University of Wollongong Research Online University of Wollongong Thesis Collection University of Wollongong Thesis Collections 2008 Bite your tongue Francesca Rendle-Short University of Wollongong Recommended Citation Rendle-Short, Francesca, Bite your tongue, Doctor of Creative Arts thesis, Faculty of Creative Arts, University of Wollongong, 2008. http://ro.uow.edu.au/theses/918 Research Online is the open access institutional repository for the University of Wollongong. For further information contact the UOW Library: [email protected] BITE YOUR TONGUE (Volume I: Novel) by Francesca Rendle-Short A novel submitted in fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Creative Arts, Faculty of Creative Arts, University of Wollongong, 2008 310 Certification I, Francesca Rendle-Short, declare that this submission in fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Creative Arts, Faculty of Creative Arts, University of Wollongong, is wholly my own work unless otherwise referenced or acknowledged. The document has not been submitted for qualification at any other academic institution. Francesca Rendle-Short 16 December 2008 311 Abstract Two years before she died, Susan Sontag spoke about the power of fiction, how it is through inventions of a writerly kind that we receive an “education of the heart.” She said it is through art, fiction in particular, that we are able to make a world that “enlarges our sympathy.” This vision underpins this submission for a Doctor of Creative Arts, which consists of two companion texts: a novel (Volume I) and its theoretical annotation/exegesis (Volume II). The novel Bite Your Tongue is the story of a girl’s growing up and out of silence, and how her body operates and survives as the language of the process. The novel has two landscapes: the girl’s childhood in 1970s Brisbane and her relationship with her mother, a “morals crusader,” who wants to save the children of Queensland by banning books; and her reflections as an adult on her relationship with her dying mother. Complex and self-reflexive, this is a novel about books and the body, language and writing the self. This creative work and its accompanying theoretical annotation seek to “enlarge our sympathy,” to make a different kind of world in which it is possible to learn love—to speak it, to write it. 312 For my mother, Angel 313 Contents Bite Your Tongue—novel Prologue 3 Part I 11 Part II 87 Part III 177 Part IV 265 Part V 310 314 The books leapt and danced like roasted birds, their wings ablaze with red and yellow feathers. Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, p. 124 315 This is a book about really good books in one hundred chapters. It is a novel, a work of fiction. In writing this story, inspired by a life, the names of various people have been changed to protect their identities. Some place-names and institutions have also been changed, although not all. If you are familiar with Brisbane, you might well recognise the “lie” of the land. 316 Prologue 317 Chapter One It was the year before Joh Bjelke-Petersen and his mates pulled down Cloudland Ballroom in Bowen Hills, that grand landmark, a glam, art-deco jewel in Brisbane’s crown. It was the summer of 1981, the summer Glory Solider would begin to read Mrs Dalloway, the summer she would wear a black crucifix in protest at being “a Solider” (the cross was worn in secret, mind, hidden underneath her clothes). That summer Glory thought she had grown up at last, she was already twenty-one, not that her mother sent her a birthday card with best wishes. Glory didn’t tell her mother where she was going. Dancing was strictly forbidden in the Solider family, like alcohol, like rock music. She had just hoped she could get away with it. To this day, Glory has no idea how her mother knew where to look for her. But minutes before MotherJoy burst into the ballroom on top of the hill, minutes before there were boos and hisses and spit, Glory sensed something climactic was about to happen, her mother centre stage. Glory felt the rush of wings, the weight of shadow closing in. 318 Chapter Two How hot her body was, how prickly, but not the kind of heat you might welcome on a dance floor in the company of a hundred or so other bodies pulsating to the beat of drums, bass guitars. It was the heat of premonition, that’s the only way Glory could explain it to herself. She knew what was going to happen before it did happen because of the peculiar way her body responded, because she was powerless to do anything about it. She had to live through whatever it was coming her way. No one must see her! When Glory looks up the word premonition for its exact meaning, when writing this story, she can’t find it anywhere in her 1968 Fowler&Fowler Pocket Oxford, and she feels the agitation a second time—perhaps she really is making all of this up. Back at Cloudlands, there was nowhere safe to go, she couldn’t keep still. Glory wedged herself into a corner under the balustrade that held up the mezzanine floor. No one must know she is here! No one must know she is hiding—afraid. In particular, she mustn’t let her old school friend, Lisa, find her there, not now; their reunion was ruined. Glory’s stomach felt so heavy, her feet and legs turned to thick mud, and this mud pulled the rest of her body down into the sludge, her skin boiled to touch. She must escape, slew out of this place. Find air to let her lungs fill. Breathe! “Please, please,” Glory begged into the fug and uproar, into the sleaze, “please don’t make a scene.” Glory’s skin was so tight over her bones it hurt, it felt like the film of sweat she’d been half enjoying as a passive dancer was now baked solid and wouldn’t let her out of its stiff crackling. When the shouting and exclaiming started—“Whoa!”, “Lady!”, 319 “You can’t do that!”, “Watch it!”—Glory said out loud, as if to apologise to anyone who might be listening nearby: “That’s my mother!” If she could bend over she would dry retch onto the sprung floor. At her throat the clanging of cymbals, her lungs tight with an itching chest, like that awful asthmatic constriction of the lungs, the ventricles closing up. And even though she and her mother weren’t yet touching, MotherJoy’s fingers squeezed her daughter’s heart dry. Please, please don’t make a scene. Please. It was spectacular: how the band stopped mid chord, stunned, how the reverberations whined in the ear. The way those who were dancing were dancing, which was nearly everyone, how they moved aside in a single choreographed wave to make room for MotherJoy: Glory’s mother, a latter-day prophet parting the waters of the Red Sea. Because of the uncharacteristic hush too. And then, that very distinctive voice Glory could easily mimic, broke lose, exclaimed: I must speak my mind. MotherJoy did find Glory in the dark, in amongst the velvet-green upholstery. She grabbed her daughter roughly, and dragged her into the middle of the circle that formed around them. The light shone on these two Soliders through the smoky haze, marooned hand-in-hand with a wide margin singling them out (someone must have shifted the spotlight to see what was going on). How the cloudburst of silence from hundreds, mixed with a single track of sonority from her, a voice that was gaining momentum and oomph with each uttered word, each proclamation. She said: Do you not know this is an abomination to God? As she spoke, it looked like her body was a musical instrument, a cello perhaps, miked up for this special performance and planted into the floor on a steady stand, so you could see her whole body vibrate above her ankles with each note. Do you not 320 know this is the work of the Devil? This is the sort of moral corruption I’m talking about. A kind of shuddering from her chin down through her thighs as her bow swiped the strings. She might have been conducting a little orchestra with her gesticulating. I will not allow my daughter—flesh of my flesh—to be influenced by such a thing. By this flagrancy. God knows the mortal danger she is in, now, speaking directly to her daughter. The righteous shall inherit the earth, she concluded with emphasis. Thus says the Lord. Or something like this. What Glory remembers is the way her own hand was so tightly held by her mother’s, she was once again a small faithful child. Lest she forget. She remembers the rub of rough, dry skin (her mother had hard-working hands, she liked being in the backyard with the chooks and ducks), how Glory felt pulled, the bones stretched out of her sockets. And everybody else in the massive room blinked at her from out of the circle of darkness, although nothing particular could be distinguished in the haze. It was a blur but for the whites of all those eyes. Glory imagined Lisa amongst the crowd, rolling her eyes, her pity, and there was nothing Glory could do to make it better. She hears her mother’s voice, still, after all these years, and the suppressed gasp that held it aloft. A shocked silence—could this be true? A ghastly, ghastly moment.