Tender Morsels
Margo Lanagan
Praise for Tender Morsels
‘… a density and moral complexity almost suggestive of a George
Eliot novel, with its decades-long narrative arc, its shifting
relationships, its questions involving responsibility,
misdirected love, and the nature of families.’
GARY K. WOLFE, Locus
‘Lanagan … employs a preternatural command of language, twisting
it into archaic and convoluted styles that release into passages of
absolute, startling clarity. Drawing alternate worlds that blur the
line between wonder and horror, and characters who traverse
the nature of human and beast, this challenging, unforgettable
work explores the ramifications of denying the most essential
and often savage aspects of life. … a marvel to read.’
IAN CHIPMAN, Booklist
‘Lanagan’s poetic style and her masterful employment of mythic
imagery give this story of transformation and healing
extraordinary depth and beauty. Lanagan offers up
difficult truths — and complicated, human characters
— that are as sobering as they are triumphant.’
DEIRDRE F. BAKER, The Horn Book
Praise for Black Juice
‘I want to hire a plane and write “Black Juice” across the sky so that
people will read these intense, rich, disturbing stories. This book’s
extraordinary, very strong; I haven’t read anything like it before.’
JOHN MARSDEN
‘… superbly unearthly tales … Lanagan is in a class of her own.
Every story in this book is a wonder: Lanagan’s range of invention
is breathtaking, her assuredness and unerring tact a joy to savour.
This is one of the most imaginative and attractive collections of
short stories to appear in more than a decade.’
MICHAEL SHARKEY, Weekend Australian
‘… dazzling imaginative reach … dark humour … subtlety …
humanity and depth of feeling … rich, strange, wonderful and
compelling. Margo Lanagan is an enormously talented and skilful
writer, with a powerful and original imagination.’
GARTH NIX
‘Lanagan uses fantasy to highlight certain universal truths about
human relationships. Her imagination is a powerful beast,
encompassing clowns and angels, dreams and nightmares —
mostly nightmares. She writes with wit and debauchment, and a
certain exuberant ruthlessness. It cries out for a sticker —
“If you like Angela Carter”.’
KATE SAUNDERS, The Times
‘The genius (not too strong a word) of Australian writer Margo
Lanagan is her ability to reach into darkness and return with
something both different and powerfully convincing.’
FAREN MILLER, Locus
‘Always moody, evocative and original, Black Juice is an intensely
imaginative collection from an accomplished and distinctive author.’
The Age
‘With enormous skill, Lanagan disturbs as she entertains, stimulating
our minds and playing havoc with our hearts. Black Juice is a feast of a
collection by a daring and talented writer.’
Good Reading
‘Margo Lanagan’s short stories are like funeral flowers, beautiful and
terrible at the same time … (they) tell us something about what
makes life worth living, even in the darkest times, the “black juice”
times. Margo Lanagan is a dark magician, and potentially dangerous.
Enter her fantastic world with care, but do enter it!’
Spress Magazine
‘… something else again … inventive, intriguing and extraordinary
in their power. … story after story astonishing, gripping and
multifaceted. … I’ve rarely been so touched by any writing. …
What a remarkable gift!’
Magpies
Praise for Red Spikes
‘Driven by beautiful, often quirky language and deep psychological
insight, these works demonstrate a powerful sense of the marvellous
… Gritty, dark and sometimes very nasty, these stories are, at their
best, worthy of comparison to the fairy tales of Angela Carter.’
Publishers Weekly
‘… Lanagan has an extraordinarily dark sense of humour and takes
obvious delight in subverting our expectations.’
Bookseller & Publisher
‘… Highly imaginative … disturbing in their oddness … Every story
is unexpected. Lanagan’s books are to be approached in a state of
fearful, delighted anticipation.’
Australian Book Review
‘… I was astonished by Red Spikes… The inventiveness, variety and
quality of each story are extraordinary … Lanagan seems to have
tapped into a bottomless reservoir of inspired creativity,
each piece a unique gem.’
Viewpoint
‘An extraordinarily dense compilation of philosophical ideas and
meditations on the precarious act of living and the dark beauty of
dying with dignity, [these stories] thrill with the epiphanies we have
when life suddenly reveals its grandeur. They offer astounding
insights into worlds just beyond our line of vision — the worlds
conjured up in dreams which reflect our real lives so devastatingly.
Greg Bear says they are like “a memory of the real”. See the world
through Lanagan’s eyes and it will never look quite the same again.’
ROBYN SHEAHAN-BRIGHT
Tender Morsels
ALSO BY MARGO LANAGAN
White Time
Black Juice
Red Spikes
Tender Morsels
Margo Lanagan
This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory board.
First published in Australia and New Zealand by Allen & Unwin
First published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf,
an imprint of Random House Children’s Books,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Copyright © Margo Lanagan 2008
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.
Allen & Unwin
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Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone:
(61 2) 8425 0100
Fax:
(61 2) 9906 2218
Email:
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Web:
www.allenandunwin.com
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Lanagan, Margo.
Tender morsels / Margo Lanagan.
ISBN 978 1 74114 796 4
A823.3
Set in 11.5/14 pt Goudy by Midland Typesetters Austral
ia
Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For my sisters, Susi, Jude and Amanda
Prologue
There are plenty would call her a slut for it. Me, I was just glad she had shown me. Now I could get this embarrassment off me. Now I knew what to do when it stuck out its dim one-eyed head.
She were a revelation, Hotty Annie. I had not known a girl could feel this too. Lucky girls; they can feel it and feel it and nothing need show on the outside; they have to act all hot like Annie did, talk smut and offer herself to the lads, before anyone can tell.
Well, we lay there in the remains of the hay cave that we had collapsed around us with our energetics. We looked both of us like an unholy marriage of hedgehogs and goldilockses. I laughed and laughed with the relief of it, and she laughed at me and my laughter.
‘By the Leddy,’ she said, ‘you have the kitment of a full man, you have, however short a stump you are the rest of you.’
‘I’m not so much shorter than you,’ I said, perfectly happy. She could not annoy me; no one could, this night. Shakestick might come along and stripe our bums and fill our ears with shame and still I would be swimming in air. Let him try.
It was warm, perfect for nudding down, the air like warm satin sliding all over me. The last blue of evening, close around us, shielded us from eyes, and yet some stars winked there and were festive also and who could mind their watching? And moths flew soft and silver. The stars silvered them, I guessed, and the last light from the sky, and the slight light from Shakestick’s lamps as he hurried the last of the haystackers, other end of the field. Anyway, they were low like a mist, the moths, like a dancing mist, large and small like snow wafting on a breeze, as if the very air were so alive that it had burst into these creatures, taken wing and fluttered in all these different directions.
Everything made sense—this girl and me wrapping each other, and what had gone before. I could see, as I’d not seen heretofore, why the whole world was paired up man to woman like it was, buck to doe, bull to cow, cock to hen: for both their releases, to keep them present on the earth, instead of away suffering inside their own bodies and heads. Moth to moth too, eh? Moth to moth—look at them, floating and flirting, giving off their moth-signals, curling their feather antlers at each other’s nearness.
‘Gawd, Annie,’ I whispered. ‘What are you made of? Caves and volcanoes!’
‘I am!’ she said. ‘I am!’ And she laughed, a careful laugh so as not to be heard outside this hay, yet full of delight and delights.
Our laughing wound down and we rested. We could rest a little longer, before Shakestick’s deputies came along the field rounding us all up to go back to St Onion’s.
‘Here,’ Annie said, and there was more kindness and gentleness than ever I heard in this girl’s voice before; she was a brassy one, this one, all bawd and bluster. ‘Close your eyes.’ She closed them for me with her damp fingertips that smelt of her and of me, ripe with the thing we just done, the parts I just discovered.
‘What?’ I said. ‘What you going to do to me?’ Not that I cared, not the littlest jot.
‘Shh.’ With her smelling fingers she made a sign on my forehead, and another, and a third. She wrote and wrote.
‘Makin your letters?’ I said. ‘Writin your name on me?’
‘Shh.’ She kept writing.
‘You’re very welcome to if you want.’
‘Dought, shut up or I’ll whap you,’ she said, but without heat; she were too concentrated on the marks she wasn’t making.
And she put me to sleep that way, and in my dream I sat up and the hay fell away, and it was daylight, and the field was full of haymakers, but they were all to a man or woman short-stumps like me. In fact I was one of the taller among them and one of the more handsome. Dought, they were saying. Where is Dought? We need his aid at the wagon. Oh, here he is!
And they needed me to do much what Shakestick did—that is, to say how things would be done and choose who would do them from the crowd. Respect came at me from all sides. People soberly took me at my word and did as I said. And several girls’ eyes gleamed and some of the older women’s too, towards me. I could have said the word and they would have follered me into the hay tonight just like I follered Hotty Annie.
‘Come back, Dought. Here comes Oul Shaky,’ says Annie in my ear. Darkness fell on the hayfield and she were pulling my pants up. Shakestick’s anger blew and banged towards us. Everything was scramble and stack the last forkings of hay, and shouts and smacks of the head for a while. Then we were in the cart and able to rest, jammed in so close we might almost do the thing again and not be noticed.
‘What was that,’ I murmured to Annie who I was half on the lap of, ‘what you done to me?’
‘Well, if you don’t know that, there’s something wrong with you.’ She laughed.
‘No, after. On my forehead. So that I went away.’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I’ve begun to be full of that stuff, these last several months. Curious, int it. Did you like it?’
‘Like it? If I could get there and live there I would be happy as a king in his treasure-house.’
‘Hmm,’ she said, ‘I have wondered that.’
‘Oh, I would be happy, all right, no doubting it.’
‘No, I’ve wondered if I could send a person there. I think mebbe I’ll be able to, one day. Right now all I can do is show.’ She looked tired, and more serious than I had ever seen her. The road’s stones and sprouts flowed behind her along the gaps between the cart-slats.
Beamer leaned in and goggled at me. ‘She will show anyone,’ he said. ‘You show her yours, she will show you hers, and even give yours a rub for you if you ask nice.’
‘You goose.’ Annie laughed and whacked at him. ‘We’re not talking about that.’
‘Oh well, makes a change, then, don’t it?’ said Beamer mildly, and sat back to his place.
1
Liga’s father fiddled with the fire, fiddled and fiddled. Then he stood up, very suddenly.
‘I will fetch more wood.’
What’s he angry about? Liga wondered. Or worried about, or something. He is being very odd.
Snow-light rushed in, chilling the house. Then he clamped the door closed and it was cosy again, cosy and empty of him. Liga took a deep private breath and blew it out slowly. Just these few moments would be her own.
But her next breath caught rough in her throat. She opened her eyes. Grey smoke was cauliflowering out of the fireplace, fogging the air. The smell! What unnameable rubbish had fallen in the fire?
She coughed so hard she must put aside the rush mat she was binding the edge of and give her whole body over to the coughing. Then pain caught her, low, and folded her—just like a rush-stalk, it felt—in a line across her belly, crushing her innards. She could hardly get breath to cough. Sparks that were not from the fire jiggled and swam in her eyes—she could not see the fire for the smoke. She could not believe what she was feeling.
The pain eased just as abruptly. It let her get up. It gave her a moment to stagger to the door and open it, her insides dangerous, liquid, hot with surprise and readying to spasm again.
Her father was halfway back from the woodpile, his arms full. He bared his teeth at her, no less. ‘What you doing out?’ White puffs came with the words. ‘Get back inside. Who said you could come out?’
‘I cannot breathe in there.’ The cold air dived down her throat and she coughed again.
‘Then go in and don’t breathe! Shut the door—you’re letting the smoke out. You’re letting the heat.’ He dropped the wood in the snow.
‘Has the chimney fallen in? Or what is it?’ She wanted to step farther out and look.
But he sprang over the logs and ran at her. She was too surprised to fight him, and her insides were too delicate. The icicled edge of the thatch swept down across the heavy sky, and she was on the floor, the door slammed closed above her. It was d
ark after the snow-glare, the air thick with the billowing smoke. Outside, he shouted—she could not hear the words—and hurled his logs one by one at the door.
She pressed her nose and mouth into the crook of her elbow, but she had already gulped smoke. It sank through to her deepest insides, and there it clasped its thin black hands, all knuckles and nerves, and wrung them, and wrung them.
Time stretched and shrank. She seemed to stretch and shrink. The pain pressed her flat, the crashing of the wood. Da muttered out there, muttered forever; his muttering had begun before her thirteen years had, and she would never hear the end of it; she must simply be here while it rose from blackness and sank again like a great fish into a lake, like a great water snake. Then Liga’s belly tightened again, and all was gone except the red fireworks inside her. The smoke boiled against her eyes and fought in her throat.
The pains resolved themselves into a movement, of innards wanting to force out. When she next could, she crawled to the door and threw her fists, her shoulder, against it. Was he out there any more? Had he run off and left her imprisoned? ‘Let me out or I will shit on the floor of your house!’
There was some activity out there, scraping of logs, thuds of them farther from the door. White light sliced into the smoke. Out Liga blazed, in a dirty smoke-cloud, clambering over the tumbled wood, pushing past him, pushing past his eager face.
But it was too late for the cold, clean air to save her; her insides had already come loose. She could not run or she would shake them out. Already they were drooling down her legs. She must clamp her thighs together to hold them in, and yet walk, and yet hurry, to the part of the forest edge they used for their excrements.
She did not achieve it. She fell to her knees in the snow. Inside her skirt, so much of her boiling self fell away that she felt quite undone below the waist, quite shapeless. No, look: sturdy hips. Look: a leg on either side. A blue-grey foot there, the other there. Gingerly, Liga sat back in a crouch to lift her numbing knees off the snow. The black trees towered in front of her, and the snow dazzled all around. She heaved and brought up nothing but spittle, but more of her was pushed out below by the heaving.
