Welcome to Story Club

by Zoe Norton Lodge

  I was still two stops away from my house, but I had to get the hell out of there. But when I stood up, I looked much less pregnant than when I was sitting down, and for some reason I wanted to be more pregnant than her. But I wasn’t more, because I wasn’t at all, so as I moved through the passengers and got off the bus, I added a little limp. A pregnant lady with a limp trumped all of those jerks on the bus!

  I hobbled in the direction of home, thinking I’d only have to keep the whole charade going until the bus was out of sight. I limped and pushed and tried to breathe but the bus wasn’t moving, and when it was, it only went a short distance and then stopped again in the traffic, so I kept catching up to it. And no matter how much you think you might get a pushing, limping rhythm going, no. There was no rhythm. The steady beat of the terrible trash music amazing classical music mocked me so I ripped my headphones out and shoved them in my bag. Then I noticed that I’d missed a call on my phone, and I listened to the voicemail so at least it looked like I was on the phone to a friend or something, which at the time seemed like something a pregnant person might do. It was the insurance company. I’d got the job and I started on a particular date. Limp, push, breathe, bus. I was excited about the job but realised that another job with equally poor career progression but that I would probably like more wouldn’t be finalised until after the start date I’d been given. I started freaking out. Should I say no to this job? What if I don’t even get the other job? Would I be able to beg for this one back again? What if I ended up with no job? Will I ever get another job again? Will I be a loser forever? WHAT ABOUT THE BABY?? The usual thought pattern. And all this time I was limping and pushing and taking shallower and shallower breaths and getting even more pissed off that I didn’t have a personal driver.

  While most people might’ve just walked home, or had a think about it before they did anything, or decided to call the woman back later to negotiate a later start date, not me. I’m scared of the telephone. I used to yell at my family to get out of the kitchen because I was too embarrassed to order pizza in front of them in case I did it wrong. No, if I waited until I got home I might lose my phone-nerve, so it was now or never!

  In the second attempt to ‘take what’s mine’ that afternoon, I returned the call. Someone picked up straight away and I was thrown because I hadn’t even planned on anyone picking up the phone that I was calling.

  I managed a, ‘Oh, um, hi, um, I was, um, I’m, I think I, oh, um,’ stuttering out something about the start date, but she cut in, saying it wasn’t flexible because of a group induction program. ‘Oh,’ I said, having zero comeback, ‘well I can’t start that date, I just . . . can’t.’ Not thinking it was as compelling an argument as I did, she asked why, and in a characteristic panic I looked down at my tummy and my limp and said, ‘It’s a medical thing! I need to have a procedure!’ In the moment I thought it was an inspired excuse, and surely not one that anyone would pry into further. Apart from someone offering you a job. She asked me more questions: had I known this when I applied, could I do the job, would it affect my performance, was I OK? Somehow I muddled through and I think she made a note of it and we hung up.

  I was feeling relatively chuffed, until it dawned on me that the answers I gave her made it sound like I was having an abortion. ‘No, I didn’t know when I applied; no it’s not ongoing; no it won’t affect my long-term performance; yes I’m OK it’s pretty full on but it’s for the best.’ In my mind, which was now low on oxygen, I had just told a stranger/my new boss that I was having an abortion. Which is nothing to be ashamed of, but also not something you really want to go around babbling to random almost-colleagues when it isn’t even true. I did the sensible thing of calling her back immediately.

  It rang and rang and rang and I didn’t think to just hang up, or let it go, or to use the time to think of something to say. At least the bus had disappeared by now and I could stop limping so, you know, you win some. The call went to message bank; it beeped.

  ‘Oh hello, it’s Jessica Tuckwell . . . Just wanted to say that I’m not having an abortion.’

  I looked up and found myself face to face with the pregnant woman from the bus. She must’ve got off at the next stop while I kept walking and had either then or now realised that I definitely had no limp and probably wasn’t pregnant. I’ve had my fair share of ‘What the fuck is wrong with you?’ looks, but hers was a whole new level of disgust. I wanted to tell her that I was indeed pregnant, but I was still in the middle of leaving the voicemail to my no longer future boss. It occurred to me later that saying I wasn’t having an abortion in front of the pregnant woman actually would have helped with the authenticity of my performance, but we were in last-resort territory now, so I just stood still and said nothing and stared into space. She started walking away, shaking her head with the mythic power of a disapproving mum. I went back to the message quickly.

  ‘Um, yeah, it’s not an abortion . . . it’s something else . . . OK, bye.’

  I hung up. The pregnant woman had vanished. With nothing but a hollow ball of shame in my tummy, all I could do was go home, eat a giant bag of Twisties, watch West Wing and look up how much it would cost to get a personal driver. It’s a lot.

  ROB CARLTON

  Rob is an actor, producer, director and writer. He has starred in a long list of Australian TV series, including Wanted, Mabo, A Moody Christmas, Underbelly III: The Golden Mile and Chandon Pictures. His portrayal of Kerry Packer in Paper Giants: The Birth of Cleo and Magazine Wars won Rob the 2012 Logie Award for Most Outstanding Actor. Chandon Pictures, the show Rob created, co-directed, wrote and starred in was nominated for numerous awards – Logies, AFIs and Directors’ Guild – and won the Australian Writers’ Guild award for best narrative comedy. Rob’s play A-Framed has been staged in Sydney and Melbourne. In 2006, Rob’s short film Carmichael and Shane took out first prize at Tropfest, and he won Best Actor at the festival that year.

  ‘Christmas’ copyright © Rob Carlton 2018

  Christmas

  by ROB CARLTON

  This story was originally performed at the event A Very Story Club Christmas

  It was Christmas and Gran Gran was dying.

  This one would be her last.

  ‘It’s Gran Gran’s last Christmas,’ the adult grandkids were saying. ‘We’re all going to be there.’ They’d repeat this phrase, with each other, with friends, at work. It was a rare chance to be serious. No one would joke, they’d make the right noises. ‘I’m sorry, that’s sad, your grandmother?’ ‘Yes. Gran Gran.’ Conversations are comforting when everyone knows the rules. It adds gravitas where often we have none. And because everyone was going to be there it was dignified too. We are a dignified family. This year there wouldn’t be any questions about who was or wasn’t turning up. Everyone would be at Christmas this year because Gran Gran is dying.

  And so the house down in Canberra was full. Full of presents in shiny paper, full of bags and beds and food and summer hats. The Christmas tree always makes everything feel even fuller, but most of all the place was filled with family. Aunts and uncles, cousins, brothers and sisters, wives and husbands, nieces and nephews: everywhere they were, in every space, round every corner, enjoying the beautiful parts of the garden normally forgotten and everyone always with food and a drink and a drink for someone else. ‘Here have this!’ ‘Who’s it for?’ ‘It’s for you!’ Everyone was at their most generous, their best self. Even the little people, the three great-grandchildren! They too knew Gran Gran was dying. They even knew, when the topic came up, that it was sad. It was the sadness that made Christmas that year so special. The tug of family, the sense of kin, our tribe, everyone had come to Canberra to nestle and coo around a great matriarch and her endless love nearly ended. These are the times we know who we are. The times we all turn up.

  But because everyone had turned up there weren’t enough beds.

  Now if Helen had known her youngest son David as well as we knew him, it’s unlikely she would have said:
‘David, you and Pokie won’t mind sharing the big couch. If we take the cushions off it’s as big as a king single. You can go top to tail.’

  David and Pokie were first cousins, both twenty-two years old. And while I don’t believe geography or name determine character, it’s too delicious a titbit not to mention that Pokie was from Tasmania and her name was Pokie. And in the same way neither age nor gender determines action, David was a twenty-two-year-old male. So you see, in hindsight, ‘top to tail’ seems particularly naïve.

  But Helen was the oldest child of Gran Gran, the matriarch in waiting, the lady of the house where everyone was gathered, the mum losing a mum; even if there were less naïve minds pondering the bedding arrangements, no one was going to cast a pall over Christmas by questioning Helen’s authority. Perhaps everyone thought it was sweet.

  Nevertheless, after all the family brushed their teeth and went to the toilet and got into comfy pyjamas and whispered good nights, and climbed into their beds, after the last light went out on the eve of Gran Gran’s last Christmas, David and Pokie climbed under the covers and right there in the middle of the house on a couch as big as a king single, surrounded by a sleeping family, they got stuck into it.

  January in Sydney is ushered in by the five-day test match at the Sydney Cricket Ground. For those who love the idea of time stopping while conversation continues, and if you don’t hate cricket, the five days at the SCG in the new year offer up the perfect wormhole in which friends can gather and remember why they like each other. It’s holidays, of course – people are reading novels they don’t normally have time for, being people they normally don’t have time to be. The real beginning of the year, Australia Day, is still almost a month away and so till then it’s a chance to drink and talk and argue with friends while getting crosswords done and fortifying what it is we think about the questions of the day – so come February we’re ready and armed to return to our lives and spout our thinking to the wider world beyond our best friends, where there is little room for wonder, confusion or vulnerabilities. In short, the cricket provides the perfect place for close friends to discuss the rights and wrongs of cousin love.

  Because David and Pokie got caught. Not by their parents, thank God, but by our friend Sarah. She caught them pashing at midnight up the front of a ferry on a New Year’s Eve harbour cruise. Sarah was staggering up the port side of the ferry towards the bow when she witnessed the tender kisses belying the hungry grinding below with which the cousins were welcoming in the new year. Sarah was very drunk but knew right away something was amiss so she yelled ‘Hey!’ and having got their attention said, ‘That’s fucking wrong, but get into it I say,’ and in an effort to try and normalise the situation went in for a bit of a party pash herself, not thinking, in this borderline environment, there were questions of etiquette. But whatever else they were, David and Pokie were not swingers, and so Sarah, rebuffed and perhaps a little hurt, staggered aft and very secretively and sensitively and, given how drunk she was, admirably methodically, told everyone on the ship that something deeply unnatural was occurring on the bow. ‘Go and see for yourself if you don’t believe me,’ was always her final, unassailable, point.

  And so at the cricket, for five full days, between overs and during breaks in play, we all cross-examined David. It was the best time any of us had ever had at the cricket. We had a subject that seemed never-ending; energised as it was by shadowy morals, questionable ethics, deep sexual urges o’er-leaping taboos, it dredged up religious beliefs some of us were horrified to discover we held. The science too was compelling. A full morning was given over to the subject of extra chromosomal pairings and probability. There is one in sixteen chances of a ‘royal’ baby, apparently. David being a punter, thought one in sixteen sounded like OK odds. Anyway, like the cricket, the kangaroo court started in a flurry of excitement and fiery clashes and questions of character, often followed by laughter and long thoughtful pauses, but it soon found its own order and the facts were established and the facts were these:

  They’d not spent much time together growing up. He could remember Easter when they were twelve, but nothing had happened then.

  On that first night on Christmas Eve neither had made the first move, or they both had. ‘Predestiny’ was suggested. In any case, each participant was as willing as the other.

  While in Canberra, in the house where Gran Gran was dying, the two hadn’t had actual sex. ‘Gran Gran was dying, of course we didn’t,’ David said, affronted, indignant.

  ‘Out of respect for Gran Gran you didn’t have sex?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And while you respectfully didn’t have intercourse in the house where Gran Gran was dying, to get a sense of the level of respect, were tissues required?’

  David, caught, paused. ‘We used my socks.’

  ‘Had Gran Gran knitted those?’ Richie asked.

  ‘Fuck off,’ said David.

  Pokie was a school teacher. That seemed important at the time. That the next generation of thinkers were being guided by this woman added an urgency to our investigations. It made it sexier too, for reasons none of us articulated.

  No one in their family knew what was going on. David said that secrecy had made Charades on Boxing Day, full of innuendo and stolen glances, electric.

  And the big question that would ultimately help us understand. ‘Is the sex good?’

  ‘It’s unbelievable,’ said David, with a composure that made it true. Apparently when one line is crossed all the other lines disappear too. This particular topic lasted the better part of days two and three. David, our newly minted expert, while stonily quiet in the earlier conversations around genetics and mutated offspring, found his voice as we discussed the calibre of the sex. He thought, at first, it was the enforced secrecy that made it so exploratory, but the secrecy theory fell because, after people found out, thanks to Sarah, the sex was even more unapologetic. ‘You should definitely try it,’ said David, reasserting his power over the group. And we’d all thought about our own cousins . . . Happily, it was David on trial.

  Our responses were all different. The most appalled was Anthony, who’d been brought up a Catholic. ‘It’s just wrong,’ he’d assert, and he’d follow up this observation with a very hearty, anxious laugh and the final rejoinder, ‘You can’t fuck your cousin. No way.’ He repeated that position for five days without addition or subtraction. And for five days we went through the whys and wherefores of this summer coupling, arguing and laughing, all the while with David in the middle of it defending his actions, protecting his dignity, playing hurt, or silently knowing that at the end of the day’s play he’d be back in the sack with his cousin Pokie and none of the talk would matter.

  Those five days twenty years ago stand out. Shouting and laughing and putting up a thousand hypotheticals, dissecting each of them meticulously . . . giving pause for thought the way you never do when you get older and need to get other things done. Would it have been as fun if we’d known Richie was already addicted to the drugs he was dispensing as a young pharmacist? That his addiction would end up tearing his family apart and getting him deregistered? He’s still sliding. It definitely wouldn’t have been as fun if we’d known Sarah’s boyfriend would die from a hot shot of heroin, and not before leaving her body too ruined by her dalliance with the junkie lifestyle. But the seeds of that were already sown for her. The rest of the group would do fine in their own ways. It was a great, fun week, and really only tinged with the sadness of what would come to pass.

  But for now, on the morning of the fifth day after Australia had beaten the Indians, the verdict was in, and it was time to tell David what the jury had decided. We gathered around, with Dave in the middle.

  ‘David, we have decided it’s OK to have sex with your cousin, as long as you truly love her.’

  David nodded. ‘I think I love her, guys.’

  ‘If you love her, then why haven’t you shared this new love with your mum and dad, and her mum and dad
, and all your brothers and sisters, your other cousins . . . Gran Gran?’

  David’s eyes narrowed. ‘Perhaps I’ll just love her for another couple of weeks.’

  Which turned out to be when Gran Gran died.

  KATE MULVANY

  Kate has written more than 25 plays and screenplays, including The Seed, Jasper Jones and The Harp in the South, and the upcoming Foxtel series Upright. As a stage actor, Kate has performed as Antigone, Lady Macbeth, Cassius, and her award-winning turn as Richard III for Bell Shakespeare. On TV, she has appeared in shows including The Chaser’s War on Everything, The Hamster Wheel, Winter and Lambs of God. Kate has been in numerous feature films and played Mrs McKee in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby. Australian Story devoted an episode to Kate’s life and her work as an ambassador for the victims and survivors of dioxin poisoning from the Vietnam War.

  ‘He Shall Be Named Hammerstein’ copyright © Kate Mulvany 2018

  He Shall Be Named Hammerstein

  by KATE MULVANY

  This story was originally performed at the event There’s No Place Like Home