Review of Australian Fiction, Volume 3, Issue 2

  Volume 3: Issue 2

  Emily Maguire & Krissy Kneen

  Imprint

  Published by Review of Australian Fiction

  “So Many Things Happen” Copyright © 2012 by Emily Maguire

  “Unspeakably Blue” Copyright © 2012 by Krissy Kneen

  www.reviewofaustralianfiction.com

  Editorial

  The first story in this issue of the Review of Australian Fiction shows why Emily Maguire is one of the most interesting and talented writers in Australia today.

  In terms of the themes she tackles, she can effortlessly bring together personal and political, past and present, individual and cultural, history and dream.

  As a child, I thought that Vietnam was the name of an illness. It was why Dad sometimes spent all afternoon shouting and then half the night throwing up, why he stopped speaking to my mother and I for weeks at a time, why he couldn’t keep a job….

  I don’t know when I became aware that Vietnam was not an illness but a war or when I understood it was not a war but a country.

  And in terms of her craft, she can evoke in only a few short sentences a whole novel’s worth of story.

  I was seventeen then and my mother and I had been at war for several years already. Her weapons were cheesy casseroles, freshly-baked pies and self-help books left open on my pillow; mine were ever sharper bones, visible hickeys and silence.

  Emily Maguire is the author of three novels, Taming the Beast (2004), The Gospel According to Luke (2006), and, more recently, Smoke in the Room (2009). She has been twice highly commended for the Kathleen Mitchell Award for writers under 30 and she was a finalist for the 2006 Dylan Thomas Prize. In 2010 she was named as a Sydney Morning Herald Young Novelist of the Year.

  As well as writing fiction, Emily is also a thinker and a writer of non-fiction articles and books, exploring the relationships between sex, feminism, culture and literature. Her 2008 book, Princesses and Pornstars: Sex + Power + Identity is also available in a Young Adult version, Your Skirt’s Too Short: Sex, Power, Choice (2010).

  The writer that Emily chose to be paired with in this issue is Krissy Kneen. I was delighted when Emily chose Krissy, because Krissy is one of the great booksellers at Avid Reader in Brisbane’s West End, which I used to frequent when I lived there. Her first book, Affection: A memoir of love, sex and intimacy was published in 2010, followed soon after by a suite of novellas, Triptych, an erotic adventure in 2011.

  The erotic (well, pornographic) adventure continues in the novella published here. “Unspeakably Blue” tells the story of, not so much why, but how, a dog can be a man’s best friend. Bestiality has never been so poignant. At least, not since Gene Wilder introduced us to Daisy the Sheep in Woody Allen’s Every Thing You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask) (1972).

  Enjoy. But not too much.

  So Many Things Happen

  Emily Maguire

  I wake up each day to a noise like an elephant trumpeting through foam. The first few mornings I leant out my window into the damp early air and tried to find the source amongst the narrow tube houses and labyrinthine alleys. But this city distorts sounds across distance and it was as though that strained, throaty roar came from beneath every rusty rooftop, from behind every grey-streaked concrete wall. It vibrated through the rows and rows of dirty-clean washing hanging from black-dust coated balconies and if I stood at the window long enough, it began to seem as though it was in the room with me.

  My landlady, Mrs Nguyen, cannot hear it because she is seventy per cent deaf. Based on my description of the sound she believes it is the con ma—the angry ghost—in the empty house at the end of the street. She has begged the owner of the building to exorcise, but he is foreign-educated and scoffs at the idea. Meanwhile, the six-storey house remains empty in a neighbourhood where three families will share a single floor not out of poverty but simple lack of housing.

  I have a room to myself on the top floor of Mrs Nguyen’s house. It is the size of the ensuite bathroom at my mother’s house back in Sydney, but bearable because of the large outward-swinging window which gives the illusion of space. I was only supposed to be here for ten days, but it is coming up on a month and I am still waiting for my father to return and take me home with him. He calls each day and says soon. Each day he sounds happier and his soon sounds less convincing. I could call my mother and beg the cost of a ticket home, but I can’t see the point. Here or there I am still me, but here, at least, there is no one to be distressed by that fact.

  * * *

  As a child, I thought that Vietnam was the name of an illness. It was why Dad sometimes spent all afternoon shouting and then half the night throwing up, why he stopped speaking to my mother and I for weeks at a time, why he couldn’t keep a job. It wasn’t right to hate him for his rage or his foul breath or mortifying public tears, because none of it was his fault. It was because of bloody Vietnam.

  I don’t know when I became aware that Vietnam was not an illness but a war or when I understood it was not a war but a country. I only know that twenty-nine days ago as we began our descent into Hanoi, I understood in a nauseating instant that even the very little I knew about the place was forty years out of date and filtered through trauma and regret.

  ‘Will they be angry at us?’ I asked as the wheels hit the tarmac.

  ‘Who?’ Dad had his face pressed to the window although there was nothing to see but blackness broken by the occasional runway light.

  ‘The people here.’

  ‘Nah, mate. It’s not like that.’

  The plane was speeding along the ground and the seatbelt lights were still on, but passengers all around us unclicked their belts and stood up. Overhead lockers snapped open, bags swung out and down, filling the aisle.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I’m not the first bloke to have done this.’ He patted my leg, but didn’t look away from the blackness outside. ‘We’re treading a real well worn path. Nothing to worry about.’

  I had never been overseas before, but even without anything to compare it to, I knew Noi Bai airport was a shithole. The lino under our feet was cracked and grubby and the beige walls were splotched with grease. The air was thick and damp and smelt like laundry left in the machine all week.

  But when we’d finally collected our luggage from the over-burdened carousel Dad grinned and spread his arms wide. ‘Bloody amazing,’ he said.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Just that—Oh, hey, that must be Rob.’ He nodded towards the only white man amongst the mob of sign-holding blokes near the airport exit. ‘Rob?’ he yelled, and thirty Vietnamese men turned to stare at us.

  The white bloke, Dad’s age and height but as scrawny as me, rushed forward and grabbed both of Dad’s hands. ‘Mick. Great to see you.’ He turned to me, snatched my backpack. ‘Trina, yeah? How’s it going? Drivers waiting out front, let’s go, eh?’

  He took off with my bag and Dad and I trotted behind him.

  Outside I took a deep breath and my lungs filled with exhaust. Rob stepped out in front of a moving bus and I didn’t have time to shout before Dad stepped out behind him. Somehow the bus missed them, as did the white Toyota van on the inside lane. Dad stopped on the other side and looked back at me. ‘You coming, or what?’ he called and I remembered he’d told me about the traffic, how it never stops, you just have to step out into it and trust it to go around you. It had sounded okay, but standing here on the edge I couldn’t do it. I stared across at him, hoping he’d read my face, come and help me, but he wasn’t even looking. After a few seconds a Vietnamese man with a roller-case stepped out next to me and I wa
lked in his shadow and made it to Rob, Dad, and the waiting jeep.

  Rob had been organising returning vet tours for years. He had told Dad that family members were welcome, but I clearly was not. Rob spent the drive from the airport nattering about the plans he’d made and everything was ‘the men’ this and ‘the blokes’ that. Six of them all together, Rob said, though one bloke would be meeting them in Danang and another leaving before they took the Mekong cruise.

  ‘What about me?’ I asked Dad.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Rob answered. ‘Guesthouse I’ve booked you into here in Hanoi can organise some fun tours for you. Halong Bay, Sapa—those are the usual for young backpackers.’

  ‘I’m not travelling with you?’ I asked Dad, annoyed by the whiny tone of my voice but so near panic I couldn’t stop it.

  Dad looked at Rob who turned his head and stared out the window.

  ‘Listen, mate, it’s going to be heavy going. Probably best you stay up here. Have a proper holiday. Explore the town. Then when the tour’s done, you can show me around Hanoi, eh?’

  The roads seemed to have no rules or speed limits. The jeep bounced and darted and the sound of horns drowned out every third sentence Rob spoke. My bones rattled; my joints ached. I hugged my knees and bit down on my panic. I told myself it would be a relief to be away from the old man. He was a stranger, really, and a strange stranger at that.

  The night before we left Sydney I’d been drifting off to sleep on his couch when he began to scream. I sat up, heart hammering, mind scrambling for an answer to a question I could only feel. Dad’s wife Patty was suddenly beside me, her arm around my shoulders.

  ‘Sorry, love. Shoulda warned you about this. I was hoping it wouldn’t happen while you were with him. Sometimes he goes weeks…’

  ‘What is it? What’s happening?’

  ‘It’s like a nightmare.’

  ‘Like one?’

  ‘He calls ’em nightmares, but… His eyes are open and not just staring into space or anything. He’s looking at something. His face is like, like if there was a train coming at ya and you can’t get out of the way. And then he starts screaming.’

  We sat and listened to him. I don’t know if I was shaking or if her shuddering arm was making it feel that way.

  ‘What do we do?’ I asked her.

  ‘Leave him alone until it passes.’

  Patty was older than my mother, though still a few years younger than Dad. She was his third wife. The first he had married at twenty, a few months before he was sent to Vietnam. She left him a year after he returned. He used to refer to her as ‘the bitch’ but now when he speaks about that time he calls her Penny or ‘the girl’. He was single a long time after Penny. At forty he married my mum, who was eighteen. She was his ‘second-chance’. She kicked him out when I was six and fifteen years later, he married Patty who was not, he assured me, his third-chance but the final one.

  Patty was a receptionist at a medical centre. The kitchen and bathroom cabinets were crammed with drug samples but Patty said Dad wouldn’t take anything for the night terrors or the insomnia that tormented him for weeks at a time. He wouldn’t take anything for the splitting headaches or the tremors or the nausea. He had spent almost forty years blocking out eighteen months and he wouldn’t do it for another day. The pain and sickness and anxiety and nightmares were all part of the deal.

  ‘The deal’ was what he called all the shit he was voluntarily digging up and wading through and occasionally flinging around since he hooked up with Patty and started therapy. My being there, sleeping under the same roof for the first time in years, was also part of the deal. He had tracked me down, wept in repentance, begged me to come and stay with him and Patty. I was sick and broke, relying not so much on the kindness of friends as on their apathy and so of course I said yes. I didn’t expect him to invite me on his returning serviceman’s tour or that my mother and most recent therapist would agree it was a good idea. I didn’t expect to be cowering in the night, listening to his howling and feeling five years old again.

  In the morning he was fine. Patty drove us to the airport. She kissed him goodbye and told me to look after him but I could tell from the way she squeezed my upper arm that she thought I was the one who needed looking after. I felt the same way, yet here I am almost a month of wet, cold, haunted days later and I am still alive with no help from him at all.

  * * *

  Every day I walk for hours. Motorbike taxis trail me, begging for custom, but I wave them off. When I leave the guesthouse I am freezing and by the time I stop for my first cup of coffee I am warm enough to remove my gloves to pay. After my coffee, I walk back to the guesthouse and nap until it’s dark out. Then I walk into the heart of the Old Quarter for a vodka and a bowl of clear soup. I walk for another hour or so and then return to my room in time for Dad’s call, which never takes more than five minutes. I do fifty squats, fifty push-ups, one hundred sit-ups and fifty star jumps. I lock myself into the shared, bleach-reeking bathroom and shower. I run a fresh razor over the fluffy regrowth on my arms and legs. I moisturise and stretch. I go to bed and sleep until dawn when the angry ghost from the house on the corner roars me awake.

  Every day except today. Today I woke in total darkness and I could not move. I couldn’t see and there was no sound, but I knew someone was there. This is death I thought and then I was released. I sprang out of bed, switched on the light and the tiny portable television. I checked the door and window locks and then checked them again. I was shivering so hard my teeth hurt and so I climbed back into bed and lay there watching the Korean news channel and waiting for my pulse to slow.

  The terror had felt familiar and as my panic subsided I was able to dredge up the memory. I was sixteen, still living at home but not for much longer. I had woken and, like in a nightmare, tried to scream but found I was voiceless. I was on my back and couldn’t not be. There was something in the corner, hovering close to the ceiling. I couldn’t see it but it was there and it wanted to hurt me and I could do nothing about it.

  Mr Forbes, the only adult I spoke to back then, said it sounded like sleep paralysis. He Googled it for me, slid his laptop computer across the desk so I could read the description for myself. I read that instead of a presence in the corner like I’d felt, some people saw a creature sitting on their chest, physically holding them in place. I read that such experiences have been reported pretty much everywhere since pretty much forever and there are at least fifty different names for it. I clicked every link, read each one out loud, ignoring Mr Forbes’s attempts to cut me off.

  Eventually he shouted, ‘Trina!’ and I stopped and looked up at him. ‘The important thing,’ he said, leaning his palms on the desk he insisted on tucking himself into whenever I was in his office, ‘is that it’s harmless.’

  ‘It’s not, though,’ I told him, sliding the laptop back across his desktop. I watched his face as he read about the eighteen Khmer refugees who died in their sleep. He was twenty-eight but had worse acne than any teenager I’d seen. I often wondered if he’d been tormented for it at school and if that was why he’d become a school counsellor, to help kids who’d suffered as he had. I couldn’t ask him, though, because it was Crossing Boundaries and I had signed a pledge agreeing not to do that.

  Mr Forbes looked worried for a second and then he smiled. ‘Trina, these men didn’t die from sleep paralysis. They were survivors of genocide, no doubt had all kinds of complicated medical conditions. Just because they were asleep when they died—’

  ‘But they all reported it before they died. The thing on their chest. The…’ I leant across the desk, flinching as Mr Forbes flinched from me. I grabbed the laptop and scanned the page. ‘The Tsob Tsuang. The demon holding them down in the night. They were all terrified of it and nobody listened and now they’re dead.’

  ‘The article says their cultural beliefs included the demon, not that they…’

  ‘If they believed in it, they must have been terrified. Don’t you think?’<
br />
  ‘Probably,’ Mr Forbes said and then he asked if I’d eaten that day and I stung him hard with my eyes and left his office.

  * * *

  Mrs Nguyen is upset at my continued refusal to eat the breakfast she serves in her front room each morning between 6 and 9 am. At first she would bang on my door at 8.45 and when I still didn’t come down until after 9, she accused me of being lazy. Then when I started leaving the guesthouse at 7am she scowled and said it was a waste of money for me to eat breakfast elsewhere. Now, though, she just shakes her head and mutters ‘so skinny’ when I pass her front room. I don’t mind. There’s a German girl in the room next to mine who is not much bigger than me, but Mrs Nguyen calls her Fatty and tells anyone who’ll listen that some mornings she eats two bowls of beef pho and a toasted roll.

  Some mornings as I pass the breakfast room Mrs Nguyen calls to me and asks if the angry ghost is still waking me each dawn. I tell her it is and she nods as if she knew this was so. I shouldn’t worry, though: she has been consulting with the neighbours who assure her it is a ma đè, which is good because the ma đè only comes for men.

  Mrs Nguyen has some experience of this. When she was a child, the village men were being terrorised nightly by a wicked ma đè. Someone suggested that the men dress as women to fool it, but the men scoffed at the suggestion. They would rather die than degrade themselves in that way. One man had more fear than dignity, however. He began to wear a skirt and weave his hair, at first only at night and then all the time. The ghost never came for him, but the village men did. His face and body were so battered that he could only be identified by his delicately woven hair.

  Mrs Nguyen tells me this story while chopping pineapple with a knife as long as my forearm. She is around sixty, I guess, and must be almost exactly my height and weight. Her arms—scarred, bubbling skin loosely covering twisted ropes of muscle—resemble the trunk of the banyan tree out the front of the house. When she describes the beaten transvestite the veins on her neck stand out, stiff and engorged with blue blood, and I have to look away.