. Can’t you tell the difference?”

“Sorry,” Lorraine muttered.

“Of course you can’t because you were clearly born in a stable,” Dolly blew a noxious cloud of tobacco at her. Templeton smirked, peeping.

“Dot, bring me the jewelry box, the good one. Need to be at my best.”

“Yes Dolly.”

187 “Annie, go into the kitchen and fill the hip flask that’s in the third drawer under the serviettes with the brandy that’s behind the false back in the top cupboard on your right. Fill it all the way up, mind you. There’s a good lass.”

“Boy! Boy, come in here,” she bellowed, and then after a long pause.

“Boy!”

“She means you, you know,” Roberta said to Templeton as she traipsed out of the room sighing.

“Um, what?” He spluttered.

“You’d better bloody get in there!” She warned him.

“Coming! Yes, ma’am,” Templeton had never been inside Dolly’s bedroom before. The mantle above the fire was crowded with fading portraits of her as a young woman. The rest of the space was overflowing with trinkets; little china cat ornaments, more than a dozen clocks, tapestries and rugs. He tried not to stare.

“Yes?”

“Go and get some grease and come back here,” she commanded and then turned the exhausted drapery of her neck back to the mirror she was contemplating it in. He knew better than to ask her what she meant. In the kitchen he stood looking at the unhelpful surfaces and shelves in panic.

“Butter,” Roberta said, cigarette poised on her lower lip.

“What?”

“She wants butter. Or dripping. She needs to get her old rings on.”

“Oh… Thanks,” he took the lid off the butter on the counter and began to walk back. “Wait, what do I need to do?”

188 “Grease her up, baby. Grease her up,” Roberta waggled her fingers at him in amused pity. He swallowed. “Old trout ain’t as thin as she used to be.”

“Mother of God,” he blurted.

“That’s not the worst of it. Worst is getting them off, sugar,” Roberta smirked, but not unkindly.

“Oh help me Jesus,” he said as he carried the log on its chipped dish into her boudoir.

“Better take off that good shirt,” she said matter-of-factly after she looked him up and down. He tried to hide his shudder and did as he was bidden. Dot laid the jewelry box on the ground beside him. Templeton looked at it gobsmacked; the loot within it gleamed as grand as Captain Flint’s treasure. With his back braced against the foot of the bed and Dolly sitting at her coiffeuse he applied pinches of butter to each finger and worked the rings on, often three to each, like turning nuts onto stiff bolts. She barely looked at him during his labour, packing and stoking her pipe instead.

“Dot, what do you think of my jewels?” Dolly said, raising her shoulders and puffing away as grizzled and oracular as a pirate captain.

“They’re beautiful,” Dot replied demurely.

“Do you think so?”

“Yes – ” she hesitated.

“Would you fancy a box like this of your own some day?” Dolly asked, her voice low and her gaze riveted to Dot’s confused face.

“I guess so.”

“How about today? Right now?”

Templeton could see Dolly’s florid fingers bulging around the rings. Her knuckles were straining with ill-concealed tension.

189 “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Oh I think you do,” Dolly said, enunciating each word.

“What – what is this about?” Dot swallowed.

“There’s £10 missing from the strongbox. Do you want to tell me what you know about that?”

Dot visibly blanched. She looked as though she was about to be sick. Annie moved closer in support although she hung back from standing directly in

Dolly’s line of fire.

“What makes you think I took it?” Dot said, wetting her dry lips, sensing the danger she was in.

“You put it back and I’ll forget it ever happened,” Dolly leaned back and put her pipe down slowly.

Templeton knew how generous an offer this was, coming from the woman who had been known to cut a girl’s face beyond recognition for far less than such a sum. He also knew that Dot would never have taken the money, not for any sense of morality but because she would never be so stupid as to steal from Dolly Jenkins.

“I didn’t take it,” Dot said, very quietly. The expression in her eyes was defiant although he could see that her hands were shaking.

“She didn’t take it, Dolly. Please!” Annie interrupted. “She would never– ”

“Did I ask you?” Dolly roared as she drew herself up with considerable effort.

“It must have been someone else,” Annie floundered. “Lorraine! It must have been Lorraine. She’s had it in for Dot since the start. Please, Dolly.

190 You must search her things. The money will be there. Please! If you just look in Lorraine’s case, I swear – ”

Templeton cowered, angry and ashamed of himself. Dolly was incarnadine.

He had heard the girls say she kept a pistol and a cutthroat razor in her dresser drawer.

“That’s enough,” Dolly said to Annie. “You – ” She latched her snake- eyes onto Dot. “Will be gone from this house. You will not stop to collect your things. You will not stop to say goodbye.”

“But – ”

“And I will spare you your livelihood! I will not cut that fucking Jew nose off your pretty face. That’s the deal. Do you understand me? The boy will take your flea-ridden possessions and follow. He’ll go with you. I’m sick of the sight of him too; useless no-good bludger.”

“What?” Templeton gaped in shock.

“Come on, Lucky,” Dot nodded at him.

“Annie?” He turned to his sister but she gazed fixedly at the wall.

“She stays here,” Dolly cuffed Annie’s wrist in her clenched grip.

“I loved you,” Dot grabbed her friend roughly by the waist and pulled her ear close to her mouth. “So did he, you fucking traitor.”

Tears kindled in Templeton’s eyes. Annie looked as though she might faint or spew her guts, yet she made no move to stand with them.

“Come on,” Dot said to him, regarding Annie with betrayed revulsion.

Margot, Sally and Hazel stood with their eyes rooted to their floorboards. Dot focused on each face one by one with glacial clarity as they walked by. Only

Roberta came forward to embrace them.

191 “I’ll find you. Don’t worry,” Dot held her tightly. She released her and glanced up to see Lorraine in the doorway, the look of triumph unconcealed on her mouth. Dot shot her a glance that Templeton could only describe as murderous.

“Let’s go,” he said, taking Dot’s arm and leading her out into the street.

He cast his eyes back into the house waiting for Annie to change her mind and burst out to go with them but she did not. It hurt more than anything had before.

192 7

They had tramped up the long rise of William Street without speaking to each other and it was not until they were across Hyde Park and almost at the harbour that Templeton dared say what was in his throat like a fishbone.

“It’s my fault! I’m sorry Dot. I’m a bloody idiot!”

“What are you talking about?” Dot wheeled in surprise.

“I spilt the whisky. They heard me. Snowy and Lorraine – I heard them, I mean… I was listening to them in secret. They must’ve thought I was you! Lorraine must have wanted to punish you.”

“What? Rubbish. That bitch had it in for me from the start. It was her that set me up,” Dot irritably clicked her tongue against her teeth, waving his protestations off with a dismissive hand.

“No! Listen,” he insisted. “They were talking about something bad. I heard them! I was hiding on the landing about to take Snowy’s drink up to him. I think they might be rooting around together, but that’s not the point.”

“Who’s rooting?” She stopped and smoothed her hair, which was curly with perspiration. He wondered if she had been taking any more cocaine. Her eyes looked like over-cooked eggs. “What are you rabbiting on about?”

“Lorraine and Snowy!”

“Ha! Lorraine would be so damned stupid. Doesn’t she know what

Dolly did to the last girl Snowy shot his bolt in? Almost bit her bloody ear off!”

“That doesn’t matter,” he said impatiently. “I think they know who killed Frances Reed.”

“What exactly did you hear?” Dot paled.

193 “Snowy was saying something about a group of blokes did something to a girl.”

“Are you sure you didn’t hear a name?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?” She pressed.

“Yes! I didn’t hear a name. Christ! I’d tell you if I did.”

“Alright,” she seemed to believe him and started to walk onwards. She stopped outside the Fortune of War.

“What are we doing?” He asked.

“Go in and ask the publican if he’s seen Bob Newham today.”

“Are you cracked?” Templeton gawked at her. “Bob Newham wants to kill us!”

“No. He wants to kill Jack Tooth. And I have some information for him about where to find him.”

“How do you know Newham would be here anyway?” He glanced in the doorway uneasily. Old grizzled blokes drew from their beers and looked at him. He could smell the piss and vomit clinging in the infrequently swept sawdust on the floor.

“He’s from the Rocks boys, ain’t he? Well good bet he’s been in the

Fortune or they’ll know where he is. Now go in there,” she lit a cigarette and shoved him.

“But – Dot – I don’t…”

She breathed a mushroom of smoke out into his face challenging him wordlessly.

“I’m sorry,” he hung his head.

194 “I don’t care. I wanted a reason to be out of Dolly’s anyway. One more grope from Errol and I was going to strangle the bastard in his sleep. Then where would I be? State Reformatory that’s right! Out on the street is better than Long Bay. Now get to it.”

Templeton slid up to the bar doing his best to ignore the hostile attention sticking to him like metal filings on a magnet. He looked straight ahead and asked in as steady a voice as he could muster if Bob Newham had been seen today.

“Who wants to know?” Asked a man of about fifty, reasonably dressed in a clean suit but with a long white scar through his eyebrow and a broken nose that had set badly into a stepladder of bumps and rises.

“Uh – the lady outside,” he stammered. “She has something to tell him.

Something he’d be interested to know.”

“Oh yeah,” he tilted so he could get a look. He whistled low. “Tell her she can say it to me and I’ll pass it on to him for her.”

“No. That’s fine. We’ll find Newham ourselves,” Templeton tried to step away.

“What d’ya think mates?” The man said to the wall of blokes behind him; beer-swelled, bulging bull-shouldered. A nuggety fellow swung around to outflank him. Templeton squirmed.

“Oi. Stop him!” The first man ordered. Templeton gulped at the scrum coming at him.

“Hands off!” What he had initially assumed to be a portly fellow with little neck to speak of sitting in the corner alone smoking, had now come to their feet and was intervening bodily on his behalf. In surprise, he registered

195 that below the man’s suit jacket, old-fashioned button-on collar and tie was a long dun-coloured skirt.

“Alright now, Dulce. Settle down. We wasn’t gonna hurt the little bugger,” the first man said.

“Well leave him alone then,” Templeton’s defender stared down stonily. “Go on, piss off. Back to your beers.”

To his astonishment, the thugs who only moments before seemed bent on pulping him settled back to their conversations like grumbling hamsters. He tried not to stare at his strange champion.

“Mickey, get the little fellah a drink,” she barked at the barman, who speedily delivered a frothing glass. She guided him back to where she had been sitting before the commotion and nodded at the ale wobbling in his hand: “Bottoms up.”

“Th – thank you,” he swallowed, trying not to cough.

“Dulcie Tipper,” she said. Her eyes were small and amber, set deeply into her broad face. She wore her hair short and pinned underneath an unfashionable bowler hat. Her nose was fleshy and lips almost invisibly thin, yet she had a charismatic twist to her mouth when she smiled as she did watching him choke his name out.

“Luckett? That rings a bell. Your sister does the Enmore Road corner, is that right,” she said in a way that didn’t sound like she was asking a question.

“Yes. How did you know that?” He was taken aback.

“And who’s the lass outside? Dot Kajac. The pretty Jewess.”

Templeton did not reply, speechless. Perhaps Nellie had described them all to her after that night of dancing. But why would Dulcie want to know their business, he wondered. She finished her beer in one long impressive

196 mouthful and raised a finger in the air. Almost immediately another had been brought over. The cold glass left a wet ring on the greasy table.

“Ain’t you two working for Dolly Jenkins’ any more?”

“I wasn’t working for Dolly,” he said indignantly.

“Well what were you doin’? Dolly doesn’t take in charity. Must’ve earned your keep somehow.”

“I mostly stayed out of her way.”

“I see,” Dulcie pulled a chunky, filterless cigarette from a pristine white packet and lit it. “Ha ha! Clever boy.”

“We… we’re trying to find Bob Newham. Do you know him?”

“Know him!” She snorted. “Newham’s one of mine.”

“One of – I don’t understand…” Templeton floundered. “He’s your… son?”

“Lord have mercy!” Dulcie wheezed so hard she almost fell off her stool. Then she chuckled.

“You’re alright, kid. We’re going to get along just fine!” She tapped him on the cheek with her fist. He smiled and attempted a giggle along with her. “Come with me.”

They walked to the exit together. Dulcie counted out a stack of bills and left them on the bar. “Thanks Mickey,” she grinned at him and tilted her hat brim.

“Anytime Dulcie,” he looked up from wiping glasses.

Templeton noticed how the men all parted for her as she moved through the crowd. The bloke who had accosted him kept his gaze down sourly at his boots. None seemed game to look her in the eye. He could see Dot reflected in triplicate through the frosted glass panels of the door, smoking, with her fur

197 collar pulled close to her chin and her cropped hair hugging the sharp angle of her jaw.

Later that evening they were seated in a grand café upstairs in the Royal

Arcade eating off silverware while a quartet in white tie blew softly into their burnished golden instruments. Templeton felt like he was eating the music along with his bolognaise and he sat with his back ramrod straight so he did not get any of the delicious red sauce onto his borrowed suit. The champagne made his blood dance and his eyes dart gaily soaking up the soft glitter of the wall-set lamps and the casual elegance of the other diners. Diners who could afford to eat like this every day of their lives. Dot sat by him vocally enjoying her dish of strange little lumps.

“Pierogi,” she said and sighed rapturously, popping a dumpling into her mouth and licking her lips like a cat. “They remind me of when I was a little girl.”

“More champagne,” Nellie beckoned to the waiter and then with her hand pressing gently on Dulcie’s inner arm: “Can we? Oh let’s. Do say yes!”

“Of course, hen,” Dulcie nodded indulgently.

A fresh bucket arrived brimful of crystalline ice cubes, the bottle lodged jauntily amongst them. The waiter leant to take it out but Dulcie told him not to.

“Would sir care to open it?” He deferred. Templeton’s eyes widened but Dulcie’s countenance showed not a ripple. Nellie chortled as if that were commonplace enough.

198 “Don’t mind if I do,” Dulcie popped the cork with a satisfying bang and upturned the stream of bubbles into their glasses. “Nectar of the Gods!”

She said and raised her hand in a toast.

Over the rim of his champagne Templeton noticed a party of men entering, about half a dozen, between the ages of twenty and forty, all in beautifully tailored single-breasted suits, silk ties and trilbies of charcoal, grey and olive green. They talked and laughed loudly as they were seated, joking around and teasing one another. He looked at Dulcie who was flirting shamelessly with Nellie and Dot. His brow knitted. He’d never seen so many of them in the one place. He scrutinised the table of men, the ripples of their amusement peaking regularly. He strained to hear what they were saying.

“Now, do you see this here?” Dulcie’s voice cut across the table. “What does this remind you of?” She winked cheekily, holding up her empty glass before she reached to refill it, and Templeton’s too.

“A saucer?” Nellie said.

“That’s right. It is a saucer. Or a coupe as the French would call it. But what else does it make you think of?” She was clearly enjoying herself. Her face was flushed and her gaze twinkled, her hair slicked back with pomade.

“What part of the body does it resemble?” She winked.

“Oh! Ha ha,” Dot blushed.

“She’s got it! She knows it, don’t you sweetheart? Ha!” Dulcie slapped the table.

“What? What part? What is it?” Nellie said, pouting and tipsy.

“They say it was originally modeled on Marie Antoinette, for she had the two most perfect specimens!”

“Who’s Mary Ant-won-it?” Templeton asked.

199 “Ha ha! This kid. Oh, God love him,” Dulcie tousled his hair. He leant out of her reach irritably. He glanced to see if the men were watching.

“Only the Queen of France. Before she got the shhhhwwiiit – ” she ran a finger across her neck sharply. “Old head chopped off.”

“Oh I get it,” Nellie said raucously as she took two of the empty glasses and held them up against her chest. “Look they do it better than my own brassiere!”

“Stop it!” Templeton hissed, buckling down in his seat.

“The baby doesn’t like it. Look. Aw. The boy’s a little prude isn’t he?”

Nellie jested. Dot smirked and jabbed a finger in his ribs playfully. Dulcie chuckled.

“Don’t!” He stood up and smoothed himself down disapprovingly.

That’s when he saw him, part concealed by the shadow of a corniced archway, sitting amidst the men’s group: the man from the Archibald. Had he seen him? Templeton slid back into the chair like a lead balloon.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Dot laughed. She was the jolliest he’d ever seen. He grimaced.

“Don’t worry, he won’t hurt you,” Dulcie said looking over his shoulder toward the doorway.

“What?” Templeton spluttered in horror.

“Bob. He’s not here comin’ after you,” she said, standing in welcome.

“I invited him to join us.”

Templeton allowed himself to breathe again. It was not the Archibald man approaching, who was still ensconced in conversation, but Bob Newham; he recognized him from that horrible night when he’d unloaded his pistol at them on the street.

200 “Dulcie,” Bob Newham took her hand and pumped it briskly. He sported a black eye patch where he had lost his sight to Jackie’s razor, and his good eye was an unusual and pleasing shade like a wren’s wing. His dark hair sat flat on his skull, pasted down and shining.

“Nellie,” he nodded. “You’re looking lovely, as usual. Forgive me. I’m

Robert Newham,” he stretched to make Dot’s acquaintance. She coolly gave him her slender fingers, which he took and kissed.

“I know who you are.”

“That’s enough, you snake,” Dulcie clapped Bob on the shoulder. “Sit down.”

“Alright,” he beamed, taking his chair. He nodded toward Templeton.

“G’day son.” Templeton went to pour him a drink but Bob raised his palm.

“Nah. Don’t want that foreign stuff. A beer will do me, or a whisky.

Oi,” he put two fingers in his mouth and whistled. A waiter stalked over.

“Yeah, a bottle of Haig’s. Thanks mate. You’ll join me won’t you, son. What’s y’name?”

“Templeton.”

“Pleased to meet you.”

He poured out two noggins and slid one across to Templeton. Bob took his in an easy swallow and then measured himself another. Templeton looked at his balefully.

“Down the hatch,” Bob grinned, showing a fine set of teeth. “Now tell me why I’m here,” Bob turned to Dulcie.

“Go on, love,” Dulcie prompted Dot. “I invited you here because my new, young acquaintance may be in need of your services.”

201 “Services?” Bob snorted into his drink. “And just what kind of business do you think I’m in?”

“It’s about Jack Tooth,” Dot blurted before Dulcie could answer. “I heard you’re looking for him,” she said ramming the butt in the ashtray and fixing her large brown eyes on him. “I am too.”

“Bathurst.”

“Pardon me?”

“He’s in Bathurst,” Bob plowed his whisky, shrugging simply. “I know where he is. Mates down there cabled last week.”

“I heard Blackheath,” Dot said, less sure of herself.

“No. I’ll bet you London to a brick he’s in Bathurst. Got my boys out west on it. They could tell me what the bastard had for breakfast. Christ, they could tell me what time Jack Tooth went to take a shit.”

“Right. Bathurst,” Dot lit another cigarette. “Well that would make sense. Certainly no one’s seen head nor tail of him in Sydney. It’s like he vanished. Poofff! In a puff of smoke.”

“He’s got a car. Snowy Jenkins sorted it out. Don’t know where he got the bloody petrol to get all the way out there though! Must be robbing on the way.”

Snowy? Why on earth would he want to help Jackie? Templeton could see the muscles still pulling and twitching like ship’s rigging around the vacant socket where Bob’s eye once was behind the black square of material.

“Does Dolly know?” Dot’s skin looked grey.

“I would wager that bitch has a pretty good idea,” Dulcie muttered.

“You think Snowy can scratch himself without her say-so?”

“You think he’ll come back?”

202 “Not if he’s knows what’s good for him,” Bob licked his lip.

“Jack Tooth?” Nellie interrupted, her voice strident with booze. “That that skinny, ratfucker broke my damn nose last year.”

A stylishly coiffed woman at the next table looked over aghast. Her male companion dropped his fork with a clatter.

“More champagne,” Dulcie barked an order at the hovering waiters.

“He’s the one that took me bloody eye out if that’s what you’re getting at,” Bob growled. “And more…”

“I want to help you,” Dot said with a chill in her tone. She leaned close in to Bob, whispering so only Templeton next to her could hear and even then he wasn’t certain what she said but it sounded like: “I want to help you kill him.”

Bob leant back but kept his fiery curious eye on her. “What makes you think I need your help?”

“Because I was there and I saw you balls it up the last time,” Dot said, her gaze calm and cold.

“What did you say?” He bristled.

“I was there, in Newtown, that night. When you missed…”

“Shut it!”

A phalanx of servers interrupted to distribute pudding. Templeton looked at his plate in nauseous wonderment; little cakes with icings in robin’s egg blue and sherbet pink, glistening ices pert and frosty on immaculate china, wafers as delicate as birds’ breastbones. He had thoroughly lost his appetite.

“Perhaps we should continue this somewhere more appropriate,”

Dulcie stood and dropped her serviette into her plate. Templeton and Nellie pushed their chairs back to accompany her. Bob and Dot slowly rose.

203 Templeton had been so absorbed he had forgotten the presence of the man from the Fountain. As he followed Dulcie to the exit the route took him close to their table and he was startled to see he was watching. The man raised a hand in the faintest of waves. Templeton turned quickly as though he had not seen it and left the café, his neck an inferno in scarlet beneath his stiff collar.

He was sure he could hear the echo of the men’s laughter following him. Had anyone seen? Out on the street Dulcie was leaning on the bonnet of a large black car talking to her driver through the window. Nellie drooped against her, shaky on her heels, one strap of her dress slipped from her pale shoulder.

Bob and Dot were silent and grim. He opened the door for her and they both climbed into the vehicle.

“Come on Lucky,” Dot called.

“No. I think I’ll walk,” he dug his hands in his pockets. The night was unseasonably warm and the trams rattled by noisily. People were everywhere and the city lit up like a birthday cake.

“Get in the car,” Dot snapped.

“Oh, let the lad take a stroll,” Dulcie said busy trying to bundle Nellie into the front seat. Nellie’s face pressed semi-conscious against the dashboard.

Dulcie took out a silver money clip and went to peel off a note.

“No thanks,” Templeton shook his head at the outstretched offer. His fingers closed around the pound still in his pocket giving him a secret sliver of thrill.

Dulcie looked surprised, and then her countenance changed to respect.

“Suit yourself,” she said and climbed into the car, the door clicked shut.

He smoked and walked, looking in the bright windows of the arcade at dresses on mannequins and displays of sewing machines, at hats and

204 watches, all sparkling and new behind glass. He whiled away the better part of an hour walking in a long, loose loop. He was back outside the café as the men emerged, still laughing, donning their hats filing onto the street. The man from the Archibald was with them. Templeton stepped into a doorway and listened as the man said his goodbyes to his companions. He walked around the corner, the man behind him.

“Hello,” he said with a smile.

205 8

Kate Durand lifted her knife and tapped it against the boiled egg. The hat scissored off cleanly, exposing the just-set white and runny yolk.

“Eat your soldiers,” she said across the table at Nancy who had scarcely eaten all week. She picked up a dainty finger of toast and applied it to her egg. Nancy wrinkled her nose at her plate.

Kate had sat at the mirror of her dressing table that morning and carefully applied her makeup. Nancy watched her from the doorway. The night had been a fitful one and she sweated in the sheets and twisted the covers into a corkscrew. She caught a glimpse of her mother on her way down to the kitchen for a glass of water and was shocked to see what she looked like without her pain and powder. Her once-perfect skin was mottled; her eyes were dull and sunken, buttressed by ruched grey bags. She would never have let herself go if her father was still alive.

“You have to eat something, biscuit,” Kate continued her mission to make Nancy eat. Nancy curled her lip. “Hurry up so I can clear the table.”

“Is someone coming by?”

“No. Why do you ask?”

“No reason,” Nancy knocked her egg against the table to see the craquelure spread. She watched the faint tic in Kate’s black drawn eyebrow as she peeled her egg achingly slowly and then put it aside on the butter dish where it wobbled like a naked eyeball.

“Only Izzy and Mrs. Roberts for lunch,” Kate said.

206 “Oh,” Nancy sank her blade through the skinless globe creating a neat bisection. The little hemispheres of orange yolk oozed out. She put her cutlery down. “I wanted to visit Frances.”

“What do you mean?” The egg quivered on Kate’s fork.

“I want to go to the cemetery and visit Frances.”

“I don’t think that is a very good idea.”

“Why not?”

“Don’t take that tone with me.”

“Why can’t I?”

“Because it’s maudlin, it’s gloomy and there’s no point to it. Right-o? I just won’t have it,” Kate slipped the forkful into her mouth but seemed to have difficulty swallowing.

“Dad would have let me,” she muttered.

“If you want to talk to Frances you can speak to her in your prayers, because she’s in Heaven with God and the angels now.”

Nancy looked at her witheringly. She was well aware her mother did not believe one word of what had just come out of her mouth.

“There’s a special place in Heaven for Innocents. Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for such is the kingdom of heaven,” yet she persevered doggedly.

“Why did God let Frances get murdered?”

“I can’t answer that darling. God works in mysterious ways.”

“How would you know?”

“Nancy! I still talk to God.”

“When? After a bottle of whisky?”

207 “That’s enough of your cheek. I’ve never smacked you before, don’t make me start now.”

“Well let me take a casserole over to Mrs. Reed then,” Nancy said after a strained silence. “Perhaps she’ll let me sit in her room for a while. I just want to feel her there… I just miss her so much – ”

“Darling I wish you could, but Peggy’s gone.”

“What?” Nancy sat bolt upright like a rabbit. “What happened? What do you mean – she’s dead?”

“She’s gone on holiday! What are you on about?” Kate looked at her with deep confusion. “There’s nobody there. The house is empty. I think she left the baby with her sister Ada.”

“How could she?” Nancy was sour with contempt.

“Don’t be uncharitable sweetheart. That woman has been through

Hell. A man from the factory, a Mr. Langby – I think – gave her his property in Berry for a little while. To recover. From the shock,” Kate explained haltingly.

“But they haven’t caught him yet!” Nancy’s eyes narrowed. “How could she leave before they’ve found him? Mr. Cameron said in class that he would hang for sure. I want to see him hang. I hope it’s slow. I hope the rope breaks so they have to string him up twice.”

“Nancy!” Kate said worriedly. “That’s a horrible thing to say.”

“I don’t care.”

“Killing whoever was responsible for Frances’ tragedy will not make anyone feel any better about what happened.”

“I thought the bible said an eye for an eye,” she pinned her mother with her gaze like an ant under a magnifying glass.

208 “The bible says a lot of awful things,” Kate shrugged and went to the wall mirror to pin up her hair.

“Then how does anyone know what to obey and what not to?”

“Well you just make an educated guess,” she said as she secured her rolls with bobby pins. “And more often then not people do the right thing.

They raised a collection for Peggy at her church and it was very generous. I heard it got up to more than £40!”

“May I be excused?” Nancy pushed her chair out and rested her bunched fists on the cobalt swallows embroidered on the tablecloth.

“But you haven’t eaten a thing!”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Yes you may be excused, but don’t go far. Stay away from that cemetery. I hope the council goes ahead and gets rid of it. I want you home for supper,” Kate sighed, holding herself together as though her edges of composure were fraying and the whole thing might rip at any moment.

“What do you mean the council’s getting rid of it?”

“Oh just something that was said in the town meeting last night.”

“You went to a town meeting?” Nancy asked doubtfully.

“Why yes I’ll have you know I did. And the consensus was that the place is a hazard and a breeding ground for trouble. This latest tragedy is the final straw. Something should have been done about it years ago.”

“It’s Frances Mum. Frances Margaret Reed. Don’t say tragedy like you didn’t know her.”

“Nancy, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. Give your mother a kiss.”

209 “I don’t want to,” she said but then she saw her mother’s face start to crumble, her eyes grow misty. She darted a kiss on her cheek that felt waxen under the slick of the powder.

“Never mind about your breakfast. We’ll feed you up when we’re back home in Clonmel,” she stroked Nancy’s ribcage through her dress. “When we’re away from this whole nasty business. Away from this blasted country.

Hmm?”

Nancy said nothing but exited the room pale with worry. She had still been clinging to the hope that the Ireland thing was just another of her mother’s phantasies. It didn’t seem so.

“Hi there, girlie. Who you looking for?” A jostle of returned servicemen called to her. Nancy was sitting on the sandstone wall down at the Quay near Customs House. It was the first warmish day in the whole dark winter. She had bare legs with long white socks pulled up to her knees.

“Is your daddy here? Your uncle?”

“You got a sweetheart?”

She watched them file past going into the building to collect something-or- other. They were excitable and dopey as puppies.

“You want a smoke-o?” They held out packs of cigarettes to her, which she ignored.

“You got a big sister, sugar? If she’s as pretty as you tell her to come down here. Ha ha ha!”

“Mmm, you know I sure do like those copper tops.”

“Hey Ginger Meggs, how ‘bout those freckles?”

210 An officer with a prodigious moustache strode out into the square and broke them up. “Alright you lot. Get back in the queue,” he roared. “You run along now, missy,” he turned to her, frowning. “You’re distracting my soldiers. What’s your business here anyway?”

“I’m looking for Peter.”

“Peter who?” The officer asked. “What’s his last name? His rank?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well there’s not much I can do, is there?” He said. “Now piss off.”

“I’m Peter!” A man who had overheard yelled cheekily.

“I know a Peter! In D company. What’s he look like?” His friend laughed. “What’s his last name?”

“No! I’m Peter!”

“No! I’m Peter!”

The troops erupted into a ruckus. The officer bawled commands at them and waved his hands like a glove puppet. She rolled her eyes and hopped off down to the lea on the other side of the wall away from the men’s game of silly buggers.

“Come back! Come back, little honey!”

“I can be your Peter. You can call me anything you want.”

The sound of the sea against the harbour wall drowned out their calls and she rested against the iron post of the fence and watched the ferries swing out churning the green water white.

It was the glooming hour but she had no intention of returning home in time for another awkward supper. She was tired of her mother’s indigestible platitudes. She had left the Quay and returned to Enmore on the tram

211 ignoring her empty belly. All food tasted like ash. She entered the cemetery as the light started to fail, simply lifting the chain strung up by the police over the hole in the fence and slipping beneath. She didn’t know where it had taken place. It had rained more than once in the days since and people left their flower tributes on the edge of the wasteland after being instructed to keep out. She chose a flat gravestone and sat down on it to cry.

Nancy had been contemplating ways in which to kill a man. It made her feel light-headed. There were, of course, the obvious ones, but she didn’t think she could get her hands on a revolver. And she didn’t think she would have the strength or knowledge of where to stick a knife in a bloke to do more than just scratch him. Then she had to take into consideration that she barely scraped eighty-five pounds on the scales. So a physical contest needed to be avoided.

There was no one she could pay to do it for her, and she had no money of her own in any case. Poison seemed the only realistic option. She knew that poison could do the job because it had been in the papers. Thallium. It was tasteless and odourless but slow acting and had to be continuously fed to the victim over a period of time. Some woman had done it to her husband over a year by putting it in his porridge. She imagined being the wife quietly watching her fat, piggish spouse take little bites of death with each breakfast.

Nancy wiped her face. A rustle in the bushes made her seize up with fear.

It’s just a rat, she told herself. She had been making poison. Not because she thought she could really use it, more because it made her feel purposeful. She kept it in an empty bean tin in the garden and added a little more each day.

Any poisonous thing she could think of went in; bleach, petrol, wild mushrooms that she hoped were the poisonous kind that she had pounded into a paste. She stirred the brew with a stick, squatting like a witch.

212 Perhaps a gun was the only way to do it. She considered taking Frances’ diary to the police station on Australia Street. They had men, and guns. And yet they seemed able to do nothing. No. She would track down Peter and find out who R. was herself. Tomorrow she would go back to that house and ask those ruined women exactly what had happened that night. The breeze lifted the limbs of the paperbark and rustled them. A nightbird called. She would find out even if she ended here, dead in this cemetery. At least she’d be with

Frances.

213 9

“Tell me what you know, you murderer!”

Templeton was crumpled and hung-over, viewing the over-bright world through slit eyes shaded by the brim of his hat pulled low, his pockets full of money. He was reaching through the busted window of the Enmore flat, content that Jack Tooth and pals were on the other side of the Mountains, to happily pass out when a crazed girl leapt out from nowhere waving a dead branch thicker than her own thigh.

“What the Hell? Where did you come from?” He looked around as if expecting to see some kind of astral portal.

“Tell me why you were watching her! Did your whore sister and her friends have something to do with it? Tell me, or I’ll… I’ll – I’ll shove this in your face,” she menaced him with the jagged broken end.

“Hey, hey, calm down. You were her friend, weren’t you? I know you.

I used to see you playing in the cemetery together,” he held his palms aloft leaning well back from the reach of her make-do club.

“What do you know about it? Why were you watching us? Tell me!”

“Settle down. I weren’t spying on you! I just meant I’d seen you a few times. You’re talking about Frances aren’t you?”

“How do you know?” She spat.

“Aged 11. Ravished and strangled. I believe there was something about it in the papers,” he raised his eyebrows.

“Shut your mouth! Don’t you talk about her like you knew her. Don’t you dare!”

214 “Hell, you’re wilder than a feral alley cat,” he said as she jabbed at him. “I didn’t have anything to do with it.” She went for him with the branch.

He recoiled, shimmying back against the front door. “I didn’t do it. Trust me.

But I know who did.”

“Who was it? If it wasn’t you, who was it? I read her diary. Do you know how Peter is? Who is R.?”

“I don’t know what you’re on about!” He shook his head. He kept one eye on her as he very slowly lifted his cigarette packet, withdrew one and lit it. She was clearly escaped from the nut house. “She kept a diary?” He asked curiously.

“I’ll cut you. Don’t think I won’t,” she fought back the weeping, livid.

“I’ve knocked you senseless before!”

“Yes. I remember,” he said and patted his nose. “Well I’ll tell you who did it. But I don’t know any Peter and certainly no R.”

“Who do you say it is then?” She let her weapon fall to the ground.

“Jack Tooth killed your friend; the girl with the brown hair and the yellow cardigan. It was him alright. That night in the cemetery.”

“Who’s Jack Tooth?” She glared, unconvinced. “She didn’t write about anyone by that name.”

“He’s who you’re after. Trust me. My sister’s bloke,” he coughed and hawked a spit into the gutter. “I’d like to kill him myself.”

“What does he look like?”

“Why do you want to know? He’s not someone you want to mess around with. Anyway, you’re only a little girl.”

“Just tell me,” she expelled the words flat through clenched teeth.

215 “Well he’s a wiry bastard, not too tall but has muscles, you know. He’s freckly, with blue eyes, gingerish hair not quite red. Typical Irish hard cunt.”

“I’m Irish.”

“Sorry,” he shrugged. “It doesn’t matter what he looks like. You should bloody well keep your distance. I’ve seen him take a bloke’s eye out with a razor. He’s mean, real mean.”

“Did you really see it?”

“What?”

“The eye, come out?”

“No – but my sister did. And I’ve seen the man he did it to and he wears a patch now so it must be true.”

“Where can I find him?”

“You can’t! Don’t you hear what I’m telling you?” He found himself shouting in frustration. “To begin with no one knows where he is. He went bush, out west or something. And finally if he was around, don’t you think he’d notice some featherhead girl spying on him like she thinks she’s Nancy fucking Drew?”

“I don’t care.”

“You don’t care? What are you, retarded? They’re not playing around.

This isn’t a detective story. This isn’t some kind of game. If you ask me you should go home. Turn around and go home right now. Run back to your

Mum. Before you go and get yourself killed.”

He’d seen the hate in the girl’s eyes, but worse than the hate was her sharp- focused resolve, and it had rattled him to the point that all hope of sleep was extinguished. Standing in his cave at Tamarama, Templeton ran his knuckle

216 over his cropped hair that had just started to soften and sprout from the stubble Jackie’s razor had left. How long had it been now? Two weeks?

Three? His macabre collection kept time better than any Christian advent calendar.

Reverently he lifted the crates and looked at the bones: birds, rats, and the large sculptural backbone of a possum in the sand. He took the defleshed skull of a cat in his hands. It was clean and warm. The sun had been licking it.

Were Frances Margaret Reed’s bones stripped now in the grave that she lay in? He shuffled back into the natural curvature of the rock that normally fit his back like a glove. It did not feel so comfortable today. He wondered if he had grown; his boots seemed tighter on his feet than before. He took a bottle of beer out of his trousers and uncapped it, the psssshtt satisfyingly crisp, and drank deeply. He had stolen one of Dot’s books long ago that he had read one night and that stirred something in him – ‘The Wanderings of Oisin and other poems’. He had read it in bed holding a candle to the pages not wanting to turn the lamp on and disturb the girls. Wax had dripped on his fingers and a bit on the cover. He’d tried to scratch it off with his nails.

He had flirted for days now with the idea of going to Frances’ grave to say the poem to her and then tear it out and bury it with her. But he did not know where they had put her and he didn’t know whom or how to ask without arousing suspicion. The next best thing, he resolved, was to read it at his special place. He stood and put his beer down and turned to face the sea.

Gulls wheeled and abseiled far out on the horizon. The poem was long so he chose the best bits.

“Where the wave of moonlight glosses the dim gray sands with light,

217 far off by furthest Rosses we foot it all the night, weaving olden dances mingling hands and mingling glances till the moon has taken flight; to and fro we leap and chase the frothy bubbles, while the world is full of troubles and anxious in its sleep,” he bent to take a gulp of beer to whet his blunt throat.

The birds dived and reemerged from the waves.

“Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild with the faery, hand in hand, for the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.”

Then he pulled out the poem and folded up the pages and tore them into little bits. He crept up to the edge of the cliff. The swathe of foam creamed on the smashed rocks yards below. He opened his hand and the pieces took wind like snowflakes. He watched them fly out over the ocean. Maybe they would go all the way to South America; he knew that if you kept swimming that’s where you’d end up. He remembered from the globe in his old classroom.

Someone coughed. He whirled around to see a man standing there, not much older than he, maybe eighteen or nineteen, with fair combed hair, dressed in short sleeves and light grey trousers with neatly ironed creases.

“What are you doing?” Templeton shouted. “Were you watching me?

What the bloody Hell do you think you’re playing at?” He raised his fist in the air.

“Pardon me,” the man said raising his hands. “I’m ever so sorry. I think I must have taken you by surprise. Forgive me. I did not want to interrupt,” he turned to go back down the ragged path.

“No. Wait. You just gave me a start, that’s all,” Templeton said getting his breath back.

218 “I’m sorry,” the man said. He looked from circle of bones to Templeton and back again. “Quite a set-up you have here. Is this… uh – is this a hobby of yours? What would you call it? Amateur mortician?”

“What’s it to you?” Templeton hardened again.

“Oh no. Nothing. I don’t mean to be rude. Each to their own and all. I was just on my way down to the beach and I heard you reading that poem.

You said it so beautifully.” He had a square face with thick eyebrows and a large nose but his eyes were brown as molasses beneath long fine lashes. His blonde fringe flopped over the left one. “What is it about?” He asked and relaxed enough to sit down on the rock ledge.

“What do you mean?” Templeton said stiffly.

“The poem. Why are you reciting it?”

“It’s… It’s for a friend. Who died. A girl. Actually I didn’t know her all that well,” Templeton stayed near the precipice, holding the vandalised book against his chest like armour, aware of how odd he must appear.

“I see,” the youth nodded as if that made perfect sense. “Would you like a cigarette?” He tapped one from the pack and held it out.

Templeton took it and lit it with his own match, ignoring the one offered and bent and picked his beer up from the sand and swigged it. He kept his distance, circling to the other side of the cave.

“Was she your girlfriend?”

“No!” Templeton was aghast. “She was just a kid.”

“Oh. Do you have a girlfriend?”

“Are you going to bathe? It’s cold,” Templeton turned suddenly and gazed at the uninviting surf.

219 “No. I’m going to meet some friends,” the man said and puffed on his smoke. Templeton kept drinking his beer, eyeing the man. “My name’s

Anthony – Tony,” the man sprang to shake his hand.

“Templeton.”

“Is that a family name?” Tony’s hand felt strong and sincere. His eyes met Templeton’s.

“What?”

“Only it’s a curious name. Are you Scottish?”

“I don’t know,” Templeton said, colouring.

“Right-o,” Tony said with kindness. “So then Templeton… Would you like to come down with me and meet my friends?”

“Why would I want to do that?”

“Well it’s better than standing on a blustery cliff-top reading poetry to a dead girl isn’t it now?”

Templeton allowed himself to smile. “I guess.”

“Well then. Shall we?” Tony offered his arm. Templeton took it shyly.

“Where are your friends? Down on the beach?”

“Uh – not exactly,” Tony demurred. “There’s a, well, a boathouse, that we like to go to, that offers certain sorts of… social possibilities.”

“I see,” Templeton felt Tony’s hand press lightly at the small of his back.

“I bid your esteemed ex-creatures farewell. Goodbye extinct things.

Adieu to the obsolete. Ta-ta defunct beings. Au revoir and bon nuit to the discontinued, ” Tony bowed to the circle. “And let’s be off. That’s enough gloomy talk. We’re going to have fun.”

220 Every man with faintly auburn hair caught her eye as Nancy walked home.

She saw reds in uniform laughing in the pubs and ginger youths running in their roughshod gangs pelting each other with dirt clods near the brickpits in

St. Peters. She wanted to kill them all, shoot and poison every one. This desire sat like a smooth, cold acorn in her chest.

“You’re going crazy,” Lily said. She had walked beside her although

Nancy did not speak to her nor look at her. “They’ll send you away. They’ll put you in a facility.”

She closed her eyes and the world went black while she counted to twenty.

Light again. Lily was still there. She hung her tongue out of her mouth and lolled her head around like it was on a stick.

“That’s what mad people look like.”

“Go. Away.”

“Make me,” Lily said and danced around on tiptoes.

Nancy slammed into a woman walking towards her whom she didn’t see: “I’m sorry,” she mumbled.

“Watch where you’re going!”

“Ha ha ha,” Lily contorted herself like a jester. “Mental hospital.

Mental hospital. Bedlam. Bedlam.”

“That’s not here. That’s in London,” Nancy told her; fairly confidently she’d read it in a book. “They’re not going to ship me to London.”

“Bet you they have one here. Bet you that’s where they’ll send you. Or to the gallows, they hang women too you know. Murderesses.”

“I’m not listening to you anymore.”

Nancy walked the rest of the way with her fingers jammed in her earholes, ignoring the perplexed looks of passersby. She charged through the front

221 door to go straight up to bed. She halted. Everything was different. Her mother, made-up and dressed, was directing men moving furniture.

“What are you doing?” Nancy tried to sound calm.

“We’re packing up. Darling, I told you. All of this is going to auction.

Would you like some iced tea?” Kate glanced around. Nancy could see how her mother was playing at being a grown-up. The men paused, sweating in their dirty shirts as they strained to heft an armoire.

“We’re not really going!”

“Yes we are. Nan, what did you think? That I was joking?”

“But not now! Not right away!” Nancy felt hot choked aggravation.

“Yes now. The sooner the better, as they say,” Kate flashed a smile around that was lost on the labouring men.

“But we’re not getting on the ship for months!”

“It’s only a few weeks. And we need to get organised. The auctioneer needs to evaluate what is going to sale,” she said brusquely. “Heavens! You look frightful. You’re covered in muck. Take those socks off to give me to darn – I can see a hole from here. Why don’t you go upstairs and take a bath?”

Nancy stood at the foot of the stairs staring like she was about to throw up.

“Carry on,” her mother clapped at the movers and scowled at her.

“Have it your way,” she said under her breath. “But make no mistake. In seventeen days we are getting on that boat.”

Nancy trudged to her room. Dead Aunt Jo’s room had been dismantled. The empty space looked huge in its sheer bareness. She shivered remembering

Josephine’s stiff form in the rocker and the dog yapping at her cold feet.

Passing the door to her mother’s she saw it was half packed, the rest of the

222 contents lying in disarray. Empty glasses rested in stained ring marks of condensation on her vanity and bureau tops. There was a small box on the carpeted floor at the foot of the bed.

Nancy picked up the box and shook it. It was locked. Something heavy rattled inside. A leather bound pouch of keys lay on the table. She tried key after key. After three or four attempts a large brass one twisted obligingly and the lid sprung open. The box was lined with green velvet and in the custom- made depression was a handsome looking pistol. She stared at it, breathing deeply. Careful not to touch anywhere near the trigger, heart suspended in the roof of her mouth, she took the gun out. She didn’t know her father had kept one. She flicked something the curlicue at the top of the barrel and it popped out to the side. There were five empty sockets in the barrel; she spun them with a finger, and one bullet in a chamber.

She closed the box and locked it, putting it exactly as she had found it. She took off her cardigan and used it to wrap the pistol.

223 10

Templeton sat smoking on the stoop of Dulcie Tipper’s place watching the rainbow lorikeets screech in the twilight and denude the tree in the yard opposite. There was a picture of a mushroom cloud today in the papers. The

Yanks had tested a bomb on the Bikini Atoll. It was said that peoples’ flesh had melted off their bones in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Wasn’t that a good enough test for the Americans?

Nellie and Dot were downstairs drinking and smoking and listening to 78s in the parlous. There was a piano in the corner for folks to play if they fancied but he’d heard no one but Dulcie take a crack at it. Bob Newham stood across the road in case of any troublemakers and cheerfully patted the bulge in his jacket where his Colt sat in its holster. Templeton tipped his hat to him.

“What they call a man-stopper,” Bob liked to say when he took the gun out to clean it after the last customer had staggered off home at the end of the night.

Templeton stubbed out his butt. It was a quiet night, cold. Jazz made crepitating revolutions on the gramophone.

“Deal me in,” Templeton nodded and drew up a chair to the table where Dot and Nellie were playing Black Jack.

“Shilling gets you in,” Nellie said, barely looking up. Judging from the pile of money at Dot’s elbow and the diminutive stack of coins at Nellie’s, she was losing badly.

“Spot me?” Templeton asked Dot.

“Here ya go, you little bludger,” Dot laughed. “You’d better be lucky. I want that back!”

224 They played a few rounds, Nellie getting steadily drunker and Dot not far behind. A tapping on the side door interrupted them and Bob stepped through with two men and a woman in his wake.

“Is Ms. Tipper here?” One man asked, looking about like an inquisitive bird. He was tall; at least 6ft 3, and well built with slick sandy hair, palms turned outward and his thumbs stretched his trouser pockets. He rocked back and forth on his heels.

“We’re old friends,” said his smaller companion, a wiry, olive-skinned

Greek or Balt. He took off his jacket, hung it on the stand at the doorway and loosened his mint green tie as he took a seat.

“Dulce is out,” Bob announced.

“Oh well perhaps we’ll catch her later then. In the meantime we’ll all take sherry, thank you,” the clean-cut tall one nodded at Bob. Bob loped off muttering to bring a bottle. Dot and Nellie folded their cards.

“Six glasses!” The tall man called to Bob. “If you ladies would care to join us? I beg your pardon, ladies and gent.”

“Don’t mind if we do,” Nellie winked.

It took Templeton several moments to understand that he was being included. He sat down and sipped from the crystal glass placed in front of him. The tall man had eyes the colour of morning surf.

“Cheers!” Their female companion held her drink out and tilted it. She was a real knockout; black curls set in fat corkscrews and a high, tiny waist cinctured by rolling even curves.

“To new beginnings,” the Mediterranean said and stretched a hand across her shoulders. She arched into his touch.

“New adventures,” she smiled.

225 “Have you known Dulcie long?” Nellie asked. “I’ve been here since ’43 and I don’t think we’ve met. I would’ve remembered.” She winked again.

Templeton rolled his eyes.

“We go way back,” the man said. “She’s a very gracious hostess. She knows how to accommodate ahhh… all kinds of different tastes. She has, ah, what you might call, an affinity with the uncommon.”

“A soft spot for freaks, misfits and perverts more like it,” Nellie said.

There was silence for a moment. Then Nellie hooted like a mallee hen. “Lucky for us woofters and bastards who like a bloody drink!” The table broke out laughing in amused relief.

“Another round! Another round, barkeep, if you please,” said the swarthy one. Bob looked ropeable but brought the bottle round.

Templeton shifted in his seat. He strained to finish the first drink and then stared gloomily at the next one. He didn’t like the sherry; it left a burning sugary trail down his throat that didn’t sit well in his gut.

“What we’re looking for, is a certain kind of, ah – show – that we’ve had once or twice here before,” the first man continued and glanced at Dot.

He leant and whispered something in her ear. Dot’s eyebrows raised and then she crossed and uncrossed her legs below the table. He pulled out a thick stack of bills from his money clip and placed them casually next to the ashtray.

“I think we can provide what you’re after,” Nellie said, reading Dot’s expression. “Bob, will you see that we’re not interrupted. There will be no more visitors tonight, will there Bob?”

226 “If you say so,” Bob stood and put his coat on, taking a half of gin from the shelf and pocketing it. He grinned crookedly. “To keep the cold out.” He put his hat on and tipped it. “G’night then. Enjoy yourselves.”

Templeton rose to accompany him.

“No. You can stay,” the tall man put a hand on him.

He looked at Dot for assistance.

“Stay. It’s alright Lucky,” she said. “We’ll just go and freshen up,” she told the strange trio. The dark haired man and the woman took up canoodling, whispering in low voices and stroking each other’s forearms.

“And how long have you been here at Dulcie’s?” The tall man cleared his throat.

“Uh – a little while,” Templeton answered through an unpleasant mouthful of sherry.

“Hmm,” he nodded. “Fresh.”

“Excuse me? I don’t work for her. I don’t work for Dulcie Tipper. If that’s what you’re thinking,” Templeton angrily picked at his matchbook, making little white scratches on the cover.

“Of course not. I didn’t mean to imply…”

“Good. Because I’m not – that’s not what I – I’m my own man, is all.

That’s what I’m saying,” Templeton pinked. He saw the couple had stopped fondling each other and were looking at him as though they found him entertaining. He was about to take his leave when Dot and Nellie came back down wearing only robes, their hair loose. They picked up the saffron chaise longue and dragged it toward the table in a billow of silk and perfume. They sat down next to each other. Nellie pointed a practiced smile at the couple

227 then turned to Dot who put a splayed white hand on Nellie’s bare thigh and turned to face her.

They started to kiss, tentative at first with their lips closed. Then Nellie’s hand went up to Dot’s face and their mouths opened. Templeton could see their tongues. Dot started to kiss Nellie’s neck and her head lolled back. She licked her throat and Nellie’s legs parted. Dot’s hand moved up and down.

The couple were leaning forward, watching.

Dot slipped her hand into her mouth and sucked on her fingers then replaced them. Nellie made a sudden low groan. Templeton could see Dot’s finger pushed inside of her, one and all four, slowly sliding in and out. Her thumb made circles on the outside of Nellie’s cunt.

Templeton snuck a glance at the tall man. He was looking at what was happening on the lounge also, but still smoking languidly. The couple had let their cigarettes burn down to just twin red circles.

Nellie put her palm between Dot’s thighs. Templeton could see Nellie’s hand was glistening and slippery. She tilted her body so the audience could get a better view, picking up Dot’s hips and forcing her to lie back also. She knelt on the ground and began to make a slow dipping motion with her head where her hand had been. Dot’s breath was quiet but short, gasping.

“Keep going,” the swarthy man said hoarsely and his girlfriend swallowed, her face flushed.

“Do you want to see me make her come?” Nellie stopped licking and turned to ask. They nodded.

Nellie took off her robe and the satin fell in folds on the floor. She lifted herself up on her hands and knees so they could all see her white buttocks.

228 “You’re soaking wet,” she said as she gazed up at Dot before nuzzling back in. The repetitive motion of Nellie’s head bobbing between Dot’s slackly spread legs made Dot reach to bury her fingers in Nellie’s hair, holding her in place, and start to moan. Nellie kept on. Templeton looked away, bashful.

Then he felt the tall man’s hand on his thigh under the table. He looked at him. His face betrayed nothing but his hand crept up to his crotch.

Then Dot grabbed hold of Nellie’s head and bucked. She lifted her hips high off the lounge and thrust into her mouth shaking. She went completely silent until the last quiver and then let out a harsh strangled cry and pushed Nellie off from her.

The couple, somewhat disheveled now, sat back and lit each other’s cigarettes and poured more sherry. Dot drew her robe around her.

“If you’ll excuse us, we’ll be with you in a moment,” Nellie stood up, completely naked, her face wet.

Templeton stood up awkwardly keeping one leg in front of the other to disguise his pitched trousers and turned to fetch some whisky. Pouring a tumbler and downing it at the cupboard he went to return when the tall man sidled up beside him.

“Yes please,” he reached for the bottle.

“Do you want a glass?” Templeton asked.

“This’ll do me fine for starters,” he slurped on the neck. “Pardon me.

Go on then, get us a class. I need something for my nerves after that little performance.”

“What, you didn’t like it?” Templeton leant against the kitchen bench.

“Oh now, I wouldn’t say that. I wouldn’t say that. Just not my cup of tea exactly.”

229 “Right,” Templeton said and sipped his drink turning sidelong.

“I’m after something more, ah, specialized. A little bit more exotic.”

“What? Like darkies or chinks? Dulcie doesn’t do that sort. You’re out of luck.”

“No!” The man guffawed. “No you silly boy,” he put one finger on

Templeton’s jaw. “That’s not what I had in mind.” Templeton pulled away, but only slightly. “Now. You’re your own man, as you say. And I am a businessman, as they say. What price for business?”

Dot and Templeton were in a club on Oxford Street in Woollahra. It was warm enough inside for men to have peeled off to their shirtsleeves and ladies, what few of them were there, to be dripping beneath their powder.

The show was boisterous. The bouncing flesh of the line girls introduced by a droll emcee with a pencil-thin moustache, who joked and nodded at the aunties, as they were called, in the audience. Templeton could spot them all now, although he doubted he would recognise them out on the street in their day-to-day wear. It was hard to tell what a man would look like in a suit after you’d seen him in a wig.

Friday was the camp night to go out and Dot seemed happy enough to sit and drink while Templeton worked the room. There was a small park down a side street he could take them to, sometimes even three or four in a night.

Templeton sipped his Scotch. He was buying. He’d taken himself to Mark

Foy’s and purchased a smart singe-breasted suit in dove-grey, a light blue shirt and a brown silk tie. He wore an old trilby Bob Newham had given him that matched the colour of the suit. His hair had grown a little and Nellie had

230 tidied it for him where it was patchy and uneven. He was beginning to get a kink through the blonde that was a reminder of his old curls.

“Looking good, kid,” Dulcie had slapped him on the back and wolf- whistled the first time he’d come downstairs in his new get-up. At midnight when the show finished Templeton stretched out his hand to help Dot up from her chair.

“I can walk by myself,” she said aggressively but she swayed on her feet like a foal. When they were out of the club and braced against the night air he slipped his arm through hers and leant in to take some of her weight. It was a long walk down Oxford Street and Dot sagged, mumbling to herself and forcing him to stop every five minutes so she could light another cigarette.

On hitting Riley Street they heard the sound of women shouting. A vicious screaming match was taking place. Templeton kept his head down as they crossed to the other side of the street to avoid it. One woman was hitting another over the head and shoulders.

“Roberta?” Dot said and halted, drawing herself up and peering into the shadows. He didn’t think she was capable of noticing much of anything for the state she was in.

“Dot! Thank God it’s you! For Christ’s sake get this bitch of me.”

Templeton darted over and pulled the woman off who was accosting her; she kicked and screamed, twisting her head to try to bite him.

“Christ!” He swore when her fingernails dragged the side of his face but he held on, forcing her arms down. Dot ran up and punched the woman hard in the mouth.

“Fuck you!” The woman shrieked spraying blood and spittle.

231 “Dot, don’t. I’ve got her,” Templeton said but Dot hit her again like she was possessed. “Stop it! I said I’ve got her.”

The woman stopped thrashing and went slack in his grasp.

“Are you going to keep still?”

She nodded and he loosened his arms. She nursed her smashed mouth.

“Bitch!” She hissed at Roberta. “This here’s my spot. Don’t you know who I am? Think you can waltz in and work my corner!”

“I wasn’t! I was waiting for someone that’s all,” Roberta said. Her face and arms were brindled with marks from the assault.

“Well wait somewhere bloody else next time,” the woman shot one last filthy look at the three of them and limped off to lick her wounds.

“What were you doing standing in the dark on Riley Street at one o’clock in the morning?” Templeton asked Roberta, hugging her tightly.

“Come on, come with us. We’ll sit you down and give you something for your nerves,” Dot took her hand. Roberta started to cry. She kissed Dot on the mouth whose eyes widened in surprise. “Come on. You look as if you need a drink.”

They led her back to Dulcie’s. The house was dark and no one stirred upstairs when they lit the lamps. Dot poured her a large tumbler of gin.

Roberta held it with shaking hands.

“Oh! I am so glad to see you both! It’s been horrible at Dolly’s since you left.”

“Shh. Tell us what’s happened,” Dot soothed.

“I don’t know where to begin,” she swallowed a large gulp of gin.

“Since she threw you out everything changed. Lorraine started lording it over us all, thinking she could get away with murder. It didn’t bother the other

232 girls so much – Sally and Margot and Hazel – but she was mean as a cut snake to Annie and me.”

“Lorraine, that little pustule,” Dot muttered.

“It gets worse. Last night Snowy and Dolly had a blue. A big one, no one knows what started it. We all come home and he has her by the hair, face against the wall, beating the living shit outta her. She’s yelling and hollering her head off about to bring the whole place down. Punched out her false teeth and everything. Tore off her wig.”

“Oh Jesus.”

“Errol gets in there to try and break it up and he pulls Snowy off her

‘cause, you know, he’s snapped. He looks like he’s gonna kill her. Next thing

Dolly jumps up grabs the poker next to the fireplace and hammers Snowy over the head with it. Whack! Hit him so hard you could’ve heard it outside.

He goes down like a stone!”

“No!” Templeton drained his gin.

“Yes. Then Errol starts ranting ‘You crazy bitch this you crazy bitch that’, and Dolly waves the poker at him and says, ‘You want some of this? Be my guest. I want you both out of my house. Take your useless sonofabitch mate and get out of here. Out! Get out!’ And that’s when the coppers show up and handcuff both of them.

“No!” Dot puffed on her smoke.

“So Dolly’s cursing and spitting in their faces like a jungle cat. They have to take Snowy to the hospital. He’s out cold with a probable concussion.

They say the whole thing’s going to court for domestic assault. They won’t even let Dolly out on bail this time. They say she has to sit and sweat and wait for the trial. She’s hopping mad, I can tell you. She’s tried just about

233 everything to bribe her way out of there. Told us to use all the cash in the strongbox.”

“But it was self-defense?” Templeton questioned. “Surely they can see that Snowy was beating on her. It won’t stand up in front of a jury.”

“Yeah but it don’t look good with Snowy lying out cold on the floor now does it? And Dolly’s a big woman who can defend herself.”

“I suppose.”

“So the six of us girls are wondering what to do. And who walks in this morning but Jack Tooth!”

“What?” Dot and Templeton started in unison.

“Cleans Annie out for every penny she’s got and then shoots through.

After he’s gone Annie tells Sally and Margot to pack their bags. They weren’t going to stay there any longer now that he’s back and knows where they are.

He could barge in and kill ‘em in their sleep.”

“That rat bastard,” Dot said. “Were two others with him? Will

Worthington and Frank Roache? One’s a big tall bugger.” Roberta shook her head no. “Did he say anything at all about where he was staying?”

“All he did was come in spouting ‘Did you miss me?’ And other horseshit to Annie and then leant on her for money told her he’d find you –

Templeton, and break your legs if she didn’t give him everything she had.”

“I’ll kill him,” Dot breathed. Roberta’s face twisted and she burst into tears. “Oh, hush, honey,” Dot comforted her. “It’s alright. You’re safe now.

No one can hurt you here. You stick with us. In the morning we’ll go find

Annie and bring her here too. Dulcie will take care of us.”

“This is Dulcie Tipper’s place?” Roberta looked about her as if taking in her surroundings for the first time.

234 Templeton nodded. He tapped three cigarettes out of his packet and lit them off one match.

“Does Nellie Cameron live here too?”

“Yes. Nellie’s upstairs right now. Sleeping. Why?”

“Because Errol’s gunning for her, that’s why. Been telling everyone she ripped him off. Said she gingered his wallet right out of his pocket whilst they were… you know.”

“Don’t you worry about that, Nellie can take care of herself,” Dot stroked Roberta’s hair. A fresh veil of tears misted her face.

“What is it? What else is wrong?”

“Oh Dot,” she sobbed, clutching at the front of Dot’s dress. A large damp patch had spread across it from her weeping. “I need help. I’m in trouble Dot.” Templeton saw the realization flicker across Dot’s eyes. “I need

£10. That’s why I was out tonight. I wasn’t waiting for someone. I was working. I don’t have any money. I’m desperate,” she whispered.

“We’ll help you. Don’t cry. Don’t cry anymore,” Dot wiped Roberta’s wet cheeks.

“It would take me at least a month to make that kind of money. And I don’t have that kind of time,” she placed a palm on her belly. “They can only do it if they catch it in the first few months, you know?”

“I know a man,” Dot said, holding her face up in her hands. “We’ll take care of it.”

Templeton sat up for a while after Roberta had fallen asleep. They laid her down on the couch. She looked scarcely fifteen her face serene having finally succumbed to rest. He took all the money he had from his stash and

235 everything in his pockets, scarcely over £3 after the fine clothes he’s bought, but he put it all on the table in front of Dot.

“That’s sweet of you Lucky,” Dot said.

“That’s all I got. Not much is it? How much do you have? Hell’s bells.

You going to ask Dulcie for it?”

“I can cover it,” Dot said waving her hand mysteriously.

“How? You’ve been saving?” He ran a sweaty palm over his hair. She took a wad of bills from inside her dress. There was close to £20 there.

Templeton whistled. “Where’d you get that? You stumble on a gold mine or something?” Dot shook her head. “What then? Horses? I didn’t think you fluttered. Robbing? Shit, Dot. That’s 4 to 7 years inside. Tell me where you got it!”

“Where’d you get yours?” She fixed a knowing eye on him. “I took mine from Dolly.”

“What!” He almost fell off his chair. “But you said – you said that

Lorraine set you up!”

“I lied, didn’t I? I didn’t want you knowing about what we had stored up for a rainy day. And anyway Dolly wasn’t paying us what we were owed.”

“But to take it! Holy fucking Mary! She could’ve killed you! She would have killed you and worse. You heard Lorraine’s story about that girl’s face she cut off. What were you thinking?”

“I didn’t do it all in one,” Dot looked at him as though he was an idiot.

“Started chipping little bits off since we got there. I thought of it as a fuckwit tax. Every time Errol or Snowy or one of the punters was a fuckwit I helped myself to a few bob.”

236 Templeton’s mouth hung open. He poured gin into it from the bottle.

“You have some giant balls, you know that? Giant, hairy balls.”

“Well I can’t say I’m sorry. I took it for a rainy day. And what do you know?” Dot laughed and drank. “Look around. It’s raining.”

“Shall I wait with you?” Dot clasped Roberta’s shivering shoulders.

They were wrapped in Dot’s fur, Templeton noticed, as he had noticed that

Roberta had spent the past two nights in Dot’s bed. Roberta’s face was pale with fear as they loitered in front of an ordinary looking terrace on Stanley

Street, yet still she shook her head.

“Are you sure? I don’t mind. I can stay just outside whilst they – when it happens…” Dot lingered.

“No. I’ll be fine.”

“I’ll be here when it’s all over then. He said it would only take an hour.”

Dot kissed Roberta firmly on the cheek and watched as she climbed the steps and rapped the iron lion’s head knocker. The door opened and she disappeared inside.

An elderly woman escorted her briskly down the corridor. She was pudgy and shoehorned into a dour grey dress and spoke to Roberta as if she was telling her what time to expect the bus.

“Wait here,” she gestured to a straight-backed seat in the cramped, musty parlour. They still had the blackout paper up on the windows. “The doctor will be along shortly. It’s been a busy day. Do not go wandering off. If you need the lavatory ring the bell.” She stood waiting for something.

Roberta looked at her dumbly: “Thank you?”

237 “Ahem,” the woman coughed and made a horizontal gesture with her palm out at waist level.

“Oh! Um, yes, of course. I’m sorry,” Roberta took the envelope of folded bills Dot had given her and handed it over. The woman took it impatiently and hustled back to her post at the door. Roberta looked about her. A clock ticked loudly. There was no table with magazines on it, just a bare-walled room with two stark bench seats, one with a girl on it who was pinching the fingertips of her gloves so the calfskin pulled an inch or so into a point. Once she had done all five she smoothed them back down and started on the other. She did not look up or acknowledge Roberta. The chairs were so close together the girl’s elbow kept brushing her.

Roberta considered introducing herself and then thought better of it. It was really not the time or place. What where they to say if they passed each other in the street? She looked down the hall for the doctor to materialise. He did not. Fifteen minutes passed, then twenty. She worried that Dot waiting in the cold.

“Does it hurt?” The girl said almost inaudibly, her eyes fixed dead ahead at the blotchy mildewed wall.

“I don’t know. They said it will hurt a bit,” Roberta answered.

“Is there blood?” She chewed her lip so hard the whole thing disappeared into her mouth.

“Later on, I think. Just like your monthly courses. Maybe a little more.”

“I’m not… good with blood. I’ll faint.”

Roberta reached out and patted her arm gently. “Don’t think about it.

You’re going to be right as rain. This will all be over before you know it.”

238 The girl turned to her. Tear beads gathered in her eyes like storm clouds.

Roberta could see how young she was. Barely sixteen if she had to guess. The thunder broke. Her face collapsed.

“Oh honey. Was it your boyfriend? Is he out there waiting for you? Is someone coming to take care of you?”

“My – my – my brother,” she choked.

“What?” Roberta recoiled.

“No! Not like that! My brother is waiting for me.”

“Right-o. Good. I’m glad you have someone.”

The girl didn’t respond, sobbing into a stained handkerchief, spindly frame rocked by tearful spasms. The door swung open and a man in a waistcoat with rolled up shirtsleeves emerged. He was stout and red with small round glasses sitting on the brink of his long nose. Behind him came a younger man, taller but sparrow-chested with a cowlick of ginger hair that had refused his pomade.

“Alright,” the waist-coated man said loudly. He took out his pocket watch and consulted it. Roberta could here the punctilious ticking of the seconds.

He pushed his glasses up with his index finger. “We’ll do you both together. If you’ll follow me please.” He turned on his heel back into the room. Roberta and the girl stood awkwardly glancing at one another.

“You may leave your things here, it’s perfectly safe,” said the younger man. “Purses, gloves, please take off your shoes and stockings.”

They shuffled together barefoot into the chamber at the end of the endless corridor and found two stripped mattresses with barely room for anything else but the tray of bottles and instruments standing between them.

239 “Lie down please and remove your undergarments.”

Roberta nodded at the girl in reassurance. She was crying but trying to hold it in. They both lay on the beds holding their scanties in their hands. The doctor moved between Roberta’s legs and pressed her abdomen, murmuring things to the younger one whom Roberta presumed was his assistant.

“Jolly good. Neither of you are too far along,” he said with three fingers inside the crying teenager.

Roberta shut her eyes and kept them screwed closed. She could hear the girl making sharp noises of pain amidst the thicket of her tears. She thought about the lap of the waves over the stone sides of the baths at Coogee beach in the summertime and the sound of the trumpet solo at the Zeigfeld and about

Dot’s beautiful, cockeyed smile. She tried to stay rigid and unmoving. It was as though the doctor was coring an apple inside of her. She shoved a balled fist in her mouth.

“Lie still,” he commanded.

At the end they were both permitted to dress and wash up in the basin in the corner whilst the men absented themselves. The girl could barely hold herself up on her feet. Roberta helped her to rinse her face.

“Expect some bleeding,” the doctor said when he returned when they had composed themselves. “Nothing to be concerned about. And you may have cramps for a day or so. If the bleeding continues or is particularly heavy go to the hospital. But you were never here. I repeat. You were never here.”

Ejected onto the murky street, sore and breakable, it was Dot who Roberta saw first, smoking and pacing across the road.

“You’re going to be alright,” she rushed over and wrapped her arms around her shoulders. “It’s over now.”

240 “Have you got a place to stay tonight, love? Is someone coming for her?” Templeton asked the girl.

“Her brother,” Roberta answered. The girl looked liverish. “We’ll wait with you ‘till he arrives.”

“That’s him,” the girl pointed, swaying as though drunk, at a man who immediately crossed over, hat pulled down low, with a fashionably dressed woman on his arm.

“Bob?” Dot did a double take. “What on Earth?” Then she registered who he was with. “Nellie!”

“Dot!” Nellie exclaimed. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m here for – this is my – um, this is my friend,” Dot gestured at

Roberta. The three women looked at each other uneasily. Roberta looked searchingly at Dot.

“Florence, are you well?” Bob cut in, taking his sister in his arms. “Did it – did it work? I mean did everything go – uh – according to plan?”

“This is your brother?” Dot asked incredulous.

“Yes, she’s my half-sister. Different fathers,” Bob said gruffly. “Can you please tell me just what you are doing here?”

“Excuse me,” Roberta heard herself say although the voice sounded entombed. “But if I could perhaps lie down…”

“Yes.”

“Of course.”

“Let’s get you home,” Dot, Bob and Nellie spoke at once overlapping.

“Both of you.”

241 “What’s wrong with them? Do they need a doctor?” Templeton demanded of Dot after he’d been upstairs and seen Roberta, her face drawn in pain.

“They’ve been to the doctor. It hurts. It hurts like Hell but just for a day or two,” Dot told him with sadness in her eyes.

“Pull up a chair handsome,” Dulcie said. They were doing a puzzle, he saw with some surprise. The corners and a bit of a blue sky with white clouds were completed. “The girls will be alright.”

They sat for an hour or so drinking gin and telling jokes. Every ten minutes

Dulcie would get up and march around.

“I’m no good at these bloody things.”

Then she’d sit back down heavily and sigh at the puzzle and Nellie would plant kisses on her and call her a big lug. At a quarter past one there came a knock at the door.

“We’re closed tonight,” she hollered. Nellie shimmied over and slipped the spyhole open.

“Oh fuck,” she put a hand to her mouth. There was a bang and a bloody great hole where the lock had been a moment ago. Nellie cowered on her knees.

“Get behind me,” Dulcie roared and went for her gun. Templeton placed himself in front of Dot. Fear struck him deep in the bowels. Dot picked up a knife from the cutlery box. Nellie dived into the kitchen and hid as the door burst off its hinges and Jack Tooth swaggered into the room. Behind him came Errol, holding a pump-action shotgun. Jackie had his razor swinging back and forth by his trouser leg unsheathed.

“G’day,” Jack smiled. “Hello Dot,” he nodded. “It’s been a while.”

242 “What in God’s name is going on here?” Dulcie planted her feet wide.

“What do you think you’re doing, bursting in here, into my establishment, ruining my door and threatening my girls? You have some cheek, lads. Some cheek indeed.”

“It’s Tipper am I right?” Jack said. “Sorry don’t know if it’s Mister or

Missus,” he laughed. Errol tittered. “Well we don’t have no beef with you.

There’s just a small matter of some unpaid debts. Seems two of your girls have been a little light fingered. I’m here to collect,” he pointed at Dot. “£5, plus interest.”

“Annie paid you already. I know it for a fact. So I don’t know what you think you’re doing here. But I’d advise you to leave,” Dot sounded flinty brave but Templeton could hear her heart banging like a hummingbird.

“Nellie Cameron, is she here?” Errol wanted to know.

“No. She’s not. I don’t know where she is,” Dot answered.

“What do you want with her?” Dulcie stared down her gun barrel.

“Well,” he rocked on his heels and pulled his belt buckle, lifting up his trousers over his paunch. “The tart gingered me when I was having a root.

Took me wallet right outta my back pocket. £5 in there too, dontcha know?

What a co-inky-dink,” he flashed his rotten teeth.

“Is that right?” Dulcie said.

“What’s the matter? Didn’t you know she was ‘round Dolly’s getting some of what you can’t give her?” Jack and Errol cracked up laughing.

“Shit,” Dot whispered and took Templeton’s hand and squeezed it.

Dulcie said nothing, just kept on looking at them over the sleek line of the gun, utterly calm.

243 “Is she here or isn’t she?” Errol asked. “If she ain’t then you can settle it. You’re the one foots her bills isn’t that right? You’re her daddy. At least you think you are.”

“She must have missed a bit of the old in-out, in-out,” Jack thrust his hips.

“Oh shit, shit, shit,” Dot murmured. Templeton squashed her little hand in his larger one tightly.

“You deaf or something?” Dulcie barked. “Dot already told you Nellie is not here. Now I don’t know what you’re thinking busting up my place and asking me to pay money to some fucking eunuch who needs a gun fifteen times bigger than his cock to feel like a man. You’re telling me my girl stole from you? Well you shouldn’t have been so bloody stupid in the first place!

Why on God’s green earth did you think she’d root you if it wasn’t to rob you blind. You think she liked it? You think she liked some rutting hog on top of her? You’re dumber than you look, and that’s saying a lot.”

“Aw – what do you know, you fucking bulldagger?” Jack lifted his razor but paused when he saw that Dulcie had the gun aimed between his eyes.

“You’re a bloody freak. You’re the third sex – that’s what them newspapers say – freaks of nature. The Germans had the right idea putting all of you down. Like dogs,” Errol lit a cigarette slowly. Templeton saw the vein pulse hot above Dulcie’s eye.

“Although their one mistake was gassing you perverts. It don’t hurt bad enough! Ha ha. You’re worse than Japs, and niggers, and Jews. Oh, that’s right,” Jack turned his gaze to Dot. “You’re a dirty Jew and a freak!” He glanced back at Errol who was red with laughter.

244 “What, you think you’re their daddy? Their protector?” Jack stepped forward, ignoring Dulcie’s gun trained on his chest. “You got a pair of tits too, love. Somewhere under that damn man’s shirt and tie you’re wearing. You’re a woman. Did you forget that?”

“What do ya think, Jackie? Shall we pull ‘em out and show ‘em to her?” Errol spat a big clot of phlegm on the floor.

The muzzle of Dulcie’s gun flashed. Templeton saw Errol drop before he heard the bang.

“You bitch!” Errol shrieked from the floor, eyes like peeled grapes widened in shock. He put his palm to his stomach and it came away gore soaked. “She shot me fuckin’ guts out!”

Dot laughed hysterically. Nellie popped up from behind the kitchen bench like a Jack-in-the-box.

“You were here the whole goddamned time!” Errol groaned.

“Just try it. You want to fuck with me?” Dulcie pointed the gun at

Jackie who seemed torn between courses of action.

“You made a big mistake,” Jackie’s eyes were black with rage. “A big, big, mistake.”

“Help me, for fuck’s sake, Jackie!” Errol whimpered, unmanned. “I’m bleeding here. Get me out to the car. Take me to a hospital.”

“Takes days to die from a shot in the guts,” Nellie walked toward him.

“It’s slow. It hurts,” she smiled as she dug her boot into his wound.

“You fuckin’ bitches. You fuckin’ whores,” Jack shouted, pocketing his blade and moving over to hustle Errol up onto his feet.

“What are you going to do, call the police?” Templeton dared.

245 “Take me to the hospital,” Errol grunted. He had both hands clapped against his middle.

“You’re a dead son-of-a-bitch,” Jack fixed on Templeton. “You’re all dead.”

“Get out,” Dulcie stepped forward and laughed all the harder when

Jack flinched backward. “Get the fuck out of here. Take your dickless friend and get him to a doctor before he bleeds out. I don’t want to see your pig-ugly faces again.”

246 11

“I have to,” Dot said to Roberta and Templeton. “I have to see if she’s alright. Jackie might come after her. I don’t know why I have to go to her, but

I won’t sleep until I know she’s safe.”

Roberta was up and walking about now and Bob had taken Florence to his grandparents’ house in the country that morning.

“I’ll come with you,” Templeton put on his jacket. “She’s my sister after all.”

“It’s better if you don’t,” Dulcie said from outside the bedroom. “I wasn’t eavesdropping, I swear,” she heaved herself in and leant her head against the wall. “These are troubled times. You might think you’re helping but if Dot needs to get in and leave with the minimum of fuss, you’ll just be a hindrance. You understand that, right kid?” She lightly ran a finger over his chin and then nudged it with her fist.

“You do what you have to,” Roberta nodded and kissed Dot on the shoulder. Her face still looked wan and she was weak as a kitten from the ordeal. Two sets of sheets had been ruined from the bleeding.

“I’m coming,” Templeton said.

When he and Dot knocked on Dolly Jenkins’ door an hour later he felt his breakfast turn over and threaten to reemerge.

“What?” A voice from behind the door asked cuttingly. He knew instantly it was his sister.

“It’s us, you daft harlot. Now let me in before the whole bloody world sees me,” Dot hissed and tried to jamb her knee in the crack.

247 After a few seconds Annie opened it. They were admitted into the parlour that smelled rank with close air. Annie looked drawn and aged.

“Where’s the others?” Templeton asked.

“Gone,” Annie said dully and went back to sit down by Dolly, who lay on the couch propped up by cushions, drink in hand.

“What do you mean gone?” Dot scrunched her eyebrows. “Where’s

Sally? Where’s Margot? Where the fuck are Hazel and Lorraine?”

“Gone.”

“What the Hell are you talking about? Gone? Gone where?” Dot shook her by the shoulders.

“They left,” Annie shrugged. “Here, have a drink,” she pushed a bottle of gin at her.

“I don’t want a drink! I came to see if you were alright – God knows why. Now I see you’ve clearly lost your fucking marbles!” Dot said angrily.

“Dolly? What the Hell’s happened? What’s the matter with her?”

Templeton pleaded. Dolly smacked her lips drunkenly. He strode over to the window and pulled the curtain cord. Sun ignited the room. The two women raised their hands over their brows in distress.

“Errol and Jackie paid us a visit last night, and Errol ended up spitting blood with a hole in his guts. Now,” Dot gestured at Dolly. “Why don’t we let bygones be bygones, huh? Let’s start afresh.” Annie and Dolly blinked uncomprehending. “Can the two of you wake the fuck up? This is serious!”

“Good riddance, I always hated that cunt,” Dolly slurred. “Hope he’s dead.”

248 “Well why didn’t you do it yourself rather than leave it to Dulcie

Tipper?” Dot smarted, seeing the cause was hopeless. “Oh Jesus H. Christ.

You’re both plastered as fucking gooses.”

“You left. What do you care? You left me,” Annie said, knocking her empty glass on its side. “You and my no good fairy brother.”

“I’m right here!” Templeton protested.

“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear you say that,” Dot said in a strangled voice. “That boy loves you more than he loves himself. You’re the world to him. The day you didn’t walk out with us – when you didn’t stand with us – a part of him up and died.”

“Once again…” Templeton said.

“Should’ve stayed here then,” Annie looked at her insolently. “I always took care of him, didn’t I? I was that whelp’s fucking mother. Gave him food and board when I starved.” The gin sloshed down her throat.

“You’ve lost your senses,” Dot said disgustedly.

“Sit down and have a bloody drunk,” Dolly growled at her. “Don’t look at me like that. I know where you been. I know who you’ve taken up with. Dulcie got you doing shows has she?”

“What are you talking about?” Dot said.

“She got out that big rubber cock and fucked you yet? Oh yes. I know all about it. We were of an age, her and me. But there are some things even a whore won’t do. Unless they like it.”

“You’re pathetic,” Dot replied. “Don’t presume you know anything about me.”

“Who are you with now?” Annie asked, standing up and pitching back and forth like she had sea legs. “Nell? Roberta? Both of them at once?” She

249 spread two fingers and stuck her tongue between them. “Fucking bulldykes.

That’d be right. You’re only with them because you couldn’t have me,” she could barely pronounce the words. Her dress was grimy and she tossed her unwashed hair back off her face sloppily.

“Shut up, Annie!” Templeton yelled at her.

“Were you so jealous of Nellie you shot Errol?” Annie ignored him and stepped closer to Dot, reeking of spirits.

“Dulcie shot Errol. And Jack’s on the warpath for you. I thought I should come and let you know,” Dot told them. “Can’t see why I bothered now.”

“What makes you,” Dolly paused to lift her drinks to her lips. “Think I didn’t know that already?”

“Nothing,” Dot said and backed to the door.

“Come with us,” Templeton said to Annie, stretching his hand out.

“I can’t,” she said, and threw her chin in the air and laughed. “Don’t ask me.”

“Please come with us,” he could feel himself begin to cry. “What is there to stay for?”

Annie’s eyes rolled showing the whites and she smiled unnervingly, sipping her drink and striking a match for her cigarette.

“What is there to leave for?” She said and turned her back to him.

“Ha ha ha!” Dolly clapped her hands. “Good girl.”

“We once had something special. Something beautiful,” Dot was crying. “And you know that.”

250 Dot and Templeton were wakened the next morning by the sound of sirens.

Reporters were gawking in the alley at the end of the block. They could be seen them from the upstairs window of Dulcie’s.

“It’s Nellie,” Roberta came upstairs with three mugs of strong tea on a tray. She laid it down next to the beds and took a hip flask out of her pocket.

She poured it into the cups. “She’s dead.”

“What!? What are you talking about?” Dot said. “That’s not funny.”

“They found her in Stanley Lane this morning. She was beaten to death.”

“Oh my God, where’s Dulcie?” Templeton felt sick.

“She knows. She was the one that found her.”

“I’m going to kill him,” Dot said later that afternoon after she’d sat in the parlour and put down an entire bottle of Haig’s. The newspapermen kept knocking on the door and they kept letting it go unanswered.

“How do you know it was Jackie?” Roberta hovered near her, filling her glass and lighting her cigarettes.

“I know it in my bones.”

“I’ll come with you,” Templeton said. “How are you going to do it?”

Her eyes were hard and dead like his skeleton treasures before the flies picked them out.

“I haven’t thought of that yet,” she used her hands to lever herself up from the table.

She was a good few over legally drunk yet he did not doubt her capabilities for a moment. He watched as she went to the kitchen and stashed two knives in her pockets.

251 “Here, do you want some of my gin?” Roberta offered. “Stay a while.

Go in the morning.”

“No, I need a clear head,” Dot brushed the bottle away.

“Lucky, please look after her,” Roberta snatched his ear and whispered into it.

“I’ll do my best.”

As they neared the old place on Enmore Road Dot stopped and shook

Templeton’s hand. “You’re a good boy,” she said.

“How do you know he’ll be here?”

“Where else will he be?”

“At Dolly’s? With Annie?” He reached out and grabbed her arm.

“Surely if Snowy helped get him a car he’d be with them.”

“Why’s he back then?” She twitched impatiently.

“What do you mean?” Templeton paused, cigarette hanging limply from his lower lip.

“If the fucker had any sense he’d stay away from Sydney, wouldn’t he?”

“So what? What are you saying?”

“I’m saying if he’s back, and he killed that little girl, then he’s a bloody fool. And if he didn’t, I’m going to kill him anyway, because I know he had a hand in Nellie. He or his fucking mates killed her, and that’s reason enough for me,” she paced, red-faced, white spittle gathering in the corners of her mouth. “I would’ve fucked the cunt up for less. I watched him beat Annie for years. If I know anything then he’s right here, where there’s a bed and four

252 walls. Why else do you think the fucking lights are on?” She nodded at the yellow-lit windows.

“Hold up!” Templeton steadied her with his hands. “Just hold up now.

How do you know he killed Nellie? We thought he killed Frances but now you’re saying you might have been wrong? You’re going to stab him on suspicion?”

“Let me the fuck go,” she pushed him off and slapped his face. “I don’t need a boy telling me what not to do. Be it on my own head.”

“I’m not a boy anymore,” he resisted the impulse to reach for his stinging cheek and hold it. “What’s the plan then? Are you going to kick the door down?”

“Would you stand behind me?” Dot challenged. “Why bother? I can still get my hand in and flick the lock through the back. This was our place, wasn’t it?” She lit a cigarette. “Take the rat by surprise. Then I’ll stab him in the jugular.”

“Not if I do it first,” a voice sounded in the dark.

Bob Newham said as he materialised from the shadow of an awning.

“What the Hell are you doing here?” Templeton inquired.

“Didn’t think I’d let them rape my sister and get away with it, did you?” He said and he took his gun out of his coat and admired its gleam under the streetlight.

“Oh, Jesus,” Templeton lit a cigarette in exasperation. He knew instantly that it was Florence. “Why do you think it was Jackie that raped her?”

“They started this war,” Bob pointed at his eye patch. “And I shot

Frank Roache on the road to Lithgow. He’s dead for all I know. And now

253 Jackie’s taken his revenge. He raped my sister and he’s killed Nellie. But I’ll fucking finish it. Mark my words.”

“I heard you Dot,” Templeton could contain himself no longer. “You, and Annie, and Sally and Margot. That night. You were there. She was dead.

You were there!” He went shrill. “You were next to Frances’ body.”

“What are you saying?” Dot went white.

“That was the night Jack Tooth, Frank Roache and Will Worthington raped Florence,” Bob was nodding. He put his hand on Templeton’s shoulder.

“No!”

“No honey,” Dot said gently. “He’s right. I thought that Jackie had killed her too. I was there in the cemetery that night. It was my voice you heard, and your sister’s. But not how you might think.”

“I don’t believe you,” he shook his head. “That was the night they cut my hair. They were worked out about something. I saw Jackie sweating.”

“They’d just raped Florence and left her at Redfern station.”

“Why were you in the cemetery?” His desperate voice demanded.

“We were cutting through the quick way from Newtown to go back to

Enmore Road for the cash and the grog in the flat. But then we saw her – we saw the dead girl – and we panicked,” Dot told him and reached out her arm, her face was contorted with horrified emotion. “Where you thinking that we had something to do with it, all this time? How could you?”

“What was I supposed to think?” Templeton dissolved like a baby onto the cold gutter weeping as though it was the day they had buried his mother.

Dot took him in her arms. “How was I to know Jackie didn’t kill her?” His nose streamed against her belly.

254 “If you had any faith in me…” Dot said, leaning with her mouth pressed against his ear. “How could you have ever have thought?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know. Forgive me.”

Bob put the safety back on his gun. Dot turned her knives from her pockets, the blades clattered on the lip of the gutter. They regarded each other wordlessly. The lights were still on in their old house and Templeton imagined they might continue to blaze throughout the night. He did not care if they did or not. He thought of Frances face down in the graveyard as he had found her; arms bound, blue and stiff-bodied on the grass, bleeding from between her legs. The last thing her eyes had seen was the grave slab. He, that unknown he, he who had forced her down next to the stone and had his way with her made her see. Every fibre within Templeton hoped it was so. He hoped that Frances had not spent her last moments gazing at her killer’s in dumb amazement, looking down into the well-hole of her destiny like a trapped animal. Why had she gone with that man that night, as the papers had suggested? What had compelled her? What ruse, what trickery had been enough to lead her to her end? He thought of the silent cemetery framed by silent bloodwoods, gumtrees and figs and struck a light to his smoke. He did not wish for Bob or Dot to see his wet eyes. The match flickered and he let the teardrop flame burn down to the stub.

255

Quicken, Shine, Fold: Jouissance Émue and the Erotics of Reading Queerly

256

[Barthes] speaks of the quiver, thrill, or shudder of meaning, of meanings that themselves vibrate, gather, loosen, disperse, quicken, shine, fold, mutate, delay, slide, separate, that exert pressure, crack, rupture, fissure, are pulverized. Barthes offers something like a poetics of thinking, which identifies the meaning of subjects with the very mobility of meaning, with the kinetics of consciousness itself…

- Susan Sontag ‘Writing Itself: On Roland Barthes’i

Most often I am in the very darkness of my desire; I know not what it wants… I enter into the night of non-meaning; desire continues to vibrate (the darkness is transluminous), but there is nothing I want to grasp.

- Roland Barthes A Lover’s Discourse: Fragmentsii

257 INTRODUCTION

Something always seems to go wrong somewhere between desire and revolution - Guy Hocquenghem Homosexual Desireiii

Literary theory and queer theory have lately witnessed a resurgent infatuation with Roland Barthes and renewed attention to jouissance.

Jouissance has been a particular and contentious point of focus to scholars in queer theory who are proponents of the ‘antisocial thesis’,1 first put forward by Leo Bersani, and who read jouissance as nihilistic sexual self-shattering: anticommunitarian and the antithesis of relation. However Jane Gallop’s recent retranslation of Barthes’s use of jouissance in The Pleasure of the Text has unearthed an overlooked emotional nuance – jouissance émue2 – with the capacity to transgress and subvert how jouissance has been theorised. In this thesis I contend that jouissance émue, not yet the subject of extensive English scholarship, provides a new way of thinking about the affective encounter with the text that intervenes in debates about queer relationality. What is timely for queer theory about this resurrection is that Barthesian erotics does not offer further readings of texts fixed to the hermeneutics of suspicion3 and its critical methodology of demystifying or exposing hidden layers of oppression in regimes of power. By challenging the psychoanalytic co-option of phallic jouissance I carve a space to reconsider Barthes’s erotics of reading within Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s legacy of paranoid and reparative readings

1 Leo Bersani, Homos, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995). More recently the 2 Jane Gallop, ‘Precocious Jouissance: Roland Barthes, Amatory Maladjustment, and Emotion’, New Literary History: Are You in the Mood? vol.43, (2012): 565-582 3 The ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ was coined by Paul Ricoeur in Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970)

258 in queer studies, and within the broader ‘affective turn’4 in literary and queer studies.5

An erotics of reading is a charting in writing of the queering effects of the reading event that produces eroticised feelings of uncanny contact between the reader and the dead author – across time and space via language – that suspends readers’ sense of secure identity. The hinge of this experience is jouissance, but not the phallocentric, antirelational Lacanian model of jouissance that has dominated queer theory, based around seminal discharge as the sign of heteronormative sexual economy. It is tempting to offer jouissance émue as a queer pleasure, and tout its radical implications for this status alone: pleasure for pleasure’s sake. 6 Yet, as Sara Ahmed argues powerfully, some queer theory advocating the revolutionary potential of queer pleasure risks overlooking two crucial points. The first is that the

“idealisation of pleasure supports a version of sexual freedom that is not equally available to all”7; (for the most part a model of gay male promiscuity that is dominated by the white and able-bodied), and, secondly, that queer pleasures can and have become commodified in the global capitalist economy. “The commodification of queer”, Ahmed writes, “involves histories of exploitation: the leisure industries… depend upon class and racial

4 The affective turn draws on the affect theory work of Baruch Spinoza and Gilles Deleuze. Yet, as Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth remark in their introduction to the recent The Affect Theory Reader, there is “no single, generalizable theory of affect: not yet, and (thankfully) there never will be … [t]here can only ever be infinitely multiple iterations of affect and theories of affect: theories as diverse and singularly delineated as their own highly particular encounters with bodies, affects, worlds.” in Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth, eds. ‘An Inventory of Shimmers’, The Affect Theory Reader, (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010), 4 5 Evident in recent work of feminist cultural theorists and queer theorists such as Sara Ahmed (2006), Lauren Berlant (2000), Ann Cvetkovich (2003), Sianne Ngai (2005), Sally R. Munt (2007), and Heather Love (2007). 6 Even though, as Barthes put it, “who today would call himself a hedonist with a straight face?” in Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), 64 7 Sara Ahmed. ‘Queer Feelings’, in The Routledge Queer Studies Reader, eds. Donald E. Hall and Annamarie Jagose, (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2013), 436

259 hierarchies.”8 The absorption and monetization of queer pleasures, (described as ‘New Homonormativity’9), is based upon the basic driving impetus of capitalism that demands ever expanding markets served up as the politics of neoliberalism. One central question this thesis addresses is how to do an erotics of reading without idealising queer pleasures or flattening difference.

Jouissance émue, which I argue is a social jouissance, encompasses sexualities’ complicated feelings and provides an opening both into intransigent debates on queer sociality and as a line of flight from a paranoid reading position.

Barthes cites the hegemonic compulsion “to arrange all the meanings of a text in a circle around the hearth of denotation” as portentous of a “return to the closure of Western discourse”. 10 He advocates ‘full reading’ as its countermeasure: “the kind in which the reader is nothing less than the one who desires to write, to give himself up to an erotic practice of language.”11 I sift from Barthes’s own jouissance émue, the queer feelings he experienced in his readings of dead authors, (Balzac, Mallarmé, Zola, Flaubert, Proust etc.), and extend a link to the poet Frederico García Lorca’s meditation on the aesthetic concept of duende as a useful analogue which also demands a negotiation with the dead – and the readings of the complex affects12 of

8 Ahmed, ‘Queer Feelings’, 436 9 “The democratic diversity of proliferating forms of sexual dissidence is rejected in favor of the naturalized variation of a fixed minority arrayed around a state-endorsed heterosexual primacy and prestige. This New Homonormativity… adds up to a corporate culture managed by a minimal state, achieved by the neoliberal privatization of affective as well as economic and public life.” Lisa Duggan, ‘The New Homonormativity’, in Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics, eds. Russ Castronovo and Dana D. Nelson (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002), 190 10 Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 7 11 Roland Barthes, ‘Theory of the Text’, in Untying the Text: a Post-Structuralist Reader, ed. Robert Young (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 42 12 Robert Masters classified the categorical distinctions between emotion, feeling and affect: “As I define them, affect is an innately structures, non-cognitive evaluative sensation that may or may not register in consciousness; feeling is affect made conscious, possessing an evaluative capacity that is not only physiologically based, but that is often also

260 duende Lorca proffered. This thesis acknowledges and explores the relationship between queerness and death as a way of bearing negativity at the same time as experiencing (and writing) pleasure; the thesis argues that an erotics of reading can incorporate negativity without foreclosing relationality and its incumbent futurity. It returns to the political erotics of lesbian-feminists to consider different ways in which we might read queerly, opening our bodies to make contact with others across temporalities and geographies.

QUEER DEFINITIONS

Twenty years ago Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick provided the enduring etymology:

“Queer is a continuing moment, movement, motive – recurrent, eddying, troublant. The word ‘queer’ itself means across – it comes from the Indo-

European root twerk, which also yields the German quer (transverse), Latin torquere (to twist), English athwart.”13 And Michael Warner, in Fear of a Queer

Planet, groomed the definition of queer to the much cited: “resistance to regimes of the normal”.14 Queering has since become a substitutive verb for challenging, transgressing or rethinking hegemonic institutions and systems of heteronormativity with interdisciplinary application. “Can we not hear in the resonances of queer protest,” asks Warner, “an objection to the normalization of behavior in this broad sense, and thus to the cultural phenomenon of socialization? If queers, incessantly told to alter their

‘behavior’, can be understood as protesting not just the normal behavior of

psychologically (and sometimes relationally) oriented; and emotion is psychosocially constructed, dramatized feeling.” Robert Masters, ‘Compassionate Wrath: Transpersonal Approaches to Anger’, available online http://www.atpweb.org/pdf/masters.pdf, accessed 16 June 16, 2013 13 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), viii 14 Michael Warner ed., Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), xxvi

261 the social but the idea of normal behavior, they will bring skepticism to the methodologies founded on that idea.”15 Queer, as a critical position of anti- normative alignment, therefore has the potential for inclusive accessibility based upon a posture of anti-essentialist skepticism and anti-homophobic demystification.

Sharon Marcus, in ‘Queer Theory for Everyone’, uses ‘queer’ to indicate “the multiple ways that sexual practice, sexual fantasy, and sexual identity fail to line up consistently”:16 same-sex desire is dethroned from the definitional centre of the term but that does not necessarily presuppose that queer has been stripped of its libidinal, desirous or genital charge. Donald E. Hall and

Annamarie Jagose, in their introduction to The Routledge Queer Studies Reader, lay out queer theory’s investment in “non-normativity and anti- identitarianism, coupled with its refusal to define its proper field of operation in relation to any fixed content”. The result is that whist queer theory remains

“prominently organized around sexuality, it is potentially attentive to any socially consequential difference that contributes to regimes of sexual normalization.”17

This dissent from orientation and rejection of fixity demands individuated caveats and attendance to the specificities of how, where, and who is invoking ‘queer’. Sedgwick explains in ‘Queer and Now’:

A word so fraught as “queer” is – fraught with so many social and personal histories of exclusion, violence, defiance, excitement – never can only denote; nor even can it only connote; a part of its experimental force as a speech act is the way in

15 Warner, Fear of a Queer Planet, xxvii 16 Sharon Marcus, ‘Queer Theory for Everyone: A Review Essay’, Signs, vol.31, no.1, (Autumn 2005): 196 17 Donald E. Hall and Annamarie Jagose, ‘Introduction’, in The Routledge Queer Studies Reader, (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2013), xvi

262 which it dramatized locutionary position itself. Anyone’s use of “queer” about themselves means differently from their use of it about someone else.” This is true (as it might also be true of “lesbian” or “gay”) because of the violently different connotative evaluations that seem to cluster around the category. But “gay” and “lesbian” still present themselves (however delusively) as objective, empirical categories governed by empirical rules of evidence (however contested). “Queer” seems to hinge more radically and explicitly on a person’s undertaking particular, performative acts of experimental self-perception and filiation. A hypothesis worth making explicit: that there are more important senses in which “queer” can signify only when attached to the first person.18

The senses in which queer can signify are necessarily self-identified. To read queerly affects the body in ways that cannot be administered categorically.

Rather than loosen the primary organisation of queer around sexuality, a broadening of preset meanings of what constitutes sexual practices might be more fruitful. Sexual feelings spread across myriad registers of meaning when bodies, imagined or real, touch each other, creating a queer topography and temporality, such as in a particular experience of reading, an engagement with a text.

PARANOID AND REPARATIVE READINGS

How can an erotics of reading that recuperates jouissance émue take a turn from the paranoid and be recast in the reparative critical mood following Eve

Kosofsky Sedgwick? In her essay ‘Truth and Consequences: On Paranoid and

Reparative Reading’, Heather Love explains that the effect Sedgwick’s work had upon her and upon other academics in queer literary studies crystalised in feelings of ‘enablement’, particularly Sedgwick’s ‘Paranoid Reading and

Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay

18 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Queer and Now’, in The Routledge Queer Studies Reader, eds. Donald E. Hall and Annamarie Jagose, (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2013), 9

263 Is About You’.19 Yet, there was a commonality of feeling amongst other academics given voice in Love’s question; “I am enabled – but to do what?”20

Sedgwick points out a now seemingly self-evident insight into systematised oppression: “What is illuminated by an understanding of paranoia is not how homosexuality works,” she writes, “but how homophobia and heterosexism work”.21 Sedgwick’s project to ameliorate some of the wounds of homophobia through reparative reading, in a sense gives license to explorations of a different set of affects, which pivot from the aggressive-defensive stance of paranoid readings to something else. Paranoia, or the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’, she recognises “may have made it less rather than more possible to unpack the local, contingent relations between any given piece of knowledge and its narrative/epistemological entailments for the seeker, knower, or teller.”22 Her approach acknowledges the weaknesses of a position that hinges on the demystification of oppression as a preventative strategy. “Subversive and demystifying parody, suspicious archaeologies of the present, the detection of hidden patterns of violence and their exposure… these infinitely doable and teachable protocols of unveiling have become the common currency of cultural and historicist studies”, however the “broad consensual sweep of such methodological assumptions” may have the unintended consequence of enervating the “gene pool of literary-critical perspectives and skills.”23 Sedgwick’s central question is: How and why did paranoia move

19 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You’, in Touching Feeling, (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 123-151 20 Heather Love, ‘Truth and Consequences: On Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading’, Criticism – Honoring Eve, vol.52, no.2, (2010): 236 21 Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading, Reparative Reading’, 126 22 Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading’, 122 23 Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading’, 144

264 from being an object of antihomophobic theory to, by the mid-1980s, becoming the methodology?24

Using the work of psychoanalyst Melanie Klein and affect theorist Silvan

Tomkins, Sedgwick lays out the conceptual framework for what she calls the paranoid position and its governing attitude that “there must be no bad surprises”.25 Whilst paranoid and reparative readings are “likely to be based on deep pessimism”, only the paranoid epistemology, Sedgwick argues, has made so “thorough a practice of disavowing its affective motive and force” that it has convincingly misrepresented itself to be “the very stuff of truth.”26

Paranoid readings are locked into inevitabilities whilst reparative readings have the capacity to accord for contingencies. She argues that the reparative reading position “undertakes a different range of affects, ambitions and risks” from the paranoid at the same time being “no less attached to a project of survival”.27 The problem with staking out a reparative reading is a prohibitive vocabulary: the language of affect has been nullified as “sappy, aestheticizing, defensive, anti-intellectual, or reactionary”.28 Reparative reading suffers from a chronic problem of credibility. “The monopolistic program of paranoid knowing”, writes Sedgwick, “systematically disallows any explicit recourse to reparative motives… [which] once they become explicit, are inadmissible in paranoid theory both because they are about pleasure (‘merely aesthetic’) and because they are frankly ameliorative (‘merely reformist’).” She asks: “What makes pleasure and amelioration so mere?”29

24 Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading’, 126 25 Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading’, 130 26 Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading’, 138 27 Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading’, 150 28 Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading’, 150 29 Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading’, 144

265 Paranoia, Sedgwick draws directly from Tomkins, is a ‘strong theory’, an affect theory of “humiliation or humiliation-fear theory”30 which grows in power according to the “size and topology of the domain that it organizes”31, in other words how much territory it covers and how simplified it can become. Affect theory, Sedgwick explains, is “a mode of selective scanning and amplification”.32 Strong theory is frequently tautological; “an insistence that everything means one thing somehow permits a sharpened sense of all the ways there are of meaning it.”33 And strong theory lends itself to pedagogy all too happily; “as a locus of reflexive mimeticism, paranoia is nothing if not teachable.” 34 The fruits of intersection come from those occasions where

“strong theoretical constructs interact with weak ones in an ecology of knowing – an exploration that obviously can’t proceed without a respectful interest in weak as well as strong theoretical acts.”35 Sedgwick evokes a metaphor of clasped hands, seeing the history of literary criticism as a

“repertoire of alternative models” which allows the weak and the strong to

“interdigitate”.36 An erotics of reading recognises the paranoid theorisation of phallocentric jouissance and in that recognition “glimpses the lineaments of other possibilities.”37 It speaks back to Love’s call: I am enabled – but to do what?

Casting an erotics after Sedgwick, I am enabled to encounter the stirred feelings that Barthes called “supposedly inexpressible, apparently ineffable”38 that simmer in jouissance émue and to consider how to read queerly in a different way.

30 Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading’, 133 31 Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading’, 134 32 Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading’, 135 33 Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading’, 136 34 Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading’, 136 35 Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading’, 145 36 Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading’, 145 37 Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading’, 146 38 Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, viii

266 JOUISSANCE ÉMUE

In 2012 as part of her study of sexual dysfunction as queer temporality, Jane

Gallop published an essay ‘Precocious Jouissance: Roland Barthes, Amatory

Maladjustment, and Emotion’, in which she reread Roland Barthes’s 1973 Le plaisir du texte. 39 Her retranslation of jouissance notes “the complete parenthesis as it appears in the original… (jouissance précoce, retardée, émue, etc.)”.40 Gallop’s argument is that Barthes’s theory of textual jouissance is akin to premature ejaculation as the experience of jouissance “does not come in its own time, does not depend on any ripening, goes off at one go”.41 Barthes’s radicalism, she claims, comes from his recognition and “affirmation of sexual otherness beyond perversion to dysfunction.”42 (Dysfunction, a lot less sexy than perversion, is seldom as welcome in celebratory surveys of polymorphous sexualities.) Although précoce or ‘precocious’ is the modifier that intrigues Gallop, amidst the other bracketed nuances she also dwells on

émue or ‘emotional’ jouissance. Jouissance émue may be unfamiliar to English readers, as it is omitted in the original 1975 Richard Miller translation.43

What is emotional jouissance and what does it look like? Émue translates somewhat troublesomely. Gallop gives the definition as the state of being

“moved, touched, excited, nervous, agitated, filled with emotion, emotional, trembling with emotion”.44 She muses that since it might be assumed that “all jouissance trembled with emotion, this remains somewhat puzzling.”45 She imagines émue as “something like orgasm accompanied by crying, or maybe

39 Jane Gallop, ‘Precocious Jouissance: Roland Barthes, Amatory Maladjustment, and Emotion’, New Literary History: Are You in the Mood? vol.43, (2012): 565-582 40 Gallop, ‘Precocious Jouissance’, 571 41 Gallop, ‘Precocious Jouissance’, 569 42 Gallop, ‘Precocious Jouissance’, 569 43 Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975) 44 Gallop, ‘Precocious Jouissance’, 572 45 Gallop, ‘Precocious Jouissance’, 572

267 even bursting into tears instead of coming”.46 Jouissance émue appears to

Gallop slippery, opaque, something she does not understand47 – but which functions like a “synecdoche for the fleeting moment when Barthes imagines emotion as radical, antinormative sexual disturbance.” 48 Thus, I argue, jouissance émue could be an experience of feeling that disrupts the cultural narrative of sexuality and displaces desire for the proper object: what happens to the subject in the space of pleasure that cohabits with tears?

This ephemeral émue experience goes against the grain of phallic jouissance.

Barthes writes: “emotion is even, perhaps, the slyest of losses, for it contradicts the general rule that would assign jouissance a fixed form: strong, violent, crude: something inevitably muscular, strained, phallic.”49 Barthes was not a feminist, Gallop is at pains to make clear,50 and his “critique of phallocentrism” springs not from a “celebration of female sexuality”, but rather is a product of “an appreciation of nonnormative male sexuality”.51 Yet, she argues, that does not negate the capacity of jouissance émue to be more than merely “a mildly transgressive variant” of jouissance – indeed it might just be the “most subversive”.52

How can this non-phallic jouissance be represented without diminishing its force? I ask how we might articulate jouissance émue given the inescapable vocabulary of ontological and epistemological sexual codification invested in non-phallic sexualities’ ‘invisibility’? In other words, how to speak of subversive pleasure when the organising terms of pleasure and the model of

46 Gallop, ‘Precocious Jouissance’, 572 47 “I understand the words jouissance émue, but I really do not know what Barthes is referring to.” Gallop, ‘Precocious Jouissance’, 572 48 Gallop, ‘Precocious Jouissance’, 581 49 Roland Barthes quoted in Gallop. ‘Precocious Jouissance’, 574 50 “Much as I love Barthes, however, he was no feminist.” Gallop, ‘Precocious Jouissance’, 575 51 Gallop, ‘Precocious Jouissance’, 575 52 Gallop, ‘Precocious Jouissance’, 573

268 pleasure is phallic; how to redress the structural sexism inherent to jouissance so it might be resignified in a non-misogynistic queer reading.

“Any attempt to understand female sexual desire on the models provided by male sexuality and pleasure”, writes Elizabeth Grosz, “risks producing a new model that is both fundamentally reliant on (heterosexual) norms of sexual complementarity or opposition, and reducing female sexuality and pleasure to models, goals, and orientations appropriate for men and not women.” 53That jouissance émue might be the most subversive stripe of jouissance is a claim with critical repercussions. To what extent does emotional jouissance destabilise the old model of jouissance? Gallop theorises that it is “emotion that spoils the moment, emotion that ruins the mood.

Whatever it might actually refer to, perhaps jouissance émue could suggest a queer temporality of emotion, one at odds with the dominant mood.”54

Whatever it might actually refer to, perhaps… Gallop’s vagueness reflects

Barthes’s characteristic evasiveness, and also a capaciousness begging speculation.

If we start with Gallop’s claim that jouissance émue might encompass a queer temporality of emotion, what are the implications for an erotics of reading?

Judith Halberstam gives a definition of queer temporality in In a Queer Time and Place: “Queer uses of time and space develop, at least in part, in opposition to the institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction… If we try to think about queerness as an outcome of strange temporalities… we detach queerness from sexual identity and come closer to understanding

Foucault’s comment in ‘Friendship as a Way of Life’ that ‘homosexuality

53 Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time and Perversion: The Politics of Bodies, (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1995), 188 54 Gallop, ‘Precocious Jouissance’, 581

269 threatens people as a ‘way of life’ rather than as a way of having sex’”.55

Halberstam argues for the radical, resistant potential of queer subcultures.

Particularly their ability to generate “alternative temporalities by allowing their participants to believe that their futures can be imagined according to logics that lie outside of those paradigmatic markers of life experience – namely, birth, marriage, reproduction, and death.”56 This is a logic of futurity outside of reproduction, indeed, possibly outside of production.

Jouissance émue is the effect of a queer temporality of emotion disruptive to capitalist commodifications of pleasure and also to the heteronormative structuration of pleasure as reproductive, (or at least possessive of the capacity to be reproductive). Addressing death’s presence in the time of pleasure creates in an erotics of reading an alternative temporality, forging connections between bodies through and across the heterogeneous field of the text. The reader yields to the text, ecstatic, but yielding is not a clear-cut dynamic: the reader desires to write back, to take reading and writing and do away with the distinction between reader and author, to “’crush’ them into each other”.57 The birth of the reader at the expense of the death of the author then: are we back to this old question? But if we refuse to anchor meaning in authorial intentionality then can readers’ chains of associations come unstuck? What if this is not a rejection of authorship, as it once was defined, but a different way of encountering the author, leveraged on the fulcrum of the queer erotic death drive: an orgasm accompanied by crying?

55 Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, (New York and London: New York University Press, 2005), 1 56 Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place, 2 57 Roland Barthes, The Grain of the Voice: Interviews 1962–1980, trans. Linda Coverdale, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985), 141

270 When Barthes felt the skin of his own language rubbing against the skin of another’s with the erotic interchangeability of fingers and words58 – the trembling he experienced, I argue, was an emotional jouissance. This emotion stemmed from the double contact of feeling desired by the author, and desiring the other in return and offering them gestures of tenderness

(enwrapping, caressing, brushing up against). Is this the real radical potential of jouissance: bursting into tears instead of/during coming – the track of orgasm derailed, delayed by transient emotive intensity? (In Swedish there is a particular word, ‘Gråtrunka’, for ‘crying while masturbating’59.) Who or what are the feelings for – is it the erotics of intimacy between authors and readers – and how might we write about it when we feel it? Self-shattering has been jouissance’s explicatory fiction, a metaphor for the violent unsettling of mind, that can and often does have physiological symptoms. A person does not split into pieces, although, like the ache in a phantom limb, it can feel real.

What if jouissance émue is a kind of antirational paroxysm of longing for a dead author, whom you’ve never met, produced by the ecstasy of their language?

In The Pleasure of the Text, Barthes asks the reader to “agree to recognize bliss wherever a disturbance occurs in amatory adjustment” 60 which Gallop interprets as by offering this concordant, he is “trying to push the reader, or himself, beyond his prejudices”.61 If we are to enter into Barthes’s bargain then it must follow that we recognise jouissance in the disturbance of desire,

58 “Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.” Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, 73 59 Gråtrunka as defined by Urban Dictionary, http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Gråtrunka, accessed 16 April 2013 60 Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, 25 61 Gallop, ‘Precocious Jouissance’, 569

271 and subsequently get past our own presuppositions as to the conditions that generate desire. Jouissance émue challenges the assumptions made by queer theorists working in an anti-relational psychoanalytic paradigm that the death drive figuration of queer jouissance countermands affects of affinity: put simply, that jouissance is antisocial. Does Barthes’s languorous62 rejection of vouloir-saisir, (his “disinclination to possess the beloved”63 according to Ellis

Hanson), reach out to a kind of queer intimacy with the dead through the unquenchable desires kindled by reading? In the queer emotional temporality in which intimacy with dead authors occurs – and we might use duende as a model – it is irrelevant to speak of positivity or negativity.

JOUISSANCE AND THE ANTI-SOCIAL THESIS

Interpretations of self-shattering are highly problematized by gender, race and class, and raise issues of identification, recognition, and the ontological intelligibility of subjects, foregrounded by Sedgwick’s critically queer politics of self-affiliation, and pertinent to contemporary queer theory debate, which

Juana Maria Rodríguez claims have become “enmeshed in an ongoing ruckus about sociality.”64 The relational or the social has been one of the most prominent sites of tension in queer studies over the last decade, particularly how the various interpretations of queer as a force of self-shattering, are often played against scholarship that focuses on queer ‘world-making’ practices: the affects and affinities of queer socialities, bonds and kinship forgings. The

‘mission’ of the antisocial thesis, as expressed by Tim Dean, is to face head-on the homophobic accusations that homosexuality is “sterile, unproductive,

62 “In languor, I merely wait: ‘I knew no end to desiring you.’” Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 155-156 63 Ellis Hanson, ‘The Languorous Critic’, in New Literary History, vol.43, (2012): 553 64 Juana Maria Rodríguez. ‘Queer Bonds’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol.17, no.2-3, (2011): 332

272 anti-family, and death-driven”, and to “heroically identify with those negative stereotypes in order to short circuit the social in its present form.”65

Hall and Jagose give their summary of the antisocial thesis as a line of argument heavily indebted to psychoanalytic paradigms and which

“emphasizes that sexuality is a psychic rather than a social formation and therefore promotes an anti-relational, antisocial and negative ethos that detaches sex from political expressions of alliance and community to emphasize instead the shattering effects of sexual desire and the drive’s violent resistance to the ego’s fantasy of identity.”66 To view queer modalities along an axis of negative/positive as though they must be necessarily mutually exclusive overlooks their fruitfully messy intersections.67

Lee Edelman’s spearheading antirelational argument is that jouissance is an unacknowledged part of the social order, and any access to jouissance must be abjected onto queerness to preserve the façade of political optimism and to keep muzzled any exposé of the pervasive western cultural denial of death.

Edelman sees that Lacanian jouissance is twofold. The first jouissance

‘congeals’ identity around the fantasy of attaining the object of one’s desire and gets attached to the yearning to know (à savoir). The consequences of which solidify in “identity as mortification”; re-imposing the structures of significance from which jouissance is originally trying to break loose. Yet the second dimension of jouissance undoes the “fetishistic investments” in

65 Tim Dean, ‘The Antisocial Homosexual’, in Caserio, Robert L., Tim Dean, Lee Edelman, Judith Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz, ‘The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory.’ PMLA 121, no.3 (2006): 827 66 Hall and Jagose, ‘Introduction’, in The Routledge Queer Studies Reader, xvii 67 Joshua J. Weiner and Damon Young discussed the reparative aims of the ‘Queer Bonds’ conference, held at UC, Berkeley, in February 2009, to quell the “acrimony of the debate around the so-called antisocial thesis”(224), and present their ameliorative argument in the special issue of GLQ. Weiner and Young, ‘Queer Bonds’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol.17, no.2-3, (2011): 223-241

273 pursuing the lost object by dissolving the “solidity of every object”.68 That mobile site of queerness is where the “Symbolic confronts what its discourse is incapable of knowing, which is also the place of a jouissance from which it can never escape.”69 What “our queerness” can offer, Edelman believes, is “an insistence on the haunting excess that this nothingness entails, an insistence on the negativity that pierces the fantasy screen of futurity”.70 Edelman would have queers wittingly occupy that space of abjection, which, he believes, evacuates utopian aspiration bound up in social/sexual interrelationships.

José Esteban Muñoz frames his rejection of Edelman in the context of

Sedgwick’s address of paranoia. Muñoz’s work on futurity and utopia comes under frequent attack from proponents of the antisocial whom he confronts with this rejoinder: “Shouting down utopia is an easy move… Social theory that invokes the concept of utopia has always been vulnerable to charges of naïveté, impracticality, or lack of rigor.”71 His work on utopia, he claims, “is attuned to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s critique of the way in which paranoid reading practices have become so nearly automatic in queer studies that they have, in many ways, ceased to be critical. In queer studies, antiutopianism, more often than not intertwined with antirelationality, has led many scholars to an impasse wherein they cannot see futurity for the life of them. Utopian readings are aligned with what Sedgwick would call reparative hermeneutics.”72 Whilst an erotics of reading is not explicitly utopian it is

68 Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004), 25 69 Edelman, No Future, 26 70 Edelman, No Future, 31 71 José Esteban Muñoz, ‘Thinking Beyond Antirelationality and Antiutopianism in Queer Critique’ In Caserio, Robert L., Tim Dean, Lee Edelman, Judith Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz, ‘The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory.’ PMLA 121, no.3 (2006): 825 72 Muñoz, ‘Thinking Beyond Antirelationality’, 826

274 concerned with reparative futurity; it imagines queer pleasure, the pleasure of the text, as part of a relational future.

Like Muñoz, Elizabeth Freeman in her work Time Binds: Queer Temporalities,

Queer Histories, positions herself with Sedgwick to challenge Edelman, whose antisociality she sees as “somewhat akin to Eve Sedgwick’s notion of paranoid criticism: it’s about solving the problem ahead of time, about feeling more evolved than one’s context.”73 Freeman situates her theorization of

‘erotohistoriography’ as a reparative reading after Sedgwick, concerned with

“queer social practices, especially those involving enjoyable bodily sensations” and how they might generate “forms of time consciousness – even historical consciousness” so queers might envision themselves “haunted by bliss and not just by trauma: residues of positive affect (idylls, utopias, memories of touch) might be available for queer counter- (or para-) historiographies.” 74 Freeman is committed to charting our relationships with the dead and acknowledging the depth of queer trauma and mourning, death and celebration, the toll of psychic violence and the legacy of AIDS. She sees her work on camp performance as dealing with a “kind of historicist jouissance, a frisson of dead bodies on live ones, fading constructs on emergent ones.”75 Her portrayal of queers as ‘close readers’ of one another reinforces my claim that jouissance émue is a textual jouissance that recognises the proximity of death in mortality, an ‘erotics with the dead’, yet does not stake itself inevitably and immovably in negativity.

73 Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010), xiii 74 Freeman, Time Binds, 120 75 Freeman, Time Binds, 120

275 “All supposedly educated people have,” according to Freud, “ceased to believe officially that the dead can become visible as spirits, and have made any such appearances dependent on improbable and remote conditions.”76

These uncanny feelings take on contours, have form, they possess a shape even though they will not stand up to the evidentiary-based system of rational enquiry. How do we limn the feelings of haunted readings?

Australian poet Dorothy Porter suggests in On Passion: “We forget how mysterious, verging on the supernatural, reading is… A book written by a dead author – and most are (indeed there will come a time when I’m a dead author myself) – is nothing less than a haunted house, which lures the reader into a conversation with a loquacious, enchanting ghost.”77 The exclusion of the dead, from discourse, from emotional life, has not always been the case, and indeed, is not the case in many non-Western cultures. And, with the exclusion, denial even, of death in modern Western culture, there is little queerer than the taboo of necrophiliac longing. Baudrillard reminds us, “it is not normal to be dead, and this is new. To be dead is an unthinkable anomaly; nothing else is as offensive as this. Death is a delinquency, and an incurable deviancy.”78 We are, and it will come as no surprise, deeply uncomfortable with the presence of the dead.

ABJECTION

Abjection figures as the “threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between subject and object or between self and other”,79

76 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, trans. J. Strachey, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol.17, (London: Hogarth Press, 1919), 242-243 77 Dorothy Porter, On Passion, (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2010), 87-88 78 Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death [1976], trans. Iain Hamilton Grant, (London: SAGE, 1993), 126 79 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. L. Roudiez, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 1

276 according to Julia Kristeva. This is what happens in the moment of jouissance or the feeling of being in the presence of duende. The abject preserves what

“existed in the archaism of pre-objectal relationship, in the immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body in order to be – maintaining that night in which the outline of the signified thing vanishes and where only the imponderable affect is carried out.”80 At the most simple level, a deconstruction of heterosexual subjectivity can occur as readers’ erotic experience with the text is decoupled from their ‘real world’ identity. Regardless of whether the reader ‘identifies’ with elements of the text, the relationship of self and other and the oppositional framework by which they are normally regulated, becomes muddled by the intensity of the reader’s relationship to the text.

Jouissance is dogged by the terror of excess, excess that shows the body’s precarious capacity to collapse into the outside, for the contours to fold and be inundated by the infinite. The erotic pull of such deliquescence is jarred by the shock of dismemberment: “Does the text have human form, is it a figure, an anagram of the body?” Barthes asked. “Yes,” he answered himself, “but of our erotic body”.81 An anagram of the erotic body, disordered, rearranged, like Picasso’s Étreinte – is dreamlike, grotesque, confounding in its malleability. In the temporality of abjection Kristeva casts the figure of the

“deject”, a stray; “one by whom the abject exists”. 82 This is a queer temporality, I argue, and the deject a queer figure – even if that is not the vocabulary Kristeva used. If it is possible to see the text as an anagram of our erotic body – the parts all mixed up – Kristeva explains, that the “eroticization

80 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 10 81 Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, 17 82 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 8

277 of abjection, and perhaps abjection to the extent that it is already eroticized, is an attempt at stopping the hemorrhage: a threshold before death, a halt or a respite?”83 The ambivalent repulsion and attraction to the eroticised abject inherent to jouissance is characterised by Leo Bersani when he writes that the

“envied sexuality is the lived jouissance of dying, as if we thought we might

‘consent’ to death if we could enter it orgasmically”.84 The bridge from

Barthes to Lorca is perhaps best articulated in A Lover’s Discourse microchapter ‘s’abîmer / to be engulfed’, where Barthes writes:

In love with death? An exaggeration to say, with Keats, half in love with easeful death: death liberated from dying. Then I have this fantasy: a gentle hemorrhage which flows from no specific point in my body, an almost immediate consumption… I conceive of death beside me: I conceive of it according to an unthought logic, I drift outside of the fatal couple which links life and death by opposing them to each other.85

DUENDE

Duende, like jouissance émue, is an aesthetic concept of intense feeling that has its own ungovernable temporality, yet – perhaps due to its relative obscurity – has never been the site of psychoanalytic investment. The duende is an ancient Andalusian daemonic force that ruptures the fabric of time and space in a moment of unbearable emotional overflow produced in the reader’s/audience member’s experience of a text. It haunts the cante jondo, or, the ‘deep song’ brought to Andalusia from the Orient by Gypsies, as the poet

Frederico GarcÍa Lorca explained in the 1933 Buenos Aires lecture ‘Play and

Theory of the Duende’86. “All arts are capable of duende”, Lorca claims, all the duende needs is “a living body”, a being who is born, and necessarily will

83 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 54-55 84 Leo Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave? and Other Essays, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 61 85 Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 11-12 86 Frederico GarcÍa Lorca, In Search of Duende, trans. C. Maurer, (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1998), 56-72

278 die, but who can fleetingly “open their contours against an exact present”87 – to open their body to intimacy with the dead.

The duende is a daemonic force and an individualised demon, complex and rambunctious. The duende requires a living vessel to bring it forth, just as abjection requires a mimesis of passions. Much is asked from the duende- bearer, often eventually their life, (Lorca notes that the masters of the siguiriya mostly “destroyed their own hearts in storms of feeling. Almost all died of heart attacks, bursting like enormous cicadas”88). Indeed, it is mortal struggle that ignites it; “the duende enjoys fighting the creator on the very rim of the well… the duende wounds. In the healing of that wound, which never closes, lie the invented, strangest qualities of a man’s work.”89

Duende, the Andalusian cousin, offers us a way of looking at the affective capacity of jouissance émue outside of a stymieing psychoanalytic paradigm.

Duende shows us that it is possible to coterminously experience a nuanced emotional jouissance that acknowledges death’s presence, through desire for the uncanny spectral author, and lends to jouissance émue an affect touchstone.

CONCLUSION

The first chapter charts Jane Gallop’s ‘Precocious Jouissance’ essay and takes her findings on émue to a rereading of Roland Barthes’s own jouissance and

87 Lorca, In Search of Duende, 63 88 Lorca, In Search of Duende, 26. Lorca’s image of bursting cicadas recalls Maurice Saillet’s account of watching Artaud perform his poem Centre-Mère et Patron-Minet in 1947. Saillet described Artaud’s “impetuous hands [which] fluttered like a pair of birds around his face; when his raucous voice, broken by sobs and stumbling tragically, began to declaim his splendid – but practically inaudible poems, it was as if we were drawn into the danger zone, sucked up by that black sun, consumed by that ‘overall combustion’ of a body that was itself a victim of the flames of the spirit”, in Maurice Saillet, ‘Close to Artaud’, Evergreen Review, (May-June, 1960), quoted in Samuel R. Delany, Longer views: extended essays, (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011), 6 89 Lorca, In Search of Duende, 67

279 an inquiry into the place of the phallus in economies of pleasure. The second chapter examines the antisocial thesis of queer theory and the possibility of a relational jouissance involving connection rather than self-shattering. It explores the queer relationships with negativity, abjection, and the death drive, and asserts the possibility of feeling, through the text, the uncanny erotic presence of the dead author, and poses the aesthetic concept of duende as an analogue. The final chapter situates an erotics of reading within the greater affective turn in literary studies and braids the lesbian-feminist mobilisation of the first person erotic tradition into understandings of future possibilities for reading queerly.

280 CHAPTER ONE

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire. The emotion derives from a double contact: on the one hand, a whole activity of discourse discreetly, indirectly focuses upon a single signified, which is “I desire you,” and releases, nourishes, ramifies it to the point of explosion (language experiences orgasm upon touching itself); on the other hand, I enwrap the other in my words, I caress, brush against, talk up this contact… - Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourseiv

In 1992 D.A. Miller turned his attention to Barthes’s “willingness to trade the self-appointed securities of the personal for the disorienting effects – of intermittence, plurality, violation, exhaustion”, 90 and, in the past decade,

Chih-wei Chang has discussed the queer potential in encountering the traces of Roland Barthes’s anagrammatic erotic body in the infinite textual play of the writerly.91 Chang’s work is symptomatic of a recent return in literary theory to Barthes’s ideas, as well as to a gradual appropriation of Barthes as a queer thinker. Ulf Schulenberg notes the ‘transgression of transgression’ impulse in Barthes’s late-life’s désir d’écrire 92 that turned Barthes from criticism; Anca Parvulescu calls out Barthes’s work on positing ‘neutral’ (Le

Neutre) as “the name of the faceless, appropriately self-effacing center of an epoch we have learned to call ‘poststructuralist’”;93 and Brian L. Ott hails movement toward an erotics of reading and a relocation of pleasure in media

90 D.A. Miller, Bringing out Roland Barthes (Berkley: University of California Press, 1992), 50. Miller also wrote that the academic disinclination to address Barthes’s homosexuality amounted to a homophobic reception of his work. 91 Chih-wei Chang. ‘Reading the Erotic Body of Roland Barthes’s S/Z’, Papers on Language and Literature, vol.46, no.1, (Winter 2010): 25-61 92 Ulf Schulenberg. ‘From Redescription to Writing: Rorty, Barthes and the Idea of a Literary Culture’, New Literary History, vol.38, no.2, (Spring 2007): 371-387 93 Anca Parvulescu, ‘The Professor’s Desire’, diacritics, vol.37, no1, (Spring 2007): 32-39

281 studies.94 Such a field of work sets the stage for a consideration of Barthes’s central ideas.

This chapter begins by looking at Jane Gallop’s work on jouissance that includes an overlooked emotional element (jouissance émue), and asking what are the implications for queer literary theory? Does this new understanding of

émue change the way we read Lacanian jouissance as interpreted by Barthes and his distinctions between plaisir and jouissance and the readerly and writerly text? Once we track the historic negation of women’s jouissance, or

‘jouissance of the other’ (jouissance de l’autre) as ‘un-representable’ in psychoanalytic theory, we can then fold in Judith Butler’s crucial work on the transferability of the phallus and the ramifications for nonheterosexual desire.

In conclusion, this chapter returns to Gallop’s long tradition of Barthesian scholarship, and in particular to her suggestion that Barthes famously pronounced the death of the author, only in fact, in his later work, to resurrect the author through his own desire, his own erotics of reading – an erotics with the dead.

Jouissance émue possesses an intimacy, hitherto overlooked, of an uncommon sort between the living and the dead, and an erotics of reading treads the queer liminal space in dichotomies of reader/author, dead/live, real/imagined – it enables erotic pulse through the language of dead authors.

Barthes viewed himself as just a small part of the infinitude of language woven into “a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture”95 and was open about his textual fetish: “this fetish desires me. The text

94 Brian L. Ott, ‘(Re)Locating Pleasure in Media Studies: Toward an Erotics of Reading’, Communication and Critical /Cultural Studies, vol.1, no.2, (2004): 194-212 95 Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, Image-Music-Text, trans. S. Heath (London: Fontana Paperbacks, 1977), 4

282 chooses me”.96 Jouissance émue disturbs both orgasm-as-usual and the text itself. Readings gash and scrape slalom-style: “I read on, I skip, I look up, I dip in again”,97 writes Barthes. It is the ‘will to bliss’ of a text, where the language “attempts to overflow”,98 and yet the pleasure is “irreducible to physiological need”99 as it swells, like loosening seawater.100 Barthes’s body has a cognizance of its own that irrupts the text when it “pursues its own ideas”, 101 but it is the imbrication of bodily impulsions that bring forth pleasure: the articulation of the body. Barthes called such playfulness

‘cruising’ for a reader, and I imagine him lolling against a toilet cubicle, A

Lover’s Discourse outstretched.

IT CRACKLES, IT CARESSES

In her 2012 essay, ‘Precocious Jouissance: Roland Barthes, Amatory

Maladjustment, and Emotion’, Jane Gallop reread Le plaisir du texte and remembered something that she had felt as a graduate student: that Barthes’s writing was an “affirmation of the reader’s perversity” and a potent illustration of a “queer theory of literature, a queer literary theory”.102 Gallop writes how she flirted with teaching Le plaisir du texte on a sexuality course syllabus abreast Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s A Dialogue on Love, but for the purpose of her essay settled on “reading this one little book as a theory of sexuality”.103 Yet there is a crucial difference in her reading of Barthes that

96 Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), 27 97 Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, 12 98 Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, 13 99 Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, 17 100 Like the lines of Pablo Neruda’s erotic poem: “My arm scarcely manages to encircle the thin/ new-moon line of your waist:/ in love you loosened yourself like sea water” in Pablo Neruda, ‘In You the Earth’, Pablo Neruda, The Captain’s Verses, trans. Donald D. Walsh, (New York: New Directions, 2004), 3 101 Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, 17 102 Jane Gallop, ‘Precocious Jouissance: Roland Barthes, Amatory Maladjustment, and Emotion’, New Literary History: Are You in the Mood? vol.43, (2012): 565 103 Gallop, ‘Precocious Jouissance’, 566

283 problematises Richard Miller’s interpretation of jouissance and subsequent theorisation based on his translation familiar to English readers of The

Pleasure of the Text. Gallop claims Miller occluded a French nuance of jouissance, émue – or emotion – specifically ‘emotional jouissance’.

Émue disturbs masculinist definitions of jouissance. We can trace the meanings and associations that have solidified around jouissance in English, summarised by Richard Howard in his foreword to the Miller translation.

Jouissance was inferred as ‘knowing’ in the Bible, and Howard writes: “…the

Stuarts called it ‘dying’, the Victorians called it ‘spending’, and we call it

‘coming.”104 Jouir, to come, is embedded in the root of the word itself, yet orgasm, at least in a contemporary Western context, does not cover the dimensions of jouissance. Although, whilst jouissance is and is not orgasm, jouissance has received a great deal of queer theoretical attention and, curiously, orgasm has not. Annamarie Jagose begins from this point of realisation in Orgasmology, and ventures it is the influence of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, “both of whom associate orgasm with the normalizing forces their critical projects differently encounter”105 that makes queer theory skittish around orgasm. Whilst emphasising Foucault and Deleuze’s dissimilarities, she notes that, “their respective framings of pleasure and desire coincide in figuring orgasm in the service of the forces of social control.”106

I contend that whilst jouissance fits into the paradigm of regulative sexuality, jouissance émue problematises the figuration. It does not take an erotic shape familiar to us. The erotic is, as Audre Lorde evinces, “firmly rooted in the

104 Richard Howard, ‘A Note on the Text’, in Roland Barthes The Pleasure of the Text, vi 105 Annamarie Jagose, Orgasmology, (Durham and London, 2013), 2 106 Jagose, Orgasmology, 3

284 power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling.” 107 Jouissance émue gestures toward Barthes’s explanation of tendresse, (tenderness), which he calls bliss: “Sexual pleasure… [is] the Feast, always terminated and instituted only by a temporary, supervised lifting of the prohibition. Tenderness, on the contrary, is nothing but an infinite, insatiable metonymy…”108 The recipient of the tender gesture is yet fulfilled, and Barthes demands; “is this gesture not a kind of miraculous crystallization of presence?”109 But of whose presence?

Perhaps the most difficult obstacle of an erotics of reading, the reason that queer theory has to skirt and dodge orgasm head-on, is that, as Jagose suggests, “orgasm is not an eidetic phenomenon.” She elaborates: “Despite its apparent indenture to the present moment, the now of embodied experience, orgasm can seem more immediately historic or futural, hard to recall or summon in any specificity”.110 Could it be that to articulate the orgasmic the writer must access the mythological rather than the experiential reservoir? Is the representation of jouissance émue different?

The hypothesis of jouissance, reached through the striving for the ‘text of bliss’, is, to Barthes, extreme anti-communication and possesses its own contingent relationship to time; it is where language breaks down and momentarily ceases to structure the narrative of our being. For Barthes, the text from which jouissance is possible is that which “imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of

107 Audre Lorde, ‘Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power’, in Sister Outsider, (Berkeley: The Crossing Press, 1984), 53 108 Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 224 109 Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 225 110 Jagose, Orgasmology, 208

285 his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language”.111

Texts which approach jouissance do so through a prohibitive discursive register that precludes casual access, (in other words they tend to be

‘difficult’), and jouissance risks being romanticised, (or dismissed), as an academic peccadillo by those who insist on an invalid dichotomy by maintaining what Barthes called the “false opposition of practical life and contemplative life”.112 Rita Felski describes jouissance as a “quintessentially eighties word once reverentially traded back and forth in graduate seminars” indicating a “forbidding, high-brow, Parisian kind of pleasure, a transgressive frisson”,113 which one imagines must have come with the full coterie of attendant snobbishness. But then, even definitional gestures appear to elucidate jouissance through exclusion; by contrasting what it is not rather than what it might be, (or even more daringly what it might feel like).

Jouissance is not delight, not bliss, its common adjectival equivalents. Delight is too naïf, too bumptious, and bliss is, (for Gallop), “too airy, too spiritual, too tranquil.”114 Barthes’s concern was material. A text could be etiolated, as most are, or it might be felt “an object of pleasure like the others” to be placed in the “personal catalogue of our sensualities” as one might “a dish, a garden, an encounter, a voice, a moment, etc.”115 Or in those rare instances, those exciting moments which “force the text to breach bliss”, where the reader experiences

“that immense subjective loss”, Barthes believes that one can identify the text with the “clandestine sites” 116 of perversion. Barthes explicitly connects jouissance with sexual abnormality and cataclysmic ego fragmentation.

111 Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text 14 112 Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text 59 113 Rita Felski, Uses of Literature, (Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2008), 60 114 Gallop, ‘Precocious Jouissance’, 566 115 Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, 58 116 Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, 59

286 Jouissance comes closer to ecstasy in its second and third listed definitions:

1. Intense joy or delight. 2. A state of emotion so intense that one is carried away beyond rational thought and self-control. 3. The trance, frenzy or rapture associated with mystic or prophetic exaltation.

Middle English extasie, from Old French, from Late Latin exstasis (terror), from Greek ekstasis (astonishment, distraction), from existani (to displace, derange) Ek (out of) + Histanai (to place)117

Terror, trance, astonishment, distraction, displacement, derangement; to be out of place, out of one’s body, shucked from a modern epistemology of self- containment, essentially giving oneself up to feelings that disrupt participation in our ‘normal’ lives and rupture our confidence in our own continuous individuality.

Clearly, jouissance comprises an intensity of feeling, but what these feelings are have not readily been plumbed due to the omission of émue from the

English account of jouissance. We know the aesthetic is borne in the “grain of the voice, which is an erotic mixture of timbre and language”,118 and that

Barthes writes his own pleasure, confessing as much, as Richard Howard described through “an evidently random succession of fragments: facets, aphorisms, touches and shoves, nudges, elbowings, bubbles, trial balloons,

‘phylacteries’”.119 Barthes cannot depersonalize, cannot be abstract, cannot be quantitative. His reading is a type of incantatory, fibrous perusal that sifts for the “pulsional incidents, the language lined with flesh, a text where we can hear the grain of the throat, the patina of consonants, the voluptuousness of vowels, a whole carnal stereophony: the articulation of the body, of the

117 Barrie Kosky, On Ecstasy, (Melbourne: University of Melbourne Press, 2008), iii 118 Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, 66 119 Howard, The Pleasure of the Text, vii

287 tongue, not that of meaning”.120 We can try to parse jouissance and try as we may to ascribe meaning to it, (against Barthes’s advice), as “it granulates, it crackles, it caresses, it grates, it cuts, it comes”.121 But jouissance is literally the breach, in the sense of breaking or failing to observe a contract. In its articulation of the body it stymies the narcissism of liberal humanism, the politics of neoliberalism, and its narrative of objectivism, because it challenges reading for plaisir, which operates as a conservative force, reaffirming identity, chronological sequence, and neat narrative resolution.

PLEASURE OR ECSTASY?

Barthes’s understanding of jouissance and plaisir came primarily from Jacques

Lacan and the psychoanalytic tradition of Continental philosophy.122 Plaisir, extracted from the “comfortable practice of reading”123 is what we might expect to predominantly encounter. A reader’s relationship to a text is mostly like a clump of damp twigs, the reading fails to ignite. The text that will not spark creates no frisson. It is a work of “foam”, writes Barthes. The writer uses the unweaned language of “milky phenomes” and the writing process is no more than the “motions of ungratified sucking, of an undifferentiated orality”. For this lactic writer when delivering their load of crema the reader is simply “the substitute for nothing”. The reader is “merely a field” for the writer’s undirected self-pleasuring.124 Unsurprisingly, criticism has been historically focused on the knowable plaisir. This is partly because it is so difficult to find the words to talk about jouissance. Barthes recognised that jouissance could

120 Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, 67 121 Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, 67 122 The ‘reign’ of psychoanalysis in Continental philosophy began in 1900 with the publication of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. Other key works include his Beyond the Pleasure Principal (1920), The Ego and the Id (1923), Lacan’s foundation in 1963 of the École Freudienne de Paris and the publication of his Écrits (1977). 123 Roland Barthes. The Pleasure of the Text, 14 124 Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, 5

288 not be theorized in the current dialectical framework of “doxa, opinion” and

“paradoxa, dispute” as pleasure is only articulable as the “indirection of a demand”. 125 There is an absent third term needed. One that could transact the quandary of having only “pleasure and its censure” as dialectically possible, yet because such a term is yet unnamed it is “postponed”, leaving us with the frustrating predicament that attachment to pleasure-as-a-term will continue to produce the same effects: “every text on pleasure will be nothing but dilatory; it will be an introduction to what will never be written”.126

For Barthes, the ‘text of bliss’, the writerly, that which gives rise to jouissance poses an impossible conundrum – not only is it always the tantalizing entrée to a never-coming main course – being outside pleasure, it is therefore

“outside criticism”.127 A reader cannot mount a critique of such a text, nor can a reader even speak about it to any meaningful degree. The reader must speak ‘in’ the text not ‘on’ it, “in its fashion” even embarking upon a kind of

“deliberate plagiarism”. 128 Barthes readily acknowledges that attempts to bring together texts of bliss into some semblance of a corpus would prove futile as, unavoidably, there would be attempts made to explain them, leading to “inevitable bifurcation” as the text of bliss “cannot speak itself”.129 He resolves then, not to attempt such a labor but rather to circle around it,

125 Barthes’s departure from structuralism and its motivation to give linguistic models scientific elevation – as Barthes resisted positivism and concluded that linguistic models were flawed – although texts contain codes they are not reducible to the sum of those codes – linguistic codification – presuming to expose a meaning present and contained within the text – text is not viewed as a finished object of a unified author-subject. 126 Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, 18 127 Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, 22 128 Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, 22 129 Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, 34

289 writing toward a horizon. The writer pursues a processual phenomenon rather than staking a claim – and leaves their flanks wide open to attack.130

Jouissance is a useless function as described by Lacan; merely a spending of built-up desire, pulsion, which never satiates the mournful subject’s yearning for its lost object, its manque-à-être (want-to-be).131 If Freud’s legacy, which

Lacan famously claimed was “an attempt to reduce the mystical to questions of fucking”,132 then jouissance “which one experiences and knows nothing of”,133 was Lacan’s attempt at hailing something more: the ineffability of mortality. His was the desire for the sujet supposé savoir, the “subject who is supposed to know”.134 Barthes homologised the sujet supposé savoir in his description of the reader as a spectator to a striptease: the suspense at the unveiling, the denouement of plot and/or revelation of character, which motivates pleasure to its satisfying release or conclusion. Yet, he contends, the trope of the striptease is an Oedipal paradigm rooted in cultural value- systems where à savoir is the aim nonpareil – the alpha and the omega.

Certainly there is an inherent banal pleasure in the divestiture of exposure,

(or, more accurately, in the tease), which Barthes extends by using the burlesque metaphor to illustrate how readers skipping text passages that bore them resemble members of an audience if they were to clamber onto the stage

130 This is the paradox of the receding horizon of the avant-garde. Try as it might all radical writing solidifies at some point into Literature, or Écriture into Doxa. Revolutionaries, such as Mallarmé (according to Barthes), try to murder literature but can produce little else but silence: “the avant-garde is that restive language which is going to be recuperated.” Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, 54 131 Lacan urges a reconfiguration of definition to align desire with pulsion – but considers desire as a condition of the split subject, lack not wholeness, manque-à-être (want-to-be) in ‘The Deconstruction of the Drive’, in Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. A. Sheridan, (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1986). Lacan writes that, “the subject exhausts himself in pursuing the desire of the other, which he will never be able to grasp as his own desire, because his own desire is the desire of the other. It is himself whom he pursues.” Jacques Lacan, Freud’s Papers on Technique 1953-1954, trans. J. Forrester, ed. J-A. Miller, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 221 132 Lacan, Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the Ecole Freudienne, 147 133 Lacan, Feminine Sexuality, 147 134 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 232

290 and accelerate the removal of the performer’s clothes, rushing but respecting the conventional order in which they would be removed; as if fulfilling an implicit ritualised grammatical structure.

Both Lacan and Barthes saw that à savoir was only possible as an ideal: (“As soon as one tries to get close to it, it becomes, properly speaking, ungraspable”135). The mortal transience, the thinking subject’s theorisation of their own death’s inevitability is what Foucault described as death’s

“sovereign gesture” holding a place of “prominence within human memory”, its intransigent approach “hollows out in the present and in existence the void toward which and from which we speak”.136

THE WOMAN OUTSIDE

Jouissance, from the Lacanian-Barthesian masculine subject position, aligns

‘woman’ with the inconceivable. “There is always something in woman as the not-all that eludes discourse”, 137 Lacan contends. Accordingly women’s jouissance is un-representable, on the ‘outside’ of discourse beyond the symbolic order and accessible to men only as phantasy. To accept Lacan’s theorisation of feminine jouissance we must also accept his imagining of language as spatial, possessive of a structure to which there is an inside and an outside. As Laura Mulvey so memorably summarised: “The paradox of phallocentrism in all its manifestations is that it depends on the image of the castrated woman to give order and meaning to the world. An idea of woman stands as lynch pin to the system: it is her lack that produces the phallus as a

135 Jacques Lacan, The Psychoses 1955-1960, trans. R. Grig, ed. J-A. Miller, (London: Routledge, 1993), 7 136 Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. D. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977), 53 137 Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. A. Sheridan, (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1977), 34

291 symbolic presence, it is her desire to make good the lack that the phallus signifies.”138 Lacan recognises the female capacity for jouissance “in relation to what the phallic function designates of jouissance” only as ‘supplementary’.

When he does acknowledge a jouissance “beyond the phallus”139 is possible, he is unable to postulate what it might be, leaving us only a thought ellipsis of jouissance de l’Autre or “jouissance of the Other”.140 This recalls Sedgwick’s articulate condemnation of the “homophobic construction, by men, of the figure of the woman who can’t know, as the supposed ultimate consumer for presentations of male sexuality”.141

Discursive fixation on the visibility of orgasm, the puissance of ejaculation (or the ‘money shot’142 as that term has slid from pornography into the popular lexicon) is symptomatic of a sexual economy based around a binary of lack; of having and not-having. But Toril Moi makes the point that, “It is not the word itself but what Lacan wants to do with it that makes jouissance seem untranslatable. Any conscientious translator would feel awkward writing sentences proclaiming that women’s ‘enjoyment’ or ‘orgasm’ is ‘beyond the phallus’”.143 And it is true. It would be as ridiculous today to argue that women could only have supplementary jouissance as it would be to resurrect the passage in Plato’s Timaeus where he claimed that the womb was “the animal within them [women]” that if, thwarted in its reproductive capacity, it

138 Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6 139 Lacan, Écrits, 145 140 Lacan, Écrits, 68 141 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Epistemology of the Closet, (Berkeley: University of California Press), 249 142“All sexual acts have an ‘aim’ which gives them their meaning; they are organised into preliminary caresses which will eventually crystallise in the necessary ejaculation, the touchstone of pleasure.” Guy Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1972), 95 143 Toril Moi, ‘From Femininity to Finitude: Freud, Lacan, and feminism, again’, in Dialogues on Sexuality, Gender, and Psychoanalysis, ed. Iréne Matthis (London: Karnac, 2004), 110

292 may go “wandering in every direction through the body”.144 Moi identifies

Lacan’s claim that feminine jouissance is extramural to language and, as a consequence, hostile to the social order. She asks: “But what, exactly, is it that escapes language and other social structures here? Are we being invited to believe that female orgasms… belong to some mystic, extralinguistic, yet revolutionary realm to which male orgasm provides no access?”145

THE LESBIAN PHALLUS

As I set up the problem in the introduction: how do we figure a non-phallic erotics? Indeed, is a non-phallic erotics possible? Judith Butler articulates her idea of the transferability of the phallus in her influential ‘The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary’ chapter in Bodies that Matter, in which she discusses the possibilities of representing lesbian sexuality. The phallus, she claims “has no existence separable from the occasions of its symbolization; it cannot symbolize without occasion. Hence, the lesbian phallus offers the occasion (a set of occasions) for the phallus to signify differently, and in so signifying, to resignify, unwittingly, its own masculinist and heterosexist privilege.”146 What Butler is arguing, essentially, is a set of occasions for queering the phallus by restaging it. She writes, “lesbian sexuality is as constructed as any other form of sexuality within contemporary sexual regimes. Of interest here is not whether the phallus persists in lesbian sexuality as a structuring principle, but how it persists, how it is constructed, and what happens to the ‘privileged’ status of the signifier within this form of constructed exchange.” Whilst carefully clarifying that she does not believe in

144 Plato, Plato’s Timaeus, trans. Benjamin Jowett, (Rockville, Maryland: Serenity Publishers, 2009) 170 145 Moi, ‘From Femininity to Finitude’, 110-111 146 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’, (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), 90

293 a ‘monolith’ of lesbian sexuality, she suggests that “the phallus constitutes an ambivalent site of identification and desire that is significantly different from the scene of normative heterosexuality to which it is related.”147

She returns to Freud’s essay ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’ to consider his attempt to “define the boundaries of erotogenic body parts.” 148 Freud’s intention, Butler argues, is to investigate erotic attachments to experiences that seem counterintuitive – pain for example – and to examine whether such

“libidinal investment in pain” in people who have experienced the “obsessive self-preoccupations” that can accompany injury or illness might be classified as narcissistic.149 Pain becomes a prevailing factor in how the subject learns to visualise themselves as a sum of our parts, a cohesive whole. Freud lays down the plank for Lacan’s later theory of ‘The Mirror Stage’150 in his linkage of ego formation to the “externalized idea one forms of one’s own body”, and although his language, according to Butler, “engages a causal temporality that has the body part precede its ‘idea,’ he nevertheless confirms here the indissolubility of a body part and the phantasmatic partitioning that brings it into psychic experience.”151Yet it is a production of ego marked by a kind of hypochondriac theatricality, based on a Judeo-Christian equation of sexuality with shame and illness and pain.152 The complex formation of self-conception, birthed through pain, creates an ambivalent relationship to pain/pleasure,

147 Butler, Bodies That Matter, 85 148 Butler, Bodies That Matter, 57 149 Butler, Bodies That Matter, 57 150 “There is something originally, inaugurally, profoundly wounded in the human relation to the world… that is what comes out of the theory of narcissism Freud gave us, insofar as this framework introduces an indefinable, a no exit, marking all relations, and especially the libidinal relations of the subject.” Lacan quoted in Butler, Bodies That Matter, 72 151 Butler, Bodies That Matter, 59 152 “Freud himself suggests that to figure sexuality as illness is symptomatic of the structuring presence of a moralistic framework of guilt.” Butler, Bodies That Matter, 63

294 and through guilt and prohibition153 produce our ‘ideas of the body’. Butler writes: “But precisely because prohibitions do not always ‘work,’ that is, do not always produce the docile body that fully conforms to the social ideal, that may delineate body surfaces that do not signify conventional heterosexual polarities. These variable body surfaces or bodily egos may thus become sites of transfer for properties that no longer belong to the anatomy.”154

Freud is already saying in 1914, Butler quotes, “that certain areas of the body

– the erotogenic zones – may act as substitutes for the genitals and behave analogously to them”.155 However the genitals Freud is talking about are inevitably male, the incontrovertible origin of erotogenicity. The logic is imperfect, Butler remarks that male genitals “are the effect and sum of a set of substitution”, and, at the same time, also “an origin for which substitutions exist”, but it is the totalizing logic of the phallus at play, that Lacanian paradoxical “privileged signifier” or: “that which originates or generates significations, but is not itself the signifying effect of a prior signifying chain.”156 Freud’s “metonymic slide” from the penis to the phallus, traps the function of the genitals in a double-bind: “as the (symbolic) ideal that offers an impossible and originary measure for the genitals to approximate, and as the (imaginary) anatomy which is marked by the failure to accomplish the return to that symbolic ideal.”157 Butler reminds us that the phallus is not the

153 “This prohibition against homosexuality is homosexual desire turned back upon itself; the self-beratement of conscience is the reflexive rerouting of homosexual desire.” Butler, Bodies That Matter, 65 154 Butler, Bodies That Matter, 64 155 Butler, Bodies That Matter, 60 156 Butler, Bodies That Matter, 60 157 Butler, Bodies That Matter, 61

295 penis, that the phallus symbolises the penis. 158 Freud’s paradox extends further; as Butler explains that in his admission that erotogenicity may be seen in all organs, not just the genitals, makes erotogenicity “a property defined by its very plasticity, transferability, and expropriability.”159

What Lacan does when he draws from Freud’s work on narcissism, Butler explains, is assert the “morphology of the body as a psychically invested projection, an idealization or ‘fiction’ of the body as a totality and locus of control.”160 The problem she identifies is that because of Lacan’s masculinist assumptions inherent to his schemata everything is forced to operate within a paradigm of “anthropocentric and androcentric epistemological imperialism”.161 And this is where she introduces the lesbian phallus as an unforeseen effect of the Lacan’s design: the relocation that the lesbian phallus symbolises calls into question the regulation of compulsory heterosexuality.

Consider that ‘having’ the phallus can be symbolized by an arm, a tongue, a hand (or two), a knee, a thigh, a pelvic bone, an array of purposefully instrumentalized body-like things. And that this ‘having’ exists in relation to a ‘being the phallus’ which is both part of its own signifying effect (the phallic lesbian as potentially castrating) and that which it encounters in the woman who is desired (as the one who, offering or withdrawing the specular guarantee, wields the power to castrate). That this scene can reverse, that being and having can be confounded, upsets the logic of non-contradiction that serves the either-or of normative heterosexual exchange. In a sense, the simultaneous acts of deprivileging the phallus and removing it from the normative heterosexual form of exchange, and recirculating and reprivileging it between women destroys the phallus to break the signifying chain in which it conventionally operates.162

158 “To be the object of symbolization is precisely not to be that which symbolizes. To the extent that the phallus symbolizes the penis, it is not that which it symbolizes. The more symbolization occurs, the less ontological connection there is between symbol and symbolized.” Butler, Bodies That Matter, 83-84 159 Butler, Bodies That Matter, 61 160 Butler, Bodies That Matter, 73 161 Butler, Bodies That Matter, 73 162 Butler, Bodies That Matter, 88-89

296 Jouissance émue could be described as a set of occasions that queers the phallus by confounding the normative heterosexual exchange through a disruptive profusion of feeling: by desiring the dead author but refusing the phallocentric directive of a hermeneutics of suspicion it is possible to deprivilege the phallus through resignification in an erotics of reading. Yet whilst reading Butler’s chapter I recall, with increasing insistence, Audre

Lorde’s unvarnished inquisition in her essay ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never

Dismantle The Master’s House’: “What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy?” And her discomfiting answer: “It means that only the most narrow perimeters for change are possible and allowable.”163

Butler succeeds in disassembling Lacan’s phallic Meccano as a signifier with effective power within the symbolic order and sexual economy. Yet even with her dismantlement and reconstruction, the phallus is still defining and dominating sexual difference and desire: the phallus remains the key signifier in the symbolic order even if is a lesbian who has the phallus/is phallic. Is this empowering to lesbians? The reversibility and transferability of this scenario still rehearses the same equation of power = phallus.

WHO IS SPEAKING?

Refusing the hermeneutics of suspicion has radical repercussions. Gallop, supporting Barthes, claims that “by refusing to assign to the text (and to the world as text) a “secret:’ that is, an ultimate meaning, liberates an activity which we might call counter-theological, properly revolutionary, for to refuse to arrest meaning is finally to refuse God and his hypostases, reason, science,

163 Audre Lorde, ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master’s House’, in Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, eds. Reina Lewis and Sara Mills, (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2003), 25

297 the law.”164 In other words, if we never let meaning coagulate around terms and text, they stay charged. When Barthes writes I desire you the double contact quivers produced by rubbing language against its own fold by reading and rereading, can he reroute the reader from ‘consumption’ to

‘play’?165 In ‘The Death of the Author’ when Barthes asks of Balzac in his story

Sarrasine, “Who is speaking…?”, he suggests that the question cannot be definitively answered. Literature, he believes, is the voice to which we cannot ascribe “a specific origin” for it is “that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity that writes”.166 On the one hand it is this exquisite collapse of/into literature that renders the immersion and on the other a ‘talking up’ of this contact; the author enwrapping the reader in words in an endless chain of reflection, as though the author’s ghost were playing faintly across the text like a fault in an optical system. The ghost is something lost making itself visible again.

Barthes fetishises language in both senses of the word. The Oxford dictionary defines fetish as a “form of sexual desire in which gratification is linked to an abnormal degree to a particular object, item of clothing, part of the body”, but also as “an inanimate object worshipped for its supposed magical powers or because it is considered to be inhabited by a spirit”.167 The text, for the writer who wants to cruise for readers, like Barthes, must insist to the reader that the text desires them. The text must convince the reader of their desirability and, like any self-respecting novelistic seduction, it must in turns bore, blaze, and bruise. The readers’ pleasure here proceeds from schisms and collisions when

164 Gallop, Deaths of the Author, 5 165 Barthes, S/Z, 16 166 Barthes, ‘Death of the Author’, 2 167 The Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘Fetish’

298 language is chopped and spliced, creating aleatory edges for its own mimetic onanism and the accompanying violence of feeling something bursting. These

Barthesian seams, work best where formalist edges and flexible edges rub against each other, when the reader feels the rustle of the infinitude of texts beneath the surface of what she reads and the veil of textual cohesion rubs thin. Narrativity must be broken up and challenged to create the text of bliss and yet a semblance of internal logic must be seen to survive – the text must still be readable – to approach bliss as near as possible. Barthes recalls Sade’s libertine engaged in autoerotic asphyxiation where the bliss of coming occurs at the point of almost-strangulation, just as he cuts himself loose. The libertine flirts with “the site of a loss, the seam, the cut, the deflation, the dissolve”; the seizure, according to Barthes, that betides the midst of bliss.168

We understand the temporal qualifiers précoce and retardée as coming either

‘too soon’ or ‘too late’. Gallop insists that this poses a queer temporality with

“things coming not at the normal time… not following the natural process of

‘ripening’”: precocious jouissance “is a complete and total losing it, in one fell swoop”169. When Barthes uses the phrase jouissance précoce, Gallop believes he literally means “premature ejaculation”170, the text that makes him come in his pants. That Barthes would go further than celebrating sexual perversion but also what is generally classified (and stigmatized) as ‘dysfunction’ – jouissance retardée – coming too late (or not at all) left Gallop “dreaming of a radically antinormative sexual theory”.171 Could she deploy Barthes’s “take on sexual maladjustment”172 and read it within the context of contemporary work on

168 Barthes, Pleasure of the Text, 7 169 Gallop, ‘Precocious Jouissance’, 568 170 Gallop, ‘Precocious Jouissance’, 569 171 Gallop, ‘Precocious Jouissance’, 570 172 Gallop, ‘Precocious Jouissance’, 579

299 queer temporality? Barthes understood the phallic as “literal penile erection” and his “theorization of literary erotics is based not in an abstract, generalized sexuality, but in an embodied sexuality, an embodied masculine sexuality”– namely, his own – hence his critique of phallocentrism is not stirred by feminist leanings but only by “an appreciation of nonnormative male sexuality, not just perverse but dysfunctional”.173 He extends no empathy to

‘dysfunctional’ female sexuality, as indicated by his use of frigide to stamp repressive contemporary social mores.174 Gallop is clear to stress that Barthes means to invoke the most common meaning in French, (“In women, absence of orgasm”175). She interprets Barthes’s fear of frigidity, (both as lack of desire and emotional coldness), as indicative of his own late life revaluation of emotion, where he learnt “to value emotion in and as sexuality”176 and to disentangle emotion from sentimentality. He came to believe that whilst emotion can be both sentimental and jouissance, jouissance can never be sentimental.

In 1973 Barthes’s “reclamation of emotion quite explicitly does not include sentimentality”,177 Gallop argues, yet, in 1977 with the publication of A Lover’s

Discourse, Gallop points out that his opinion had changed to the point where he “evinces a sense of passionate love as antinormative, transgressive”178 – essentially at this time embracing love as jouissance: (“love is obscene precisely in that it puts the sentimental in place of the sexual”179). Gallop cannot countenance Barthes’s change of heart: “Maybe it’s the difference

173 Gallop, ‘Precocious Jouissance’, 575 174 “The notion of pleasure no longer pleases anyone. Our society appears to be both staid and violent; in any event: frigid.” Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, 46-47 175 Gallop, ‘Precocious Jouissance’, 577 176 Gallop, ‘Precocious Jouissance’, 578 177 Gallop, ‘Precocious Jouissance’, 580 178 Gallop, ‘Precocious Jouissance’, 579 179 Barthes quoted in Gallop, ‘Precocious Jouissance’, 579

300 between the seventies, height of the sexual revolution, and now. Or the difference between the French and American context. Maybe it’s gender. (I think it probably is gender).”180 Jouissance émue is a quality of feeling that has little to do with sentimentality, as it took Barthes some years to work out.

DEAD AUTHORS

In The Deaths of the Author: Reading and Writing in Time, Jane Gallop explored death and authorship, literally and metaphorically, in literary scholarship since Barthes’s assertion that “the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the author”. 181 Gallop believes that Barthes ‘killed’ the author prematurely in 1968, and that he changed his mind and allowed the author to return, albeit his feelings toward the dead author were always abstracted.182

Gallop comments on the ‘liveness’ of theory and her ‘ethics of close reading’ which involves “reading against the monumentalization of theory” where her strategy is to “focus not on the whole text but on small, striking bits of text.”183

Her chapter, ‘The Author Is Dead But I Desire the Author’, replies to Barthes’s

‘Fetish’ chapter in The Pleasure of the Text. Even though there is a contemporary awareness that the author “as an institution” is ‘dead’ nevertheless it is still possible, to “desire the author”, (as Barthes did184), but

Barthes desired the dead abstractly and thus without grief. Instead of staying dead the author (like a kind of Nietzschean dead-God) becomes an Author to

Barthes: “The Author himself – the somewhat decrepit deity of the old criticism – can, or could some day, become a text like any other: we will only

180 Gallop, ‘Precocious Jouissance’, 579 181 Jane Gallop, The Deaths of the Author: Reading and Writing in Time, (Durham and London: Duke University Press), 6 182 Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 148. Gallop notes that before first appearing in French as ‘La Mort de l’auterur,’ Manteia 5 (1968), the essay was published in American literary magazine Aspen, nos. 5-6, (1967). 183 Gallop, The Deaths of the Author, 25 184 Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, 27

301 need to renounce making his person… the origin… whence would derive his work.”185

What does this mean? Gallop wonders “if we see here in S/Z another turn of that screw: if the author can ‘become a text’, then, like a classical hero, he need not die.”186 The author-becomes-text is apparent in S/Z where Barthes gives

Proust and Genet as examples, and returns to them in The Pleasure of the Text as authors who figure in their own texts. Gallop writes that for Barthes “the figure of the author is not only novelistic, it is sexy. The author appears in the text as an “erotic body,” like a character for whom we might “conceive a desire… Genet and Proust function… as objects of Barthes’s desire.”187 But

Barthes does not just desire the author, “he needs him. He needs his “figure”; he needs his “erotic body” appearing, in a certain way, in the text, appearing in a way that will arouse Barthes’s desire… In the wake of the dead author,

Barthes outlines an erotic relation to the author.” 188 Barthes is getting off, and getting emotional, over the dead.

Gallop goes on to perform a “slow, detailed reading” of the “penultimate paragraph” of Sade, Fourier, Loyola where Barthes signals the ‘friendly return’ of the author in the figure of Proust: “The author who comes from his text and goes into our life has no unity: he is a mere plural of ‘charms’, the site of a few tenuous details, yet a source of vivid novelistic glimmerings… in which we nonetheless read death more surely than in the epic of a destiny; this is not a

(civil, moral) person, this is a body”.189 This signals a change of Barthes’s ideas

185 Barthes, S/Z, 200-211 186 Gallop, The Deaths of the Author, 35 187 Gallop, The Deaths of the Author, 37 188 Gallop, The Deaths of the Author, 38 189 Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola, trans. Richard Miller, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976), 8

302 that intrigues Gallop in that Barthes has moved from thinking only hypothetically about the author’s literal death in ‘The Death of the Author’ to now considering the detailed embodiment of the author. Barthes muses that the “subject is dispersed, a bit like ashes thrown to the wind after death”, and figuring his own death: “…if I were a writer and dead, how I would love it if my life were reduced, by the treatment of a friendly and casual biographer, to a few details”.190 This transition sees Barthes reconsider immortality from being something “heroic” to being an actual “bodily immortality, an ability to touch bodies after death.”191 Essentially Barthes abandons the idea of the omnipotent deathless God-Author for an author who “is not only in the text but lost in the text.”192 Gallop poses a fascinating problem:

The image of the author “lost in the text” could also suggest that he is there but the reader cannot find him, cannot reach him. If the relation to the author is a relation to an other, it is a relation to an other who is always there but always lost, who cannot be discounted but cannot be reached.193

Barthes addresses this absence in A Lover’s Discourse where he writes, “Now, absence can exist only as a consequence of the other: it is the other who leaves, it is I who remain… I – I who love… am sedentary, motionless, at hand, in expectation, nailed to the spot, in suspense – like a package in some forgotten corner of a railway station. Amorous absence functions in a single direction, expressed by the one who stays, never by the one who leaves: an always present I is constituted only by confrontation with an always absent you.”194

The one who stays endures the other’s absence through a kind of forgetting,

190 Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola, 8-9 191 Gallop, The Deaths of the Author, 46 192 Gallop, The Deaths of the Author, 50-51 193 Gallop, The Deaths of the Author, 51 194 Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 13

303 (“This is the condition for my survival; for if I did not forget, I should die”195), and this patient endurance, Barthes contends, is both feminine and feminising. 196 In a characteristic cryptic aside Barthes parenthesises this observation: “Myth and utopia: the origins have belonged, the future will belong to the subjects in whom there is something feminine.”197

Barthes here creates a queer temporality of emotion. He acknowledges, with sighs, in longing, through coy, bracketed obliquity: “But isn’t desire always the same, whether the object is present or absent? Isn’t the object always absent?”198 In my erotics of reading I entertain the same discourse – figuring the absence of the beloved – “the other is absent as referent, present as allocutory”, which sets up a “singular distortion”, a dysmorphic

“insupportable present”: I am oriented toward a horizonal future. “I am”, as

Barthes writes, “wedged between two tenses”.199 (Like Whitman’s famous address ‘To the Reader at Parting’, in which he is present and absent, going and coming at once: “Now, dearest comrade, lift me to your face,/ We must separate awhile – Here! take me from my lips this kiss;/ Whoever you are, I give it especially to you;/ So long! – And I hope we shall meet again.”200)

In considering the dead author lost in the text, attendant but not forthcoming to my entreaty, I feel the weight of Barthes’s claim that this absence, thus staged in language, is but a rehearsal of the other’s death: that I am already, inevitably, in love with the dead. In the next chapter I track the erotic body of

195 Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 14 196 “…this man who waits and who suffers from his waiting is miraculously feminized. A man is not feminized because he is inverted but because he is in love.” Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 14 197 Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 14 198 Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 15 199 Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 15 200 Walt Whitman, ‘To the Reader at Parting’, in Leaves of Grass: First and ‘Death-Bed’ Editions, ed. Karen Karbiener, (New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2004), 763

304 the dead author, lost in the text, through the uncanny, the abject, and duende, linked by the same racking eroticism deepened by the acknowledgment of the recoil of death upon sexuality.

305 CHAPTER TWO

When I had finished my prayers and invocations to the communities of the dead, I took the sheep and cut their throats over the trench so that the dark blood poured in. And now the souls of the dead came swarming up… From this multitude of souls, as they fluttered to and fro by the trench, there came an eerie clamor…

- Homer, The Odyssey, Book XIv

INTRODUCTION

In this chapter I will argue that queers, in their experience of living as abject in queer temporality, might occupy a space – felt momentarily and exquisitely in jouissance émue or duende – where the dead are folded into the experiential relational fabric in a way that extends radii of interpersonal affect. By this I do not intend to volunteer a naïve or clichéd platitude that the dead ‘go on living’ by way of community remembrance, but that, regardless, queers carry the dead with us and factor the dead into our being. The paradox: in death there is no future, but there is no future without the dead.

To begin with, this chapter addresses the seminal polemic No Future of antirelational queer theorist Lee Edelman, and whilst it supports Edelman’s figuration of the queer as the abject, carrying the figural burden of the death drive in the social order according to the totalizing logic of reproductive futurity, it questions whether Edelman’s theorisation of jouissance as the ultimate psychic self-shattering, function of negativity is necessarily anti- relational. Instead it argues that community is found in death and in sharing the stigma of shame. That sexual relations open a body up to others, open it to shared affect, that sexuality can be social without being utopian, and without

306 buying into the logic of heteronormative reproductive futurity. Abjection is crucial to Edelman’s argument and so I return to Kristeva’s original Powers of

Horror to question what abjection is, who bears it, and how, I argue, abjection creates a haunted queer temporality. It is in literature where the abject buckles to the sublime – the experience of jouissance, or, perhaps we can reach out to a different cultural expression of similarity – the analogue of duende.

Duende, the traditional Andalusian concept promoted by the poet Lorca, read here as the aesthetic experience of being moved to tears by poetry, unencumbered with the psychoanalytic baggage foisted on jouissance. Yet duende is a dark caller, with consequences of psychic derangement of variable duration. I use Freud’s essay, ‘The Uncanny’, and his deliberation on the affective experience of the unhiemlich, the familiar/unfamiliar presence of death that recurs and unsettles, to theorise the desire for the dead author.

Finally, I chart how queer theorists such as Sedgwick, Heather Love,

Elizabeth Freeman, and particularly Sara Ahmed, have begun to negotiate the

Janus-faced orientation of bearing to live, which means entertaining a future – and a communal one at that, whilst not denying or rose-tinting (I’d like to call it ‘pink-washing’), the uncomfortable and difficult to bear genealogy of historic and ongoing queer trauma. I propose that it is through an erotics of reading enabled by a new understanding of the dimensions of jouissance, that we may encompass the histories of pain and shame without being paranoid readers, without seeing sexuality as antirelational.

FUTURITY AND THE QUEER

“The invitation to join the mainstream”, writes Heather Love, “is an invitation to jettison gay identity and its accreted historical meanings… Resisting the call of gay normalization means refusing to write off the most vulnerable, the

307 least presentable, and all the dead.”201 There are dangerous consequences for abjuring one’s stake in shame. A strand of queer theory typified by Lee

Edelman’s 2004 monograph No Future,202 vigorously rejects the affirmative turn in queer studies and defines queerness as that which must be abjected to preserve the coherence of self within the social order. This social hegemony operates in “an ideological Möbius strip”203 using the figure of the Child to extenuate an oppressive politicized reproductive futurism. So tenacious is the political logic of reproductive futurism and so pervasive its ethical purchase, it is certainly unutterable, almost inconceivable to argue against. Edelman’s point is that no dissenting position is permitted in the construct of this catch-

22, which forces a discursive “ideological limit” and maintains the “absolute privilege of heteronormativity by rendering unthinkable… the possibility of a queer resistance to this organizing principle of communal relations.”204 By manipulating the Child as the quintessential “image of the future”, occupying a place ‘outside’ of this social consensus is rendered as the death drive of the social order: for the queer, embodying the death drive is a position “of abjection expressed in stigma”.205 Of course many queers are “psychically invested in preserving the familiar familial narrativity of reproductive futurism”206 as well, and Edelman makes clear that he is referring to ‘queer’ in its figural capacity as a politicized verb that disturbs all identity.

201 Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2007), 30 202 Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004) 203 Edelman, No Future, 2 204 Edelman, No Future, 2 205 Edelman, No Future, 3 206 Edelman, No Future, 17

308 Edelman claims reproductive futurism is bipartisan: 207 whilst liberal rationalism tries to “disassociate the queer”208 from sexual radicalism and its presupposed negativity by trusting in the “limitless elasticity” of the social fabric to absorb and neutralize it politically, the conservative, ironically, recognizes the “radical threat” to the status quo that queers pose and “better sees the inherently conflictual aspect of identities”.209 Queers are unspeakable to the religious and traditional Right (to whom the distinction between homosexuals and queers is not attended to in great detail), and queers are excluded and gagged by the assimilative ‘marriage equality’ liberal campaigns whose attempts at securing legislative rights have involved a see, we’re just like you appeal to the logic of capitalist democracy as just another niche market to be demystified and brought into the fold. Every subject must participate in society and cannot escape the Symbolic. It is possible to vote for

‘none of the above’, as Edelman points out, but the price is self-negation in a system that disallows any posture unstructured by the obstinate aspiration of attaining meaning through social recognition alone. Queers are simultaneously defined and negated by their stigma. Queers are particularly unintelligible given the recent Faustian bargain of homosexual visibility and the equal rights movement.

“One may enter the mainstream on the condition that one breaks ties with all those who cannot make it”, Love explains, and these nonstarters are “– the nonwhite and the nonmonogamous, the poor and the genderdeviant, the fat, the disabled, the unemployed, the infected, and a host of unmentionable

207 Queerness “comes to mean nothing for both: for the right wing the nothingness always at war with the positivity of civil society; for the left, nothing more than a sexual practice in need of demystification” in Edelman, No Future, 28 208 Edelman, No Future, 3 209 Edelman, No Future, 14

309 others.”210 These are the people whose lives are considered valueless. (It is worth remembering the 1933 ‘Säuberung’ or ‘cleansing’ that took place in

Berlin’s Opernplatz, where, amongst the countless volumes incinerated by the

Nazis, was Heinrich Heine’s play Almansor which contained the prescient lines: Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen or

“When they burn books, they will in the end also burn people.”211)

Edelman’s argument is that jouissance is an unacknowledged part of the social order, and access to jouissance must be abjected onto queerness to preserve the façade of political optimism and to keep muzzled any exposé of the pervasive western cultural denial of death. Edelman sees that Lacanian jouissance is twofold. The first jouissance “congeals” identity around the fantasy of attaining the object of one’s desire and gets attached to the yearning to know (à savoir). The consequences of which solidify in “identity as mortification”; re-imposing the structures of significance from which jouissance is originally trying to break loose. Yet the second dimension of jouissance undoes the “fetishistic investments” in pursuing the lost object by dissolving the “solidity of every object”.212 That mobile site of queerness is where the “Symbolic confronts what its discourse is incapable of knowing, which is also the place of a jouissance from which it can never escape.”213

What “our queerness” can offer, Edelman believes, is “an insistence on the haunting excess that this nothingness entails, an insistence on the negativity that pierces the fantasy screen of futurity”214 – for queers to wittingly occupy that abjection.

210 Love, Feeling Backward, 10 211 Roger F. Cook, A companion to the works of Heinrich Heine, (New York: Camden House, 2002) 212 Edelman, No Future, 25 213 Edelman, No Future, 26 214 Edelman, No Future, 31

310 This sets up an interesting problem: whilst the queer figuration calls the

Symbolic order into emergency, it also reinforces the primacy of the system through its own abjection. As queer eludes placement and definitive fixity it also unavoidably occupies a space of deep violence and take on the affects of haunted trauma. Queer is either interpellated by hostile forces or defanged and folded in the tide of social acceptance and enfranchisement. Edelman’s response to this is to champion “Sinthhomosexuality” taken from Lacan’s term, the sinthome or ‘symptom’, or that which writes itself without end,215 which according to Edelman, “offers us fantasy turned inside out” by

“refusing the promise of futurity which mends each tear… in reality’s dress with threads of meaning… [The sinthome] implies from the outset its relation to the primary inscription of subjectivity and thus to the constitutive fixation of the subject’s access to jouissance.”216 The Lacanian sinthome functions “as the knot that holds the subject together, that ties or binds the subject to its constitutive libidinal career, and assures that no subject, try as it may, can ever “get over” itself – “get over,” that is, the fixation of the drive that determines its jouissance.”217

Non-reproductive sexuality threatens the paradigm of futurity, and so its pleasures are condemned by the heteronormative regime as unnatural, even to the point where the actual sex implicit in the definition of homosexuality is framed in “intimate relation to a fatal and even murderous, jouissance”218 – as a homosexual “culture of death” in the AIDS epidemic peak of the 80s and

215 Edelman quotes his own translation of Lacan’s the sinthome as an “old way of writing what was written later as ‘symptom’” in his footnotes (No Future, 159) as “C’est une façon ancienne d’écrire ce qui a été, ultérieurement, écrit ‘symptôme.’” Jacques Lacan, Le Sinthome (typescript of Seminar 23, 1975-76, University of Texas at Austin), 1 216 Edelman, No Future, 35 217 Edelman, No Future, 35-36 218 Edelman, No Future, 39

311 90s.219 Edelman reels off a list of his suspicions (“envy-, contempt-, and anxiety”) as to what motivates these disavowals of sex in sexuality by those uncomfortable with the “corrupt, unregenerate vulgate of fucking”.220 Yet the vulgate fucking that Edelman is referring to is a model of sexual freedom not equally available to all.

José Muñoz critiques the problem of racial erasure in antirelational theory exemplified by, but not exclusive to, thinkers like Leo Bersani and Lee

Edelman, when he writes: “Escaping or denouncing relationality… distances queerness from what some theorists seem to think of as contamination by race, gender, or other particularities that taint the purity of sexuality as a singular trope of difference”. And, even more censorious; “the antirelational in queer studies was the gay white man’s last stand.”221 Muñoz clarifies that he is referring to a particular strain of gay white male scholarship that presumes sexuality as a discontinuous taxonomy that can be theorised without reference to other social and cultural markers like race, class, ability, and gender. 222 The predominantly white male bodies in Edelman’s orgy are a symptom of antirelationality’s failure to factor in embodiment, the experience of the marked body and its engagements with other bodies. Antirelationality is a theory of queer temporality that continues to “reproduce a crypto- universal white gay subject that is weirdly atemporal – which is to say a

219 Edelman quotes Larry Kramer: “Allowing sex-centrism to remain the sole definition of homosexuality is now coming to be seen as the greatest act of self-destruction. There is a growing understanding that we created a culture that in effect murdered us, and that if we are to remain alive it’s time to redefine homosexuality as something far greater than what we do with our genitals.” Larry Kramer, “Gay Culture, Redefined,” op-ed, New York Times, 12 December 1997, A23 (No Future, 160) 220 Edelman, No Future, 40 221 José Esteban Muñoz, Thinking Beyond Antirelationality and Antiutopianism in Queer Critique’ In Caserio, Robert L., Tim Dean, Lee Edelman, Judith Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz. ‘The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory.’ PMLA 121, no.3 (2006), 825 222 Footnoted in Muñoz, ‘Thinking Beyond Antirelationality and Antiutopianism in Queer Critique’, 826

312 subject whose time is a restricted and restricting hollowed-out present free of the need for imagining a futurity that exists beyond the self or the here and now. 223

Edelman’s paranoid defense of antirelationality depends upon an atemporality instead of futurity, and an a-topia instead of an embodied present. The imaginary subjects, (crypto-universal white subjects), are products of flattened difference and the evacuation of the future is staged by those whose critically reflexive position depends upon the totalizing logic of anticipatory paranoia.224 To deny relationality, one needs necessarily to be in a position of power: not everybody can afford to turn their back on the social – to be, as it were, the master of one’s own universe. “Those of us who stand outside this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference,” writes Audre Lorde, “those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are black, who are older, know that survival is not an academic skill.”225

THE DEJECT

In Powers of Horror Julia Kristeva defines the condition of being beset by abjection as a “twisted braid of affects and thoughts”, which, although called the abject, “does not have, properly speaking, a definable object.” The abject is

223 José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 94 224 “The unidirectionally future-oriented vigilance of paranoia generates, paradoxically, a complex relationship to temporality that burrows both backward and forward: because there must be no bad surprises, and because learning of the possibility of a bad surprise would itself constitute a bad surprise, paranoia requires that bad news be always already known… No time could be too early for one’s having-already-known, for its having-already-been- inevitable, that something bad would happen. And no loss could be too far in the future to need to be preemptively discounted.” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading, Reparative Reading’, 130-131 225 Audre Lorde, ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master’s House’, in Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, eds. Reina Lewis and Sara Mills, (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2003), 26

313 “one of those dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated.” 226 Abjection creates in the sufferer a horrible hamstrung conundrum as it “beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire, which, nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced. Apprehensive, desire turns aside; sickened, it rejects.” The abject creates a queer temporal “vortex of summons and repulsion” is created which turns the subject into someone who is

“haunted” and “literally beside himself.”227

If queers are to occupy this place of “banishment” the resistance must endure the “reality that if acknowledged, annihilates”. 228 Fear is the eviscerating factor, which is kept bracketed at arms’ length by the social order: I am afraid of that which I desire, and I am afraid of my desire. “In the end” Kristeva writes, “our only difference is our unwillingness to have a face-to-face confrontation with the abject.”229 Queers have little choice but to directly confront the abject. In Kristeva’s terminology, the abjected one becomes the deject who laughs at fear and asks; “Where am I?” instead of “Who am I?”230 The deject is not concerned with self-identification but with time and space. What if we map queerness onto the deject?

Queers stray from the future, or move backward into it, much as dejects who

Kristeva places “on a journey, during the night, the end of which keeps receding.” This wilderness she calls “a land of oblivion” 231. This land of

226 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 1 227 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 1 228 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 2 229 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 209 230 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 8 231 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 8

314 oblivion, I argue, is where queers access jouissance in a folded temporality. It is a “time of oblivion and thunder, of veiled infinity and the moment when revelation bursts forth”232 – what I speculate is the moment of jouissance

émue. Jouissance binds the subject to their abjection. It is only jouissance and

“jouissance alone [which] causes the abject to exist as such. One does not know it, one does not desire it, one joys in it [on en jouit]. Violently and painfully. A passion.”233 The liminality and ambiguity of abjection is complex affect:

I am only like someone else: mimetic logic of the advent of the ego, objects, and signs. But when I seek (myself), lose (myself), or experience jouissance – then “I” is heterogeneous. Discomfort, unease, dizziness, stemming from an ambiguity that, through the violence of the revolt against, demarcates a space out of which signs and objects arise. Thus braided, woven, ambivalent, a heterogeneous flux marks out a territory that I can call my own because the Other, having dwelt in me as alter ego, points it out to me through loathing.234

It is when I seek myself, lose myself, or experience jouissance that my ‘I’ becomes heterogeneous, destabilised, queered. Death becomes “the chief curator of our imaginary museum” of our documented histories and stories but in so doing the “incandescent stake of the literary phenomenon itself, which, raised to the status of the sacred, is severed from its specificity.”235

An erotics of reading depends on specificity: the specificity of the embodied reading, the particular affects, disconnections, flirtations and attachments that one feels. This is a painful pleasure: to be a critic one “must keep open the wound”, Kristeva writes that the critic must endure a “corporeal, and verbal ordeal of fundamental incompleteness: a ‘gaping’… like a crucified person

232 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 9 233 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 9 234 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 10 235 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 17

315 opening up the stigmata of its desiring body… For what impossible catharsis?”236 Kristeva is absolutely right in calling it the impossible catharsis.

Whilst jouissance may have its dimension of momentary satisfaction (jouir – coming) it is the émue that puts off the closure of the erotic circuit, which defers the gratification of longing. For what satisfaction can one have with the dead?

The function of certain types of art, Kristeva contends, especially those that feature rhythm and lyricism is to act as the “mimesis of passions”, through which the abject “mimed through sound and meaning, is repeated. Getting rid of it is out of the question… one does not get rid of the impure; one can, however, bring it into being a second time, and differently from its original impurity.” 237 What Kristeva’s contribution does is “lay bare, under the cunning, orderly surface of civilizations, the nurturing horror… the horror that they seize on in order to build themselves up… While everything else – its archaeology and its exhaustion – is only literature: the sublime point at which the abject collapses in a burst of beauty that overwhelms us”.238 Words, art, rhythm all show us the tenuousness of our constructions as legible beings with narratives about self, society, death, creation and the future; sometimes so exquisitely and breathlessly that we are dismantled, the knots unravel.

OTHER MOONS AND OTHER WINDS

The duende does not come at all unless he sees that death is possible. The duende must know beforehand that he can serenade death’s house and rock those branches we all wear, branches that do not have, will never have, any consolation.239

236 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 27 237 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 28 238 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 210 239 Frederico GarcÍa Lorca, In Search of Duende, trans. C. Maurer, (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1998), 67

316 The great Andalusian poet Frederico García Lorca informed the rest of the world in his series of lectures and writings on deep song and duende that the

Duende is both something you can invoke and have momentarily as well as something to which you can bear witness and feel240. Deep song, the prototype of which is the Gypsy siguiriya,241 is for Lorca “imbued with the mysterious color of primordial ages… a deep song is a stammer, a wavering emission of the voice, a marvellous buccal undulation that smashes the resonant cells of our tempered scale, eludes the cold, rigid staves of modern music…”242 The rhythm and lyric of the deep song is “an endless road, a road without crossroads, ending at the pulsing fountain of the child Poetry. The road where the first bird died and the first arrow grew rusty… It is the scream of dead generations, a poignant elegy for lost centuries, the pathetic evocation of love under other moons and other winds.”243 The duende is Homeric in its gesture of offering, over the blood-filled trench of time, to the communities of the dead.

The depth of the deep song is “much deeper than the present heart that creates it or the voice that sings it, because it is almost infinite. It comes from remote races and crosses the graveyard of the years and the fronds of parched winds. It comes from the first sob and the fist kiss.”244 What Lorca called the

‘black sounds’ well up from the earth, come from the mulch, (“the fertile silt that gives us the very substance of art.”245) These subterranean murmurings

240 “In Andalusia people say of certain toreros and flamenco artist that they have duende – an inexplicable power of attraction, the ability, on rare occasions, to send waves of emotion through those watching and listening to them.” Christopher Maurer in Lorca, In Search of Duende, ix 241 “The siguiriya is like a cautery that burns the heart, throat, and lips of those who utter it”, Lorca, In Search of Duende, 26 242 Lorca, In Search of Duende, 3 243 Lorca, In Search of Duende, 4 244 Lorca, In Search of Duende, 12 245 Lorca, In Search of Duende, 57

317 have roots in the Greek ό – chthonios (chthonic), meaning “in, under, or beneath the earth”,246 and the classical cults of antiquity that made sacrifice for fertility via live burial. Lorca is at pains to delineate the demoniacal in duende. The duende is not the “destructive and rather stupid Catholic devil…

No.” Lorca’s duende is rather the “dark, shuddering descendant of the happy marble-and-salt demon of Socrates, whom he angrily scratched on the day

Socrates swallowed the hemlock, and of that melancholy demon of Descartes: a demon who was small as a green almond and who sickened of circles and lines and escaped down the canals to listen to the songs of the blurry sailors.”247

Lorca gives his roll call of those who have had duende/those whom duende has possessed; Bach and Nietzsche are a given,248 so too is “duende-ridden

Velázquez”.249 He sees the culture of duende present in “[t]he moon-frozen heads painted by Zurbarán, the butter yellow and lightning yellow of El

Greco, the narrative of Father Sigüenza, the entire work of Goya”,250 and the duende fighting the angel in the “trembling hands of Keats, Villasandino,

Herrera, Bécquer, and Juan Ramón Jiménez.”251 Lorca, like Barthes, is no feminist, and his idealisation of gender relations relegate women to the poetic

‘horizon’. “The woman of deep song is called Pain,” he writes. “In these poems Pain is made flesh, takes human form, acquires a sharp profile. She is a dark woman wanting to catch birds in nets of wind.”252 Women are the muses of great male poets, or the figuration of loss and longing – the bearers, not the

246 ‘Chthonios’, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek–English Lexicon, at Perseus. 247 Lorca, In Search of Duende, 58 248 Lorca, In Search of Duende, 57 249 Lorca, In Search of Duende, 70 250 The full quotation continues: “… the apse of the church of the Escorial, all polychromed sculpture, the crypt in the house of the Duke of Osuna, the ‘Death with a Guitar’ in the Chapel of the Benaventes at Medina de Rioseco…” in Lorca, In Search of Duende, 66 251 Lorca, In Search of Duende, 67 252 Lorca, In Search of Duende, 17

318 makers of meaning. They may have “sung soleares, a melancholy human genre within easy reach of the heart. But the men have preferred the portentous Gypsy siguiriya, and almost all of them have been martyrs to an irresistible passion for deep song.” 253 And yet, he appears to contradict himself giving not one but two examples of women who possessed duende, although, tellingly, they are not afforded names like the male artists. His first example:

As though crazy, torn like a medieval mourner, la Niña de los Peines leaped to her feet, tossed off a big glass of burning liquor, and began to sing with a scorched throat: without voice, without breath or color, but with duende. She was able to kill all the scaffolding of the song and leave way for a furious, enslaving duende, friend of sad winds, who made the listeners rip their clothes… La Niña de los Peines had to tear her voice because she knew she had an exquisite audience, one who demanded not forms but the marrow of forms, pure music… She had to rob herself of skill and security, send away her muse and become helpless, that her duende might come and deign to fight her hand-to-hand. And how she sang! Her voice was no longer playing. It was a jet of blood worthy of her pain and her sincerity…254

And his second:

Years ago, an eighty-year-old woman won first prize at a dance contest in Jerez de la Frontera. She was competing against beautiful women and young girls with waists as supples as water, but all she did was raise her arms, throw back her head, and stamp her foot on the floor. In the gathering of muses and angels – beautiful forms and beautiful smiles – who could have won but her moribund duende, sweeping the ground with its wings of rusty knives.255

When Lorca wrote that, “The magical property of a poem is to remain possessed by duende that can baptize in dark water all who look at it,”256 he asks the question that Kristeva’s deject asks: ‘Where am I?’ Not ‘Who am I?’

Who I am is insignificant. “Each art has a duende different in form and style,

253 Lorca, In Search of Duende, 26 254 Lorca, In Search of Duende, 62 255 Lorca, In Search of Duende, 63 256 Lorca, In Search of Duende, 67

319 but their roots meet in the same place… the essential, uncontrollable, quivering, common base of wood, sound, canvas, and word… The duende…

Where is the duende?” Lorca asks. “Through the empty arch comes a wind, a mental wind blowing relentlessly over the heads of the dead, in search of new landscapes and unknown accents; a wind that smells of baby’s spittle, crushed grass, and jellyfish veil, announcing the constant baptism of newly created things.”257

UNCANNY FEELINGS

The English word ‘symbol’ is the Greek word symbolon which means, in the ancient world, one half of a knucklebone carried as a token of identity to someone who has the other half. Together the two halves compose one meaning. A metaphor is a species of symbol. So is a lover.258

The ancient magical properties of words bring to mind Julian Wolfreys’ introduction to Readings, in which he disinters the forgotten etymology of the word ‘read’ from the Old English rǣdan, meaning the stomach of an animal; literally viscera.259 The reader can perceive the word/gut traces quickening, shining, and folding, and be affected by the “stored magic”.260 The authors are live/dead, liminal – at the threshold. The reader desires ghosts, queerly, by orally remaking the presence of the authors, the shape of the authors, mouthing the text through the maligned incantatory reading rite. Reading in time immemorial was potent haruspicy and the reader someone who “lugged the guts or wrenched the reads from the dying or dead animal”.261 I argue that

257 Lorca, In Search of Duende, 71-72 258 Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet, (New York: Dalkey Archive Press, 1986), 75 259 Julian Wolfreys, Readings: Acts of Close Reading in Literary Theory, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), ix 260 “True poetic practice implies a mind so miraculously attuned and illuminated that it can form words, by a chain of more-than-coincidences, into a living entity – a poem that goes about on its own (for centuries after the author’s death, perhaps) affecting readers with its stored magic.” Robert Graves, The White Goddess, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966), 490 261 Wolfreys, Readings, ix

320 the reader must to some degree manipulate the innards or the reads. Reading is tetanus; the violent response to a pulse, a hundred thousand pulses.262 It is a form of communion, of transubstantiation, an atavistic corporeal ritual of consumption and disgorgement.

Freud remarks in his essay ‘The Uncanny’, how “fiction presents more opportunities for creating uncanny feelings than are possible in real life”.263

He is curious as to the peculiar dynamic in which it is also true that many things that occur in fiction not considered uncanny would certainly be deemed so if they were to actually happen: Hamlet’s ghost or Homer’s gods, for example. Freud writes that the German “‘unheimlich’ is obviously the opposite of ‘heimlich’ [‘homely’], ‘heimisch’ [‘native’]—the opposite of what is familiar; and we are tempted to conclude that what is ‘uncanny’ is frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar.”264 Yet this is obviously an incomplete definition, as all things unfamiliar are not necessarily uncanny, and Freud is not satisfied with the prior work of Jentsch on the subject nor with his own etymological exhumation of the word’s roots.

He uses the example of Hoffman’s story of the ‘Sand-Man’ in Nachtstücken, a bogeyman who “tears out children’s eyes”.265

Freud quotes the character of the nursemaid in Nachtstücken warning the little boy Nathaniel of the Sand-Man: “He's a wicked man who comes when children won't go to bed, and throws handfuls of sand in their eyes so that they jump out of their heads all bleeding. Then he puts the eyes in a sack and

262 Tracing the word poème, Artaud found that ema in Greek means blood and po-ema – “the blood afterwards” in Knapp, Bettina Liebowitz, and Anaïs Nin, Antonin Artaud: man of vision. (New York: D. Lewis, 1969), 177 263 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, trans. J. Strachey, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol.17, (London: Hogarth Press, 1919), 250 264 Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, 219 265 Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, 226

321 carries them off to the half-moon to feed his children. They sit up there in their nest, and their beaks are hooked like owls’ beaks, and they use them to peck up naughty boys’ and girls' eyes with.”266 Nathaniel is determined to sit up all night and see the Sand-Man for himself and becomes convinced that the bogeyman is his father’s nocturnal visitor; his lawyer friend Coppelius.

The tension of the story lies in the ambiguity of whether Coppelius is, in fact, the Sand-Man, or whether this is all Nathaniel’s phantasy. The tragic end comes when Nathaniel, now a grown man whose life has been haunted by perceived reappearances of the eye-thieving Sand-Man shifting guises, ultimately throws himself off a tower after believing he sees the Sand-Man through a spyglass. Freud concludes that Coppelius is the Sand-Man, but even with the triumph of certainty, the impression of uncanniness is not assuaged.

Freud substitutes the fear of losing one’s eyes for the anxiety of castration, but concedes that this again, is not a complete explanation. The next figure he turns his attention to is the Double, where there is a “doubling, dividing and interchanging of the self.”267 The Double, according to Freud, derives from an infantile narcissism that the soul, as the ethereal double of the body, survives the extinction of the flesh. Yet the Double can also sinisterly turn: “From having been an assurance of immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death.”268 Doubles possess an uncomfortable regressive quality, they are “a harking-back to particular phases in the evolution of the self-regarding feeling”, Freud explains, “a regression to a time when the ego had not yet

266 Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, 227 267 Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, 233 268 Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, 234

322 marked itself off sharply from the external world and from other people.”269

Involuntary repetition is another element to the uncanny. Freud describes an afternoon where he loses his way in an Italian town and, even after taking completely different paths, finds himself back in the same piazza. Or when, as he notes, one finds one’s attention drawn to coincidence that seems too bizarre for chance and seem very hard for even a rational mind to squelch as superstition. The impression of the uncanny acts as a hypodermic to the

“residues of animistic mental activity within us”270 which, although repressed and frightening, is not wholly unfamiliar to us. The uncanny has become alienated to us, it was not always alien, and, nonetheless, recurs.

The taboo about corpses and ghosts reflect how “primitive fear of the dead is still so strong within us and always ready to come to the surface on any provocation”.271 Unable to conceive of death, either rationally or spiritually, the dead must be clearly delineated from the living lest contagion spread.

Madness, too, is historically treated in this way, Freud argues. Madness moves from the feared to the uncanny when there is a quality of recognition: that if not guarded against one might also go mad.

Let us take the uncanny associated with the omnipotence of thoughts, with the prompt fulfillment of wishes, with secret injurious powers and with the return of the dead. The condition under which the feeling of uncanniness arises here is unmistakable. We—or our primitive forefathers—once believed that these possibilities were realities, and were convinced that they actually happened. Nowadays we no longer believe in them, we have surmounted these modes of thought; but we do not feel quite sure of our new beliefs, and the old ones still exist within us ready to seize upon any confirmation.272

269 Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, 235 270 Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, 240 271 Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, 241 272 Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, 246

323 There are uncanny feelings about erotics with dead authors, indeed they fit into the first and last of Freud’s categorical associations. What happens, in the reading moment when the author returns, spectrally?

Derrida writes in Specters of Marx: “The specter, as its name indicates, is the frequency of a certain visibility. But the visibility of the invisible… The specter is also, among other things, what one thinks one sees, and which one projects – on an imaginary screen where there is nothing to see. Not even the screen sometimes, and a screen always has, at bottom, in the bottom or background that is, a structure of disappearing apparition.”273 The text is an imaginary screen that has built into its structure a disappearing apparition.

The reader gropes for the frequency that makes visible the projected spectre and is stirred to tears of longing at the flicker in the corner.

DEATH, QUEERNESS, SHAME

Queers know well the sting of impossible loves, and impossible futures. The term queer itself was appropriated for its archive of injury in efforts to both neutralize its poison and, by some, to wear and revel in that mantle of outcast.

One point of contention in queer studies is whether or not to keep open the wounds of historic abrogation or rather to pivot, and the instinct surely is a defensible one, to a celebratory future. Indeed, as Heather Love in Feeling

Backward surmises: “Critics find themselves in an odd position: we are not sure if we should explore the link between homosexuality and loss, or set about proving that it does not exist.”274 Renovating the past to suit an agenda is surely ill-starred, as Love is aware when she writes, “we chase after the fugitive dead. Bad enough if you want to tell the story of a conquering race,

273 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 101 274 Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2007), 3

324 but to remember history’s losers is worse, for the loss that swallows the dead absorbs these others into an even more profound obscurity. The difficulty of reaching the dead will not keep us from trying.”275 Even though the project may be nonviable there is an obstinate queer impulse to reach out to and feel the dead. Is this because of the burden of social excision, shouldered by queers but epitomized by the dead, renders a sensitivity to the exclusion that,

Bataille describes, “precedes every other, more radical than the exclusion of madmen, children or inferior races, an exclusion preceding all these and serving as their model: the exclusion of the dead”?276

…[A]mong all the blocks of the AIDS Memorial NAMES Quilt, that extraordinary tribute to those who died from complications of HIV and AIDS, only one persists in my visual memory: it says, ‘I had a FABULOUS time,’ the word ‘fabulous’ emerging from the label of a bright orange bottle of laundry detergent. Queers have, it is fair to say, fabricated, confabulated, told fables, and done so fabulously… in the face of great pain. This is the legacy I wish to honor here, that of queers as close enough readers of one another and of dominant culture to gather up, literally, life’s outtakes and waste products and bind them into fictitious but beautiful (w)holes. Because in taking care of our own we have also been forced to stay close, to wash one another’s sweat- soaked sheets in Fab when no one else would, I am hard pressed to give up on sex and sociability, especially sociability and even erotics with the dead, as ways of knowing and making.277

Elizabeth Freeman’s gorgeous and aching description of the tender scavenging behavior that queers engage in to render ‘fictitious but beautiful

(w)holes’ from life’s scrappy offcuts does not relinquish the social – and, further, the erotic – bond with the dead. Yet the shame of this, no matter how

275 Love, Feeling Backward, 21 276 Jean Baudrillard. Symbolic Exchange and Death [1976], trans. Iain Hamilton Grant, (London: SAGE, 1993), 126 277 Freeman, Time Binds, xxi-xxii

325 varnished by affirmative politics, lingers against rational liberal humanist gestures toward social and individual acceptance.278

Shame is important because it is part of the texture of jouissance émue – whether conscious or not – shame inherent in the loss of control of feeling: the spectacle of spillage and seepage, the lack of clear direction for lines of desire.

Eve Sedgwick makes us reconsider our understanding of queer shame: “If queer is a politically potent term, which it is, that’s because, far from being capable of being detached from the childhood scene of shame, it cleaves to that scene as a near-inexhaustible source of transformational energy”. 279

Feelings of shame germinate when behaviour strays from the strictly delineated geography of appropriateness. Queer bodies, queer desires, and queer readings, if they disavow these feelings of shame, risk being cut off from the source of their power. When submerged in the experience – the ripped chordal overreach of duende, or the snot-smeared tearful gush and wallow of jouissance émue – there is always the threat of affective contagion.

Shame is something primal and private, quick to alchemise into rage; an instinctive pairing represented in the classical Greek companion goddesses

Aidos (shame), and Nemesis (vengeance). The textual relationship is sticky, viscous. Mary Douglas describes the peculiar qualities of viscosity:

278 See sex-positive commentator Susie Bright’s interview in reference to her reaction to 1961 film The Children’s Hour (dir. William Wyler) in the 1995 documentary about the history of queer representation in film The Celluloid Closet, (dirs. Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Freiman): “The loathing she [Shirley MacLaine’s character] feels, how sick she is with herself… it still makes me cry when I see that. And I think, you know, ‘Why am I crying? Why does this still get to me? This is just an old, silly movie, you know, and people don’t feel this way anymore.’ But I don’t think that’s true. I think people do feel that way today still. And there’s part of me despite all of my little signs, you know, like ‘Happy!’ Proud!’ ‘Well-adjusted!’ ‘Bisexual!’ ‘Queer!’ ‘Kinky!’ – you know, no matter how many posters I hold up saying, ‘I’m a big pervert and I’m so happy about it’ – there’s this part of me that’s like, ‘How could I be this way?’” in Love, Feeling Backward, 16 279 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Shame and its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995), 210

326 An infant, plunging its hands into a jar of honey, is instantly involved in contemplating the formal properties of solids or liquids and the essential relation between the subjective experiencing self and the experienced world. The viscous is a state half-way between solid and liquid. It is like a cross-section in a process of change. It is unstable, but it does not flow. It is soft, yielding and compressible. There is no gliding on its surface. Its stickiness is a trap, it clings like a leech; it attacks the boundary between myself and it. Long columns falling off my fingers suggest my own substance flowing into the pool of stickiness… to touch stickiness is to risk diluting myself into viscosity.280

The sticky, shameful, queer feelings of desiring the dead are bound to the experience of risking self-dilution into viscosity: neither one thing nor another. Eve Sedgwick writes that, “to perceive texture is to know or hypothesize whether a thing will be easy or hard, safe or dangerous to grasp, to stack, to fold, to shred, to climb on, to stretch, to slide, to soak. Even more immediately than other perceptual systems, it seems, the sense of touch makes nonsense out of any dualistic understanding of agency and passivity; to touch is always already to reach out, to fondly, to heft, to tap, or to enfold, and always to understand other people or natural force as having effectually done so before oneself, if only in the making of the textured object.”281

The unstable dichotomy about touching and being touched is evident when one regards the text as a textured object. The author, long-gone but still present, touches the reader through the double-sided skin of the text – a palimpsest of touch. It is impossible to consign jouissance émue to the reductive meter of positive/negative affect: displaced grief, yearning, arousal, nostalgia, all at once and in many infinite combinations.

280 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, (London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1980), 38 281 Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 14

327 AND THEY ALL LIVED HAPPILY EVER AFTER?

PELLÉAS: ‘What’s the matter? You don’t seem to be happy.’ ‘Oh yes, I am happy, but I am sad.’282

How do we begin to conceive of a genealogy of queer affect that does not omit the mundane, the negative, the trauma, the hauntedness, the not- fabulous? In The Promise of Happiness, Sara Ahmed claims: “Heterosexual love becomes about the possibility of a happy ending; about what life is aimed toward, as being what gives life direction or purpose, or as what drives a story.”283 How do you live when you are excluded from the possibility of a happy ending?

Ahmed asks us to consider Judith Butler’s work on “livable and unlivable lives”, and think about what is ‘bearable’: “A bearable life is a life that can hold up, which can keep its shape or direction, in the face of what it is asked to endure. To bear can also then be a capacity; a bearable life is a life that we can bear… The unbearable life is a life which cannot be tolerated or endured, held up, held on to. The unbearable life ‘breaks’ or ‘shatters’ under the ‘too much’ of what is being borne.”284 Ahmed refers to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New

World and his assessment of happiness as the condition “of making people love their servitude”, where being happy means people “get what they want and they never want what they can’t get”. 285 The modern Western preoccupation with the acquisition and performance of happiness is a pervasive cultural narrative to the point where those individuals or groups who are not happy are stigmatised and shunned.

282 Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 22 283 Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010), 90 284 Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 97 285 Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 192

328 Ahmed argues for the communal possibilities of unhappiness: “If to challenge the right to happiness is to deviate from the straight path, then political movements involve sharing deviation with others. There is joy, wonder, hope, and love in sharing deviation. If to share deviation is to share what causes unhappiness, even joy, wonder, hope, and love are ways of living with rather than living without unhappiness.”286 Possessing ‘bad feelings’, or being seen as negative is cast as retrograde, as refusing the future. But it is not a zero sum equation. She directly addresses Edelman’s No Future and asks that if “all forms of political hope… can be described as performing the logic of futurism” then “those who cannot inherit this future” must then in turn be the locus of negativity. Yet she sees a kind of hopefulness even in Edelman, in that he is “still affirming something in the act of refusing affirmation”, and she locates optimism in the “possibility opened up by inhabiting the negative”.287 In embodying the negative there is profound resistance to the commercialization and commodification of gay culture and the hierarchies and exploitation that are its price.

Ahmed, whose work she acknowledges is deeply influenced by Audre Lorde, summarises Lorde’s argument that “we should not be protected from what hurts. We have to work and struggle not so much to feel hurt but to notice what causes hurt, which means unlearning what we have learned not to notice.”288 The happiness that is the reward for assuming one’s place in the social order with the structuring logic of the heterosexual ever after is based on acculturated obliviousness, learned insensitivity; and for those who are

286 Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 196 287 Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 161 288 Sara Ahmed. The Promise of Happiness, 215-216

329 hurt, the staunch disavowal of the hurt. Lorde recalls a devastating childhood memory:

Tensions on the street were high, as they always are in racially mixed zones of transition. As a very little girl, I remember shrinking from a particular sound, a hoarsely sharp, guttural rasp, because it often meant a nasty glob of grey spittle upon my coat or shoe an instant later. My mother wiped it off with the little pieces of newspaper she always carried in her purse. Sometimes she fussed about low-class people who had no better sense nor manners than to spit into the wind no matter where they went, impressing upon me that this humiliation was totally random. It never occurred to me to doubt her. It was not until years later once in conversation I said to her: ‘Have you noticed people don’t spit into the wind so much the way they used to?’ And the look on my mother’s face told me that I had blundered into one of those secret places of pain that must never be spoken of again. But it was so typical of my mother when I was young that if she couldn’t stop white people spitting on her children because they were Black, she would insist it was something else.289

In the next chapter I want to take seriously Ahmed/Lorde’s recommendation that we stop protecting ourselves from what hurts, not necessarily to feel the hurt more, (although that upswell of feeling will be unavoidable), but to unlearn, or at least momentarily disarm, the paranoid critical techniques queer theorists have become so expert at to guard against this hurt. “Hope,” writes Sedgwick, “often a fracturing, even a traumatic thing to experience, is among the energies by which the reparatively positioned reader tries to organize the fragments and part-objects she encounters or creates. Because the reader has room to realize that the future may be different from the present, it is also possible for her to entertain such profoundly painful, profoundly relieving, ethically crucial possibilities as that the past, in turn, could have happened differently from the way it actually did.”290 Jouissance émue is

289 Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, (London: Sheba Feminist Publishers, 1982), 17-18, quoted in Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 82 290 Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading, Reparative Reading’, 146

330 about the feeling trauma, the hurt that is gamely allowed to be noticed, that enables an erotics of reading to develop into a rich reparative practice.

331 CHAPTER THREE

Only for a moment; but it was enough. It was a sudden revelation, a tinge like a blush which one tried to check and then, as it spread, one yielded to its expansion, and rushed to the furtherest verge and there quivered and felt the world come closer, swollen with some astonishing significance, some pressure of rapture, which split its thin skin and gushed and poured with an extraordinary alleviation over the cracks and sores. Then, for that moment, she had seen the illumination; a match burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed. But the close withdrew; the hard softened. It was over – the moment.

- Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dallowayvi

In the past two chapters I have established the opportuneness of the moment in critical discourse for an erotics of reading to make an intervention in movements away from the paranoid, antisocial position, which dominates some queer theory. In the final chapter I acknowledge the contributions of feminist writers and their tradition of courageous theorising, using their own bodies as sites of politicisation and writing their erotics in the face of scorn, ridicule and silence. The affinity of feminism and queer theory has an intimate, intertwined, but vexed history, often plagued by misunderstanding and misrepresentation. Judith Butler writes a caveat in ‘Against Proper

Objects’: “There can be no viable feminism that fails to account for its complicity in forms of oppression, whether they be colonial, class-based, racist or homophobic. And there can be no viable lesbian and gay studies paradigm that does not examine its own complicitous investments in misogyny and other forms of oppression.”291

As Susan Sontag wrote in her eulogising introduction to A Roland Barthes

Reader, Barthes’s work later in life became more and more personal. Although

291 Judith Butler, ‘Against Proper Objects’, in feminism meets queer theory, eds. Elizabeth Weed and Naomi Schor, (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1997), 2

332 whilst never a feminist, taking a leaf from Barthes’s erotics of reading poses a potential for a strand of queer poeisis and future possibilities for reading queerly that could defy the capitalist economic monopoly on pleasure if braided with the lesbian-feminist mobilisation of the first person erotic tradition. Rita Felski writes that feminists “have often been more willing to admit to, and to elucidate, their intense involvement with literary texts”.292 Yet queer’s conceptual definition disinvests in identity formations, which problematises an erotics that resembles the feminist. “Although queer activism was often engaged with a fierce earnestness of its own,” Felski compares “…its campy style reversed the ethics of authenticity that had defined lesbian-feminism.”293

Returning to Barthes, who, as Sontag so elegantly put it, “speaks of the quiver, thrill, or shudder of meaning, of meanings that themselves vibrate, gather, loosen, disperse, quicken, shine, fold, mutate, delay, slide, separate, that exert pressure, crack, rupture, fissure, are pulverized. Barthes offers something like a poetics of thinking, which identifies the meaning of subjects with the very mobility of meaning, with the kinetics of consciousness itself”.294

As Barthes’s thinking evolved he began to dredge the personal, yet his position was never earnest, his posture always playful. His work became

“more full of grain, as he called it” and “his intellectual art more openly a performance”. 295 Sontag describes the tones in which he would rehearse his address to the reader and finds them “invariably… affable… This is seduction

292 Rita Felski, Uses of Literature, Malden, (Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2008), 62 293 Felski, Uses of Literature, 40 294 Susan Sontag, ‘Writing Itself: On Roland Barthes’, A Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), xiii 295 Sontag, ‘Writing Itself: On Roland Barthes’, xvii

333 as play, never violation.”296 The seductive quality of writing was something

Barthes was explicit about, both his own and others. He was continuously exploring the connections “between desire and reading, desire and writing – his insistence that his own writing is, more than anything, the product of appetite”, Sontag claims. “The words ‘pleasure’, ‘bliss’, ‘happiness’ recur in his work with a weight… that is both voluptuous and subversive.”297 The subversion, for Barthes, comes not from a politicisation of language. Sontag asserts that Barthes never ventured “the commitment that writing makes to something outside of itself (to a social or moral goal) that makes literature an instrument of opposition”. It is, to Barthes, instead, “a certain practice of writing itself: excessive, playful, intricate, subtle, sensuous – language which can never be that of power.”298

Jacques Ranciere discusses the implications of the redistribution of power inherent in the democratization of writing in The Politics of Literature, and historicises the hermeneutics of suspicion, (and, implicitly, the methodology of paranoia):

To analyse prosaic realities as fantasmagorias bearing witness to the hidden truth about a society, to tell the truth about the surface by tunneling into the depths and then formulating the unconscious social text that is to be deciphered there – this model of symptomatic reading is an invention peculiar to literature. It is the very mode of literature in which literature asserted its novelty and which it then passed on to those sciences of interpretation which believed that, by applying them to it in turn, they were forcing literature to cough up its hidden truth. What makes these ‘returns to sender’ at once so easy and so pointless is not just that literature itself provided the conceptual schemas with which people claim to be demystifying it. It is also that literature did not wait for such criticism before

296 Sontag, ‘Writing Itself: On Roland Barthes’, xvii 297 Sontag, ‘Writing Itself’, xxi 298 Sontag, ‘Writing Itself’, xxii

334 problematizing its own science, in order to itself turn this into an object of a diagnosis and a reappraisal.299

We are currently experiencing a cultural profligacy of words. An “excess” that Ranciere believes “can be interpreted as the sign of a sickness of an era”. 300 Hermeneutics was, to begin with, an invention to regulate the explosion of literature. Yet, Ranciere claims, the “hermeneutic profusion that first appeared to be the antidote to the untrammelled democratic appropriation of words” has now become “equated with the same excess.”301

Literature itself moves against the plenitude it has engineered. Ranciere notes that some have equated this turn with the reactionary “aristocratic desire to set up a sanctuary of words reserved for the exclusive use of the highly literate”, but rather, he writes, we should instead view it as, “the process by which literary hermeneutics turns against itself.” 302 Ranciere explains this like a settling of accounts, in which hermeneutics “pays back” its overdrawn enticing methodology of demystification into the bank of the “democratic excess of words”, and thereby recognises the “’language of life’ it pitted against the representative rationality of actions and intended meanings as a danger to that very life.”303

Throughout this thesis I have discussed the language of power and the function of jouissance in the phallocentric hegemony. I have attempted to theorise a way to recuperate Barthes’s erotics, with redress to his structural sexism, within the context of the broader acknowledgement that literary hermeneutics is becoming beggared. I have established that, for Barthes after

Lacan, the character of bliss is “asocial”: jouissance is “the abrupt loss of

299 Jacques Ranciere, The Politics of Literature, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011), 22-23 300 Ranciere, The Politics of Literature, 23 301 Ranciere, The Politics of Literature, 23 302 Ranciere, The Politics of Literature, 23 303 Ranciere, The Politics of Literature, 23

335 sociality, and yet there follows no recurrence to the subject (subjectivity), the person, solitude: everything is lost, integrally. Extremity of the clandestine, darkness of the motion-picture theater.”304 Thus it follows that jouissance has been theorised as self-shattering: antirelational. But what of jouissance émue – the most disruptive, most subversive variant of jouissance (subversive even to jouissance): must all desire for the state of bliss end in a conflagration of connection, a psychic solipsism?

A HUNGER NOT TO BE SATISFIED, A GAPING LOVE

I turn briefly to Barthes’s discussion of langeur – ‘Love’s Languor’ – in A

Lover’s Discourse, where he responds to Freud’s idea that: “’[i]t is only in the fulfillment of amorous states that most of the libido is transferred to the object and that this latter takes the place, to certain degree, of the ego’”.305 This

‘fulfillment’ of the amorous state is exemplified by the Satyric impatience, which Barthes describes thus: “I want my desire to be satisfied immediately. If I see a sleeping face, parted lips, an open hand, I want to be able to hurl myself upon them.”306 This is the imposition of force, not desire. It is the use of the other rather than an act in which, Audre Lorde writes, “we share the feelings of those others who participate in the experience with us. And use without consent of the used is abuse.”307

In the state of languor there is no expectation of ‘fulfillment.’ “In languor,”

Barthes tells us, “I merely wait: ‘I knew no end to desiring you.’”308 Perhaps languor is the temporality of emotional jouissance? This particular phylactery

304 Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, 39 305 Freud, Outline of Psychoanalysis, quoted in Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 156 306 Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 155 307 Audre Lorde, ‘Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power’, in Sister Outsider, (Berkeley: The Crossing Press, 1984), 53 308 Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 155

336 is an unusual one; Barthes leaves his quotations suspended in the white space of the page, free from annotation, unlike most others where his notes and challenges crowd the text, impinging upon the inalienability of his references.

The mood is dreamy, appropriately volupté, his excerpts of Sollers309 and

Sappho,310 set delicately, allowed space to breathe. There is a fullness and a hunger, a yearning and a sense of satiation: an agitating paradox of wanting both to come and to cry.

“In amorous languor, something keeps going away;” Barthes describes, “it as if desire were nothing but this hemorrhage. Such is amorous fatigue: a hunger not to be satisfied, a gaping love.”311 I suggest that in an erotics of reading a gaping love is the desire for the dead author, who is there in the text, but who

‘keeps going away’. The queerness of the temporality of reading, the sense of time queered in such a reading, is the condition of feeling acutely, desire “for the absent being and desire for the present being: languor superimposes the two desires, putting absence within presence. Whence a state of contradiction: this is the ‘gentle fire.’”312

In the wake of Eve Sedgwick’s elucidation of paranoid and reparative readings Rita Felski carves out a space to talk about reading in the greater critical affective turn, and, particularly, to talk about the aesthetic and emotional experiences of reading. She claims that readers “begin to engage

309 “and you tell me my other self will you answer me at last I am tired of you I want you I dream of you for you against you answer me your name is a perfume about me your color bursts among the thorns bring back my heart with cool wine make me a coverlet of the morning I suffocate beneath this mask withered shrunken skin nothing exists save desire” Sollers, Paradis, quoted in Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 155 310 “… for when I glance at you even an instant, I can no longer utter a word: my tongue thickens to a lump, and beneath my skin breaks out a subtle fire: my eyes are blind, my ears filled with humming, and sweat streams down my body, I am seized by a sudden shuddering; I turn greener than grass, and in a moment more, I feel I shall die.” Sappho quoted in Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 155-156 311 Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 156 312 Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 156

337 the affective and absorptive, the sensuous and somatic qualities of aesthetic experience” only when the “limits of demystification as a critical method and a theoretical ideal” have been acknowledged.313 This is the interdigitation of weak theory with strong. Felski uses enchantment to describe the ‘swoony feelings’ of literature. Enchantment is “a term with precious little currency in literary theory, calling up scenarios of old-school professors swooning in rapture over the delights of Romantic poetry”.314

A critic might admit her “fervency and helplessness of response”315 to such a text, irreconcilable with the paranoid muscularity of decades of critical thinking embedded in the methodology of a hermeneutics of suspicion, yet,

Felski suspects: “While critics do not talk of enchantment, it does not follow that they have never been enchanted.”316 Recognition bleeds into enchantment in what she dubs the “Madame Bovary syndrome”317 where the reader’s “self- awareness is swallowed up by her intense affiliation with an imaginary persona, an affiliation that involves a temporary relinquishing of reflective and analytical consciousness… Immersed in the virtual reality of a fictional text, a reader feels herself to be transported, caught up, or swept away.”318

There are some overt similarities in Felski’s account of enchantment to

Barthes’s illustration of languor. Both can be said to be “soaked through with an unusual intensity of perception and affect”, akin to an experience of altered consciousness, like “the condition of being intoxicated, drugged or

313 Felski, Uses of Literature, 76 314 Felski, Uses of Literature, 54 315 Felski, Uses of Literature, 75 316 Felski, Uses of Literature, 54 317 Felski, Uses of Literature, 34 318 Felski, Uses of Literature, 34-35

338 dreaming.”319 Indeed, similar to Sollers’s description of the lover’s ‘burst’ of perfume and colour amidst the thorns: “Colors seem brighter”, Felski writes,

“perceptions are heightened, details stand out with a hallucinatory sharpness.” The reader’s sense of ‘autonomy’ and ‘self-control’ are bled, like

Sappho rendered mute, blind and deaf: “There is no longer a sharp line between self and text but a confused and inchoate intermingling… You feel oblivious to your surroundings, your past, your everyday life; you exist only in the present and the numinous presence of a text.” 320 I read this as an analogue of Barthes’s uncanny presence/absence – the queer drift of the text.

Felski adopts the taxonomic classification, ‘shock’, used in art theory but not commonly in literary theory. To trace shock she uses a “more specialized language of transgression, trauma, defamiliarization, dislocation, self- shattering, the sublime”. 321 She distinguishes between shock and enchantment: “shock marks the antithesis of the blissful enfolding and voluptuous pleasure that we associate with enchantment.” 322 Shock, she writes, “felt like a slap in the face; an exhilarating assault equal parts intellectual and visceral.” 323 She gives her specific list of texts that have shocked her: Marat/Sade by Peter Weiss, Beckett’s Endgame, The Measures

Taken by Brecht, Nausea by Sartre, and Euripides’ The Bacchae. Whilst enchantment possesses “some of the viscerality of shock” it has “none of its agitating and confrontational character; it offers rapturous self-forgetting

319 Felski, Uses of Literature, 55 320 Felski, Uses of Literature, 55 321 Felski, Uses of Literature, 105 322 Felski, Uses of Literature, 106 323 Felski, Uses of Literature, 106

339 rather than self-shattering”. 324 Shock, I argue, is the extenuation of the abjection of jouissance.

What is the difference between self-forgetting and self-shattering? If self- shattering is the darkness of the motion-picture theatre, the slap in the face of antirelationality, is jouissance a kind of Brechtian anti-catharsis? The pleasure of enchantment turns out to be thoroughly unheimlich at its core,” Felski argues, “underscoring the limits of our attempts at self-possession and signaling the sheer opacity and intractability of subjectivity.” 325 Perhaps jouissance émue, through an allowed continuity in subjectivity (however wayward), interrupted only by a moment of self-forgetting, (as though one had stumbled into the queer dimensional temporality of a fairy-ring), takes on its subversive capabilities through its potential shared-ness? (Indeed, how could this discussion proceed if jouissance émue was, in a sense that undiscover’d country, from whose bourn no traveller returns?) This gaping love is Kristeva’s open wound, a wound that the reader must endure as a

“corporeal, and verbal ordeal of fundamental incompleteness: a ‘gaping’… like a crucified person opening up the stigmata of its desiring body… For what impossible catharsis?”326 An erotics of reading occupies that conflicted territory of contradiction, of amnesia – to love and love without fulfillment.

AY, THERE’S THE RUB

The integration of arousal into a reading strategy was the substance of

Sedgwick’s ‘Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl’ and her explanation as to why there is such cultural discomfort surrounding the idea that reading is erotic. She writes that “sexuality of any power is likely to hover near the

324 Felski, Uses of Literature, 55 325 Felski, Uses of Literature, 134 326 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 27

340 threshold of hilarity”,327 and that masturbation in particular is demoted to the ineffable domain of infantile sexuality preceding object-choice, which blurs the delineations of comfortable heteronormativity – thus marking it as taboo.

Masturbation is cued in social discourse as funny, or sad, precisely because of the power it holds.328 Sedgwick points out that the condemnatory charge of

‘mental masturbation’ so frequently levelled at academic research strikes close to the mark. She refers to what she calls the “foundational open secret” regarding the difficulties of controlling the “vibrations” of the “solitary pleasure”329 – (indeed, Derrida joked that deconstruction was “coming-to- terms with literature”330), or what we might disparagingly call ‘one handed reading’. Because masturbation, “escapes both the narrative of reproduction and (when practiced solo) even the creation of any interpersonal trace, it seems to have an affinity with amnesia, repetition or the repetition- compulsion, and ahistorical or history-rupturing rhetorics of sublimity”331 – the repetition of the uncanny pleasure of self-forgetting.

The crucial point Sedgwick makes here is that there is a frequent interruption to heteronormativity when masturbating as autoeroticism constitutes a heterogeneous and polymorphic field of erotic impulses not directed at desire’s proper (heterosexual) object, or even at any object. Sedgwick positions herself as following the trajectory of Foucault’s work on the history of

327 Sedgwick, ‘Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 17, no. 4 (Summer, 1991), 819 328 “I did play with myself. I was pretty sure everybody did, but I was also sure that everybody had to pretend that they didn’t. Playing with yourself was dirty and would get you a whipping if your mama or your aunts found out. It was all sex and it was all ‘funny’ – funny-scary or funny like the jokes my aunts were always making… They’d laugh themselves silly and never explain anything.” Dorothy Allison, ‘A Personal History of Lesbian Porn’, in Skin: Talking about Sex, Class, and Literature, (London: Pandora, 1995), 185 329 Sedgwick, ‘Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl’, 820 330 Jacques Derrida, ‘Deconstruction in America: An interview with Jacques Derrida’, trans. J. Creech, Critical Exchange, vol.17, (1985): 9 331 Sedgwick, ‘Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl’, 820

341 sexuality wherein divergent sexual experiences can be seen to evolve and permute over time. These experiences are “entangled in particularly indicative ways with aspects of epistemology and of literary creation and reception.”332 She draws out the links between masturbation and literature,

“not least an analogy to writing”, but further than this, autoeroticism offers “a reservoir of potentially utopian metaphors and energies for independence, self-possession, and a rapture that may owe relatively little to political or interpersonal abjection.”333

Sedgwick acknowledges the tradition in some feminism and gay and lesbian theory that recognises and puts stock in nonreproductive sexuality. What might be most important about masturbation is precisely its ability to not be a sexual identity category; it fails to register in our categorisation of people due to their sexual object choice.334 Masturbatory sexuality “is a long execrated form of sexuality, intimately and invaluably entangled with the physical, emotional, and intellectual adventures of many, many people, that today completely fails to constitute anything remotely like a minority identity.”335

What this might mean, Sedgwick proposes, is that this is a form of sexuality, indeed, a powerful one, that is seemingly able to “run so fully athwart the precious and embattled sexual identities whose meaning and outlines we

332 Sedgwick, ‘Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl’, 820 333 Sedgwick, ‘Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl’, 821 334 “Far from there persisting a minority identity of ‘the masturbator’ today, of course, autoeroticism per se in the twentieth century has been conclusively subsumed under that normalizing developmental model, differently but perhaps equally demeaning, according to which it represents a relatively innocuous way station on the road to a ‘full’, that is, alloerotic, adult genitality defined almost exclusively by gender of object choice”, Sedgwick, ‘Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl’, 825 335 Sedgwick, ‘Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl’, 821

342 always insist on thinking we know”.336 The repercussions of this must prompt us to interrogate the essentialism of all categorical identities.337

In her analysis of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, Sedgwick turns her attention to “the great and estranging force of the homoerotic longing magnetized in [Sense and Sensibility] by that radiant and inattentive presence – the female figure of the love that keeps forgetting its name.”338 This figure of amnesiac autoeroticism, which Sedgwick sets up so cleverly against the old adage of the love that dare not speak its name, is figured in the characters of the sisters Marianne and Elinor Dashwood. Sedgwick shows us the longing and deep love Elinor feels for Marianne – indeed, it is the love story of the novel – and the instability of Marianne’s sexuality according to nineteenth century pathologising narratives of masturbation. Marianne’s “distracted”, “excess” sexuality is both “radiantly attractive to almost everyone, female and male, who views her”, whilst, simultaneously, signifying “a horrifying staging of autoconsumption” according to the medicalised model of the day.339

Sedgwick lingers over the particularly crushing scene in which a weeping

Marianne is writing her final letter to her errant erstwhile suitor Willoughby, whilst Elinor looks on helpless. “Bedroom scenes”, Sedgwick points out, “are not so commonplace in Jane Austen’s novels that readers get jaded with the chiaroscuro of sleep and passion, wan light, damp linen, physical abandon, naked dependency, and the imperfectly clothed body.”340All does not end well for Marianne. The reward for her sensibility, her excess sexuality, is a

336 Sedgwick, ‘Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl’, 822 337 “…the dropping out of sight in this century of the of the masturbatory identity has only, it seems, given more the authority of self-evidence to the scientific, therapeutic, institutional, and narrative relations originally organized around it”, Sedgwick, ‘Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl’, 829 338 Sedgwick, ‘Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl’, 829 339 Sedgwick, ‘Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl’, 829 340 Sedgwick, ‘Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl’, 822

343 devastating illness, and, after that, the unexciting consolation prize of Colonel

Brandon. And yet her ending is not ‘tragic’, it is the familiar succession of settlements and compromises of a negotiated, difficult reality.

The bedroom scene in Sense and Sensibility involves no masturbation in its moist chiaroscuro, but it does involve a quivering sensibility. “A person who is drawn, however tremblingly, to what disturbs identity”, Calvin Thomas suggests, “may ironically be identified or even self-identify as one of what

Sedgwick calls those ‘other people who vibrate to the chord of queer without having much same-sex eroticism.’… Of course, consciously or not, everyone has had some same-sex eroticism, if not as a polymorphously perverse infant, then as a (no matter how furtively or infrequently) masturbating adult.”341

Masturbation is identity complicating, identity problematising; it exudes an identity unbecoming. Marianne’s weeping is the stand-in sign of her desire; it is the performance of her feelings both to comfort herself in the viscerality of her affect rendered visible, made ‘real’, and to enact the emblematisation of her desire, knowing that she is performing for a spectator, that she commands

Elinor’s rapt audience.

WHO WILL WRITE THE HISTORY OF TEARS?

It will come as no great surprise to readers of history, or observers of popular culture, that lovers are prone to crying. (Indeed, the whole eighteenth century literary genre of the sentimental was steeped in the lachrymose.342) “By

341 Calvin Thomas, ‘Foreword: Crossing the Streets, Queering the Sheets, or: ‘Do You Want to Save the Changes to Queer Heterosexuality?’ in Straight writ queer: non-normative expressions of heterosexuality in literature, ed. Richard Fantina, (North Carolina: McFarland & Co. Publishers, 2006), 3 342 “It is among the paradoxes of the lachrymose fiction that bedewed the eyes of novel readers in the later eighteenth century that the foremost exponents of the sentimental mode were also its most cogent detractors.” Thomas Keymer, ‘Sentimental fiction: ethics, social critique and philanthropy’, in The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660-1780, ed. John Richetti, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 572

344 releasing his tears without constraint”, Barthes writes, the lover follows the directives of “the amorous body, which is a body in liquid expansion: to weep together, to flow together”. 343 The temporality of the crying lover is concomitantly strange and familiar, the weeping taking ‘place’ in an endless, shapeless night, outside of ‘real’ time; ahistorical. (And for those of us who have spent such a night, eidetic in a way orgasm is not.)

“Perhaps ‘weeping’ is too crude; perhaps we must not refer all tears to one and the same signification;” Barthes seeks to clarify, “perhaps within the same lover there are several subjects who engage in neighboring but different modes of ‘weeping’.” 344 He draws this back to the reservoir of his own experience: “If I have so many ways of crying, it may be because, when I cry, I always address myself to someone, and because the recipient of my tears is not always the same: I adapt my ways of weeping to the kind of blackmail, which, by my tears, I mean to exercise around me.”345 Like Marianne, Barthes makes himself cry, “in order to prove… that [his] grief is not an illusion”; he narrativises his tears, which “tell a story”, they engender a “myth of grief” that becomes bearable because he has constructed for himself “an emphatic interlocutor who receives the ‘truest’ of messages” – as Barthes decides that the inarticulate sign of the body is more trustworthy than the confected article of speech.346

Crying is a phenomenon that must be studied in its relationship to speech.

Indeed, it is a phenomenon Jack Katz observes, “that often speech calls into existence in order to make problems for speaking. Crying is not just a ‘feeling’

343 Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 180 344 Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 181 345 Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 181 346 Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 182

345 nor just a series of effects; it is a subtle range of corporeal doings, such as a balking at speaking, resonant markings of pauses between utterances, and a manner of depicting the body as too light or too heavy a vehicle to bear or hold on to language.”347 The idea of a ‘bearable’ life was discussed in the second chapter in relation to Sara Ahmed’s study of the particularly Western construct of happiness and the possibilities of learning to live with rather than without unhappiness, or as Lorde put it, how we might go about unlearning our reflexive impulse to neutralise, via psychic quarantine, things that hurt. If we agree with Katz’s proposition that crying, “emerges when culture forces people to embody a response they cannot say”,348 does Gallop’s grope for a definition of jouissance émue, (“something like orgasm accompanied by crying, or maybe even bursting into tears instead of coming”349), signify that we have reached an edge where affect supersedes language – where language is no longer possible?

Crying is a subject explored by James Elkins in his work Pictures and Tears: A

History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings, who approaches a similar aesthetic concept through the visual medium. He borrows from the playwright Georg Büchner, who, Elkins writes: “has a wonderful line about how dry people have become, and how parsimonious they are with the little bits that they do manage to feel.”350 There is a Western cultural recoil to inappropriate displays of emotion, a flinch in response to an incontinence of feeling unmoored to its ‘proper’ place. One has only to think of the awkwardness that the decontextualized tears of a stranger elicit in our

347 Jack Katz, How Emotions Work, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 197 348 Katz, How Emotions Work, 198 349 Gallop, ‘Precocious Jouissance’, 572 350 Elkins, James. Pictures and Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings, (New York: Routledge, 2004), vii

346 response – in most situations one feigns total oblivion – to see the extent of our deficit of feeling. The performance of tears requires an intimacy with the observer, or at least an understanding of what precipitated them, to be read by the onlooker, otherwise they are a signifier adrift from a signified.

In Elkins’ qualitative survey of people crying at paintings he identifies a pattern: peoples’ tears tend to fall into two categories of response. In the first example, “people cry because pictures seem unbearably full, complex, daunting, or somehow too close to be properly seen. In the other, they cry because pictures seem unbearably empty, dark, painfully vast, cold, and somehow too far away to be understood”. 351 This appears to conjure a

‘smothering’ on one hand, a ‘vacuum’ on the other. 352 Yet he admits, some tears were mysteries even to the person who cried them: “They came from nowhere, and in a minute they evaporate, like a dream that can hardly be remembered.”353

The jouissance émue of a text encompasses all three of these rationalisations for the inflorescence of tears – tears that come from absence, tears that come from presence, tears that come for no critically fathomable reason – (do tears need to have a reason?) It is the suppression of tears that denies the subject access to jouissance émue, indeed, to any relational connection with others.

(Elkins observes the ‘saddest’ entry in the visitors’ book at a Rothko exhibition in amongst others who vividly expressed how they were moved to tears: “I wish I could cry.”354) Like Laertes, who, upon hearing of his sister’s suicide, initially makes the flat joke: “Too much water hast thou, poor

351 Elkins, Pictures and Tears, vii 352 Elkins, Pictures and Tears, 15 353 Elkins, Pictures and Tears, 16 354 Elkins, Pictures and Tears, 16

347 Ophelia/ And therefore I forbid my tears”355, who then cries despite himself, but swallows the tears as shameful and unmanly; “when these are gone,/ The woman will be out”,356 and finally exits decrying his weeping; “I have a speech of fire, that fain would blaze/ But that this folly drowns it”.357

AN EROTICS OF READING

In her essay ‘Uses of the Erotic’, Lorde argues that the suppression of feeling is the means by which systems of power keep people from revolt. The erotic is the most potent and radical expression of this feeling. “The erotic”, she insists, is “not a question of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing.”358 The patriarchal hegemony has suppressed women’s access to their own erotic power and that the “superficially erotic has been encouraged as a sign of female inferiority”.359 Sexuality expressed by women of their own accord has been discouraged or ‘confused’, she argues, and made into “the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized”, so much so that women have

“come to distrust that power which rises from our deepest and nonrational knowledge.”360 She describes her own erotic feelings as “the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy. In the way my body stretches to music and opens in response, hearkening to its deepest rhythms, so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience, whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem”.361 She details her eroticism, drawing power from the affects of the sensual:

355 Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act IV, Scene VII, 185-186 356 Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act IV, Scene VII, 188-189 357 Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act IV, Scene VII, 190-191 358 Audre Lorde, ‘Uses of the Erotic’, in Sister Outsider, (Berkeley: The Crossing Press, 1984), 54 359 Lorde, ‘Uses of the Erotic’, 53 360 Lorde, ‘Uses of the Erotic’, 53 361 Lorde, ‘Uses of the Erotic’, 56-57

348 During World War II, we bought sealed plastic packets of white, uncolored margarine, with a tiny, intense pellet of yellow coloring perched like a topaz just inside the clear skin of the bag. We would leave the margarine out for a while to soften, and then we would pinch the little pellet to break it inside the bag, releasing the rich yellowness into the soft pale mass of margarine. Then taking it carefully between our fingers, we would knead it gently back and forth, over and over, until the color had spread throughout the whole pound bag of margarine, thoroughly coloring it. I find the erotic such a kernel within myself.362

There is something very Barthesian about Lorde’s erotic pleasure, kneading that kernel of colour into oil, recalling a dish, a garden, an encounter, a voice, a moment – and evocative of Lorca in the way her body splays its contours to an exact present. (Although she does acknowledge a hierarchy: “There is a difference between painting a back fence and writing a poem, but only one of quantity. And there is, for me, no difference between writing a good poem and moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love.”363) In the ability to feel, and to share, which is the manifestation of the erotic, Lorde articulates:

“In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness”.364

But the erotic is a difficult thing to get in touch with. Dorothy Allison writes about her expedition to Sagaris, a feminist theory institute in Plainfield,

Vermont, with other members of her lesbian-feminist collective in 1975. She wants to take Bertha Harris’ writing class but feels anxious to show her work.

She relates an anecdote of Bertha splitting the class into two groups:

“‘Lesbians over here, straight women over there’”, and the subsequent

‘horror’ and ‘delight’ the women felt thus divided. The straight women were set an exercise where they wrote about ‘fear and the forbidden’. Bertha said:

“’I want you to write about sex, about sex between a mother and a

362 Lorde, ‘Uses of the Erotic’, 57 363 Lorde, ‘Uses of the Erotic’, 57 364 Lorde, ‘Uses of the Erotic’, 57

349 daughter…’” and then walked over to the lesbians “with a swagger” and smiled. “’I want you to see what you can do with language. No euphemisms.

No clichés. Write for me about going down… Oral sex… Write about it as if no one before you had ever written about it before.’”365Allison writes about being castigated by a former lover when she’d waxed lyrical about going down on her. Such talk (and such activities), were condemned by the lesbian- feminist collective. “No one admitted using dildos, wanting to be tied up, wanting to be penetrated, or talking dirty – all that male stuff. Sex was important, serious, a battleground. My lover wanted us to perform tribadism, stare into each other’s eyes, and orgasm simultaneously. Egalitarian, female, feminist, revolutionary. Were those euphemisms?” Allison poses rhetorically, and then answers: “Euphemisms for I can’t come like that.”366

I read with a mixture of shared, nodding, anguished desire, how Allison admits that she wrote, “wanting desperately the love of beautiful women”,

(“all right, the beautiful women who would read me”, she clarifies), and how every “effort was marked by my terror of their contempt”.367

I thought of all the pornography I had ever read. Male language. Fucking. I liked oral sex as an act of worship, after fucking strenuously, after coming and making her come. Afterward, teasing a clit so swollen my touch is almost agonizing, listening to her moan and weep above me, or performing that act of worship while her fist is twined in my hair, holding me painfully, demanding that I work at this thing, strain with every muscle in my body until my neck and back are burning with pain and I can barely go on, following her every movement, every gasping demand, coming myself as she comes, released from the torment, orgasming on the agony and the accomplishment. I couldn’t write that!368

365 Dorothy Allison, ‘Sex Writing, the Importance and the Difficulty’, in Skin: Talking about Sex, Class, and Literature, (London: Pandora, 1995), 86-87 366 Allison, ‘Sex Writing’, 87 367 Allison, ‘Sex Writing’, 88 368 Allison, ‘Sex Writing’, 88

350 Allison writes of her struggle to articulate her desire, a desire that sometimes made her feel uncomfortable and ashamed: “Half a dozen times I began the piece and tore it up… I wanted to talk about how confused I was about desire itself, what acts seemed sexual, what seemed dangerous, what funny or humiliating or deeply, deeply erotic. Every attempt stalled on my fear.”369

Eventually she penned something, which she read “in a sweat of terror, self- consciousness, and pride”, and was surprised to see that in the “context of what everyone else had written my cowardice was not so apparent” as so few of the women’s writing “actually described sex itself.” 370 However, she was sensitive to just how much her fear had dictated what she had written. Her explicitness was counterweighted by what she had not said. Whilst she had read out the word “labia, and talked about sweat, and referred to the pulsing shout of release that punctuates orgasm” she had “only flirted with the truth”. 371 What she had not written was the unidealised tokens of pleasure, what she expressed she expressed in “gentle seductive language”, tailored to her audience, and preserving one last comforting veil. “I am not gentle in bed, not seductive”, Allison confesses: “In heat, I am abrupt and desperate. What I had not said was so much greater than all the soft words I had used with such care.”372

What I had not said was so much greater… Allison grows into her ability to articulate her erotics, as evidenced by ‘A Personal History of Lesbian Porn’, another essay in the collection in which ‘Sex Writing’ appears. She describes her delirious but lucid house-sitting stint at a mansion with a well-stocked closet containing, (the spines all turned to the wall), such titles (amidst others,

369 Allison, ‘Sex Writing’, 88 370 Allison, ‘Sex Writing’, 89 371 Allison, ‘Sex Writing’, 89 372 Allison, ‘Sex Writing’, 89

351 heterosexual, gay male, and fetish,) as: “Sorority Sister Initiation, Anything She

Wants!, The Loving and the Daring, Emanuelle, The Image, [and] Women in Love

With Women.” She would take books out with her on lawn-mowing duty, her breaks consumed by “retiring to the bushes only when overcome by sun or lust.” 373 When the ‘Lesbian’ finally materialised in the text, (“with hair sprouting from both her upper lip and her nipples, bloated, fat, and sweaty)”

Allison recognised her, but also recognised her as a caricature, as unreal as

‘Zeus or Jesus’: “I knew her immediately. She wasn’t true, either. She wasn’t me… But she was true enough, and the lust echoed.”374 It was the erotic verisimilitude that captivated her. When the Lesbian “pulled the frightened girl close after thirty pages, I got damp all down my legs.”375 In the conclusion to the essay, Allison narrates how she returned all the books to their place, and, when back in her apartment, went through her “underwear drawer”, the

“pile buried under the comforter in the corner of the storage closet”, the

“magazines tucked everywhere: from the kitchen cupboard to behind the towels in the bathroom”376 – and decides, once and for all, to put them on display in the living room: “Anyone who comes to my house can see my porn.”377

This is a candour shared with other lesbian-feminists who are realistic about pleasure, and about poetry and politics, in limitation and in commodiousness.

“I hope never to idealize poetry – it has suffered enough for that” Adrienne

Rich quips. “Poetry is not a healing lotion, an emotional massage, a kind of linguistic aromatherapy. Neither is it a blueprint, nor an instruction manual,

373 Allison, ‘A Personal History of Lesbian Porn’, 184 374 Allison, ‘A Personal History of Lesbian Porn’, 187 375 Allison, ‘A Personal History of Lesbian Porn’, 187 376 Allison, ‘A Personal History of Lesbian Porn’, 192 377 Allison, ‘A Personal History of Lesbian Porn’, 193

352 nor a billboard. There is no universal Poetry anyway, only poetries and poetics, and the streaming, intertwining histories to which they belong.”378

What poetry does possess, Rich writes, is the “capacity… to remind us of something we are forbidden to see. A forgotten future: a still-uncreated site whose moral architecture is founded not on ownership and dispossession, the subjection of women, torture and bribes, outcast and tribe, but on the continuous redefining of freedom… This ongoing future, written off over and over, is still within view.“ 379 Rich’s expression of a poetic futurity that acknowledges a moral obligation of community also makes explicit its validation of the presence, within communities, of the dead: (There are ghostly presences here…”380) Rich gives a long list of her particular ghosts,381 but makes clear that she does not engage in this spectral roll call to establish a canon. Rather, she views these dead authors as “voices mingling in a long conversation, a long turbulence, a great, vexed, and often maligned tradition, in poetry as in politics… The tradition of those who have written against the silences of their time and location.”382

Dorothy Porter is one who wrote against the silence of her time and location, and who recognised the uncanny desire between reader and author. In her essay On Passion, which she wrote whilst she was struggling with (and ultimately dying from) cancer, she composed a meditation on the passionate

378 Adrienne Rich, ‘Poetry and the Forgotten Future’, in A Human Eye: Essays on Art in Society, 1997-2008, (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009), 134 379 Rich, ‘Poetry and the Forgotten Future’, 143 380 Rich, ‘Poetry and the Forgotten Future’, 143 381 “Qafi Azam. William Blake. Bertolt Brecht. Gwendolyn Brooks. Aimé Césaire. Hart Crane. Roque Dalton. Rubén Darío. Robert Duncan. Faiz Ahmed Faiz. Forugh Farrokhzad. Robert Hayden. Nazim Hikmet. Billie Holiday. June Jordan. Frederico García Lorca. Audre Lorde. Bob Marley. Vladimir Mayakovsky. Thomas McGrath. Pablo Neruda. Lorine Niedecker. Charles Olson. George Oppen. Wilfred Owen. Pier Paolo Pasolini. Dahlia Ravikovitch. Edwin Rolfe. Muriel Rukeyser. Léopold Senghor. Nina Simone. Bessie Smith. César Vallejo.” Rich, ‘Poetry and the Forgotten Future’, 144 382 Rich, ‘Poetry and the Forgotten Future’, 144

353 relationships she had experienced throughout her life with books; her youthful, intoxicating flirtation with Rimbaud, the splintering ravishment of returning to Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, the desolate hunger she felt in and for Sappho, and the raw, thrilling indecency of reading Allen Ginsberg’s

‘Please Master’ aloud to a crowd:

If any poem has convinced me of the power of language to shock, indeed turn on a live audience, it is [‘Please Master’]… I read it once, with shaking knees, to a festival crowd come to hear a discussion of erotic writing. Ginsberg, bless him, gave them more than they bargained for. And I got more than I bargained for too. One member of the audience – a complete stranger and, as far as I could tell, not a lesbian – told me that listening to me read the poem made her ‘wet’. While on the other hand, four members of the audience conspicuously walked out…383

Porter writes about a quality of reading that has depth, texture, a topography that has the unrepeatable singularity of an event. Reading Porter recall her catalogue of frissons made me consider what stirs in that interrelational triad of reader/text/author in the event and afterwards, and then, most interestingly, what emerges. She contemplates whether her most “deeply passionate experiences” may indeed have “happened between the covers of a book”.384 Like the people who cry because pictures seem unbearably full, these erotics seem to me so close, so intimate, and yet, I cry also at the vastness of the text, the far awayness of the author, the reflection in the corner of the screen.

CUNNING LINGUA

‘I’m anxious for the red pearl’ said the abalone diver fishing around in the aquarium of her mind with a pretty finger ‘amongst the convoluted and scalloped lips and innerfrettedpetal scraps that sway like anemones under the weight and tide of the

383 Dorothy Porter, On Passion, (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2010), 79 384 Porter, On Passion, 53-54

354 ocean all that’s as may be but nevertheless I am anxious for the red pearl’385

In her essay ‘The Cunning Lingua of Desire’,386 Dianne Chisholm reads Mary

Fallon’s Working Hot and describes the way the verse novel affects her erotically. Working Hot is an Australian ars erotica, a carnivalesque and pornographic tableaux. Chisholm calls it a “pornologopoeia”,387 presenting an urban Sydney landscape, which Fallon manipulates by “improvising the seedy calamity of everyday Glebe for the telling and narrating of postmodern sexuality”. 388 In Fallon’s work readers are “cued to hear the whisperings, hustlings, solicitings, gossipings, bawlings, chortlings and cooings of Glebe’s rabble as of a libidinal leviathan”.389 Chisholm writes that it is precisely “this excessive vocality and audibility of sexy language that especially intrigues” due to its “eroticizing capability.”390 Toto, one of the narrators in Working Hot, who “addresses her desire in letters, poems, telegrams, songs and ditties and drunken soliloquies”, is unlike, Chisholm argues, “the subject of Kristeva’s and Barthes’ [sic] semiotics, an ego subject to the bombardments of the signifier and thus to the jouissance of textual excess, of sense beyond meaning; instead she is a self-proclaimed slut for sex… playing with discourse and dialogue as oral sex toys, twisting and teasing…”391

Toto’s cunnilingual gifts, made manifest by “Fallon’s lingual capability” are,

Chisholm asserts, “an erotic tour de force” in stark bas-relief to the critical paradigm of Foucault’s historicisation of sexuality, (which she calls the

385 Mary Fallon, Working Hot, (Melbourne: Sybylla Co-operative Press & Publications Ltd., 1989), 76 386 Dianne Chisholm, ‘The Cunning Lingua of Desire: Bodies – Language and Perverse Performativity’, in Sexy Bodies: The Strange Carnalities of Feminism, ed. Elizabeth Grosz and Elspeth Probyn, (London: Routledge, 1995), 19-41 387 Chisholm, ‘The Cunning Lingua of Desire’, 38 388 Chisholm, ‘The Cunning Lingua of Desire’, 19 389 Chisholm, ‘The Cunning Lingua of Desire’, 19 390 Chisholm, ‘The Cunning Lingua of Desire’, 19 391 Chisholm, ‘The Cunning Lingua of Desire’, 20

355 “Foucauldian nightmare”392). In which, ‘sexuality’ has come to signify; “a deployment of discursivity as an instrument-weapon in the regime of knowledge-power where there is no pleasure which is not (already) the effect of a regulated desire to tell the truth of sex, and no ars erotica except insomuch as scientia sexualis in its sublimated form.”393 This recourse is achieved through what Chisholm describes as Fallon’s dexterity in “shifting epistemological registers from the discursive-confessional to reverie-revelation”, to the effect that the “shift is not merely parodic or ironic, but intensely, arousingly erotic.” 394 Fallon’s narrator’s technique is the “‘sucking’ on the ‘cunt’ of language in an articulate exchange of pleasure”;395 Chisholm is adamant that the mode of reading Fallon advocates does not simply put the tongue in the place of the phallus. The tongue, she makes a verb tonguing, is “a lingual activity, at once real, imaginary and symbolic, mouthing an earful of erotic tonguing while designating homo-erotic exchange in a titillating tongue- twisting bodies-language, an ‘obscene’ language whose sole object is to arouse the clit of the mind”.396 What Fallon’s Working Hot does to the reader,

Chisholm claims, is stimulate their desire by “performing lingual sex on

[their] clitorized ear”.397

Instead of phallic dominance and preoccupation, desire is mobilised by the lingual interplay and exchange in Working Hot, Chisholm claims, and the

“clitorized reader is not prompted to identify herself as a lesbian but to feel as if her ‘clitoris’ has been touched through contact with the print on the page. It is not the desire to be lesbian she feels but an erotic affectivity, a clitoral

392 Chisholm, ‘The Cunning Lingua of Desire’, 21 393 Chisholm, ‘The Cunning Lingua of Desire’, 21 394 Chisholm, ‘The Cunning Lingua of Desire’, 21 395 Chisholm, ‘The Cunning Lingua of Desire’, 28 396 Chisholm, ‘The Cunning Lingua of Desire’, 36 397 Chisholm, ‘The Cunning Lingua of Desire’, 36

356 intensity or sexual mobility: com(cum)-motion”.398 As a reading strategy, cunning lingua is an “erotics-poetics” possessive of a “perverse performativity”, 399 yet unlike Butler’s resignification of power via the transferability of the phallus, Chisholm argues that Fallon’s cunning lingua

“articulates an eroticism whose bodies-language is wholly excentric to

Lacanian phallogocentrism.” 400 If sexuality is “still phallic in that sexual relations are constituted as the difference between ‘having’ and ‘being’ the phallus even though this difference is no longer the mark of gender”.401 How then, Chisholm challenges, “can a radical displacement of masculinist eroticism be figured?” 402 Her argument is that Fallon, through her deployment of a “lingual, instead of phallic, function to mobilize the (dis)play of eroticism, a cunning lingua instead of a structuralist linguistics to articulate the fantasy of erotic satisfaction” 403 mounts a significant challenge to phallocentric domination of erotic articulation, and also to Butler’s conceptualisation of the lesbian phallus.

An erotics of reading acknowledges the wealth of reparative reading practices; Chisholm’s ‘cunning lingua’, and its predecessors in lesbian- feminist writing, all of which contain that ‘kernel of eroticism’, the pellet of topaz that is kneaded into the rest of those margarine-like feelings – confused, indistinguishable, hesitant – that articulation of pleasure and emotion, (why merely aesthetic? why merely reformist?), that just might be the most transgressive, the most subversive variant of jouissance.

398 Chisholm, ‘The Cunning Lingua of Desire’, 24 399 Chisholm, ‘The Cunning Lingua of Desire’, 24 400 Chisholm, ‘The Cunning Lingua of Desire’, 34 401 Chisholm, ‘The Cunning Lingua of Desire’, 35 402 Chisholm, ‘The Cunning Lingua of Desire’, 36 403 Chisholm, ‘The Cunning Lingua of Desire’, 38

357 CONCLUSION

I myself cannot (as an enamored subject) construct my love story to the end: I am its poet (its bard) only for the beginning; the end, like my own death, belongs to others; it is up to them to write the fiction, the external, mythic narrative.vii

The ecstatic expression of the statue of St. Theresa is beheld by Lacan who recognises “immediately that she’s coming (elle jouit), no doubt about it”.404

But she cannot speak it, and so we are left only with Bernini’s fascinated study. She is the perfect Lacanian phantasy. What contorts the face of St.

Theresa? Marie Bonaparte would like to call it “transverberation”, drawing from St. Theresa’s account of being speared by God through the heart all the way to her “entrails” making her feel “pain so sharp” yet “so excessive was the sweetness” it induced her to “utter several moans” – this, Bonaparte compares to what a friend experienced as a teen as the “descent of God into her”.405 This the friend later recognised as a mystic experience that produced, in Bataille’s neat summation, “a violent venereal orgasm.”406 Bataille is careful to point out that whilst “sexual urges are often at the root of a powerful emotion that spills over through every channel” it would be folly to believe that all “mystical experience is nothing but transposed sexuality”, as many mystics have been historically aware.407 No, it is the rush of the “feeling of being swept off one’s feet, of falling headlong”, that is the emotional reeling between death and ‘the little death’: not the same as the death-drive, although

404 Jacques Lacan, Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the Ecole Freudienne, ed. J. Mitchell and J. Rose, trans. J. Rose, (London: Macmillan, 1982), 147 405 Dr. Parcheminey gives an account on the theories of Marie Bonaparte as set out in an article in the Revue Francaise de Psychanalyse No. 2, 224, (1948): 238 in Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death & Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood, (San Francisco: City Lights Books, [1957, 1962] 1986), 225 406 Bataille, Erotism, 225 407 Bataille, Erotism, 225

358 it “may well be a desire to die”, but concurrently it is a “desire to live to the limits of the possible and the impossible with ever-increasing intensity.”408

The ecstasy of St. Theresa is “the longed-for swoon” containing the ambivalence of living-death (“I die because I cannot die”), where ultimately

“all she did was to live more violently, so violently that she could say she was on the threshold of dying”.409 St. Theresa’s longing is upended – who knows what she felt in that emotional instant – but then reunified and narritivised retrospectively by the irresistible “nostalgia for a moment of disequilibrium”.410 It is as though St. Theresa’s visage emotes the ineffability of what to Bataille was engulfment; “the totality of what is (the universe) swallows me… nothing remains, except this or that, which are less meaningful than nothing. In a sense it is unbearable and I seem to be dying. It is at this cost, no doubt, that I am no longer myself, but an infinity in which I am lost”.411

It begins like this… A woman sits at a desk before a black backdrop and reads aloud from a literary work of her choice. The camera remains still, focused on the woman. The film is black and white. Beneath the table an unseen assistant applies a Hitachi vibrator to the woman’s clitoris. Occasionally the hum of which is audible as the assistant changes pressure, but mostly it is imperceptible. The woman continues to read on until, and sometimes whilst, she orgasms.

408 Bataille, Erotism, 239 409 Bataille, Erotism, 240 410 Bataille, Erotism, 240 411 Bataille, The Accursed Share: vol. II, trans. Robert Hurley, (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 115-116

359 ‘Hysterical Literature’ is an online video art project by Clayton Cubitt412 comprising seven films. The premise is simple: seven women of varying racial backgrounds, (although all young and attractive), read aloud from Walt

Whitman, Anthony Burgess, Jeanette Winterson, Supervert, Tom Robbins,

Brett Easton Ellis, and Toni Morrison. Each woman differs in how long she remains composed and committed to the reading. The tension is exquisite, almost unendurable, as each woman gets closer to orgasm. Duration ranges from under five minutes to near thirteen with most about lasting about seven or eight. The title of the project references the historic medical and psychological pathologisation of women – (the diagnostic category ‘hysteria’ derived from the Greek word hysterikos meaning ‘of the womb’.) Hysteria was often ‘treated’ by pelvic massage or the use of a vibrator bringing women to

‘hysterical paroxysm’.

Whilst similar to Andy Warhol’s 1964 film Blow Job, and more recently the

Internet phenomenon of Beautiful Agony – facettes de la petite mort,413 in that no stimulation is actually depicted and only the face and upper body are shown,

‘Hysterical Literature’ is unique in its combination of reading from literature whilst being brought to orgasm. At the videos’ commencement each woman is self-possessed and calm. They introduce themselves and state the title and author of the book they will read from. Initially their voices are uniformly modulated, calm and articulate, as if they are resolved to ignore what is going on under the table. Subtle physical changes become gradually noticeable after the first minutes elapse. Some women start to sweat. Quite a few smile or

412 Clayton Cubitt, ‘Hysterical Literature’, http://claytoncubitt.com/hysterical-literature/ (accessed 22 May, 2013). 413 The concept was launched by Richard Lawrence and Lauren Olney in 2003 and turned into a website www.beautifulagony.com in 2004. Content is user-generated and access is through paid subscription.

360 burst into short laughs, and touch their face or hair. Breathing begins to become rapid and changes the way they are reading. Some take intermittent long, slow, deep breaths. Passages are rushed, slurred, slowed down; unusual stresses are placed on certain words or individual syllables, which changed the rhythm of the piece as the women’s voices quaver, tremble or blurt.

Familiar texts are given strange new associations; one woman called

‘Stormy’414 reads a stretch of Patrick Bateman’s relentless descriptions of 80s music from American Psycho. She only gets to the bottom of the second page of the ‘Whitney Houston’ chapter before she loses control. Her body starts shaking as she reads: “The last thing it suffers from is a paucity of decent lyrics which is what usually happens when a singer doesn’t write her own material and has to have her producer choose it”, and then she gasps and laughs, stringing the words “But Whitney and company have picked well here” into one another and trembling. She recovers herself momentarily to read, “The dance single “How Will I Know” (my vote for best dance song of the 1980s) is a joyous ode to a girl’s nervousness about whether another guy is interested in her”, but then she starts to look down and grip the book. She manages to squeeze out, “It’s got a great keyboard riff and it’s the only – “ before breaking off into moans. Her body goes rigid and convulses as she comes, hard. Afterwards she says her name and the book details again, then laughs and comments to someone off-camera: “Well, I didn’t even get two pages in, did I?”

In total tonal contrast, Alicia415 reads ‘Song of Myself’, from Whitman’s Leaves

414 Clayton Cubitt. ‘Hysterical Literature’: Session Four: Stormy ("American Psycho" by Bret Easton Ellis), http://claytoncubitt.com/hysterical-literature/ (date accessed May 22, 2013). 415 Clayton Cubitt. ‘Hysterical Literature’: Session Two: Alicia ("Leaves of Grass" by Walt Whitman), http://claytoncubitt.com/hysterical-literature/ (date accessed 22 May, 2013).

361 of Grass, a poem noted for its eroticism. She reads slowly, seemingly introverted, and seldom looks right into the camera. Her breaths deepen. She smiles to herself and licks her lips, pauses and sighs between the lines “There was never any more inception than there is now / Nor any more youth or age than there is now” and shifts slightly back and forth in her seat. The evenness of her diction makes the recitation almost incantatory. Her voice has a timbre of feeling; a grain. She falters again after “Looks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest, / Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next, /Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it”. Alicia sighs and lets an “Mmmm” escape her lips. Her face twitches in pleasure and she frowns through the line, “Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog with linguists and contenders,” and then her mouth opens soundlessly. “I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning,” her face contorts: “How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn'd over upon me”. Her head tilts, she swallows, eyes blinking, as if remembering, or imagining. When she gets to,

“And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own”, the next lines become “And I know that” – oh God! – she blurts, “the spirit of God is the brother of my own / And all the men ever borne are also my brothers” – aaaaah! – She groans, “and the women my sisters and lovers”. By this point she’s rocking up and down, brushing hair out of her face, blowing out air every so often like a runner. After reading, “O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues, / And I perceive that they do not come from the roots of mouths for nothing”, she bows her head, and starts making little whimpering ohs. Eyes closed, rocking harder, she murmurs yeah, yeah until she’s saying yes yes yes in a staccato climax. Hands clenching and flexing as though kneading

362 dough, the muscles of her neck taut. She closes the book: “Done!” She laughs, rolling her eyes at the intensity and shudders, then lifts the tablecloth to very sweetly say a somewhat self-conscious “Hi!” to the hidden assistant.

The last video I’ll describe is Solé’s416, who read from Toni Morrison’s Beloved.

Solé begins in a clear, well-measured voice for almost two minutes until she comes to, “If we had more to drink we could make tears. We cannot make sweat or morning water so the men without skin bring us theirs,” and slaps the table. She regains herself and reads on but at, “His teeth are pretty white points. Someone is trembling. I can feel it over here. He is fighting hard to leave his body which is a small bird trembling. There’s no room to tremble so he’s not able to die. In my” – oh! She winces as if pained yet seems resolute to continue. “The sun closes my eyes,” she speaks, “Those who are able to die in a” – a glottal stop. Her face is condensed with emotion and she speaks quicker now, skipping a word or two, “If I had the teeth of the man who died on my face I would bite the circle around her neck. Bite it away. I know she does not like it. Now there is room to crouch and watch the crouching others.

It is the crouching that is now always inside the woman with my face it is the sea”, she gasps, “a hot thing. In the beginning I could see her.” She’s stricken for breath, “I could not help her because the clouds were in the way.”

Seemingly on the brink, she recovers one more time. The words ring with resonance. She articulates each syllable crisply. “She wants her earrings. She wants her round basket. I want her face, a hot thing”, she leans forward as though to weep and she moans, lays a palm flat on the table and arches her head back, baring her throat. She orgasms as though it is a sharp stab. She grimaces, reaches behind her to grab hold of the chair as she thrashes in the

416 Clayton Cubitt. ‘Hysterical Literature’: Session Six: Solé ("Beloved" by Toni Morrison), http://claytoncubitt.com/hysterical-literature/ (date accessed 22 May, 2013).

363 seat making sounds between a sob and a groan. “Fuck,” she mutters, shaking.

It takes her a while to recover. She opens her eyes and smiles. “My name is

Solé and I have just read Beloved by Toni Morrison,” she says, face radiant.

She grins wide. She puts her head down on her forearm, laughing and swears. She whacks the table, chuckling: “Oh my fucking God. That was the best thing of my life!”

Certainly there is a performative element to these acts; the women are consenting to be filmed, and each acknowledges the camera in a different way

– it is hardly ‘private’. Eve Sedgwick discusses the connotations of the performative in its divergent applications in theatrical discourse and in deconstruction in the introduction to her book Touching Feeling.417 She writes that the “stretch between theatrical and deconstructive meanings of

‘performative’ can seem to span the polarities of nonverbal and verbal action.

It also spans those of, at either extreme, the extroversion of the actor (aimed entirely outward toward the audience) and the introversion of the signifier”.418

She digests Paul de Man’s idea that rather than focusing on “a radical estrangement between the meaning and the performance of any text” what is most interesting in the equation is performativity’s “aberrant”419 correlation to its own citation: “the torsion, the mutual perversion, as one might say, of reference and performativity.”420

Are the women of ‘Hysterical Literature’ experiencing the torsion of reference and performativity? Are they undergoing a kind of jouissance? What is making these women come: the vibrator, the literature, the exhibitionism,

417 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003) 418 Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 7 419 Paul de Man quoted in Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 7 420 Touching Feeling, 7

364 something else, or a combination of the above? The latter two examples I have

(cherry)-picked, (Alicia and Solé), are the ones where I feel like the women are responding to the words, that have a personal, intimate relationship to the texts they chose and are playing with the way they read them, trying to extend the experience by lengthening their readings, and anticipate or prolong their own orgasm, regardless of the camera, and by extension, the prefigured audience. Is this jouissance, recorded? There are factors, (the vibrator, the person manipulating the vibrator, the camera, the director, and x number of unknowns) that make it impossible to comb out if it is the reading itself that is producing the emotional and physiological effects on the women, and although the women have been asked to read what they choose, some seem more connected to their material than others. I scry for the parts I deem they feel the most, whilst I appreciate the singularity of the reading where the administration of the vibrator is making them annunciate the words in a particular way. Yet it is the torsions in the contortions of their physicality and voice, their relationship to text that make me, as a viewer, feel both my own erotic feelings and their erotic connection to the reading.

I have argued that jouissance émue is an experience of feeling that disrupts the cultural narrative of sexuality and displaces desire for the proper object: that it creates a space of pleasure and of tears. Desiring the dead author is not a rejection of authorship, (as the Dead Author once was defined), but a different way of encountering the author, leveraged on the queer erotic death drive. I have ventured that jouissance émue challenges the hypothesis made by queer theorists working in an anti-relational psychoanalytic paradigm that the death drive figuration of queer jouissance nullifies affects of affinity: that jouissance must be antisocial. The importance of feeling in an erotics of

365 reading becomes a way to articulate subversive pleasure and moves to redress the structural sexism inherent in Lacanian-Barthesian jouissance. I have turned to the aesthetic concept of duende and to the lesbian-feminist erotic mobilisation to see how pleasure might be resignified in a non- misogynistic queer reading. An erotics of reading is an occasion to stage reparative readings that shoulder “different range of affects, ambitions and risks” from the paranoid, but are in no way “less attached to a project of survival”.421 These are the women who have led me to write this thesis: Eve

Sedgwick, Audre Lorde, Dorothy Porter, Dorothy Allison. They are the writers who I read in the tyranny of loneliness that was adolescence, who made me think life was bearable, that a future was possible even if it meant the gradual accommodation of a profound, unshakeable sadness. I spent countless hours alone in my room reading them, listening to music, looking at pictures, smoking pretentious French cigarettes, writing, masturbating, and crying. My erotics is a work-in-progress, this is the beginning.

421 Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading’, 150

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