by Chloe Hooper
Miss Byrne: It sounds like you think there are white lies, as well as black lies. And maybe gray lies.
Eliza: And pink lies.
Billy: And yellow lies.
And they all yelled out the colors of their favorite mistruths. I sat still and let this rainbow arch over me. I admired their slapdash sense of morality. Their mix of amorality and integrity. Their innocence and sophistication—in essence, the childness and adultness of them. Their advocacy of balance seemed quite sensible: you couldn’t have too much lying, and you couldn’t have too much truth. Not too much good, nor too much evil. I thought of the last few days. You couldn’t have too much dream; and no one should have too much reality.
The bell rang but the children were slow to join the others in the playground. Perhaps they sensed that when they returned I’d be gone. Clutching her lunchbox, Eliza approached my desk. She stared down and said sadly, “You can’t make a perfect world, I don’t think.”
“You might be right, Eliza.” Leaning over to shake her hand, I tried to smile. Each child then came forward and, one by one, they put their hands in mine. I pretended we were delegates at a special conference, one that had tried to explore the nature of truth. “Plato believed that in an ideal society we would be ruled by philosophers.” There was a tremble in my throat. “If I could make a perfect world,” I promised, “you guys would get the top jobs.”
All of them were pleased by this possibility; they were already doling out its privileges as they each passed through the vandalized “door of knowledge.” In seconds they would be screaming down the slide. They’d be bellowing from the trees, playing a game involving twigs with made-up rules. How many of them could legitimately claim I KNOW with any glory, I didn’t want to speculate. Some had learned things in my class; others had just felt the labor pains. To them I whispered: “May you never know.” I thought of Lucien. Thomas and Veronica might have been open with each other all along, but their son had discovered I had a sex apprenticeship with his father through his classmates. How convenient to have imagined they would not find out. Children find out! Children should have their own intelligence agency. They’re the greatest eavesdroppers, the greatest spies: they watch and sense what’s really going on, reading every nuance.
Removing my desk drawers I dumped any evidence into the bin. I swiftly wiped from the blackboard every trace of my hand. Then I stood in the doorway looking back at the classroom. Last Friday, during lunch, Lucien must have taken a key so as to scratch with fear, with fury, with glee his message to me, as I lay on a four-poster bed, pretending to be someone else. I had realized that I was not the girl in the book. Veronica and Thomas’s relationship may have mirrored the ill-fated Harveys, but I was not Eleanor Siddell. She could have been played by the last girl Thomas had humiliated his wife with, or perhaps the girl before that, or the girl to come. Doomed girls, all over the world, kiss good-bye the ones they love to go and practice brinkmanship. What these princesses afraid-of-nothing do not immediately realize is that they are leaving home to learn fear. Eleanor Siddell left her father’s house, “but how far have I come,” she mused, “living in his other house?” No wonder she wanted to get a little bit killed. She wanted to kill off the part of herself that was weakest: Close my eyes, so I won’t see this rosebud wallpaper I picked when I was seven. Kiss me and take away the china ornaments. Instill oblivion in every fornication; make me like a missing person, in your secret way, only promise to bring it all back after so many minutes.
• • •
Lying all around Point Puer were bricks. Every few steps I came across another orange-yellow brick made by the boys. This site would have been the perfect place for a stoning, were it not so serene. Agapanthus sprung up, purple and white; wildflowers grew all around the rubble; a pond was covered with water lilies, each petal still more exquisite.
I felt it shouldn’t be so beautiful, but it was. I felt I should imagine the boys stepping from the ship’s hulk, taking their first drunken steps, but my mind rebelled. No one now really knew how the children’s prison would have looked. On the western side of Point Puer, over the water, lay Port Arthur and, along farther, Dead Island, with its eucalyptus and gravestones. The point itself had a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it quality. The remnants of a granite wall rose to support nothing. A stone basement was full of leaves and dank rainwater. The bay in which the convict children had washed was pure primary blue, but beside it piles of their bricks were cordoned off with wire and the yellow tape of a crime scene.
This was where bad children ended up. I walked toward Point Puer’s eastern side, along the track leading to the Suicide Cliffs. As a child, I’d heard about the convict boys linking hands and throwing themselves to the sharks. Clasping a branch, I now took a step forward. Maybe the first stories we are told are the ones we find our way back to. “I often think of the old nursery rhymes,” my grandmother told me before she died. “Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall—all the men who rise so high fall down.”
Cliffs unrolled in every direction. From a distance they claimed the same easy curves as the clouds above. Close up, they were stark vertical walls of granite; ramparts the waves had battered flat. Shelves of rock, like diving boards or planks, jutted from the cliff face. I stepped forward again. “Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle. Well, they’ve got cats now that can play a little violin. The little dog laughed to see such fun, and the dish ran away with the spoon. They can train dogs to laugh, you know. And I’ve seen the dish move away, just slightly, then the spoon stirring it.”
At the very edge of the cliff, trees grew horizontally; the stone was pockmarked. Staring across the water, I turned back half expecting to catch a boy’s shadow disappearing behind a tree. There was creaking in all the high branches, but the rock-a-bye babies were long gone. This book for Lucien: a bird would have to sing it to him. He’d have to walk outside one day and hear rain drumming or see the light slanted just so. In Russia when the adults had finally awoken, the storytellers and illustrators had been punished, horribly. A famous artist was sent to Siberia, where she developed gangrene and lost both her legs. A writer, to avoid being captured, hanged herself in her apartment. Between each line in these books there must be another story, which has to be imagined, written in blood. Always true, this blood story will haunt you and keep you awake, and the grown-ups should never know of it.
Waves now rose like walls of glass, then shattered, leaving smashed shells—or the ground-up bones of suicides—by my feet. Wind stung at my face and I stood feeling faint. This was the windiest place in the whole world. Wind blew straight from Antarctica and still the horizon’s line looked flat. From miles away all the waves rocked in with their ancient come-on, that old tease: I-might-not-break. If the sea is a crib endlessly rocking, don’t tell me the bough won’t rot, baby won’t fall. How can you look down without some awareness of the end’s proximity, and not be slightly seduced? Close your eyes: listen to the sea. You’re so near to it—the cradle and the grave—even if you never want to die.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author gratefully acknowledges Doug Dibbern, Alex Halberstadt, John Wray, Juliet O’Conor of the State Library of Victoria, Nigel Hargraves of the University of Tasmania’s Centre for Historical Research, and the very inspiring teacher and brilliant fourth-grade students who shared their philosophical insights.
A SCRIBNER READING GROUP GUIDE
A CHILD’S BOOK OF TRUE CRIME
SUMMARY
A Child’s Book of True Crime is a remarkable first novel by Australian Chloe Hooper. Set in Tasmania, the narrative centers on Kate, a young primary-school teacher who is having an affair with Thomas, the father of a precocious student. Thomas’s wife meanwhile has published a successful book of true crime about the brutal killing of a young adulteress, set in a nearby town. When Kate’s own life begins to resonate with echoes of the infamous local murder, she suspects that her rival’s account may be incorrect. Caught between the world of
her young students and her very adult life outside the classroom, Kate imagines her own version of the book of true crime, this one written for children but filled with a violence that is unmistakably adult.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. As a primary-school teacher, Kate straddles the world of adults and the world of children. How do her personality and behavior reflect this split? How does her version of the Black Swan Point murder story mix the two worlds? Do other characters in the novel have elements of both maturity and childishness?
2. “I liked reading children their stories. And I liked the stories: dogs and cats had magic powers; nasty people suffered slapstick doom. The world seemed manageable, its scale of anarchy to my liking”. What does Kate’s fondness for children’s stories illustrate? How does the world within these stories differ from the world she encounters outside the classroom?
3. Compare Kate’s version of the Black Swan Point murder story to what we know of Veronica’s version. What are the key differences? What do these differences suggest about the two women? What might Kate’s description of Veronica’s book suggest about Kate?
4. “Everyone should have one great secret to carry around as a talisman. Then, when people look at you, thinking she’s like this, or she’s only this, they’ll always be wrong”. The quote above is from the passage in which Kate is exploring the psychology of Ellie, the young mistress in Murder at Black Swan Point. How does Kate’s thinking differ from Ellie’s? How is it similar?
5. “Children understand tragedy in a way adults are unable to: atom by atom. Untainted by a hundred other learned horrors, they are haunted for the appropriate length of time. They ask a thousand unanswerable questions. The story stays with them; they dream of it”. What does it mean to understand tragedy “atom by atom”? Why are adults unable to do so? Is there something cruel about telling children crime stories, which they will then vividly imagine? Are there elements of cruelty in Kate’s nature?
6. “And by 1839 most of the indigenous population had died or been driven away. Our local history is the Ur-true-crime story, and in volume after volume the bodies pile up”. Consider the ways in which the setting—both geographical and natural—contributes to the overall effect of the novel. How does the author use the surrounding of a particular scene to enhance the narrative?
7. Discuss the scene in which Kate drives off the road in the old Mercedes and has to seek help from a local man. What makes this scene so unsettling? How does the author achieve such tension? How does this scene relate to the rest of the novel?
8. Images and stories of sex permeate the novel, as do images and tales of death. What does the author suggest about the relationship between sex—especially illicit sex—and violence or death?
9. “It was strange, but despite the Marnes’ threats for the first time in a long while I felt totally alive . . . . Fear, like guilt, must have a way of increasing the pixelation of everyday life”. In what ways does Kate seem to cultivate fear and guilt in her own life? Is there an element of masochism in her character?
10. What are the parallels between the story in Murder at Black Swan Point and Kate’s own story? Is she justified in her fear and suspicion of Veronica, or has she spooked herself by becoming too engrossed in the Murder at Black Swan Point story?
11. Discuss the scene at the end of the book when Kate visits the Marnes. What did Kate expect to accomplish by confronting Veronica and Thomas? How is she disappointed? How is Kate’s view of the world and her own life different after the incident?
12. “And I’d decided, in another life, to write a book-length explanation for Lucien: a child’s book of true crime. Apparently in Stalinist Russia, blacklisted writers and artists had embedded secret messages in children’s literature . . . disguised as the naive, subversive content was unrecognizable”–. In what ways does Kate disguise her own story by using “the naive”? Is there a sense in which the novel itself is “a child’s book of true crime”?
13. “Close your eyes: listen to the sea. You’re so near to it—the cradle and the grave—even if you never want to die”. The ending of the novel encourages us to think about mortality, and about the relationship between the young and the old. What does the author suggest—here and elsewhere—about the relationship between youth and death?
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“Why I Wrote The Engagement”
by Chloe Hooper
This book is the kind of book I’d like to read. From childhood my favorite stories were those about people trapped in spooky houses trying to escape. I love all the gothic classics, such as Du Maurier’s Rebecca, especially her famous beginning in which the narrator recounts dreaming of the forbidding gates of Manderlay. Hitchcock’s 1940 film version maintains the book’s wonderful dreamlike sense of unease. And I wanted this book, The Engagement, to have a Hitchcockian feel.
In a way, the protagonist Liese Campbell is a classic Hitchcock character: a cool blond Englishwoman with dubious morals, who, upon finding herself retrenched because of the global financial crisis, begins working as a realtor in Australia, where markets are still booming. While showing a wealthy farmer, Alexander Colquhoun, around some apartments she allows him to pay her for sex. This becomes a regular arrangement, and eventually Liese agrees—for a handsome fee—to spend the weekend with him on his remote cattle station.
When she arrives at the Colquhouns’ grand Victorian homestead, now empty of servants or anyone else, Liese realizes she’s in trouble. Alexander proposes to her, claiming, “I don’t care about your past.” She tries to explain that she is not actually a prostitute, but he will hear none of it. Liese is trapped in his house, and in his fantasy.
A woman threatened with a forced betrothal is a perennial gothic story line. But genre fiction can allow writers to move their story along classic tracks while layering in more complicated social or psychological concerns.
I wanted The Engagement to feel very contemporary and for it to be psychologically suspenseful (rather than full of uncanny apparitions) and for it to be edgy. Without being in-your-face explicit, this book is sexually very frank.
Prostitution is obviously a subject of great outrage, concern, and fascination. Feminists have long linked historic concepts of marriage—in which women were regarded as chattel—with contractual prostitution. (“What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many?” wrote Angela Carter in Nights at the Circus.) I hope The Engagement explores questions around the nature of prostitution—its psychology, its power dynamics, its erotics. And also questions around the nature of marriage: Why do people still want to marry? What games might they play within a marriage? And does this commitment ultimately bring them closer together or further apart?
Turn the page for a preview of Chloe Hooper’s
The Engagement
A Novel
Available from Scribner February 2013
Excerpt from The Engagement copyright © 2013 by Chloe Hooper
I
It started with a letter he wrote, sent that April care of my uncle’s estate agency. A thick ivory envelope with my name in elegant type. There was always something too formal about his advances, as though this man’s intentions were disguised even from himself. He enjoyed the civilities, but they made me uneasy. Wasn’t the etiquette a suit of armor to keep him safe while calling me to battle? I read it standing by the shredder.
Dear Liese (or whoever you are),
Before you leave Australia to pursue your travels, I wonder if it might not round your experience to see life outside the city. Every visitor should take in the Bush. Warrowill, my sheep and cattle property in western Victoria (itself the third-largest volcanic plain in the world), is close to much pristine bushland and any amount of wildlife.
I propose you join me on the long weekend of June 11–14, and calculate for three days of your time payment would be $xxxx.
/> Upon your meeting me on the Friday afternoon, half this fee will be given to you in cash, the other half transferred to your bank account on Monday afternoon at the end of your stay.
Kindly consider this proposal and let me know at your earliest convenience if terms are agreeable.
Sincerely,
Alexander Colquhoun
It was a ridiculous amount he offered, enough to delay my departure for two months, and so it was a relief when, at the appointed time, Alexander, dressed in a blazer and business shirt still creased from the shop, finally picked me up around the corner from the office. He stepped from his oldish Mercedes without meeting my eye. Taking my small suitcase he opened the passenger door, closing it behind me with a deferential nod. He was nervous. I was brusque, lest this whole weekend slide immediately into farce. The dashboard clock read 3:04.
He handed me an envelope. “Do you want to count it?”
Inside would be cash in those bright colors like play dollars. “No, I’m sure it’s all in order.”
“Perhaps you can now tell by weight?”
“Yes.” Turning, smiling, it was the usual surprise to see his face. He had the kind of looks I regarded as typically Australian: untroubled, slightly sunburned, slightly elsewhere. If you looked at each feature individually, as sometimes I had for long stretches, they had their complications—an oversize nose; fleshy, inanimate lips; and one blue eye a fraction smaller than the other—but the combination was attractive, probably more so than he realized. He was forty-five, I guessed, his sandy curls now turning gray. I struggled to believe someone this tall and thin could be so preoccupied by flesh. My body, strapped into the car seat’s beige leather, matched his sharp angles with hips and breasts. It didn’t hide its interests.
