Welcome to Story Club

by Zoe Norton Lodge

  I assumed it would stop. In my teens, it just got worse. At school, I had to watch all the girls transition into women, while I slowly became more and more monstrous: a Jekyll to Hyde transformation played out in hormonal slow motion. I knew I couldn’t fight it, so I tried to embrace it, overcompensating in public but going home to a well-hidden stash of dresses, twisting my sex between my thighs, approximating happiness. In quiet moments, I would watch the breeze weave through the faint straggling hairs on the back of the neck of the girl in front of me as she took notes in class. There is nothing more feminine than the etheric strands of silken hair at the base of a woman’s neck, nothing so maddeningly spiteful, so callous, so cruel. A million nights I prayed to a god I don’t believe in to make me a girl, or to make me die. Predictably, he didn’t respond either way.

  When I lost my virginity, I was suddenly in over my head. I hated being touched, given pleasure. It drove the point home how different I was from her. Each sigh and insensible moan was a thick, tobacco-stained finger jutting me in the ribs, reminding me that one of us was in the wrong skin. I plunged myself into cowardly gothic drag and stole the clothes of a succession of girlfriends, who I soon became no more interested in touching than myself. As soon as they took off their clothes my skin was an ant farm of jealousy; as soon as they came I wanted to tear myself in half, one end fish, one end human, in bloody pieces on either side of the room.

  By twenty-five, I had decided that I had to die. I could never be who I was supposed to be; I was trapped, slowly suffocating in a gender-swapped effigy. I reasoned, if there is a god, he will show me kindness, and make me right the next time around, and if there isn’t, then all of this will become a passing dream in the slumber of oblivion. I made several attempts on my life in the next four years.

  In essence, I became a drag-king. A woman caricaturing a man. I simply stole male affects from movies and wore them as my own.

  I played Tony Soprano, I was David Letterman, Wolverine, Christopher Hitchens.

  Irish whiskey, martial arts and meticulous acting all wove a persona for me so huge, so overbearing, that no one would notice the creature hidden in its heart. I deliberately let the drinking and smoking get out of control; perhaps it would have the strength to do what I could not.

  She will never go away – I know that now. The mermaid is beautiful, and silent, and the forgery I created is far too powerful. From beneath the ocean she whispers, still. She wants someone, somewhere, to know my name is Cassie.

  That would have been the last thing I ever wrote. But then, I thought, fuck that. So what was going to be a death note is a celebration, because now I’m sort of happy, I am transgender, my name is Cassie.

  Pleased to finally meet you.

  RICHARD GLOVER

  Richard is the author of a number of bestsellers including Flesh Wounds and The Mud House. His most recent book is The Land Before Avocado. He writes regularly for the Sydney Morning Herald and the Washington Post and presents the comedy show Thank God It’s Friday! on ABC Local Radio.

  ‘Rooted’ copyright © Richard Glover 2018

  Rooted

  by RICHARD GLOVER

  This story was originally performed at the event Big Mistake. Huge.

  I have a block of land in the bush and some time on my hands. First thought: Go up there, sit under a gum tree, read a good book.

  Second thought: Why not plant a vineyard?

  The vineyard idea was so much worse than the read-a-book idea that naturally I soon found myself in Bunnings, surveying the mechanical cultivators. I chose the cheapest on offer – a device that offered a powerful 25cc engine and promised years of rugged, trouble-free performance.

  At this point, perhaps, I should have twigged that the terms ‘powerful’ and ‘25cc engine’ are not normally spotted in the same sentence.

  Years ago, I was the proud owner of a Honda step-through motorcycle – engine capacity 160cc – which, in my mind, transformed me into a flash of speed and testosterone that left observers gasping, but which, in reality, turned my appearance into that of a fey hippy sitting astride his grandmother’s sewing machine.

  But I digress. I paid the money for the mechanical cultivator – $439 – and hauled the thing into my vehicle. I started driving away from Bunnings. Then, at the first traffic lights, came the thought: If I’m going to be a vigneron, I’ll probably need to water the vines.

  Returning to Bunnings, I bought a petrol-driven water pump, for $262, in order to supply water from the dam with which to water the vines I was yet to plant. This device also featured an engine described as ‘powerful’, sufficient to pump water as far as twenty metres, which – providing you don’t engage your brain – sounds like a fair distance.

  I set out again for home, before realising that, for the pump to work, it needed to be connected to a hose, so I did another U-turn and went back and spent $39 on twenty metres of hose.

  There have been lots of discussions recently about the differences between men and women and, while I believe in the fluid nature of gender, this single thing may be true: if the typical woman was considering planting a vineyard she might think about it for, oh, at least ten minutes prior to the purchase of the capital equipment. By this point, I’d spent $740 without any idea of what I was doing. In terms of vineyards, I could have bought a single bottle of Grange Hermitage – which is a quantity sufficient to ruin the career of a NSW premier – and still have change for a slab of beer.

  I decided to get serious. I went home and Googled the words planting a small vineyard in Australia. By this means, I discovered that people who plant their own vineyards are almost always retired company directors seeking to waste the $7.9 million–dollar payout they received after sending their company broke.

  They also, I noted, tend to use more than a single 25cc mechanical cultivator when establishing the site.

  My reading led to the related revelation that vines are incredibly difficult to keep alive. The internet is full of lists of things that can kill them: frosts, rabbits, cattle, kangaroos, too much heat, not enough heat, too much rain, not enough rain. I was reminded of the old farmer’s phrase about sheep: ‘A sheep is an animal that wakes up every morning trying to think up new ways to die.’ That’s your grapevine in one.

  Still, I was committed. After putting in an order for sixty vines, I bought multiple bags of lime. I checked my receipts. By now I could have bought two bottles of Grange Hermitage – which is a quantity sufficient to ruin the career of Sam Dastyari – and still have change for beer.

  I drove up to our bush block and discovered the mechanical cultivator required assembly. While I worked, I read the advertising on the box, noticing the manufacturer had taken time to brag that the handle was fitted with a rubber grip, thus making it ‘ergonomic’. The thought struck: just how few attributes does a machine need to possess before a rubber-clad handle is enlisted as a major selling point?

  Some hours later, I started the thing up, whereupon the ‘powerful’ 25cc engine caused the ‘large 200mm tines’ to spin, whereupon they made absolutely no impression on the ground. It was as if the soil was being lightly slapped by angels. Or blown upon by a very careful archaeologist. The sound it created – a sort of high-pitched wheezing – sounded like a Janome sewing machine forced into service on some double-pleated denim. EEEEeeeeee.

  I threw the cultivator aside in disgust and set about striking the ground with a pick axe and shovel, completing two holes before I was forced to retreat injured, back hurting, hands aching, throat dry.

  A few hours later, I returned and found the neighbour’s cows had invaded and were fascinated by the cultivator. Already they’d eaten the rubber handles which – while not that ergonomic – did prove delicious. One of them had also done a huge poo right on the machine, thus expressing my own feelings exactly.

  Talking about poo, meantime, up near the house, the man was due to arrive to pump out our septic tank. I retired defeated from the vineyard and walked back up the hill
to our shack to await his arrival. The vines could be left awhile.

  Bob, the septic man, drove up in his strange truck – all loaded up with pumps and tanks and hoses. It also, let’s face it, smelled pretty bad. Bob was friendly, smart, engaged. We talked about his impending grandchild. (‘I can’t wait,’ he said.) We talked about why he moved away from the city. (‘Too many people.’) And we talked about how he came to be in the septic tank business.

  Some years back, he explained, he moved to a house on the outskirts of town. The septic tank had been left so long it had become solid. When the pump-out man arrived, his pumps were unequal to the task. So he and Bob set to, digging out six thousand litres of compacted poo, some of it dating back decades.

  There was poo there that had been formed when Menzies was prime minister. Some of the poo may have emerged as a frightened response to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Poo closer to the surface may have been laid down in the hours after an Elvis concert on TV, involving hamburgers eaten in some sort of misguided tribute to the king.

  The flies came, the sun beat down and the two men dug themselves ever deeper – past the ’90s, through the ’80s and into the ’70s, the odour only getting really bad once your head dipped below the surface. You’ll remember the line from the movie Kenny: ‘There’s a smell in here that will outlast religion.’

  Halfway through the miserable task, Bob turned to the septic guy and said: ‘God, why would anyone do this job?’

  The septic guy, pushing his shovel deeper for another rich load, agreed: ‘Fair point. Matter of fact, I’m thinking of selling the business and getting into a different line of work.’

  Through a process not entirely explained, Bob bought the business.

  While we talked, Bob’s pipes sucked up the final contents of our septic, which flowed rather more freely than those of the compacted tank that’d lured him into the business. It was then that Bob noticed a problem. Our outflow pipe was clogged with tree roots. It was a problem Bob couldn’t fix. I would need a plumber.

  Apprehending my misery, Bob offered a hopeful alternative. In some cases, especially after a drought, tree roots that are downhill from the outlet can attempt to find a way into the tank. They clamber into the exit of the plastic tube, trying to clamber up the pipe, blocking it in the process.

  Once that compacted plug is worked loose, it is sometimes possible to pull the roots out by hand.

  As Bob drove off, I got started. The end of the pipe, I discovered, was jammed solid, a thick mass of tree roots rising out of the soil and snaking into the opening. First, I’d have to cut the pipe free from the ground. After some failed experiments with various tools, I decided only a chainsaw would do.

  I fired it up. Then sank the blade into the moist pit.

  You may be ahead of me here.

  I was pushing a spinning blade into a sump of poo and roots and doing so without first popping on eye protection, face protection or hair protection.

  Hair protection is not usually at the top of the list of protective equipment on worksites, but then again most work practices don’t involve large quantities of faecal material being driven at high speed into the operator’s face and hair. I felt like an adulterer in a medieval town, being pelted with shit by angry villagers.

  The chainsaw, though, worked. The pipe was still clogged with roots, but the roots had lost their connection with the earth. All I had to do now was dig them out of the pipe. I lay on my belly in the clay. I pushed my rubber-gloved fingers into the pipe and its compacted sludge. After some minutes, I managed to wriggle free a single, wispy tendril of root. Another tendril came ten minutes later. I made very, very slow progress. After another hour, I discovered that a crowbar, pushed violently up the pipe then twisted, pulled out more gunk than most things. It was a discovery that caused a feeling of such delight I am unable to properly communicate its intensity.

  Many hours later my fingers tightened around a large clump, which came free in a glorious rush. This happened twice more. There was a chance – a remote chance – this would be enough to get the pipe flowing.

  I pushed a hose into the top end and turned it on.

  I limped back, full of pessimism, to the exit end. Then I heard, or thought I heard, the sound of gurgling. A few seconds later, water came splashing from the pipe, gloriously flinging itself into the trench.

  ‘Hey, hey, hey,’ I yelled, so loudly the sound bounced off the mountains and echoed back.

  The water cascaded. A choir of heavenly angels started up. The universe itself tilted and smiled down on me. I ran a hand across my forehead, dislodging an unfeasibly large amount of shit, and thought: Life really doesn’t get much better than this.

  In the Australian bush, joy can arrive in the most unexpected places.

  If only I’d had some wine, I could have celebrated.

  JESSICA TUCKWELL

  Jessica writes and directs for stage, TV, film, radio and unsuspecting storytelling audiences across Sydney who cannot get their money back. She studied directing at NIDA, screenwriting at AFTRS and did a Master’s of Creative Writing, after doing a B.A. in philosophy. Following a stint in the public service, Jess re-emerged into the world of freelance writing and is genuinely thrilled to own a dedicated ‘work tracksuit’.

  ‘No Strategy’ copyright © Jessica Tuckwell 2018

  No Strategy

  by JESSICA TUCKWELL

  This story was originally performed at the event Fools Rush In

  Oh, the bus. My twice-daily reminder that I don’t have a personal driver – my first choice if I was ever rich enough to have ‘staff’. A misguided marker of success, sure, but it’s not surprising that I don’t have one, given that my life is characterised by a distinct lack of strategy. And it’s not as if I don’t want some: I just don’t know when we were supposed to get it. Was there a class I missed? Was someone handing out fact sheets one day? When was that? Are they still available?

  And this elusive thing called ‘foresight’ – I have exactly none of that. This is why I once thought it was a good idea to sprinkle beef stock over an omelet and why I’ve done four degrees that leave me with not much apart from being extremely overqualified to earn absolutely nothing, forever.

  The biggest trouble with having no strategy is that when I get really frustrated at my predicament, my attempts to ‘take what’s mine’ are really just anxiety-fuelled implosions that manifest in weird behaviour which, this time around, started on a crowded bus and ended with me leaving a terrible message on an answering machine.

  I was going home from a job I hated, because it simply had not occurred to me to get one I would like. I hated it so much that I’d had an interview for an insurance company customer service call centre job, and that seemed like an exciting prospect. I was so frustrated with how my life was going, and needless to say I was pissed off that I didn’t have a personal driver, and I just wanted to get home, eat a giant bag of Twisties and watch the entire West Wing catalogue for the third time over just like all successful people are known to do.

  I am usually very good at standing up for people on the bus if they need it. I’m even better at avoiding having to do that by just going up the back of the bus. But today I was taking what’s mine, which was one of those really awkward seats at the front that faces everybody else. A negligible win, perhaps, but importantly it faced away from the front door, so sitting by the window with my headphones on would make it really easy to pretend I didn’t notice someone who needed a seat.

  Partway through the trip I sensed a kerfuffle over my shoulder, then the young guy diagonally opposite me leaped out of his seat and a pregnant woman sat down in his place. Through whatever garbage high-brow music I was listening to, I could hear her monologing about being pregnant, so obviously I loathed her because she either recently got laid or had enough money to do IVF, so yay, congratulations for both those things and no I wasn’t bitter about it! I wasn’t even paying attention, remember, because I was busy listening to some bad pop music re
ally important music and looking through a really important window.

  Not long after that there was another commotion and the pregnant lady started scolding everyone again because no one got up quickly enough for an old man. In hindsight, this is really shit and I do feel bad about it now, but the pregnant woman just kept on reminding us that she was pregnant and was absolved of the responsibility of getting up for anyone and even though I could think of a heap of people who would deserve to sit down more than her, such as a pregnant woman with a broken leg or an old man who was somehow pregnant, I wondered if I should point out that she probably wasn’t the first person ever to get pregnant and didn’t need to keep talking about it but I was mainly thinking that nobody knew I wasn’t pregnant because my backpack was on my lap. And because all the best ideas come at times of slight shame, jealousy and probably depression, I thought pretending to be pregnant was the way to go.

  I’ve never been particularly overweight, but I’ve certainly had a few phases where the top button of my trousers rebelled against my penchant for unlimited junk food. This was one of those phases, so the top button of my trousers was wide open, pretty much begging for the hot chips directly. So I slid my hand under my backpack, eased the zipper on my pants down a few centimetres and pushed my tummy out. Yep, plenty to work with. I adjusted my top down over my small miracle and I moved my backpack aside, holding my tummy as if it was a life-giving salad bowl.

  If you’ve ever tried to look pregnant, you’ll know it isn’t easy to maintain. Pushing your tummy out hurts and you can’t really breathe properly. Despite the discomfort, it was worth it for the flicker of retreat from the pregnant woman when she saw my tummy. I don’t actually know if it was recognition, or very accurate scepticism, but either way I suddenly panicked. Naturally I hadn’t considered what might happen next, and it struck me that if she felt connected to me she might ask me how far along I was. And if she instinctively knew I wasn’t pregnant she might try to mess with me by likewise asking me how far along I was, and because I hadn’t thought this through I was sure I’d say something like ‘seventeen days’ or ‘seventeen months’ or something that would seem like I had been impregnated by an alien, or was lying. And it’s one thing to be shamed for not standing up for an old man. It’s another to be shamed for not standing up for an old man because you were pretending to be pregnant in front of a pregnant person.