The Art of Navigation:

Navigating the Art

Rose Michael, BA (Hons), MA

This thesis is presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of The University of Western Australia School of Humanities English and Cultural Studies 2017

1

Abstract

Novel: The Art of Navigation

The Art of Navigation is a speculative fiction set in the Dandenongs, Victoria, in 1987. Three young girls, Nat, Liz and Di—exhibiting varying levels of adolescent vulnerability—leave their safe suburban world behind to spend a life-changing night in the Emerald Forest on the outskirts of Melbourne. They plan a half-serious gothic adventure: in the forest they will conduct a séance to call forth the Australian bushranger Ned Kelly. The bolder girls persuade their more nervous friend, Nat, to join in. But their plans are disrupted when a group of boys from a nearby party intrudes. The teenagers share alcohol and drugs and Nat, intoxicated, becomes convinced their game has succeeded in a way they never intended: when day breaks she is in a psychotic state, believing she is possessed by the spirit of a different Edward Kelley, whom she’s read about earlier at Liz’s house. She is pregnant, though she doesn’t know it. ‘Her’ Ed is a figure with a darker past, and far more dangerous motivations: an alleged alchemist, necromancer and crystal ball ‘scryer’ for Elizabeth I’s astrologer and one-time adviser Doctor Dee. The narrative moves between 1987, 1587 and 2087, with each part telling the same tale from the point of view of a different non-realist literary tradition. The first takes the form of a gothic ghost story, the middle section is a fantastic tale of possession, while the last uses science fiction to imagine the possibility of future time-travel technologies. These three sections are linked through letters that Nat’s son Jo writes to her grandson John in an attempt to pass on what he knows; hoping that what is not clear to him, and was not clear to his mother, may make more sense in the future. This is, in fact, the case. Nat—dying, a hundred years hence— stumbles upon a skrying device inspired by Dee’s speculations that enables her to

3 revisit the original scene in the forest and also the Elizabethan past where Dee and Kelley’s actions strangely echo Nat’s own experience years before.

Dissertation: ‘Navigating the Art’

My dissertation uses conventional genre theory and recent publications to establish the case that literary fiction is not categorised by intrinsic, essential qualities but is the product of unspoken agreement among authors and publishers, booksellers and buyers. Indeed, it frequently incorporates elements of popular forms such as romance, travel and crime. Literary titles are no less formally produced or consciously manufactured than other genres; they are simply identified according to different, but still verifiable, characteristics. I detail the ways writers and readers work together—consciously and unconsciously—to construct genre in an analysis informed by my own professional experience as a publisher. I discuss recent literary works that exhibit various aspects of more and less popular forms. My analysis is informed by Bruce Sterling’s notion of ‘slipstream’ literature;1 a term he coined in 1988 to describe works that are clearly literary but exhibit speculative aspects. He did this in order to argue that ‘the work’ of science fiction—what Ursula Le Guin has described as the genre’s ‘characteristic gesture’ of estrangement,2 which provides readers and writers with a place from which to review their world—was being done by literary fiction. I explore the ways in which Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, David Mitchell’s Slade House and Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things seem to be aligned with specific non- realist genres. My discussion is concerned with generic content and the production—the ‘paratextual’ and ‘epitextual’ aspects—of these titles.3 I consider whether books like these, which are concerned with fundamentally speculative content, might be on the rise. JG Ballard wondered whether the increasing strangeness of our unreal world might be reason for an increase in nonfiction production and popularity, 4 but I wonder whether an environment where science fiction is increasingly becoming science fact might prompt producers and consumers to instead seek out more fantastic forms. My dissertation argues that ‘unreal’ award-winning books by established literary authors challenge any easy identification of contemporary literary fiction

4 as primarily realist, as China Miéville has controversially claimed. 5 Realism, I believe, might more properly be a defining characteristic of the ‘middlebrow’— which is an old term taking on a new form—and literary fiction more likely than ever to show evidence of slipstream experimentation. Literary fiction is, as always, in flux. Readers and writers, publishers and academics recognise and describe it not in terms of what it is, but how it works: what it ‘does’, to take up Sterling’s term. I conclude my dissertation by considering whether ‘intentionally aesthetic’6 cross-genre fictions—that, in keeping with Martin Amis’s great description of literary fiction as, ultimately, a ‘conversation’ 7 —are making a substantial contribution to current literary fiction.

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Contents

Thesis declaration 2 Abstract 3 Acknowledgements 7 Authorship declaration 8 Novel: The Art of Navigation 9 Part I: 1987 13 Part II: 1587 67 Part III: 2087 118 Dissertation: ‘Navigating the Art’ 181 Introduction 183 Chapter 1: A Generic Proposal 185 Chapter 2: The Buried Genre 198 Chapter 3: At Home in a Genre House 207 Chapter 4: A Book of Strange New Genres 215 Chapter 5: Terra Anthropocene 223 Conclusion 231 Bibliography 232

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to everyone who has, directly and indirectly, made this PhD, but particularly my supervisor Professor Brenda Walker: for your firm emails on the big picture and small details to my colleagues in academia, Tracy O’Shaughnessy especially, as well as students past and present—for helping me turn what I love doing into something I’m paid to do to my friends in the publishing trenches: writer Nicola Redhouse, for your ever-present ear and shoulder; and editor Penny Mansley, for meticulous last- minute assistance in styling my endnotes but mostly to my partner Peter, who has done this decade far harder than me: he’s shared the worst aspects of writing a novel, researching different genres and another era, without reaping the reward—the absorption that gives as much as it takes. This art has been a long time navigating, it’s had its own alternate incarnations: I built the story up and up—writing during nap times, while the grandparents kid-sat (thanks are due there too), then on park benches and poolsides—before finally cutting it back in the evenings when the boys were old enough for that time to become mine. Thank you, Daniel sons, for letting me write. And you, for reading.

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Novel:

The Art of Navigation

- 9 -

‘What seest thou else

In the dark backward and abysm of time?’

Prospero, The Tempest

- 10 -

3 December 2057

Back then I had no idea—a grown up might’ve, maybe; but I was six, after all. Seven. Crouched before the narrow gap between my mother’s door and the floor, posting my drawing into the darkness. The first magician I ever drew was in 1995—lead-grey beard and hat coloured in black. She always said, with that slight shake of her head, watching the pictures my pens conjured, that I was born a listener. Her stories were my world: soon, she promised, I’d go to school but for now I could amuse myself among her books. That morning, I remember, I’d been looking for a picture of her favoured chess-piece Queen when the pages—the sound of their turning slicing the quiet room—drew a thread of blood from my thumb; but who was there to tell? I sniffed a breath. Inhaled our house. Stopped flipping on and instead turned back to two men, who the parabola of paper made look 3D when all the other prints were as flat as their original portraits: no depth, no shadows. While the rest of Queen Elizabeth’s court stared back at me, face-out in full light, those two looked at each other instead. I dug out my favourite 6B pencil and began to copy. Faithfully. Curving a skinny arm about my drawing and bowing low over the page—almost as close as when I pressed my forehead to Nat’s so our lashes brushed and eyes on either side were wateringly wide. One white corner disappeared under her bedroom door. I pushed the whole sheet in; pulled my hand back to suck the still-stinging cut. On the other side I sensed Nat’s dreams crowding that dark room which smelt of something medicinal, and mothers. I realised it was up to me to free her from the sleeping spell. I stood on tiptoe, the better to turn the porcelain knob—with two hands, which I did.

- 11 - Carefully, so it didn’t catch. And saw for the first time what everyone had always said. How very small she looked, lying down. Not like a mum at all. I beat a retreat holding the notebook that’d fallen from her hand. Flushed with pride—now she would wake and open curtains and windows and doors and arms. Shake off the curse that had made her forget I was the love of her life. Her little man. When she saw my drawing she would smile and tell me there’d never been any magic, only ever science. That there was no such thing as a potion: only prescriptions like hers. And if I ever heard her talking it was just inside her head (‘not yours,’ she’d promised). But I had never. Not a murmur. Until I saw that diary covered in a collage of cut out rock stars. An old journal, she said: an odd journey. I fingered the peeling tape that pinned the paper men down. Rifled through pages I couldn’t read—her teenage script was hieroglyphics: running writing recognisable, but indecipherable—wondering at the story her words spelled.

- 12 -

1987

- 13 -

10 p.m.

The year of the Slippery When Wet tour Di and Nat took to hanging out at Lizzie’s house and never leaving. The three of them said they were orphans, they only had each other to rely on. ‘There’s only us,’ they swore, and promised to love each other forever—even if they killed each other first—and die together if everything ever got too much. Or, as Di pointed out was probably more likely, life turned out not to be enough. Though surely she was joking. It was 1987, the year cock rock crossed into the mainstream, and in the Yarra Ranges one night in May the girls were belting out ‘Living on a Prayer’. Lizzie might’ve said they sounded like choirgirls from a religious school that’d buried its virgins alive out there, but Nat secretly—sacrilegiously—thought chipmunks described them better. The rock anthem, sifted through their private girls’ school soprano, came out sounding too perfect, prissy: neither the hit single of the year (not that they knew it’d be that), nor ghost girls singing. But it was, for the moment, their song. They liked it because they’d discovered it, because it wasn’t whatever the rest of their classmates were tuning in to. Because it wasn’t U2. ‘Wo-ah, we’re a pathway there!’ The lyrics echoed their own desperate fixation on the future. And they were in love—sooo in love—with glam metal’s self-conscious pose. They had no idea grunge was waiting in the wings, no inkling of the gritty guitars and angst-filled lyrics already rising from the Seattle streets—the indie attitude that would define their generation. They didn’t know they were a generation, one that’d be labelled by a letter for the first time that year. As far as they were concerned they were alone and unique, probing their parents’ lies with X-ray eyes. Seeing, they thought, right through society’s façade: searching for

- 14 - answers, seeking identity; singing themselves into being as they mixed romantic lyrics into mashed-up messages. Even if you could’ve warned them of the massacres that year would bring— named after the city streets where two twenty-something boys went on separate shooting sprees—they’d have acted unsurprised. Hoddle Street might make history by winter’s end, its clippings inspire the Queen Street copycat come summer, but back then there’d only been the Russell Street bombing a year before. And—they were teenagers, remember—the fact that a cop shop had been targeted made it a meaningless move in a grown-up game that didn’t concern them. No matter that the nutter had come from the nearby town of Kalista. Foreknowledge of those shooting sprees might not have had the effect you would’ve expected; it’d take other unimaginable events to turn that year into a mercurial amalgam of wrong times and right places. But while Nat and Lizzie, and Di too, may’ve been naïve, their cynicism could make them seem world-weary—almost wise. If you’d told them that the Cold War would end before the decade was done, that the Berlin Wall would fall, they’d barely have cared. It wasn’t that they were apolitical, or not exactly: they just knew they were powerless. Seventeen and stuck in the sticks. There. Then. In an outer-suburban upstairs bathroom, light filtered through a creepered window. In a not-so-modern mansion on the edge of Sherbrooke Forest: above a cellar jackhammered into a green hillside. A lonely walk from the end of the line. There they were then, that night when three girls pushed something to breaking point—and someone broke. Three self-styled misfits watching themselves being best friends in an amber-tinted mirror. Nat meticulously teasing Lizzie’s hair into a pink-gold mane as the other two sang their hearts out, riding the high of those days and—Nat’s skin constricted as she surfed a feeling she didn’t dare describe—a wave of preemptive nostalgia: cresting, crashing, with the conviction that their youth was almost over. And they’d done nothing with it except try to ditch it. Nothing was solid and no one was sure, certainly not unstable Nat. ‘We gotta sol-dier on, ready or not!’ Di’s alto barely made it. Was Nat the only one finding it forced? As though the girls were acting out how they thought they were supposed to be.

- 15 - ‘We could row out to the Bermuda Triangle and wait,’ Lizzie said abruptly, pulling her hair out of Nat’s hand. The image fitted Nat’s feeling that the three of them were floating: unhinged, adrift. The only set thing the pyramid of their friendship—the solid line joining the other two, anyway; she wished she were more sure she was part of it. No one, she knew, had ever felt such sympathy, such synergy. It was everything worth living for. That, and Bon Jovi. ‘When we’re thirty, maybe,’ shrugged Di, swinging her foot so her heel hit the side of the bath: hard flesh on harder tiles. That seemed a lifetime away, a lifetime again from seventeen to then. So Nat thought anyway as she returned to Liz’s hair, teasing it into knots as Liz dug through a nearby drawer, picking out a pale lipstick. Then a bright-blue eyeliner that she handed to Di. The other two leant side by side over the basin, peering speculatively into the darkish mirror, as Nat drew back. ‘An angel’s smile is how you fool,’ Liz pouted to the mirror, leaving her faithful friends to finish: ‘You promised me hea-ven then put me through schooool.’ ‘If we don’t burn up before then,’ Di said, screwing up her face. Her tanned features throwing Liz’s into pale relief. ‘Man, thirty.’ ‘I feel about to explode,’ Liz declared. ‘I might spontaneously combust, right now, so only my fingers are left.’ She stretched her eyes. ‘Don’t I look witchy?’ ‘You know what they would’ve done to you,’ said Di, reaching for the brush to fluff up her own unruly mullet, ‘last century? A dirty virgin dreaming of hairy men?’ ‘You know what we would’ve done?’ Liz retorted. ‘Been mediums, like the Fox sisters, communing with angels and falling into trances. Touring the country turning tables—cracking our toes in code.’ ‘Like who?’ Nat asked; which was all Lizzie needed to launch into what she was learning at the esoteric Belgrave bookshop they’d passed on their way here. A coterie of homegrown Goths hung out there, making it the closest thing to the city in this hippie shire of towns that sounded like they’d been founded by flower fairies—Olinda, and Sassafras—or foxes, for that matter, and only lately overrun by rednecks.

- 16 - Di snorted into the mirror as she opened and closed her aqua-rimmed eyes, handing the brush to Nat behind her, who absent-mindedly picked their hair from it: strawberry-blonde and Lady Di brown. She added some of her own more mousy strands to the pile then quickly—surreptitiously, superstitiously—swept the tangle to the floor. Something about the night was pulling Nat’s nerves tight. ‘We wouldn’t have been,’ Nat said, channelling her most matter-of-fact tone, ‘not who we are, anyway. No school for girls—’ ‘No Bon J!’ shouted Di as Lizzie pushed her out the bathroom door and towards the stairs that led back to the heart of the house. ‘I would’ve spoken in tongues,’ Liz continued, ‘worn a white nightie with nothing underneath—hidden behind a curtain before wafting out.’ She gestured to demonstrate, exposing the shadowy hollow of her armpits and the sparse hair growing there. Bringing Nat back to the here and now of them, the where and when of then, as she wondered whether maybe her friend didn’t use deodorant because she was proud of the musky odour that—Nat breathed it in—wasn’t actually that bad. Though it certainly wasn’t good. Maybe Lizzie wanted to be teased. Maybe she thought standing out for the wrong reasons was better than not standing out at all. Lowering an arm in a faux-regal wave, Lizzie directed them out. And down. ‘Covered in K-Y, so they felt your ectoplasmic coolness when they groped you in the dark!’ ‘Was it all a con, then?’ Nat asked, trailing after. ‘No real ghosts—ever?’ She ran her hand down the banister as she followed the others to the ground floor. ‘I guess no one would’ve known.’ ‘Yup, one huge hoax,’ Lizzie kicked a strut. ‘Exposed a hundred years ago— A hundred years ago exactly, actually.’ She stopped short, looking back up at the others for a hung moment before jumping the last step. ‘What happened?’ ‘The sisters? Alcoholics. Seriously though,’ as they entered the kitchen she raised her voice above the sound of Di rummaging through the pantry, ‘why don’t we give it a go? Hypnotism, mesmerism, precognition.’ She rapped her knuckles against the pine bench behind her: rat-a-tat-tat. ‘Nat?’ Tat-tat.

- 17 - Nat shifted from one foot to the other as Di stacked the kitchen table with a box of Cheezels and bag of Smith’s chips. Their perpetual gourd of Diet Coke. ‘How d’you know about this anyway Liz?’ ‘I’ve been reading up on séance shit since we moved out here. The Dandenongs is like a nexus for weirdness: first in the 20s, then the 70s. This forest is so ro-man-tic.’ She shrugged again, shaking out her hair: ‘What else is there to do at the arse end of the world but commune with the dead?’ The others knew neither of her parents were ever around. ‘You got any better ideas?’ ‘You just said the Fox chicks were phoneys.’ Nat watched Liz’s eyes slide between the pair: careful not to stare at the odd one out, no doubt. ‘Then it doesn’t matter, does it?’ ‘Now, now, ladies.’ Di interrupted, loading her friends up with snacks and propelling them towards the couches at the far end of the room, where the open- plan living area was separated from the back deck by large glass doors. ‘Leave her alone, Liz.’ ‘The theory is,’ Liz continued, and Nat was listening, even though she wasn’t looking, ‘there isn’t a single heaven or hell but a series of spheres.’ She dumped an armful of food and gestured a universe with her hands. ‘And God communes with the living through the spirits of the dead.’ Not until the silence became palpable did Nat realise she’d spoken aloud. She wished she hadn’t; Liz was getting her going again. ‘Right on!’ Di snorted, as though some old Nat were back. Di dropped to the ground and leant back against the couch, stretching out denim legs: kicking off sneakers and flicking on the TV with a satisfied sigh. Stuffing her mouth as though she couldn’t see that something was going wrong. As though she didn’t know that anything was going on. ‘Or,’ Liz stared at Nat with shining eyes, ‘we could try the Wicca rite Drawing down the Moon. That’s when the High Priestess enters a trance, after a ritual bathing, and requests the Goddess—the moon—to enter her.’ She raised her arms high above her head so her T-shirt, thin with wear, revealed ribs beneath barely there breasts. Lizzie closed her eyes: ‘If I command the moon, it will come down; and if I wish to withhold day, night’ll linger over my head.’ She spun on the

- 18 - spot, spun once around again. ‘If I embark on the sea, I need no ship; and if I want to fly, I’m free from my own weight—’ ‘Ri-ight,’ repeated Di, pointing the remote at Lizzie and miming changing channels. ‘Whatever you say, B-itch. Personally, I think we should do like those Fox chicks and get toe-pop-ping-ly drunk.’ ‘Or that,’ Liz agreed, unoffended, as she crashed onto the couch and reached for the bag. She made a grab for Nat’s hand. ‘Come on, Nattie, don’t be afraid of Big Bad Lizzie because I can call on the Goddess Trinity. I’ll let you be the god within? The spark of life divine!’ Laughing, she pulled the shorter girl to her so they sprawled together, limbs mingling. Surely she too could feel their separate hearts keeping the same time? Nat tried to push herself up, pull herself away. ‘Forget about it, Our Nat, I never meant … or not much anyway!’ Quick as a trick Lizzie licked her finger and slipped it into the other girl’s ear—‘The small straight pin is mightier than the pen!’—so Nat squirmed to be free of that feeling: a wet hole in her head. Laughing all the same. Finally, losing, letting herself go limp. ‘In red voodoo the Queen Priestess or Doctor Priest serves the spirits, drawing them near by binding hair into the heart of some form with a thorn,’ Lizzie whispered, pulling a mousey strand from her friend’s scalp and winding it tighter and tighter around her own finger. These two, Nat thought, almost as though she’d slipped outside herself to look down on them: we interchangeable three. Was the ache she felt recognition that what they had wouldn’t last? Or was it fear that the symmetry and perfect harmony weren’t real? She wondered if the others felt that too. Was she only outside it now? Or had she always been on the outer, and it was just that she’d forever feel it from now on? Now that most days passed as though she were living someone else’s life. ‘Another time, maybe?’ Lizzie whispered just as the stillness seemed about to settle, so they started laughing again. The whole couch shook beneath them, the world rocked and rolled. At last the chaos subsided. The background sound and shifting light of the flickering TV finally only interrupted by an occasional comment from one or other of the girls in the room; the rare response.

- 19 - There they were then, our three teens: seemingly so similar—even if two of the girls were following their more forthright friend, and one was wondering if she weren’t on the outer of this trio of self-professed outliers. Nat sighed, gave a brief half-laugh and wriggled into the cushions, burying her face in the back of Lizzie’s cotton tee, its Radiant soap smell achingly familiar. She curled around the other girl, closer: clung. And finally felt herself relax, her softness cleaving to her friend’s sharper angles. There might be only this, she thought—no more, no forever (she trusted nothing now that everything was at once the same and so so subtly different)—but there was this. Is this; Nat was almost absolutely sure.

But Lizzie could never stay still for long. When she shifted, which wasn’t much later, Nat took the chance to pull down her own top where it was riding up. She shuffled the seams back into place and tried to tuck her tummy in, noticing as she did how day had faded: the last of the light drained from the sky. Evening had wrapped itself around the house. The room growing dark about them while MTV strummed on. Lizzie sighed—did she too sense the moment’s passing? And sat up to speak, but before she could make the suggestion that would determine the evening’s direction, Di turned to the others from her seat on the floor and offered her rare two cents’ worth. Which made what she said all the more surprising. ‘I know,’ she grinned, turning off the TV decisively. ‘Ghost stories!’ Billy Idol’s pouting pose contracted to a single pixel and the screen went black. Before Nat had time to hesitate Lizzie’d seized on the idea. ‘Oo-oo-oh yeah!’ she sang. Jumping up she began to gather Tim Tams and blankets and—from a kitchen drawer as she swung by—a box of extra-long matches. ‘Come on girls, come on. Let’s go: gothic!’ Back towards the stairs they went, this time heading down a flight to the dugout below. Nat put one cautious foot in front of the other on a curved metal staircase that must’ve come from the garage sale of some tree change gone wrong. And reached rough-hewn rooms that stretched almost the length of the house— from what she could see in the strobe of one swinging globe. Liz’s father’s last project, started with wine in mind, presumably, or real-estate prices. Or had it just

- 20 - been a way of keeping busy when his wife was leaving him? Did he jackhammer it out before or after Liz’s stepmum had left? Nat’d been too caught up in her own drama then to know, but could see how any activity might be better than an absence, and wondered if an obsession didn’t make the best repression. In the weaving shadows, made more wild by the flare of Liz’s match, Nat scrambled aboard an ancient couch. For a moment the room seemed to open out around her: walls retreating into blackness, furniture and bric-a-brac shuffling back. But strange shapes crept from the corners and leapt onto the roof. ‘Don’t be such a scaredy-cat, Nat!’ Di said, so Nat untucked her legs and let her feet dangle over the edge. ‘Well I already told about the Foxes.’ Lizzie threw herself onto the cushions beside her nervous friend. ‘Three sisters—A doorway in time.’ ‘Or not,’ Di pointed out, ‘since it was just a hoax. And wasn’t a story anyway.’ Liz slid onto the hard-packed floor and threadbare rug beside her and Nat shifted into the space left behind, leaning into the cushioned arm of the couch, coughing on damp dust as she tried to reduce the height that made her feel unfairly exposed. ‘Okay,’ she forced herself to say, copying one of the other girl’s shrugs. ‘Sure—shoot.’ Lizzie turned so they were all facing in towards each other and sucked the last Cheezel from her finger as they waited, five—four—three—two—one: Di began. ‘D’you remember what happened here?’ She poked the thin carpet under their feet. ‘Right here?’ ‘What?’ One of the others asked. ‘It wasn’t that long ago—’ Di said nothing for a minute. ‘I can’t remember exactly, but there were some kids,’ she chewed her chapped bottom lip, trying to remember the details, or maybe just building suspense: ‘A brother and sister.’ Nat searched for her friend’s face in the limited light; it could be anyone, anything, over there. Or just a paler patch of darkness: her own eyes playing tricks. She knew enough at least to know what not to trust. ‘The last anyone saw was the two of them walking into Sherbrooke forest,’ Di continued as Lizzie broke a line of Cadbury’s off the fast-disappearing block. ‘That’s what everyone remembered—afterwards, anyway.’

- 21 - ‘So what happened?’ Now Nat—eyes adjusting to the darkness that crowded out Liz’s candles— could see Di’s wrists clasped around drawn-up knees. And there was the other head, tipped forward expectantly. They were her best friends, but how much did she really know them? Not like they knew each other, came the quick retort. Nat frowned, digging her chin into the sofa arm as she struggled to recall: dark water, a distant pale reflection. Was it some urban myth? They were way past the urban zone out here. Dimly Nat remembered the story of a boy who climbed a tree and refused to come down when his mother called. Who said he wanted to stay up there forever. How gradually his hands became claws, his ears got bigger and fur grew to cover his body. Eventually, when his mum passed right beneath where he was sitting, all she saw was a koala, beady black eyes staring in shocked surprise as she walked—and kept on walking—by. ‘Wasn’t there a pool?’ Nat gave an exaggerated shudder to hide the hint of a real one. ‘Didn’t someone see a ghost?’ ‘What made it so weird,’ Di went on, ‘is there weren’t any clues. There was this huge search party. Which turned up nothing. It’d been a couple of days and everyone said there was no way those kids could still be there—’ ‘And then the girl appeared,’ Nat took up the tale, seeing, as she said it, a small figure stepping between enormous trees. Visualising it vividly, though she knew she must be making it up: a pale androgyne emerging into watery sunlight as if passing through a dark doorway. ‘It was right here.’ Di said again, so the girls turned as one to where the cellar reached back beneath the Belgrave home. And there, in a glass door abandoned at the bottom of the stairs—a blind window, framing a forgotten way—they saw themselves reflected back. Sitting in a circle of sorts. ‘She just kind of appeared.’ ‘I don’t get it,’ said Liz, watching her see-through shadow open and shut its mouth. ‘What’s to get?’ Di shrugged. ‘Everyone just thought the teacher did it— whatever it was.‘ ‘The girl walked out,’ Nat interrupted, ‘but the brother—’

- 22 - Di nodded. ‘The sister had a few bumps and bruises, some pretty vicious scratches. She was soaked to the skin.’ The image of the lost girl at the edge of a big wood waned. The feeling of sun on long-chilled skin receded. Nat wondered what it was about the tutor, and then remembered: the young woman had claimed she’d seen ghosts. Or one, anyway: a man out of time. A shadow from some other side. Nat’s skin crawled with warning. ‘That’s it?’ Liz asked. ‘That was it,’ Di shrugged. ‘Foul play and the dark arts suspected but nothing ever proved. No body found. I’m surprised your new friends at the Belgrave bookshop haven’t filled you in?’ ‘A vanishment.’ Liz shivered with pleasure. Nat kept quiet about the haunting man, not sure why exactly, just some sense that she didn’t want to draw who-knew-whose attention to this. To them, sitting in companionable silence as the story settled: two children entering a forest but only one emerging. ‘Maybe time stopped,’ Di offered. ‘I mean, it isn’t real for kids anyway is it? So maybe it ceased to exist. Maybe they were just, literally, caught in the moment—You know, walking, stopping. Minute by in-the-moment minute—Hour by getting-colder-when’re-they-gonna-fucking-find-us hour.’ Her nonchalance made Nat wonder why she’d brought it up at all; it wasn’t like Di to fixate on something so fantastic. Maybe the story wasn’t actually hers, but otherworldly words channelled through a down-to-earth dummy. Nat tried to give herself a shake— —but had never been able to resist where a good narrative seemed to lead: ‘Maybe the sister was never found,’ she whispered and felt familiar chills. She could scare herself better than her friends ever would. ‘Who’re we to say the same girl who went in walked out?’ The others looked across at her, their faces masked in the dark, and she felt a shock of premonition at the pattern they presented: them and her. Two, to one. ‘I mean, just because she was the right age, wore the right clothes—looked the same.’

- 23 - Nat didn’t mean it was the brother who’d emerged; she was picturing two silent siblings frozen hand in hand on a deathbed of dank leaves. And an apparition walking out into the world.

- 24 -

11 p.m.

An hour later Liz pulled herself off the rug, poking Di as she did. ‘I’m so bored,’ she said, drawing out the ‘so’ as long as she could. Longer: ‘Sooooooo bored.’ Lustily launching into Europe’s latest power ballad: ‘We’ve seen through this before / in every rhyme / in every re-ea-son.’ When no one said anything Liz circled the room in search of something, ending up at a cupboard in the far corner from which she unleashed a small avalanche of board games and books. The performance was so typically Liz: their Drama Queen Teen. Returning to the dusty sofa Lizzie slumped against it, sighing exaggeratedly as she shuffled through the paraphernalia in her hands. ‘I know,’ she said, perking up, ‘I know what we should do—’ But Nat never heard how the sentence ended. She felt sidelined, and so suddenly, that her vision shrank to a pinprick filled with her friends’ faces, almost kissing close. How impossible to imagine ever brushing Liz’s hair! Swinging from the sweet moment of their togetherness back to her aloneness—left out again— Nat sank deeper into the decrepit couch, her worst suspicions confirmed. Of course their threesome was a partnership plus one. Three might be a magic number—uniting mind, body and spirit; synthesising past, present and future— but triangulation was ever a means to measure the distance between two points. She was but a bridge, a route: a way for Lizzie to get to Di. That was the only reason she’d been missed last term—if, in fact, she had. So Nat withdrew, too caught up in her own emotion to hear what Liz said next. If she had, the evening might’ve taken a different turn. But if she had—and had managed to steer them in another direction—she wouldn’t have been their Nat.

- 25 - Because something flirtatious had crept into Lizzie’s voice: a coaxing note, a cajoling tone. At Nat’s feet, if as good as ten thousand miles away, Lizzie’s eagerness was practically palpable: an intense intimacy, impossible to resist. It was as though those two couldn’t see Nat, perched on the couch above them. As though a physical shrinking mirrored her shrinking within and Lizzie and Di were alone in the underground room. Why didn’t they just fucking get it over with? Why didn’t they just go ahead and fuck? The vehemence of her thinking, rather than the thought itself, shocked Nat, who wished she were anywhere but there. Why was she there, anyway? Why’d she come when she could’ve been home in her room with the radio on, listening to Casey Kasem count ’em down? Nat didn’t belong here. She never belonged anywhere. But before her thoughts had time to spiral further, Di turned and cast a conspiratorial wink. That’s all: one quickly glimpsed chink. And then Liz looked over too and grinned with an excitement she clearly expected Nat to share. Thank God thank God thank God, Nat thought, forcing herself to unwind her legs and lean down from the couch towards her dear, dear friends. Thanking, fervently, the heavens and her not-always-lucky stars as she plucked her T-shirt loose and leant. ‘So?’ Lizzie asked. Obviously not for the first time. And Nat said yes. Casting her vote ‘for’ rather than, as usual, ‘against’. For what? Who cared! Could destinies be determined by such incidental actions—and even if they were, wasn’t it worth it to be caught up in Liz’s embrace? All Nat had ever wanted was to be part of everything. With a shrug that might’ve meant anything—from ‘So be it’ to ‘It’s on your head’—Di picked up a thick black texta and reached across Liz’s lap to grab the nearest cloth-covered games board. Quickly she flipped it over. Her gestures had none of Liz’s theatricality, yet they seemed somehow significant. Nat was nervous, wondering what she’d agreed to, but all about them she could swear time was bating its breath. She caught her own when she saw the characters Di was drawing on the back of the old Scrabble board. Snatched another in a flick of … not fear exactly, more like fate. An instinctive ‘Oh no’ followed by an almost instantaneous ‘Oh yes’. So this was what she’d agreed to. Oh. No!

- 26 - Oh yes. Trying for a more steadying breath, Nat then happened to look up at the very moment when a second wave of pamphlets slid from the still-open cupboard to the floor. A slow-motion waterfall of paper that made Liz, too, start. The two girls shared a shocked look as the pages settled, and Nat wondered if Lizzie felt the same, as if she’d made it happen. Abruptly she unfolded her legs and walked on pinned-and-needled limbs across the room. ‘What are they, anyway?’ Nat asked, squatting to tidy the flyers from galleries and museums around the world into a sliding pile of DL and A4 souvenirs when one picture caught her eye—held it as surely as if the image had gravity: its own drawing force. ‘What?’ Liz asked, in a voice that made Di look up. Slowly Nat extracted the thin brochure—black and white pictures from the British Museum faded to a uniform grey—and turned it towards the others so they could see for themselves the magic mirror in its wood case covered in tooled leather, and its uncanny resemblance to the Ouija board Di had just finished. Nat fingered the pages, turning the leaflet over in her hands—loath to leave it on top of the pile, reluctant to slip it surreptitiously into the middle as though it were something to be hidden. She rejoined the others. Lizzie, clearly thrilled, threw herself onto the collapsing couch and sang out from its sunken centre: ‘Can’t you free it in my thighs!’ Making Nat realise that that was just what she was afraid of—that their threesome would free something (pre- empting The Witches of Eastwick, which wouldn’t be released for another three months). That they would pretend, and it’d become real; that they’d play, and it wouldn’t be a game. Not that Nat could blame her friends for her breakdown last summer: she’d been the one too stupid to work out that not wanting her current life hadn’t meant she actually wanted to die. Her shrink and her were working on ‘other ways out’. A phrase Nat saw in neon, lit up like an exit sign, except that she hadn’t seen it yet. ‘Let this night be our fast go-od-bye!’ The chorus to ‘Carrie’ buffeted Nat’s brain and she realised, in one of her rare flashes of real insight, that her friends needed her and her fateful thinking. Oh yes. Her fear was fuelling the night, creating that sense of consequence she recognised from the other party, and the

- 27 - pool. Oooh no. She was the one lending it the edge they were all—yes even her, if she were honest—relishing. The edge of a knife, a cliff, reason. She, little old Nat, was the one making things mad. So be it: Nat decided. Surprising no one more than herself when she slid the pamphlet across to Di. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Better get it right.’ Under Lizzie’s direction they proceeded to make a circle of sorts out of the junk on the floor—crockery; books—and shifted to sit inside it. Having selecting an old Monopoly piece, a tiny mottled-grey iron, Liz and Nat reached their hands towards it. One lean, one small. One so white it was almost tinged blue. ‘Come on, Di, you too.’ ‘We need three,’ Nat agreed. And within a heartbeat that’s what there were: three little pinkies; three girlish hands; three almost-women sharing one secret wish for something more, someone to come.

Perhaps what happened next wasn’t entirely unexpected. Perhaps it was a bit of a con by one or other of the girls in the room. Maybe Di, maybe Liz. Maybe not. Could it have been Nat, unconsciously wanting to punish the others for leaving her out earlier, for making her feel left out again? Maybe all three, whether they were aware of it or not, tugged or nudged or pushed what the brochure called a make- do planchette. To give it a start: to loosen gravity’s hold. It would’ve made sense, might’ve seemed part and parcel of the childish game of conjuring that anyone can play and probably everyone has. Or maybe an alien wind snuck in and eddied about the die-cast miniature until it started to slide across the board of its own accord. A slip, a skip, a slightly sinister sli-i-ide. ‘Is anyone there?’ Liz asked, her voice a shock in the earthy dark. Electric. Paper rustled in the airless cellar as the toy began to inch its way towards the square marked ‘Yes’. Yes. ‘Who are you?’ they asked, and the answer came like an echo: U. It wasn’t long before Nat was shaking. Excitement, perhaps. Her teeth chattered and skin rippled with goosebumps. She shifted closer to Di, until she

- 28 - thought she could feel the warmth rising from her friend’s solid form. At the same time she pressed down harder on the smooth metal object, until the tip of her little finger went almost numb. She wouldn’t give in, give up. She wasn’t going to be the one to give the game away. ‘Are you dead?’ asked Liz. Yes. ‘Are you alive?’ asked one of the BJ mad three. Yes, came the answer again, making Lizzie shriek and lift her right hand to her mouth. She, at least, was loving it. Then someone whispered: ‘What’s your name?’ And Nat leant forward, as though tuning in to a conversation between just her and … him? This time the answer, when it came, seemed less sure. First the token travelled to N. But there it hesitated, waited, and stayed awhile before making its slow way onto E and, quicker then, to D. But Nat only had eyes for the first letter of her own name: N for No. N for Never—never mind, never fear: nevermore. As she stared intently at that single letter and wondered about a northern hemisphere place—Northwick Hill—that she couldn’t remember every having heard of, she imagined the hastily sketched symbols were a reflection cast on water and she was searching the depths beneath. That they were scribbled on a steamed-up mirror and she someone straining to see beyond. And then the letters at the edge of her vision began to behave strangely, breaking apart and joining together. Some retreating, others rising to greet her. Inviting Nat in, enticing her until she longed to leap, like a prisoner escaping a castle keep. (What made her think of that?) A final free falling: no longer fearful, no longer afraid, she no longer felt like Nat. She—not-she—swam alongside the letters’ non-existent height, somersaulted through one-dimensional space towards the very centre of the circle. And what was that, there? Of course! A curtained door. There was a sense of touching something, touching nothing. There was a sense. And then Liz gave a gasp, pulling her left hand back as if burnt, so at the very point of dissolution Nat found herself sprinting, limping, back. And back and

- 29 - back. Squeezing into her scrunched-up teenage form, thoughts slipping into place behind a familiar if flushed face. She wanted to say no—to leaving? to returning?— but it came out more like ‘woe’. ‘Go.’ Said a small sad voice: hers, and yet not. ‘What?’ asked Di, yawning as she stood. Stretching her arms above her head to tap the solitary light so the exposed globe swung. Making the whole room sway seasickly. ‘Nat?’ Nat shook her head to try to steady it, blinking: ‘I thought I heard— someone.’ A call like a tug: a definite pull. Ah! Yes. ‘Who?’ Liz asked, intrigued. Ready to believe. ‘I don’t know. Probably one of you guys. I think I was falling asleep.’ Nat spread her hands, stretching her fingers and flexing her knuckles until quite suddenly a joint cracked. Clicked into place, or out of it. She felt impossibly aged. ‘Was it Ned?’ Lizzie asked. ‘Ned?’ ‘Maybe you heard “Ned”, not “Nat”,’ said Liz, pointing to those three letters on the board. N. E. D. Needing nothing more to launch into everything she’d ever heard about Ned Kelly, and how it must be him they’d found—or who’d found them. And how they had to try again. ‘We don’t have to do anything.’ Di said when Lizzie begged them to head into the forest behind her house where a bushranger would no doubt feel at home: ‘Go on.’ Come o-o-on. And absent Nat—off in another world where letters and numbers kept combining—for the second time that night, distractedly agreed. Not that it would’ve mattered: Lizzie was already packing them up, pocketing matches and leading her loyal followers back upstairs. Depositing the leftovers from their pre- midnight feast before heading out through the double doors. Towards the waiting forest.

- 30 -

12 p.m.

Silently the trees closed around them. One, two, three girls left the dark garden and disappeared from sight under the green canopy that, at nearly midnight, extended beyond the bounds of the gully and inched towards the houses on the hill. One by one they left the lawn and passed quickly through the first line of trees until they were shoulder to shoulder with thicker, darker, older ones. Nat, bringing up the rear and already falling behind, put out her palm and found the nearest trunk mossy and damp, at least up to waist height—like some Pan-god with smooth woody chest and wild hairy legs. Quickly she pulled her hand back and followed the others deeper in. It wasn’t long before they came to a clearing. Clouds parted to reveal a bright moon. Beneath it, before them, a square black rock. And behind that—of course!—a pool. Nat watched as Lizzie arranged the homemade Ouija board on the centre of the stone. White candles weighted its four corners and the small iron token pointed towards the roughly drawn Texta letters. Darkness quickly resettled after the brief flare of Liz’s match. Nat moved closer in. The three girls linked arms and resumed their positions around the downturned board. ‘Ready?’ someone asked. ‘Ready,’ someone answered. ‘Here goes nothing,’ whispered Lizzie as the witching hour neared, turning from one friend to another. Here goes everything, thought Nat. ‘Come on Kelly,’ Liz begged, beckoned, beseeched: ‘Famous bushranger, handsome stranger,’ so Nat found herself imagining Ned’s spirit—if that’s whose

- 31 - it was—flying to their girl-triangle. Whispering through the trees, whistling through the misty night towards the light, an untapped power, their need for something more. ‘Come to us, Kelly—Now, at the hour of our need.’ Lizzie called. But when Nat joined in the sound was thin and snaked away. Above the girls’ heads water collected on leaves. Water dripped onto the forest floor. Each of the three lifted their left hands and moved them towards the very middle of the stone with a drawn-out slowness that ensured no one was first—or last—to touch the tiny token.

Time, what was it? Passing or standing still, Nat hardly knew. A world away she thought she heard her name being called: ‘N—’ She kept her gaze fixed on the board, ready to deny that in the darkness at the edge of her vision shapes were moving. As if. It was only shadows and anyway, they were only being cast by moving leaves. She kept her eyes focused firmly ahead, coughing uncomfortably as she fidgetted to ease an ankle pinned beneath her. On Nat’s right Di sighed loudly. She dug deep in a pocket with one hand, eventually extracting papers and a lighter. ‘What’s that?’ Nat asked stupidly, feeling cold, which made sense—and alone, which didn’t. ‘Nothing,’ Di shrugged, awkwardly opening a zip-locked bag. Nat’s defensive, ‘I don’t want any,’ was drowned out by Lizzie’s eager, ‘I do!’ Ignoring them both Di fumbled a knobbly number that she lit and sucked before passing it to Liz, who took her time inhaling before handing it back. To and fro it went, leaving Nat feeling even more out of things. The sweet smoke hung suspended. ‘I’ll pop the other half here shall I?’ Di teased not long later, pinching the unfinished joint between thumb and forefinger. Slipping the butt and lighter into their plastic pouch, feigning reluctance, and popping it into Nat’s pocket. ‘For safekeeping? Don’t go getting any ideas Miss Goody Two-shoes,’ she wagged her finger in her friend’s face, daring her, ‘that’s wicked weed.’ But Nat only half heard, too busy worrying about other things; trying not to think on Ned Kelly’s death cast—the features that’d been hidden in life behind

- 32 - his famous mask. She must’ve seen it in some history book. Or had he been in one of those flyers that’d escaped from Liz’s cupboard? Nat found herself wondering if it’d occurred to either of the others that maybe no one would come here; someone would go there. (Where?) Who said séances were a one-way portal? It was hardly a science. Nat reined her thinking in: it was hardly real. She shifted her weight, watching the dope fog fa-a-ade, knowing that not-so-deep-down she didn’t want whatever it was they were doing to work. Not like Lizzie, on the other side of Di, who wouldn’t shut up—as though she could make miracles with words and will alone. ‘Come on you fucking fucker,’ Liz hissed fiercely, clearly longing to be swept up and over a saddle. ‘Come thundering out of the past and galloping into our present. Come to us—come here, come now, come on. You daring darling Ned!’ Liz’s body seemed to sway then, or was it Nat’s head spinning? There came that voice again, laying a hand on her. That call, bypassing ears to ring inside her head. Now Nat heard it clearer: not ‘N’, no ‘N’ … And gradually—so gradually it was impossible to tell when it began but only to notice once it had—the iron started to move. Were Nat’s eyes playing tricks on her? Were the others? Was it some sort of game?! Focusing on the cold and feeling, fleetingly, so skeptical—and safe with it, Nat let her head dip towards the stone. Closer and closer her forehead slipped. Her fringe hung perilously close to the flames. There was no doubt now she’d hear the edge of the planchette scraping against the old Scrabble board if it moved. Lower and lower, until Nat’s temples came to rest against the rock the board was on and then. It seemed. She thought— was that a voice within the stone? ‘Alone,’ it said; or ‘Atone’? Nat tried to concentrate on the cold, the way her skin felt like someone else’s that she was shrinking within, but the sound— ‘own’—swelled to fill her skull. And then the piece gave a strange little shudder. And then it began to move. Travelling in startled fits—as though possessed with surges of power or decisiveness—it made its way towards the letter ‘E’. And then to ‘D’. Nat could’ve sworn it was alive under their fingers and they were holding it still and definitely not, she was shaking-almost-certain, moving it. ‘E,’ Nat sighed, blind to the forest of books.

- 33 - ‘D,’ she whispered, blocking out a library of trees: ‘Dee!’ Nat stared harder at the letters, sensing that if she looked away, if she shrugged her shoulders—if she even thought ‘away’ or wondered what a shoulder was to shrug—she’d disappear. Exit as silently as she’d so recently returned; sliding sideways from here to some there the same way she’d slipped from their universal then to this singular fucked-up now. ‘Kel-ly,’ Lizzie was chanting—‘Kel-ly’—her voice dark and wet with forest, as though imagining Irish eyes pushed in with a sooty thumb, a horse, a gun, and somewhere brothers. ‘We call you Ned … or Ed,’ a quick flicked look to Nat, ‘Our Neddy, Ed Kelly. We know it’s you / coming through … ’ she sang. ‘One minute,’ shouted Di suddenly, lifting her left hand to check the time, ‘forty-five seconds … thirty …’ But before she could finish counting down, before the distance between hour and minute hands had closed, a sudden wind whipped up the undergrowth causing leaves from the forest floor to stir and dance. Rushing through the girls’ hair and pushing beneath their clothes; almost prising their circle apart. ‘Fuck!’ yelled Di, smashing her watch against the rock as she pulled away from the other two: ‘Fuck fuck fuck!’ She struggled to catch the sides of her denim jacket and keep it closed while Nat scrabbled for her friend’s hand in vain, horrified that their protective ring had been broken. And then the heavens opened. And Lizzie—though superstitious Nat tried to stop her—was clambering onto the centre stone, pushing aside the homemade Ouija board, the token and candles; screaming with hysteria as she watched the lightning. Baiting it with head thrown back and throat exposed. She spun on her podium, beckoning Di. Laughing, laughing louder, the pair dragged each other down onto the ground getting covered in mud and mouldy leaves before staggering back up. Shrieking. Behind them the pool gleamed; the moon was shining whitely in the centre of its stirred-up darkness. Before Nat could join the other two—hesitating, as always, so she almost missed the moment—they’d stripped off and jumped in. Nat could just make out Liz’s pale face below the chopped-up surface: her long hair seethed with reeds, her face was a play of shadows. Di burst up in a fountain spurt,

- 34 - spitting a jet of water as she gargled rain, laughing and splashing and beckoning their more cautious friend to come on in. But still Nat hesitated, trying to clear her cotton-wool confusion. From where she stood the roundness of the pool reminded her disconcertingly of the magical mirror she’d seen in the flyer, which had so creepily mirrored the Ouija board Di had made—wasn’t water used to cast reflections before mirrors were invented? Reluctantly she shed clothes and edged towards the others, toes feeling for a foothold in the soft mud as water, warmer than the rain, crept up past her knees. She didn’t want to be left out. She didn’t think she could bear to be left out ever again. She stepped, and almost tripped. She nearly sank. ‘Come’, or was that ‘be one’? Nat wasn’t sure but thought she heard whispered words when she let her head slip beneath the surface of the pool. The sound seemed to get louder as water filled her ears. She duck-dived through the dark water, away from her friends’ kicking legs. Whoever thought the pool could be so big? She crested, to snatch a proper breath before diving deeper down. Toes flexing and curling, Nat reached towards slippery rocks to pull herself under. She thought she felt fish flick between her legs. It was dark in the airless underworld. Gradually a watery weightlessness overtook her and she spun slowly until she was on her back looking up at the luminous moon that appeared rippled and distorted, as though seen inside—or outside?—glass. It looked benevolent, but very far away. It was only when Nat reached towards it, her hand passing before her eyes in a mermaid’s languid wave, that she had a funny feeling. A waterlogged almost-worry: a very faint flicker of foreboding. Already fading. Again came the name. Not—this time Nat was sure—Ned. ‘Ed,’ someone called, as someone had been calling all night. The sound ebbed towards her and flowed away. In the subterranean whirl plants brushed against her legs. Far far above, the earth’s nearest satellite waxed and wept. The watery world was no more real than the wild wet wood where trunks of trees stretched straight and tall as the masts of a fleet of ships. Than the small purgatorial room she thought she glimpsed, where two globes, gifts from the Continent, trembled on their axes. ‘Kelley,’ came the call—from below, from within. ‘Kelly,’ echoed above. But her ears were full of water—her eyes, her mouth. Limbs heavy and numb dragged

- 35 - her body down, down, down: sinking towards stray numbers; drowning alongside depthless letters. And as clear as her own reflection in a piece of polished obsidian she sees of a sudden a direct grey stare that draws her like metal to a magnet. An eye, suspended—in the centre of a glass? Another pool? An I, spying new worlds. Nat’s body was fighting fiercely—lungs burning, hands and feet churning to propel her up and out. Away. And back. Breaking through the surface, she dragged herself to the edge of the pool to find the forest alive with her friends’ laughing screams. There was something else, another sound closer at hand; numbers and letters stumbling over each other in an endless alphabet. Could it be—surely not?—coming from her? Nat clamped her shivering jaw. Nobody was listening. Her body, limp with near drowning, purged pond water onto the mud. She gave in to gravity with relief. Curling towards a ball as the last vestiges of the room she had imagined, underwater, disappeared: the black-raftered roof and smoke-stained walls resolved into tree-fretted sky and rain-curtained wood. What had she seen? She wondered, as one final word forced itself between chattering teeth. ‘Home.’ Nat dragged herself to her feet. ‘God!’ she begged, shivering, and then again more loudly as she clambered to her knees: ‘God, guys pleeeease … You girls are crazy.’ Her voice trailed away. Her friends were long gone. Nat sensed she’d seen white limbs flashing in and out of trees as they crisscrossed the clearing and streaked away through the glossy wood. Why should they’ve waited anyway? She might say she wanted to be part of it, but she was forever too fearful to follow through. Wussy-puss Nat, always snapping back, then regretting it and trying to get the others to join her on the sidelines of life. Nat shook her head, already forgetting how close to psychotic panic she’d been. She rubbed her gooseflesh brusquely, stumbling across the glade to grab her clothes from the rock where they lay like a shed skin. She could’ve cried with frustration, and her face was pinched with failure as she pulled on wet wool. If it’d been Lizzie in the water, Liz who’d heard that voice; seen the dimly lit room— she’d still be there. Too wrapped up in her own adventure to notice the others moving on. Or to care, even if she had. Which was why Nat loved her so much. Liz made her, too, forget. Sometimes, around them, Nat did let go. Which was also what she was most afraid of: herself, going. Gone.

- 36 - Nat shook her head so a halo of rain sprayed out as she circled the clearing looking for the path out. It was hard to tell trees from the spaces between them. Hard, in the darkness, to see any way through. Her friends’ distant shrieks rippled back, but Nat faced stonily ahead: it was way too late to give chase. Bloody hell, she thought, wishing she could do it all again, and differently. Nat shivered, wet skin in wet clothes withdrawing, her steps slowing when she found a path: she didn’t want to go up to the house without them; she didn’t want to go back down to the pool. Fuck. Nat stopped, hesitating in the overhang of a huge tree that’d been hollowed out by age or animals. And on a whim crawled in. She crouched inside, watching sheets of rain descend like so many veils. Hiding halfway to someone else’s house. Bloody Hell. Nat’s limbs spasmed in the after-rush of adrenalin. She began to calm. For once she wouldn’t be the wet blanket who went home first. For now, she smiled, she’d stay right there. Exactly. Here. She was just a tiny bit pleased with herself and warmed by that spark of pride. Liz was always buoying her up, jollying them all along—assuming her friends wanted what she wanted and that she spoke for everyone—but when Nat was alone and got a chance to catch her breath she saw the madness they were making. She was the one who’d invented that term for their craziness: a ‘triumvirate of bitches’. And the others had loved it, screaming with delight as though their cautious friend were finally getting into the spirit of things. But Nat’d felt just the opposite: somehow so much older and more cynical than them. As though someone else inhabited her skin, and looked out at this future world with ancient scrying eyes.

- 37 -

1 a.m.

Pulling her sodden cardigan around her Nat felt a packet in one of the pockets. Eager to prove something, to herself as much as the others, Nat dug around until— success! Her fingers found the half-smoked toke. She drew out the lighter and, after a few failed attempts to flick a flame into life, brought it towards the joint. Inside a tree as vast as a spar, locked at the bottom of a wooden tower, it was as though every sense in the universe hovered over Nat’s cupped hands. Light flared as Nat breathed in and what was became what is—for a fleeting, tipping second—before becoming what would be. Time, she remembered (she was sure she’d known it, once), was a collapsing telescope. She inhaled again, losing herself in the precise specific exactness of that moment.

- 38 -

2 a.m.

The noise of a party from down the road travelled up to the house. Nat could hear it as she pottered about tidying the mess the girls had left behind—was that the classic riff and funky synth of ‘Dude Looks Like a Lady’?! Realising she was still shivering, despite having changed into Liz’s clean clothes, Nat moved to the kitchen to heat some milk. Tiny bubbles clustered and disappeared as she tilted the pan this way and that. So, Nat slo-o-owly smiled, this was being stoned. This: sto-o-oned. Waiting for the milk to come to the boil, keeping an eye out for the creamy head that she always thought made it seem— not that she knew—as if it were fresh from a cow and not out of a carton, Nat sipped brandy from a spoon in a newly invented ritual that seemed to soothe. She screwed up her face at the taste, but swallowed again and again like the good girl she was. Tipping up the bottle. Before suddenly remembering the milk. With a care she knew was comical, Nat chose a tiny teaspoon to lift off the skin. She felt warmed just seeing the steam rise from her Milo mug. Which made her realise how dark the kitchen was. The only light was coming in from the window. There’s a party on the hill would you like to come? Then bring a bottle of Rum- tum-tum … Nat shook her head, which rang from water in her ears or stray words still echoing around in there. Funny how the night that’d been so recently wild and wet was now utterly mild and unbelievably benign; could she be caught in the eye of a passing storm? The air certainly seemed clear enough: the sound from down the road did, indeed, travel like light. Nat returned to her milk, reminding herself that the evening was over, her night as good as done. Straight Nat might regret her early exit from the pool but this version didn’t mind so much. It was as though

- 39 - she’d left some strung-out self in the hollowed-out tree—that adolescent Natalie might be waiting, trapped in an indecisive moment at the fork of a dark path, but this more mature her was here now. Carrying an empty cup to the sink, carefully. Rinsing it. Dry. Nat licked her lips, wondering at their sweetness. Already forgetting, having hidden the empty brandy bottle in the bin. She made her distracted way through the lower level of the house, turning off lights and carefully closing doors as though there was anyone to hear but her. The activity seemed to settle her nerves, at least temporarily, but as soon as she’d done one room and turned away she felt she should go back and check it again. Not that she did, reminding herself that she was just really ripped. For the first time: split. This was—she stopped at the top of the stairs that led to the dugout below—it. A pity she was alone, but maybe that was why she was so far gone. Had let herself go so far. Nat noticed the smudged white circle of her own face staring in the dark glass of the front door. Which she deliberately double-checked was locked before descending with drunken caution to the underground den. What now? ‘Now?’ The sound startled her—she hadn’t meant to speak aloud. She should put some music on, picked up Cinderella’s Night Songs knowing she wanted to take in ‘Nobody’s Fool’, but suddenly unsure how. Oh my, she was tripping now! She looked at the album with its vampish pink type. Slid the record out, and slipped it onto her finger; she knew you didn’t lick it. She spun it slowly, watching the grooves. Thoughts were appearing in her head as words. Words written by someone else—some future elf—were directing her thoughts. ‘Indeed. Indeedy-do. Da-da-dah.’ That was her humming—not a good sign but one she couldn’t control. Nobody’s perfect. ‘What next, Little Miss Perfect?’ Nat asked, as she abruptly stopped gathering up the stray papers that’d drifted into every corner, feeling her fingers tingle. So, she raised an eyebrow in imitation of Liz as she picked up one particular pamphlet, wondering if it was what she’d been looking for all along. God she felt gone: the slowness of her brain, the doubleness of everything. Nat—or her doppelgänger, if that’s who she was—tugged at Liz’s sloppy joe and looked deliberately at the brochure in her hand. This time she read the text that accompanied a long-ago exhibition on a radical scholar who was

- 40 - scientist and sorcerer both, apparently. Back when magic and maths were flipsides of the same Elizabethan coin. Nat launched into the prophecy of one Doctor Dee: ‘As the molecules of metals are transformed, so the emotional elements in human nature undergo an increased intensity of vibrations, which transforms them, making all spiritual.’ She licked dry lips. Mouthing the words as she went: ‘In its third and final stage the secret of the philosopher’s stone lets a man’s soul attain unity with the divine.’ ‘Metal molecules,’ Nat repeated, unaware that she was standing and walking in circles as she pored over the paper, puzzled. Picking out odd phrases: ‘elemental emotions.’ She tapped the page, chewed her lip. The dense text made no sense to her spaced-out mind—but the sentences still sang out below the garden that, above, sloped away. Nat moved towards the stairs. Making her muttering way one slow step at a time. ‘Vibrating intensity.’ That was them all right, their trinity of teenage furies. Was it her fault for not believing enough? The thought Nat’d been avoiding swung to the fore: had she done all she could to make sure it—whatever it might’ve been—didn’t actually happen? But wouldn’t that mean she’d believed? That she believes! Nat walked through the kitchen and into the lounge with the leaflet still in her hand—noticing only distractedly, on the page facing the magical speculum, the picture of a small crystal ball encased in silver like a sea float caught in a fisherman’s net. But so much smaller. A cloudy marble snug in a mesh bag. She heard herself say not ‘alone’, not ‘atone’, not ‘home’: ‘The stone!’ It was only when she felt cold and looked up that she realised she was standing before the double doors that gave onto the lawn and, over on its far side, the forest. For all the world as though she were about to reach for the handle, step out onto the deck and descend into the dark garden. Nat stepped out. Turning determinedly away from the trees, she strode off in the other direction. Towards the party that swelled with sound and heaved with light: ‘Oh what a spunky shade-y!’

- 41 -

3 a.m.

Weaving around the odd body on the lawn, pressing past a stray one in the hall, fuelled by brandy, skunk and such a mad mad night, Nat headed into the heart of the house. It was only once she was well inside the faux Revival facade that she realised there were far fewer people than she’d imagined—maybe everyone had left? It didn’t look like it: backpacks and bags stowed in corners suggested that those who’d come this far into the sticks were here to stay, even if they weren’t planning on sleeping. Not only were there fewer people but—Nat noticed—they were all boys. Usually she’d care, but in her present state she just thought how easy it’d be to find her friends. ‘Welcome, and well met!’ came a languid cry from a pile of pillows. A long form unwrapped itself from the floor and Nat had to laugh at the mismatched get- up: a plaid dressing gown worn like a smoking jacket over cricket whites, topped off with a woman’s silk scarf tied in a careless cravat. ‘The fairer sex is always welcome,’ her host said, standing with a slight stagger. Extending a hand and bowing low over Nat’s in return, ‘expected or un- expected, invited or not-yet-invited.’ Byronic ironic; he gestured expansively about him, telling her to make herself at home. ‘Though I don’t actually live here, you know,’ he confessed in a more normal voice: ‘Home for the hols to find the olds had moved—trying to find themselves in the Forest,’ he finished, keeping up the capitals and italics. ‘I got lost,’ Nat offered, not shy like she usually was. ‘My friends?’ The pair laughed unsoberly. Tilting her head to look up at him, Nat guessed he wasn’t as much older as she’d first thought.

- 42 - Johnno, as he told her to call him, tucked her hand under his arm. ‘First things first,’ he said, leading her through myriad rooms to a kitchen where he introduced her to a stockpot that was filled with a steaming sangria punch. ‘As if,’ he waved theatrically, ignoring the piles of empties at their feet, ‘by Magic.’ And Nat found she was right: her two friends were there, with post-pond- dunked hair and clean boy clothes. A dramatic reunion followed, complete with drunken kisses for their audience’s benefit. Between Liz and Nat anyway—Di was too busy leaning over the brew, ladling glacéd cherries and rough-cut orange quarters into cereal bowls she’d commandeered since there were no cups left. Boys watched appreciatively as the three girls drank till their lips were berry red and their teeth stuck with pith. It was far sweeter than the brandy, Nat noted, accepting a refill, and then—when proffered, no one pushed her—another. And more fiery.

Presumably some time passed before she found herself back in the front room, Nat hardly knew. No matter, they were there and all firm friends by now. It was, Nat thought, very late and she was … not out of it exactly but not quite present. She’d read about the room spinning, but this house seemed far more tricksy than that. The room was fading. No, she corrected herself, concentrating, it wasn’t actually actively fading, just every now and then she’d realise that for a little while it hadn’t been there—and again, not there. Or maybe—a scary thought—it was still there and she wasn’t. Either way Nat only noticed when she returned, so it wasn’t really worth worrying about. She let her head drop back onto the couch behind her and focused on the friends beside her: Lizzie, leaning into John. Nat dragged her head up; sensing rather than seeing the room swing into focus. ‘So,’ Liz challenged, flicking her hair off her neck with long fingers. Johnno lifted a strand from his shoulder; examining its split ends. ‘What’s it to be then?’ She eyed off the group one boy at a time. ‘Truth? Or do you dare, to dare?’ ‘Sure,’ Johnno drawled, only a slight slur giving away his state as he spun an empty bottle. ‘We’ll do what you ask—but—what’s asked?’ He gave the empty a final flick towards where Nat sat. For once Nat wasn’t afraid of going first—her nerves seemed to have taken a backseat. She thought she could see so clearly how far gone they were, and

- 43 - guessed she knew just where to start. She looked across at Liz and wondered if her friend registered the similarities: the cross-legged circle, the coming questions. This was different than what they’d done around the Ouija board. This was a hoot, that’s what it was. A lark. She laughed. ‘The first time,’ she started speaking, slowly rolling the anti-planchette, ‘you ever—’ The bottle slowed. ‘Wanked!’ The last word bursting out as the vessel came to rest with its neck pointing towards a boy on her left. ‘Can’t remember,’ he said quickly, ‘too young!’ Laughter swelled as he chugged back his punch and gave the bottle another spin. ‘Last time—you ever—’ it turned back to Nat like a compass that only gave one right reading, ‘did!’ ‘Can’t answer,’ she laughed so hard she toppled over. Surprising herself with the admission that followed: ‘Never have.’ ‘No!’ Liz joined in the protestations of disbelief. Waves of laughter buoyed Nat up as the room receded. Oh, to let go! (To plummet over the edge and be caught in clouds—to know no death but only flight.) ‘Seriously,’ Nat swore, straightening, licking her index finger and beginning to trace a cross over her heart—but trailing off; she left the sign unfinished as she reached for Johnno’s joint. He passed it over, along with an appreciative smile, shifting to sit on the other side of her so he’d get a go again before the reefer did the rounds. It didn’t matter what she said, Nat told herself, she was among friends: literally now, wedged between Liz and John. Nat drew smoke into her lungs until she burst into a coughing fit that made her lose it more. ‘Me?’ Liz chuckled, looking past Nat to John, ‘I remember when I discovered what my finger could do—couldn’t get enough. Thought I’d have to duck into public loos on the way to school! ‘Of course,’ she conceded to the cheering boys, ‘that was after years of practice on the poles in the playground. My turn, my turn, all the girls cried but No! I was the big bully who got there first and shimmied to the top. Not letting go till I was: Done!’ She gave a big sigh of satisfaction and accepted the joint that’d come full circle, smoking it exaggeratedly like a post-coital fag. Reaching over Nat

- 44 - to pass the burning butt to John who cupped it expertly and inhaled the last gasp deep into his lungs. Nat felt herself fade.

A mutter. ‘’K,’ someone asked and answered. K— When Nat next noticed they were lying in a loop: everyone’s head on someone else’s stomach. Playing a wordless game that started with a chuckle, a belly ripple; rose to a guffaw, a roar. By the time their laughter had settled back down they’d started up again. They were, she thought, resting her heavy head on Liz’s slim midriff while Johnno lay his on hers in turn, chasing time. Or driving it. It stopped; it started. It flowed forward and back. She could feel it moving through her, along with emotions that swept her up and dumped her dramatically: fear, excitement, anticipation, dread. Desire. She felt alternately trapped and happy, at peace and restless. Can’t wait: waiting. Waiting: can’t wait. The room receded, and returned. This moment had gone on forever. This moment had only just begun. Like Johnno’s breath where she could feel it on the tops of her feet: it had gone on forever; it was just now beginning. He’d rolled her socks off gently, so slowly she’d thought she would melt and peel away with them—once she’d noticed what he was doing, that was. Now his warm tongue pushed in and out around her toes until her sole trembled in his palm. Her skin flinched when he took his mouth away and the wet patches turned cold. She lay deathly still, aware of his weight where he lay across her legs, and reached behind her head for Liz’s hand. Her own palm was sticky with sweat, fingers strangely numb. But her feet were so alive! Johnno’s sucking was so soft and subtle she wasn’t sure where he was nibbling and where he wasn’t. Tongue and finger merged and converged. Pulses of pleasure raced up the insides of her legs. He was turning her inside out, that was it: outside in. Nat licked dry lips, opening her eyes to the darkness and wondering who else was awake and if she cared. Did she move? Was she about to or had she just? She lay still, barely daring to breathe; gripping her girlfriend’s hand so tight she could feel Lizzie’s bones. Begging Johnno to keep going with every fibre of her being. Willing him to never ever stop.

- 45 - He was on his side, and she on hers. Nat could feel the heat of his mouth above her knees and when he slid his hand between her thighs, upwards, she let him separate one leg and bend it up so she could feel the fabric of her jeans press into flesh where the weight of her thigh rested on his hand. She remembered the recent touch of his fingers against her feet and her mind brought the two sensations together: fingers here, tongue there; skin there, wet here. She felt his heat and teeth through the denim and almost against her will thrust her pubic bone out as he bit against the cross where the stitching of Liz’s borrowed jeans came together. When he laughed into her she grabbed his head between her thighs, loving the feeling of it: the weight, the substance of his skull. Lizzie rolled over and stood up. Nat followed her friend to the bathroom. She waited, perched on the edge of the porcelain tub, hanging her head and swinging her feet: smiling sheepishly, staring into the woven pattern of the bathmat and wondering how on earth they’d managed to find the toilet and whether they’d ever make it back to the boys. ‘You’re fucked,’ said Liz, not completely unkindly, as she finished, flushed, and flicked on the light. ‘I know,’ Nat rolled her head back, her eyes closed. ‘D’you know what was in that punch?’ ‘Nope.’ ‘You OK?’ ‘I dunno.’ Nat tried to right her head, aware how she must look but guessing her awareness meant she was on the way back. The room, returning. She tipped her chin up and opened bloodshot eyes: ‘It’s like I keep waking up—like I’m surfacing through all these layers of me; layer upon layer of all the different Nats of all the various ages.’ ‘What-ever,’ Liz cut her off, considering the two of them in the small mirror of the medicine cabinet. Turning back and bending down to stare into her friend’s face so she was only millimetres away when Nat kissed her. An unplanned, unprecedented pash. A minute or hour later Lizzie wiped her hand across her mouth. ‘What’re you doing?’ she said. Nat smiled, Lizzie always liked to be surprised. ‘You wanna—’

- 46 - ‘What?’ Liz shot back, ‘with that boy out there? You sure you know what you’re doing?’ she asked. ‘Nope,’ Nat shrugged her shoulders like Lizzie might, ‘but one of us is gonna do it anyway!’ She stuck out her punch-pink tongue, laughing hysterically when Liz popped half a tab on it, keeping the other half for herself. Oh, it was a most auspicious night all right! Innumerable first best times. Nat swallowed. She felt so very not-Nat she couldn’t believe Liz still recognised her. Or maybe—Nat wasn’t going to stop to think about that—Lizzie didn’t. Swallowing, she waltzed them both back to the boys.

- 47 -

4 a.m.

‘Come on—this way!’ Lizzie’s voice rippled back as she darted ahead, leading Nat deeper and deeper into the dark forest. ‘Follow me,’ she called again, pressing into the undergrowth, quickening the pace. And Nat did, wondering whether John would keep up, weighed down by bedding and booze. When she turned around he was peering past her. Nat swung her torch in a wide arc. ‘What?’ Her question was quickly swallowed by the wet wood. ‘Are we nearly there?’ she whispered to the figure flitting in and out of the foliage. All she could make out was a mass of close-pressed trees. Or was it the opposite? Panels of matt-black sky? She shivered, flipping from claustrophobia to agoraphobia, the dope in her system unleashing bubbles of paranoia that threatened to pop. Pop! ‘Yes,’ Liz hissed, so close it sounded as if she were inside Nat’s skull: ‘Shhhh,’ she whispered, appearing out of nowhere to run a finger up her friend’s arm. Pressing it to her own lips before darting away. ‘Thirsty?’ Nat gasped as Johnno dramatically dropped what he was carrying, opened his dressing gown and pulled her to him. Briefly he tied the belt around them both—tilting her chin up to land a kiss before she ducked away. ‘Thirsty,’ he agreed, bending to the bottle at his feet. But Nat grabbed his hand; drawing him towards two trees that grew so close together she’d almost missed the narrow opening Liz’d slipped through a bare breath before. She heard it before she saw it, but as soon as they were through the gap they both saw the small fall of water that dripped over a slippery outcrop of stone. Quickly Johnno crossed the damp ground, making Nat wonder if he’d seen Liz, but

- 48 - he just leant in delightedly to lick the glossy rocks where they shone silver and black. When she reached his side he twisted around and—holding her by the waist, leaning into her for support so she couldn’t help but feel his hard-on—tilted his head back till the trickle ran over his forehead and into his eyes and then his open mouth. Wondering out loud where the water came from, Johnno pulled himself upright and sprang up the rocks in search of the source, all trace of his earlier camp manner gone. Had that been an act, thought Nat, or this? ‘Ace!’ She heard him yell from what she suddenly guessed—suddenly knew—was the clearing. ‘Bulk ace!’ Of course: the pool! A second later he’d jumped down and ducked back for their things. Clambering with them to where she’d been—was it hours? only hours!—earlier. Wheels within wheels, Nat thought; spheres she’d set in singing motion once upon a twilight time. Back at the start of this wild night that was driving them all towards some unimaginable end. ‘And the night woes lie so very low,’ she hummed under her breath, telling herself unsympathetically that it was a bit late to think that now. ‘What?’ It was his turn to ask, not recognising her mangled version of Heart’s power ballad. Or not wanting to. ‘And now it wills me to be home,’ Nat broke off, noting how the pool waited glossy and slick as a well of ink. And on its far side: the rock. The perfection of the setting was obvious and even—no!—Johnno had found the girls’ candles and was lighting them delightedly. Lizzie was nowhere to be seen. What’d made her friend bring them here? Nat wondered. Did Liz think he was the hero they’d summoned? And she some sacrifice?! Johnno patted the sleeping bags, looking pretty pleased with himself and the bed he’d made atop the rock. Well, Nat told herself, running hands through reedy hair: the room had gone for good. No smokers here or other partygoers. Time might seem a maze you could get lost in, but really it was a labyrinth with only one twisting turning path through. Was she even on her way out the other side? Or still only heading deeper in? The night had doubled back to dump her here because this place was not yet done with her. (Was she in a tree tower, too— lighting a smoke, or sighing her whole life out in one infinite exhale?)

- 49 - Trying to act as if this were what she’d intended, Nat walked over to John— carefully avoiding the churned-up mud at the edge of the water where earlier prints might’ve been. Shyly, Nat climbed up.

‘Did you ever—’ Nat started to ask, trying to break the uncomfortable silence that made her want to jump up and run. Knowing the timing would never get better than this, the choice never better than him. ‘Ever what?’ He grinned down at her. ‘I dunno. Believe in magic?’ Nat tried to laugh, wishing she knew how to dispel the seriousness that’d settled. They shifted, sat up and reached for cigarettes, and somehow, instead, kissed. Clumsily. One of them keeping eyes open. Mouths exploring each other ineptly and the kiss lasting a little too long; they didn’t know how to move on and didn’t want to start again. Until Johnno lay back on the sleeping bags. They made awkward eye contact, prompting Nat to grab the bottle and sip from its slippery neck while Johnno lit two cigarettes. ‘I guess I did once,’ he answered eventually. ‘I had this imaginary friend?’ Flipping his fringe out of his eyes, he blew a practised smoke ring that hung above them perfect as a porthole. ‘What happened?’ Nat asked, thinking how it should be so obvious what was real and what wasn’t—what was possible and what was not—but maybe once upon every lifetime it wasn’t. She stared at the billion stars. ‘I grew up, I guess.’ Johnno said. ‘I remember one afternoon Mum asked whether he wanted anything,’ he dragged on his fag, their makeshift bed rustling as he shrugged. ‘I thought she was so stupid not to know.’ ‘Or maybe you thought she thought you were stupid,’ Nat giggled, wriggling a little against him; she’d never seen anyone so close-up before. The pores of his skin were like pinpricks in wax. She lifted a hand, ran it up his jean-clad thigh and along his side. She was trembling before he even touched her. To lie so close to a boy was somehow dirty and divine. Nat shifted on their bed–stone, pulled his head to her chest to hide her face. Over his tousled hair she looked boldly around the circle of

- 50 - trees, daring them to see. Two, about to become one: the most mystic meeting. She felt herself moisten at the thought of herself, moist. Pushing aside Liz’s borrowed Bonds top, Johnno bunched up Nat’s bra until the thin elastic stretched under her arms and the front fastening came undone. He flicked her nipple with his tongue so she gasped and gripped his hair—harder. He sucked Nat’s swollen flesh so her reactions came on strong: that’s good, that’s bad; too little, too much. When John slid an icy hand beneath the waistband of her jeans, popping the button and working at the fly so she wriggled her hips to help free a leg—when his finger, just the tip, finally reached between—everything in her was ready to recoil: Nat almost pushed him away and had to remind herself that she was the one who’d wanted this. She … wanted. This. Her nails dug into his skin. He withdrew his hand and licked his fingers before going back. Nat took his cock where it crested his jocks and tried to caress it like he said: harder. She guessed she was doing it right when he ate a gasp and the skin in her grip tightened. A bead of moisture, Nat sat up to get a better angle. And John slid his finger fully in: her turn to bite and grip her thighs together. Squeezing him hard in turn. She was shocked by the sensation—so strange, so brutal; and at the same time she was thrilled—so brutal. How strange. It was when Johnno pulled back onto his knees, so his lean form and curved prick were silhouetted by the sudden moon, that Nat saw Lizzie on the far side of the clearing. How long had her friend been there? Nat heard John suck in a breath; he’d seen her too. Wearing only her thin white tee, Liz danced towards them, pulling herself up onto the rock where they waited. Smiling broadly she straddled Nat; kneeling on all fours, kissing her full on the lips. Behind Liz’s arched back Nat could just make Johnno out; presented, there was no doubt, with alternatives. Her tongue still in Nat’s mouth, Lizzie reached behind to grab Johnno’s hand and pull it down and back into her friend. Nat gasped, arching hips almost against her will as his fingers—surely many more than one?—dipped in and out of her. Then Nat felt another vicious sting: Lizzie bit her neck and was sucking so hard it hurt.

- 51 - Everything was slipping, sliding. Nat wriggled on the rock beneath the two of them. Writhed. Blood racing between pinned cunt and pierced throat. ‘Come,’ Liz commanded, her teeth at Nat’s nipples. She rocked further forward on her knees and reached further back behind to peel apart a thigh, a buttock, or perhaps to guide him fully in. ‘Go on: ‘COME!’ Rocking even further forward—arching even further back—she turned to look at John, giving Nat the chance she needed to squirm out from under the two of them. Stumble damply down and stagger away.

Nat saw Lizzie staring across the clearing, as though she could make the moment theirs. But Nat was miles away, centuries ago: caught in a stoned reverie; paralysed with pity for the poor fools they all were to think they could connect when nothing would come together that wasn’t separate. Didn’t they know? Everything was already — One! She broke away, suddenly seeing the forest for the in-between realm it undoubtedly was—the waiting wings between worlds. How would she find her way back? Could she swim through the leaves? If the wood were an ocean and she, a ship skimming its surface. Floundering through night, clinging to the idea of dawn, Nat began to run. Half-buried roots tripped her up, half-hidden branches caught on unfamiliar flesh: looking down she saw bare legs that seemed not hers. She told herself to find the straight way and the true path and the one road. The house, she remembered, putting one foot in front of the other. Push on, she willed herself: push through. Get back to that—home!—where some things at least made sense. But Nat knew the truth: that nothing did. She was scaring herself. Nat was afraid. How could she be in the wood, and running, still? Shouldn’t she have made it out by now? Could she have been turned back and back again? Doomed to follow that poor fairytale boy to his sad storybook end? Why hadn’t dawn come? Her jerky jogging slowed. ‘Come along, Nat,’ there was that voice again, clearer now. It sounded like that other her, the one she pushed down only to have him sometimes spring back up Jack-out-of-the-box-like.

- 52 - ‘You’re nearly home now, Nat,’ someone said. (How long had she been … not thinking in words, but thinking about those words? Writing, reading these thoughts of—not—hers?) She didn’t remember falling down. The body was preserving itself, propelling her onwards through green drapes. What was this self, she tried to hold the thought: what, beyond it, and who, before or after her? Finally Nat stopped thinking, stopped talking, stopping talking thoughts and thinking words and ripping at leafy hair and hirsute leaves in her desperate haste to be free of a forest that, she now knew, was inside her. It was nothing more—and nothing less—than the monstrous mess of her own deranged imagination.

- 53 -

5 a.m.

‘Di?’ Nat called, stumbling through the door of the house they’d left so long ago, loaded up with candles and a homemade Ouija board. She regretted it almost as soon as she said it: if their friend wasn’t around she didn’t want to call her down. The moment of reaching out had passed an age ago. When no one replied Nat fell into the nearest easy chair with relief, pulling a rug up and over herself. Sinking into the cracked vinyl cushion as she tried to hide from the coming day. She was dreading the morning now, with its freshly scrubbed sheen. Flicking between five channels on TV, Nat longed for her exhaustion to resolve into sleep but found herself unable to settle. As video clips strutted their New Romantic stuff, all Egyptian eyeliner and poetic ruffs, she thought she might remember this drawn-out moment more than all the excitement of before. It was taking at least as long to pass; longer. Idly Nat tuned in to the test pattern that kept no-time better than any true clock could. Her head rocked, dipped forward and jerked back up once or twice before coming to settle at an acute angle. She dreamt she was still at the party. Only it wasn’t the same. It was more like the masked ball from Labyrinth, the girls’ favourite film of the year before—where Bowie played a Goblin King based on his own ultra-vivid childhood nightmares. And fell for a teenage girl. Nat sighed, vaguely aware in her dream that she was already too old: ageing way faster than anybody knew. Wishing she had a crystal ball. And what would she see? Tarot faces flipped before her fast-shut eyes: the Magician, master of creation; the Lovers’ duality; the paradox of a Hanging Man. What did she know about such esoterica? Had those flyers featured Renaissance sketches of the

- 54 - Catherine wheel of fortune? The circle of life: destiny, fate. But the dial in the sky was there to remind them that the seeds of every death were present in its birth. And in all endings was a new beginning. Once we know that everything is connected, a voice whispered into her eardrum, the universe opens up to us. Someone’s downfall was essential if another were to ascend. ‘Everything we did, we did for you,’ Johnno was saying as he swung her through empty rooms, one arm around her waist. ‘We’ve reordered time,’ he said, waltzing her on. They swayed to a standstill. Nat, concentrating on not wanting him to be frightening, offered up a laugh that had a manic edge. She recognised the hollow ring a beat too late. She got angry with him then, but couldn’t escape and dared not move: caught as she was. So frustrated, she cried, and felt the plaid wool of Johnno’s dressing gown rough against her cheek. The threads were so clear she could see where they crossed over each other, and peer into the gaps between. The dark squares that, as she looked, switched from negative to positive space so they seemed like buildings and the woven grid the streets. She was flying above Melbourne’s CBD. Or was that the fucking forest far below? Trees lining up along old ways. Nat gave herself over to the vision of the two of them, now moving serenely through the fixed firmament—dancing, spinning, spun. She caught the echo of an earlier scene: an Escheresque tower—stairs stepping into nowhere—that taunted with the idea of escape, teased with the threat of entrapment. And there, impossibly upside down, crawling up the underside of a fallen tower: a squalling baby boy. She was trying to tell Johnno something, but couldn’t speak. Her mouth might’ve been open but the only words she heard were Bowie’s lyrics, twisted: Cal-ling / as the girl falls do-o-own. Nat wanted to say that she shouldn’t be here, and in a way she wasn’t, or soon wouldn’t be. That someone was coming, but she couldn’t remember who. And no one knew when. She grabbed a nearby chair, waking only then to find herself scratching at tear-streaked cheeks with the remote, still gripped in her fist. Throwing it at a curved glass wall.

- 55 - FUCK! Nat jerked upright as the French doors slammed back. Cold air rushed in: Liz arrived, just as Di emerged from the main part of the house. ‘Fuck, Lizzie! What happened?’ Di asked—in a normal enough voice that made Nat realise how very far from normal she felt. Lizzie, semi-naked, rolled over, scratching her back against the carpet. Smiling slyly, she grinned up at them. Nat stepped over Liz’s outstretched hand and walked across the room to the banging doors. She rammed in the bolts and dragged shut the floor-length drapes before returning to her still-warm chair. Tucking knees up and the blanket tight around her again she sat back, watchful and on edge. Di looked from one to the other. When no one spoke she chucked a rug in Lizzie’s direction and headed towards the kitchen, switching on lights and turning off the TV as she passed by. ‘Fuuuuuuck,’ Lizzie might’ve been saying, but Nat wasn’t listening; she didn’t want to hear. Fuck. Hugging her arms around herself she scratched at the skeletons of leaves pressed into exposed patches of her skin. Liz crawled over and tried to push her head into Nat’s lap. She raised her knee to keep her friend away. ‘I—’ Nat started to say when Di came back. I am indeed an I, she thought self-consciously or, rather, the other who’d taken over thought for her: an eye. Aye! Nat shook her head, taking the offered cup and holding it tight. ‘Me, me, me,’ she whispered: not Dee. Nat felt hysteria like a fatal tightness in her chest, and whistled in a shaky breath: ‘I never saw,’ she whispered, closing her eyes. ‘Such a forest!’ Smooth grey trees that creaked like a royal navy set to sail the seven seas and four rivers in one great act of global circumnavigation. ‘Shhh, Nat,’ Di soothed, a hand on her arm; ‘Shhh.’ She turned up the gas heater and dragged Nat’s chair closer to it. ‘Just wait while I grab Lizzie some dry things.’ Staring at the flickering flames, vaguely aware that she was rocking in time to a heartfelt beat, Nat concentrated on not humming or keening or in any way letting on how far away she really was. The voice in the prompt box inside reminded her to breathe, and she did. Breathed. She counted to ten, breathing once in the middle and then again at the end: bre-e-eathe.

- 56 - From the kitchen, snippets of Di’s monologue could be heard saying she wouldn’t be a second and to just sit tight. ‘—sugar for shock I think,’ she finished, returning with dry clothes and a box of Arnott’s choc-chip cookies. ‘Now,’ Di munched comfortably as she gestured for the others to hoe in, washing a mouthful down. ‘What’s the damage? Someone’d better tell me what the fuck happened tonight—last night. You guys,’ she peered into bleary eyes. ‘You guys look totally burned.’ ‘’t’s okay,’ Nat whispered—unsure whether she was reassuring them or her. ‘It’s okay now.’ And suddenly it was, as if the saying made it so. Relieved at the momentary mental quiet, Nat sipped, registering then her burnt tongue. It seemed an aeon ago that she’d made Milo in one of these mugs. Or another mug in the same set, she corrected herself. Or a completely different cup but from the same kitchen. Nat sat straighter, snipping the neurotic spiral. Reminding herself that she mustn’t be afraid if she didn’t want fearful visitations. Carefully she placed her cup on the floor and crossed to the pile of wet clothes in the corner of the kitchen. Digging in the pocket of her cardigan, Nat pulled out the small Monopoly piece and brought it back to the hearth. When she put the iron down in front of the fire its base scraped across the ceramic tiles. She knew they all recognised it. ‘That flyer,’ she said, searching around for it, ‘you know, the one with the speculum in it? And crystal ball?’ She sat down, skidding it towards Liz. ‘I read about your Doctor Dee. And his scrying glasses.’ ‘Dee?’ Lizzie echoed. ‘Oh! That exhibition. Elizabeth, the First Elizabeth,’ she explained to Di. ‘Her adviser, this occultist—him and his henchman, Mister Kell- ey.’ But Nat was silent: something in her had stirred at that name and she veered away from saying it. Avoided the other girls’ eyes as though he might stare out at her—or was it fear that he’d peer at them through her? That mad thinking again. Already she was regretting her attempted confession. She’d hoped her friends would help, that talking about the black-beamed book-lined room she’d seen when she floated in the pond—sank, in the pool—might make it go away, but suddenly she was terrified that speaking out loud might send her back. She

- 57 - worried she wasn’t really there. Here. An icy wind licked the far side of the big glass doors. ‘Kell-ey?’ repeated Di, finally getting the connection. Watching Liz watch Nat. Nat remembered almost drowning. The flying feeling of freefalling. She gave herself a shake: ‘I feel okay now—kind of okay, anyway—but for a moment there ... Fark! I was completely out of it.’ ‘It’s okay,’ Liz murmured, reaching for the other girl’s toe the way she had a millennium ago—but Nat pulled her feet away. Tucked them up under herself. ‘It was a fucking crazy night,’ Liz said. ‘That skunk—and booze. Boys.’ ‘We pushed your superstitious buttons with that séance crap,’ Di added. ‘Don’t say that!’ interrupted Nat. ‘Just,’ she lifted a finger, let it fall, ‘don’t. I nearly died,’ Nat tried. ‘In the pool—I felt that whole falling-asleep thing. And there was a light: I was floating above my body, drifting towards it.’ ‘Ri-i-ight.’ Di would probably have snorted if it weren’t for her friend’s history. ‘I was slipping, sliding. Someone was calling.’ Di shifted. Lizzie tried to take Nat’s side: ‘Don’t, you know, make reality only what you can imagine.’ ‘And not—what? Unimaginable?’ ‘Please,’ Nat held up her hand again. ‘Just shut up. This is me we’re talking about: me, mad. Losing the plot, my marbles—my mind.’ She offered the words like a trail of breadcrumbs, begging them to follow and find her. But she also kept her eyes on the fire. ‘I just felt,’ she stared at the base of the flames where blue jets burst into orange leaves. Fucking forests everywhere. ‘Feel. So small and evil and alone. It’s like,’ Nat whispered, as if she didn’t want anyone to hear, ‘I’m this different girl: an alien impostor, utterly other—a changed thing.’ She laughed strangely, pulling the blankets in. ‘A changeling.’ There it was, that ill wind whistling in. ‘And at the same time this, this is the real Nat. I could barely remember you guys.’ She sensed that the door that night had opened wouldn’t be easily closed. From subterranean depths icy waters were rising: an epic flood tongued beneath the curtains of her

- 58 - mind. ‘And when I did it wasn’t with love—it wasn’t with anything. You were just a memory.’ Nat sat absolutely still; resisting rubbing her skull or pulling on where ears should be, afraid any movement might disturb her hands. ‘You weren’t there,’ Lizzie told Di. ‘Nat and I went back to the clearing. Later.’ Di waited. ‘We saw Ned,’ Liz said defensively. ‘Didn’t we Nattie? Ed Kelley? It was him.’ ‘Yeah. Right.’ ‘Fuck you, Di, you weren’t there. It was him—the right time and place. We did it, Di, whether you believe or not, we did it.’ But Nat thought even Lizzie didn’t know what it was they’d done.

s

Nat was waiting, still: squatting on her haunches in the burnt-out hollow of a tree; mesmerised by the receding night. Her senses preternaturally alert to the air against her skin and breath tickling the tip of her nose before filling her lungs. She reminded herself every minute—but it might’ve been more often, since she had no way of knowing and there was no doubt her mind was playing tricks on her—that time moved in a straight line. She’d been here before, but then she left. She was back at the pool, and then back at the house, but now she was here again. It was as if this place had been forever waiting. Time, it seemed, wasn’t an arrow after all—travelling from bow to target in a meteoric arc that could be calculated mathematically, given known factors, if you knew how. Time was boomeranging back. Nat waited, still as a statue about to be brought to life. Outstretched arms resting on knees: palms rotated outwards offering up lifelines.

- 59 -

6 a.m.

When, finally, the girls slept it was with the help of the Valium Johnno’d given Lizzie as a parting present. A couple of pills pressed into a palm to ward off the comedown that waited on the other side, or add another dimension to their hallucinatory high. Meant to soften the edges of the night, not dissolve them entirely. Nat pictured it so clearly. She almost couldn’t believe he hadn’t given them to her. She wasn’t sure that she and John hadn’t, actually, fucked. Did they really just do everything but? She ached, but whether that was desire or its fulfilment, she hardly knew. Her pubis was bruised and swollen from grinding, her lips sticky and sore. Raw. Rearranging her position on the hard floor Nat worried, typically, about the drug’s side effects—hadn’t she heard talk at the clinic of anterograde amnesia? What were the odds no more memories would be made? And where was the harm in that, Nat thought with a snort, given what they’d lived through this night: times enough for all her life, lives enough for all time. She was so tired—so tired—she shouldn’t need the chemical help, but her mind was ricocheting away. And Liz’d been so intent on doing everything together that Nat’d swallowed the Diazepam along with Di, not asking why Lizzie had left John. Had she been so eager to get back and boast about how far she’d gone? Stupidly proud to no longer be their Virgin Queen. Nat shifted as much as she could, tight-packed between the other two. Her body was growing heavy. A comfortable numbness crept over her as night lifted. She tried not to notice signs of encroaching sleep, knowing that only made it

- 60 - retreat. Her body really was unbearably heavy. Nat sank through the carpet and floor and foundations to settle into the earth far, far beneath the house. As she touched down an arm on her left flung over her, to find another limb there, reaching from the right. Unable to open her eyes, Nat sensed her friends holding hands over her almost-asleep form and wondered if they were really there with her, or if they’d gone off and left shucked shells of their former selves to stand guard. A mind wanders: what would’ve happened if tomboy Di had followed Lizzie into the bathroom at that party? If it were their new friend John, here, who thought he was not where he was or who he’d always been. A restless brain, too fried to hold a proper thought but revving too fast to unwind into sleep, spied on the three from above: arms interlinked like the famous graces in their maiden forms. Breathe—as the garden shrugged off night and light peered in the window at the one, two, and then—breathe—three sleeping girls.

s

Nat dreamt she was a man called Edward. Lying on plaited rush matting. The roof overhead, Ed knew, even from behind closed eyelids, was fretted wood with plaster in between. Oh! A scream was building: No! What time, what place was this? Not now, not then again. He sat up, rubbing eyes filled with tallow light; wicks in need of trimming telling him time had passed. What’d made him hide out here, among the boxes and books? Ed knew from experience that much as he’d have liked to slide a knife between uncut parchment pages, he couldn’t read most of the languages in which the Doctor dabbled. Any secrets here were safe from the likes of him. He crawled out from under the trestle sensing, suspecting, seering, that in the middle of it, resplendent on its own throne, sat the lodestone. He didn’t look, but even so a potent undertow lurched to the fore, making him spew into the nearest ewer. So that was it: not slumber, but stupor. An action, and its ending. He poured the last of the water from the pitcher so it ran over his cracked lips before bending sharply, shaking. Wiping his mouth with the back of a hand he rose and made his way towards the small casement that opened outwards onto the courtyard below.

- 61 - Imagining a future fellow slipping in one split from such an opening into the next world. He pushed the shutters properly apart and looked down on his employer’s household. Ant-small and just as industrious, Dee’s people went about their lowly lives while he, Ed, framed in the eaves, watched from on high. How far East were they? A wave of some sickness swept through Ed as part of him wished he could return to the sleeping girls. But even as he thought about returning to sleep, Ed found himself waking more fully into this post-swoon present. And found himself flat on his back before a scholar’s joint-legged stool on the other side of the room. A long way from the window that he hadn’t walked towards or looked down from. Flames of recently tended candles climbed skywards to curl in the corners of the Mortlake attic roof. They hadn’t left England yet then. Ed still had to persuade Dee to get their journey underway.

s

Groggily Di rolled over as Nat threw up. She scrambled to her feet, hearing snatches of mad talk retched between the poor girl’s heaves. Her fingernails had left raised white welts on blotched red flesh. The crook of her ear was ripped as though she’d tried to tear off a mask. ‘Nat!’ With surprising strength the shorter girl resisted Di’s attempt to stop her. Heading towards the kitchen. Di followed, throwing a look at Liz. ‘Shhh, Nat. Easy, Nattie.’ Di murmured, making her way heel-to-toe slowly, as she would towards a sleepwalker. SILENCE! The command rang so loud Nat grabbed her throat as though to physically hold words in. Had the others heard it too? Again, the voice in her head advised silence and she obeyed. Not wanting to give herself away. Would hiding what was happening—what was happening?—give her time to win, or leave another Nat free to find her own way out? Not knowing, it seemed safest to refuse to admit that the voices were real. The wood had finally overflowed its bounds: fronds had come in on their clothes; mud, tramped through on their shoes. Wild dread grew in her. Angels

- 62 - were massing: from the treetops, in the flames, and inside her mind. Divine forms bridging the divide—watchers and messengers in the service of some, one or no god—pressed against them like creatures made of matter. Everywhere Nat looked they loomed, crowding the room. ‘Did you doubt us, Edward Kelley?’ Nat thought she heard. ‘Dids’t disbelieve?’ Yes! Nat wanted to yell, but had no voice no place in this new world where all she could remember and hold onto—he reminded her—was the need for silence. It took Di all of a minute to see what Nat held in her hand. By which time Nat had already taken the first thin precise slice at her own forearm. One and one and one: multiple crosshatched slashes. Until Di got to the blade just as Nat let it go, wrapping her arms around the other girl. Bloodying both their hands. ‘What the fuck!’ The two girls sank to the floor in a corner of the kitchen. Di rocked them as she tied Nat’s wrist in a clean tea towel, telling everyone that everything would be ok. Not that anyone believed her now. Liz put down the phone: ‘Her parents are on their way.’

- 63 -

17 March 2058

At every European poste restante in 2007 someone seemed to come back with a message from my mum. I often wished I’d written to Nat more—letters were never my strong suit. I’m trying, halfway into the next century, but in the first decade of the new millennium the occasional postcard home was the most I could manage. It wasn’t easy being her son, that’s for sure. It isn’t easy being anyone’s, but an only one to a single mum had its particular cons. All my friends were jealous— no curfew, no real rules: she gave me money for cab rides home and never waited up the way other mothers did. Sometimes I’d take advantage. Figuring if she couldn’t work out how to act, why should I. Stealing her pills—convincing myself she wouldn’t notice. Flaunting my flings—telling myself one of us should be getting some. Then feeling bad: I didn’t think she was mad. I’d make up for it by asking about Shakespearean England, pretending I was one of her Arts students hearing tales, for the first time, of that far-off age and place which was about as opposite as you could get to her suburban upbringing. Our inner-Melbourne life. Don’t get me wrong, I was into it too: who wouldn’t want to know about the glyphs Doctor Dee’s ‘friend’ Mister Kelley glimpsed in the crystal? Who could resist the strange symbols the Queen’s own astronomer, Johannes Dee, and his offsider, the outsider Edward Kelley, had transcribed? The great grids of letters they’d concocted struck me as a pre-linguistic crossword: cryptic, yes, but complete. That was the idea, wasn’t it? That those ancient emoticons contained the answers to every question men like them—like me!—might ask. An infinite Word Search, if you only knew what to look for. Oh yes, I could believe in an angelic alphabet: a language of perfect oneness that revealed the wholeness of the universe. Then again, what did I know?

- 64 - Only everything there was to! Growing up with the Renaissance as I had. And my own in-house expert. I was your clichéd neuroatypical word nerd who’d found himself in his mother’s books, finding himself drawn to the teenage-hood of the Western world. Recognising alchemy as no metaphor. The base metal was— had always been—us: our civilisation, and our souls. We were the ones who could be transformed, through testing. I know. I sound like her. That’s what I’d realised that gap year when, on a whim, I followed John Dee, the forefather of contemporary physics and quantum mechanics, onto the continent. Nat, too, would’ve seen evidence everywhere of the Doctor who’d lived in the shadows of the court she taught. Why was I surprised? Like an old flame of Nat’s, Dee had popped up all over the place my first summer abroad: stargazer, navigator, imperialist, spy. Honestly, the man had had a hand in everything! A universal figure, if singularly unremembered. No Brits I met had ever heard of him. Which seemed a fitting finish for the diarist who wrote in code and hid his meaning behind pseudo-mathematical signs, always far more worried about being found out than lost for all time. Dee’s quest might have been for mystic unity, but he’d never been great at sharing his epiphanies—with patrons, peers or common readers. Frankly, I’d had enough of the pair of them. My mother and the long- forgotten scholar I’d been reading about forever: astrologer, mathematician, secret alchemist, Queen’s magician. I’d gone on that trip—bridging the divide between uni and whatever came next—in an effort to escape the past, not delve deeper into it. But then I met Emily, who told me she was going to Trébon to bungee off an old ruin in Southern Bohemia. It would be hyper gothique, she promised. Did she know that one of Dee’s sons had the town’s name hidden in the middle of his? Theodorus Trebonianus Dee was born four hundred years before me, exactly. Did she know that Krakow, where Dee had transcribed the second set of coded texts—those with the all-important English translation—was near enough for an Aussie to think it close? I told myself the trip was because of her, I told Em that too, but I knew then that Nat was with me. I was channelling her—knowing full well that being around an expert in esoteric things was irresistible. The reason I hadn’t written wasn’t

- 65 - because I didn’t want to tell my mother about the clues leading me to Dee, but because I was so sure that she already knew. Nat had done a job on me all right—not that I ever thought she meant to, not that I really think it now. But it’d been like VCE all over again when I moved back for my final swot vac. Four hours for rest, two for food. Her brewing a pot of tea every morning, leaving it on the table so I could tell the time by its temperature. She never told me to get up earlier, just left the cold dark dregs to be read. She never said anything but each act—and my every reaction, I can see now—led me to then. To them: Doctor Johannes Dee and Mister Edward Kelley, once called Talbot, who didn’t appear in history books until he arrived at John Dee’s door. It was enough to make anyone grab the last seat on a cheap Contiki tour, pop a ten-quid E and go along with a girl for the ride. Further on. Further from home. (Though actually, heading east from England meant I was starting to work my way back.) I figured drugs, at least, as well as drink, separated normal-enough me from my neurotic mother. How was I to know running would only speed me to our destiny? First stop Germany: twenty hours to Prague.

- 66 -

1587

- 67 -

Mortlake, 1582.

In the small scrying ball Edward Kelley spies a great glass house, unlike anything he has ever seen. It is early in their endeavours; he is still feeling his way. Sometimes his vision gains clarity as he gazes upon it—as though the crystal is the lens of a great man’s spyglass projecting a vision from far away and Ed, homing in, is polishing the surface with his will. Other times what he sees emerges unbidden from the mist of a dreaming mind. His? Then, if he hones his sight, he starts to lose sense of this self. In that room. With the Doctor, John Dee. Spying, scrying, lying. ‘Pillars of silver frame a black doorway—Bess’s own colours. She is inviting us in,’ he mutters, sensing his master tense at the liberty he takes in so calling their Queen. Some things—most women—were not to be nicknamed by men like him. Light spills from impossibly large windows onto marble polished to a European sheen. From the poured glass, panes held together with lead, Kelley glimpses a garden laid along symmetrical lines. Elsewhere fake panels conceal chimneys and stairs, but the effect of the whole is like light caught. Brightness brought in. Oh, the things he saw! ‘Courtiers pose like chess pieces awaiting an opening move,’ he tries to describe it to Dee, ever at his shoulder. Wanting, both men know, to be the one. Wishing that he, too, could see. But John has not the power: the visions are Ed’s alone. ‘What else?’ ‘Diamonds, gleaming on sloe backgrounds.’ The whole tapestry-hung hall sparkles: gold rings adorn fingers and ears, brooches are tucked into folds of fabric, and everywhere there are pearls—small imperfect spheres, sewn or strung or set.

- 68 - One trick of scrying, he is learning, is that he can chart his progress from above—from outside the crystal—at the same time as he makes his visionary way; so Ed knows that the room he glides through makes up the cross-arm of a giant E. An audience is watching, falcon-eyed, as he makes his way towards a great stone fireplace. The only familiar-fashioned thing among the wondrous expanse of glass and light new oak. The court, he can tell, has been there some time by the smell of the throng: fabric and flesh waft stench and incense. ‘Is she there?’ asks Dee. The scritch of his goose quill splices the silence as he writes, religiously, what Kelley reports. Ed hesitates, how to say what he sees? How to capture the sense of being there? The smell? He wills himself towards the Queen and it is like making his way through water. Easy, and yet hard. He wades towards a murky mirror. ‘Can you,’ Dee asks again, ‘see her?’ ‘I see—’ ‘What?’ Dee is standing so close Ed can almost feel the other man’s heat through the thick worked fabric of his clothes. Or could, if he weren’t so absorbed by this secret pool he is leaning narcissistically over. ‘I … we—’ ‘What, what do you see?’ Catching himself a beat before he falls, Ed curves protectively over the pearlescent sphere, hiding the vision within from the other man’s eyes. ‘Nary divine.’ He hears the sharp intake of breath behind him, but doesn’t share Dee’s fear of heresy, not having his master’s experience of the consequences—Ed has missed his ears far less than John regrets the months he was imprisoned. Kelley is well aware the world thinks they were lopped for forgery, that they were cut for the crime of taking an identity that wasn’t his God- given one. There are worse crimes than claiming an imitation to be the by-your- lady deal, which would be an act of defiance not so dissimilar to what they’ve embarked upon now, he thinks. Ed can hardly tell what really happened. He remembers fingering the side knife he’d lifted from another man’s scabbard, thinking it would do. ‘This will do.’ He doesn’t know whether the creature he attacked was a person—was another person. He only knows that when he woke his poor head was held together by a bandage he would not now be without.

- 69 - ‘Sh-h,’ he says, returning to the scene he’s spying on: the Princess, then. Though, when? ‘Sh-h-he’s … not yet a woman.’ But the cupped world has already begun to cloud over as Ed’s attention has waned: where is the future castle of wood and light? Could it really be their Queen? Was anyone there at all? ‘Her hair is loose and long. Her eyes are—’ Any possible picture is obscured by his own gargantuan face, pocked and waxy as a moon. ‘Closed.’ Ed casts a sly look in the other’s direction: Dee must know that Kelley, the latest in a line of scryers, can only see in the glass what’s in his head to be seen; what’s there to be reflected back. The Doctor is, after all, the pre-eminent scientist of their age. He’d petitioned for a mirror to be propelled into space at a speed exceeding light so people could see events from the distant past, and made his fame at Cambridge fooling audiences into believing that an actor flew on the back of a beetle. He must be wise to the frisson of their new friendship: he, Ed! Here, finally, with the royal astronomer and Queen’s own tutor, who gives classes in navigation to captains of exploration, dreams of a British Armada and new Virginian empire. Who has a bonnie wife, a wealthy-enough life, and seeks keys to open doors best left locked when fellows like Kelley are around. The Doctor taps his teeth with the quill, eyeing Ed steadily. ‘Unbound hair means she’s perfect, as a virgin—eyes shut signify … not blindness, but the importance of listening; our hearing what the spirits have to say.’ Offended, Ed stares back. Starts: ‘She’s—’ not knowing that this time it’s he who bites a breath, as a raw image clarifies, ‘upon a … stone!’ ‘A throne, you say?’ In an instant Dee decides: ‘It is a mystery play, Mister Kelley. We must determine the message.’ The Doctor pulls a sheet of vellum towards him, dipping his nib in an iron inkhorn. ‘An angel on an altar; that’s a sign of some sacrifice.’ He hesitates, looking at his recently arrived guest with something of an academic’s eye; no doubt wondering who’ll be asked to part with what, and hoping lodge and board are the coin with which he’ll pay—they both know by now that the sweetest angel to speak to Kelley is the ten-shilling one. Probably hoping this new enterprise won’t cost him more than what he’s already committed to part with. ‘Ask her to come to us, Kelley; tell her she is welcome in my home.’

- 70 - But his new medium doesn’t hear—Ed’s ears are too full of other sounds: someone is calling his name, as someone has been calling for a while now. The sound crests towards him and pulls away. A tingling travels up his arms, causing his muscles to cramp and contract as though dragged down by a great weight. Ed feels the power of speech retract and flounders, drowning; drawn to a muffled cry that’s snuck through a cosmic crack: ‘Kelly—Kell-eeeeeee—’ Could everything that’s made him him be stripped away? Was he to shed selves as easily as he’d abandoned his old name, as she will be asked to give up her innocence? Or—the moon looms in a cloudless faraway sky—has he never been unique at all: not any individual, let alone Ed? Kelley stares deeper and deeper into the opaque-becoming-clear stone until he tumbles into the will-be Queen—back when she lay waiting on a majestic bed a quart-century before. Small head, red on the pillow-bere, turned towards the door. Gasping, wordless for once, Ed falls onto a miniver-lined coverlet, beneath two ladies-in-waiting who stretch taut a Rennes sheet so the linen slices a body in two: cleaving torso from root. There is a rustle of fabric as petticoats are carefully, as respectfully as can be, pushed up. Past the young Queen’s knees. Until her whole leg length is exposed to the chill of the room. Even the huge fire her maids have built up is not enough to keep the penetrating cold at bay. Ed, become one with an earlier Bess, looks upon the ceiling as though seeing through it to the God-fixed firmament beyond. Sombre-robed men enter the room. Following their mistress’s lead, her maids face fixedly forward as the chosen doctor steps up to the foot of her bed and kneels with reverence. Before he can ask, Bess inches her limbs hip-width apart—parts her legs slingshot-like—to reveal the blazing triangle of tight gold curls. The women stare ahead the doctor looks into the most private part of the realm: between the cloth, betwixt the lips. Vagina Regina. Ed waits, bodiless, until Bess says, ‘Enough!’ Brusquely patting down her rucked-up dress as, obediently, the man steps back—gathering with his colleagues in the corner to confer while their sovereign swings her slim legs over the side of the canopied bed.

- 71 - ‘Well, gentlemen?’ The Princess Elizabeth raises a finely plucked brow as she pulls herself up to her full, not insignificant height and Edward Kelley, with a great effort, rips himself back—forward, to decades hence—into his own fleshly form above the scrying stone. Leaving their Queen daring the parliament of physicians to meet her father’s daughter’s eyes. Kelley mends the rent in time and space. Twisting his face into its usual shape, righting robes—wiping first one hand then the other till palms are once more sweat-free and heart steady. Wondering what he has conveyed. He turns to Dee: ‘Hopefully no one knows we have this—’ he finds the Queen’s words ready on his tongue—had she uttered them already, or would she, soon? ‘unholy window into … souls.’ With exaggerated reverence Ed places the sphere back on its cushion and, making a mock bow, finds his balance: ‘I certainly wouldn’t recommend you speak of this. Or breathe a word of it to Her.’ Ed wags his tongue in the vulgar fashion that he knows the other man finds gross but so neatly conveys his double meaning: he is thinking of both the Doctor’s mistresses—the one his maid, Goodwife Jane; the other his master, their Good Queen Bess.

- 72 -

London, 1583.

Water laps at the wherry’s bows as Edward Kelley crouches, concealed, in the aft- most part of John Dee’s boat. ‘You take your time, my good man,’ Bess’s words come surly with cold— she’s strung as tight as any of her archer’s bows. ‘Accept our humble apologies!’ The hour is early and a mist only just beginning to lift as the smaller vessel ties up alongside. ‘Your Majesty,’ Dee bends so low the smaller boat sways unsteadily. ‘You are the perfect heart of the last Tudor rose—and such a rose, if I may say, Your Highness, so fragrant a flower and perfect a bloom!’ The Queen dips her head fractionally, accepting his flattery as no more than her due. Her beauty may be passing—ageing barely held at bay with masks of egg white and wigs of human hair—but her power lasts. Though not, perhaps, that of the Tudors. Bess lifts her chin, as though she’s heard his thoughts or caught Dee’s gist. Will the dynasty’s hundred-year rule really end with her? And, if so, is the future he’s seen fixed or just how it now stands? Bess smiles tightly under the packed ceruse, clearly knowing better than to ask what she doesn’t want to know. Would that they were all so wise. A whinny, carrying clear across the water, makes it seem an animal is right by the boat, about to gallop out of the gloom. Even a hardened horseman could’ve been forgiven for flinching. Not that Bess does. She, of all people, knows Johannes Dee is more mathematician than magician. Like her father Harry the Great, she knows better than to waste her fear on the unknown. (Ed wonders what her mother might’ve taught her if Anne had lived: he knows a beauty mark came with

- 73 - the pox—their Queen is not as unscarred as they say. He suspects her dreams, too, are full of meaning. Why else would they be meeting?) ‘Tell me, dithering Dee, sage of symbols and scientist of signs—what of this new star Nova that’s made its home in our skies? And—more to the purpose—this comet that’s come after: five years, almost to the day?’ ‘I know only what others know, Your Majesty. The Bohemian astrologer predicts new worlds will follow. The ancient sibyl Tiburtina said a star would rise to enlighten all the world—she foretold the heavenly spheres jostling one against another, fixed stars moving faster than the planets.’ ‘But what does it mean?’ Bess fidgets, setting both boats aquiver. ‘I want answers, not more auguries that lead like ropes of sand or sea slime to the moon! I have little interest in your New World, Dee, and endless talk of ships and travel and the possibilities of perfect exploration—I care for this world. Which includes the comet that’s beset my court with fear and doubt.’ Along with the many omens, likely ill, that Ed knows will follow after. ‘You’ve heard of the earth beneath London quaking—as if England were an animal shrugging her skin?’ Dee nods, enthusiastic: ‘Causing bells to ring out unprovoked—a pealing as for a royal procession!’ He has her full attention. ‘I tell you, my lady, it’s witness not of our imminent destruction but your ultimate elevation.’ Ed imagines the trajectory of a celestial body: an invisible rainbow arching over both their boats. He bets Bess would’ve stared directly at the meteor while her fearful courtiers turned away. ‘Our fulfilment of a destiny far greater than we ever imagined!’ Dee is inspired. ‘I’ve imagined a lot, old man.’ Has she even entertained Dee’s dreams of a united empire: an unconquered virgin land? ‘Some say the comet’s closer than our nearest nightly neighbour—yet others measure it as far, far away.’ Bess’s naturally quick movements, at odds with the stately pace she adopts in public, cause the boats to jostle. ‘We’re lost in a universe infinitely larger than any of us supposed.’ Did Dee mean they were far smaller than they could ever know? The Queen sniffs, no time for popish debates about angels on a bodkin and whether dogs (or

- 74 - doggesses) have souls. She knows where—and what—the centre of her world is. Her. She is not like Ed, doubting everything. ‘What of it, goodly Doctor? What of the flashings of fire I’ve heard were seen over your own house?’ She gestures northwest, towards Dee’s Mortlake estate. ‘Grave signs, Your Majesty: great times. A comet forms in the west over the New World—’ ‘I’ve heard,’ Bess interrupts, ‘that it appeared in the seventh astrological house. That relating to marriage.’ She waits, clearly wondering what to ask of this archimagus—she who’s so adept at getting what she wants from men. But what did she want? And who is this man, Ed wonders; knowing Dee to be no common fortuneteller providing answers at her command, just as she is no village virgin longing only to be lucky in love. True, she’d hired Dee to decide the date of her coronation, rather than arresting him for calculating horoscopes as her weak- minded half-sister had done—but that was back when she was young and Britannia new. What were they to each other now? Or, who could they be? Ed’s mind pulls and grinds. The repeated pulse of the current beneath them no longer soothes. ‘The future, John,’ Bess leans towards Dee, who observes the heavens through an eyeglass and—so she must have heard—in a scrying glass. The whole court knows he dabbles in the dark arts more than her laws allow. The Doctor’s name, after all, comes from the Welsh word for ‘black’. The Queen’s slender shadow slides over the side to lie across the water between them: ‘Tell me about the future.’ She gestures for her men to bring the boats closer yet, and hold them closer still, so she can whisper. They said she must marry; they always said that. They said she might not bear an heir; that, too, has been said before—though age hasn’t always been the reason. Bess shifts with something firmer than resignation and straightens as the early light reveals Kelley skulking in the shadows. Dee, too, turns towards Ed. Reaching for the papers to be passed over. ‘Allow me to submit for your—and Walsingham’s—approval, plans for the calendar reform. ’Tis a work of much significance and divine import. Indeed,’ Dee stumbles in the face of Bess’s obvious lack of interest, ‘an accurate calendar based on astronomical observations and mathematical principles is essential for the

- 75 - consideration of sacred prophesies. Without one ’twould be impossible to know when a millennial event—such as the fiery Trigon’s arrival in our skies—were to occur.’ Bess accepts the parchment without even glancing at the Doctor’s careful calculations, much to his evident distress. John has laboured long to determine where they are in time, and patiently plot forward and back to find out where they’ve come from and where they might end up. As Dee tries to explain how a minute discrepancy was accumulating annually so three days might be lost every three hundred years—as though days were something to roll between the skirting and the wall, slipping down an unseen crack, she cuts him off: ‘And who is our friend?’ Bess nods to Kelley. ‘My right-hand man, Your Majesty. My trained apprentice and most loyal lackey, newly arrived among us. Heralded by the very signs you’ve been observing.’ Dee bows before his one-time pupil, offering more than he’d usually share: ‘It’s he who probes the shew-stone and communes with angels while I sit by and write what they import—through him.’ ‘So,’ says Bess, ‘he’s privy to discussions such as these?’ ‘He can hardly hear, my lady: his ears are lopped. He’s as good with secrets as a priest.’ ‘A priest?’ she repeats. ‘He means as good with secrecy as with sorcery,’ Kelley speaks at last. ‘And as comfortable in the company of Angels as the presence of Princes.’ Ed holds her stare so he wonders if he’s mad, to be so bold. Has he seen her in the magic mirror? Has she seen him? Abruptly the Queen draws the meeting to a close. Kelley drops to one knee—following Dee’s lead, only keeping his lawyer’s cap on his head while the other man’s, doffed, dandles in the water that has collected in the bottom of their boat. ‘Your companion pleases me, old conjurer—and talk of secrets pleases me still more. Bring him to court, Dee, I have need of such men. Perhaps your new world venture is about to begin, dear Doctor. You’d do well to prepare your household—for I scry your future by my side!’

- 76 - The lawyer-forger and philosopher-magician are left to follow after: first to Windsor and then—as the Queen has predicted and will soon instruct—on to the Continent, where she will charge the Doctor to negotiate navigation rights for her Company of Merchant Adventurers to New Lands. It is as good a reason as any, Ed projects.

- 77 -

Strasbourg, 1584.

Ed Kelley and John Dee are alone in their temporary quarters, far from home. Ed considers his Trinity-trained employer, whose house he’d arrived at so soon after Dee’s previous prophet had vanished. Almost as though he’d known there was a post vacant. Almost as though he knew of Dee’s attempts at angelic actions. And maybe he had, having the ways and means he did. Drying himself by a banked-up fire in the study, which he’d gained access to after saying he had a secret to sell the master—having first gained entrance to the kitchens by saying he’d lost his way (both of which were true enough)—Ed didn’t contradict John when the Doctor confessed he thought he’d called his visitor up. Conjured Talbot from the thick charged air that hung about the great house and had pressed in with the stranger when Ed’s hammering had finally opened Mortlake’s doors. Dee’s own wife inviting him in. How good it was to be unknown, Ed thinks: to have left the infamy of a forged identity behind not just a county but now a country ago. How far from home they already are! No tale of Talbot can have made it here. Still Ed’s discontent twists and turns trying to find a target. The Doctor? Who had insisted on carting a great hillock of baggage across the channel, afraid to leave his precious books and priceless instruments behind—as though they meant anything to anyone other than him! Or Her Highness, Bess, who had started them on this journey? What did Ed care whether the Muscovy Company’s charter was reinstated, or their fickle Queen got her northeast passage? (Forgetting, for the moment, that he has been the one edging them on: east, to the utter East!) Ed remembers when Lord Łaski, leader of their current expedition, had made his progress down the Thames to meet them, clearly convinced he was a

- 78 - personage of some estimation. Clearly not needing to spare any expense. Dee had assumed their guest’s invitation to Poland came from the Queen, her betrothed having briefly worn the crown there. He let Łaski tarry long after supper, staying till the summer sun went down. Settling himself in. Slipping between Kelley and Dee, till Ed had flung out of the room in a passion, mounting his mare and riding off: swearing he was leaving. And for good this time. Shouting that he cared not for the Doctor’s stipend, which was a paltry thing! Nor for his own wife, whom he couldn’t abide. Dee was welcome to the money and the women and could seek his own bloody visions henceforth alone. Ed whipped his mount, as if she were not already as scared as though the Devil rode her, and cut her flanks with Łaski’s stolen spurs. When he returned the Doctor was full of a more proper appreciation. Promising all would be well. Welcoming his friend, who stepped softly up the stairs soon after the long midsummer twilight was over, and sat himself down where he was ever wont to sit. After Ed had finished off the wine and the silence between them had been exhausted Kelley relented, saying that if John was so sure, so insistent, so absolutely convinced that they must go, then he, Ed, would find them a boat. And they—all together—would go on this praeposterus adventure. He’d said everything Dee might’ve against their trip, leaving the poor man no option. No, Ed stopped the Doctor with an imperious hand: leave it all to me. We will go despite my better advice. And here they were, well on their way. Far from the men Ed owes and near to those he doesn’t owe yet. Ah, the roving life of risky tricks and fickle sleights of hand. Ed denies his disquiet, the subtle sense that they are being directed by someone, something, other than him. He pays no mind to his superstitious senses. He is ready for this new territory they are already traversing: real re-invention. It is no scam: he can do it, discover the philosopher’s stone that will unravel the very nature of things—make old men young again and precious metal so plentiful children would play at quoits with golden rings. If anyone could, it would be him. If anyone did, it would be Ed. If only they’d leave him alone to sift the red dust and sip the red— ‘Nothing, I tell you, I see nothing!’ Kelley snaps, though the Doctor hasn’t said anything. Closing his eyes in frustration, which only seems to make the

- 79 - swirling colour clearer. After a brief interval and swift sideways glance at Dee he walks over to stare down at the crystal that sits at the centre of their hastily made travelling table. Trying to probe its obscure depths. Trying to look like he is probing what he suspects is simply a small glass ball: unusual, but not unnatural. Possibly mystical, but hardly magical. The benign sphere offers nothing other than a reflection of his own face. Ed leans in closer and closer, until all he can see is his right eye, much larger than life-size. Each orb absorbs the other. ‘It’s no good,’ Ed sniffs, disappointed that this tavern is the best their European patron can afford. ‘No one is coming. I see nothing—nothing!—because there’s nothing to see here, Dee!’ The bottom of Łaski’s purse was surely in sight, which is why they must continue to Prague and make the acquaintance of the Bohemian King—the greatest art patron the world has ever seen! So Walsingham has whispered; as though Kelley needed encouragement to leave an England riddled with his not-always-small acts of artifice. And what Dee and Ed did was artful indeed. ‘Come now, Mister Kelley, come, come. This is no time to give up,’ Dee counsels. ‘The waiting is just another test. We must stand steadfast or all will be for naught. Tomorrow or the next day we’ll succeed.’ ‘You drive me to distraction,’ Ed storms, more than bored. ‘This emptiness is no test but proof there’s nothing there—there’s nothing to see because I. See. Nothing!’ He shakes his head: his anger no act. ‘Haven’t you worked it out yet? How can such a scholar be so simple?’ He rolls his eyes. ‘I am the see-er and an expert con-jurer—I, your so-called friend, make them up!’ He snorts, heart racing with the thrill of self-exposure. Oh yes! Confess! ‘Angels, out of air!’ Enough of this game of blind man’s buff, where each gropes arms outstretched looking for it. He was ready to betray whatever held them together: to sunder one from another. But even as he does it—makes a show of throwing over the table—Kelley loses momentum. Wishing, as the emotional tide subsides, that he were elsewhere. In the tavern’s crowded taproom. Mingling with men and maids who’d see right through his awful act; sense the danger in the Doctor’s daydream, and know Dee instantly for the mark he is—men like Dee were, to such as Kelley, as honey to a

- 80 - bee: the Doctor had had other scryers before him, and Ed is sure there will be others, after. Though none will be to John what Ed is, he would bet. As he would also bet that there is a buxom maid at the bar below who could be beguiled to linger beside a homey brew. There usually is, he still possesses a trick or two. A coin he can seemingly magic out of nowhere. Ed is disgusted at the pair of them, and the spell they’ve already started in the warm close room. Some science! It might as well be henbane, hemlock, mandrake and nightshade—just thinking those words seems to weave them about his head: cool as a compress, firm as a dressing. Binding him. Readying his senses to receive. ‘Now, now, Mister Kelley,’ soothes Dee, stroking his beard as he watches the younger man warily. ‘You shouldn’t entertain such doubts. Of course you’re the one who sees, I know that, we all know that.’ The Doctor stifles a sigh, no doubt as tired of his medium’s moods as Ed himself is. Might great heights not be his destiny after all? Kelley rubs his hands, washing himself of this dumb show. Preparing to go. Already planning on losing his self: not to other worlds but in the simple pleasure of a mug of sweet and heady mead—dew beading on a pewter tankard. He licks winter-cracked lips, tasting honey wine. Or better yet, sweet poppy syrup! He’d take soporific medicine over witching ointment every day. Dee’s interminable abstinence has brought him to this pass. Poor fool John; his scryer is a constant worry to him—like every medium ever known Ed sometimes applies himself and sometimes doesn’t; is often uncomfortably honest, yet frequently a cheat. Oh he is well aware who he is. None wiser. Dee always rallies, no doubt reminding himself that such fickle temperaments are part of the mystic nature, but in his calmer moments Kelley wonders if his mind is truly sound. And in that odd calm moment tries not to hold the fear of being out of it, outside his mind, against his mentor—whom he knows he needs while wishing he didn’t. The two of them are bound like brothers, though Ed can’t see how and doesn’t dare to ask the glass why. He hates the fact even as he exploits it in, lately, less than equal measure: telling gravediggers he’s tried to bribe for a body that his name is Johannes Dee, so any ill will be directed towards the Doctor. They are one, though not the same. Promising royals that he, Edward,

- 81 - is the ultimate alchemist, so all praise can come to him. Not that either the corpse of a dead virgin or praise of a live, royal one has found its way to him yet. But he is a man of ambition. Ed’s roving mind moves on to Dee’s wife, Jane: if he left the loft now he might have time to catch her in the courtyard. Carry something for her. Curry favour. Follow close behind that swinging farthingale—‘twasn’t fair the Doctor got to copulate with a woman not half his age! Ed knew he did, and regularly too: he’s read the other man’s diary. Odd how for all his shameless spying he’s found no reference to the first missus Dee—who died after a brief year of marriage. Was’t a story worth the knowing? You’d think the old miser—as tight with money as he was with words, and food, and time off for hard work (though you had to say he rode himself as hard as his man)—would’ve written something, anything, other than that the Queen had visited that day. John wrote enough about everything else: from his solitary hieroglyph, to his search for a secret path between two places. Scholarly mysteries held little meaning for a convincing fraud such as Ed, a nearly convicted felon. Ed’s face flinches in a lopsided grin at the thought of the signature he’d forged on those promissory notes. It was his to crib: his adopted daughter’s bastard father owed him that much, more. Paying Ed’s gambling debt was the least the cuckquean could do after saddling Kelley with a wife Ed only wanted less the more he knew her. No matter the terms of their original deal. Kelley has no doubt what he is all about: the trick—and quick financial fix—of transmutation. Alchemy, by any name; how poor Ned Talbot could be turned, through testing, into soon not-so-poor Mister Kelley. Albeit saddled with the widow Joanna and her daughter Elizabeth Jane (whom he tutored in Latin, not that he could imagine the future poet, Westonia, she would become). Knuckling his nose Ed moves across the room, mind—mad!—all but made up. ‘Maybe,’ the Doctor’s apology knocks on blocked ears, ‘maybe I have been driving us too hard. Heaven knows I’m sorely overtired myself—four hours for sleep and two for food and rest is, perhaps …’ Dee’s words trail away. His mathematical mind might be returning to their forty-eight Enochian translation tables of over two thousand letters, revelling in the possible permutations and

- 82 - combinations—over a hundred thousand characters! But Kelley has already forgotten the co-ordinates he last conveyed: intent only on ending this interminable session and exiting the closed room. Eager to forgo fasting and, instead, feast. To use his silver tongue to woo some nubile mistress to sit upon his lap. And if she be comely as John’s young wife, well, then he wanted to use it even more intimately. Ed’s smile shows wolfish teeth. Dee didn’t appreciate his good woman enough—Jane was more than just the Queen’s ex-lady-in-waiting! The old scholar in his corner double-crosses lines riddled with secret triangles and strange formulations. Was’t a code? Who cared! When the fustian doddy doesn’t lift his head Ed turns with the quick, light movements of one free to go. Only by chance throwing a last look at the cloudy-becoming-clear sphere. A glance. Oh! For something he sees makes Ed fall towards the table, grabbing the shew-stone in his fist and thrusting it up close to his face. Ye Gods, ho! A prick in the darkness. A hole (a key?) to another time and place. Sensing a scouting eye, staring back at him, Ed’s blood seems to seize. ‘N—? Did you say N—?’ Dee is asking, but Ed’s as gone as he had meant to be. A light. An angel in not-yet-human form: some fair messenger piercing the membrane between unconnected times. Kelley sways unsteadily, caught between one footfall and the next. There is no floor beneath his feet—no roadside hostelry or Europe even. Only a reddish haze. In vain Ed tries to remember his training, to hold on to where he is by focusing on the flickering firelight here and Dee— there!—on his knob-kneed scholar’s stool. But their rote-learnt prayers are lost; the words he’s been taught, gone. He is only what little is left after days of fasting and nights without sleep. He is nothing. But, ‘Kel-ley,’ he thinks he hears, knowing better than to look around. He stumbles to the ground. That’s earth beneath his knees! Presses hands to head as if to block out, or hold in, that disconnected cry: Kel-ly. ‘We know it’s you, coming through.’ Ed peers into the precious crystal. Was it an angel there—as he’d made believe so many times? Or a red-haired devil; gathering in the glass like wine

- 83 - clouding water? The ball calls like a lodestone pulling iron. And who is he to resist? He bows low over: ‘A hole!’ Kelley cries in a breaking voice as time slams to stand still. Is that scratching sound Dee’s quill chasing after Ed’s words? Following where he has little wish to lead? (Both men remember—now the action is embarked upon—that neither wants these visions to come to them through Kelley: Ed would give anything not to bear them; John would do the same to be the one.) ‘Did you doubt, Kelley? Didst demur, and disbelieve?’ The flare, the flame, the not-yet-female flickers between shimmering states as Ed takes himself to task for his most recent—and so regular—blasphemy of disbelief. ‘I don’t know!’ he tries to say, thinking of the infinite relay as strange angels pointed to co-ordinates that he read and the Doctor plotted. He had not the head for it. He has not the heart. ‘Yes!’ he cries. No. ‘What is it, Mister Kelley? Who’s there?’ the Doctor begs: ‘What do you—’ he catches himself, ‘think you see?’ Someone was crying out, but whether it was Ed or a spirit in the glade —‘I don’t know!’—Kelley couldn’t say. Can only see his seraph caught in their crystal like a baby in a belly. Or was she trapped in a watery bubble? Hidden in a gouged- out gourd of wood … ‘Dee—’ he beseeches, unwrapping the tightly wound bandages that he is never without. Peeling away layer after layer of unclean cloth—ignoring the Doctor’s distracted remonstrations—until the holes in his head are weepingly exposed. A foreign wind fingers where Ed’s ears once were. The rustle of an evergreen winter whispers in. That familiar-unfamiliar forest, and smell of mint. ‘Come,’ he cajoles, kneeling before the miniature table—the pivot of their travelling grimoire. Knowing he shouldn’t, that she is God’s messenger and not to be trifled with, but he can’t help himself. (He remembers everything now. He denies nothing, now. He believes. Now.) Come on in. ‘There seems to be,’ he mutters. ‘She seems to see,’ For she did, she seemed to see him. Their look of shocked surprise—across time, across place—the very

- 84 - same. So when they saw it in each other they experienced it again in themselves: an uncanny doubling. Not because he was some spiritual spouse who’d invited her in, but because in their obvious opposition they were the warp and weft of the whole woven world. The two of them dual poles: her sweet new grace, his sour old face. ‘Tell her—’ ‘I know,’ Ed snaps, not happy to be back. If she couldn’t come to him then he would go to her. Wherever. Whenever. For in his thick-skinned hands, before his close-set eyes, he holds the shortest way. So Dee has said and said and said. ‘Become—’ Kelley commands, himself as much as her: ‘one.’ He is trying to remember what he is already forgetting. He is stuck and unstuck, spinning and spun; he is fast … becoming … un— ‘Done!’ Kelley cries, fainting to the floor. Falling hard from a stone eyrie that looms on their horizon—the one thing he’s sure he saw; not that he’ll tell Dee. Ed lets his mind drift. Believing—as anyone would—that what a scryer sees is not necessarily what will be.

s

His mouth open, Ed draws breath before snatching someone’s hand back. An ancient on the cusp of death. Sh-he is … what? He saw … what? There’d been fiery light and fey life but water like curtains, like veils, like skirts, like layers of skin had come between. Vernix and shroud. A fish out of. A duck taking to. In hot, in deep: dead in the—water. He gulps, eyes thirsty but throat about drowned. Senses a coming clarity of moment. Rising up to enter their world again—he almost can’t connect. Then! She was: there. The thoughts that think him calm.

s

‘I can’t,’ Ed whispers from where he lies forgetting on the floor. ‘I can’t see. Her!’ He rubs his face with a hand, mashing the sunken skin beneath his brow with the base of a calloused palm—as though the visions of their virgin, become an ageing

- 85 - crone, came from there. He groans. There is no lid to lower over an inner eye. Kelley claws his way back. Describing the feeling, not of falling, for there’d been no fatal pull of a planet. Nor flying: he’d had no sense of the rush and push of wind. Sailing? He could almost see himself skimming across a glassy surface; skipping over blue- black depths like a thrown stone, tossed aloft by monstrous waves. Driven onwards to an unseen shore. Returning to their rented room, wishing the other man would stop his constant scribble—the firk!—Ed steers their story seaward. Keeping up his rambling as long as Dee records it. Buying himself time to regather himself. ‘A ship.’ Ed’s thoughts pull together: had he leapt from the rigging? Been plucked from the ocean with a hook so he was being dragged up while his clothing, heavy with salt water, pulled him back down? Had he stood drenched on a deck? Shielding his eyes from some sun until they reached the edge of a map and went over, suspended in oblivion before somersaulting into a waterfall of darkness. To land here. Clearly not. But there is something about a ship that sounds right, that seems to fit, that suggests some truth his visions are guiding them towards. ‘A passage!’ Ed imagines an elegant vessel bound for the new world: a spy ship nosing in foreign waters, a warship sent to do the same. His lady, carved upon a prow pointed towards one new continent coming aground upon another—a siren singing sailor-him onto a wide white land. Jane! Ed wills her hard up the stairs; he is done with travel and this whole racket. Tired of lies. He runs a rough hand over his head, groping for a covering cloth. Dee is so absorbed in what Kelley is sure he never saw that he misses the way Ed’s eyes sting when the Doctor’s wife brings in the last piney whiff of the Yule log that’s been burning itself out in the great fireplace below. Along with a quilt, which she lays over their friend on the floor—so much more than a mere house guest now. Travelling together on this journey out and east, which will take them a long way into a dark Bohemian wood. Is she the only one suspecting there is no end to the men’s quest?

- 86 - Leaving, only to return a moment later with fresh bandages, Dee’s pretty Janey avoids Ed’s eye, as well as the stone’s. She feels the fever transfer itself from his hot brow to her cool hand as he offers her a bracelet, coiled in an upturned palm. Not that her husband notices; covering a new page in spurting fits and slipped-up starts. The metal is cold, as though Kelley has brought it back from some nether realm and hasn’t had it secured beneath his robe against just such an opportunity. Jane wonders how that is. They said he could breathe the Devil into you with a kiss.

- 87 -

Prague, 1585.

Here Kelley and Dee are, three years after first meeting, in the home of the Habsburgs and there, there he comes: the Roman Emperor, parting a sea of silken hose and sibilant whispers. Handsome men, flanked by flamboyant boys—human members of the menagerie of exotic animals that wander here—make way for the King of Hungary and Croatia (in his first incarnation, as Rudolph I), and Bohemia (as Rudolph II). Ed is well aware of the myriad titles the Archduke of Austria can claim: that’s why they’ve come so far east to find him. But who knew, when they sought a peer worth courting—one as eager for the shady side cast by its light as for the sun of science itself—that they’d find a paragon after Kelley’s own design? Bright-eyed as a peacock Rudy preens, ready to receive their prostrations. Aflush with the Spanish humours that have his minions scampering towards him and away. Ed would never have recognised royalty in that fat hereditary lip if he’d come upon Rudy in the alchemist’s alley below the castle. Dee has his uses, and knowledge of the peerage is one of them; another is his reputation—which seems only to grow the further from home they go. Is there nothing in which the Doctor has not had a hand? No scientific development, diplomatic intrigue or religious debate he isn’t privy to? Not that it’s vouchsafed them a living! Ed’s own fame is growing: almost as fast as his ambition, which shoots up beanstalk-like. His ego ever a plump and ready seed. The more a man changes— Rudy I to II; Talbot to Kelley—the less he’s really altered. Like Bess: surely she would never marry now. Rudy too had dangled himself as a matrimonial prize, but similarly avoided wedlock—if only Ed had done the same! Then he’d be free to pursue … whatever he liked. Whomsoever he

- 88 - wanted. These rulers knew what to do: flirt and forget. Tease, treatise and leave. Lovers were there for the taking—or to take them, if that was their fancy—though Ed, try as he might (and he has tried!), could never actually see—see—Bess giving it up for her darling Robert Dudley. Too great a gift. Too grave a risk. She who was so fond of likening her body to England itself would know that any man mounting her would be doing the same to the throne. As well as, no doubt, planting his likeness upon it—albeit in some future time, via that most ancient act of common copulation: ‘Biological transmutation.’ Kelley isn’t aware he’s spoken till Dee hisses at him: ‘This obsession with alchemy, Ed! As if it were the answer to everything.’ Ed must stay stumm; better he says naught until they heard an angel speak through him. He slips his left hand into a capacious pocket sewn for the purpose. Searching the stitching for copper crumbs—not that they’re here to conduct the kind of experiment best undertaken in the Prince’s private laboratory; crafty Rudy has no desire to share what he wants the pair of them to do down there. The court hums with an expectant air even as courtiers hush. The uncut gemstones of the naturalia exhibit in Prague castle’s new north wing join the crowd’s collective stare. Rudy’s cabinet of curiosities—an epic theatre of the world, presenting him as ruler of all—is a fitting backdrop to Dee and Kelley’s coming action. Ed is all admiration for what the King has accomplished: collected, catalogued. But even in this wonder-realm of objects (and the occasional fraud, he’s sure), their orb is unique—Kelley had thought he might find its mate here. But no. Beneath the custom-built chests he spies strongboxes. Behind the displays, beyond the open galleries, storehouses. This cabinet is a museum. The castle— with its churches, chapels and palaces—a city. He, legion! He brings his mind back to the present. Ed doesn’t begrudge this request for a public performance; acts like his need an audience. Even if Dee pretends to take offence—such a faker himself, Ed knows falsity when he sees it—the Doctor must know his magnum opus would provide little defence should they be called to court. ’Twere better they avoid a summoning by finding a benefactor who wanted

- 89 - what they could give: a glimpse of the philosopher’s stone. A show! That would also prove how essential Dee and Ed would be in attaining the same. Not that Ed would blame the church for coming after them, if it did. He thought it would. How dare Dee suggest that neither man nor God was at the centre of this universe? The idea of infinitely expanding space kept Ed awake at night—everything endlessly repeating was a Hell he couldn’t bear to think on, but couldn’t stop returning to. Mirrored stars strung across sky after sky after sky. Some nights he has to drink or screw himself to get any rest at all. Some nights, no thanks to Dee, Ed imagines a giant satellite orbiting the earth, relaying images from a world away. And who’s to say it doesn’t? Some mornings he is so drugged he cannot drag himself awake, and stumbles through the day. Best to focus on what everyone was always really after: the richest elixir vitae. The liquid gold that could create life—not to mention secure them the protection that it increasingly looked like Dee and he might need; the Queen being so terribly tight, bent on refilling the royal coffers her father had wantonly plundered, rather than giving any out. Always, he came back to money. Ed rubs together his still-hidden forefinger and thumb as if seeking particles of the powerful powder and not simply avoiding the crystal that fills his secret pouch as completely as an eye sates a socket. Gold: a solid mineral—though how else it might differ from their own precious stone was beyond his layman’s mind. Their whole quest is, after all, about how much things might change and yet remain the same: Dee’s ultimate unit of indivisibility. From what Ed hears Rudy, like Bess, also aspires to a unified empire. With himself, no doubt, as its revered head. Making His Holiness wait no more, Ed lets the slippery sphere slide into his palm. He spins it out of his pocket, whirling it with a bold twirl so the nobility gawp and gasp at the master illusionist. No-one other than the scryer ever seems disappointed by the smallness of the ball. If Ed’s thinking is reductive—if he sees the world in terms of having and having-not, as Dee’s been known to accuse—it’s only because life itself is so easily reduced; particularly when a man doesn’t have two pennies, one to flip and the other to win back what was lost on the next toss! Privileged Dee has no idea: being

- 90 - at odds with Bess is nothing compared to the stony outcome—that Babelic building that towered like a finger crooked in warning—Ed foresees. In the silence Ed readies himself. Concentrating on controlling the crystal, not wanting to get lost in starveling trances that provide arcane answers from which they then have to work back to find the right question. Not that he ever wants that, but especially not here and now, before this crowd. What justice can there be if he’s judged according to work that’s hardly his? More than ever he wants to be in control. Avoiding Rudy’s look—Dee knows not what the King has privately asked of him!—Ed refocuses his talent on directing them all from the winding path that leads to a no-good wood. If their road overflowed with gold there’d be no room for ought else: the fire of desire would diminish. The wide way would narrow before them, and the broad gate straighten. Ed hides his meaning from himself—blaming Rudy’s lust, and not his own: though both herd them where they should not go. He has told the Emperor so. The power of a purse paves many a way. Ed considers the concept of currency the way the Doctor might a potential ingredient—testing its weight, estimating its virtue, trying to determine its hidden properties. It has solidity. It is quantifiable. Hanging tight to that thought, he dares to stare into the heart of the glass, holding a concrete question in the forefront of his mind: How can we make more? Nothing has changed since the Romans, Ed thinks, enjoying the collective intake of air as, leaning forward, he breathes out over the surface of the sphere. Despite what might be said about the new age arriving—everyone waits breathless with him for the mist to clear—history lives on in the signs for pounds, shillings and pence. Libra. Sestertius. Denarius: £. s. d. There is nothing new under the moon. Now is connected through the darkest times in one unending string to an ancient ongoing then. ‘I cannot direct you, Ed,’ Dee whispers, his warm words worming into Ed’s head. ‘I cannot protect you.’ Is his hand raised in an attempt to halt what is coming? A finger, pointing heavenwards, stitching air to earth. Or does the gesture show he has no power to do aught more than record? A finger, upwards, points.

- 91 - ‘You’ll be believed, you know. That’s your fate, I suspect. In the end someone will buy the stories you’ve been so desperate to sell.’ Dee has firsthand experience of how convincing his once-employee can be. Even when he shouldn’t, he can’t help but believe. But never mind destiny! Ed is burning up with what is never said: their one- sided lives. The unfairly allocated wives—his Jane, alone, on a conjugal bed, amoan. Bringing hands together in secret prayer, to silently separate dry lips. Dipping a finger in to open her sweet self. Using the other to rub softly forwards and gently back—first in slowish strokes and then smaller and smaller concentric circles around a swelling kernel. While he watched. When she came, he thought, beyond shame, it would be from within and without, as orgasm always was. That shortcut to enlightenment. Ed watches. Wanting to see in the crystal what he always wants to see. ‘I may be judged, but so will you!’ The words are torn out of him by the power of his own eyeless tower and urgent need to seed. ‘Our sins will be delivered on all our sons!’ Rudy starts back. Ed will remember that, later: how the father in the King heard a dread meaning in Kelley’s words. At the time, though, he barely sees the scene of Rudy’s mad progeny cutting his concubine to pieces and throwing her into a castle pond, too busy noticing anew his suddenly seeming sceptical compatriot. Comparing Dee to the frighted royal Roman, Ed realises, with the certainty that comes when we finally acknowledge what we already know, that his friend is no longer afraid of him—if he ever has been. The Doctor’s eyes shine with an opposite emotion. Is it because he’d begun to believe his scryer when Kelley said he couldn’t see? Or does Dee finally accept that Ed really wearily does? Either way, clearly he too now knows that Ed’s episodes are not the God-given gift they sought. Kelley brings the stone closer, until all he can see is his own curved lip. And presses it to his forehead, till it looks as though he is inside it and the sphere, large as a celestial star, fills the foreign room. ‘I see!’ Ed wills the crowd to lean in. Judging trees crown a secret circle. Come on!

- 92 - ‘I, she!’ he yells. Clenching his jaw against that future where rain is emptying out an ocean of sky. Against the overlaid vision of himself in a death- undefying leap. The thing is—he tries not to think about this too carefully, but he is also trying not to let his thoughts run away—the thing is, if you’re not there when you fall into a fit then you don’t really know how you do it. But he has to. Heaven knows he’s done it often enough. Pretending both to bring it on and hold it at bay. Is it like this? He writhes inelegantly on the floor, dark robes curling and catching as the fabric polishes a pool beneath Rudy’s pointed feet. More like that? ‘Sine me,’ he Latinises the words to give them an otherworldly sparkle— the night sky of his eyelids studded with copperplate instructions to let go and leave be—‘nhil!’ His animal instincts are rearing up, but he grips lips as though he doesn’t want to pass any advice on. And maybe he doesn’t. Through half-moon eyes Ed sees Dee cock his head. Is the old man warning the King away? The patronising prick! Pulling reflectively on a whey-white beard. Ed growls between gritted teeth. He quite likes everyone thinking him mad—he is, after all, aware that they are probably but parts in someone else’s dream. ‘We are but bits.’ His low tone stands his own hairs up. All Ed knows—all Ed has ever known—is that everyone here, now, and those to come, are slaves to a mystery greater than any of them. The only solid thing he is sure of is the steady primal thrust of insistent will. Whether it was his or not is neither here nor there. ‘And when the storm breaks, each man will react according to his nature, and every maid according to hers. The fearful will hide; the strong, fight; the bold stare into the utter eye of the tempest, needing neither courage nor knowledge. All will be the same, though none will remain unchanged.’ He twists and turns. ‘The eighty-seventh year,’ he (who?) speaks the numbers, seeks the numbers, beseeches the numbers: eight and seven. Seven sins, seven wonders, seven days. The most magical prime combined with another—introduced by itself plus one. A tingle spreads up his arm to reeling head, loosening untight tongue. ‘I, I, I,’ Ed mutters, letting go the here and now—the there and then. His where and when. Giving in to the fit that’s building. Why has he ever fought it? Come. In!

- 93 - ‘I, I, I,’ he repeats—seeing with his mind’s eye three stick figures dancing ’cross Dee’s page—as though there was such a singular thing as an I! He is the angelic horde. He, their sole angle. With a clarity he’s sure he will not lose, Ed suddenly sees that though their natures are not fixed, each is more solid than any of them has supposed. More sure. And it is strength they’ll need for the ordeal to come, which will be unlike anything any of them has ever known, or anyone could imagine—certainly not a poor creature such as he. Or Dee. ‘I, I, I.’ Ed spies an unanchored eye. He is at the door and John is the one to let him in; guide him through; welcome him home. He is, after all, isn’t he: she? The one sure point in a spinning world: a fixed and constant, ‘eye.’

s

Some one is watching someone watching. One looking, at one who looks: a perpetual mise en abyme that threatens to pull them all—all!—into the abyss. Until, succumbing to the lure of the stone like a criminal jumping from a keep towards a bottomless pool (a microscopic earth-circle of blue spied from on high), intending to but nevertheless still caught unawares by the sudden thrust of his own plummeting body, Ed leaps. And Nat sees, with her mind’s technically externalised eye, through the castle’s circular window—vast as a globe, a planet, a pool, a pixel. Past winding stairs and bending stars. Before they both drop back to an earth a time away in worlds.

s

Back in England, Bess is waiting with more patience than many would credit. Licking crumbs from the long fingers she’s so proud of, she imagines herself free of the maiden garb she wears more as provocation than protection: part-exposed breasts and undone hair are gauntlets freely flung. She sees herself floating above

- 94 - the atmosphere, facing off her sister moon. No mirror needed magic to show Elizabeth she was still and always would be the fairest Virgin Queen. Bess anticipates her old friend’s return from a sojourn that is not beyond her reach: ’twas not for no reason the gossips said her digits had been stretched by thumbkins! Not that she would’ve let her nursemaids. But her hands were surely born to hold this wholest world. And she to be Emperor: the ginger-haired Faerie Queen of everywhere and any-when. ‘Come back soon, my milk-bearded man,’ she whispers, biting into Dee’s likeness—one of the first-ever figure-shaped sugar cakes, fashioned on her command—so Ed can almost taste it when her royal tongue sticks deliciously to the icing, crisp enough to crack.

s

When Rudolph recommends they take a break Kelley refuses—but wishes they would. This seeing nothing was hard work! But he had a sweat up now and starting again wouldn’t make it any easier. Everyone was willing him to see, to succeed. And hadn’t he scried something? Ed opens wide blind eyes, sensing a forest’s tendrils. He can hear Dee cracking his knuckles, ready for the wordy magic to begin—he hopes the Doctor’s fingers cramp! Language might be the original enchantment but the magician’s portentous spelling seems to mesmerise himself more than anyone else. ‘I see—’ Ed pushes on, pushes through. Pushes. In. ‘The Queen! I spy … her hive.’ Again, Rudy gives a start, so Ed knows he’s on the money. He’s heard the King can sit and stare for hours at all manner of paintings—from powerful romps to erotic rumps. And is in rapture when he finds an image that combines the two. Ed conjures a gallery: a working memory house. Filling it with the pictures of Bess he’s seen, heard of, or read about in Dee’s accumulating books. ‘Her elegant hand rests atop a globe, covering a continent. ‘The same pale palm holds an apple before three muses—withholds an apple—none of whom can compete with E— for beauty.’ Complex ciphers he knows will appeal to a man like Rudy, who nods. Who wouldn’t?

- 95 - ‘Fireships threaten a fleet, driving it onto a rocky coast amid stormy seas.’ So far, such a good carny show. ‘A pelican,’ Ed puzzles: why has he spied the sign of the red stone? ‘Plucks at a milkless breast.’ He pauses, taking care how he describes the next: a scandalous cartoon with riding skirts hitched up to show bare flesh atop a horse’s haunch. Rudy might appreciate the way the artist had worked the royal image but Ed has to watch his own licence—he has no desire to lose his tongue, should Bess ever hear tell. Flitting through the rooms he’s built, like the ghost he may as well be, Ed notices that in Regina’s hand again and again is a book. Was it a symbol of piety? Or a particular text? Certainly the Queen has read Dee’s Hieroglyphica—the two are united in their desire for the return of the one rule. But Ed wonders if it isn’t a clue his inner eye means for him, alluding to another alchemical tract: the bound book he’d found at Northwick Hill—with the help of that madman John, who’d said he’d navigated his way back in time. Perhaps a polyglot here in Prague could translate the incomprehensible textings he’d left into a synthetic recipe of some sort? ‘Ed,’ Dee is murmuring, ‘don’t be convicted by your own success. Engendering faith in others comes at a cost.’ But the advice of the man Ed used to admire is ousted by an iridescent image arising from the embers of his mind: a phoenix—the ultimate immortality. And their favoured sign for the philosopher’s stone. ‘Turning nothing into something, Dee! Death to life; dreams to reality; dross to gold.’ ‘This business with alchemy you obsess over—it’s but the basest transformation of matter.’ ‘Turning everything, Dee, into One Thing. You, of all people.’ Ed sighs, letting his old friend off the hook; he of all people knew what it was to pass on unwanted information. (For someone who could not scry, the Doctor’s was a goodly premonition: Kelley, too, sees a dock, himself set for a defenestration from which there’d be no coming back—a window too high, a fall too far.)

- 96 - Like Dee’s faith in the mystic, which used to light up the room—buoying all the members of their little band along; including both their wives—the crystal was growing dim. Rather than filling the court it seemed to be absorbing the castle. The orb was surely becoming smaller and harder and more finite than it had been at the beginning of their story. As were the two men.

- 97 -

Krakow, 1586.

There are, of course, no stars. Just a blind sky above. No one to see what Dee and Kelley are about: just the sightless dead and them. Another year has passed. Are they any closer? Are the two men, in fact, further apart? Occasionally they glimpse the moon, but it appears watery—unable to penetrate the mid-lying clouds that promise a storm and unremitting rain. Another night and they would’ve found it hard to uncover the body without their feet being sucked into the soil. Another week and the corpse they’re after would’ve begun to meld with its new home so no amount of care could’ve brought it up uninjured. A month more of this rain and the earth will be running from the raised graveyard, exposing more inhabitants, from both inside and outside the consecrated wall. A midden belching bones—of the saved, and of those still steeped in sin. Dee finds the weather fitting. The long flat nebula suggests The Cloud of Unknowing supplication; it may be a sign that they are about to contact a soul One- ed with God. Dee had suspected that the threat of a storm was conjured by Kelley as a way to persuade his master that they couldn’t wait to hire a helper but had to dig themselves. Ed was always forcing Dee’s theory into reality (though for now the scholar’s hands are still clean—he holds the lantern higher, aged arm aching). Dee tries to summon an angel, researching how and where and why. Ed does it. Hating it, resisting it; doing it anyway. Dee considers contacting a departed spirit. He’s read the old books, studied novel methods. Ed says let’s. Do it. Any way. John suspects the other’s hunger is not for knowledge, as he had first thought, but for experience. Experiments. Next Kelley will be at him to hatch an homunculus. Ed wouldn’t baulk at fermenting semen for forty days before adding horseshit to the

- 98 - retort. His lieutenant wouldn’t baulk at much, Dee thinks, imagining a miniature man sloshing knee-deep towards them through this bone-churned gravesite. He shakes his head to clear the image: when one didn’t believe, and one only wanted to, was that enough to bring something indescribable to pass? Sometimes he thought so. Sometimes he hopes not. Here it comes! The first sign of rain interrupts Dee’s reverie: a fat drop tapping the Doctor’s shoulder. But though he looks to the heavens, no more follow; apparently it’s a singular event, just enough to convince him of the coming downpour. So it often was with Ed: predicting something he could not know that then comes true. Promising something not within his power, which came to pass. When he’d first arrived at Mortlake—knocking on Dee’s door in weather as wet and loamy as this, on the kind of night when you might’ve almost expected a mired stranger to rattle the housewife and beg entrance—John had suspected Edward was a spy. And maybe Talbot had been (who is Dee to blame a man for spying?), maybe Kelley is now, but they had had such success—more than the Doctor had dared hope—that they quickly fell into their current close association. Like lovers, Ed once said, finding their lifelong helpmate. So, John has come to see, it always is with Ed: Dee’s doubts will never be disproven, new worries are always arising. Glancing back from the eyeless sky to the ground at his feet, Dee imagines what a full flood might unearth: skeletons entwined to create new creatures— triple-headed, double-legged affairs swimming up from the underworld. Made of a union with neighbours from the next graveside or, even more monstrous, by coupling with ancestors from the plot below. The membrane that encloses our organs, and separates us from the world, having utterly given way. Dee knows of man’s composition—and decomposition—not only from Vesalius’s pioneering work but his own personal dissections. Hands-on direct observation is the only reliable resource. Hitching up the lantern, Dee turns it so the beam shines more brightly between the panes of horn. He’s reminded of the land surveyor he was in a previous life; the wax tablet they now travel with—the elaborately engraved Sigillum Aemeth, surrounded by a ring of Enochian characters—is more than a

- 99 - little like an astrolabe, that elaborate inclinometer used by astronomers, navigators and astrologers. Dee pulls his cloak closer with a free hand: he’s fooling himself. It isn’t only the night that makes their work dark. Invoking angels is one thing, unearthing the dead quite another. His friend might seek divination in entrails and excrement but the Doctor has little appetite for it. ’Twere better Ed persuaded King Rudolph to plant coins that he might dig up later—Dee wouldn’t put it past him. That’d be a more reliable way to grow gold. Even when the spirits come they are never at Ed’s call. They arrive when they want. They say what they will. There are no tame angels, answering only what is asked: everything is passed on in riddles and code. And no one can make any sense of it except Dee, who seeks not alchemy or some saleable elixir but the unifying principle that strings all life together: the smallest indivisible unit of which they are all made. (Quantus, he ponders: how many could they each contain? Quantum: how much might the discovery cost?) John burrows his beard in his civet-cat collar and shuffles his feet in the sludge, hoping it won’t snow. Winter this close to the Baltics is so much harsher than London’s meagre season. He tucks in his chin but still the cold gets in. No matter how rugged up he is the cold finds a crack, a gap, a way. Like doubt, Dee thinks, and disillusion. Like lust, he tries not to think, and base desire. His frozen ears ring as his numb nose runs. Ed, meanwhile, is working up an honest sweat. Dee shivers, exhaling a great gust of air—always breathing out more than he seems to breathe in these days— and wonders whether he still believes or whether it’s just that he can’t afford not to. (What can they afford? Dee wonders, mind pulling against his will towards Ed’s red powder.) Somewhere along the way Dee has become a follower on the mission he used to lead: alchemy has ousted augury. Now it’s his protégée who hobknobs with European royalty, filling capacious pockets with new-shined gold and empty heads with angelic advice. The Doctor’s exhalation freezes before his face and he could swear he hears it fall to his feet; once, no doubt, it would’ve seemed like fairy chimes, now it’s the Devil whispering that some debt is due. Could this whole obscuring fog be made of the town’s sad sighs? He adds another of his own. And

- 100 - its inhabitants doomed to lie here, buried beneath the thick press of each other’s dread despair? Dee hunches into his musky robe feeling like a man from an earlier age. An unenlightened, unEnglish muž from the period that separates the wisdom of the ancients from this new epoch of possibility ruled—mostly, he catches himself: ruled mostly—by empirical observation. He lowers the light, peering into the plot of the newly passed maid they’ve picked, not because he believes the poor lass’s despair—was it really the worst of the seven sins?—excludes her from God’s grace. Though he does think it might make her more susceptible to their summoning. (Who wouldn’t want to set the record straight? Name the father, the other half responsible for the condition she had to bear.) He thinks it took courage and not the Devil to act as she did, knowing she’d be tried posthumously and her family’s goods forfeited to the crown. It’s harsh punishment, but at least these ignorant villagers have buried her here. Better than carrying her corpse to a crossroads and flinging it naked into a pit for the crime of self-murder, as villagers far from the civilising lights of cities still often do. Ed, Dee sees, has cast his tools aside and is using his hands. He soon unearths a phalange. Followed quite quickly by four more and a palm. His and her nails are rimmed with dirt, fingers ringed. The girl’s tallow-white flesh reminds Dee of the effigy of Elizabeth that was dug up—was it seven years ago?—at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, on the other side of the solid brick wall that barricaded the fourth inn of court, housed on Chancery Lane. Home to barristers from the Queen’s own council. Dee’d kept that in mind when he cast his counter-spell to defeat the designs of any evilly disposed person. Or persons. As well as gently suggesting that Bess ease up on the sweetmeats if she would suffer less from the curse of black and aching teeth. But what to do with the doll? How to unmake it in a way that did no harm? He could hardly melt it down! So Dee stowed it safely, and had it to this day. Pray Ed never find it. Never feel those features, rounded as though worn with rubbing. The elemental shape: small red head, widespread legs. (It’d been discovered waist-deep in the earth, soil like an ocean lapping at the loins. Looking for all the

- 101 - world as though it had grown there—a womandrake root. The mud that accentuated every crease only made its form more flesh-like.) Twenty years after the Queen’s accession, when Bishop Jewell had preached against sorcery, not knowing good Bess’s reign would be as different from Bloody Mary’s as men like Dee could hope for, that waxen image of Elizabeth had prompted a spate of persecution on a par with any of her predecessors’. Future folk will look back on this time of burgeoning understanding and see how supposed witches still suffer for common man’s lack of knowledge about medicine and the natural world; even his Jane, who makes cures for most ailments as part of her housekeeping, could be called to account. Dee is doing what he can to dispel ignorance: making mathematics accessible to everyone; inventing navigational aids that will benefit all at sea. Having already corrected the Julian calendar more accurately than any other has yet done, despite his perfect work being turned down by the council of archbishops because it smacked of Popishness. He sucks in a hiss. The girl’s limbs are clear. Gingerly the Doctor helps roll her in the rugs they’ve brought and hoist her onto their handcart. Ed is panting and perspiring but seems not unhappy—more satisfied by this physical labour than he generally is with their study. Struggling with the awkwardness of their task, Dee mildly inquires again why they need the body when the girl can pass on knowledge unavailable to them precisely because she’s no longer limited to the physical plane. Ed snaps that they still are. In strained silence the two men push uphill towards the tomb where the Polish people bury their dead when the ground is too cold to open easily. Dee gets the rushes from the cart, forcing the dried and grease-soaked material into iron clips set high upon the walls before using the flame he’s carefully tended to set the lights ablaze. Kneeling in the centre of the chapel, Ed is drawing a large circle with a muddy middle finger. He goes slowly, shuffling back before the careful line. Licking his dirty tip to produce more mud-ink so he can complete the ring that will protect necromancer and assistant from any ill that might come of provoking the dead. Both men are aware how dangerous their work is—once a soul possesses a medium it can be reluctant to let go. The rituals demand meticulous execution and

- 102 - exact preparations: the choice of a proper place (here); the right time, between the hours of midnight and one in the morning (now); the use of specific incantations and accessories (these). Dee joins Ed inside the circle, where they’ve already laid the girl. ‘Hear that? No—that!’ Dee tilts his head but can only catch the sound of Ed picking at his fingernails. Talons to scratch any enchantress, believing if he draws her blood no seductress can harm him. Perhaps. Dee used not to doubt Ed’s customs or the common superstitions: even the recently knighted Walter Raleigh—Bess’s own ‘water’, who’d sailed a goodly stretch of the same to name Virginia after her— believes in witches. Lately Kelley is bringing out this contrariness in him. They are stepping on each other’s toes: into each other’s shoes. Dee had wanted to commune with the dead (hadn’t he?), so maybe his reluctance is just some new form of that old longing to be the one: He Who Sees. As if in on cue, the storm breaks. A downpouring upon their heads, gushing outside the door so it sounds as though they’re within—not behind—a fall of water. Ed, Dee sees when he turns back, is prostrate by the girl’s side, one arm flung over her as though he’s about to unrobe and expose her. There he goes again, Dee thinks meanly, as winds howl around the building. Preparing to wait with the bodies—one warm, one cold: both empty of their own souls—he crouches down, tucking his gown inside their ring of three, and begins to pray. ‘I am the ghost—I am writer of. All!’ Ed suddenly shouts. Dee searches for something with which to scratch upon the ground, but Ed’s words are gibberish. Here they go, again. Perhaps he has driven Kelley to the brink of insanity with the long sessions he’s been forcing on an almost daily basis. Jane is right: both men are bordering on mad. On closer inspection he can see Ed’s eyes are racing beneath the thin skin of his eyelids. Lashes flutter—an effect Dee has noted before. Is his friend floating back up to the surface or sinking deeper into dreams? This time sketchy Latin is offered, which Dee translates as: ‘Dear to you is your wife, dearer to you is wisdom, dearest to you am I,’ but he is distracted from the message. Looking into his medium’s cat-like slits it has occurred to him that the dead girl might not deserve

- 103 - their sympathy after all: for his friend’s eyes are vacant. Void. And Dee is afraid of what is really here with him. He whispers: ‘Who’s there?’ Wondering at the alto answer, Nat. Hearing: ‘Not.’

s

‘You say you see a child?’ Dee transcribes. Muttering that he supposed they did say Bess could still beget. ‘A son, coming?’ From the grey light Ed can’t work out whether it’s dusk or dawn. In the end it’s the temperature that gives morning away: the chill is abating. It’s a new day, and he is returned from the far reaches of a universe that can yet be held in a conman’s hand. He sighs, drained, as after every episode. Scratching at the parasites his headgear harbours, Ed wonders why his hands are sore—back when he was Talbot he’d cut away calluses to pass for a nobler man, but now it feels like his blisters are back. Rolling onto his right side he tries to rise. Boldly calling on Jane for some wine. Kelley knows his luck won’t last, but while it does he’ll ride it hard. And it appears he has been: his whole body aches. What he wouldn’t give for a drink! His temples are tight as a vice. Looking around the room his vision is momentarily overlaid with some starker structure. Is it a sign they’ll end up imprisoned for probing a world beyond the Queen’s dominion? Ed will swear he sees neither the future nor her past— both of which would see them hanged—but a conjuration of consorts, who could be put to work for Britannia, searching out her New Green Land. Belatedly he remembers that Dee and he have moved on to more persuadable patrons. Ah Rudy, whose love of collecting goes well beyond Art: a monarch who shares many of Kelley’s passions, and has welcomed the pair as devotees of the occult, disciples of science, and a charming new-come couple. But Ed has led them on again, convinced now that it’s at Trébon, where the High Burgrave’s castle had been remodelled to include a cloud-scraping tower, that he and Dee will achieve their first alchemical transmutation. He has a new idea: how to manufacture a red tincture from the particles that a future angel—

- 104 - named for prophetic John—has pointed him towards. Yes, it was in a dream. What of it? While he doesn’t share the Doctor’s magnanimous aims, Kelley too really does seek the root heart of creation and has been working as tirelessly as Dee towards that end. A son, the old man says? Could his visitor from the future be kin, as well as kind? Ed hauls himself upright, despite pains as sharp as when he last rose from the stocks. His hands, he notes, are black as a scholar’s—he who couldn’t craft a line without resharpening his nib. But it’s not ink, Ed realises when he raises a finger to his lips to soothe the raw skin he’s ripped. It’s earth. Maybe his vision of a maid on stone is no message but some memory? It was a business, this being a medium. It was a challenge, to be a blank page awaiting inscription. Fasting. Praying. Depriving all senses of sustenance. Fasting and praying more until his palsy pulsed. Oh Ed, poor fool you! Because he knows he is: a fool, and oh so pathetically poor. He should be out angling for carp in the Treasurer’s vast pond, not fishing for verity in this bare border room. He was being used: him and his red-hot white-hot lust. At the mere thought of it Kelley can feel his desire swell: a potent vein running between him and Dee. A current coursing ’neath their every action. Eventually it was bound to erupt. It’s beyond his control. Dee has taught him that. Ed is not playing; he is being played. He is a puny plaything in God’s good game. Slowly the seer draws his dirty finger from his mouth. By cocke and cross whatever happens next will not be his fault. ‘Do not make of it more than it is, Mister Kelley,’ Dee tries to guide the younger man not to mind, but Ed suspects the other knows little more than Talbot ever did. He minds. Very much. Dee might think a momentous decision lies before them with whatever latest instruction his so far faithful had been passed on, but Ed believes the future is already set and the illusion that they are in any way free to exercise a God-given will is purely that: an illusion. As is the idea that he will not do anything he can to achieve his end—to fix the object of his attention—has not already done it a hundred times, in a thousand dreams and more than one life.

- 105 -

Trébon, 1587.

Pulling his woollen cloth-of-the-realm cap low to keep the light of the long Northern eve out of his eyes, Dee takes a post-supper turn through the winding cobbled ways in the Southern Bohemian city of Trébon. He avoids those who doff their caps; his life is filled with too many people and not enough patronage. He never imagined he’d be reduced to this poverty when he left the Low Countries to lecture in Paris and, at twenty-three, had students crowding at the windows to listen. He was offered the post of King’s Reader in Mathematics at the University there for a stipend of two hundred crowns—and promised ten times that to be adviser and court physician to Ivan the Fearful, Tzar of all the Russias! Who would’ve thought he’d be reduced to penury when he patriotically refused. Dee’s thoughts returned to England, so thither he went. Neither had he thought he’d be the one spending thousands of pounds on hundreds of manuscripts—mathematical, astronomical and alchemical texts he has elaborately annotated and illustrated. No wonder he’s so poor! The thought of his library soothes him. Thinking of the fifty pounds a year he pays Kelley has the opposite effect. Dee winds his way towards the Gothic fortifications. The oddly late sun shimmers on the water of Trébon’s famous fishponds, shivering his vision like ague. Or like an angel appearing? Would these long Polish days never end—eight of the clock and everyone still up! He hadn’t been able to sit at table any longer, he couldn’t bear to rest opposite his closest friend, or be served by either wife; every presence in the house had reminded him of Ed’s latest request. Not Kelley’s, Dee corrects his thoughts; despite the fact that it had come to them through Ed it was

- 106 - an angel’s decree. Dee’s mind keeps circling back. It’s hard not to see this surely impossible-to-act-upon instruction as impure. Following the stony path that weaves through the city’s shadows, the Doctor acknowledges himself unanchored for the first time in a long and not unsurprising life. He might see naught in the glass, but he knows as well as any that he’s set to die as John of all trades; not be remembered as a master of one. No Corpernicus, he. Nor Tycho Brahe neither: alone on his island working on a geocentric system—having proven (Dee had known it!) there is no unchanging celestial realm: planets are not embedded in rotating spheres like jewels set in orbs. But while Brahe was developing instruments to take ever more precise measurements, Dee was out here, walking foreign streets, a caller and conjurer. Companion to what? He knew not who Ed was, but had heard himself called Demonolator Dee. Was he the master, Magus of Mortlake, or an obsessed fool? Would history know which? Witch! Dee steps cautiously over cracks, knowing he is too interested in too many things—the only unifying principle of a lifetime’s work the cardinal rule of magical philosophy: that the world is a lyre, the overall structure determining its harmonies and dissonances, sympathies and antipathies. The infinite variety of marvellous music—including all puzzling perplexities—drawn from its individual strings. Dee hides a rueful smile in his milk-white beard. He’s not a boastful man, but neither does he countenance false modesty. A scientist, geographer, astronomer and—some suspect—secret agent for his Queen, he is interested only, above all, in knowledge. Empirical knowledge; imperial knowledge. Knowledge gleaned by the naked eye. Experiential knowing. Jane will not like it, of that he is sure. She’s disliked Kelley from the start, when he first came to them as Ned Talbot, and none of their visitor’s gifts have ever changed her. What if she has the right of it? Dee’s mind spirals back to that sticking point. It’s true Kelley’s been praying loudly every day, saying he’ll have no more dealing with the scrying glass if such cross-matches are the message he’s asked to pass on, but Dee knows how obsessed his colleague is with the union of

- 107 - the red man of copper and the white woman of mercury. Kelley might be praying daily, but he’s possessed by thoughts of generation. And the link from creation to procreation, getting to begetting, is as neat as any necklace loop. Cross-hatching. The thought of what might come of exchanging Jane with Joanna is beyond him. Yet he does see how it is the literal realisation of everything he’s been preaching—it’d just never occurred to him what his words might, practically, mean. The ultimate union. The one way two men might be conjoined. Dee knows—knows!—singularity is real. Wholeness, no mere speculation. All matter is of a unity: one hidden glyph, one perfect point that needs no path between. And what if Jane did like it? Something in him loosens. Something in her aged husband comes away. Dee might believe—and he does, he does believe!—that Ed sees things he doesn’t, but the Doctor is also confident he has an understanding the other man lacks. What Kelley is proposing may end everything between them. As with alchemy, the separate ingredients won’t be able to be reconstituted after. Kelley is an accidental adventurer, bringing back stories of otherworldly shores he longs to explore. Dee is the mapmaker, working a route from Delphic clues. Neither of them is the virgin vessel that will be loaded up and cast off, both men know. Nor are they the fertile ground where one will put ashore. Dee turns towards home—their temporary home: he’d never planned to stay away so long; it’s three years on—hoping his wife might find a way of accepting what he’s not sure he does yet. For better or worse they embarked upon this journey, and the path that brought them here is the only way out of their current impasse, even if it leads to a dead end rather than the new beginning they’ve come so far for.

When Dee broaches Ed’s proposal, after he joins Jane in their bedchamber for the night, her reaction comes as a surprise. Like Lot’s wife she seems pillared. Dee finds himself—momentarily—relieved. He’s not sure he could’ve persuaded her: he’s not sure he’s convinced himself that it is right for each man to conjugate with the other’s wife. Yet it seems they will do it anyway, so obedient are they. Could it

- 108 - be that inwardly she rages against his decision, but salts her anger down? And if so, is that because she thinks he doesn’t care or because she knows he does? All at once Dee sees the inevitability, realises Jane was there a breath ahead of him: there is no turning back. In the space between shutting the bedroom door and this open—closing—moment, there is suddenly nothing more to say. And if what’s said remains unacted upon, then that would mean it was unholy. (Is that heart burn the stab of imminent or hint of eventual death? Could it be love, breaking open the ribs that hold him together? His Jane!) Dee wishes there were a way to thank her for not asking him to make a case he cannot. Her silence reminds him how blessed he is to have such a capable consort who can run his household competently; an obedient third wife, raising his children wisely. A biddable young copesmate to host his stranger friends. The ancients knew such luck attracted the gods’ attention. Kelley would say the same, as long as it were someone other than himself basking in fortune’s sun. Why, Dee ponders, did Ed find his own wife so unworthy? Many would disagree, but Kelley has confessed he had no natural inclination to marry and only did so because the spirits said to. Dee wonders, unworthily, if rumours of a nobleman paying Ed to stepfather someone else’s bastards could be true. He should not think such things of poor put-upon Joanna! She’s been a good companion to them all. It is Ed’s nature never to value what he has, to strive constantly for what he has not. Or what he has not yet, Kelley would correct—Dee remembers when his colleague interrupted a session to ask an angel if she knew how to make gold. That had brought their evocation to an end! It was soon after that Kelley conveyed a message—relayed in Greek, so he wouldn’t know the warning he passed on—that Talbot was about to leave. Prompting Dee to pay his assistant more. But the price has kept on rising. Dee puts a tentative arm around his wife’s cold shoulders, steering them both towards the bed. They sit upon the edge: side by side. He is here, if she needs him. (And what about him? He thinks fleetingly, who will comfort and console him for the price he’s asked to pay?) She is there, if he wants her. ‘How can he—we—’ Jane murmurs, so low John barely hears. He moves to stroke her hair; studies her profile:

- 109 - ‘To participate in all things, one with another is a … a manifestation of our close community. It’s not—just—about Love,’ Dee struggles. ‘It’s about Law. Obedience and Fidelity.’ An unfortunate choice of words. He welcomes the silence, which shrouds them in a strange peace. Relief expands his breastbone, swelling his chest cavity: she can see there hasn’t really been a choice. Just as she has no free will, neither does he. Which means nothing is Ed’s fault either. Dee drops a hand to Janey’s thigh. ‘I can only see it as a sign we’re ready. That we are—spiritually—prepared for what’s to come.’ And what is that? ‘It’s a way of binding us closer.’ He wonders how Missus Kelley is taking the news. ‘Jane,’ Dee rubs an inky thumb on her lockram smock, not sure she can comprehend but convinced the angels’ latest request means he’s meant to share what he and Ed do with her—just as he’ll share what she and he do with Ed, in turn. ‘This is the culmination of our good work. We are all the same already: there isn’t any difference, not between any of us. Not between any thing, one with another.’ The argument Dee is marshalling is not against his wife but his own doubts; for all his faith and reason he is no more reconciled to this than her. He doesn’t need prescience to know there’ll be no more sweet communion between their three: and what might come of such a union? The straight way is a sure path to one true thing: ‘There’s a magic in our basest union that mimics the most exalted conception—that Singular Moment from whence all matter sprang and that we carry within us still.’ Jane bows her head. ‘To which we all return. In time.’ Perhaps—Dee exhales his effort, pushing away his dismay at the part his wife is asked to play—perhaps Ed has the right of it. Fate is rarely fair; they are lucky to have been chosen. Jane, he reminds himself, has never seen an angel— even though she’s lived the past five years in accordance with their decrees. Sleeping, eating alone while he works night and day. Packing up everything and pilgrimaging along. She’s never even heard, as he has at least, the trumpets and the chimes! He thinks back to the strange knockings in the nights before Kelley’s coming. The angels had always been most eager to communicate.

- 110 - Dee pulls his wife towards him, agreeing to draw up a document that will ensure no one tells of what’s to happen—trust a woman to think of that. He pinches her shoulder, agreeing to let Ed know that Jane will go to his rooms once, and he must never come to her. Kissing his wife’s closed eyes Dee feels a burden lift like life leaving. When the thin smile of moon can no longer be seen against the sky, Dee rises and records the date and time of their latest commixture. He writes that after a night of talking they reached their decision, that they discussed the matter in all details and then made love, referring to himself with the Greek letter delta: D. But omitting that at the very moment of climax he’d felt strangely separate—from her, and from himself. As though his spermatozoa were ejected into the hungry ether. And he and Jane abandoned on the shore like sea-scrubbed shells.

Dee shuffles his stool closer to the small round hole. The keyhole glows with candlelight from the room beyond. Pulses. Throbs. Quietly he scoots his scholar’s stool so close to the whorl he can rest his wizened eye against the knot. Or where the knot was before he prized it out. It’s as though he’s on the inside, peering out from a hidden hollow in a dark wood. He bates his breath, not wanting them to know he’s here. Not wanting them to know he is. Here. Kelley is standing in the middle of the room. He swills wine and flushes it around his mouth as he works his tongue like a tooth rag. Ed may be nervous but Dee’s not sure whether that makes matters better or worse. He didn’t think anything could make him feel worse, but now he’s guessing nothing about this night will make him feel any better. Dee steadies the stool, fixes his eye to the hole, wishing the events he spies might unfold other than how he knows they must. Why punish himself with watching? He wants to bear witness; after all, this is his sacrifice too. He wants to feel every minute of the pain, every sting and dart. To own it, and be part of it. If the angels are watching, he wants them to see him feeling. And if they’re watching he wants to be here with them too. He sucks his teeth briefly in unconscious imitation.

- 111 - Kelley crosses the room, passing close by Dee’s spy-hole. All Dee can see is the bed. Out of his range of sight the door opens and closes. He can’t make out the words, only the low murmur of Ed’s voice, offering refreshment perhaps? She’ll have none. Again, a murmur, and again, a reply he can’t make out. Dee is realising his pain—this torture—might extend beyond the coming act. What do they have to talk of? What have they ever talked about, before? He cannot bear to think of the pair of them after. The present extends into the future. The future expands into a once-perfect past. Some small time passes. Not much, but to the Doctor it’s an age. His back is sore before the couple moves towards the centre of his circle. His back already stiff when she puts down her glass and begins to undress. His wife! To watch what he’s been privy to so many times, yet rarely really seen. To watch the habitual movements he’s so used to not noticing. To watch what another man is more discreetly watching. Dee presses his head against the wall, forcing wide his beady eye. And feels an unsubtle stirring he didn’t expect. He pushes his cheek against the ring of wood and presses his legs together. Jane ignores Kelley’s offer, having had her maid unlace her quilted damask before she came. She gestures that he should look to himself and finishes swiftly, piling high her whalebones with the unbroken ties, and slips quickly into bed. She pulls up the coverlet so not even the embroidered collar of her cambric chemise can be seen. Ed slides in after. John breathes the world in, behind the wall, having just seen the hard evidence of his rival’s affection. His ache ratchets up a notch: this is giving, letting go the very core of base, ignoble self. Dee cannot see his wife’s face, only where the other man’s hand grips the soft flesh of her upper arm. Only where the curve of her throat ends, cropped by the circle that frames his vision. But Dee can hear the other man’s breathing. It seems so close he can hardly believe it is not his. He notes the movement of the bed as it—and they—strain. It all feels so familiar that he wonders, wildly, if he isn’t watching himself. He wonders if it isn’t him, there: hands gripping throat catching breath.

- 112 - He is spinning in a whirr of emotion, spilling into his hose. Swimming in a pool of motion, swooning into his partner, Kelley looks up and catches his master’s eye. Sees the bead of black staring out at him from the other side. His friend. And feels a wave of tenderness, a tide of loss. An ocean impossible to cross. Like a medium given over to a divine possession, Ed separates, and duplicates, so the two men share each other’s desire and despair as it pulses through the air.

It’s strange, thinks Jane, eyes fixed on the black-beamed roof above: it’s strange how alike this room is to the one she shares with her husband on the other side of the stairs. Same size, same shape, though here the window’s on the wrong wall. She turns her head to follow her eyes, and looks towards the bright expanse of sky. She shifts towards the middle of the bed. It’s strange, Jane thinks, to lie naked with a man. To lie, like Eve, under a naked man. No nightgown fabric bunched between—she hadn’t expected that. Their breasts and bellies joined just as much as their private parts. She shifts beneath him, slides her fists beneath her hips. How strange copulation is, she thinks, in the end. How basic and brute and simple. And how similar it seems with, for the first time in her life, another man. It’s strange. And even stranger that at the end of this dark tunnel there might be a baby. That’s the way this works; she knows that even if they don’t. Theodorus Trebonianus Dee. A boy wholly rooted in this world and not the in-between place from which these two quarrelsome men might imagine they’ve conjured him up. That nowhere place that she knows—with a cramp of unwanted intuition as Kelley clambers off—her husband will try to get him to spy on. Strange. But that is the way these stories go: the present giving way to the future. The past, gone.

- 113 -

9 June 2058

I’ll try to explain. I’m writing to you, John, from Nat’s old house, the North Carlton terrace where I grew up. I’m sitting at an old school desk in my mother’s study— your grandmother’s room—tucked under the eaves. It used to be open, airy, now the attic is dark with leaf shadow. There’s an underwater atmosphere. The city’s reforestation law has been effective, with unforeseen consequences: the greening has drastically lowered temperatures. Not even Melbourne’s famous northerly— the hot, dry wind that set off asthma and allergies and a tickling anticipation—can find a way in. The house beats around me, alive: animistic. Its light and warmth modulated to my needs. You must’ve programmed it to respond to my presence, guessing I’d come—unless it thinks she’s back. Now you’re hooking her up to your mainframe, getting ready to upload Nat’s cipher into the cloud; crowning her skull in a cap of cups as she prepares to leave her body. Soon, for good. Her mobile intelligence already loosing itself from moorings I’m not yet ready for her to shed. I need to know where I came from before I can let my mother go. Our selves are entangled—through her, I am one with what came before; through you, my son, I live on. I will Nat back to that night, such a long time ago. It’s three-score years and ten since a trio of girls summoned a spirit and Nat heard Elizabethan Ed—in her mind, at least. And mine. I know myself as the son of that cross-matching, rather than the unacknowledged offspring of a teenage one-night stand. Some ghostly reincarnation. A fantastic projection.

- 114 - I know, it doesn’t make sense; I’m still getting our story straight, even at this late date. Maybe by the time you read this you’ll have more answers than I do now. But I don’t think there is one answer. I was born into a dark wood where the straight way was pretty clearly lost; Nat and I had to carve a new path out. Which we did. Leaving a trail leading back to a midnight pool. I was fertile soil for dream-planted clues; and sowed my own conspiracies, to reap when grown. It was almost as though I were programmed to seek some pre-experienced state where everything was One. Find some fitting philosophy. What do I mean? I was born to join disconnected dots, sketch the trajectory of Dee and Kelley’s brief partnership. Inevitably downplaying the everyday, in-between moments of Nat’s and my time together—the real life that happened while my tale was on the way to somewhere else—focusing instead on my mother’s unique experience, which was, I was sure, what made us both so singular. Missing the point entirely: that we were universal. Family history—all histories, actually—are the stories we choose to tell ourselves, as well as the stories we’re told. One point of view doesn’t cut it; you have to marry other peoples’ perspectives. You have to, too. Along with these letters from me you’ll find your grandmother’s old diary, and my own—speculative—research. I’ve tried projecting myself back to 1587, now I need to propel myself forward. In the words of Doctor Dee, we must bring something to perfection. To some conclusion. I’m not so sure any more that I can lay my Elizabethan obsession at Nat’s door: maybe I was the precocious, home- schooled child who asked ‘What’ and ‘Whether’—drawing us deeper into Kelley’s dark mystery. I feel such an affinity for Dee: who wouldn’t risk everything for life’s elixir vitae? Spoken like the old man I finally am! You’re probably already primed to sympathise with the Doctor’s quest: his ‘almanac’ has been accessible for a century now. But even with these interlinked texts of hers, mine and his, don’t expect to get a complete picture. Life, I’ve learnt, isn’t like that. Ed, after all, left no record—there’s only a second-hand script of what Dee’s right-hand man might’ve said. Long before our story starts, in 1579, John Dee had a dream where the words sine me nihil potestis facere were tattooed on his right arm: without me you can do nothing. (He was standing naked before the hooded gaze of the Queen’s

- 115 - principal secretary and chief spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham—but that’s another story. Or maybe it isn’t, if everything connects.) The thing is, this is all you have: me. My words are the ink connecting you to me, her to there. From my conception, in 1987, to Kelley’s triangulated copulation, in 1587. The thing is, I suppose, how little the world changes even when the way we understand it seems to be reinvented so radically. But I mustn’t get sidetracked trying to insert myself into a fantastic future where all Dee dreamt has come to pass and you can do everything, including delay our Nat’s inevitable death. I want to tell you of your own beginning, John: John Jnr. Little John. So I called you because of something unchildlike I saw in your face when you were hauled forth, howling, into the breathing world. And regarded me like another who’d been here before.

At first I’d thought the keening was my own. Then I thought—and this was worse—that it was her. Oh Em! Mothers ripped apart to birth our giant brains; only now, thanks to modern obstetrics, surviving deliveries such as yours. Emily said afterwards she heard your otherworldly cry before you were born. Said she heard it before they had finished cutting you out. The very thought of that—the serrating that she’d been sure was the surgeon’s knife but found out later was his fingers prizing her uterus apart—making her shake again. Then, when they dragged you from where you were wedged up under her ribs, her whole body was lifted off the table in a tug of war she didn’t want to win. The surgeon climbed onto her chest and knelt like a gothic incubus to pull you up and out and into the light. The room roaring around us. Later, I tried to be glad that she hadn’t seen what I had, but at the time I just wished they hadn’t asked me to come behind the plastic sheet that sliced her, belly from head. What could I do, anyway? It was nothing, that tie which bound you to your mother—but who was I to cut it? Time sped up. Heart rates too. A theatre was opened and they wheeled Em off, leaving me holding: you. The whole world weeping.

- 116 - I don’t know how long I stood there wishing that you would open your eyes and look. See me. But I realised then, with the unforgiving knife of too-late insight, that I had never loved as I’d been loved. Please, son. There we were, here we are, our perfect unit of three. Thanks to that team of doctors who knew what I didn’t: how close birth is to the other side—how fine the membrane that separates those apparently opposing but really mystically connected states. I suppose I rocked you, if you could call it that: I’m surprised you were able to breathe I held on so tight then, swung us so roughly—swaying from side to side on a boat of life; unbalanced. Rougher and longer than I would’ve thought I should. Until your desperate squalling ceased. The animal in both of us finally subsiding: convinced—for the moment—that we were not freefalling limbs flinching into space but gripped by gravity. Safe in our father’s arms.

- 117 -

2087

- 118 -

00:03:00

It’s 2087, the year a digital deviation will be accessed from outside the mainframe. That’s how this story starts; that’s where it really begins—when an icon containing infinite space, maintaining ultimate time, is tapped by a once-was-girl who never knew what possessed her. Not that it was meant for Nat. Her grandson John built the app not to search for his father’s origins but to seek out his namesake Dee’s ideas for a projected- time machine. He planned to work from the Doctor’s notes to program a spacecraft’s code. All he had to do was identify a gravitational anomaly in the four spacetime dimensions, and he thought he could: contradictions were proliferating throughout the universe. Oh, and harness it; which would be trickier. And then, the tricksiest move of all, return! And use Dee’s clues to set a fantastical action— which would, by then, have already transported him—into mechanical motion. He was living at the crest of science and fiction, where mirrors and screens project truths human brains can barely grasp. Inhabiting borderlands where real and virtual converge, angels and flesh merge for the briefest time—the dive-roll of an imploding universe, caught! Contracting. He could hardly be blamed for his father Jo’s conception, or grandmother Nat’s self-deception: even if authoring an anomaly might seem an unsurprising outcome, and potentially predictable, in so far as anything to do with time travel was. Contradictions, after all—doesn’t he know it!—abound. But who was anyone to point a finger at him? (Unless Jo had trialled his son’s skrying app a moon ago, in an alternate universe, and spied this future. Could he have been that tempo- spatially untied agent scouting out mutual histories? The haunting that damn near

- 119 - drove Nat crazy? In which case, well, this John could hardly be blamed for such a world and mind-bending improbability.) He closes his eyes. ‘Clinical death,’ Nat fears she hears, ‘is the cessation of blood circulation and breathing. After three minutes the brain cannot recover.’ But she’s not sure— words are blurred by the breathing machines that whisper her age as they in- and exhale: one one-hundred … one hundred and seventeen. Older than she’d have ever thought possible, if she’d ever thought about it. Older than should be possible, she thinks. A hundred years ago people knew when they were done. Four hundred years before, their lives were often over before their time. Beneath the disinfectant, beneath the perfect, scented flowers, Nat can smell death on her breath. And beneath that, the damp green of a waiting forest. Tendrils toey to tuck her in. Sensing her grandson’s lowering lids, Nat finds herself finally free to leave—and begins to rise above them both. Drawn to the wall of pseudo-windows that shows the city as it once was. Nat remembers when the skirted spire—taller than Doctor Dee’s giant maypole—had shone like that. A latticed lighthouse drawing moths, which in turn lured birds, so lost seagulls were a common sight on the southern night skyline. Circling the gold triangle that’s now towered over by apartment blocks that crowd around. She is floating towards that water which flows to an infinite ocean: dreaming of sailing to Dee’s speculated Terra Australis; of rowing on an old-world river; of swimming through incalculable space. But then, Nat’s passage slows. Suddenly she remembers how very much she once wanted answers. Was this a last time to find them? Soon she might know everything, but be nothing. Three minutes. It takes a housefly’s wings three milliseconds to beat: three hundred, for the human eye to blink. Light travels 300,000 kilometres in a second—she has, Nat thinks, time to go far. A minute: from the Latin, meaning first small part. (So she imagines someone from a long way away saying.) A second: named for the second, smaller part. The Poles had a word for the smallest third—she might be counting on that. Nat puts a cold foot on the floor and slips from the bed, a mere bag of bones. Glides past curtains as though they’re not. Light billows as she wills herself towards the

- 120 - bank of screens that monitor her nearly non-ness, thinking one might be a window that truly opens out. There is still that, isn’t there? Outside? An emerald forest waiting to absorb all: roots thirsty to soak up matter and release bodies, such as hers, back into the atmosphere—effervescent as forest air. When she finds herself before the flat polished mirrorscreens, and it is as if she finds herself, like she’s returning, even as her last minutes tick away—as if she isn’t hastening towards death but has been other for an age and is about to be utterly again. Nat makes herself turn back. She feels so connected to him in that chair—son of her son—that she could almost believe it is her sleeping there, chin neatly tucked into rising-and-falling chest, and John (which, she wonders, of the three Johns she’s known in this lifetime would that be?) out here, launching a final unfinished string of code that will program a satellite of precision-cut crystal with a click. The physicists’ man-made planet—but woman-named, since the word ‘Nova’ has come to John from Good Queen Bess, via Nat (the arch thought of which makes Nat think she still is: thinking! and might live on too, in his thoughts)—is a hecto-ball. A hundred-eyed crystal with which to play ‘I Spy’. What magic science has become! The dying woman taps an icon with her bony finger, aligning herself to a blackhole opening. Rotors move in slow motion as planes align. He couldn’t have done it if he’d tried. Dark obsidian discs turn and cast their brilliant light onto a world that once was. One diametrically opposite in space and time. She sees that, now. If the perfect, polished supra-lenses of the John who’ll see in the twenty- second century had been other-directed, would Nat have ever found another self? Was she elsewhere—every-when!—too? The almost-ghost-woman savours the question. Looking forward—in due course, she has every time and all space at her disposal (via his time machine, or her coming transmutation)—to hearing the Doctor–Philosopher expound on that: were Dee and she opposites, at either ends of an imagined earth, or are they both the same? Nat is all ears. Only hearing now—the first dying minute ending, no heartbeat or pulse of blood distracts. Nat doesn’t know she hasn’t left the bed. That John is picking back

- 121 - up an iPen, the better to transcribe the phrases that fall from her lips as she—like Ed, when he went out of his head and into another’s—fits.

s

I close my eyes; lower my hands to the desk. What desk? This desk. Hard, though not as hard as I can be; old, but not as old as I should feel. A school desk from last century, blonde wood with secret cuts, some coloured in. I remember this. I run my finger along a groove as I push back the wooden chair I’m sitting on and stand, seeing it all afresh: the messy bedroom, the messier bed. Where am I and when is now? (And who am I, again? Still Nat. An earlier version of my own familiar self.) Piles of papers and towers of books crowd around; am I the lonely girl trawling through tomes from the library in her last year of school, or the lecturer in Renaissance studies of a decade later—who’s learnt her subject from the inside out? The room is as untidy as a teenage den but it’s the first house I ever owned: a crumbling North Carlton terrace. I’d thought I was so different then from who I’d been, from who I was going to be. So bloody sure I took a different path out of that wood than the one I’d walked in on. But now I wonder how far you have to walk into a goddamn forest before you’re heading out the other side. Wearier than that me knows, I leave the notebook where it is—open pages weighted with a worn set square—and stumble towards the bed. Falling onto it, I barely feel the body I’m back in connect with the crumpled linen. Barely feeling. I’m done; as if I were one of the Fox sisters who’s been channelling some spirit— who’s been possessed, against her will, and to her infinite surprise, since she knows herself to be an utter fraud. So thinking, I inch out of that world and toe towards the realm of sleep. Twitching as I succumb to the exhaustion of an interstellar traveller. Don’t, don’t, don’t … I whisper, wanting to stay: there’s work to be done! But the sun is so soothing on the back of my neck, the air so soft. I don’t remember flesh feeling like this; I can’t not give in to the tiredness—I have a lifetime to catch up on.

- 122 - Sighing like the old woman I—for a brief relieving moment—am not, caught on the very cusp of slumber, I wonder: if teenage Nat wasn’t lost that long ago May, would I still be found? Did it, the thought drifts up as I slip down, truly happen? What happened anyway, really? Then I was too young to understand and now, quite suddenly it seems, I am beyond old. All I clearly remember is the three of us encircling that rock—that bloody rock! That bloody cold and unrelenting rock: Di on one side and Lizzie, the other. Their arms around each other’s shoulders as my head lolled towards the centre stone. As though the three of us have never unlinked hands and that scene is a stage still set. Or could it be that I was never really part of it at all, but always somehow outside it? Only ever a watcher. Like I was—am!—some spirit, ears straining for the spell that will call me into being. From the watery underworld of sleep ink-stained fingers tweak. I hear someone—who might be me—cry out in a quiet room: ‘Don’t! Come.’ A voice is calling and I am falling towards it, tumbling from the middle of Nat’s life into another past: and from there, through Kelley’s darkening days, towards his traitorous vision of a long-limbed rosy Queen. I knew I should fight it—I’ve come back to face facts—but I also knew that the dying woman I still was, too, wasn’t about to pass up on the chance to relive the release of real sleep. My head is already on my arms, ducking half-forgotten memories, resisting half-remembered fragments. Was that the smell of damp earth? Surely not a sheen of wet rock? My teenage past tries to rear up, to trip me from the reality I’ve crafted so carefully over the in-between baby- and then schoolboy-busy years. It must be 2010, the year Jo took off to Europe—where I’d not yet been. That was when I became lost in dreams of Elizabethan queens. Strange visions of courts and curios; characters I’d met through my research coming to life at night. All because I was alone and my son had asked the most obvious question: Who had his father been? Back in the beginning I’d buried myself in history because of what had happened—turning Ed’s world into my specialty; myself, into an expert—but after Jo left it wasn’t me who sought Bess out but Dee’s world that drew me in. I

- 123 - was caught as an ouroboros: the tail-devouring snake neatly summing up my self- reflexive, seemingly cyclic existence. I recognised the way my mind dragged and snagged: 2010, then. The wheel of life turns again and again. In every beginning, a sign of its end; in every ending the seeds of a new beginning. As an acorn is filled to the brim with not-yet and once-was tree, so I am her and she will, in time, be me. How my heart had started, that year, at the picture Jo sent of bungeeing from the keep of an ancient Bohemian castle. What did he know? Could he possibly be blessed—or cursed—with some direct connection? What if he were to see the seal of God and be able to read its wax inscription? My mind snags. What if, indeed? I was not, and would not be, John Dee! Here I was, then, forty years on; not yet back in 1987. I needed to travel further, but there was no way this body wasn’t giving in to the spell of forgetfulness that unconsciousness offered. Who would’ve thought dying was so exhausting that you’d long for the sleep you’d be deprived of until the utter end? I’d had my fill of thin and unsatisfying naps, drifting across the surface of a pool that promised a deeper and more satisfying immersion. I was staying put. I was sinking down. From outside my old room come the sounds of a new day—the metal-on- metal of early trams rounding an empty corner; the harsh scold of a noisy mynah bird. Further away a mower starts up at the cemetery south of my first grown-up home—but it was impossible to resist: another minute? Another hour? Another lifetime of not being me. Of not being Nat. Of not being.

Then, of being there again: our old Carlton home. When I wake, it’s mid-morning. Late. The blue sky shimmers with sun and the upstairs bedroom is filled with light. It seems less cluttered now, more composed. Still full of the flotsam and jetsam of an odd academic’s life, but the unstable tables of books and leaning stacks of papers look more like they’ve been put there by me and less like they’re what’s holding me here.

- 124 - I roll onto my back and stretch, first one side and then the other. Even the stiffness feels good. Early morning in Melbourne and already it was another sweltering day. Wasn’t this when summers had started coming later, lingering longer—or had they always been like that? I remember how the back of my knees used to stick to the blue vinyl bus seat on the way home from school; the back of my dress was always wet with sweat in those first months of term. And then the contrast when we arrived at Lizzie’s new house and the temperature dropped by noticeable degrees. Walking from the last station to her home on the hill as we left the local shops behind and traipsed single file along the edge of the cool green forest that smelt so wet and enticing, seemed so cool and inviting. Singing some shit song—though the other girls’ voices never carried back and I always wondered if I weren’t really singing it alone: ‘Bess I hear you calling, but I can’t phone home right now …’ Not that I’d been there for much of first term. Abruptly I swing strong legs over the side of the bed and cross the room to hitch up the window, propping it open with an old ruler to let in the northerly that’s been pushing against the glass. This time I would make myself take the advice they’d offered half my life: write it, to right it. Jo deserved that, given everything I could never give him. This way he, here, in 2010, would get the full recorded story—aero and Instagram: words from now, pictures from then. The memories of a quarter of a century after the event combined with skrying-app flashbacks filmed a century hence. This time I’ll believe, at least I’ll try. And I am: trying to control the wilful, wayward mind that seems so much stronger and bolder than anything that could possibly be mine. I direct myself, insofar as I can—from this no-place between being and keying —but I don’t know how to get to that night when those final-year friends crossed some line that I, at least, never really came back from. There are bugs aplenty in the app John’s built; I’m not as in control of this adventure as I ought to be. It was the last month of autumn, I remind myself, when even the most tenacious deciduous leaves were beginning to let go. I meditate on the seasons turning: winter wafting from the wings. Me trying to settle back in after my

- 125 - unexpected stint away: everyone had acted as though I was the same, which had just made me more sure I wasn’t—only Di and Lizzie had looked me in the eye to see if I was still me. Not that any of us knew the answer to that one: maybe I was as much Nat as I had ever been. More, for sure, than I am now. (Or should that be, was then? Travelling through time is confusing my never-that-stable sense of self—am I me-now in 2087 or me-then in 2010? I settle for one continuous but contradictory Nat: this forty-year-old at that desk, trying to remember, with the help of John’s spy device, the night Jo began.) I wonder, closer to that side of the millennial divide, if my once-best friends ever experience something similar: a sense that who they are now is not the real them? That who we really were was who we were then; when we saw ourselves reflected in each other’s shining eyes. Then, we’d thought life was before us. Now, I know it’s all behind me. I sigh before the warm wind the window lets in, hoping I was once part of something grand. Something bigger than the three of us. Running middle-aged fingers through hair that’s thicker than I remember—as though clearing my face will do the same for my mind. This-me might try to accept what I’ve been told to get better for good—that writing is an exercise in exorcism—but other-me suspects that by the time I actually believe that, I’ll already be well. The whole strategy smacks of Liz; like when she’d said we could fly if we only believed. Really, truly believed. And what if she was right? I yank ponytail tight. Was it so long ago that I was that naïve-wise girl? It seems like yesterday that three friends ducked beneath dripping leaves and I fell further and further behind, horrified that what we’d hoped for might actually happen. Clearly, at forty, my thoughts are as mad as when I was sent away. Was it possible that I’d never wanted to be well? Anything and everything was possible, but could I be reverting to some pseudo-psychosis, decades on—do I really think I’m possessed by some future self?!—because I didn’t know who I’d be without it? Time keeps looping back. Time kept trooping on. Returning my attention to the second-hand desk and pinned-open notepad, I rub at the crease that age is cleaving between my brows. No doubt my short-term

- 126 - memory is clouded by sleep, or the lack of it—another stupidly wakeful night. Another morning where I’ve risen more exhausted than when I went to bed. Another night in a long line of nights that ties this new year to that decades-old one. I rub my eyes; I did have a recollection of sitting here scribbling away. Scratch-scratch: a tightly held biro moving, almost automatically, over pages. What had I been doing? My memory is faint as a dream … The dream! I pick up a pen, intent on capturing another night’s fantasy before it fades any further—before I get distracted by the strange mathematical symbols peopling facing pages. (I’ve been trawling the web since Jo left: searching for answers in scientific journals, seeking consolation in arcane contemplations. Home alone for pretty much the first time in my whole life, I’ve been brushing up on space and time to see if I can’t come up with an answer to what actually happened that night. And why.) What about my recent reading into singularity? When matter has infinite density and infinitesimal value? As it did in the Big Bang beginning. I imagine, if only for a second, that I’m caught inside my own spacetime distortion—and have been for the decades since the Dandenong Ranges, when there was one and one and one more girl. Trying to shake the latest snippet of science I’ve seized out of any context— maybe I’m the one free while everyone else is trapped: bound by unstoppable, indisputable, gravitational forces? And which would I rather be: the one caught, or the only one not? I pinch my nose tight enough to imagine the indentation of old- fashioned eyeglasses. If modern astronomy and quantum mechanics offer no explanations … well, evidence of Doctor Dee was all over the esoteric sites my late- night investigations had stumbled across. Maybe he was onto something, after all. A word disappears in a diminishing triangle— ABRACADABRA ABRACADABR ABRACADAB ABRACADA ABRACAD ABRACA ABRAC ABRA

- 127 - ABR AB A —so the spell—‘Create, I say’—can be read from the apex back up the right-hand side. Is finding the ancient Aramaic inscription a happy enough coincidence to be called serendipity or is it another word I’m looking for? I resist a shiver at the sign of the three-cornered polygon. When I stumble upon such geometric shapes, scribbled in the margins of the pages riddled with the dreams I’m trying to decipher, I feel a panic not far off fear. Like a dyslexic faced with unreadable sentences, unspellable words—or your average maths-phobic teenager, dreading some coming exam, I sense a test: impossible, unpassable. Impenetrable. If I died now, and Jo read these words, overlapping as though paper is a luxury, or the writer blind to what’s already been recorded, what would he make of who his mum has been? Surely other mothers don’t do this: wonder if their reflections are centenarian selves trapped in two dimensions? An older iteration, projecting herself back to direct some fantastic action. I flip to a new page, having nearly convinced myself my nighttime world holds the clues Jo’s after, if only I could map them. Or at least points a way, if only I can navigate it. I am not ready to descend into that fecund forest. I dreamt it again last night, I write, fingers waking as they pace out the page—holding this present to ransom so in his future he can mine my past. That dream within a dream within— I wriggle my feet on the bottom rung, lean elbows on knees as I try to seize on specifics that must—surely?—lead somewhere. I tap the pen against my teeth and launch into the ghost writing that might seem like procrastination but isn’t, I am nearly certain now. I can almost believe the night of Jo’s conception is the dream, and this nightly court I’m trying to capture some half- remembered life? I felt The divide between worlds dissolves. All I need do is relax my constant effort to keep the veil down … I let go my desperate hold and waking life gives way to Elizabethan dreams.

- 128 - her ghost breath by my lips. But at the very point where we must’ve merged, the dream dissolved. Only to be bereft all over again. I was alone— Only to be— Or … was I finally and forever never to be alone again? I pinch a breath laced with dread and something more. Letting myself remember: Liz. Eating a frozen Sara Lee cheesecake with one teaspoon: thinking with each icy bite how no boy would ever know her better. Later, shivering under her yellow blanket—my body temperature brought low by pre-binge starving— the taste of fake lemon burnt the back of my throat like bile. Waking on the wet woodland floor, back in that fucking forest. Suddenly I am zooming towards the hungover, coming-down morning! I pull myself up short: as I had—I remember! I was a queen, in a bed, on a stone—last night. It was only after that, once I’d woken again in the woods, that I’d been able to wake myself for real to find it was sheets—not roots and leaves—that my hands were twisting into ropes. But realising I was in my own Carlton home had brought little relief: I’d been gripped with the conviction that I hadn’t escaped. A dreadful feeling that now was still then and time hadn’t moved on one fraction of a second. I—some essential part of me—was there. In a circle, beneath a tree: that teenage threesome was my reality and this forty-something life the crazy made-up dream. I’d tossed and turned through the rest of the night; first stretching my mouth to release the cramp in my jaw that came from grinding my teeth, before forcing my breathing to slow as I reminded myself they were only dreams I was remembering. It was all—only—a dream: if awash with seeming, and alive with meaning. I may have lain awake a while longer, looking at the strangely leaf-shaped shadows on the far wall of my room, but eventually I drifted into a fitful early- morning doze … Sleep, I can only suppose, finally easing my frown and releasing my still-clenched fists. Certainly sealing my eyes as firmly as needle and thread were ever used to blind a bird—so I now wrote, slipping neatly into the words of Kelley’s world. Was this regal dream the same as the one before, and that no doubt to come? Or were the versions of virgins all subtly different? Bess might not be the world’s most famous virgin—she wasn’t even the first Britain made Queen—but there was

- 129 - clearly a connection: she, too, had had to present her sealed state before disbelieving medicos. When I finally submitted to an ultrasound I’d wondered whether it would show my hymen still intact—if they’d been looking for evidence of destruction, rather than confirmation of creation. Was it a doctor’s out-breath I’d felt whisper across my sweat-soaked skin? Or just the warm sigh of a summer night creeping in? In my bed and in the dream I sensed the future could already be read if there was only a seer to see: in the whorls rendered on metre-thick walls; the curls of eucalyptus leaves tapping against a Belgrave bathroom window. If I follow faithfully, I think, these dreams should lead to what I’ve spent the past quarter-century repressing: John’s cross-matching and my Jo’s hatching. If I can document every detail—demented or otherwise, dreamt or remembered—Jo should be able to spy any secrets within the scenes. (He was born a code-breaker: had birthed an expert coder son.) Or so I’d justify it if anyone asked—not that they would; back then they’d always encouraged it. Back when I was so lost I couldn’t see the forest for its multiplying trees. (Doubt fingers in: what if telling him is the worst thing I can do, unintentionally damning Jo too? That Jo was, was so much more important than who his father had been. Or how he’d been conceived.) I pause, pen in air—‘they’ never seemed to suspect that the act (of writing and remembering and dreamy Dee dreaming) might’ve been the ‘in’ the chimera were after. That’s what I’ve been afraid of over the intervening years: what if the search for meaning leads to madness, to more madness? Back, to madness. I will not let myself get lost again—I block out the freakishly familiar voice in my head: I will not lose—not this time, or any other. I will not be. Lost. No one knows better how obsessed I can be with coincidence, how persuaded by coexistence—I’ve been searching forever for signs of synchronicity, even when I wasn’t aware that’s what I was doing. I am so desperate for answers, I’m afraid I might just make them up. The idea of arbitrary accident is anathema to me. Still, any teenager—whether Gen X, Y or Ω—knows that while meaning might seem the opposite of an empty vortex, the quest for the first can lead directly to the last. I must step carefully on this dangerous path. Not let the puzzle drive me insane before any answer has the chance.

- 130 - For now, I reassure myself as the January sun shines down, the exercise is purely purgative: the memories well up; the writing will draw them out. Making sense of it is up to someone else. I do not need to lose myself in dreams. Quite the opposite: I need to wake myself up. I will myself to stop analysing—a habit that’s its own futile search for truth. To stop. I have only to gather my thoughts, garner my past; concentrate on pushing the balled point of this pen along. Regardless of what it all means, this is what I do. Where I have ended up, after all this time: writing, like the good Doctor himself. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s for my son, in the end. Jo has just—again—started me on a journey: this time backwards towards the beginning of us rather than onwards into the healing minutiae of the everyday life that came next. I am ready now, and just waiting for him to come. (There isn’t any chance, is there, that I’m afraid of what I might not find in the stories from English history—or is it only one story?—that I revisit on certain nights, when conditions are right, like stepping onto the stage of another, alternative life? My Elizabethan project couldn’t be more escapist than dangerous, could it? The dreaming is certainly starting to seem more real than my waking Jo- less days. Could the writing act be a way of building up an antipodean life: putting myself at the centre of a mystical world? Just one more example of my messed-up reaction to the emptiness of existence—since Jo’s taken off and I’ve found myself so strangely aimless and unnaturally aged. As left out as I’d always thought I was before he was born. Clearly I’ve been spending too much time alone! Fidgeting in the warming morning, I remind myself how mutable reality— and relationships—can be. What could I possibly write that would free Jo from the weightlessness of not knowing without saddling him with the burden of what I thought I did (didn’t I?)? That wanting—being wanted—isn’t everything. Maybe it wasn’t up to me. Maybe everything had already been passed on. After all, every generation is the culmination of evolution up to the moment of its conception: a newborn’s molecular matter, the product of worlds that’ve formed again and again. Back then, when I was seventeen—and even before that, way back when—my dark yin already contained his perfect seed. All I knew for sure was that once upon a turbulent time three friends swore to love each other forever: it’d seemed so certain they always would that to vow it had seemed silly.

- 131 - And then, one night ... Though in my heart of hearts I suspect events were set in motion long before that tableau in time: the tightly locked triangle where you might think things started. And then. One night. Something, surely, had made Fate’s pendulum slow between one swing and the next. Finally coming to rest over our teenage heads. I let the twenty-first century pen drop; crack knuckles distractedly as I imagine it from a GoogleEarth’s eye perspective. Imagine if that technology could be programmed to show not just the Street View of months before, or satellite perspective of a year past, but decades ago. That ever-present, never-ending night when who I was became who I’d be, who I’ve been ever since. ‘Who I am,’ I whisper, trying to rein my thinking in. The planets, I conclude, however improbably, however implausibly, however not-possibly, may as well have been aligned. Who am I to say otherwise? Certainly I’m no expert on everything that can or can’t have happened, which could or couldn’t ever be; I, of all people, know that. There are truths that are stranger than anything I can imagine: I’ve been privy to things I would never have believed, things I’m not sure I do credit, even now. Things I’m not sure I don’t. Things no one should be asked to—and usually, no one is. Certainly some aspects of it all seem weird and wild, and any explanation is bound to sound outright crazy. The pull of the past proves planetary strong. Can three friends coming together throw moons out of orbit and constellations off their course? The year of the Slippery When Wet Tour, I imagine writing, and can almost see the text appearing, read a date emerging. Is it foresight? Hindsight? Hard- wrought insight? When is now and where am I? 1987 was when our circle was the closest it would ever be to complete. Not that we knew it then. I pick up the pen again, ready for the real work to begin: writing the world to recognise it, in myself. To recognise myself in it. How to convey the absolute high? Life, peaking. Doubt, however temporarily, retreating. Lizzie’s voice rippling, ripping back: We’ll fake it TO WHE-RE?!

s

- 132 -

Ed brings his gaze to the man opposite. No longer interested in the blue earth glimpsed beyond the curved pane of glass. Clouds are clearing; he is on the cusp of understanding something. Might there be no actual line between inside and out? Is the distance between him and Dee not real, when he has spent their whole friendship thinking it is the one true thing? That Dee had this and Ed did not; that Dee was this and Kelley, the other. In that imagined city at the world’s end, as far away as he could see and still—he believed—be on the same small ball, the streets were unnaturally straight and preternaturally clean. People, ears blocked with white buds or otherwise bound, pushed past in waves, transfixed by small screens held in their hands. He peers over shoulders, leaning in, feeling as much a part of them—as much apart from them—as she does. Ed shakes his head, which is, here, hers: there is a buzzing. ‘Bees,’ he whispers, beneath his breath (inside her brain): bzz bzz. It was a positive portent when not much else was. The men were, finally, at an end. Death beckoned. There was no one else he could be, nowhere else he could flee to. The Doctor taps his nose with the quill in a gesture Ed has come to hate. At other times he’s been sure it is a secret sign to an angel in Kelley’s own head: tap— the quill waves wand-like in the non-light—tap. Like a drunkard waking, shaking, Kelley gulps at the cold damp that goes by the name of air and drinks till he is full. He is full to the absolute hilt with the fetid prison. No longer an arrow seeking its destiny, no longer an arc in sight of its mark, his story has nowhere left to go. His sentence stops. Ends with Ed extending his hand into the no-man’s-land between him and his imagined friend, knowing only that he is not and never was alone.

s

My forehead scraping across the desk as I turn my head wakes me up. Again. When? Still then. I come to, to a dark room and the childish feeling of feet kicking free. The bloodless numbness of a hand beneath my cheek—which turns out to be mine.

- 133 - Returned to that time, half my life away, like a stroke victim waking: silent, watchful, needing to relearn the simplest things. A foot kicks against the desk leg in a snatch of unconscious code. Clumsily I push myself up from the chair and away from the table so paper slips to the floor: falling asleep writing again—the never-ending words that bound us all about! Those Ed once spoke, that Dee wrote, and now I too note. Lifting my hair where it’s stuck to my neck, I walk to the window where smoke hangs like a warning. Has it travelled in from the northwest, where the houses give way to sunburnt grass? Or the eastern perimeter, where they’re hemmed in by iridescent trees? Or were, back when we hung out there. Where I’ve come from, when the first century of the new millennium is nearing its end, the green isn’t so neatly contained. Banned burning has given the ancient giants a chance to send their descendants down: inching, one seed at a time, towards Melbourne. Turning the abandoned outer-burbs back into the forest they once were, cracking open rarely used roads, stretching their ancient network of roots, sending off new shoots. I make my way to the bathroom between mine and the other now-empty bedroom. Water to cool my skin and soak my dreams off in. Sleepily I turn my hand under the uncapped tap so diamonds and pearls splash into my palm. A royal ransom? A watery illusion. Elizabethan allusions abound—my mind hoards Kelley’s history the way a crazy person collects what everyone else knows is rubbish, and maybe I do too: stacking it ceiling-high until it crowds me out of my own brain. I try to tell myself I should head into the city and pay a visit to the State Library’s old archive; there’d be a million stories of odd goings-on at the foot of those godforsaken hills, which lure at the end of the Burwood Highway like a gateway to more than the ranges beyond. Though I’d take the EastLink to get there in 2010—not that we ever drove. We rode the Belgrave train, knowing we were getting near Liz’s place when that wet peaty smell filled the carriage, even if we missed the signs for the stops before: Upwey, once called Mast Gully for how ships used its wood, and then the tiny timber town of Tecoma.

- 134 - Stepping out of my crumpled clothes and into the bath, I can’t help but sigh as I lower myself and slowly—slow-ly—lie back in the tub. High temperature dropping and, for the moment, agitation easing. It’d been cold then, the night of the séance. I don’t just remember it, I feel it too; the way the cold crept into my bones until I’d thought I was made of stone. Until I was sure I’d never be warm again. And maybe I haven’t. Is that why I’ve loved the summers getting hotter and hotter: the now-normal days of blistering temperatures topping forty degrees? Because my blood turned sluggish that night. Because my limbs never entirely warmed again. Looking down at my body in the bath—laid out like a corpse, or a maiden on her marriage bed—I’m sure I can still feel that end-of-autumn chill. (I am at risk of forgetting that a darker, colder ocean is by the minute bearing elder-me away. I have almost forgotten that oldest me, who is by the minute becoming more spirit than flesh; as I channel myself back and back and back.) I close my eyes and lower my head into the water until only my face remains in the room. By May, winter had already come to the woods east of Melbourne: branches bowed before the coming cold. The forest floor was so soft it retreated beneath our feet. Decades later and suburbs away I can still smell the moss-moist earth. And, as though drifting above, see three friends making their cautious way down the overgrown path that led from the remote house into the forest proper: One, two, three girls leave the dark garden and vanish into the overhanging gloom. I exhale deeply, breathing everything out. Inhale exaggeratedly. Pinch my nose closed and sink beneath the surface, not wanting to get distracted from what had or hadn’t happened once upon a teenage time. Below, all is quiet. The only sound the steady thrum, thrum of my heartbeat. That’s what it is, isn’t it? Not a baroque drum. Not a heel strumming an invitation to a prancing dance. I let a minuscule breath seep out. Tiny bubbles escape parted lips to rest on my skin like miniature worlds. The white bathroom on the other side of the watery divide is very far away. The tiled walls are vague, receding into lightness like an over-bright overcast day. I hold out until I think I might burst, the water absorbing any tears the way it did another night. A night I’m not about to revisit. Am—

- 135 - NOT. Furiously scratching fingers through hair until my scalp sings, I rush my remembering further back instead: an earlier instance of night-swimming, when I’d dreamed of drowning—or my friends had thought I had—in a backyard pool. Staring up at a distant sky, it was true I’d wondered whether I’d even wanted to make my way back. Year twelve loomed and though I hated school I didn’t know what else to do. Didn’t want to go; didn’t know how to get out of it. There were my bathers—abandoned on the concrete next to a heap of other clothes: someone had said only skinny-dippers were allowed. At first I’d thrilled at the new sensation—water everywhere—feeling so almost thin, so unusually light. No Speedos or T-shirt. My puppy fat no longer weighed me down: if anything, it was buoying me up. But then I’d felt beyond free. Bodiless. The only girl knickerless, I’d realised as I swam mermaidly between scissoring legs. Ashamed to emerge. Unable to find a corner to cling to, paddling this way and then that as fear rose with my frantic hands. Finally I’d floated, gasping, towards the deep end, out of my depth. Breath in my ears louder than the pumping music. A small girl lost beneath cold old stars. The water had been not malevolent exactly, just—I thought—uncaring. Slapping me casually in the face as it’d moved me—incidentally, but relentlessly— towards the darkest pocket of the overcrowded pool. It was only when I’d stopped scrabbling for the other side and let myself lie back, tucking chin towards chest and flexing feet so toes tipped up, that my panic had subsided. Naked beneath the outside lights I closed my eyes so I couldn’t see anyone else’s. The water in my ears blocking out screams of laughter as I floated in my own limbo. Would I never reach the distant tiles? It only really registered that I was eyeing not the sky but the pimpled bottom of a packed pool when my shoulder was grabbed by some longhaired stoner. Who hauled me out, dragging me to an edge and draping me over it as though I might retch up water. As though I could be in some kind of danger. He breathed smoke into my face in a friendly enough fashion as I lay beached on the concrete. Wet feet slapping into the distance when he went off to find my friends.

- 136 - ‘You fool,’ Di said fondly, roughing me with a towel while Lizzie rattled on about how you didn’t do it like that. What was it that she thought I hadn’t I done, I wondered as she wrapped her arms around me, neat scars reminding me that I was with them and had no reason to be sad—my life wasn’t that bad. I struggled back into my clothes. Not ashamed: drained. Only now, rearing out of the bath, did I remember the pinpricks of light I was sure I’d seen shining through from another world. I had never been suicidal, whatever they said: just so self-conscious, or unconscious—so something, that growing up nearly did me in. No matter how much we changed over the years—how much weight I lost once I started worrying about other things, like looking after little him—the way I thought of myself back then had stuck: the chubby one. The shyest of our three. Who then had the others been? Typecast by our classmates, we’d revelled in calling ourselves freaks. Stepping out of the bath before the water gurgles away, I reach for a towel I don’t need in the heat—wrapping it around the angles age will further reveal— forgetting for a moment that the house is empty. What was it about normalcy that we’d so despised? Now it seems some kind of weird wishful thinking. Like the last night of all our old lives—or was it just mine?—which was, after all, only an answer to that eternal teenage craving for the party to end all parties. The rapture, the rupture: whatever. Bring it on, we’d cried, calling all angels, never thinking of what we might lose. Or what we could gain. I rub my skin roughly, telling myself that maybe a certain oddness was all we’d had in common in the end. An awkward edge, if we’d even had that. It was so damn easy to doubt everything. I hang the towel distractedly on the rack before padding back to my room. Which has that golden glow that means it’s going to be a scorcher. Not smoke then, but a heat haze that hadn’t yet burnt off. I pull on underwear, loose linen pants and a lightweight cotton top, hoping distraction, and perhaps direction, can come from the library where I’ve always felt at home. It would do me good to step into that cone of calm. It always did. Every time I ever arrived the silence of the State Library came as a physical surprise, the famous dome seeming to absorb the words whispered within. Sure, there’d be the background murmur of muted voices, but the bluestone blocked out the sounds of

- 137 - the modern city. Inside, it could be 1887. I picture the reading room rising above Melbourne at the turn of last century, proud to think it was one of the world’s first free libraries—where rich and poor alike could learn, through other people’s words, of the wondrous wider world. Every book, every magazine, every pamphlet ever published in Victoria was housed there. Every map! Where to start? Such a wealth of knowledge reminds me of the largest library ever amassed in England, by Dee: 1587—though by then his books would’ve already been recirculating. And the smell! Just the thought of the cool atrium is enough to transport me back to year twelve. Catching the train in from the suburbs to study, it stopped at Flinders Street on weekends so I had to get out and walk up to what had been Museum Station. Not that I remembered getting that much done, but the voice in my head that was running me ragged had seemed to calm. As though the building offered some protection; though whether it was sanctuary for him or me I couldn’t have said. Stonehenge—I’m not sure how I know or if I’m right—was once called bluestone too, though those dolerites weren’t local but transported by an ancient glacier or prehistoric hands. Inside, the temperature drops. Fine hairs rise on bare arms. The automatic doors open and close as visitors file past, making their purposeful ways while I lose myself in the vaulted ceiling above. That’s the plan, anyway. (Now it occurs to me what a great place the library would’ve been to hide out in when the bushfires burnt up the horizon. There it would’ve been still, and quiet, even when outside the end of days raged.) Tidying the notes strewn over every surface, I hurry up. I don’t want to get distracted—again. The answers I’m after lie in the act of writing, not reading, of that I’m sure: these notes are meant for Jo. But still, I stop, disturbed to see how my handwriting alternates between two distinct styles: in some places letters have been pressed into the paper so hard they’ve broken through the page. In others large loops slide right off the lines. It’s almost as though two people have had hold of the pen. Like that crazy duet that once jousted in my head: youth and age this time, rather than male and female. I bundle up the books, slipping stray pieces of paper between random pages, not wanting to feel too keenly the low point of that winter

- 138 - when I’d roamed the school alone, pulling down the sleeves of my jumper so I could poke thumbs through the cuffs to make holes. Shrugging my shoulders in their getting-bigger blazer. I’d tried to hide inside my uniform—from everyone, Di and Lizzie too, having finally accepted that those BFFs were just like all the rest. Refusing to feel any sorrier for my then-self than I already did, I toss my head, keys into bag, and head out the door. I will not let this morning get away. The past mustn’t be allowed to hijack what looks like becoming a brilliant day—I feel anticipation in the air! It seems an age since I’ve felt anything at all. Hanging on to the here and now by a taut spun thread I tuck the last loose sheet into my pocket, but not before three letters leap off the page. One syllable. Forcing me, for the first time in a long time, to directly address the presence that I’d once been so convinced possessed me. Ned. Ed. Kelley, a name I recognise almost as well as I do my own. Kell— ringing out from the stone, seeping up from the ground —ey. Keying me towards the fraught months that followed our autumn adventure: this time-trip is a wormhole I can’t control! John’s shortest-cut hasn’t connected me to the spacetime co-ordinates I’ve journeyed so far for. I want the perfect vanishing point, not the empty term before, or dark time that came after when I nearly lost everything I was and wasn’t yet. I’d passed the rest of that year like a shadow aping movements made by someone offstage. Now jerky, now smooth. In the end I left my English exam before time was up because I’d suddenly thought of some mathematical equation I was sure I should be studying. Though maths had been that morning, I’d realised after I left the hall. Not that anyone seemed to think it was weird when I ducked out the door. I did, by then, always need to wee. Honestly, it was a fucking wonder I passed year twelve at all. Purely on the back of the hard work I’d put in the previous year, when I lost the plot swotting like the nerd I wouldn’t be for much longer. It was as though I saw the next year coming and the months of studying before weren’t what pushed me over but, when I was falling, what pulled me through.

- 139 - At first I’d tried to use food to smother my manic thoughts, pushing down the tricky teasing, filling the anxious vortex with other feelings—of fullness and fat. But the more I ate the hungrier I seemed to get. And then I got this idea that there was a cold cruel elf nestled evilly at my core. So I decided to starve him out instead. I would diet, so he could die. I layered up, to hide my fat dropping away. And took the fact that my period stopped as a sign I was on my anorexic way, accepting without question when my vomiting escalated until I had to detour via bins between classes. The sudden purges left me briefly elated: shaking, but hyper-alive. Believing I was doing it to him. Not he to me. No idea that there might be another, more natural explanation. I took to missing the bus and staying late at school so I could head home later, avoiding the others girls. I liked the quiet that swelled to fill the locker room as their footsteps faded. I purged the little that was left into the long metal trough as I tried not to lose what remained of my mind, wondering if cutting my skin might make corruption seep out with my blood. Cupping—the word arises, uninvited. I fidget as I wait for the tram, remembering how Lizzie’s splinter-thin cuts had looked more like slices to let salt into meat than an outlet via which something festering might drain away. Bloodletting to balance a black humour? Am I remembering or pre-empting a bub thumb on shiny pages, slipping? A thin paper nick. I’d looked older as soon as the weight came off, almost androgynous, except for the taut skin around belly and breasts. I pulled up scrunched socks over shins sharp enough to cut the wind. Closed my blazer till lapels overlapped. Who knew where I might’ve been by year end except that by then I was under another spell and the rapid weight loss had stopped. We were stabilising. How much had the others known? I’d been different ever since I’d come back—grades had never mattered much again—but at first, at the start of that year, I’d wanted to fit in. And I had, for a bit. Or I’d thought I had. Or I’d been sure I would, soon. But then, after that May night nothing was the same again: the previous paranoia took on a whole new aspect. I became convinced I hadn’t been initiated into a peer-perfect clique but sacrificed as some kind of sick joke. Honestly, I hadn’t known who to blame—Lizzie, myself or another force entirely.

- 140 - It wasn’t about being one of three any more; that moment had passed so fast it was as though it’d never been. I was just trying to stay whole, as one. I scuttled between classes, clenched fists by my side, almost falling on the bricks as I tried to cross the quadrangle with rigid hands and torso tight as if it were laced. Braced. Bending so as not to be broken—the stoop of a primal thing, scooting beneath a cloud of wings. Having to remind myself how the left–right rhythm went, which arm swung forward with which striding foot, all the while hunched over to protect myself from my own buzzing imagination. Oh we’d’ve been relieved if we could’ve believed we were making it up! My forty-something brain sticks on thoughts of then, without the distance the future usually feels for the past: how had I ever made it back in one piece? I remember all too well how my head had hummed with Ed’s confessions. He swore we could call up flying fiends, summon storms—or so he’d have had me believe. Making me glance askance at other girls—judging, questioning, critiquing: them and me—until I lost the ability to do even the simplest thing: Like look someone in the eye. Or avoid doing that. Were you supposed to look directly at them coming towards you? Then when did you look away? Was I—suddenly, or had I always been—making eye contact too early? Had I ever known, instinctively, the answers to such questions? What if they were mad? Look? Look away! I couldn’t bear to think my churned-up thoughts, even to myself … which only went to show how bad at simply being I must’ve always been. The more I thought about it, the more apparent it became how mad I obviously already was. He wasn’t to blame; he was just the latest form of my mania. But also: my new friend. He was the only one who understood; the only soul as out of time as me—unless he was worse and making me more like him with his picking and poking. I sigh, a finite breath expelled. I have to get out of here. I see my ride approaching with relief. Or maybe everyone else wondered the same, and it was actually a sign of how normal I was that I was perplexed. I lost myself in clichéd teen angst—until an arm threw my almost-natural rhythm and I had to pull the pace back, skirting cracks. God, if only Di had been there to take my mind off things! Lizzie would’ve known how to catch me from those sickening sinking spins. But. They were not.

- 141 - I sigh again, expelling an infinite breath. Things had begun to change—thank God—when I’d realised that there would be, and already was, you. Jo. Which was well before we were actually two. It was when I’d become so desperate that I’d finally risked drawing attention to my state. Raising my hand in class to ask if I could, please, see the nurse. On my way to sickbay I’d become confused, circling the grass we weren’t allowed to walk on as my breath grew short. Behind me, in high-up redbrick rooms, I’d sensed the others still studying as I floundered among waist-high agapanthus that waved lopped heads on wooden spikes, only to find the door locked when I arrived and knocked. By the time I’d made it back I had to lie down with knees bent and feet up on a chair. Tears polishing the sides of my face as the small of my back ached under your weight. I will never forget the smell of that schoolroom carpet as I hyperventilated as quietly as I could, waiting for the chaos to clarify, the morning sickness to subside. Eventually accepting that—by whatever circuitous route and imperfect art—I was pregnant. With child. Knocked up. Done.

s

I look around the empty changeroom, wondering what time, what place it is. Have I finally travelled further back, or am I still on some city tram; before a flat black screen; lost in a last-ditch dream? I shuffle my feet in their scuffed T-bars, registering my shape beneath late- 80s-large clothes. I feel neither normal nor particularly not. Was I different just because I (now, knew, I) was up the duff? I shrug, almost feeling the ‘whatever’ I’d been pretending, and—dig this, Jo!—discarded the latest mix tape Liz had wedged into my bag. No longer interested in her over-the-top odes—locked down, a slave to his story. Once upon a rhyme I’d have given anything for her to woo me, now I could’ve snorted at our old game: twisting cock-rock quotes into selfie-conscious codes. Then: the pounding in my brain, the gasping of my heart and sickly sweet taste in my cheeks. I race across the room to just make the toilet in time, wiping

- 142 - tears from my eyes with coarse squares of paper. I shut the lid and sit down to think. A minute later I’m up again, but there’s nothing left. When I’ve stopped dry- retching I leave the stall and scrub and scrub and scrub my hands. Who’d have thought that would be it? The moment when I free myself from a past that never was. Commit myself to a future that’s already happened. At first, like any ascetic, Ed had thrived on my famished high. But as I held out, held more tightly on, my confidence had grown. I would turn his table, make him my conjuration. I almost felt sorry for him: I’d always been a stubborn thing, the slyest of our three. Even when I went to bed fully clothed, wrapped in rope with a pocket of chocolate and torch tight in my hand, it hadn’t been because I’d really thought we were going to another world like the Ouija board had said, but because I would not be caught out as the ring-in I was. I lock the thought away: a secret pearl made from the grit of his rub. A tiny hardness I will always harbour within. I know—insofar as there is any ‘I’ to know any thing—that I am both before and after him. Having always been, I am in all likelihood the one possessing Ed. Whether he would or no. And he was, I realise—straightening infinitesimally then, I think; on my bed four-score years hence where I will never straighten again—already gone .

- 143 -

00:02:00

The book of Nat’s life flutters its pages before her dying eyes—from the future– present 2087 end-date to her unplanned pregnancy, via chapters crafted around an obsession with Elizabethan England that nearly undid her in 2010. But she has to travel further to find a more malleable Nat. She needs to come upon lost best friends at that time when the straight path through a strange wood first diverged, if she wants to change the way everything after went: alter the past, her then- future, to make their present. Two minutes. She is running out of time to GoogleMaps back to where three girls thought nothing would ever come between them—and on to four hundred years before, when two men prayed the same.

s

Tendrils snake towards an underwater light, I flinch the thought away. Bees buzz. I physically flick: it’s time for wine. A white so cold I can barely taste it—I am not as grown-up as I seem. I will fill my glass unfashionably to the brim. Make a TV dinner, since Jo isn’t here. Where is he, then? Too young yet to be off by himself. This must be when he went on his first-ever camp. I move to the head of the stairs, wondering what nine-year-old boys play at when they’re away. Jo’s world is so much a part of mine I can’t imagine him out of it. He seems a normal enough kid, despite having me for a mother. And no father. Which is not to say I can’t see the fantasies that consume him: building palaces around the room, books for bricks and a chessboard for the tiled court. My china figurine for Queen. Isn’t that a sign of how well I’ve done; how far we’ve come?

- 144 - That he acts it all out rather than keeping it in? I never expected to have a kid who’d play kick-to-kick with other boys’ dads, but I also never thought he’d hold on quite so tight. Then again, I’m hardly letting him go. Halfway down the stairs a square of white on the doormat catches my eye. From where I stand—if I dip my head and squint to see—it actually looks more like an equal-sided quadrilateral than a right-angled rhombus. So someone into such things might think; I screw my eyes so the paper kite dances in the evening light. The diamond seems to spin in homage to the Greek word it’s coined from. I press my palm against head, errant facts I never knew are bouncing round my brain: the area of a rhombus is fucking K! The winged letter practically causes pain. K__. In the dim downstairs the envelope shines. The mail slit above it is shut, but framed by the extended daylight-savings dusk. Next month is the last of the Julian calendar and the first of the Gregorian, of a sudden I remember: Thursday 4 October 1582 was followed by Friday 15. Though not in England, despite Dee’s best efforts; but on the Continent as night followed day nearly a dozen dates went astray. That was the year Doctor Johannes Dee met and took in his helpmate Mister Edward Kelley. I hesitate, my hand on the banister: who took in whom? I have a sudden image of Kelley stowing those stray hours in a dirty sack. Hiding them in the hold of some dodgy boat, skulking across the channel with a secret stash of European time, squirrelled against the day. As quickly as the picture surfaces it sinks away. Unwincing—where is that wine?! I give myself a shake. Turning on lights and Triple J so the stop–start of Nirvana chases ghosts away. Could grunge be any less like the music we’d been into? From teased to greasy hair, the gender-bending metal we’d loved so much, which had triggered such satanic panic, merging with punk to make the underground sound that’s morphed into this chart-topping heart-stopping pound: Come, AS you are, AS you were … When I turn back, there the card still is. Of course I recognise the crest. I suppose the university has passed on my address—it’s hardly surprising someone in admin acquiesced to a request. It couldn’t have been Jo? I know he’d want me

- 145 - to go; I guess it’s a reunion for the class of ’87 before I’ve even opened the envelope. It seems inevitable. I tell myself it’s not that odd: that ten years is something for everyone to celebrate—it’s harder to believe it hasn’t been hundreds more—but the sense of déjà vu is so strong it’s like I’ve been here before. I haven’t, have I? Received a loaded invitation after an extended time away. Had I dreamt I was Dee, preparing his return to court, wondering whether Bess had aged more or less than him? He must’ve thought Sir Walsingham’s plans were as sure a route as any to the Queen, which would’ve been one reason he’d gone. And why he came back: to dance attendance upon their sovereign. How could I not think of Liz! The leader of our year twelve clique, who’d bossed us other two, assuming our adulation as her due—which it had been, most of the time. Had I really loved her more than life itself? What a stupid thing to think! More than my own, perhaps, or the life I knew then. Was it love, though? The way I’d longed to slip inside Liz’s skin and be that girl: the one we all loved best. Who, in the end, got the guy. It is not odd, I tell myself again. Time cannot be a curled leaf, one point touching another precisely so everyone slips willy-nilly—in their minds and memories at least—from here to there, but never into the arching years between. (And if it was, if such a sci-fi explanation were true and everyone, in fact, did, that’d just confirm my own worst fears: that we are all stuck, viciously circling. I think, and it might even be the truth, that I’d rather be the odd one out, neurotically obsessed with something I’ve repressed while the world around me—and everyone else in it—remains relatively sane.) ‘’kay,’ I mutter out loud, thinking time was more like a fiddlehead of fern frond. In my case, anyway: spiraling around a central circle that didn’t actually exist; yet would still prove the ultimate endpoint once all was uncurled. ‘Okay,’ I repeat, slower, as though someone is waiting to see what I will do. And someone is: I’m sure I sense the girl I used to be—or is it the woman I’ll become?—watching present-tense me twist and turn, wriggle and squirm. Should I go, to show I’ve come good? Not go, to prove I’ve always been okay? Pouring that wine, pinning the card to the fridge—its stiff parchment reminding me of regal documents another woman similarly put off addressing,

- 146 - once upon a far-off time—I wonder how it would feel, going back to the old school. I’ve driven past the grounds a few times over the years, seen new buildings going up, noted when it went co-ed. Not that I’d ever have sent Jo there, even if my folks had footed the bill. My parents, and my friends’ parents too, had spent every cent they had on fees so there was never any money left for that all-important first tan of summer, or last ski trip of the season. The off-the-shoulder bright white tee, designer-ripped jeans and naturally perfect perm—not to mention the class excursion to France: Liz and I had never even told our folks about that one. Not that the money was the only thing that’d made us different, but it might’ve been the easiest to see. I like to think we’d chosen not to know what we had to do in order to fit in, or at least chose not to do it, but maybe Lizzie had never noticed. I’d had to point out that T-shirts should be worn untucked, except for an optional scrunch at the front. Liz had moved, as though to comply, but then stopped. It would’ve been so easy to rearrange her top, roll down a sock! I would’ve done it in a shot. It’d never occurred to me not to. Not that Lizzie was showing off; she was just being herself. Her true self. Showing us other two that what went on outside our threesome mattered less and less. What mattered was what was between us. And that mattered so much more. My intense self-scrutiny amped up as I began to understand that there was an unspoken anti-uniform, under the unwritten uniform. Now I’m a mother myself—albeit years younger than any others I’ve met—I have more sympathy for those tennis mums who’d idled their BMWs in the circular drive, waiting for their precious progeny to emerge. I wouldn’t be surprised to find the lacquered nails and toned arms hid secrets worse than chewed quicks and loose flab. Who picks their kids up anyway? Nearly thirty- something now, I imagine days given shape by the school runs that topped and tailed them while my misfit friends and I took the bus. Our parents were barely part of our lives—we’d hardly known what was going on in our own empty homes, let alone each other’s. Which was the whole point. Friends were the new family and our gang of three was all-powerful. Though not, in the end, as strong as triangles are supposed to be.

- 147 - That night, after a bowl of cornflakes for tea, I dream of walking up the long curved drive. The red spires of the original building rising out of the rubble of what I remembered. On my right, in its own bricked circle, the tree we’d sat under every lunchtime of our high-school lives. Its gnarled branches growing around the dinky tin, long rusted in, where Liz and I had hidden our daily notes. Small, scrawled fortune-cookie codes. Love letters from detention, where we were always doing time apart for whispering together in class. ‘A cunning virgin waiting in a curtained room,’ did one of us write? ‘For her doom,’ had another answered? Racing when the bell rang to add our couplet to the endless ode we wove between us. Folding and refolding the paper until it was too thick to fold again. Before I reach the main hall with its walls of floor-to-ceiling glass from another era, set in old oak almost as hard as metal, I wake up. For the moment I don’t know where I am. Was that my bedroom door? An eye at a keyhole, peeping. A waiting stool beside a warming wall—I squirm. The coming reunion has me in a fluster. I’ve been trying not to think about it, have even waved the invitation over the bin, but something keeps telling me I should put in a show, and back on the fridge it goes. Awake in the dark, the sense of the old–new school and fast pace of my heart remind me of when we’d broken in after hours: ‘We’re on a plane!’ Lizzie whispered, pointing to the exit lights as we ran through empty rooms. Along long corridors and down dark stairs that spiralled in a smooth space curve. A helix. I shiver at the un-me word. I’d been struck by the smell—dry chalk dust and wet whiteboard markers, mouldy cheese sandwiches and old bananas. Overlaid with antiseptic. It wasn’t that the school had smelt so different; it was that it had smelt the same when everything else was changed. The tide of sound—the shrieks of hundreds of hormonal girls—sucked out. Waves of silence rolling in. My fear is laced with excitement. My confidence that I won’t go being effaced by a growing conviction that I will. Excitement, braced with fear. Maybe the invite—stamped with the school logo dead centre like a hex—is traced in invisible ink and if I lit a joint the smoke would reveal a secret message directing me towards a more fantastic meeting.

- 148 - It seemed like the séance all over again: a set time and place. I’m mature enough to smile, insecure enough for it to soon slip. I’ve never had another puff. The rift that had been opened—between us, within myself—wasn’t so easily closed: that gap, prised a crack, had soon yawned wide. When we came out the other side of that May weekend, and it was time to walk through the school gates Monday morning, I hadn’t been able to get off the bus. And yet, here I was. Psyching myself to return to that faraway forest where my story got so lost. It was a bloody mystery, worth not mulling over if I can. I roll out of bed to get a glass of water. Knowing one reason I’m so wary is that it isn’t some May date we’re heading towards this time—which is only significant at a stretch (when I remember Dee’s midsummer festivities: resurrecting the Celtic tradition of a towering maypole 150 feet tall)—but the last day of October. I don’t want to believe all the superstitious things I think, but everyone knows that once upon an ancient time the 31st was when the old year ended and next began. Spirits— hallowed or not—hovered: ghosts of futures past, angels of pasts present. The last hurrah of the old world’s summer, when the dead were remembered and the future could be summoned. The absolute flipside of the start of spring. It makes sense that the membrane between worlds thins in more than one place: if there’s a front door, why wouldn’t there be a back one? And if the latter opens so easily, what would happen if we hammered on the main entrance? (I wonder if Lizzie’d known about such things: had she wanted us to be wandering in the woods when fairies were known to ride? If anyone was all over that it would’ve been Liz: our font of all fantastic lore.) I catch myself in the bathroom mirror. If I were looking in at Halloween it might’ve been the face of my future companion staring out. The thought makes me snort, pulls me up short—did divination always have to be about love? ‘If you love me, pop and fly; if you hate me, burn and die.’ What time had I ever had for any of that? Neither suitors nor hazelnuts being in abundance. Scraping together enough tutoring to repay the mortgage my parents had guaranteed. Looking after my son who, admittedly, seemed so much more mature and less in need of looking after than I had ever been. There’s nothing for it but to crawl back into bed. Pull the doona up over my head. If we were to Freudianly re-enact that formative scene, who would I call up:

- 149 - which John? The Doctor, or that stranger I never really figured for Jo’s father? Though I was wise enough to know it didn’t matter who you dialled, the operator would choose who to put through. As night ticks towards morning I remember how one Halloween we’d huddled over the White Pages—the landline like a planchette between us— dialling number after number, looking for a likely lad. Lizzie had said we should peel an apple all around and fling the paring on the ground to see the first letter of our sweetheart’s name. ‘E, for E-liz-abeth!’ she’d laughed at our tightly turned attempt, which I know now had been E for Ed. ‘D, is for Di!” she’d hooted at the next loop; pre-empting the way our token would be pushed and pulled between those two letters, come winter: E. D. D—E—E. At last, I remember, hurtling through the cosmos—summoned and sent— that I’d been the one who’d thought we should call an outlaw: ‘Wank, so he can slide into our cunts on wet fingers and travel up to merge with us inside our heads.’ Had I had anyone in mind? The others looked impressed. Liz, laughing hysterically before I had a chance to backtrack: ‘Where’s the fun in that?!’ And realise, as the past reaches out to suck me in with its relentless gravitational pull, that I do—after all, after everything—want to see them again. I have never stopped wanting that, even though everything I did after was to be free of them—and there, and then. I would have given anything, I would … so I almost think, caution catching me just in time: I would not give him. I will never give over Jo. So. I am not going to go to our class reunion because I want to reassure myself how boringly normal our lives are—my own included, these 90s days—but to remind myself that time really has rolled on. None of us will be who we were. And what we had—or almost had, or tried so hard to have—was long gone; I know that. There is never any going back. Only the possibility, the absolute necessity, of pressing on. I will go because it might mean something if I hadn’t.

- 150 - ‘I’ll check on you when I get in.’ I kiss the top of Jo’s head; muss his hair the way mothers do. He’s not the little kid he was and he pulls back to stare squarely at me. ‘You won.’ I shrug, we both know this is not the kind of thing I normally do. I avoid his questions about that time and those girls. But, here I am: as ready as I will ever be. Eager, in fact, to see that final scene from three points of view— hoping triangulation might help me see true. I pull at my modest black dress, thinking how opposite it is to those bridalesque gowns Liz had made us try on in bogan boutiques—dramatic satin affairs with ruched leg-of-mutton sleeves. Planning what she’d wear to a school dance I never got to go to. Nervously, I pat. I’m over blaming them; that’s the difference between these mostly sane years and the maelstrom of our micro- family’s first few. It’d taken a while to convince myself that it couldn’t all be Lizzie or John’s fault, not everything. Maybe not anything—even if it’d fucking felt like it. I pick at the black. In the end though, I’d succeeded. It would be nice if they were nice. Not necessarily nice to me even, just nice people. It’d be nice to know that the friends I’d had had been worth having. That we had been friends, and if I were knocking on the door of heaven and Saint Peter said, ‘Who’ll vouch for this lost soul?’ they’d put up their hands. That my memory of Who We Were—and who I’d been—was right. Calling goodbye to the babysitter I pick up my bag. Give my son the high-five he’s after. Tucking mouse-brown hair behind an ear I smile at the hall mirror, welcoming the lines I’ve worked so hard to earn. Turning to go, I watch myself as good as disappear: no butt to speak of and flat post-baby boobs. In some ways— not just weight-wise—I am more girlish than I ever was. Putting on a spare 500 grams throughout the pregnancy, I’d emerged from hospital lighter in more ways than just weight. As my fat had faded so had the solid outlines of our old world: I was reborn into a silver shining-brightly day. Kissing the new moon of Jo’s head, I’d inhaled him and fallen in love as only someone who hasn’t can. Sensing then that he would be the one to keep me safe, and not the other way around. Double-checking the front door with an automatic tug, I head to the tram stop suspecting the others aren’t so caught between not wanting to be early and afraid of being late. Aren’t trying so hard to time their arrival perfectly.

- 151 -

A teenager unable to find my friends, I duck through the crowd. It isn’t just being back here—the school hall so familiar, if festooned with balloons; desks ill- concealed beneath pristine linen. A mother and lecturer I might be, but I still feel like a child much of the time. Back then it’d been the opposite: I’d felt like an old woman already—some storytelling crone. Will I never be the age I am? Choosing to stop thinking. Choosing not to think about not thinking; NOT seriously thinking, I dodge familiar-ish faces, age blurring features into an out-of- focus class photograph. An unregistered Greek chorus whose names I’d recognise—if spoken Christian first and maiden last—as the background to my super-vivid technicolor close-ups of Di and Liz. ‘They just chose sepia, you know. I mean when they invented photography it could’ve been any colour—black and blue, red. Whatever. They chose sepia.’ I scan the crowd. So strange to hear that voice out loud. No sign of Liz; I arrive at the bar. A row of tables stacked with wineglasses, buckets of bubbles at the ready behind. It was all so daggy: the eskies of ice plastered with scratched stickers bearing the school coat of arms. It didn’t fit my memories of money and class and privilege. What else could I have got wrong? Next thing you knew, there’d be no bitches! ‘There was this guy right, in England, who had a blister that was actually, no joke, this big. When they popped it they found a fish. Not like a fish fish, but a fish all the same—some early mutant swimmer.’ It was Liz all right; now I could see her pale hand in the air. The connection between her words and my thoughts was, as always, freaky. I couldn’t really hear her, but I got the gushing gist: my old friend was a second heart that beat outside this body. Her mania made me calm, as though anxiety were an infection and, in spreading, had passed from me. I didn’t remember that, though: I don’t remember Liz being nervous at all. ‘I was so sick, I mean soooooo sick. We were sick as. Flu is one thing, and bird another, and then there’s swine, but this just took the cake—I thought there was no way we’d make it. But then, here we are—a hundred kilos lighter,’ Liz strokes her belly—did that mean anything? Shakes her head, as if in answer; as though we are still umbilically connected. ‘I couldn’t touch a drop …’

- 152 - ‘Sick as a dog huh?’ I interrupt, an in-joke only I enjoy—riffing off thoughts only I have had. The two of them turn and, squealing, pull me into a scrum. Squeezing shoulders hard with their hands so fingers gouge flesh. They push each other back to get a better look, prompting me to see the box-cut diamond on Di’s tanned hand. Framed by square nails and a fancy oversized watch worthy of one of the trendites we’d never had any time for. How much else hadn’t I seen? I’ve spent the years picking holes in Lizzie’s lies; I was ready to catch her out if I ever got the chance: ‘Come on,’ I nod, ‘tell us more!’ but it’s no fun giving someone enough rope if they too happily hang themselves. As she goes into gory detail about her internal workings, I tip back my glass and slip off for a top-up. I have to take the edge off this. It’s very weird. Like I’m here, and at the same time I’m not. It’s like we’re all back there—could it be that I am not the only dyschronic one, and our whole class is lost in time? A ghosts’ ball in an old school hall! ‘Here we are then!’ That’s better. ‘Here we are.’ Three glasses chink. The partners of the other two, I discover, are deep in conversation—as though the guys who don’t know each other have more in common than the three of us, who do. Or did. Now it’s obvious how well Di fits in with the rest of our year, I wonder if the others have caught up in the interim. Quizzically, I look to Liz. It turns out Di hasn’t just stayed in touch with girls I never knew she knew, but has even married the brother of one them. Kristine? Kirsten? Who’d ironed her hair till the split ends frizzed with static; overdyed it black, so greenish streaks ran down her blazer when it rained. She’d gone on to become a catwalk model and had always, apparently, been an old family friend. Well, what did I know? We clink glasses again. It wasn’t that awkward; it wasn’t, really. What did I expect? Lizzie was still electric, her strawberry hair only dulled to a burnished blonde. And, it turned out, less in love. Or maybe she just enjoyed a more open relationship, reminding us—with a raised eyebrow—that her mother had run off with another woman. Remember! I didn’t. Clearly too wrapped up in my own world then: so self-absorbed I wasn’t even sure it’d registered that Liz’s mum had left.

- 153 - Which was just what I needed to be reminded of to soften towards them. I was the one who’d been so crap! Lizzie’s man looked over with that mixture of care and concern I used to feel—but didn’t, right now, feel—just as Liz leans in, and plants an open-mouthed kiss. Smack. Bang. ‘Remember,’ I blurt out, ‘the tennis centre?’ I hadn’t meant to be the one to start, but everyone around us is playing ‘remember when’ and I’m feeling so forgiving—towards the pair and, by association, my juvenile self. What else were we here for, after all, except to remember? ‘The David Lee Roth gig?’ Pimply boys had pushed towards us yelling, ‘make way, make way, lady with a pram!’ which had seemed so witty I hadn’t noticed— too busy dragging on my own new T-shirt and awkwardly threading the old one out through a sleeve—that Liz was sitting pretty, babs out in the city. Flaunting her new buds between taking one T-shirt off and putting another on. Had I learnt nothing? I wished I’d thought how the story went before I’d started it. There’s a lesson there. ‘Hullo boys!’ Lizzie laughs hysterically, making the men look over. Attracting stares from nearby girls: were they having more fun? Oh fuck, now I remember. Oh fuck yes, I remember now—tears come without a sound as something hungry in me is fed again. ‘What about Poison, at the Metro?’ I am laughing. I am crying: ‘The Met! Dollar pots and watered wine. Us waiting in that back alleyway—singing “I want traction all right!” like some naff a capella trio.’ C.C. had kissed the window, asking where they were staying as the white stretch limo pulled away. It was all so clichéd. ‘And we were like: “I don’t think so”!’ ‘No, Nat, we were like: I don’t think so.’ Perhaps. Perhaps. The laughter settles. It’s a little disconcerting the way I seem to have acted the opposite of how I felt. How odd. To have appeared, to have been, not how I’d thought I was. Or is it just how I think it now? Remembering things that happened to other people as having happened to me; remembering things I’d done as having been done by other people. Who had sat before the tennis

- 154 - court with proudly bared breasts? Oh all three of us were one and the same all right. ‘What about—’ Liz nudges, like she’s been waiting. ‘What about our book?’ ‘Mills & Bon!’ Di shrieks behind her sparkling hand—a gesture that draws as much attention as it hides. Is she showing us off as a couple of kooks? I wave the thought away, leaning towards Lizzie as I remember those rock-star locks and rugged good looks we’d stuck all over the cover of our precious book; our own Jovi version of Mills & Boon. And bedrooms: walls plastered with life-size cutouts of Jon and Richie—not that we’d rubbed up against them, much. We’d practice- kissed the paper until the coating had come away, leaving wet white pocks where pictures of lips had been, but our teenage lust had been all about courtship: wooing, and unrequited lurrrrrrve. As those stories had shown. Or would, if that old journal were ever found. How could I have forgotten that excruciating choose-your-own-romance Liz and I had overshared? It makes me wonder whether the information overload of today’s electronic mail might hide my students’ embarrassing exposés. Or seem to, so online communication—already proliferating; e-letters passing in the ether, myriad messages missed—gives everyone a chance to let it all out, leaving nothing to fester and ferment. No desire repressed or rejection unexpressed. If we were teenagers today Lizzie and I would’ve been doing the same. We’d hardly been reticent—quite the opposite in fact: our friendship had demanded nothing except that nothing be out of bounds. Every feeling had to be echoed, every emotion amplified. Once upon an 80s time I’d shared every thought I’d had before I’d properly held it. Maybe instant messaging would be the medium of the future—if the internet survived Y2K and we weren’t all back out living in the hills, picking bugs from the undersides of bark. Working out where the sun was and which way the rain ran by how moss grew on trees. (The smell of green is reaching out towards ancient Nat, frozen in her last repose. A cool is rising up from within, passing through the surface of her skin to chill the room where Little John is waiting. Her scrivener, he hovers his iPen, sensing she is speeding towards a rendezvous with Father Time, who twiddles his milk-white beard as queens come of age, grow old, and are reborn phoenix-like

- 155 - from their own pyres; amethyst wings burning in a glorious act of self-sacrifice and self-preservation.) ‘That day you left your locker open—’ ‘—I left it!’ ‘And our book did the rounds faster than the lie that we’d been lesbians.’ I look sharply at Liz. Our classmates had added their own scenarios in a flirtatious game of textual erotica while juniors graffitied the precious clippings with cocks. Di’s eyes shine. When had the fantasising begun? Had we been that much older than the bastard Elizabeth, when she’d nearly lost her life playing grown-up games? Our titillating tales had grown like a weed well watered—each of us writing a chapter, then handing it back on a cliffhanger, daring our friend to take it further. A suspicion sneaks in that, if I asked, it’d turn out Lizzie hadn’t been the one to start it. That it’d been me: lying on a folded blanket on the floor—the other two squeezed into her wrought-iron bed above. All eyes closed the better to imagine ourselves slim, with big hair, wide eyes and casually breeze-blown clothes. Who’s to say which of us had been speaking? And yet, I have a feeling now that they’d be right: and everything had come from me. ‘Once upon a twilight time,’ our stories always started: ‘three hitchhiking girls sought shelter in an old house at the end of a train line as a great storm broke. Thunder crackled overhead and lightning split the sky before they could make the creaking porch. Panting, they pushed past the broken door and ran into the abandoned homestead. Huddling together in their wet clothes, white lace skirts dripping puddles around pixie boots as a wind shook the building—rough enough to blow them all to Oz. Upstairs, though the girls didn’t know it yet, three other runaways were already asleep in unmade beds. Three beautiful young men. And the girls were about to slip on up and slide right in beside them. It was always raining, so our clothes clung revealingly and we could slip and slide against each other—and the boys too, when they appeared. Which they often did on horseback, when filming a music video nearby; or sometimes running and out of breath; when they’d been mistaken for criminals or ne’er-do-wells from the wrong side of town. Warm jackets were then wrapped around us, and we were

- 156 - lifted and carried to trailers or tents or houses or the nearby protective covering of sometimes evergreen and sometimes deciduous trees. Where clothes were, eventually, at least partially, peeled away. Which was how the tales had ended, neither of us knowing where to take them from there. None of us having any idea what came next—well, sex, but we weren’t interested in that. We were after the long drawn-out play before. ‘Another drink?’ I come back from miles away, pretending to wipe sweat from my brow and springing Lizzie doing the same thing at the same time. ‘Jinx!’ Together we make our way to the drinks table, waving Di away when other girls call out to her: who knew? ‘So, how’re things?’ I ask carefully. Does Liz see Ed flashing towards our meeting faster than light beaming between showers? She is focusing on her breathing, slowing it down, shutting thoughts down—feigned lack of interest always was the best way to keep him at bay. Stop the self-consciousness, I’d advise; he thrives on that. I imagine a future female pitying my now-present then-past person. Imagine, hard: a future, un-so- conscious self. Leaving no room for him in me. Or her, I hope. ‘Good.’ Nodding. ‘You?’ ‘I’m kind of surprised to see you here.’ He is not far off. Liz’s feeling might be drawing him in. She should pretend she can’t feel. ‘I just thought … you know?’ I only have to get a whiff of the insanity I was lucky enough to shake to re- appreciate how I—just—got away. But I am so well now I am ready to risk it. And dive right in, sensing time pressing: ‘What the fuck happened—then, Liz?’ She has only to raise an eyebrow in that inimitable way for me to nearly come undone. Could my friend possibly know everything I’d been through? Possibly be feeling it now? Was Ed already needling in? I’d save her from that, if I could; I would save both of us, if I can. ‘I’ve been thinking,’ I start. Stop. I have though, oh I have. ‘Never a good idea!’ Liz’s half-laugh is an unplayed card between us. ‘I mean, thinking differently,’ but mid-apology I’m not sure whether I mean thinking my own thoughts: or—I catch a breath as she catches hers and we’re

- 157 - suddenly slipping sideways into the alternative realities of each other’s lives. We are all points of view. (Which reminds me of the son of our son who is not sleeping in his chair but watching my no-longer-rising-and-falling chest. Counting down the last minute. Watching closely to spy me leave.) Welcome to the rumble / we got one unnamed / Guns ’N Roses screams through the stereo, targeting my heart like an assassin in an Elizabethan daydream. Everyone here is covering their ears except Lizzie and me. We are laughing, we are looking at each other and need no words. We should be running down empty corridors, guided by old exit signs. Giggling in the dark. Leaving these stiffs for dead. But I’m frozen in place, holding a glass to lips lost in the liquid within. ‘Here I come,’ Ed whispers, ‘ready or fucking not. Here I bloody come!’ An ocean of me rushes out as a tsunami of him rushes in.

s

Staring into the reflective surface of a small still pool with unblinking eyes, Ed sees, from high up, a room reflected very far away. An event Nat never went to, or hasn’t been at yet. He launches himself into that dream scene, and out the other side; backwards, towards the younger man he’d been when he first looked—in 1582— and was hooked by the Doctor’s lure. Forward, to when he will leap from a parapet in 1587, gasping: ‘Here! Come! I!’ Unable to believe what he sees—himself in a tower, or her holding court— Ed caresses the cold surface of the stone, as though to unsee what he is scarce able to believe. The face in the convex lens distorts, the smudge of his print warping thoughts. He feels, more than wonder at the angel’s presence, more than awe or fear at how like Elizabeth the girl before him/her looks, relief. Relief that he has not failed, that he even seems to have succeeded. Relief that this could work; that she might choose him for her channel just as God had chosen them. He will be the messenger—never mind what the message is. Who would’ve thought that what he’d said he could do would prove true! Who would’ve thought? Not him: he was a doer, ever chasing an action, only asking after what he had done and why. Often not even asking.

- 158 - Confidence rebuilding, Ed sets novice reverence aside to ask what everyone is always after. His future self has nothing to lose but the universal need to know …

s

‘What happened?’ I prompt. ‘Nothing.’ Liz leans towards me, brushing long-untouched skin with sticky lips. How dare she. ‘Nothing?’ ‘We didn’t do anything.’ She shrugs like it’s no big deal. Like this is not news when it is everything to me: but is it true? Answers elude, as though what’s factual is yet not actual. ‘He was done, Nat; he’d come. We never knew each other, in the biblical sense.’ I’m unconvinced—though I wouldn’t put acting orgasm past our Liz—but that wasn’t what I’d meant. I wanted to know: ‘What happened next?’ Avoiding the fearful face in the bottom of my up-tipped glass, not recognising it as mine, I look at Liz and see—copper hair, burning mercury, magenta powder; bright and shiny gold! Ed’s orb would burst a bloodshot vein; a hairline crack snake across its glossy surface at my poor-little-rich-girl vision of a ruby Red Queen. Tough times at teenage high, that’s how I like to look back on that time— belittling my grandiose emotions. The way she used to make me feel. D&M, that’s what we used to say: deep and meaningful. Which was how I used to knock the Ed in my head off his keel, push him back to his shore: by believing that there was a world outside, and it was real and actually mattered. Even if there isn’t, and it didn’t—doesn’t still. ‘I guess, I wish …’ I’m saying, concentrating on the vessel in her hand, the fluid it holds: has Lizzie seen, in the interim years, the face that haunted me then? The one I still sometimes ken? I drop my drink so the sound of its shattering cuts across the party. He is there. ‘That we never had! Oh Liz, not any of it—swinging, or swapping: crossing.’ ‘Not even,’ it was true: ‘with you.’

- 159 - But I am here, too. I sigh Ed out for the last time, wondering now what happens next. But it’s Liz’s turn not to hear, transfixed by a ragged-edged prism of glass and freakishly familiar face staring up. At her.

s

Even before he came round, Talbot’s sweating sickness had gone a fair way to convince Dee of his new guest’s sincerity. That, and the fact that Kelley didn’t know where or when he was when he returned: shaking, like one in the throes of a fit or fatal ague, clinging to the good wife of the house as though he didn’t know Jane was not his. Telling his master that Dee would not be him for all the world. Ed— as he now wanted to be called, not liking how someone had a handle on old Ned— said he’d glimpsed a fearful future five hundred years hence. An infernally hot down-under land an astronomical distance away. What could the Doctor do but bow his head? Pulling parchment, nib and knife obediently towards him. ‘Death flips us backwards through the play script of our lives,’ said newly named Ed, ‘so we end as we began: stripped of the self—the selves—we layer up like onionskin; lay down like layers of rock.’ When Dee pressed, more prosaically: ‘But who was N—? Where is this hall with walls of glass, and who the uncrowned Queen?’ Ned hissed the word reunion, which came out: ‘union’, but spoke not one word about how desire, stirred, beset. Confident, dangerously confident, that he could manage that; knowing he was onto a good thing here. Tongue working at his teeth, Ed’s worried brow unfurrows under the soothing ministrations of his host’s fine wife.

s

Nat is a wanderer in her own mind, death ending the work dementia had started, stripping away time and self, turning eking minutes into one unending moment of

- 160 - convergence. Nat becomes Ed becoming Nat becoming Ned. Between the two– three–one sum of them they hold the whole world, knotting the line of time tight. ‘I want to know,’ Nat, as Ed, had overheard Bess buzzing in the Doctor’s ear, ‘what happens next. Go—so you can hurry home. Come to me by the most direct route, Dee.’ Not on a Renaissance ship then, but in secret, coded notes. Permission, even, to enter the Queen’s own dreams. This was a hundred years before men took on board dogs with open wounds, thinking they might use the poor creatures’ pain to communicate with those left behind—who held the knife that had caused the cut. But Dee knew all about sympathetic magic. Time was always needed for true navigation. How to chart it, though? How to mark it? Maybe it couldn’t be understood, only moved through: ridden as best one could, like a roiling ocean. Any explanation was, after all, only an approximation, as the philosopher’s stone was no concrete thing to dig up and set in a ring but an alchemical substance: an elixir vitae—some formula, symbol or metaphor! So Nat’s grandson thinks, as the silver plates of his 2087 machine projects forward pictures from further and further back: 1997, 1987, 1587. Projects back echoes from a future shore. Nat, turning from the berth where a ghost of her self rests under a tented hospital sheet, returning to the screen, types. Skrypes. Intent on seeing for herself, if only with her mind’s eye, as Kelley once did: what happens. Next. Resisting, this time, the call of sleep; recognising its pull as not unslated tiredness but death—just as once upon a morning-after she was about to realise that it wasn’t really lethargy that’d made her hurry bedwards.

s

I’d been so desperate to reach the sanctuary of my own room and shut a door upon that day. No idea then that I wouldn’t be able to sleep properly again for a good while to come—first because of the residual chemicals ripping up my bloodstream, then because of the manic form my madness took: I never felt depressed, whatever their diagnosis, just anxious beyond all reason. I’d been so desperate that all my energy was focused on getting me there, not on what I would do once I was.

- 161 - First, I had a shower, standing under the water until it had run from stinging hot to slamming cold. The towel against my skin so rough I’d half expected flesh to bleed. My vagina aching as though he were still inside me—or was I throbbing with unsatisfied want? How could such opposite states feel at all the same? I was a mess. Limbs tingling, fingertips turned numb; my waterlogged hair hung heavy as I struggled to know how to go on: to bed? Don’t go to bed. Stay up. That Saturday I was simply glad to have made it back alive, listening aghast to my own groans as I turned my body on its side. Trying to settle into a normal sleeping position. Was this it? Did it usually feel like this? That was the start of my darkest winter: get up? Don’t get up. Go back to bed. I burrowed in, trying to tune out the thoughts that circled my head. Bed. My eyes, not weeping. Sleep. The aching where his ears had been. Dream! My limbs twitched involuntarily. Lying, poisoned, on my side I waited out the hours until compulsive cogs began to slow. Time will pass, I told myself, not knowing if it was true, but hoping I could make it so. Time will. Pass, I promised my spiralling selves. And yet, not now—right now time was not passing. I may as well have stayed at Liz’s house. Or outside, hidden in the empty heart of a hollow tree. Not sleeping; dreaming I was sleeping. Dreaming I was not sleeping—napping on an English throne. There, in my childhood home, the night before 6 May: vividly planning the party to come. A custom-made adventure for one. Counting down from midnight, to morning, when shoulder-to-shoulder on the top step, my friends will watch me go. Right hand on the rail, Liz raises her left in an awkward wave. Sliding on sunglasses and putting a shhh-ing finger to her lips. Turning the gesture into a carelessly blown kiss as though I were already gone. How did it come to this? In the passenger seat of our family car I imagine being in bed remembering being in the car: time not passing, but having passed. My friend’s face framed in halo-bright hair. (Could it be—the echo of Ed dying Nat has called up stares through the tinted glass. Could it really be …? To have come so far and found someone so the same: God, she was the very likeness! He sat the body he was in back into the fleshy seat, reminding his host’s lungs to pump and heart to beat. Could she—Bess—too, be a traveller between worlds? For so he now recognised himself.

- 162 - Of course their Queen would rule the timespace waves! She was the centre of their universe, Dee had that right. Ned was but a satellite. He remembers, as if it were a recent morning, when he’d last seen the Queen: materialising out of the mist at that pre-Bohemia meeting, pretty as any princess from an unfair tale. Presenting the pair of men with a picture they would not forget: the Thames, flat as the sheets of a bed prepped for birth or death. Her voice, lapping at them. Who was he to resist?) In a sudden surge of action, as the car reverses down the drive, I reach for the handle—press my other palm to the window, fingers splayed against the glass. But before I can open the door my father has accelerated. Not intentionally, surely. Small stones fly out from under the heavy sedan as he takes off down the road we’d walked arm-in-arm along to Johnno’s party—hadn’t we? Was it really only hours before? ‘You’re all right, Nat?’ he asks the rear-vision mirror as we head towards the highway that will take us back to town. Awkwardly reaching his hand between the front seats to squeeze my knee: ‘You’re right?’ No idea that I am not all there; that some aspect of who I’ve been was gone forever, I know now. Unable to shake my aching head, I pick at the bandage beneath my sleeve. Belly churning—in my head ‘Silence!’ buzzed—and swallow hard, vowing to keep my peace. For now, at least. There was no rush. Nothing would come of pushing, or so I had to believe because right now there was nothing I could do—except be. Accept that I had him for company—and our repeating thoughts, which were one and the same thing, really: them, and him. And me. And it looked set to be that way for some time to come. Maybe, a candle of fear flickers in my ribcage, maybe this one is the other world—the pool, a path between. Could we be trapped in Dee’s shew-stone? Caught in a sphere spinning so fast—scenes are blurring beyond the glass. I close my eyes as nausea rises. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say weakly a moment later, straddling a puddle of spew by the side of the road, wishing there was more. Would that he could expel everything and then some! Thinks hungover and head-sore Ed, a thin string of spittle dribbling from his chin. I concentrate on my crawling skin, the sick slack of sunken belly, until I’m back. ‘Sorry, Dad.’ I spit again, wiping my mouth with the back of a

- 163 - hand. Feeling, actually, a little better. The physical act brings my attention to the precise points of ache and pain that join my body into a coherent-enough whole— bruised bones here, chafed thighs there, aching neck above and sensitive snatch below. Even the acid afterburn is worth it. Back in the car I close my eyes, falling quickly into sleep. Barely waking when we make it home so my father has to half-carry me in. As if I were a child, still, or him my friend. He turns on the shower and leaves me to it as I mumble my thanks and stumble in. Kneeling on the tiles so the warm water pummels my back. Pulling myself up to wash and dry myself, and turn my fragile body over to bed. Which was when I’d found out that sleep wasn’t the sanctuary I sought, but rather a doorway into the strangest dreams. Weird images churned in the whitewash of my mind and rose to the choppy top, covering over the clue-crumbs my virgin-self had dropped on the way out of a fairytale forest. In case I’d ever wanted to go back: I wanted to! But kept eyes shut and limbs in simulated repose, biding my time; ignored the new self planted within—not yet ready to welcome anyone home.

- 164 -

00:01:00

Nat’s future is changed as surely as if a comet’s discoloured mane had scarred her sky. Not that she sees a Queen on water, now—hand hidden in an ocean of brocade. Nor the friend whose half-wave from a doorstep long-eroded barely stirred the air. She is hastening towards the forest. (A changed climate makes growing green no metaphor; just as new technologies prove possession temporally possible. The imagined has become possible.) Down through the century Nat feels the pull of that night.

s

I hesitate, in 2010. Mind briefly backtracking to the reunion I had not planned to go to. But to which I then went. Not that I think about that for long, because already—in this new version of that next decade—I am set to confront the union that came before. I am peering so far backwards through time, scanning the images in my mind, that it’s like I’m seeing into a possible, probable future. Or spying so far ahead that my gaze has circled the world and come upon me from behind. Either way, I’m fast approaching that night that is catching up on who we—Liz and me—were. Who we are. ‘Who we will be,’ I write decisively—pressing so hard my pen pierces holes in the page—as though the ending is mine alone to script. I could cry at the thought of finally letting myself be: for a fleeting present moment, a fleeing moment past. That night. Our three. I am not just stumbling between tenses; I am tumbling

- 165 - between worlds. Oh Jo! (Or John? My audience of two merges in my mind into one: you.) The true story is not as either of us have written it. The act of remembering is itself a time-travelling trap—like spying, via an inbuilt mental app, like skrying via this iSpy-device. It snaps me back. To relive then, again. So thinking, so knowing, I reach behind me to grab a throw off the bed I’m leaning against. Ward off the evening chill that of a sudden I feel. I don’t remember waking up, let alone napping; I can’t remember grabbing the notebook that lies in my lap. But here I seem to be, sleeping sporadically, writing obsessively. Jo may have taken our routine with him when he headed overseas, but not my sanity. No thanks—I don’t think—to the journey he started me on. Whose grand tour would this year turn out to be? I dig my toes into the shaggy pile of wiry rug, ready at last, ready now, ready any minute to return to that magic night. The night to end all nights. The night that never ends. And so. I reread the words I’ve scribbled and scrawled through these pages. There’s me, here, but there’s a whole lot of you—and others—too. It’s weird, what I reread has so little to do with what I’d thought I was transcribing: Dee and Ed, Di and Liz, circle a mearstone of my making. Such a shallow shadow of a life. I shrug, bemused, that it has come to this. It’s what the doctors were always doing: Ed’s, on his scholar’s stool, reporting on a speculated future; mine, in his psychologist’s chair, recording a contested past. Now it’s my turn to try to find some greater design in our strange tale. By reading back, and writing on. To understand what happened in the wider scheme of things—the wilder scheme. And, secretly, I’m lured by what I might learn, drawn by the answers I dream of turning up. As well as being, really, scared. Still, there’s no point getting ahead of myself, right now I’m where I need to be: in the clearing moment where three girls become two, and then one, who’s coming undone. Our tightly locked ménage-à-fucking-trois: that’s where this story starts, and seems set to end. A trinary—the image lingers, suggesting some kind of chemical composition: three elements, three variables, three parts. Nary a one among us had any idea where our crossed paths would lead or what our passions could conceive. I chew a strand of hair, considering what I’ve written. The words don’t even sound like me. Is the formal language a writerly trick—a wordy magic worthy of Dee himself: a way of warming my hands, flexing fingers

- 166 - before some meaningful tract to follow? I crack my knuckles theatrically and begin. Again. ‘1587: the year Catholic Mary was executed for trying to topple her sister from the throne. In far-off Bohemia two English alchemists were coming to conjure for Rudolph’s court.’ Not that! I hope this is the right thing to do: burrow into a dark work that springs from a black wood. What if my mad attempt to recreate the minutes that went before, the seconds that signalled one world’s ending and heralded in a new, was only an attempt to comprehend the event that came after and shaped me into who I am and was and would forever be? A single, sane-ish mum: best friend to my dear beloved son. Or what if breathing life back into my ’87 virgin self isn’t purgative at all but draws author–reader deeper in? These inky inscriptions couldn’t be his, could they? A last great enchantment, spelled by myself! I might be sceptical, but I can think of nothing else to do. (And someone— some part of me—is making me do it.) I reassure myself that I’m writing in the hope my son—some descended self my DNA has become—can comprehend what up till now, I haven’t. Why me? Why him? Ignoring what’s been and gone, not letting myself think too much about what’s to come, has got me nowhere. Or, rather, has got me where I am: trapped in a constantly passing present and never passed past. Writing it out should help make sense of it, in time. Because Time does that, has already: helped me make my own fantastic sense of things. It’s funny how we know not what we know, but what we need to believe. I take solace in the novel idea that everything might not be about me, in the end; if it ever was at the beginning. What a reprieve that would be! Knotting the white wool with my toes, remembering how I used to backcomb Liz’s hair—teasing the rose-gold until it was spun the other way, to hay—I welcome the night that’s almost upon us now. In under a minute, less than a second, barely a Polish tercja, I’ll be right where I am and at the same time somewhere else entirely: a darkened cellar beneath an empty house at the end of a remote cul-de-sac. Across a long lawn from the forest that might seem a neatly contained square of green on any map but is already augmenting. I imagine it as clearly as if I were there and am still, hovering a beat above the three. As vividly as if I saw it all before me in a magic mirror: that filmic forest and gothic house. As

- 167 - if I had a slipstream device that could join those dots. As if, if I could—or when some future-self does—they’d make a perfect arc. From here—2087? 2010?—to there: 1987. Where Liz is calling us to ‘Come on!’ As she will again, later, when she leads your father and me back into the forest: past the watching pool. Towards the cold, waiting stone. As she had when we saw each other again a decade later, a dozen years ago, at our old school. Telling me—in that way she had, so I never knew whether to believe her—that the treat neighbours had originally knocked for at Halloween were spirits of the alcoholic kind. So we owed it to history to each sneak a bottle of vin de 97 from the crates behind the bar. Which was what we’d done: me rising to the dare as I ever had. Whose dare? Who cared! Stealing them, we ran down empty corridors as if we were still teens, but instead of narrowing claustrophobically, the hallway had opened out into a light and airy new wing: an award-winning architectural design. That was more like it. Some things did change. Loving her, loving seeing her again, but intent on not losing the self I’d fought so hard to find, I told Liz how sick I’d been. How I might’ve died if it hadn’t been for what had happened; though, weirdly, that was also what had almost killed me. For once Lizzie was silent. And I kept talking; telling her about the shrink who’d been Doctor–Father–best friend to me. Maybe I was saying it for her sake too: the drugs had helped a heap. She said it’d seemed only fitting that they’d had a part to play in making me whole again, since they’d broken me so wide open. Oh I had missed her! My other self, who’d known me better than I ever had. Had known who I could be—and, now I wondered, might’ve seen who I had been. I confessed everything, about the doctor’s trusty sidekick Prozac—which I called The Pro, as in, ‘Send in The Pro’, ‘Blame it on The Pro’. Though there hadn’t been much need for blame once he’d tweaked the dosage and I’d stopped clinging to an illusion that, he’d almost managed to convince me, was already gone. If it had ever been. I told her how I’d surprised everyone with how quickly I’d come good. Beginning with easing up on myself, which was made easier with the new consciousness hatching within—loving a bub was a subtle segue to accepting myself as a good-enough mum.

- 168 - Ending now, a couple of decades later, with this weird-arse memento mori— a crafted diary of one unbelievable night, our very own homegrown Slippery When Wet Tour. I recap my millennium pen. Having read it, finished it, reached the end. Hugging my knees in the mirror that hangs on the back of my bedroom door, the image echoes my conviction that I am—and have always been—more than one. Which was where we’d started—on the second or third or maybe it was even the fourth visit to the old doc’s office, when I’d begun to open up to my new shrink. Not telling him about that night, which I was so sure had changed everything, but about the end of primary school, when the three of us had first met. Thinking that was the safest bet; no idea how much I probably gave away with everything I said. I surprised myself with how much I talked once I’d popped his blue-and-white pills and had someone to listen who—I was almost completely positive—existed outside of me. Like Liz finally, finally, was a decade on. ‘The Pro knows,’ I nod to the mirror another decade along, remembering how every night I’d gargled toothpaste and spat before—most of the time— downing my prescription. Only once or twice time had frozen, fractured around that moment: when I held a pill in the palm of my hand and considered what magic might lie within the meds. A capsule far smaller than Dee’s famous crystal ball, on display half a globe away. One gulp and gone. I move on—as you probably will too, once you’ve crossed that wonder off your Gap Year bucket list.

We met at the end of grade six, I told my shrink, taking us back to the time before Liz. A time before sickness. It had been a pre-teen party for our junior school, when the old girls got to welcome those coming in from outside. Had it been my first after-dark do? Other than a sleepover, where we might’ve set an alarm for midnight but had only woken briefly to wolf down chocolate and prove a point before hopping back into bed. I got ready with Di, who’d asked her mum to drop us at the corner before. Double denim, that’s what we wore; I scrunched down bright-pink floppy socks, remembering how the lolly shade had offset acid-wash even in the dark. Peering into the driver’s rear-vision mirror to pick two small pieces of hair and twist them till they encircled my head like a crown. Which might’ve suggested how

- 169 - young we were, though I was wearing my first bra—but that was probably more fat than breast. It was our last outing as little-ish girls, trying to appear older than we were. From the tipping point of middle age I can see how we weren’t just stepping prissily into tweendom. Real life was reeling us in as fast as anyone could want— or, later, might’ve wished it hadn’t. We needn’t have spent such energy dressing up; we couldn’t have held back the future if we’d tried. Only in the effort to be mature were we marked as not. Later, we’d graduate from adolescence even faster: over the course of one night, and all its flow-on fucked-up effects. It was clear to me, talking at the end of ’87, how everything that would shape our senior year was fated in that first meeting. So I still think in 2010; in ’97 I’d said as much to Liz: how Di and I had been waiting for her our whole lives long. Not that we’d been looking—or known how deeply we were longing—until she’d arrived. She’d been the answer to a question we hadn’t known to ask. I never knew how empty my life was before, or could be after, until she filled it. Our Liz: that skinny, strawberry blonde in cropped bubblegum jeans and cut- down sneakers who’d won a scholarship from a state school on the edge of town, a good hour away. About as far as you could get and still be in Melbourne. She was all ‘I’m not from here and don’t fit in, but could if I wanted to.’ That brittle air of needing to prove herself, combined with proving herself by refusing to give in to that need, created an aura of otherness that made her seem so different and somehow the same. ‘I painted these runners myself—I used a stencil, that’s why they look so perfect, but I cut them down and bought these fabric paints that dry super- professional. See?’ But when we leant down to take a closer look, Liz pulled her foot away. ‘It’s hard to get the lines this good. I mean, I’m not sure I could get it so neat again.’ Soon she had a circle of girls around her, laughing at insane stories of absent parents, an open house and running off into the nearby forest. Was she for real?! No one believed half the stuff that came out her mouth as the disco ball cast fluorescent flecks over the day-glo punch. No one believed most of it anyway, but that didn’t make it any less fun. Maybe more so: she was crazy, man!

- 170 - If, that night, Di and I had been happy to hang on the edge of Liz’s entourage, we were even happier the following year, when our new class queen lost her crown. Once the other girls saw her every day they quickly tired of her inability to tire: she was too much. Toooooo much! Adoration shifted, as it did among teenage girls, but Di and I never forgot how the coming of Lizzie had changed everything: shown our snobbish school up as the conservative ladies' college it was. And our loyalty was rewarded. Liz shared her tattered copy of Puberty Blues, dog-eared and bath-stained, with its cryptic Vaseline scene; showed us The Blue Lagoon, knowing how to tweak the tracking when the tape stuck so we wouldn’t miss our first seaweedy full-frontal. She dragged us along to Witness at the Belgrave Cinema, so we all heard Harrison Ford say, ‘If we’d made love last night, I’d have to stay. Or you’d have to leave.’ In the darkened school a decade later I would’ve liked to ask Liz how the hell she’d discovered such things. Were there kids at the train station who’d talked about The Vampire Lestat, that pocket-sized bible of how to be three, complete with Jon le Bon in velvet pants and to-die-for ruffs. It seemed unlikely: the ferny gullies might be shrines to the sublime, but Belgrave had always been a bogan outpost. Popping the top of the other champagne bottle, I suspected the real question was why Di and I had never uncovered anything new. We toasted in companionable silence; how could it feel so much like nothing had happened, then or after? Nothing at all. Maybe I was as much like the rest of our class as I could see now Di had always been. Maybe the woman beside me was the only person I would ever know who wasn’t—thinking that in 2010 sends me back where I began: she was nothing like me; I was the one who’d always wanted to be her. My crazy ensuing years were just a goddamn copycat act. She was Queen Regina, showing me how far I had to go. Teaching me to use a tampon, shave my legs, wag school and phone in sick. Smoke cigarettes without inhaling, and then with. Teaching me everything until that May night—and even then: everything I’d ever learnt until Jo came along. I’d almost forgotten you. (I have forgotten John: listening, scribbling, just like his Elizabethan namesake.) Scraping hair back behind ears I uncap my pen, ready to write again—appreciating that it wasn’t only thanks to my son that I was here,

- 171 - in 2010; credit was also due to my dear doc, too; and the older, this-time-listening Liz. All of them were responsible for these notes that were shaping into some kind of chronology. Jo might’ve been the one who’d asked the question I’d thought I’d answered, or at least neatly enough avoided, but it was the others who’d convinced me that the answers he was looking for lay within. Come on, she calls. Someone is humming Whitesnake’s ‘Here I Go Again’—on thy lo-o-one. It wasn’t just Di and me who’d been drawn to Liz; Lizzie had been hurtling towards us too. Me, especially. Oh we were alike all right: I wasn’t the only fucked-up one! In my very non-uniqueness, my ordinariness—that I’m finally owning—I was the foil her shining sought. All our spheres spun closer and closer to the charged moment of coming together, separate paths gradually merging until three once- random rocks were flying through timespace bare inches apart. Which couldn’t last. Sucked into Liz’s central orbit, Di and I had raced towards her roaring brightness. Just A Fucking First Year: that’s how I think of my students, not meaning it meanly—how could I? I’d been the JAFFYest of them all: so sure that what I was learning, the world was learning. So absolutely confident it was my first time that parted the Milky Way and birthed a world of stars. God, even writing about it was so self-indulgent I barely could. Forgive me, Jo: when you’re the subject it all seems so much more important—and oh so serious. That break between grade six and year seven, Di and I had hung out in each other’s bedrooms labelling stationery for the year ahead and talking about Liz. Conjuring our Lizzie. It’d been my last soundtrack-less summer, filled with cicadas and the smell of cut grass. The smoke of Di’s dad’s incinerator wafting towards the opening ozone. We’d written to the headmistress, asking to be in Liz’s year—not asking that she could be in ours—as Lizzie had suggested. Instructed, actually. Hadn’t she? I played at being her, raising my voice and rolling my eyes as I faux- raved about the new books we were covering in contact: ‘Oh I read that years ago. Mum has it. I mean, I kind of missed the whole love-interest stuff—she marries?? But the red room is amazing … She really knows what it’s like to be like, you know: terror-FRIED!’

- 172 - If none of us had a choice and our friendship was an astrologically arranged marriage—would that diminish its significance, or amp it up? She was neither good nor bad: neither the same nor different, just someone who knew me so well—and I had wanted, oh how I wanted to be so known!—that it was impossible to resist. Someone who got the mess, the contradictions: who knew you were not one thing or another. I’ve been so wary of that with you, Jo, given we were mother and child too—though I was always more like a big sister, in terms of age. But maybe that made it worse? Though as it turned out I needn’t have worried: in the blink of an eye you went from boob, to bottle, booster seat, the end of a phone, the other side of the planet and then—pft!—into the email ether. Now a one-way postcard away. Have you crossed the Channel, as I write this: left Europe in your trek ever eastwards? Time-wise, are you still behind me or coming closer by the month? Living it large with a bunch of other shiny-bright young things, hiking up ruined towers and bungee-jumping into ancient ravines? Having the absolute time of your pre-adult life, as we once did—albeit so much younger and a whole lot closer to home. Lizzie was the best friend I’ve never been sure I ever had; who’d slipped a pill on my tongue when I’d least expected it and, it’d turned out, was most receptive. So ready it was as though I’d called her up out of the dope-thick air— cowering, until she became frightening. Go on, I may as well have prompted, pop it on! Which was how I’d finally persuaded myself to do what the doc had said, I confessed: because doing what I’d been told had worked so well for me once. Twice. It’d been the cause of everything, my saying yes. First, when the Ouija board came out. Then, when we’d taken it outside—one by one ducking under that growing canopy. Remember? Oh yes, Liz nods, she remembers all right. Saying no to The Pro might’ve been a delayed reaction to the original drug-taking, and not the right response to the resultant situation at all. So, for a third time, I’d nodded— believing I was being presented with two options and choosing one. Yes. Why not swap the fog of psychosis for the fug of medication? I might not have really believed the pills could reduce anxiety, rekindle karma and rebalance my soul, but maybe my absence of conviction wouldn’t mean anything much at all.

- 173 - To have spent the first trimester holding out just to give in, and—assuming I got well—prove the paid professionals had been right all along … well, what did I care? As long as I got to where I suddenly wanted very badly to be. Please, doc, help me become like everybody else; and let’s pretend that asking isn’t any proof I’m not. What if I’d never been normal before? How would I go, if I had no model to return to or mirror an evolving self on? Maybe I wouldn’t recognise a sane state even if I achieved it: Scaredy-cat Nat was known by her neuroses, and I feared I felt most myself when I was the self I liked least. Centred, I cease to exist, but with that freedom comes agoraphobic fear. It’s a state I long for and resist. The absence of presence, which my shrink was guiding me towards. To not be meant not having to keep my self under lock and key. Giving over control would mean no one could wrest it from me: how glorious if every thought rethought or forgot was neither a fight nor surrender! Obviously I had to take the blessed bloody pills not for the morning but months after: those already gone and those then still to come. Doing what I knew I must, my 2087 skrying-self encouraged 1987-me to trust, and stop wondering whether the this-time-legal drugs wouldn’t lead me deeper into the very wood I’d run so hard from. Having made a similarly conscious decision in 2010—to log our original adventure—I consciously decide not to revisit it and, now spent, close this book on that story. Pad downstairs to slide the journal back between the pages of some older tome; hide that at the bottom of a leaning stack where my Jo can find it when he returns, and is ready. Or leave it, if he never is, for some future offspring to peruse. And if I had got lost, caught in some timespace limbo-like priest’s hole shored between the walls of worlds, well then, I wouldn’t have been her any more and there’d be no Nat to know that she was not, now would there? Twenty-odd years later I remember thinking that (as another Nat will, some eighty years on, when the idea of an ending takes on new unabstract meaning), and tell my self—and anyone else here to hear—that the only way through was, is, in. Which sends me flying back to our fateful catch-up and Liz’s laughing lips. Me leaning in. And in, and in. So close I could see myself reflected in her ermine eyes. Closing mine, and her kiss. Soft. Self-ish. Such dual feelings—of rightness, and

- 174 - wrongness—occupying the same space, that I was kicked out of time. And could only watch us as different futures were sucked back into that one embodied act. Ah! I succumbed.

s

In a 2087 sterile room, high above a Melbourne that is no more, Nat turns the dial all the way back to 1987—keeping one eye on the other times she’s been skrying, no idea that doing so will rip her into an alternative history at the very moment of dissolution; restarting them all on the loop she’s lived her whole life long. Reaching out a lifeless hand towards the two-dimensional picture the past is beaming up on the screen. Beneath the antiseptic she tastes the bite of a more basic alcohol. Beyond the halogen white light, senses the ghost of a moon. As if in a dream, Nat pops the meniscus of probability and slides right in. Impossible! Slipping through the screensaver as if it were a curtain. Into the monitor as if the thin-film transistor liquid crystal display were water. And with the extant outbreath of death, rebirths herself in an amaranthine act. In her mind’s eye—unless it is another’s, ah! and she is haunting her son’s son via old notebooks he’s been rereading as he records her last random words— Nat roams a vast British Library of Alexandria. A virtual web of words and spells. A net, woven from twenty-six Latin characters, scrolls around her. She floats, floorless, beside infinite shelves. Runs fingers over spines. Could she be seeing Dee’s study at Mortlake, north of the London wall? Before it was ransacked when he left his home to chase angels mystical and pecuniary with Mister Kelley. Or is this some memory house the Doctor painstakingly built? Perhaps to hide those three leaping days the old Gregorian calendar would’ve lost in the 400—500?—years that’ve passed between his time and hers. The long weekend his calendar had to shed to stay in sync with the astronomical year and correct the imposition of old-style Christian linear time on cyclical seasons. Not that such days were anyone’s to horde, or hide in an Ars Memorativa! Listen to her: Nat’s as crazy as she ever was. Just when she thought she was coming out the other end of such a long sane-enough life.

- 175 - This is what she’s left with then, this is what she’ll leave behind as she finally becomes un-one: her mad obsession, sense of possession. The thing that’s ever felt the least like her—the thoughts that’ve felt like another’s—this, it turns out, is her most particular part. In her very lack of singularity, she is singular. In her very singularity, is she nothing. The contradiction does her in. She disappears. Ghost-Nat lets the uploaded impressions of an infinite hive mind wash over her. So this skrying thing works both ways: in letting go she is taken over. Learning—if anything as academic as a lesson could come from being flung a slung-shot world away—that every year divisible by four is a leap year. Except for those divisible by 100; though centurial years that could be divided by 400 were still leap years. Which meant 1900 wasn’t and 2000 is. Or was. Or will be. Dee! Nat has only a splintered second left. Soon there will be nothing to remember. A grave has opened while she’s hung on in non-timespace. A limbo-like daylight-savings time—at least when the seasons still changed and winter hurried evening up. She’d find herself referring back to ‘real’ time. Then, as the new time became the real one, mistakenly relating further forward instead: so when it was three o’clock she thought ‘It’s really four’, but actually it would’ve, should’ve been two. Until, eventually, Nat had kept sleeping only to wake naturally with the sun and realise that whichever way it went before was wrong and she was now living in real real time. Sinking deeper than sleep.

s

Beneath the oak Bess waits impatient. Rising, as horsemen ride up, sensing this will be when everything changes: for her, and the Empire. No thought of her dear Robert Dudley who, out of sight behind, is wedging himself into an opening in the trunk of their meeting tree. The riders not yet close enough to see. He tucks himself further in, a near-grown boy burying his face beneath its crust. As Britain welcomes a new ruler to the throne, her Robert tastes bark dust in his mouth. Which was what the first Earl of Leicester, rumoured to have once been Bess’s master courtier, would remember on his deathbed decades later. When, in

- 176 - 1588, the Queen took up his old man’s hand. Holding it the way she ever had when she wanted something. Sweetly. A finger pressing prettily into the centre of his palm. ‘Remember?’ she whispers. As though he has forgotten! Much as he has oft wanted to forget. Yes, he remembers: her, a princess, pre-crowned; them, sweethearts riding ’cross English fields. She, whispering that he was her other self and he, seeing no need to agree, the truth of it pulsing in the vivid air between them. ‘I remember,’ he promises with a love as sharp as winter apples. Smiling, as he should’ve when she’d ordered him to the tower for marrying Letty. If he had not taken Bess’s jealousy seriously she might not have felt it so keenly; might’ve known she had no call to be so—Rob’s wife was never a substitute for his Princess–Prince. Thinks her Lord, hand growing cold.

s

All this is in my mind: every word I’ve written, every dream I’ve dredged—pushing past Elizabethan echoes to reach my own buried memories on the other side. All, within. That’s what everyone always said, and they might be right—not to mention the fact that I’m sure I contain way more besides. I know Dee’s muse as well as I know—or ever knew—any of my friends, even if the only commonality between Bess and me in 2010 is gender and age. And the only connection back in 1987 was how far we had or hadn’t gone. ‘Everything but,’ that’s what we three used to say. Until I’d done everything and, apparently, then some. Made a bloody baby. Given up the very friendship that was all I’d had, for a relationship I didn’t—and one I hadn’t, yet. Shifting on numb knees—how long have I been sitting here since slipping an odd book into a hidden nook?—I imagine Ed curled over a wax-less wick. Waiting for an unfuelled flame to spring into life. No longer not believing. He is lifting a warning finger as though he sees me, or some version of the same: his shhh is a message to remember as much as an instruction to keep shtum. I might be done with that past, but clearly it’s not nearly done with me.

- 177 - I stand, turn away from the inner vision, not wanting to see Ed walking towards a window. Not wanting to hear an earlier girl calling: ‘Come on N—’ As he, forever, falls. Instead I imagine, elsewhere, a hierophant’s hand raised in benediction. It is as though Dee—not here, home now—is about to write what will lead us all towards some maybe seen but neither understood nor ever welcomed end. His other hand would be pointing down: connecting heaven and earth just as the tarot’s hanged man does with the perfect plumbline of his suspended form. Both figures, in their own ways, bridging worlds. Hadn’t Liz said? I remember Lizzie saying how, in tarot, kings made things happen but the Queen made them real: we women worked like water, bringing life forth from a dormant earth. As if I needed anyone to remind me of the slumbering, sentient pool! I think I sense someone scribbling ‘multiplication’ in a margin, trying to pin down a mirror meaning in these repeated themes of reproduction and procreation with which I am threading our lives together even as my own ends. I’m remembering. John. Once upon a when, I couldn’t have imagined anything ever coming between Liz and me—let alone a boy. Now I had to wonder if I weren’t the one who’d opened the rift. Cracked it wide. The thought constricts. Had fatalistic thinking brought on friendship’s end? I am spinning through space: back and back and back. I am: dreaming— though it feels like I might be waking up, not falling into the deepest ever sleep. I see myself repeated and divided: captured and reflected by giant glass discs rotating in space. Flung so fucking far into the past that from far above the earth I see the salt-free meltwater that has slowed the advance of warmer weather, receding. Returning to an icy cap. Submerging beneath an ocean’s depth. So semispheres locked in opposition—as the harsh cold northern light holds back the warm dark wet of a rerainforested southern land—are reconnected. There is a sense of coming to, of almost, but not quite, consciousness. A state on the edge of states, a point on the verge of planes: a place of being-in-waiting. I, hover. I, haunt. Speaking, to myself, I sense another sometimes-self. Are my lines reeling it in? Or is it the one—The One—whispering these words that cleave souls together and cleft a soul apart?

- 178 - Whatever there is of me, here, focuses on the image shimmering in the flickering periphery of vision. Two becoming one. Becoming three! I home in on the circle of light. What I see, when I look—leaping from the book, lying in the writing, launched on the screen in this remembered scene—is myself. Not me me, but a seventeen-year-old she: Nat, on her back, spread on a rock. Not lost—as I will think I am after—but, for now, found. This is it then. That night that’s ever-present. I have only to unguard an opening—let the curtain drift—for a century to disappear. Time might have passed outside, but in the constant forest it’s standing still. And a child-like figure is trapped inside. What I wonder, when Johnno makes his awkward move as carefully as he can so Nat doesn’t know it’s not fingers but a hard prick knocking; what I wonder, when he opens her wholly so the next day it will seem as though he’s still within— and, contrarily, feel as though there’s a hole in her that was not there before; what I ponder, is what it would’ve been like to have stayed sealed forever. What might it mean never to give up that much-vaunted but rarely really treasured prize? What if the meant-to-be moment never came? Or came and never went and time stopped, still, on a coital cusp? John, I note, with an old woman’s inward eyes, is not so different from the girl beneath him, really. Just another human trying to connect any way he can. But she has her head turned away to peer across the clearing at a face hanging in space. Conjured by the grass, the dope, the out-smoke and her own tendency to over- dramaticise: a déjà-vued death mask. She will never know if it is real. She will never guess that it was me! Above that-me, then, there, is Jo’s father. Had I ever really doubted it? Even when I spent the next decade semi-believing some character from history had possessed me, had I really believed I could will an apparition into being? Who John could’ve been is something we will never know. I had no idea that a child could wrest me into the present. Jo and I grew up like siblings in my parent’s house. And, later, roommates in our own. Willing growing selves into being. Eventually the old craziness lost its hold as I assumed second place in my own life: learning that children never love the way they’re

- 179 - loved; accepting that was as it should be—the world would spin the wrong way if they did. Letting my old self go. I sigh, and with a pleasure akin to sinking into a tub of precious water when skin is parched by the out-zone and muscles ache with the weight of earth’s constant gravity, let myself stop. Begin to forget. I feel no fear, hovering on the edge of the forest: I am too aged, already as good as dead. And can see how the route my life took was perfect, because it was the one taken: our course is the only navigable channel. These circumstances arise, this scenario presents itself, again and again, and even when it appears otherwise—in terms of what comes after, or went before—the variations are just that: variations on a theme. There’s Ed, living on in John’s son Trebonianus, who pushes up against Jane’s heart so she cannot breathe when she hears the news of his last act. Everything already done was still to come. It’s only as I fade from the clearing—finally free, and moving on—that Lizzie emerges from the mist behind me. Stepping right through this shadow of self that my future skrying has cast back into our mutual past. How funny; it almost looks as though she’s travelled here from a time further down the line than mine— turning the attention of an upgraded app to this moment as though it is a pivot point for her story too. She wasn’t the one who went mad, was she? When I became sane. She wasn’t the one—on the stone, now—filled with some distant soul in a mystical act of transubstantiation? (And whose would that have been? Whose might that yet be?) The woman I became and want to continue having been—as well as the girl I once was; who has circled the clearing to watch the couple coupling from where I have been standing—wants to know not what happened then, but to determine what is happening now. That face, which a moment ago was hanging in the clearing, it’s me. Leaving. A star-filled space: two girls looking out through open eyes.

- 180 -

Dissertation:

‘Navigating the Art’

- 181 -

‘Cut that in Three, which Nature hath made One.’

—Dr John Dee, Testamentum Johannis Dee Philosophi Summi ad Johannem Gwynn

- 182 -

Introduction

In this dissertation I will examine the mobility of ‘literary fiction’ in relation to established writers who have produced unexpectedly genre-appropriating work. The consequences of this are significant in terms of the direction of fiction at this point in literary and ecological history, as genre currently exhibits a capacity to move between categories that might, in earlier times, have seemed exclusive. The category of literary fiction may be the product of consensus, but it is generally an unspoken, often unconscious, and frequently precarious consensus, and this is especially interesting given the situation of writers, readers and publishers today.8 Genre distinctions carry their own associations: popular or niche; high art or low brow. Literary fiction is also, first and foremost, recognised as not commercial genre fiction. ‘Big L Literature’ (to use Ken Gelder’s expression 9 ) has always assimilated ideas and forms from wherever writers find inspiration, but its works are, as Gérard Genette argues, ‘simultaneously (and intentionally) aesthetic and technical’.10 According to Genette, the key attribute of literary fiction is quality: of writing, of ideas, and of their ability to incorporate and experiment with those. Literary fiction aspires to the canonical, defined by Harold Bloom as ‘authoritative in our culture’.11 (His sense of who ‘we’ might be is, of course, open to question.) Bloom, a conservative critic, also writes of a distinctive ‘strangeness’ in canonical literature, ‘a mode of originality that either cannot be assimilated, or that so assimilates us that we cease to see it as strange’.12 He is not writing about genre, he is writing in defence of the canon, but his comments about strangeness are relevant to my argument about the current mobility of established generic forms and the increasing significance of science fiction and fantasy to literary fiction. The

- 183 - intersection between science fiction, fantasy and the literary is the zone of speculative or ‘slipstream’ fiction that I will consider in this dissertation. My research investigates instances where literary fiction incorporates and experiments with such strange generic formations. I became interested in the ‘outlier’ edges of conventional literature when I saw a phrase repeated in two rejection letters from different publishers for my first novel, The Asking Game. The difficulty, they said, would be in ‘how to position and market it’; this was, they explained, because it was both ‘literary’ and ‘speculative’: belonging to the ‘high’ art field but exhibiting ‘generic’ aspects.13 I agreed; it was also an accurate description of the books that engaged me, which I had not previously recognised as a particular type, since they operated on the cusp of literary fiction and other genres. All genres are mixed of course: detective and romance frequently intermingle the gothic, mystery and travel; fantasy and Young Adult fiction are so entwined some speculate the former is a subset of the latter.14 But reading this I explicitly realised that stories which crossed the literary and speculative genres held special interest for many readers. How, I wondered, do books cross fields and why do some writers mix genres? When might that pose a problem, and could it ever be a solution? This dissertation considers these questions.

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Chapter One: A Generic Proposal

The literary is generally accepted to be a field, as is popular fiction (presumably a force-field, rather than a geographical field; as a force field is potentially flexible or even movable). The speculative is recognised as a genre, whether a sub- or super-genre of science fiction—or, I will argue, a sub-genre of literary fiction, exhibiting science fiction aspects. In this chapter I will explore these terms as a foundation for a discussion of the movement between established and evolving uses of genre. Literary fiction may be ‘too inclusive of other modes and meanings, too dependent on other genres’ (as Mikhail Bakhtin described the novel15) to be one in its own right—its very definition might even be that is difficult to define. ‘What is literary fiction, after all?’ ponders Stephen Romei in The Australian earlier this year, when discussing the final instalment of the Macquarie study of the publishing industry where it was revealed—to no publisher’s surprise—that only a minority of respondents (forty-eight per cent) said they were ‘interested’ in it, with a bare fifteen per cent actually ‘reading’ it.16 Ken Gelder is speaking for both these groups when he describes works of literary fiction as ‘serious, contemplative, unique, “universal”.’ 17 Like Gérard Genette’s ‘intentionally aesthetic’ texts, or Harold Bloom’s ‘strangeness’, referenced in my introduction, these are imprecise terms. In the world of trade publishing any subtle understanding of a form as fluid or inclusive must be put to one side as books are marketed, shelved, and sold, according to simple, clearly signed categories. In bookstores literary fiction and science fiction are equivalent but visually distinct and geographically differentiated options. Publishers may be becoming more interested in books that work across fields—be they literary/popular, or the fiction/non-fiction

- 185 - categories; often intentionally, packaging one type of content in the form of another category for a range of commercial and socio-cultural or even aesthetic reasons, but they remain sceptical of those that truly mix and muddy conventions of ‘kind’,18 such as the science fiction (that also ‘works’ as ‘big L’ Literature) of James Tipree Jnr and Ursula Le Guin. Producers and distributors want generic clarity, knowing it is easier to market, and believing it is easier to make. A US publisher told me at the Adelaide Writers’ Week in 2004 that they quite consciously chose not to include or allude to any generic science fiction elements in the manufacturing and marketing of The Time Traveler’s Wife, 19 admitting that their strategy was to take what other countries call genre fiction and repackage it as literary. 20 Closer to home, temporally, as well as geographically, From the Wreck—which takes the true story of the survivor of an early Australian shipwreck and combines it with that of a traumatised refugee from another world—stakes its literary claim in similar ways, with an evocative cover image that looks more like historical fiction than science fiction and a blurb that only coyly refers to the otherworldly nature of its heroine, concealing her species and emphasising her femaleness.21 While the literary and speculative are two different genres, in terms of their identifying characteristic and status, they are seen as similar by non-specialist book buyers who recognise both these distinct types according to the same formal aspects of cover, format, fonts, category etc. This practical understanding is pragmatically useful in helping us analyse how books can belong to, or travel between them. Hybrid examples, such as the works of Kazuo Ishiguro, David Mitchell and Michel Faber, are not easily agreed to be either literary or speculative, exploiting elements of each but belonging finally to neither. The latest titles from each of these authors do not obviously fit a particular, popular type, yet they work so closely with certain aspects—in the content of their stories especially, rather than the style of their writing necessarily—that their literary identity may be compromised. This raises questions: what happens to the boundaries that are crossed, in such cases? If enough examples of this kind spring up, is the speculative/literary border breached and are categories on either side confused? Contemporary theorists such as John Frow convincingly argue that genres are not established according to some set of stable rules; ‘they have no essence’ in

- 186 - and of themselves;22 rather they are performed (and can be transformed) in the act of reading. This situates them in relation to a contemporary ‘hierarchy of value’23 that is not fixed but established at the moment of each engagement. Genre, then, is a question of identification according to current context.24 As that context changes so do readers’ relationships to genres, and our understanding of works, since that exists in relation to external realities. This is how readers, reviewers, theorists, critics, publishers and booksellers decide what is and isn’t literary.25 Genres also, in turn, have an impact on their readers. As Anis Bawarshi argues in ‘The genre function’, genre plays a role ‘in the constitution not only of texts but of their contexts, including the identities of those who write them and those who are represented within them’,27 which is particularly relevant in the case of the prestigious category of literary fiction and may be one reason why respondents to the Macquarie publishing industry study 28 said they were ‘interested’ in the genre. Although Frow is not directly concerned with the ‘formulaic’ and ‘conventional’29 sub-genres of the novel that interest me, his understanding of genre as a dynamic process, with ‘new genres ... constantly emerging and old ones changing their function’30 is what I am concerned with in this dissertation, which examines fluidity between the literary and the speculative. If we accept the idea of literary fiction as a (sub)genre of fiction, as the book trade and general population does,31 then I too am primarily concerned with ‘an investigation of the relations between genres’, 32 with border crossings and boundary books, which are sometimes contained within the literary catchment, and sometimes spill over. According to Frow, genres ‘classify objects in ways that are sometimes precise, sometimes fuzzy, but always sharper at the core than at the edges; and they belong to a system of kinds, and are meaningful only in terms of the shifting differences between then’.33 Genre, then, is not a stable taxonomy—although at any given moment, as Frow argues, it is ‘“stabilised enough” or “stabilised-for-now”’.34 That is, it is stable enough … stable enough for writers to find it, and confound it. This has consequences for readers, the publishing industry and bookselling community. Categorisation might delimit reading practices and limit writers, but I am proposing that it could also have the opposite effect: the more producers—be they

- 187 - authors or publishers—define a given genre, the easier and more alluring it is for writers and readers to challenge the confines of those definitions. In this way we all actively participate in the (re)construction of genres. The more distinctly the edges are drawn the more the generic core is clarified, which means more obvious opportunities for cross-genre forays. One way in which books signpost their allegiance to or cross between genres is through those aspects of the text that Genette terms ‘paratext’. These include the ‘publisher’s peritext’ of format and font, through the title and even the name of the author, to the ‘public epitext’ of interviews and reviews—in short, everything that ‘enables a text to become a book and to be offered as such to its readers and, more generally, to the public.’35 A close consideration of the more obvious of these illustrates how publishing practices clearly participate in what Frow calls the ‘doing’ of genre.36 Covers and author promotions position books and reading communities. While the agent’s or possibly author’s pitch and the book’s blurb may emphasise its ability to appeal to more than one type of reader, the publisher’s peritext must locate it within a chosen section or risk missing the anticipated market. 37 This necessary, if reductive and sometimes inaccurate, activity in turn reinforces the (albeit false) stability of that type. Even when genres are crossed, as they so frequently and perhaps inevitably are, since artists push boundaries for personal or political, aesthetic or experimental reasons, books are forced to fit a particular category from the moment they’re entered into TitlePage—the Australian book industry’s online price and availability database. The original ‘Harry Potter’ was often shelved at the back of bookstores where adult readers who were looking for it couldn’t find it. This prompted booksellers to ask publishers for a new, ‘grown-up’38 edition— resulting in not just a reprint with a different cover, but larger, easier to read, more expensive formats. Abridged illustrated versions were also produced for younger readers, showing the mobility of market-driven classification. BookScan, which tracks the sales gathered from participating retailers, does not recognise literary fiction as a category, just fiction. For the trade, the all- important distinction is between fiction and nonfiction: producers and consumers recognise these as the two main types of writing, which must be manufactured and marketed as essentially distinct and absolutely differentiated. 39 In fact,

- 188 - nonfiction is often imaginatively infected—or vulnerable to deliberate misclassification, as in the case of James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces40—just as realistic literary fiction is frequently informed by that core nonfiction form, memoir. Not only are there no subcategories for fiction, but in the annual Books in Print catalogue, where publishers enter general text descriptions for all new books, titles that are ‘clearly’ science fiction are frequently called fantasy, according to author and publisher David Henley, 41 citing the hugely popular ‘Hunger Games’ series as an example. Others never mention their generic aspects. An example of this intentional miscategorisation is The Time Traveler’s Wife.

The genre-crosser’s life

The Time Traveler’s Wife42 is an elegy on love and loss in which a man travels in time, returning to his more temporally conventional lover periodically. It bears comparison with James Tiptree Jnr’s short story ‘Forever to a Hudson Bay Blanket’, which similarly uses time travel to explore the intermingling of love and loss. In particularly, it is worth taking a closer look at the paratextual aspects that clearly signpost one book as science fiction (of a certain era, admittedly) and the other as literary fiction—if, perhaps, in a more middlebrow than Gelder’s ‘Big L’ Literature. While time is certainly a factor in these cover designs, it is fascinating how similar identifiers can still be seen today. The cover of the original edition of The Time Traveler’s Wife43 (Figure 1), in all territories, is a tinted, slightly blurred photograph of the kind strongly associated with literary books—in line with the poetic prose inside. There are a number ways in which Ten Thousand Light Years from Home44 (Figure 2), which contains the tale of Tiptree’s time-travelling lovers, ensured Tiptree’s work was shelved as science fiction, at the other end of bookstores, but her story too culminates in a wife being left alone to wait a lifetime for a brief, longed-for reunion with her lover—although these scenes are evoked in quite a different register: Tiptree’s tone is laced with sharp humour, which only seems to increase the pathos, whereas Audrey Niffenegger’s intensity risks diminishing our emotional response it is so overwritten. The spaceship front and centre is clearly stamps the collection as science fiction, but the fonts of each book also fit their respective generic conventions: futuristic for Tiptree; an elegant serif, pseudo-

- 189 - handwritten font for Niffenegger. Other textual aspects are further elements to be manipulated in order to reach the right market: James Tiptree Jnr is the pen name of Alice B Sheldon, while Niffenegger has ‘shout-lines’ from tabloid papers that speak to the readers of other ‘international bestsellers’ (i.e. mass-market blockbuster fiction): for the Australian edition, The Daily Telegraph; for the UK, The Daily Express; and for the US, The Chicago Tribune. And then there are the epitextual aspects, all of which worked together with an aggressive marketing campaign which saw Niffenegger’s book debut on the New York Times bestseller list; her endorsement on The Today Show by Scott Turow had a huge impact on her novel’s success. For all the effort publishers invest, in time and money, in design and publicity, word-of-mouth still has the biggest effect in terms of generating sales, and programs such as Oprah and The Today Show are instrumental in creating and perpetuating those conversations.

FICURE 2 As well as the directed marketing (which includes the paratextual packaging and epitextual discussion), could another reason why Niffenegger’s title was received as literary be simply a matter of context? In the same decade that Tiptree’s collection appeared another science fiction writer, Joanna Russ, published an article on ‘The wearing out of genre materials’ in which she proposed that scenes, or plots, pass through three distinct stages as they’re used, reused and possibly abused: innocence, plausibility and decadence. 45 Firstly there is the simple and naive stage of novelty, of the introduction of a marvel; then the situation makes concessions to logic and the emphasis is on explanation; finally

- 190 - the ‘genre construct’, ‘the motif or scene or thrilling action for whose sake whole stories were once written’, becomes either a ritual, a stylised convention, or an image or metaphor ‘in something else’.46 This describes what has happened to these lovers who time-travel within their own lives: the more recent book has reworked the seventies story, worked it in, or into, a new ‘mode’.47 The central science fiction paradox has matured into a metaphorical device to explore and express a love that transcends life, and time, in a work of literary fiction. It is not only the publisher’s peritext that makes The Time Traveler’s Wife genre-crossing or field-distorting. We also recognise its thematic content as literary, albeit based on a story straight from science fiction. While Niffenegger’s novel offers a narrative traction generally associated with genre, the poetic prose and grand emotions align the writing with more literary conventions. Some, such as science fiction writer and academic Adam Roberts (author of a history of the genre, as well as the title on the genre in the ‘New Critical Idiom’ series48), may disagree—genre is, after all, dependent on the reading, and academics are particularly active and contrary readers—but reviews and accolades, and even his own description of the novel as ‘a conventional love story that uses its SF novum as garnish to an otherwise rather ordinary tale’ 49 suggests that most concur. Michelle Griffin described time-travelling Henry in The Age as ‘custom-designed for the fantasy lives of bookish ladies’50 and apparently the US Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction—a source as far away as we can imagine in terms of genre worlds—agreed, 51 saying the emotional depth of the characters was one of Niffenegger’s greatest achievements. To try to identify literary aspects in The Time Traveler’s Wife, be they language and tone, ‘novel’ mode, interest in character depth and aesthetic poetics, or even linguistic and thematic use of metaphor etc., is a fraught exercise that risks taking the book out of the very context that affirms and confirms its classification. Perhaps we should resist assigning The Time Traveler’s Wife to the literary genre, with Russ’s ‘decadent’ or exhausted science fiction motif as its dominant metaphor, and instead consider it as an example of another, hybrid form. Martin Amis argues that ‘even the best kind of popular novel just comes straight at you; you have no conversation with a popular novel.’52 To use Amis’s image, might a literary ‘conversation’ be coming straight at us in work that is generic and

- 191 - ultimately received as ‘serious, contemplative, unique, universal’? 53 Could the literary/speculative border be the birthplace of a new genus? This is one way in which genres are conceived: as the offspring of established lineages. The border of literature and life-stories has seeded ‘fake’ autobiographies (such as those of JT Leroy, James Frey and Norma Khouri); the boundary between literature and Young Adult writing has given rise to first the ‘crossover’ category, and then ‘New Adult’.54 There is a strong historical precedent for works emerging at or out of the fertile intersection of the now comparatively well-established category of ‘science fiction’55 and the literary—although this may have been truer in the case of HG Wells, when literature was less focused on first- person, present-tense, semi-autobiographical narratives of self, or even in the time of JG Ballard when New Wave science fiction writers were more likely to jettison generic narrative forms and plots.56 Just as classification is not necessarily productive, neither is re- or new classifications. Whether undertaken by readers, (consciously or not), reading communities and academics, or publishers (who need categorisations and comparisons in order to convince acquisitions meetings, as well as clone success), trying to define genres may result in reinforcing borders that are in the process of being redrawn—redefining the very boundaries whose movement has prompted the defensive shoring up of genre walls. To return to Frow, ‘the point, in any case, is not to assign [the example] to one or more genres, but rather to notice its provocation of the question about what kind of thing it is, a provocation which, however forcefully it unsettles generic norms, never takes us to some point beyond that question’.57 Attempting to fix something that is fluid and constantly in flux may unintentionally but productively identify new opportunities for powerful creative transgressions. If genres only have meaning in terms of the shifting differences between them, as Frow argues, then genre classification relies on knowing other genres, and having the reading confidence to respond to ‘provocation’.58 This is equally, especially, true when it comes to the ‘conversation’—to continue Amis’s image— of literary fiction. Instead of pursuing the hybrid idea, then, I would like to use Jacques Derrida’s ‘Law of genre’59 to propose that texts such as The Time Traveler’s Wife, which unsettle generic norms and are ‘impurely’ literary, might be—because

- 192 - of this, not despite it—literary, too; they might even be worth recognising as the most literary of all.60 The attribution of popular genre aspects is an established part of literary reception, but what is the effect of such influences and ideas? Do they dilute the core category? Could this be one reason why ‘the literary paradigm’ is in decline, as critics such as Mark Davis have argued?61 Davis locates the reason for the industry’s diminishing emphasis as not only to do with changes in literary taste, but deregulation and the rise of a global information economy. As publishers have been absorbed into global media corporations, and the financial support they have traditionally received for works of agreed cultural value has been withdrawn, they have changed their approach to risk management, ‘searching for certainty in stable formulas’.62 Instead of being funded, and ‘the cornerstone of the industry’s self-perception’,63 literary fiction has become but ‘one genre among many’.64 The use, misuse and abuse of generic aspects—which literary fiction has always done, and done well, such that it might even be seen as a defining characteristic of that genre—may be occurring even more, now, in response to what Davis has identified as literary fiction’s loss of special status. Russ admits with refreshing honesty65 that ‘artists usually pay a great deal of attention to “low” culture, and when they find low culture that interests them they pay it the supreme compliment of stealing it’. 66 According to her model popular genre writers introduce new marvels, and explore their plausibility, before they're assimilated, adopted or ‘stolen’ by the dominant mode. Daniel Defoe is by no means the only writer to have been inspired by non-literary texts, in his case the confessions of the condemned.67 Richard Flanagan has written recently in The Monthly of ‘an extraordinary trove of anonymous Australian short stories’; the official record of refugee testimonies that he describes as a wake-up call—going on to describe ‘reality [as] expressly the realm of power, and the rest of us become asylum seekers camped on its borders.’68 Frow, too, sees genre as ‘the driving force of change in the literary field’,69 arguing that genres test the limits—of shared values and who we are, as well as of writing and reading practices. But if we continue to read the literary as a genre—just a genre, another genre—then it must share the generic aspects we’ve been charting here: a fundamental instability (stabilised enough always meaning relatively unstable);

- 193 - the ability to be crossed; and perhaps even a particular susceptibility to a delightful impurity.70 Derrida points out that any law inevitably contains its opposite, unavoidably calling up the counter-law. That ‘principle of contamination’71—the law of impurity—doesn’t only apply to the literary genre: literary fiction is also a driving force of change for other fictions, even if they absorb aspects of it less consciously, or perform them less perfectly. Literary fiction, as examples such as The Time Traveler’s Wife demonstrate, inspires other works, as well as drawing inspiration from them.

A generic solution

The edges of genres are lines just begging to be crossed, as demonstrated by the literary works under discussion in this dissertation.72 ‘As soon as the word “genre” is sounded’, writes Derrida, ‘as soon as it is heard, as soon as one attempts to conceive it, a limit is drawn’;73 it is one which producers and consumers alike may wish to redraw. If we define a genre, if we can agree what constitutes it, we are as good as sounding a challenge. Our very consensus may prove, as Russ would see it, that the ‘material’ in question is already ‘exhausted’ and worn out. This may be true for all sub-genres of the novel, from the literary to the less so: any rule is at once a disabler and an enabler, a fence for some and for others, a new frontier to explore. According to Derrida, the law of genre is ultimately ‘a principle of contamination, a law of impurity, a parasitical economy’,74 and any intermixing ‘by accident or through transgression, by mistake or through a lapse ... should confirm, since, after all, we are speaking of “mixing”, the essential purity of their identity’.75 The idea of purity is highly questionable for such an unstable entity, which is why it is so important that we conceive of it as an impurity. This suggests that the literary border is never bent by ‘impure’ books like The Time Traveler’s Wife, though nor do those novels bend themselves around it—rather books like these show the literary genre has no limits other than those we bring to the text, which are always directed, and redirected, by our context and its paratext. If works that transgress borders simultaneously lie closest to the Frowian ‘core’, then ‘the literary’ might be made up of or best manifest in precisely such

- 194 - genre-crossing texts as The Time Traveler’s Wife—which ‘participate’ without finally belonging, ‘take part in’ while not fully being part of;76 in this case, the literary and speculative categories. In the Derridean scenario ‘the boundary of the set comes to form, by invagination, an internal pocket larger than the whole’.77 The ‘cross’ types on the outer rims are not only experimental and ‘intentionally aesthetic’, fulfilling Genette’s requirement of literary fiction, but can be recognised as the penultimate experimental and aesthetic type. I am not the first reader to consider whether speculative fiction might be the field that ‘gathers together and keeps from closing’, 78 containing the literary as but one set within it. Doris Lessing has suggested that ‘the current mode of “realistic” fiction of the last 200 years is the aberration and that fantastic literature is the mainstream which has never run dry and still flows freely.’79 This view was expressed even earlier by John W Campbell (editor of science fiction magazine Astounding) in 1948 when he said that “‘mainstream literature’ is actually a special subgroup of the field of science fiction—for science fiction deals with all places in the Universe, and all times in Eternity, so the literature of the here-and-now is, truly, a subset of science fiction.’ 80 The category, after all, contains everything except realism—which surely makes it the more obvious superset than the common, popular, current iteration of the literary genre. What science fiction is, of course, is as unclear as every other genre—the difficulty of describing common attributes may even be particularly true of this category that is so concerned with change, and the imagined advent and impact of new technologies. Echoing the other theorists discussed here, Anthony Wolk says ‘you do, in fact, pretty much know what science fiction is’,81 pointing out that it is the boundaries—which demark what is not science fiction; mark what is literary—that stand in need of definition. This is doubly true because it is there that the binding, defining lines are drawn. Le Guin has hypothesised that the very origin of storytelling came from retelling dreams82—or, perhaps, explaining the universe—but it is Darko Suvin’s conception of science fiction as the literature of ‘cognitive estrangement’ that she is more well known for disseminating. According to that common conception, science fiction offers a different world,

- 195 - whether an alternative present, imagined past or projected future, that gives readers a new perspective from which to view their own. The idea that literary fiction is the subset of a more ‘unreal’ form may not be new, but the time might be ripe for us to entertain it now as publishing charts a fraught course through the perfect storm of globalisation, digitisation and the very real threat of disintermediation. Literary fiction has borne the brunt of these pressures, and responded by mutating and adapting: in the case of China Miéville’s realistic ‘litfic’,83 by taking up aspects of more popular non- and mass-market middlebrow fiction; in examples of speculative fiction, by extending itself into the new world of Sterling’s ‘slipstream’.84 It is the latter’s list of ambitious, aesthetic novels—which engage us in a provocative conversation—that prompt me to wonder whether they really are the newest off-shoot of an exhausted genre in decline, or whether they might be evidence of literary fiction’s return to its essentially fantastic roots.

A pragmatic conclusion

According to Davis we are witness to a literary crisis of sorts:85 popular fiction tops sales lists to the detriment of local, more ‘mixed’ and less-mainstream authors. Australian publishers’ aversion to risk—post-GFC and the collapse of the largest local bookselling chain Angus & Robertson—means they are less likely than ever to be looking for books that work across categories, and potentially work well in none. Their focus on generic markets has further narrowed the field, to the frustration of many writers and readers, but while the decline of the literary paradigm supports my argument that literary fiction is, as Davis says, ‘one genre among many’, it is hardly on the way out. While some familiar versions may be showing signs of exhaustion, other aspects are reappearing as if in conversation, in conversations taken up by new voices. Of course publishing itself, and genre publishing in particular, is by its very nature responsible for exactly that Derridean ‘repetition’ that has resulted in the state where we cannot distinguish with rigour between the original concept and its copy; between Tiptree’s ‘innocent’ motif and Niffenegger’s ‘decadent’ metaphor, according to Russ’s construction. But repetition is also a means by which disruptive anomalies are engendered. While genre is a theoretical approach

- 196 - to understanding the relationships between literary and not-so-literary texts—as well as understanding reading communities and publishing practices— reconceiving genres is one way of investigating and articulating changing contexts and perhaps even proposing a practical solution to the dire state Davis describes. Publishers are already investing in popular alternatives, with new commercial imprints launching: Bonnier’s Echo, Black Inc’s Nero, as well as Pan Macmillan’s failed digital publishing experiment Momentum. Academic interest—as evidenced in the ARC-funded Genre Worlds project—is following. General fiction readers may be more curious and inclusive than catalogues and commissioning editors give them credit for, as the success of books like The Time Traveler’s Wife surely prove. But what works overseas does not necessarily get the same chance here: the Australian book industry is commercially a very small and highly competitive market, dominated by a handful of multinational companies that import their parent company’s titles and rely on BookScan to make local publishing decisions. Not only does the sales tracking system fail to categorise books as literary, its data doesn’t cover the majority of independent booksellers—the main outlet for such fiction.86 This is why it has been identified by Malcolm Knox87 as responsible for the declining sales—and resultant drop-off in production—of literary fiction. The difficulties that face the most easily identifiable examples of what Gelder describes as ‘big L’ Literature only increase when it comes to publishing literary fiction that is even less clearly categorisable. Works that could be the saving grace of the genre—the driving force of transformation: fantastic, speculative or science-inspired provocations that are not only imaginative, but aesthetically and intelligently so—offer readers and writers the opportunity to be educated, enlightened and entertained. Like literary fiction, ‘science fiction is less a genre ... than an ongoing discussion’,88 which writers and publishers, as well as readers and academics, participate in. Books that cross the space between the literary section of the bookstore and other shelves, such as those of Ishiguro, Mitchell and Faber which I consider in the following chapters, have more to offer us than the history of their generic parts or the future of their hybrid natures. At once unique, but with familiar aspects, they draw us in—and out—by reflecting

- 197 - and refracting our radically changed (environmentally, politically, technically) and changing ‘unreal’ reality.

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Chapter Two: The Buried Genre

Genre is widely acknowledged as flexible, responding to the historical context of the imaginative work in question. A current interest in speculative novels with literary foundations, exemplified by Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant,89 among other works, indicates a movement away from the literary realism of Jonathan Franzen and Zadie Smith into imaginative territory which may prove liberating and has in fact been revelatory for contemporary novelists such as myself. Of course, as with all genre matters, the boundaries are indistinct. James Wood argues that ‘everything flows from the real, including the beautiful deformations of the real; it is realism that allows surrealism, magic realism, fantasy, dream and so on.’90 Some critics, as I have indicated in my introduction, argue that everything flows from the fantastic. What is clear is that the movement between the ‘real’— however that might be defined—and the speculative is currently extremely significant and a source of literary energy and inspiration. My own interests as a novelist have always been generically flexible: while I read, write and teach literary fiction, I take great pleasure in popular forms that more obviously propel writers and more commercially compel readers. In particular, I am interested in books that introduce an idea—a fantastic or scientific concept—that seems, at least fleetingly, to be a possible, literal, answer to the questions raised by the text. My first novel, The Asking Game, begins as a detective story set in a futuristic Sydney. The main character, Alice, takes a road trip deep into the Australian desert—back to the town where she was born. As she travels Alice sheds her adopted identities and gives herself over to strange dreams that seem more like memories. Indeed, that is what they turn out to be, although they are not

- 199 - her own: Alice is remembering her sister Lucy’s childhood because she is her sister’s clone. Alice was cloned to be a bone marrow match for Lucy. As well as inheriting her sister’s DNA, she has inherited her memories, which include dying from leukaemia. The Asking Game is a novel about a fraught relationship between two sisters, which is explained—and ultimately understood—by extending current scientific knowledge into the realm of fantasy. In this way the use of an imaginative non-realist genre illuminates the tensions of an irresolute family relationship. The capacity of science fiction to create strangeness that enables us to see the familiar anew means it has much to recommend it to any exploration of the traditional concerns of literary realism, such as familial relationships and identity formation. The Art of Navigation similarly uses aspects of fantasy and science fiction to understand and explore intergenerational inheritance and the restless search for connection—and explanation of connections that cannot be understood logically, or through the lens of realism—across time and space. In a situation such as the one experienced by the main character, Nat, who is diagnosed with psychosis, multiple possibilities are mobilised by the speculative genre. A realist text does not allow the imaginative scope that I required to realise this work. In The Buried Giant Ishiguro controversially deploys speculative fiction as a way of understanding time, history and human interconnection. Ishiguro insists on a continuity of English history and habitation, at one point writing that ‘the view before them [Axl and Beatrice] that morning may not have differed so greatly from one to be had from the high windows of an English country house today’.91 However, Ishiguro’s England in The Buried Giant is extraordinarily remote, inhabited by ogres, pixies, decrepit chivalry and a dragon called Querig. This is very different to the view we might hold of England today. Axl and Beatrice, the elderly Briton couple at the centre of The Buried Giant, are living in a hollowed hill not long after the time of King Arthur. Already we are far from conventional realism. Their cave-like room is away from the entrance to the warren, far from the light, and they are clearly not valued members of their small community. Something great is at stake here, but we don’t know what it is for a long time. The actual story is deliberately obscure, but gradually clues emerge: people are having trouble remembering things. Axl notices this, and when

- 200 - Beatrice finally persuades him that they should go and see their son (whom they think is in a nearby village, though sometimes they are not sure that they actually have a son, and the reader suspects—rightly—that he is dead) their journey begins. Like Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled, The Buried Giant is frequently unclear or even contradictory. The reader is drawn deeper and deeper into a fantastic world until we are not surprised to find a sleeping dragon at its centre, breathing out a spell of forgetting. We are never quite sure where Ishiguro will take this story that seems to be a fable; little more than a fairytale. It is an extremely unusual book and a radical shift—even for Ishiguro, master of so many styles that have complex generic affiliation (as I will discuss later in this chapter). Ishiguro’s writing is muted, discursive, full of explicit ‘telling’ as the third-person narrator clearly, at least in the beginning, addresses a contemporary reader directly. It is as if Modernism, with its urban settings and complex characters full of depth and interiority, had never happened. The reception of The Buried Giant has in many ways been more interesting than the book itself. There is a demonstrable concern with how to categorise it. In an interview in The New York Times Ishiguro betrays an obvious anxiety about its being read as generic: ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen,’ he confessed the month before the book’s release. ‘Will readers follow me into this? … Are they going to say this is fantasy?’92 (It is probably not irrelevant that Ishiguro said this to The New York Times—the readership of which may be likely to have a preference for ‘straight’ literary fiction. As Jacques Derrida and John Frow have shown, genre is constructed, for better and worse, in the moment of reader recognition and Ishiguro is well aware of his readership.) The timing of Ishiguro’s comment is worth noting too: the author was considering his book as a product; holding, in his mind at least, the published artifact that no longer had the infinite potential of the manuscript. Just as every choice made in writing—every sentence, scene, paragraph and plot twist—makes the resultant work one thing and not something else, so the publisher’s peritextual contribution had by this stage also been brought to bear, further locking down the final, finished form. The cover of the initial edition makes no reference to dragons or fantasy, it is marketed as historical: ‘The Romans have long since departed, and

- 201 - Britain is steadily declining into ruin’; and a romance, Axl and Beatrice discover ‘forgotten corners of their love for one another’. The genres of romance and historical fiction—or aspects of them—certainly seem more palatable from a marketing point of view than fantasy. However, it is the fantastic elements that enable Ishiguro to become imaginatively expansive about the complexity inherent in the connection between his characters and the trauma of induced memory loss. This reinforces my point about the capacity of cross-genre works at the same time as it provides evidence of uneasiness about genre transgression. Ursula Le Guin, famous for having identified Margaret Atwood as a science fiction writer in her 2009 review of The Year of the Flood, leapt to the defence of fantasy, pointing out in a response to Ishiguro’s interview that ‘it appears the author takes the word for an insult.’93 She writes that The Buried Giant fails as fantasy, since ‘no writer can successfully use the “surface elements” [as Ishiguro called them in the article in The New York Times] of a literary genre—far less its profound capacities—for a serious purpose, while despising it to the point of fearing identification with it.’ 94 Though we might beg to differ about how important authorial intention or identification is in the creation of genre works, the point is made, again, that literary fiction is likely to be received as high art while genre fiction is, in Le Guin’s terms, ‘ghetto’ low. Many were surprised by the passion brought to this conversation: was a distinction between literary and fantasy genres relevant? Her article even seems to suggest, perhaps unintentionally, that fantasy is more ‘shunned’ than science fiction—which is consistent with the shameful memory Ishiguro shares with The New York Times: his wife had said ‘none of this [The Buried Giant] can be seen by anybody.’ The reasons for her reservations are not specified but, taken in conjunction with the publisher’s careful packaging and Ishiguro’s own concerns about whether readers would ‘follow him’ into this fantastic world, genre concerns are likely to predominate.

From the ‘ghetto’

Genre is conventionally and contentiously gendered and may also be age specific. Crime fiction is often marketed as ‘masculine’, as though its readership is exclusively male and its writers suitably hardboiled—though these clichés have

- 202 - long been disrupted, in Australia by authors such as Jan McKemmish and Emily McGuire. Women have been a key force in detective fiction since its inception, from Agatha Christie to Patricia Highsmith they have defined and redefined the genre to great acclaim and bestselling popularity. The Library of America’s two- volume Women Crime Writers (2015) collects classic noir thrillers by women crime writers from the 40s and 50s, while the 70s and 80s saw further diversification in terms of race and class as well as feminist politics. Not all of the original titles have stayed in circulation – there are often attempts to rediscover lost sisters, by researchers as well as publishers looking to cultivate new or capitalise on old readers – and those who have are often identified as classics rather than by their genre association. Mary Shelley, often credited with founding science fiction and horror, could also be claimed as the first suspense writer. Perhaps the most interesting recent development is the replacement of the hardboiled ‘dick’ with the ‘girl’ books (Gone Girl, Girl on a Train). Rather than being identified primarily by the gender of their readers or writers, though certainly to some extent those associations persist, fantasy and science fiction are perhaps more closely—and potentially negatively—associated with Young Adult readers. Thomas Disch, in his confessional article ‘The embarrassments of science-fiction’,95 claims that science fiction is ‘a branch of children’s literature’ appealing first and foremost to teenage boys. (It is easy— even if erroneous—for him to then argue that those who keep reading, who become lifelong fans, are readers who fail to mature.) This like the connection between crime fiction and masculinity, this has been substantially challenged, especially by feminist writers such as James Tiptree Jnr and Ursula Le Guin. The literary as a category has quite different associations and may appear more flexible and even expansive to a serious (possibly male, likely well-educated) writer, but my argument is that genre forms might be enabling rather than restrictive for literary producers. In the reception of The Buried Giant we see Ishiguro’s fear of a possible stigma against speculative and perhaps specifically fantasy fiction, which raises the question of why he uses this genre at all. It is my conviction that fantasy makes things possible that would be impossible in a realist novel—not just at the level of plot, or form, but in terms of reader engagement and writerly exploration.

- 203 - In Ishiguro’s latest book Britons and Saxons are afflicted by a collective spell of forgetting. The dragon Querig has been made to cast this spell because it is the only way these two warring peoples can coexist. The ageing knights and old women Axl and Beatrice represent cannot forgive the violence and invasion of Arthurian Britain, so they must be made to forget in order to live in peace. It is clearly a compromised and uncomfortable life. The conceit is consistent with Young Adult fantasy motifs, such as those used by JRR Tolkein—whose Middle Earth is not so far removed from the Arthurian Britain of Rosemary Sutcliff and TH White. Ishiguro uses this fantastic idea to capture and communicate a powerful insight into our own current state of climate change denial. The degraded landscape Axl and Beatrice journey through is the world around us: an ecologically ravaged country damaged by battles we no longer remember; populated by the walking wounded and near-dead knights, as well as mythical and mutant creatures such as ogres and pixies. The slumbering female dragon, bound by King Arthur’s knights, may represent Mother Earth: towards the end of the story she even adopts the voice of a Saxon boy’s mother. When our loving couple start out on their journey we long for the mist to lift. By the end of the book we dread it, aware of the horror that will transpire when Querig is killed. As with all good quest narratives, the ‘grail’ itself—the quest to kill the dragon, which has overtaken the journey to see the old couple’s son—is compromised. Readers are not the only ones who may ask how inseparable this foolish but clearly fond couple is: it is a question that preoccupies Axl and Beatrice themselves. ‘Are you still there, Axl? Still here, princess’,96 they ask and answer in a ritualistic exchange. The Buried Giant is concerned not only with generational and national forgetfulness; it explores this idea on a smaller scale. (Ishiguro’s other books, such as The Unconsoled, are also concerned with an inability to remember. Never Let Me Go features child clones who know nothing of the world outside the walls of their school and The Remains of the Day has a main character who cannot see beyond the Great House.) Axl continually reassures his ‘princess’ that ‘the feeling in my heart for you will be there just the same, no matter what I remember or forget’.97 At the end of the book he tells the boatman—who, it has become clear, is there to ferry them to the island of the dead—that ‘black shadows make part of its [an old couple’s love] whole’.98 Their personal memories include

- 204 - betrayal and tragedy—‘black shadows’ that mirror the country’s dark history— and his reassurance encompasses more than an obliteration of impending death. If Ishiguro’s objective is to explore the ‘corners’ of love, as the publisher’s back-cover blurb suggests, why didn’t he write a conventional romance? Imaginative genres offer revelatory possibilities that realist forms struggle to realise. While it is hard if not impossible for readers to predict specific events in a fantastic journey, the predictability of such quest narratives is part of their pleasure, even if we cannot anticipate the precise conclusion of such a unique and distinct fiction. Writers such as Ishiguro, and myself, take up generic forms because they offer readers the possibility of ‘unreal’ revelations that create imaginative engagement and intellectual satisfaction. In the case of The Buried Giant many readers ultimately found the experience of reading the book unsatisfactory—whether because Ishiguro resists giving clear analogies, so the significance of characters such as the boatman only gradually becomes evident, or because, as Neil Gaiman wrote in his review in The New York Times, we are sure there is an ‘allegory waiting like an ogre in the mist’99. (‘Can one write a successful novel about people who can’t recall anything?’100 ponders James Wood in his scathing New Yorker review.) Whether this tension is a source of pleasure or frustration may depend on reader expectations and particularly the genre readers expect when they read a book which has not, in terms of the cover, signified that the content will include fantasy. ‘Fantasy is a tool of the storyteller,’ writes Gaiman, and Ishiguro applies it to carve a path towards what cannot be said and what is unable to be understood in realistic terms. He has produced a work that is, in Derridean terms, ‘impurely’ literary and risks alienating both literary and fantasy readers. Ishiguro may be experimenting with genre fiction not only because of the specific advantages a speculative exploration presents, but because when readers recognise a familiar non-realist storytelling form they are more likely to suspend disbelief. Crime fiction, gritty as it is, does not reflect the reality of most of its readers’ lives. The same could be said of romance. In his review in The Sydney Morning Herald Andrew Riemer says ‘there may be no point [to The Buried Giant] besides the pleasures of storytelling.’101 If he is correct, the pleasures here lie in the quest narrative and accompanying romance. Riemer speculates that one of the

- 205 - reasons Ishiguro utilises Arthurian legends, which are so nostalgic and familiar to English readers, is because of Ishiguro’s own history as an emigrant. His interest in all things British is similarly evident in his investigation of the class system in The Remains of the Day. Riemer argues that this immigrant’s perspective is also why Ishiguro renders the Arthurian legend ‘fundamentally strange’, according to Riemer, though he doesn’t suggest that this is an intentional rendering. For an ‘outsider’ such as Ishiguro—to adopt Reimer’s description—speculative fiction is the perfect means to capture and convey that very sense of estrangement Le Guin has identified as its ‘characteristic gesture’, that I would argue is as deliberate as decision as his undeveloped English mythology. The spell of forgetting is not only a metaphor for our blindness to war and environmental catastrophe, but a description of the displaced people we might become: adrift from our heritage, alienated from those we love. Ishiguro, responding to correspondence regarding his interview in The New York Times, claims that he is on the side ‘of the pixies and dragons’.102 He adds that ‘genre walls should be porous if not non-existent.’ However ‘should be’ can also be read as acknowledgement that genre walls are not, at present, ‘porous’ or ‘non-existent’. They are clearly important to publishers and reviewers. The debate surrounding The Buried Giant illustrates the consequence of genre usage. As Kim Wilkins concludes in ‘Popular genres and the Australian literary community: the case of fantasy fiction’ ‘genres are not inherent in texts but are partly formed in … public discourse’.104 Literary fiction is also tacitly defined, through a discussion around what it is not. Ken Gelder writes that popular fiction is ‘literature’s Other, the thing literature despises even though it needs it to be, well, literary’,105 but the literary may also be genre’s Other, differentiated through a practical process of dis-identification, as it is excluded from bookseller’s science fiction shelves and speculative award shortlists and has no place on fan-fiction communities’ recommendations and review sites.

Slipping between streams

For Ishiguro, genre is clearly not what his stories are about, even if it may be how he goes about telling them. The Unconsoled could be called magic realism; When We Were Orphans may be classified as detective; Never Let Me Go as science fiction;

- 206 - The Remains of the Day as historic romance; A Pale View of the Hills as gothic. The same could be said of Le Guin—whose membership of the genre community she aligns herself with is not uncomplicated. She too has spoken of fantasy as a tool, useful ‘for embodying and examining the real difference between good and evil’.106 She fashions that genre, and science fiction, to a particular purpose, in her case, frequently feminist. The way Ishiguro uses elements of fantasy to great effect in The Buried Giant is comparable to Le Guin’s own writing practices, not only in her more obviously genre works, such as The Dispossessed and The Left-hand of Darkness, but arguably even in her more Young Adult trilogy ‘The Wizard of Earthsea’: ‘Chief among its concerns are morality, identity and power,’ writes fellow author David Mitchell. 107 He describes ‘Le Guin’s thumbnail sketches contain[ing] the psychological depth of oil paintings’, contradicting the idea that fantasy—or, indeed, any popular genre—must necessarily produce shallow writing. In my own writing practice The Buried Giant is inspirational because I too am writing a fantasy with an identifiable location, in my case the Dandenongs—a rainforest on the outskirts of Melbourne. The history of the setting is apparent in the text, but the evergreen forest and specifically the mystical pool become a portal to another world which features identifiable characters from English history. The Art of Navigation could not have proceeded without Ishiguro’s complex cross-genre work where Gérard Genette’s ‘intentionally aesthetic’ aspects, which identify Ishiguro’s books as belonging to Ken Gelder’s ‘big L’ literary fiction, work with motifs from fantasy, Young Adult fiction, mythology and romance. ‘Fantasy plus literary fiction can achieve things that frank blank realism can’t’,108 Mitchell told The New York Times when he was contacted for background to Ishiguro’s interview; adding that he hoped The Buried Giant would ‘de- stigmatise’ fantasy. There appears to be comparatively little stigma attached to historical fiction or romance, or indeed the other genres used by Ishiguro before: magic realist, detective fiction, science fiction and the gothic. This discussion of The Buried Giant argues that the conventions of fantasy are of great assistance in forcefully imagining a world in the aftermath of war and environmental disaster. Furthermore there may be greater resistance to some popular genres than others.

- 207 - To appreciate what Ishiguro is doing and to recognise how a force is being applied to the current literary mode is to recognise that all genres—including the literary—are permeable and, in John Frow’s terms, are only ever ‘stabilised enough’ and appreciate that perhaps literary fiction is not that ‘stabilised-for- now’.109

- 208 -

Chapter Three: At Home in a Genre House

David Mitchell’s novella Slade House,110 published as a book in 2015, began as a Twitter story written from the point of view of an adolescent boy who accompanies his mother to clean an old house. The initial ‘manuscript’ exemplifies a movement well beyond the boundaries of conventional publishing: one that challenges received wisdom about literary origins just as the text itself challenges genre boundaries. Slade House seems a particularly apt example of how digital developments and the rising popularity of social media might be facilitating literary fiction’s experimentation with more marginal forms; providing a platform that not only an author may use to communicate directly to fans,111 but one which genre authors such as Mitchell may work within, as well as publish through. The published novella that followed comprises discrete sections set in different time periods, nine years apart, told from diverse characters’ points of view. These chapters are largely disconnected—though later characters are aware of the history of earlier events and, indeed, investigate these—but are all located in or around a mysterious British manor house hung with spectral paintings and surrounded by an abandoned garden. As with Kazuo Ishiguro, Mitchell presents us with a natural world that conforms to genre expectations but also gestures to past and potential future wreckage. Characters from different time periods are summoned to Slade House, which is difficult to find: it can only be entered via a small black door in a crooked alley. Both the door and the alley are seen only sometimes and easily missed. ‘It was invisible till you were right on top of it’.112 In the house, and garden, inexplicable events occur as sinister voices seemingly from the past interrupt the present and time becomes suspended in fantastic fashion. In traditional gothic style the main characters in the final chapters are members

- 209 - of a paranormal club convened specifically to investigate the strange house and its routine (re)appearance. Most readers of Mitchell’s latest, most generic, title would know that this house is a portal to another dimension and would understand that its mythical inhabitants are evil beings, once human, who feed off their victim’s souls: Slade House is a follow-on from Mitchell’s Booker Prize–listed The Bone Clocks, featuring the horologists who first appeared in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.113 The same grandfather clock is a key motif: ‘an old, pale-as-bone clock face, saying TIME IS and under that TIME WAS and under that TIME IS NOT’.114 The latest book might even be considered an exercise in fan-fiction—a genre that frequently originates in online outlets, as in the well-known example of Fifty Shades of Grey 115 —albeit one written by the author of the original work himself. The denouement of Slade House (which owes much to science fiction, with its alien beings that need the ‘clear cloud of stars’116 released at the point of death to maintain their suspended state), is not surprising to readers in the way cross- genre experimentation usually is. However, the use of gothic storytelling aspects is new for Mitchell, though the traditional seriousness of that genre is undercut by the author’s distinct and recognisable humorous style117—the shout-line from The Times printed on the back cover of the third edition says Mitchell ‘masterfully, humorously, combines the classic components of a scary story … with a realism, when describing the lives of the victims, that is pacy, funny and true.’ Slade House is a key text for any discussion of contemporary cross-genre fiction. Mitchell has abandoned many aspects of commercial literary fiction: Slade House is a novella; it was originally published in a radical format; there is no attempt to connect diverse sections of the book—rather he uses a structural device: in the systematic re-emergence of the portal, that allows him to directly access different characters at different times. This would not be possible in realist fiction. Mitchell repeatedly uses ellipses and line spaces within the scenes to connect paragraphs. This would be unlikely for realist fiction. Slade House is a unique example of cross-genre experimentation, using many traditional gothic tropes to scaffold a speculative conceit while its original publication is not unlike the episodic instalments that constituted mid-nineteenth-century serialisations. It appeared finally as a novella, a common enough gothic form—consider examples

- 210 - such as The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Turn of the Screw and The Hound of the Baskervilles. This is, however, an uncommon mode for contemporary mainstream publishers,118 although some small independents such as Inkerman & Blunt have recently had critical success with the format, and platforms such as Seizure and Griffith Review continue to experiment with it. Many of Mitchell’s other titles similarly demonstrate strong generic affiliation: Ghostwritten uses a spirit and the idea of possession to connect totally different people, places and times; Cloud Atlas uses a science fiction idea to connect diverse voices and genres. As John Mullan writes when discussing Cloud Atlas in How Novels Work, ‘The novel’s success is that, no sooner are you plunged into a new genre, than you find yourself taken up by it, carried along.’119 (It may be worth noting, given Andrew Riemer’s comment about Ishiguro’s foreign affiliations, that Mitchell spent many years abroad, in Japan, where his wildly inventive second novel Number9Dream is based. Perhaps being an outsider is useful in enabling some writers to recognise and repeat the formal rules of distinct storytelling styles. Slade House certainly features many English caricatures.) As with Ishiguro’s more experimental works, Slade House received mixed responses, often within the same review, though The Australian was unequivocal, with Adrian McKinty writing that Mitchell ‘needs to be firmly guided away from the baleful influence of Neil Gaiman, JK Rowling, Terry Pratchett and Michael Moorcock and back on to the straight and narrow of sophisticated, psychologically penetrating English literature.’ Clearly Mitchell is a writer with a vested interest in ‘de- stigmatising’—as he said in The New York Times interview—the creative amalgamation of genres that might normally be distinct. As with Ishiguro, he writes across genres, though he seems more comfortable creating works that are closer to what John Frow describes as the generic ‘core’.120 Slade House is inspirational to me not only because of the audacious manner in which time is managed and traditional narrative conventions of realist literary fiction are dispensed with, but for the way Mitchell’s characters exist in a liminal world of scepticism and belief. I am fascinated by his use of recognisably gothic settings and storytelling techniques to realise a far more fantastic tale, which echoes the imagined science of science fiction. I am aware that these aspects make my work unlikely to appeal to mainstream publishers, and I know that the

- 211 - shorter length of The Art of Navigation also work against commercial interest.121 In the rest of this chapter I will discuss publication norms in relation to genre work and explore ideas concerning the mobility of genre—not only under the influence of highly inventive literary writers with a visible interest in genre shifts, but as evidenced within the context of Australia and particularly Melbourne’s local small press publishing network.

Generic publishing

The dominant literary paradigm, particularly as far as the larger multinational publishers in Australia are concerned—commonly referred to as ‘the big five’ since the merger of Penguin Random House122—may be seen as realist fiction, but it is often accepted—and, indeed, may be required, not just desired—by readers to be semi-autobiographical. Fiction that is read as fact. I have experienced this firsthand as a commissioning editor, tasked to turn manuscripts originally submitted as fiction—such as the short stories of Summer Land, published as the Gen Y memoir Summerlandish—into non-fiction. My personal publishing practice was built on the opportunity this trend presented. I worked with inexperienced writers to tell, and sell, history as a series of stories.123 As I mention in Chapter One, in recent decades fundamentally fictional accounts have been bought and sold as ‘real’ stories. A prominent example is Norma Khouri’s Forbidden Love, which was marketed as memoir and exposed as fiction, though Helen Dale/Darville/Demidenko’s The Hand That Signed the Paper also had the imprimatur of her claimed heritage before that was revealed to be false. Both these authors (were) purported, paratextually, to be legitimate, and this alleged legitimacy was crucial to the reception of books that were nationally and politically charged. The claim to personal experience was a kind of currency and essential validation. When questions were raised about the authenticity of Khouri’s account her local publisher offered buyers their money back, indicating the significance of the attribution of personal experience. 124 When Lance Armstrong finally confessed to drug use booksellers moved his autobiography to the fiction section of the store. What is clear in these examples is that readers have an appetite for ‘truth’ that publishers are acutely attuned to. What we are seeing, in relation to the cross-

- 212 - genre works I am considering, is an uncomfortable response on the part of some publishers and reviewers to the very movements that inspire many literary writers—as well as a number of fraudulent claimants. It seems publishers are generally conservative in the matter of genre, regardless of their interest in generating new genres where they perceive a market advantage—as in the example of the new ‘New Adult’ category previously mentioned. While other publishers followed St Martin’s Press, seeking to similarly retain readers who were growing out of the Young Adult category, we have yet to see publishers enthusiastically embrace the adventurous transformation of works that encompass other genres. Examples such as those of established writers Ishiguro and Mitchell continue to be the exception. However Mitchell’s sales, and his Booker longlisting, suggest readers may not be as conservative as publishers in this matter. While the initial Twitter incarnation of Slade House may violate the norms of a conservative industry, the book trade has been required to respond to new technologies and new ways of reading or risk disintermediation. The digitisation of the publishing industry has fundamentally and irrevocably changed the production, and at times reception, of literature. It has been described by Jason Epstein, the former editorial director at Random House and founder of The New York Review, as a technological shift ‘orders of magnitude greater than the momentous evolution from monkish scriptoria to movable type.’125 World wide publishing is in a state of transition. A traditional bookstore is a horizontal market offering a large group of customers with a vast range of needs a broad range of services, and conventional publishing has evolved to intersect commercially with these. Online suppliers—selling books in high volume with low overheads in an often vertical marketplace—undercut prices and command major influence in terms of stock and discounts. Multinational marketing and publishing promotional machines are less influential than they once were. Social media may enhance or contradict the word-of-mouth sales that have historically boosted budgets—at this point publishers are not in agreement as to how to harness social media celebrity ‘authors’ and are simply responding in an ad hoc manner to tectonic change. Territorial rights are no longer the inviolable sales entities that once delivered a potential living to authors; Australia is currently experiencing a

- 213 - troubling controversy about the reduction of copyright for all artists. The point of this, for the purposes of our discussion, is that this level of uncertainty—which is likely to persist for some time—has resulted in an increasing reliance on conservative titles. The potential may exist for small publishers, with lower overheads and greater institutional capacity for risk, to offer cross-genre writers such as myself the opportunity to reach a readership. Others have also turned their attention to the role these niche outlier literary producers play. The environment described above means that for a range of reasons which are neither exclusively local nor solely about literature—from globalisation to deregulation—‘almost no major Australian publisher [is] aggressively seeking or promoting new literary fiction at the forefront of their lists, and literary fiction [is] no longer the cornerstone of the industry’s self- perception’.126 Mark Davis has gone on to identify the importance of small presses such as Giramondo and Transit Lounge in contributing to the cultural conversation.127 This has been recognised with their authors’ winning literary awards. Emmett Stinson has pointed out that such marginal outfits often themselves work across genres as their writers and readers are often both consumers and producers.128 In the case of Giramondo and Transit Lounge, the publishers themselves are also an academic and a poet, respectively. It is heartening that cross-genre work is being supported, though the paradox is that writers such as Mitchell have taken advantage of new media in an industry that is having difficulty adjusting to the very changes which may stimulate cross-genre experimentation and new writing. Mitchell says that he enjoyed making the ‘diabolical, treble-strapped textual straightjacket’ of Twitter work for him.129 Perhaps the constraints of the platform freed him to allow the characters and story free rein and shed some of the conventions of literary fiction.130 He had no need to work to the formal constraints of long word counts or lead-times. It is impossible to know how much imaginative work will be stimulated by social media. Perhaps Mitchell is not a unique example after all; he may be one of many. Twitter publication is by its very nature—potentially at least—a ‘conversation’, in violation of the established and expected boundaries between writer and reader and a radical extension of Martin Amis’ notion of the literary as a kind of conversation.

- 214 - Joanna Russ is not alone in speculating that ‘genuine novelty’131 arises at the coalface of genre practice, on the outer rim of generic proliferation. Frow agrees that this is where limits are inevitably tested—especially, we might say, in a publishing environment experiencing radical change in term of production and methods of reader engagement. While Russ explicitly locates such experimentation in bad or undistinguished work this is clearly not the case with Ishiguro and Mitchell. Frow’s argument that genre is ‘the driving force of change in the literary field’132 may be a more useful as a way of anticipating how such novel projects might feed back into and inform and inspire literary fiction.

Cross-genre presses

My perspective on both cross-genre work and the intersection between cross- genre writing and the publishing industry is grounded in my own experience. I have something of a profile as a publisher—I co-founded and ran micro-publishing house Arcade Publications from 2007 to 2012, 133 and worked as a commissioning editor for fiction and narrative non-fiction at Hardie Grant between 2010 and 2015. Clearly I am also a cross-genre writer, committed to non-realist work. In the last decade traditional publishing has faced immense challenges in the form of globalisation, digitisation and the advent of Amazon. When A&R/Red Group, the largest bookselling chain in Australia, collapsed many presses responded by investing more in production and offering books at a lower price. In general, publishers enacted a risk-minimisation strategy that resulted in conservative choices. Titles became visibly more familiar in terms of content, format and authorship. It was this situation that prompted me to enter the market, working with academics and literary authors to publish books that blurred the lines between fiction and history. I was partially inspired by reading how other cultures not only do not distinguish between the literary and other genres, but apparently do not even necessarily distinguish between fiction and nonfiction. 134 Our Anglo-Saxon heritage may have something to answer for when it comes to the prevalence of realism in Australian writing: other cultures, European and Asian alike, seem not to share our obsession. Bosnian writer Aleksandar Hemon is quoted in The Guardian as saying: ‘This is not to say that there is no truth or untruth … It’s just

- 215 - that a literary text is not defined by its relation to truth or imagination.’ 135 According to Geoff Dyer in the same article, and to return to my earlier image, the strength of the fence has waxed and waned over the years and centuries: he says in the same article ‘you’d have to go back to the early nineteenth century or earlier to a time when “literature” referred to fiction and nonfiction rather than to a particular, highly regarded form of imaginative writing.’ Dyer is, ultimately, in favour of the distinction, pointing out it ‘serves as a useful guide to the kind of experience the reader is wanting to have’. Again, genre understanding is useful in prioritising the role of the reader and the publisher’s crucial job in framing a book’s likely reception. At Arcade Publications we produced twelve titles under the motto ‘small books, big stories’. We sold out our print runs, developing our own relationships with non-traditional outlets that bought our titles firm-sale, as well as signing on with an established book distributor. Our content included unconventional characters from Melbourne’s history—from publisher and bookseller EW Cole and brothel-owner Madame Brussels to chocolatier McPhearson Robertson—as well as broader histories such as The Making of Modern Melbourne, Melbourne Remade, Hoax Nation and a curated collection of Oslo Davis’ Melbourne Overheard. Our focus was on cross-genre titles that bridged the historical and fictional. Production costs were cut by digitally printing black-and-white in an A6 format. The unconventional size meant they could be printed on an often-unused machine at Griffin Press at a time when most printing was moving off-shore. In the resultant ‘practically palm-sized’ books (as our tag-line read), we consciously produced novella-length texts for easy consumption. These were perfect for reading while travelling on public transport, and for display on bookstore counters, at a time when commercial publishers were moving to larger Trade Paperback books. Arcade Publications clearly demonstrated that consumers were prepared to pay more for smaller, less polished, locally produced titles. Our customers proved committed to the imprint, rather than individual authors or titles, which is not generally the case in publishing. As well as witnessing unforeseen transformations in the creation, production and marketing of books, I am aware that all industries face the uncertainties of a radically changing climate which will not be sufficiently addressed by simply printing on sustainably forested paper stock or moving to

- 216 - eReader platforms. This changing climate may well be uniquely represented in literature, especially in genre fiction such as speculative and science fiction, as I will indicate in my later discussion.

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Chapter Four: A Book of Strange New Genres

Michel Faber’s latest novel, The Book of Strange New Things,137 was published in 2015 soon after his wife’s death. I mention these facts together because the discussion surrounding the book’s release, in the press and among readers, focussed predominantly on the novel’s central love story that seems to mirror Faber’s own relationship— including its inevitable dissolution as his wife’s cancer advanced. Faber has been quoted as saying it will be his last published work.138 He has also discussed his intention to make a book of his wife’s writings.139 Other articles and interviews detail the minutiae of their final months together140: how, when Faber struggled to keep writing, his wife made him write one sentence a day; how she managed to see the completed manuscript shortly before she died. There are parallels here with the epitextual interest in Kazuo Ishiguro’s relationship: he referred to his wife in The New York Times interview as someone who was (also) equivocal about an early version of The Buried Giant. The authority of the spouse is invoked by both male writers. The media focus on Ishiguro and Faber’s personal lives may well spring from the fact that both novels concern a love story, and have a particular intimacy as though they were written for an audience of one as if each novel is the writer’s gift to his life partner. Of course this interest in the context of a work’s creation, and an author’s personal circumstances, is not only the result of the content of these books. A large part of book promotion today focuses on author tours and events. Readers flock to hear, see and meet their favourite authors and many emerging writers such as myself make money from such festivals, which is a welcome addition to small royalties.141 Festivals often create the intimacy of proximity to the writer, and foster a sense of personal access to the writer’s process and life. In The Book of Strange New Things the main character, Peter, accepts a missionary posting to an unknown location that will entail leaving his wife, Beatrice, ‘Bea’, behind in

- 218 - England. Clearly her name conjures the same association with Dante’s Beatrice that The Buried Giant evokes. Peter does not know why Bea was not chosen to accompany him on his mission and he has reservations about leaving her behind—not least because her love has saved him from a life of alcoholism and homelessness, as well as being the instrument of his own conversion, and he is afraid of what might happen to him without her. He fears who he might become or perhaps return to being. Bea, however, encourages him to go. It is only once the story is underway that we discover Peter’s mission is to another planet. Once he arrives on Oasis, resolved to convert the alien natives, Peter’s relationship—the strength of his love, as well as his wife’s face—begins to fade. It is as he, and we, feared. The inevitability of the rift between them makes it no less a source of grief for Peter or the reader. He seems incapable of holding on to her or what they had, and our empathy is tempered with frustration: why doesn’t he reach out and write back to her? The Book of Strange New Things, like The Time Traveller’s Wife, is a tale of love and loss: ‘A beautifully human story of love. Loss. Faith and the sometimes uncrossable distances between people,’ as the cover states. 142 It is also about distance within a relationship, and the inevitability of its ending, realised here through the science fiction device of space travel, rather than time-travel. Technical communication between the couple, between Oasis and Earth, is unpredictable (and unexplained—while Faber uses the science fiction idea of space travel and new worlds, he indulges in none of the ‘world- building’ traditionally associated with that genre.) The emails Peter sporadically receives from Bea begin to bring news of natural disasters; she describes an England succumbing to climatic catastrophe as early concerns with the weather and food shortages become warnings of severe weather events, and announcements of rationing and looting. Eventually she advises Peter not to return, despite the fact that she is pregnant with their child. The Book of Strange New Things ends with Peter leaving Oasis, having finally understood that the Christian inhabitants’ bodies do not heal the way humans’ do. The Oasans die from the smallest cut, which is why they are so obsessed with the New Testament, their book of strange new things, and the story of the Resurrection. They call themselves Jesus Lover One and Jesus Lover Two even before Peter arrives. This is not the first time that Faber has used a science fiction idea to explore themes of alienation and relationships. His earlier novel Under the Skin concerns a female entity who picks up unwary hitchhikers, whom she drugs and delivers to an alien corporation that turns them into a source of food. Faber’s interest in genre as a device to

- 219 - drive a literary narrative that fulfils Gérard Genette’s ‘intentionally aesthetic’ 143 requirement—as a tool to achieve things that David Mitchell believes ‘frank blank realism’ 144 can’t—is also apparent in The Crimson Petal and the White, an historical romance concerning two Victorian women involved in a love triangle. Described in one review as ‘extremely literary’145 the novel was critically well received, achieving good sales among both literary and middlebrow readers.146 Despite his evident interest in utilising diverse genres, Faber is visibly uneasy about discussing his works in genre terms. When questioned about the aliens in The Book of Strange New Things at a Wheeler Centre event in 2015 he categorically stated ‘it is not about aliens, it is about alienation.’ Of course it is, but the reader may add that it is about both. His quick response was delivered with such heightened emotion that it was seen by many of the audience not to be a consciously held political position but an impulsive reaction to a perceived criticism—the common low-brow or YA association, which might mean either readers would miss the ‘deeper’ messages of the book, or the book might miss its market. Where Ishiguro seems to have unwittingly let slip his nervousness around generic reception to The New York Times, prompting a discussion that ultimately saw him declaring his allegiance with the ‘pixies and dragons’;147 and Mitchell embraces his genre allegiance proudly, arguing not for equality between the literary and speculative modes but for the superiority of genre work under some circumstances or to achieve certain affects; Faber resists such associations, despite—or perhaps because of— being described as ‘genre-defying’ in his publisher’s marketing materials which are reproduced on his author website. The first academic conference on his work in 2016, attended by the author himself, was even titled ‘Defying Genre’, suggesting a more conscious and committed campaign may have been underway, from an author as diverse and experimental as Ishiguro, concerned with surprisingly similar themes of loneliness and isolation. The resounding success of Faber’s novel raises an interesting question about the possible hierarchy of value for the different (but related) speculative genres I have been discussing in this dissertation. Perhaps science fiction is not as ‘ghettoed’ as it was when Ursula Le Guin was originally writing, perhaps it never needed to be ‘de-stigmatised’ the way Mitchell thought fantasy did. It seems even Margaret Atwood is now less fervent in her disavowal of science fiction categorisation; at the very time when The Handmaid’s Tale does seem to be, as she originally claimed, fiction in which things happen that are

- 220 - possible today.148 I would posit that it is the very fact that such speculative and fantastic imaginings could have happened or be happening somewhere that has lifted the profile of speculative fiction. As authors expert at writing Gérard Genette’s ‘intentionally aesthetic’149 literary fiction turn their attention to non-realist forms, so these genres gain popularity with readers. These factors are interconnected. The ‘decadent’ or ‘exhausted’150 generic aspects—which, in line with Joanna Russ’s views, have become a motif in experimental literary fiction—enable these literary authors to approach a new understanding of relationships and the natural world. This is obvious in The Book of Strange New Things. Whether genre is a tool wielded by literary writers in the examples I have discussed, or whether the literary aspect is like a skin the genre is inhabiting, may be unable to be resolved. Different writers doing the same work may see themselves differently, and, as in the case with Atwood, their self-perception may change over time. Publishers, too, have a vested interest in positioning authors or books in particular categories and their positions are also subject to specific literary contexts. Reading The Book of Strange New Things enabled me to understand the ending of The Art of Navigation, and to write it in a way that resisted the kind of technical scaffolding usually associated with science fiction, which readers such as myself are not particularly interested in. Introducing my third and last genre in Part Three of my novel freed me to cast a new light on the first two sections, which concerned an idea central to Slade House: that the medicated, neuroatypical ‘odd’ child actually sees the truth, and that what one era understands as psychosis may be more complicated than we currently acknowledge. Introducing a time-travel device enabled me to surprise the reader with a resolution they could not be expecting, as long as the book in their hands is not signposted as a science fiction story. The conclusion also wonderfully connected with my research into Dr John Dee, whose ideas seem almost as possible as much of the science we accept today.

Real popularity

In an introduction to the disturbingly prescient novel Crash written twenty years after the initial book’s publication, JG Ballard speculates that the balance between fiction and reality has changed significantly; increasingly, according to him, the roles are reversed. ‘The fiction is there, the writer’s job is to invent the reality.’151 He speculates that the most

- 221 - ‘prudent and effective’ way of responding to the world around us may be to assume that it is unreal and respond accordingly. The ‘reality’ which is ‘invented’ in Crash includes an eroticised attachment to celebrity and automobile accidents. This is far from the reality of the conventional reader. In fact, it is so far from most readers’ experience that Ballard’s quote must be read as playful. However his parody of celebrity culture is an extreme version of mainstream publishers’ recognition of readers’ interest in fanciful but seemingly plausible accounts of heightened experience. Ballard’s comments seem not so much to justify the popularity of his own unusual and exceptional title as to capture publishers’ interest in commissioning works that draw on the genres of history and romance. These categories may be seen as more likely to encourage the emotional connection, and provoke the ‘conversation’152 Martin Amis sees as the essential nature of literary fiction, than fantasy, science fiction or speculative experimentation. The idea of a reading practice that primarily emphasises an emotional connection with literary works has been discussed by Beth Driscoll and identified as a ‘new literary middlebrow’ category.153 Certainly in my professional experience many booksellers and publishers, marketers and festival organisers recognise popular literary fiction as working in this way. This ‘new’ category—or, rather, a new phase for middlebrow–is consistent with Jacques Derrida and John Frow’s description of genres as categories that are constructed through the style of readers’ engagement rather than the content of specific books—though my argument is that the generic content of those books is still associated (by producers, especially) as a factor in their categorisation. These newly identified ‘literary middlebrow’ readers consume different books in different ways at different times. These are the readers who made The Time Traveler’s Wife a bestseller, and it may be that they are more receptive to unconventional genres than commercial publishers concede. Literary fiction might be the genre used to describe a work,154 but the books which receive that categorisation are variable. For some writers, myself and Ballard included, liminality does not threaten our literariness but neither does it negate our possible middlebrow market. The way Ishiguro, Mitchell and Faber perform and reform genre in literary fiction does not mitigate the literariness of their latest books, rather their speculative aspects are part of what makes these titles distinctive.

The Booker of genres

- 222 - Le Guin has argued that realism is not an essential aspect of literary fiction,155 but China Miéville disagrees. He sees the Booker as a prize for specifically realist ‘litfic’ titles.156 In part his comments are in response to the trend I identified in Chapter Three for realist, semi-autobiographical novels—‘fictional memoir’ according to the subtitle of Shantaram; or ‘autobiographical fiction’ as Karl Ove Knausgaard and Elena Ferrante are described.157 Miéville pits this ‘literature of recognition’ against his preferred ‘literature of estrangement’158—referencing Le Guin’s own description of science fiction to establish his version of ‘spec-fic’. In this way he reconceives the high-art versus low-brow literary- versus-genre debate more productively for my own investigation into how authors such as Faber may use genre to strengthen and extend, rather than threaten or diminish, their literary works. As the connections to Le Guin make clear, this discussion is not new: Russ divided writing into that which was ‘about things as they characteristically are or were … and [that which was about things] as they may be or might have been’.159 Miéville, however, is trying to define the category of literary fiction itself, which we suggested in Chapter One is inherently unstable, even if it does operate as a recogniseable genre. Miéville goes on to point out that while science fiction novels can appear on the Booker shortlist, they are generally not called genre fiction in that context—though the examples he cites, Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, are fraught; those authors have worked hard to ensure they are not identified as genre writers. Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks is another example. ‘The book doesn’t care if it’s science fiction,’ 160 Mitchell says in a podcast for Wired, conjuring a wonderful act of anthropomorphism that could belong to either spec-fic or the gothic, imagining a sensate if not sensitive book that ‘doesn’t give a damn about genre.’ Indeed, one wonders if The New York Times would have interviewed him for the article on Ishiguro if Slade House had been released. We have already established that Mitchell embraces his generic connections. In fact, in the tech magazine, Mitchell describes genre snobbery as a ‘bizarre act of self-mutilation’. His choice of words nicely articulates what we already know: the literary genre always has (had) generic aspects.

Strange literatures of recognition

I am by no means the first to identify examples of literary fiction with speculative conceits. In 1988 Bruce Sterling coined the word ‘slipstream’ to describe ‘a contemporary

- 223 - kind of writing which has set its face against consensus reality.’161 He was reacting against a much-quoted interview in which speculative fiction author Carter Scholz pointed out that ‘there are other people doing our job.’162 Scholz’s description of ‘the job’ of science fiction echoes Frow’s ‘doing’ of genre ‘(in performing and transforming it)’.163 The books Sterling lists as belonging to this group are ‘fantastic, surreal sometimes, speculative on occasion, but not rigorously so’164—like those by Ishiguro, Mitchell and Faber. Sterling is not interested in hierarchies of genre evaluation. He makes the case that literary works which exhibit weird and wonderful aspects are something else again: ‘Novels of Postmodern Sensibility.’165 Slipstream, as Jenny Green puts it succinctly, is ‘the cover required for literary fiction to venture into a world of aliens, or monsters, without losing its credibility.’166 Sterling self-consciously mocks the term slipstream, as well as the idea of inventing a new genre,167 and in Chapter Five I will suggest that there is another more useful category emerging in the literature of the Anthropocene. What is interesting is Sterling’s speculation that the writers of this ‘new, emergent genre’ may lose the community established genres offer. ‘Slipstream authors must work outside the cosy infrastructure of genre magazines, specialised genre criticism, and the authorial esprit- de-corps of a common genre cause,’ he writes. This helps our understanding of the positions taken up by the authors I have been considering in this dissertation: Mitchell embraces the ‘esprit-de-corps’ of more popular/populist authors while Faber and Ishiguro resist it, not wanting to work outside the infrastructure of their own familiar genre of literary fiction. Despite Sterling’s self-deprecation, his New Wave manifesto may have made science fiction relevant again. His article ends in a long list of literary examples where ‘the largest themes and most powerful emotional materials’168 are dealt with in ways that are not ‘irresponsible and trivialising’, contrary to Thomas Disch’s description of the failings of science fiction. Adam Roberts has also listed the number of Booker contenders whose novels are based ‘on essentially science fiction conceits’;169 even if, as Kingsley Amis is said to have suggested, once shortlisted ‘they’re not called science fiction any more.’170 The quantity and quality of the books Sterling cites supports his case, suggesting that science fiction’s ‘job’ has actually been saved at the very moment when Scholz gives up on it. To return to Russ, ‘the motif or scene or thrilling action for whose sake whole

- 224 - stories were once written’171 has been taken up by or in ‘something else’. This is how I want The Art of Navigation to read, to work.

Publishing in speculative times

In a recent article 172 Emmett Stinson reports on a systematic study of twenty-seven literary titles from 2012 in which he found many exhibit aspects of the commercial genres of crime, thriller and romance. ‘Since [the Aus. Lit. database] records no “literary” category,’ 173 Stinson explains, ‘tracking literary titles in the database is an oblique process of excluding novels that have been tagged with generic designation.’ We have already noted in Chapter One how BookScan is silent on the sales of literary fiction: the subgenres it identifies are the bigger-selling non-fiction categories.174 Stinson considers the various paratextual and epitextual aspects that work together to establish which genres specific titles belong to from publishers’ marketing materials to reviews and prizes, which are not so obviously within the producer’s control. He concludes by suggesting that there is ‘a new class of populist or popular (depending on your view point) genres that are being infused with literary devices and techniques that historically have been associated with “high cultural” works’.175 In the next chapter I will consider instances of small independent publishers experimenting with crossover titles. Along with 2017 examples like Elizabeth Tan’s Rubrik, published by Xoum, and Krissy Kneen’s An Uncertain Grace, published by Text, which occur at the outer edges of a sliding scale from professional to self-publishing, Jane Rawson’s From the Wreck, Transit Lounge, and Briohny Doyle’s The Island Will Sink, The Lifted Brow, evidence the important role of such presses as agents for disseminating experimental works that are either literary with speculative aspects (according to Sterling’s conception) or speculative with literary devices (according to Stinson’s perception). I do not agree with Stinson that small and independent publishers have become ‘the primary agents for disseminating Australian literary works’176—many large established publishers are also publishing what I will argue is an Australian literature of the Anthropocene. James Bradley’s Clade, published by Penguin, Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things, by Allen & Unwin, and Mireille Jachau’s The World Without Us , by Bloomsbury, all appeared in 2015—but it is clear that small publishers have an important role to play as writers like myself look to fuse the literary and speculative in a new literature of strange recognition.

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Chapter Five: Terra Anthropocene

As 2016 drew to an end, it was calculated that it had been the hottest year on record. The world’s meteorological societies had said the same for the previous year, and the one before that.177 The US National Climatic Data Centre has pointed out that people under thirty have never experienced a month in which average temperatures are below the long-term mean.178 This was a summer that came after Melbourne’s wettest October on record. The CSIRO projects more intense rain events to come.179 The world is heating up; the skies are pouring down. We are burning. We are drowning. This is no metaphor but the literal reality of our changed climate. Science-fiction is fast becoming science fact. As James Bradley wrote in the Sydney Review of Books, ‘climate change, habitat destruction, extinction, pollution [are] transforming our world in ways that would have seemed unimaginable only a generation or two ago.’180 It is in this context that I look for books slipping between literary and other, less-real categories; for novels that relate to, and anticipate, world disorder. As a reader, I seek not just award-winning bestselling books that use aspects of genre fictions, but local examples that share the same slippery cross-genre tendency. Jane Rawson’s From the Wreck182 and Briohny Doyle’s The Island Will Sink183 are two such titles: stories of connection and disconnection set around changed and changing climates. These novels are about the endings of known worlds, as well as what might emerge. The coming climate catastrophe is closely watched—in Rawson’s book, by the beings whose planet has been invaded; in Doyle’s, by humans, who keep an eye on live weather feeds that record rising sea levels around Pitcairn Island. These authors aren’t just turning our attention to the wrecked environment, they are turning their attention to our own fascination with that wreckage, and our fear of what might come next.

- 226 - For Rawson’s unnamed alien, the worst has already happened: ‘she’ is a refugee from another world who has escaped from faraway stars. The heroine of From the Wreck has lived a lifetime deep in our ocean—as a cephalopod, rock, sand and fish—before emerging, evolved, to walk among us, first, as a woman called Brigid, then a cat, and finally as a boy’s birthmark. In all forms she is homesick for a world long gone, shifting shapes as she searches for signs of her own kind—along the way meeting characters so sympathetically drawn (an unconventional grandmother; her precocious young neighbour), that they seem universal figures, cast adrift in what could almost be called historical fiction were it not for the fantastic conceit at the story’s core. Rawson, like the new nature writers Bradley identifies in his recent essay for the Sydney Review of Books,184 doesn’t just imagine different genders or times, she projects herself—and readers—into a whole ‘other’ species. Like Le Guin, who has spoken about her interest in animals, and rocks, 185 these authors each seek to connect us shamanistically: with an injured rabbit, a stray cat, an ancient ocean chameleon, a newborn giant sloth. Objects, too, are written with animistic respect. The cube, for Doyle, and the mark, for Rawson, have a real presence in the way of good horror stories. The inspiration for From the Wreck came from the tale of Rawson’s shipwrecked ancestor George Hills, but the author has extended her great great grandfather’s experience well beyond the realm of possibility. Imagining what might have happened during the eight days after his ship went down, when he clung to debris while others around him drowned, she uses an encounter with an extra-terrestrial to explore trauma and its impact. The speculative trope enables her to express a certain kind of insanity, or, what may perhaps be worse, to be seen so and yet still be sane. For George isn’t the only one who encounters the visitor: the complex, compelling stranger we finally recognise, from the diverse points of view Rawson deftly draws, as the only nonalienated character. ‘She’ alone knows what she has lost (her whole world), and what she must find (her kin). For Doyle, the end is still nigh. The title event of The Island Will Sink may be a natural disaster, like the storm that overturns Rawson’s boat, but this rising tide is the result of human behaviour. The fact that an island will sink—which is actually possible— is as impossible for her characters to comprehend as it is for readers in the real world: climate change, or any of its catastrophic consequences, may change nothing, may change something, or may change everything. As Doyle’s anti-hero, Max, sums it up: ‘If it sinks, it sinks. We’ll know what it means when it happens. Or we won’t. Whatever’.186 The story

- 227 - starts with Max recording a prescient vision for his next blockbuster disaster film: a tsunami. The making of his immersive extravaganza propels us through the narrative. Like Rawson’s fantastic idea of an alien visitor in our distant past, Doyle’s future deluge is a generic concept, made to work here as a literary metaphor for (and in, genre world– wise) Joanna Russ’s ‘something else’.187 There is no doubt that what Max has repressed will return as an avalanche of emotion. The ending of the story is open to interpretation, but that is not the point. This book is signposted by the publisher, as well as author, as belonging far more clearly to the science fiction category than Rawson’s (which, once one accepts the speculative set- up, is written and reads as literary fiction), but it inhabits the boundary of that category. Habitual genre readers may be frustrated by the lack of resolution or clear conclusion. Doyle performs and reforms aspects of other genres too. In some ways The Island follows in the footsteps of amnesia thrillers: Max has a brother in a coma, or thinks he does, Max cannot remember; he’s outsourced his memories to a living archive long ago. His wife has put him in touch with someone who wants to work with him to establish a connection between Max and his sibling. While this world may not mirror ours as it is now, it is certainly one where we recognise some of current society’s more ominous aspects, reflected and distorted.

Non-generic solastalgia

From the Wreck and The Island Will Sink show us places that are like—and yet not-like— ours. They echo our relationship to the world around us, which is altering at an unprecedented pace. It is easy to conceive of archaeologists finding records of an ancient alien preserved among fossils; new stories are constantly emerging about the intelligence of cephalopods and their advanced cognitive evolution. It is harder to believe in rising sea levels, even if they are imminent. The idea of a recognised–unrecognisable reality conjures Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht’s description of a ‘form of psychic or existential distress caused by environmental change’,188 which he forged when studying the effects of long-term drought and large-scale mining on communities in New South Wales. He coined the term solastalgia as a way to describe a sense of nostalgia for a place that once provided solace, but doesn’t any more. It is an apt description of the aching homesickness, for a not world ravaged by forces beyond one’s control, that washes through Rawson’s work. Doyle’s book too is suffused with a sense of desolation. Her

- 228 - convincing creation of a near-future that is disturbingly familiar, but disquietingly ‘unhomely’—for her estranged characters as well as us. These speculative titles, which combine science fiction craft with literary art, demonstrate the way in which the novel—with its long-term perspective and varied possibilities—can communicate macro concepts through micro moments, as befits a literature of the Anthropocene. Genre fictions freed from the conventions of realism are rarely only about un-real stories: they are almost always about more than story, even if they are, also, proudly, about compelling storytelling. Fantastic forms have always been a way to explore issues and ideas about identity, community, technology and otherness. Speculative literature goes further, bridging worlds—birthing new ones—as it brings together popular genres and literary fiction. The best speculative fictions embody a kind of cross-genre: they are sometimes-angry experiments that resist binaries. Perhaps we should more properly call them ageneric. This is what I want to read, and write: a ‘simultaneously (and intentionally) aesthetic and technical’, 189 familiar and unique, generic and literary, response to a reality that I find strange enough even without eco- catastrophes like the extinctions of whole species or isolated geographies.

In the beginning

Science-fiction itself arose at, or out of, an intersection between information and storytelling, as the methodical study of the material world merged with narrative structures. That tension lives on its hybrid name. Literary fiction is a similarly telling term, communicating an emphasis on fictionality as the premier category, with literariness as a qualifier. The original ‘science’ fictions were stories of perfect worlds written as tall traveller’s tales from a different place, but within the same universe. When early maps started to be filled in authors needed space in which to exercise their imaginations, and otherworld-building became essential—in terms of writing style, as well as story setting. That tradition endures in Doyle and Rawson’s stories, which are each mapped onto real places: Pitcairn Island and a specific site off the South Australian coast. The wreck was real, even if interstellar travel is (probably) not; our rising sea level is real too, even if it’s not being filmed in the way Max does (yet). Science-fiction has spawned new genres before, and I suggested playfully in Chapter One that speculative fiction—seen by many as the latest offshoot of science fiction—may actually be the ‘superset’ rather than a fictional subset; a new genus which,

- 229 - in a Derridean process of ‘invagination’,191 is the boundary set that is an internal pocket that is yet, impossibly, larger than the whole. The latest slipstream forms appear, as Brian Aldiss puts them, on that same continuum as early creation myths and heroic epics, as: ‘the search for a definition of man [sic] and his status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge’.192 The books I have discussed in this dissertation—from Ishiguro’s fantastic fable and Mitchell’s gothic speculation to Faber’s science fiction—appear on a speculative continuum. Their precise location, essential characteristics and the degree of stigma their authors experience as a result of genre affiliation depends on readers’ perceptions, which in turn depend on context. The relationships of these subgenres to each other is also fluid and also part of that process of definition and identification. New concepts from popular genres have always appeared in literary works. As Joanna Russ193 and John Frow194 each argue, it is in the margins of mainstream publishing where unique mutations arise. Since this is where literary presses tend to find themselves at home, we shouldn’t be surprised that publishers like The Lifted Brow and Transit Lounge have brought these two new titles into circulation.195 Popular fiction has always been an important income stream for publishing—if, historically, it hasn’t been much discussed, the renewed attention it is getting from academics and authors, publishers and critics, as I have argued in this dissertation, may partially be the result of the current challenging climate—commercial and environmental. There is another more specific heritage shared by From the Wreck and The Island Will Sink, and that is female-authored future fictions. Many dystopic works by women don’t focus on external conflict—rape, murder or cannibalism (though the latter appears in both these books)—as much as the interior landscape of catastrophe:196 the threat of forgetting, and hell of remembering, which so concern Ishiguro and Faber. For Doyle and Rawson, the end is a foregone conclusion: the boat, the island, have already sunk, but what will happen next? Will we remain the same, or are we already changed? These books use non-realist genre conventions to imagine and explore a dystopic experience, in order to gain new perspective on our current situation. If we agree with Ballard that our world has itself become strange, 197 contemporary speculative fictions like From the Wreck and The Island Will Sink seem less a literature of estrangement—to use Ursula Le Guin’s conception of science fiction’s ‘characteristic gesture’ 198 —and more a literature of (discomforting) recognition—as

- 230 - China Miéville described realist, prizewinning literary fiction.199 Books like these might be recognised as a ‘real’—‘appropriate’, to use Ballard’s word—response to our current reality. From the Wreck and The Island Will Sink, then, are not the latest science fiction, with literary motifs, but nor are they simply literary fiction, with fantastic aspects. We may consider them as exemplars of an Australian Anthropocene, a newly emergent genre. If Sterling sees slipstream as literary fiction doing ‘the job’ of science fiction better than its purist genre practitioners,201 might that mean Miéville’s realist ‘litfic’ genre itself is no longer ‘stabilised enough’ or even ‘stabilised-for-now’—as Frow lead us to believe202— but finally, as Russ might say, all ‘worn out’203 and ready to be replaced? Any geological age is eventually laid to rest and a new era named.

Towards a novel genre

The Island Will Sink came out late last year, the first book to be published by The Lifted Brow. From the Wreck was launched in March, by what was originally a poetry press— but has since established itself as a literary publisher.204 On first reading, on first sight even, both these titles clearly wear the vestments of genre; their covers contain elements of popular markets, that of the literary and commercial science fiction, but they each also have aspect that belong to the customers of their other kind. While Rawson’s atmospheric image of a girl, hair melding with rock, positions From the Wreck as a literary work, the blurb reveals the otherworldliness of her heroine—‘a woman from another dimension’. This would be a spoiler, of sorts, if this were a classic science fiction genre tale. As it is, it is more like a warning for non-genre readers. Doyle’s book, on the other hand, has its science fiction associations on its sleeve, most obviously in the smaller B-format but blue is also often associated with futuristic genres. However, the slick design, clever type treatment and edgy white border of The Island Will Sink badge it as indie/experimental rather than mass-market. Of the two works, Doyle’s is closer to science fiction conventions, with its smart speculations, tight plotting, and complex building of a concretely imagined world (often ‘told’ through dialogue that risks making its characters pawns to story—though it soon becomes clear that their lack of dimensionality is not unintentional)—down to the detailed tech specs of self-driving cars and temperature-regulating rooms. There is even a school project that charts history (including ours) as a ‘timeline of misconception’.205 The Island Will Sink is an extremely clever work. The meta-fictional topic of forgotten

- 231 - memories and false rememberings, that classic interest of literary fiction and Ishiguro, Mitchell and Faber, is extended here via emotions that are endlessly archived and compulsively reviewed and deleted. Ultimately The Island Will Sink and From the Wreck refuse to give us answers, though manipulating genre modes to generate those expectations in us: not only in terms of what happens next, which is common enough, but also with regards what has—or hasn’t—happened already. However, the authors’ shared interest in a climate, changed in mutations and adaptions, as well as themes of disconnection and alienation; and a ‘collapse culture’ 206 obsession, identify these visions further as works of the Anthropocene. Speculative titles that put our changing climate at the centre of their stories have been called ‘Cli-fi’207—though many authors resist that label. Mireille Juchau summed it up in the Sydney Morning Herald: ‘I love novels of ideas, where the ideas take centre stage, but I felt here I wasn’t trying to convey one single message, one particular thing to get across, but rather involved myself in the complexity of these questions.’208 Her reservations may be shared by others. Rawson’s interest in climate change is less apparent in From the Wreck than in her earlier work: the end of a world has already happened; her novel is concerned with the consequences. But it too is suffused ‘with loss and disappearance’—as Robert Macfarlane describes Anthropocene art in his article in The Guardian,210 like The Island Will Sink. Both titles are haunted by what has gone before, foreshadowed by what is to come. Bradley, whose novel Clade has also been classified as cli-fi, has argued in The Australian that ‘it’s probably not surprising our literary culture has become suffused with narratives about the end of the world, or that so many of them have an environmental element’,211 given the increasing incidence of flash floods, fires and drought. At once he claims the cli-fi subgenre as ‘literary’ and identifies the trend as a response to our newly emergent climate reality, which makes a case for Australia’s particularly close affiliation to or ownership of the genre. Bradley goes on to query the usefulness of classification: ‘to speak in terms of genres or categories is to mistake the wood for the trees’. To read From the Wreck and The Island Will Sink as examples of genre-crossings that have historic roots and futuristic shoots is, for me, to home in on the trees—to take up Bradley’s metaphor— that make up a forest too pressing for me to see, too depressing for me to read. These examples of recent genre explorations are evidence of writers, and small publishers, marshalling a different perspective and tradition to try and communicate the

- 232 - incomprehensible big picture through small details. Such engagement is galvanising my reading—as well as writing. Terms like cli-fi, speculative fiction, slipstream and the Anthropocene have a specific utility: they let bookstores know who they could be handselling to, and how; to show reviewers who might read a book and where they might write about it. Bestselling transgenre books by brand-name international authors might challenge the idea of literary fiction as a realist genre—clearly working in some slipstream way while refusing to be easily classified as generic (being unique and distinct, rather than familiar and repeated)—but so do these local independent titles. Might genre- bending books be the result of a shift of literary production to the margins, or might their rising popularity—among authors particularly, as Russ predicted and Bradley suggests; be part of what’s prompted a movement back towards the outer rims? Could the circumstances that have made publishing’s major players more risk-averse than ever (such as globalisation and the digital revolution) enable reader–writer communities to increase their often-(inter)connected activities? If Sterling sees slipstream as literary fiction doing science fiction better than its purist genre practitioners, could these novels be doing ‘the job’212 of literary fiction but in a new form? And might that mean the realist lit-fic genre itself is no longer ‘stabilised enough’ or even ‘stabilised-for-now’213 but finally, as Russ might say, worn through and ready to be replaced, as any geological age is eventually laid to rest and a new era named.

- 233 -

Conclusion

The Art of Navigation is a slipstream experiment, a consciously literary work that incorporates aspects of speculative fiction. There has been renewed interest among critics and academics in popular fiction, 214 which has long been a mainstay of commercial publishing, but my creative practice takes up the idea of genre fiction as the wellspring for new literary works. Recent texts by Jane Rawson and Briohny Doyle show how conceptions of literary fiction as anti-generic, and fundamentally realist, is inadequate when it comes to categorising an emerging literature of the Australian Anthropocene. Based on my critical investigation into cross-genre works, the creative component of my PhD explores the literary/popular nexus, in particular how slipstream fiction simultaneously and intentionally215 uses aspects of each. JG Ballard has said that ‘the writer’s job is to invent the reality’,216 and literary fiction—that doesn’t come ‘straight at you’217 according to Martin Amis’s description of popular fiction—engages readers and publishers in an ongoing conversation. My novel recasts a gothic ghost story in a work that sets itself up as literary fiction before slipping into something even stranger as the narrative culminates in a science fiction conclusion that poses more questions than it answers. The established literary authors I have considered in my dissertation gave me the confidence to write The Art of Navigation. The Time Traveler’s Wife, The Buried Giant, Slade House and The Book of Strange New Things provided me with the permission I needed to attempt radical transitions in time and space—as well as concrete examples I could consider closely with a view to adopting. Such experiments are, I believe, an effective, even essential, way to reach a new non-realist understanding of our interconnection and interdependence.

- 234 -

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Abstract

1 Bruce Sterling, ‘Slipstream,’ Electronic Frontier Foundation, 1989, accessed November 2015, w2.eff.org/Misc/Publications/Bruce_Sterling/Catscan_columns/catscan.05.

2 Ursula Le Guin, ‘Ursula K. Le Guin Talks to Michael Cunningham about Genres, Gender, and Broadening Fiction,’ Electric Literature, April 1, 2016, accessed April 2016, https://electricliterature.com/ursula-k-le- guin-talks-to-michael-cunningham-about-genres-gender-and-broadening-fiction-57d9c967b9c.

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3 Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 1.

4 JG Ballard, Crash (New York: Vintage, 1995), 1. The introduction to the 1995 edition was written twenty years after the original edition’s 1974 publication.

5 Literary fiction, too, has a wonderful history of hauntings and hallucinations, ghost stories and ‘science’ fictions—from Wuthering Heights to Utopia, Frankenstein and Ulysses to Tristram Shandy. Of course Miéville is speaking to a very specific contemporary and political context in his interview with Sarah Crown, when he says that the real schism lies between ‘the literature of recognition versus that of estrangement’, though he is well aware that ‘all fiction contains elements of both drives (to different degrees, and variably skilfully)’ and ‘great stuff can doubtless be written from both perspectives’ (‘What the Booker Prize Really Excludes,’ Guardian, October 18, 2011).

6 Gérard Genette, Fiction and Diction, trans. Catherine Porter (New York: Cornell University Press, 1994), 28.

7 Martin Amis defines literary fiction as a ‘conversation’, even ‘an intense argument’, in Experience (London: Jonathan Cape, 2000), 224.

Introduction

8 Yet literary fiction is a category, one which contains, among others those books, that do not belong elsewhere. As Jacques Derrida asks, ‘Can one identify a work of art, of whatever sort, but especially a work of discursive art, if it does not bear the mark of a genre, if it does not signal or mention it or make it remarkable in any way?’ (‘The Law of Genre,’ trans. Avilal Ronell, Critical Inquiry 7, no. 1 (1980): 64).

9 Ken Gelder describes the ‘other’ of popular fiction as ‘best conceived as the opposite of Literature’ in Popular Fiction: The Logics and Practices of a Literary Field (London: Routledge, 2014), 11.

10 Gérard Genette, The Aesthetic Relation, trans. GM Goshgarian (New York: Cornell University Press, 1999), 51.

11 Harold Bloom, The Western Canon (New York: Riverhead Books, 1994), 1.

12 Ibid., 3.

13 I’m happy to say it was published by Transit Lounge in 2007—which was predominantly a poetry and travel publisher when I approached them, although they can no longer be so described having built a successful literary list.

14 Thomas Disch, ‘The Embarrassments of Science-fiction,’ 1973, in On SF: A Last Judgment on the Genre from Science Fiction’s Foremost Critic (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 3–15.

Chapter One: A Generic Proposal

15 While Mikhail Bakhtin’s study of the novel is generally understood as a conceptualisation of what is referred to commercially—and here—as ‘literary fiction’ (as opposed to other literary genres such as the epic etc.), he seems to speak for the broader category of novels in general when he argues that it’s ‘the sole genre that continues to develop, that is as yet uncompleted’ (‘Epic and Novel: Toward a Methodology for the Study of the Novel,’ in Modern Genre Theory, ed. David Duff (London: Longman, 2000), 69–74).

16 A 2017 ARC Linkage grant ‘Genre Worlds: Australian Genre Publishing in the Twenty-First Century’ signals growing academic interest in an area of publishing that has long been a mainstay for the trade.

17 Ken Gelder, ‘Recovering Australian Popular Fiction: Towards the End of Australian Literature,’ special issue, Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (2000): 114, accessed November 1, 2017, https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/index.php/JASAL/article/view/9597/9487. - 241 -

18 ‘Kind’ was the older Anglo-Saxon word for a literary category that was replaced by the ‘irremediably French’ word ‘genre’ around the beginning of this century—‘at precisely the point at which the concept was being seen throughout Europe as increasingly problematic’—according to David Duff, ed., Modern Genre Theory (London: Longman, 2000), 6, with reference to the Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. ‘kind’.

19 Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler’s Wife (San Francisco: MacAdam / Cage, 2003).

20 The fact that this, apparently, works says something about the American market, and its (historical) relationship to other markets—which is being recalibrated through the influence of globalisation and the impact of digitisation.

21 Jane Rawson told me at the launch of From the Wreck that our mutual publisher Barry Scott ‘wouldn’t let the term “spec fic” anywhere near’ her book.

22 John Frow, Genre: The New Critical Idiom (London: Routledge, 2005), 134. Indeed, this ‘generic’ process seems particularly in evidence when it comes to literature: many books, such as those by Kurt Vonnegut and JG Ballard, are belatedly claimed as ‘literary’ after initially being produced, and received (according to Frow’s understanding), as popular fiction.

23 Frow, Genre, 130.

24 Genre recognition resides with the reader then, as was evidenced for me personally in those professional summaries of my own ‘mixed-up’ writing, referenced in note 17.

25 As Adam Roberts writes, regarding science fiction’s similar resistance to easy definition: ‘This is a strange thing because most people have a sense of what science fiction is’. Science Fiction: The New Critical Idiom (London: Routledge, 2006), 1.

27 Anis Bawarshi, ‘The Genre Function,’ College English 62, no. 3 (January 2000): 335.

28 David Throsby and Jan Zwar, Book Authors and Their Changing Circumstances (Sydney: Macquarie University, 2015); David Throsby and Jan Zwar, Disruption and Innovation in the Australian Book Industry (Sydney: Macquarie University, 2016). Of course, that small percentage who say they read may be self- deceiving.

29 Frow, Genre, 1.

30 Ibid., 10.

31 Dymocks and Collins in Melbourne’s CBD even have a ‘literary fiction’ shelf—though one wonders if that’s more to direct general customers away from ‘Aus. Lit.’ reading list titles than to sell them.

32 Frow, Genre, 3.

33 Ibid., 128.

34 Ibid., 28.

35 Genette, Paratexts, 1.

36 Frow, Genre, 144. What Frow calls the ‘doing’ of genre nicely echoes Carter Scholz and Bruce Sterling’s description of the ‘job’ of science fiction, which I will come to in Chapter Four.

37 This is not to take up the ‘sort of circular reasoning’ that, according to Adam Roberts, suggests ‘the whole business of definition is nothing more than a cynical marketing exercise’, Science Fiction, 2, but rather to adopt Genette’s approach in order to explore how contemporary publishing practices, such as marketing, define the science fiction category: to extend the discussion of genre from reader reception to publisher conception (Paratexts).

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38 The trade resists using the term ‘adult books’ for obvious reasons.

39 This has resulted in some interesting discussions as academics grapple with publishing data designed to serve a different purpose. It is hardly surprising that the key to such categorisation seems likely to reside in format: Trade Paperback (the new hardback) denotes contemporary literary fiction while at the other end of the scale an A-format signals a popular blockbuster. B and particularly B-plus formats are generally literary, except in the case of re-released classics. It might be simpler if publishers entered the requested data themselves, but as Books in Print evidences, that can also be incorrect. Perhaps the distribution channel should be factored into the equation, as well as the price-point and units sold. That certainly would realise Roberts’ ‘circular’ argument: mass-market fiction is that which acts like it. Michael Webster of Nielsen BookScan told RMIT Masters of Writing and Publishing students in 2016, in the kind of circular reasoning that could be said to prove Roberts’ point, that ‘the whole business of definition’ is no more than a cynical marketing exercise, that a bestseller is a book that behaves like one (The History of Science Fiction). It is perhaps the neatest example of a descriptive definition after the fact; a category completely based on how a book is received, by readers. Buyers, actually (which may or may not be the same thing), since the measure is how well it sells. Unless the bestselling categorisation is simply a marketing claim, in which case it may mean only that the book has exceeded the publisher’s expectations; perhaps not even that, but rather that they hope it will, since bestsellers are often made so as much by the claim before the fact—the publisher’s decision to invest the requisite money in just such un-subtle marketing strategies as a ‘bestseller’ sticker—as how they subsequently act.

40 When Oprah Winfrey challenged author James Frey ‘why would you lie?’ he said he had developed a ‘tough-guy’ image of himself that he clung on to, reported by Edward Wyatt in ‘Author Is Kicked Out of Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club,’ New York Times, January 27, 2006. Frey’s identity was bound up in a particular author persona: he was a writer of non-fiction, and, in particular, memoir.

41 David Henley makes the point in ‘A Bridge Too Far: Sci-fi versus Fantasy,’ Bookseller+Publisher, July 2015, that fantasy is trumping science fiction on the shelves due to ‘technobabble, moralising and a high chance of crapness.’ When I interviewed him the same year he explained that if books were categorised ‘correctly’ then people’s view (of science fiction) would change because they would see how the category actually contained ‘better books’ than they had thought. He said the names he had originally used for genres had been edited to reflect more common categories.

42 The book has since been made into a film which downplays many of the speculative aspects that appeal so much to me and other readers—though perhaps some allowance should be made for the fact that when the book came out there were not many mainstream, middlebrow literary titles with science fiction aspects, whereas the film industry has gone from strength to strength in this area, Inception and Interstellar following more niche examples such as Solaris (the original and remake) and Donnie Darko.

43 The cover here is of my 2005 Vintage edition, but the original 2003 MacAdam / Cage image is the same.

44 James Tiptree Jr, Ten-thousand Light Years from Home (New York: Ace Books, 1973).

45 Joanna Russ, ‘The Wearing Out of Genre Materials,’ College English 33, no. 1 (October 1971): 48.

46 Ibid., 50. This fits, somewhat, with science fiction author and critic Damien Broderick’s argument in Reading by Starlight: Postmodern Science Fiction (London: Routledge, 1995), quoted in Roberts, Science Fiction, 11, that science fiction de-emphasises fine-writing and characterisation and is marked by ‘certain priorities (such as a focus on object over subject and plausible explanations) more often found in scientific and postmodern texts than in literary models’.

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47 This (re)working may not necessarily be conscious, of course: Roberts isn’t the only one to point out that there appears to be a discrete number of subjects for science fiction, which he goes on to list (Science Fiction, 12).

48 Roberts, The History of Science Fiction, Palgrave Histories of Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

49 Described by Roberts as ‘a conventional contemporary set love story that uses its SF novum as garnish to an otherwise rather ordinary tale of the tribulations of courtship’ (Science Fiction, 22), in a similar discussion of stories that share the same ‘novum’ or new idea—which Roberts goes on to describe very broadly as that of ‘a character who comes loose in time’.

50 Michelle Griffin, ‘The Times of Their Lives,’ Age, January 31, 2004.

51 Charles DeLint, review of The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger, Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 106, no. 5 (2004), as quoted in Wikipedia. Accessed January 2016. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_Traveler%27s_Wife#cite_note-25.

52 Amis, Experience, 224.

53 Consider, in this context, James Wood’s argument that ‘the conventions of realism are not being abolished [by ‘hysterical’ magical realist novels] but, on the contrary, exhausted or overworked’ (The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), 182). The ‘big, ambitious’ contemporary novels he clearly detests are evidence, then, that realism is indeed worn out, as Russ would say.

54 St Martin’s Press is associated with the latter term after having posted a call-out for ‘fiction similar to YA that can be published and marketed as adult’ on its website in 2009, accessed January 2016, http://sjaejones.com/blog/2009/st-martins-new-adult-contest. Hardie Grant Egmont, a division of the publisher I worked for, tried to do something similar in Australia by establishing the Ampersand Prize to identify emerging writers who were working in this burgeoning market.

55 In Russ’s 70s essay the term was not consistently hyphenated—suggesting either poor editing or that it was in a state of adjectival flux on its way to acquiring what Frow sees as ‘the status’ of a noun (Genre, 138). Many current critics choose not to compound the words, instead preferring the SF designation, which I also find revealing (suggesting an editing out of the fictional aspect). As indeed is the lack attention to this epitextual, auto-critical aspect of the genre itself.

56 Indeed, from here we might even see JG Ballard’s time as not only the birth of speculative fiction, but an ‘alt history’ moment when a different future was fleetingly possible: when its slippery progeny might have won literary awards and lured popular genre fans up towards the front of the bookstore.

57 Frow, Genre, 111.

58 What is true for literary fiction, in terms of its relationship to other genres, is also, of course, true for commercial forms: as Russ says, ‘genre fiction, like all fiction, is a compromise’ (‘Wearing Out of Genre Materials, 46).

59 Derrida, ‘Law of Genre,’ translated by Avilal Ronell, Critical Inquiry 7, no. 1 (1980): 55–81.

60 I feel I should clarify my scope by specifying some literary exceptions: I’m not referring to authors such as Haruki Murakami and Salman Rushdie whose books include imaginary and impossible scenarios. While they might fit Russ’s view that ‘the only thing that makes many stories science fiction is that they are not about things as they are’ (‘Wearing Out of Genre Materials’, 54), they are not produced, shelved, bought or read as

- 244 - genre fiction. They’re also not dominated by the implications of Darko Suvin’s ’novum’; they don’t satisfy Robert Scholes’s ‘structural’ point, or Broderick’s demand for ‘popular’ features (definitions cited in Roberts, Science Fiction, 9–10). I am considering writers working closer to the literary margins, whose works have, at various times, been understood as belonging to another camp, such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Michel Faber and David Mitchell.

61 Mark Davis, ‘The Decline of the Literary Paradigm in Australian Publishing,’ Heat, no. 12 (2006): 91–108.

62 Ibid., 97.

63 Ibid., 94.

64 Ibid., 103.

65 Just how honest Russ is being depends on who she is identifying with in this scenario—probably both parties, as a writer who crosses over into the critic’s camp. (Which makes me wonder if it might be relevant that so many science fiction writers seem to work in both fiction and criticism: could it be the result of their marginal perspective, a political defence, or a flow-on effect of working in the realm of the literature of ideas?)

66 Russ, ‘Wearing Out of Genre Materials,’ 53.

67 Andrew Pepper, ‘Early Crime Writing and the State: Jonathan Wild, Daniel Defoe and Bernard Mandeville in 1720s London,’ Textual Practice 25, no. 3 (2011): 473–91. According to Frederic Raphael, Defoe has even ‘been condemned as a fake for passing off “A journal of the plague year” as the real thing, when he was only five at the time’ (‘Mr Facing-both-ways,’ Spectator, January 7, 2007).

68 Richard Flanagan, ‘Does Writing Matter: The Inaugural Boisbouvier Lecture,’ Monthly, October 2016.

69 Frow, Genre, 68.

70 The Russian Formalist idea that parody accounts for the shift in literary directions is not so very different from Russ’s argument: as a form becomes popular it moves on to eventually be held up to derision and its value subsequently declines.

71 Derrida, ‘Law of Genre,’ 57.

72 They are rather like Genette’s ‘undefined zone’ of the paratext then, which ‘more than a boundary or a sealed border, is, rather, a threshold,’ and also, in this case, an invitation (‘Law of Genre’, 1).

73 Ibid., 56.

74 Ibid., 59.

75 Ibid., 57.

76 Ibid., 59.

77 Ibid., 59.

78 Ibid., 65.

79 Quoted in Anthony Wolk’s ‘Challenge the Boundaries: An Overview of Science Fiction and Fantasy,’ English Journal 79, no. 3 (1990): 26–31.

80 John W Campbell, quoted in Roberts, The History of Science Fiction, 56.

81 Wolk, ‘Challenge the Boundaries,’ 26.

82 Ursula Le Guin, ‘Some Thoughts on Narrative,’ in Dancing at the Edge of World (New York: Grove / Atlantic, 1989), 37–45.

83 Crown, ‘What the Booker Prize Really Excludes.’ - 245 -

84 Sterling, ‘Slipstream.’

85 Davis, ‘Decline of the Literary Paradigm.’

86 Since writing this the weighted sample of independent bookstores represented in the dataset has increased to around twenty-six per cent (2016), but the principle still applies: now it’s ebooks and online sales through etailers such as Amazon and Book Depository that escape BookScan’s detection.

87 Malcolm Knox, ‘The Ex-factor,’ Monthly, May 2005.

88 Farah Mendlesohn, quoted in Roberts, Science Fiction, 24.

Chapter Two: The Buried Genre

89 Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant (London: Faber & Faber, 2016).

90 Wood, The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004, ix.

91 Ishiguro, Buried Giant, 91.

92 Alexandra Alter, ‘For Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant Is a Departure,’ New York Times, February 19, 2015.

93 ‘Margaret Atwood doesn’t want any of her books to be called science fiction … This arbitrarily restrictive definition [of not science fiction] seems designed to protect her novels from being relegated to a genre still shunned by hidebound readers, reviewers and prize-awarders. She doesn’t want the literary bigots to shove her into the literary ghetto’ (Ursula Le Guin, ‘The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood,’ Guardian, August 29, 2009).

94 Ursula Le Guin, ‘Are They Going to Say This Is Fantasy?,’ Bookviewcafé.com, March 2, 2015, accessed June 2015, http://bookviewcafe.com/blog/2015/03/02/are-they-going-to-say-this-is-fantasy/.

95 Fantasy books are often considered Young Adult—or considered as to whether they might be Young Adult—by the publishing industry: Allen & Unwin passed my first book, The Asking Game, on to its Young Adult department, where I would have been in good company; they originally published Margo Lanagan. In fact, the term ‘crossover’ fiction first came into popular usage with Mark Hadden’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (2003) and was applied to titles that crossed over from Young Adult to literary fiction. It is interesting to reflect that in 1997—before Harry Potter; before grown-ups started admitting to reading children’s books—a ‘mere’ 3000 titles were published in the Young Adult category, as Marcella Purnama and Mark Davis describe the results of Bowker Market Research in ‘Get Thee to Social Media: Explaining the Rise and Rise of YA Books,’ Conversation, April 13, 2016. By 2007 that figure had leapt to 30,000 and five years later 55 per cent of the people buying what is still called Young Adult were over eighteen.

96 Ishiguro, Buried Giant, 35.

97 Ibid., 51.

98 Ibid., 358.

99 Neil Gaiman, ‘Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant,’ New York Times, February 25, 2015.

100 ‘Ishiguro’s level banality has always been a rhetoric in search of a form,’ writes James Wood in ‘The Uses of Oblivion,’ New Yorker, March 23, 2015.

101 Andrew Riemer, ‘Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant Depicts Strange Anglo-Saxon Britain,’ Sydney Morning Herald, February 28, 2015.

102 Sian Cain, ‘Writers’ Indignation: Kazuo Ishiguro Rejects Claims of Genre Snobbery,’ Guardian, March 9, 2015.

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104 Kim Wilkins, ‘Popular Genres and the Australian Literary Community: The Case of Fantasy Fiction,’ Journal of Australian Studies 32, no. 2 (2008): 275.

105 Ken Gelder, Popular Fiction 37.

106 Ursula Le Guin, ‘Some Assumptions about Fantasy: BookExpo America Breakfast,’ The Official Website of Ursula K Le Guin June 4, 2004, accessed January 2015, http://www.ursulakleguin.com/SomeAssumptionsAboutFantasy.html.

107 David Mitchell, ‘David Mitchell on Earthsea—A Rival to Tolkien and George RR Martin,’ Guardian, October 24, 2015.

108 Alter, Alexandra. ‘For Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant Is a Departure.’ New York Times, February 19, 2015, accessed June 2016,

109 Frow, Genre, 28.

Chapter Three: At Home in a Genre House

110 David Mitchell, Slade House (London: Sceptre, 2015).

111 In fact, Purnama and Davis argue in ‘Get Thee to Social Media’ that social media has become a key means through which Young Adult publishers and authors alike generate and cultivate reader engagement.

112 I didn’t originally have page numbers for Slade House as I read it on my Kindle, noting that this description occurred eighteen per cent of the way in. Ebooks present some interesting questions for Genette’s conception of a publisher’s paratext, as that ‘threshold’ or liminal space that shapes the reader’s engagement with a text is less able to be controlled by the producer and more likely to be customised by the reader: without the hardcopy in their hands readers are less likely to recognise a title as a ‘big, ambitious book’ (as Woods disparagingly described magic realism in The Irresponsible Self, 182). Others may also, like me, have bought and downloaded Slade House without knowing it was a novella.

113 As Liz Jensen wrote in her review for the Guardian, ‘each fresh product of Mitchell’s soaring imagination functions as an echo chamber for both his previous ideas and his oeuvre to come, components in the grand project he calls his “uber-novel”’ (‘Slade House by David Mitchell Review—Like Stephen King in a Fever,’ October 29, 2015).

114 Mitchell, Slade House, 27.

115 Fifty Shades of Grey is the oft-cited extra-ordinary example, which sold myriad ebooks to Twilight fans before selling millions of print copies which made the author money via the traditional publishing contract that followed. (The topic of this series showed that despite Russ’s predictions four decades ago, vampires were not dead, and porn was ready to cycle through the stages she specified, from novelty through realism to self-conscious, but still entertaining, ‘decadence’.)

116 Mitchell, Slade House, 36.

117 It is hard not to be reminded of Quentin Tarantino, famous for taking up and trying on different genres— even mixing them together as in From Dusk till Dawn—but always distinctly himself: an auteur, experimenting with not-so-generic forms.

118 Publishers generally believe readers don’t like to pay the same price for a physically smaller product with clearly fewer words—something no amount of large font, white space and graphic chapter openers can hide—though producers arguably still need to charge the same price to recoup editorial, design, production and marketing costs. Print too, since extent rarely makes up the bulk of that fee.

119 John Mullan, How Novels Work (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 107. - 247 -

120 Frow, Genre, 128.

121 Transit Lounge publisher Barry Scott told Jane Rawson in a 2016 email that he would consider ‘anything over 50,000 words’; quite a reduction of traditional publishing’s 80,000-word count for a literary fiction manuscript. (Some publishers may ask for more, with the expectation they will edit the manuscript down, or less, wanting to work with the author on building it up.)

122 ‘Random and Penguin are two of the “big six” book publishing companies [internationally, as well as locally], along with HarperCollins, Hachette, Simon & Schuster and Macmillan’, Stephen Romei reports, on early rumours of the merger that formed PRH, in ‘Publishing Giants Discuss Joining Forces,’ Australian, October 27, 2012.

123 I also experienced this is a writer. When discussing The Asking Game one publisher (not the same one who was potentially interested in it as YA) asked me whether it ‘couldn’t be nonfiction’, presumably referring to the desert road-trip that takes up much of the narrative, and not the science fiction story of the main character finding out she’s her sister’s clone.

124 I reported on this while working as the editor of the national book trade publication The Weekly Book Newsletter.

125 Jason Epstein, ‘Publishing the Revolutionary Future,’ New York Review of Books, March 11, 2010, Accessed September 2015. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2010/03/11/publishing-the-revolutionary- future/.

126 Davis, ‘Decline of the Literary Paradigm,’ 94.

127 Mark Davis, ‘Publishing in the End Times,’ in By the Book? Contemporary Publishing in Australia, ed. E Stinson (Melbourne: Monash University Publishing, 2013), 3–14.

128 Emmett Stinson, ‘Small Publishers and the Emerging Network of Australian Literary Prosumption,’ Australian Humanities Review, no. 59 (2016): 23–43.

129 Alison Flood’s article ‘Novelist David Mitchell Publishes New Short Story on Twitter,’ Guardian, July 14, 2014, accessed June 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jul/14/david-mitchell-publishes- short-story-twitter, includes a link to the story ‘The Right Sort’.

130 David Mitchell confessed at a Melbourne Writers Festival event in 2011 that he had always been ‘really’ a ‘novella-ist’.

131 Russ, ‘Wearing Out of Genre Materials’, 51.

132 Frow, Genre, 68.

133 Simon Caterson, ‘From Little Ventures Small Wonders Emerge,’ Age, January 24, 2009.

134 Richard Lea, ‘Fiction v Nonfiction—English Literature’s Made-up Divide,’ Guardian, March 24, 2016.

135 I have experienced this first-hand, having international students say to their classmate’s confusion that there are no genres within fiction, and that literary is the overarching category—‘truth’ a mere qualifier.

Chapter Four: A Book of Strange New Genres

137 Michel Faber, The Book of Strange New Things (New York: Hogarth Press, 2014).

138 ‘I felt that I had one more book in me that could be special and sincere and extraordinary, and that that would be enough,’ said Faber to Alexandra Alter (‘Michel Faber on the Writing of His Final Novel,’ Sydney Morning Herald, November 22, 2014). In 2016 he published a collection of poems addressed to his wife after her death, Undying: A Love Story.

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139 Michel Faber, conversation with Ramona Koval, Wheeler Centre, Melbourne, March 3, 2015.

140 As well as being his first reader and ‘a fearless critic’, Faber has described his wife Eva as playing a key role in making him ‘more inclusive; she was always curious whether it was possible to embrace just a few more readers by being just a little kinder, by giving them a little bit more of what they wanted’ (Justine Jordan, ‘Michel Faber: “I Would Have Been a Different Writer without My Wife,”’ Guardian, July 8, 2016).

141 In some ways this interest in meeting authors in person may seem to reflect or extend the current popularity of realist literary non/fiction, but the reading public has always been interested in the ‘real’ authors behind fictional works. However in today’s celebrity-obsessed and online culture we expect such access, and when confronted with the reticence of authors like Elena Ferrente we leap to fraudulent conclusions.

142 As well as this praise from the National Public Radio, advance information from Faber’s publisher included David Mitchell’s quotes from The New York Times interview—the two authors went on to do a number of interviews together.

143 Genette, Fiction and Diction, 28.

144 Alter, ‘For Kazuo Ishiguro.’

145 Kathryn Hughes, ‘Whores, Porn and Lunatics,’ Guardian, September 28, 2002.

146 Mary Dalmau’s team at Reader’s Feast played such a key role in the success of The Crimson Petal and the White, handselling the book to their regular customers, that Michel Faber made a special visit to thank her on his Australian tour. In a 2002 interview she described to me how the title ‘crossed from literary to less so’, citing this as both a reason for its success and why she could predict it would achieve the sales it did.

147 Cain, ‘Writers’ Indignation.’

148 ‘In her recent, brilliant essay collection, Moving Targets, [Margaret Atwood] says that everything that happens in her novels is possible and may even have already happened, so they can’t be science fiction, which is “fiction in which things happen that are not possible today”’ (Le Guin, ‘Year of the Flood’). In a more recent article Atwood cites her inspiration as ‘the dystopian spec fics of my youth’ and confesses she takes a guilty pleasure in the fantasy genre: ‘In moments of crisis I go back to (don’t laugh) Lord of the Rings, because despite the evil eye of Mordor it comes out all right in the end’ (Emily Temple, ‘Margaret Atwood on What It’s Like to Watch Her Own Dystopia Come True,’ Literary Hub, March 10, 2017, accessed July 2017, http://lithub.com/margaret-atwood-on-what-its-like-to-watch-her-own-dystopia-come-true/.).

149 Genette, Fiction and Diction, 28.

150 Russ, ‘Wearing Out of Genre Materials,’ 48.

151 Ballard, Crash, 1.

152 Amis, Experience, 224.

153 Beth Driscoll, The New Literary Middlebrow: Tastemakers and Reading in the Twenty-first Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

154 ‘Literary fiction’ is actually unlikely to be the category a publisher chooses to put on a book: firstly because it is not sales tracked (by BookScan), and secondly because belonging to that genre won’t necessarily help sales—which is important, as the bookseller is the only person likely to read and be affected by the barcode description. A book-buyer or reviewer looking for literary fiction will be on the lookout for other identifying characteristics from format and cover to design to reviews in the arts pages.

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155 ‘… a close correspondence of the real world and the fictional world is a defining characteristic of realism. It is not a defining characteristic of fiction’ (Ursula Le Guin, ‘Plausibility Revisited,’ The Official Website of Ursula K Le Guin, 2005, accessed November 2015, http://www.ursulakleguin.com/).

156 Crown, ‘What the Booker Prize Really Excludes.’

157 Belinda McKeon, ‘Me, Myself and I in an Age of Autobiographical Fiction,’ Guardian, August 21, 2015. Knausgaard has talked explicitly about his frustration with the formulaic nature of fiction, Tegan Bennett Daylight, ‘Inner Struggle—How Fiction Ran Out for author Karl Ove Knausgaard,’ Age, June 22, 2013. As Anthony Macris writes in ‘Poor Karl Ove! Knausgaard’s Selfie-as-novel,’ ‘it’s hard to deny that with My Struggle Knausgaard has pulled off something extraordinary, that he has to some degree, if not reinvented realism, then refreshed it for a contemporary literary readership that is perhaps growing tired of tightly scripted novels that resemble movie scripts, or maximalist fictions that rely on outlandish hyperbole.’ Sydney Review of Books, June 29, 2016, accessed November 2016. https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/some-rain- must-fall-karl-ove-knausgaard/.

158 Crown, ‘What the Booker Prize Really Excludes.’

159 Russ, ‘Wearing Out of Genre Materials,’ 54.

160 David Mitchell, ‘Genre Snobbery Is a “Bizarre Act of Self-mutilation,”’ Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (podcast), episode 175, July 11, 2015, accessed July 2016, https://geeksguideshow.com/2015/11/02/ggg175-david-mitchell/.

161 Sterling, ‘Slipstream.’

162 New Pathways, no.11, quoted in ibid.

163 Frow, Genre, 144.

164 Sterling, ‘Slipstream.’

165 It is worth remembering, as we consider the relationship between seeming opposite genres, that Modernism and fantasy evolved in tandem as two very different reactions and responses to the arrival of the modern era. Lev Grossman argues that where Modernism is a response to a fragmented reality, fantasy is the attempt to re-member whole (‘The Death of a Civil Servant,’ Believer, May 2010, accessed March 2016, https://www.believermag.com/issues/201005/?read=article_grossman.

166 Jenny Green, ‘In the Slipstream,’ Overland, November 2, 2015, accessed January 2016, https://overland.org.au/2015/11/in-the-slipstream/..

167 The term slipstream does seem to be gaining some currency, in Australia at least: author Isobelle Carmody’s blog is called The Slipstream, and the new University of Melbourne publishing program start-up student imprint Grattan Street Press is asking for slipstream submissions.

168 ‘SF deals with the largest themes and most powerful emotional materials—but in ways that are often irresponsible and trivialising. Altogether too many of us … are willing to trust our powers of improvisation untampered by powers of retrospection and analysis’ (Disch, ‘Embarrassments of Science-fiction,’ 14).

169 ‘Much of what made sci-fi into sci-fi has been absorbed into mainstream culture. Ideas like teleportation, space travel, time travel and genetically altering ourselves are commonplace—even if, in reality, they are still fictional; the concepts have been normalised’ (Henley, ‘Bridge Too Far’).

170 Crown, ‘What the Booker Prize Really Excludes.’

171 Russ, ‘Wearing Out of Genre Materials,’ 50.

172 Stinson, ‘Small Publishers.’ - 250 -

173 Sterling speaks disparaging of ‘categories’—which he sees as distinct from more fluid and writer- identifying genres—but publishing categories are a concrete way in which genres must be practically arranged, in terms of where they are shelved and how their data is entered (‘Slipstream’). Stinson’s investigation may even suggest that the literary category has escaped certain pressures precisely because it is not easily, consistently or commercially identifiable (‘Small Publishers’).

174 The limitations of this system are exposed when the breakout success of a title like Eats, Shoots and Leaves, or Don Watson’s Weasel Words, has publishers scrambling to publish into the dictionary/reference category, when the popularity of those titles can clearly not be reduced to their content alone.

175 Stinson, ‘Small Publishers,’ 28.

176 Ibid., 27.

Chapter Five: Terra Anthropocene

177 NASA, ‘NOAA Data Show 2016 Warmest Year on Record Globally,’ January 19, 2017, accessed January 2017, https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-noaa-data-show-2016-warmest-year-on-record-globally.

178 Ben Eltham, ‘A Glimmer in the Darkness,’ Sydney Review of Books, March 27, 2015, accessed February 2016, https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/this-changes-everything-naomi-klein/.

179 CSIRO, ‘New Climate Change Projections for Australia,’ January 27, 2015, accessed January 2017, https://www.csiro.au/en/News/News-releases/2015/New-climate-change-projections-for-Australia.

180 James Bradley, ‘Writing on the Precipice,’ Sydney Review of Books, February 21, 2017, accessed February 2017. https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/writing-on-the-precipice-climate-change/.

182 Jane Rawson, From the Wreck (Melbourne: Transit Lounge, 2017).

183 Briohny Doyle, The Island Will Sink (Melbourne: The Lifted Brow, 2016).

184 Bradley, ‘Writing on the Precipe.’

185 Julie Phillips, ‘The Fantastic Ursula K. Le Guin,’ New Yorker, October 27, 2016.

186 Doyle, The Island Will Sink, 82–83. Max’s son Jonas is more obviously attached to the outcome, not having his father’s apparent sangfroid, though even Jonas knows ‘it’s dumb to align yourself with any one position … either the island will sink and lead to the end of the world, or it will sink and the world will be fine. Or it won’t even sink’ (81).

187 Russ, ‘Wearing Out of Genre Materials’, 50.

188 Glen Albrecht, ‘The Age of Solastalgia,’ Conversation, August 7, 2012, accessed December 2016, https://theconversation.com/the-age-of-solastalgia-8337.

189 Genette, Aesthetic Relation, 51.

191 Derrida, ‘Law of Genre,’ 59.

192 Brian Aldiss, Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction (London: Corgi, 1974), 8.

193 Russ, ‘Wearing Out of Genre Materials,’ 51.

194 Frow, Genre, 68.

195 It’s no coincidence that the ‘margins’ of publishing where speculative and other slippery mutations have always found themselves at home is also where the nascent ‘prosumer’ movement, identified by Stinson, has arisen—which surely owes as much to a fan-fiction tradition as the literary Avant Garde he directly connects it to (‘Small Publishers’).

196 Sloane Crosley, ‘It’s the End of the World as She Knows It,’ New York Times, July 23, 2015. - 251 -

197 Ballard, Crash, 1.

198 Le Guin, ‘Ursula K. Le Guin Talks to Michael Cunningham.’

199 Crown, ‘What the Booker Prize Really Excludes.’

201 Sterling, ‘Slipstream.’

202 Frow, Genre, 28.

203 Russ, ‘Wearing Out of Genre Materials.’

204 I have some connection to all these parties: Transit Lounge published my first novel; The Lifted Brow has a residency at RMIT, in my building, where Briohny also teaches; and Jane and I met at a Victorian Writers Centre book group—where we read The Swan Book, which is as good an antecedent as any for an Australian Anthropocene aesthetic. When it comes to genre communities the ‘spec-fic’ one may be famously close—with readers who are writers, buyers who are also producers—but so is publishing, and the small press network is alive and thriving in Melbourne.

205 Doyle, The Island Will Sink, 241.

206 Robert Macfarlane, ‘Generation Anthropocene: How Humans Have Altered the Planet for Ever,’ Guardian, April 1, 2016.

207 Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow, ‘Cli-fi: Birth of a Genre,’ Dissent (Summer 2013), accessed July 2017, https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/cli-fi-birth-of-a-genre.

208 Karen Hardy, ‘The World Without Us: Mireille Juchau Explains Why Climate Change Matters,’ Sydney Morning Herald, September 12, 2015.

210 Macfarlane, ‘Generation Anthropocene.’

211 James Bradley, ‘Climate Change Takes Fear Factor in Literature to New Levels,’ Australian, January 24, 2015.

212 Sterling, ‘Slipstream.’

213 Frow, Genre, 28.

Conclusion

214 The editor of the Sydney Review of Books Catriona Menzies-Pike recently wrote, in a review of Krissy Kneen’s An Uncertain Grace, that the author ‘joins a growing group of Australian writers, mainly women, who are working with the tropes and structures of genre fiction to write about climate change’ (‘A Fluctuating Charm,’ Sydney Review of Books, July 7, 2017, accessed August 2017, https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/fluctuating-charm-uncertain-grace/..

215 I am, grammatically, echoing Genette’s construction of literary fiction as ‘simultaneously (and intentionally) aesthetic and technical’ texts (Aesthetic Relation, 51).

216 Ballard, Crash, 1.

217 Amis, Experience, 224.

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