Review of Australian Fiction, Volume 1, Issue 4
Volume 1: Issue 4
Susan Johnson and Sandra Hogan
Published by Review of Australian Fiction
“Truck of Kisses” Copyright © 2012 by Susan Johnson
“Long Way Round to the Cemetery” Copyright © 2012 by Sandra Hogan
www.reviewofaustralianfiction.com
Editorial
When we first started compiling wish lists of authors to approach in the early planning days of what has become the Review of Australian Fiction – and often these wish lists were written in lieu of doing any actual work on this project – Susan Johnson was living in London.
By the time we had reached the point when we were able to start approaching authors, Johnson was back living in Brisbane, Australia, with her two teenage sons. The story she has contributed to this issue – “Truck of Kisses” – was written, in part, however, while she was travelling through Europe.
‘For me,’ she emailed, ‘travelling is always conducive to writing.’
Susan Johnson is the author of eight books, including six novels. Her last novel was Life in Seven Mistakes (2008). She has also published a book-length essay, On Beauty (2009). And a memoir, A Better Woman (1999).
In May 2012, Johnson’s seventh novel, My Hundred Lovers, will be published.
The emerging author she has chosen to be paired with is Sandra Hogan. She has recently completed writing a memoir and a collection of short stories about ‘lost things’, which Johnson has helped edit. Hogan also co-edits an online literary journal, Perilous Adventures. Included here is an interesting interview she conducted with Susan Johnson.
This is also good interview to introduce some of the persistent themes of Johnson’s writing, how stories are grounded in the body, and how the body is grounded in a sense of place. This is an idea examined in her book, On Beauty. But it also seems to be a central concern in her forthcoming novel, My Hundred Lovers, which explores a woman’s sensual life through her bodily memories.
The two stories published in this issue, however, examine the other side of this. Both stories are played out in the shadow of death, and of the ways the living respond to it. Johnson’s story is about a daughter’s coming to terms with her father’s death, in light of her mother’s new ‘gentleman caller.’ While Hogan’s story glimpses into the lives of three women, from different generations, on a trip to a Jewish cemetery in Brisbane, Australia.
Of all the writers commissioned for the first volume of the Review of Australian Fiction, Hogan was the first to file her story. Unsure as to how our little experiment would pan out, reading Hogan’s story set our minds at ease that we were on the right track. It is a very subtle story, that hints at much in the background of these women’s lives, and it set a high standard for the stories that followed.
Enjoy.
Truck of Kisses
Susan Johnson
Doreen Stewart’s darling husband Des had been dead eight months when a gentleman started calling. Her gentleman caller was Richard, seventy-nine next birthday, tall, with a clipped silver moustache that she thought of as British Army Officer. He wasn’t British, he was Australian like her except he wasn’t born in Chippendale, Sydney, when it still housed the city’s workers, but on a dairy farm in northern New South Wales. Richard was an old friend of the family, a widower, for a short time Des’s accountant, who came first to pay his respects and to see if Doreen needed a hand with anything. Doreen’s daughter Cheryl should have been glad, but she was not.
* * *
Her darling Des, dead. Des, who used to say, ‘Come on, Dor. Land one on me,’ puckering up his lips. Darling Des who swept her up aged twenty-two and loved her so that he filled up her eyes, her heart, her whole self and she never thought of another man again. ‘I can’t fight you, love,’ he said every time she tried. ‘Don’t try to make me.’ Des had no fight in him, no anger, no clogged-up ruined mess of tears and old scabs like she had stuck in her veins because of her old bitch of a mother. By rights Doreen should probably have ended up with a clogged-up person like herself but she got lucky and ended up with Des. Des, who was temperamentally unsuited to being unkind to any woman, child or animal.
When the cancer diagnosis came it was Doreen who cried. Des remained his usual self. ‘Everyone’s got an end, love,’ he said. ‘The only thing that’s going to make it hard for me is leaving you.’
* * *
Cheryl Stewart had loved her dad, possibly more than any other girl had ever loved a father. When she was a child her dad was an atmosphere, like the weather, a kind of air in which she lived and breathed. Her dad was funny and kind and when she was small he told her that he had arranged for a truck of kisses to be delivered to her door. She used to lie awake trying to picture such a truck, whether she might be able to see the captured kisses, those smack of lips, of floating love. He called her Chezzy and told her she was a secret princess, given to them to especially care for. As well as the kisses her father promised a flight through the air, on his back, higher than the trees. For years she waited for this moment of illuminating lift-off and was embarrassingly old before she realized that men did not fly through the air and especially men with small daughters who were secret princesses clinging to their backs.
Des Stewart, alive and breathing, was a small man, skinny, capable, with a builder’s hands. He built the back verandah, a perfectionist who expertly lined up each individual plank. Des was often found smiling, whistling, or else tearing up at inappropriate moments, at soppy films or at the speeches of unwholesome politicians. He stayed out too long fishing and was much too fond of Carlton Mid and once when his car slammed into the side of another car, knocking out three side teeth, he never got them fixed because he was frightened of the dentist. Des Stewart’s worst crime was being too benign.
* * *
Des made Cheryl take her long-awaited European trip even though he was dying. ‘I’ve been dying so long I’ll still be dying when you come back,’ he said, but he was not. He died during the half hour she was eating an apple in Green Park, London, having broken away from the tour group, from the loud woman who talked too much and the young gay man from the tour bus who thought tourists could not tell they were being patronised. The half-hour was a blue dusk, the light fading, an endless northern hemisphere soft summer twilight, and Cheryl was sitting on a green bench beneath an oak tree when her father came to say goodbye, a shadow glimpsed from the corner of her eye, a breath against her face.
* * *
Doreen was holding her husband’s hand the moment his spirit flew away. The nurse had left the room and as Des flew away his body turned to wax. Doreen began to cry and she did not stop that day or the next or for any of the remaining hundred days of that bitter year.
* * *
Her gentleman caller first called on her on a crying day, bringing his condolences. She did not know then that he was also bringing the possibility of a day without a tear. Around the same time Doreen first heard her husband’s voice again, in those moments before she was fully awake, in those sweet saving seconds before she had to learn all over again that he was dead. She heard Des’s voice, whispering close in her ear, telling her that love was coming.
* * *
Naturally Doreen did not recognise love when she saw it. Love was the measurement of her husband’s head, his body, his builder’s hands. Love was an exact calibration, a measurement into which only one particular human person fitted. The gentleman caller was too tall for this space, his voice was wrong and he did not smell like Des. Her husband shared the same animal smell as herself, as if birthed from the same huddle, and his skin gave off a specific warm sweet smell that she had im
mediately recognised and met. The gentleman caller smelt odd, not unpleasant, and when he first kissed her, chastely, no tongues, which would have been unseemly in an old man, his lips were wrong.
* * *
Her gentleman caller had adored his late wife. Doreen took this as a good sign. She saw that he was a man who respected women, not because he said he was a man who respected women, but because she watched him.
* * *
Her gentleman caller began to seem to her more and more good-looking. She started to take longer choosing a dress before he arrived to take her to the RSL for lunch. Soon, she started to actively wait for his visits and his phone calls. She noticed, too, that whenever Richard escorted her across the street or into a room he guided her gently by the arm, holding what she thought of as her handbag arm, bent at the elbow. By the time he leaned forward to kiss her goodnight one evening her mouth was open.
* * *
Des arrived to give Doreen his blessing while she was in the kitchen, forcing herself to make a proper lunch, even though she was only cooking for one. ‘Go on, Dor,’ he said, clear as day, ‘go on, love. Be happy.’ She swung around but there was no-one there, nothing but a passing shadow, flickering, gone. ‘Des?’ she called, but he was absent.
* * *
It wasn’t Doreen who told Cheryl about the gentleman caller. It was nosey Mrs Forster two doors up, who cornered Cheryl as she got out of the car, Mrs Forster all swollen up with malice, who must have been watching for Cheryl’s arrival from the window and could hardly wait to rush out and tell her. Doreen was going to tell her, but all in good time, when Cheryl had stopped being angry at her for being overseas on her holiday when Des died, as if Doreen had arranged it on purpose. ‘You were always jealous,’ Cheryl said when she arrived home. ‘You couldn’t stand the fact that Dad loved me more than he loved you.’ Before she could even think Doreen slapped her daughter across the face, as if her hand flew straight up from her shocked and wounded heart.
* * *
Des arrived to ask Cheryl to stop her mother making a fool of herself one evening when she was sitting with her cat Rufus in her lap, half asleep, both of them. When her Dad spoke, really quietly like he always did, it wasn’t only her who heard it: she snapped awake and Rufus woke up too, his eyes wide, right up on his tiny bent feet. ‘Chezzy, you’ve got to do something,’ he said, clear as day.
* * *
Doreen and Cheryl stopped speaking to each other. Cheryl had been a late baby, born when Doreen was forty-four and they had long given up trying because Des did not have the heart to bury another still-born baby. Three babies, in graves out at the cemetery near the Brisbane river, and then Cheryl, a princess. Cheryl, who was so precious, so special, her father promised to take her flying through the air on his back and for a truck of kisses to be delivered. Cheryl, who grew up a little too fat, a little too fond of Tim Tams. Cheryl, aged care worker extraordinaire, secret princess, whose father’s ghost came to deliver warnings about her foolish mother who kissed old men with moustaches.
* * *
Doreen and Des’s friend Cath tried to arrange a peace summit but Cheryl refused to attend. ‘I’m not going to speak to her until she stops seeing him,’ Cheryl said. Cath, who was a good soul, patted Cheryl’s arm. ‘Cheryl, dear, your Mum’s not doing anything wrong, is she? I don’t think your Dad would have wanted her to stop living.’ Cheryl snorted. ‘I don’t think he thought kissing old codgers was living,’ she said. She was aware that she was drinking her cup of tea while it was too hot and that her tongue was scalded.
‘Look, Cath, Dad’s told me he’s not happy,’ she said.
Cath looked at her oddly.
‘I talk to him,’ Cheryl said.
* * *
When Cath told Doreen that Des had been visiting Cheryl, Doreen snorted in the same way that her daughter had snorted. ‘Well that’s rich,’ Doreen said, ‘Des’s been coming to see me. And he told me to go for it.’ Cath, who was a good soul but whose knowledge of grief did not extend to talking ghosts, was stumped. She certainly didn’t know anything about talking ghosts who appeared in two places at once, that was for sure.
* * *
The gentleman caller held Doreen while she cried. ‘Oh, dear, oh dear,’ he said, gently stroking her hair. When she had stopped sobbing long enough, and told him everything, he slowly disengaged himself from her arms. ‘This calls for a stiff drink,’ he said. ‘A whiskey, Doreen?’
They went out to the verandah to drink it, the verandah in his block of units overlooking an untidy bit of bush, with a scrub turkey in it making a mess. Doreen wasn’t used to spirits and the whiskey went straight to her head, the sound of the bush turkey scrabbling around in the leaves jostling with the music playing (Nat King Cole, was it?) and the ice in her glass and the clear sound of Des’s voice in her head. ‘Why wouldn’t he be talking to me, Richard?’ she asked. ‘Have you ever spoken to your wife?’ Richard looked away. ‘I’m afraid I haven’t,’ he said, ‘but not from want of trying. What I wouldn’t have given to hear her voice again,’ he said, sounding so sad she started to cry again. ‘You believe me, don’t you?’ she said through her sobs. ‘Of course, darling, of course,’ he replied. It was the first time he had called her darling.
* * *
Cheryl’s friends urged her to reconsider. ‘I would, except for Dad,’ she said, ‘what do you expect me to do? Ignore him?’ By and large Cheryl’s friends fell into two camps on the subject: those who thought she was barking and those who believed that the dead might naturally wish to visit the living. Her best friend Natalie wanted to hold a séance but Cheryl didn’t believe in all that crap. She believed only that her Dad loved her so much that he didn’t want to stop seeing her just because he was dead.
* * *
The weeks went on, the months, and before either Doreen or Cheryl knew it, a year had passed, and then two. It sometimes seemed strange to Doreen, thinking of the three dead babies in the ground, lying next to Des, and Cheryl, alive, in her house in Yeronga and her, Doreen, in her house at Highgate Hill, just a twist of a river and a few hills between them. At what moment did it become impossible to speak again, to invite their mutual talking ghost into the room, and ask him what he really wanted? Was her ghost real? Was Cheryl’s? Richard was still there, alive, loving her, holding her gently by the arm and the sight of his clipped silver moustache caused Doreen’s heart to dance in her chest. They were lovers now, not vigorous young lovers three times a night, but still lovers, the round helmet at the tip of his penis swelling and plump in her mouth. Sometimes he did not finish but she did not mind because Richard was skin and warm running blood and Richard loved her.
* * *
If sometimes at night now Cheryl misses her mother she never once thinks of picking up the telephone. She never once thinks of walking on her own two feet to her mother’s door and falling into her arms. She thinks instead of her father’s ghost and how she is its champion, its custodian, and how his dear voice would be stilled forever unless she, Cheryl, keeps her ears ready. It is her job, waiting for her father’s voice, waiting for him to give her advice about her mother and waiting for the expected arrival of the truck of kisses, the rattling sound of it coming down the street headed for her door, all the kisses of the world filling up the air. A kiss, a ghost, a breath against her face, the world passing, the light growing blue, dim, and nothing but herself and her father’s voice calling Chezzy, Chezzy, speaking low, bringing comfort and invisible kisses and ceaseless, unending love.
Long Way Round to the Cemetery
Sandra Hogan
‘Do you want tea, Leisel?’
‘No thank you, Pola.’
‘Do you want tea, Deborah?’
‘No thank you, Pola.’
Leisel and her daughter Deborah were standing, anxious to leave for the cemetery, but Pola couldn’t have guests arrive at her house and leave without eating and drinking.
‘Do you want a cold drink, Leisel?’
; ‘No thank you. I’m ready to go now Pola.’
‘Deborah, do you want a cold drink? I have lemonade, orange juice, mineral water. You take these glasses and I will bring the drinks.’
‘No thanks Pola. I’m not thirsty. Do you want me to carry your bag to the car?’
‘Well, eat these chocolates then. You see how nice they are? Mine little Rachel gave me these. That is her in the photo there on the piano. Isn’t she beautiful? She rings me every day. Eat another. Leisel I am wrapping this one up to go in your bag for later. You might be hungry after the consecration. Leisel what time is it Shabbat tonight?’
‘You must light your candles at 6.00 tonight, Pola.’
‘Ah Leisel, you are a Rabbitsen. Always you are so wise. Isn’t she Deborah? Your mother knows so much and she is so, so kind.’
Sitting on the edge of a well-stuffed chair, Leisel blushed and looked down at the handbag on her lap, hiding her smile.
Finally, Deborah edged and coaxed the two old ladies out to the car, Pola offering hospitality right up to the moment she turned the third key in the elaborate locking system on the front of her gracious old Queenslander home. Leisel held Pola’s bags, stroked her hand, replied gently to each of her remarks and made sure she got the front seat. Now that she was a widow, Leisel saw the back seat as her place.
At 50, Deborah was officially “the young one”. Leisel was 85, Pola was something more than that but had never revealed her precise age. ‘You go off and talk to the other young ones,’ they would say to Deborah when she drove them to music recitals at the synagogue or to the Pesach dinner at the Liberal temple. ‘Don’t sit here being dull with the old ladies.’ But Deborah walked off slowly. She didn’t feel like the young one. Leisel and Pola met their friends, chatted, laughed, gossiped and bought tickets and candlesticks for Jewish charities. They were always in the centre of a group, chatting hard, kissing cheeks, pressing hands. Deborah didn’t know many people at these gatherings and felt she had little in common with those she knew. She was the responsible person, the one who would watch her charges to see they didn’t get too tired, that they had enough to eat. She felt rather dull at these gatherings and noticed her knees were starting to play up. Elderly knees!