by Karen Foxlee
Volume 5: Issue 1
“Meeting Morrie” Copyright © 2013 by Karen Foxlee and “Clancy of the Undertow” Copyright © 2013 by Christopher Currie
Imprint
Published by Review of Australian Fiction
“Meeting Morrie” Copyright © 2013 by Karen Foxlee
“Clancy of the Undertow” Copyright © 2013 by Christopher Currie
www.reviewofaustralianfiction.com
* * *
This project has received financial assistance from the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland.
And support from the Queensland Writers' Centre
Editorial
Kate Eltham
When Matthew Lamb asked me to curate a volume of stories for the Review of Australian Fiction it took me three-point-four seconds to say yes. I’d been following the evolution of this publication since Matthew and his business partner Phil Crowley first sat in the kitchen of the Queensland Writers Centre in 2011 and told me what they planned to do, what they planned to create. Great ideas, of course, are a dime a dozen. It takes a certain kind of doggedness to make them into actual things, into published words, into a going concern. The Review of Australian Fiction is an important new vehicle for Australian writers, but if it is anything, it’s a triumph of doggedness.
It is also a singular pleasure to commission stories for RAF from authors whose work I have long admired. Some of the writers who will appear in this and the next five issues of RAF will already be familiar to you. For some, RAF will be their first publication. In all cases, though, I know you’ll find treasures in their writing.
For this first issue of Volume 5, I am chuffed to have persuaded a story from a very fine writer indeed, Karen Foxlee. Karen’s first novel The Anatomy of Wings(2008) not only won the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award for Unpublished Manuscript, but went on to be published around the world, and deservedly so. Her second novel The Midnight Dress has just been released from UQP. But it was actually through her short fiction that I first came to know and love Karen’s writing. She was a three-time winner of the One Book Many Brisbanes short fiction competition in Queensland, and each time with a story that broke my heart. In this piece she has again displayed her almost casual ability to depict the trembling, painful vulnerability we carry around inside us.
Christopher Currie’s first novel The Ottoman Motel was published in 2011, a small town drama wrapped up in a compelling mystery imbued with closely-observed detail of rural Australian life. The book announced Chris as one of Queensland’s most talented emerging writers. He returns to the small-town setting in this perceptive story of a young girl, who’s gentle and repetitive motion of everyday routine is brought to an abrupt stop.
I hope, like me, you will love these stories and look forward to introducing you to more exciting writers over the coming months for Volume 5 of the Review of Australian Fiction.
Kate Eltham
Director, Brisbane Writers’ Festival
@kate_eltham
Meeting Morrie
Karen Foxlee
He’s finally eaten the heart of a cobra. Just like that, he says it, straight down the phone, a rush of words, not even hello. I’ll explain it all, he says, when you get here. She doesn’t believe him, of course. It is exactly the type of thing he says. He’ll really only want money to pay the rent.
‘Lou,’ he says. ‘You’ve got no idea. You really must hear it straight from the horse’s mouth, in person; it’s no good over the phone.’
‘Haven’t you noticed this foul weather?’ Lou asks. She can hardly hear for the rain and the traffic surging through the water beside the phone box. It’s been raining for days, a huge low settled over the city. The normally placid river has grown choppy, has dismantled jetties and carried away a waterfront café.
‘It’s not as if you’re sailing here,’ he says. ‘Only catching a bus.’
Anyway there are no cobras in this city, so he’s lying. She knows it. He has no money, he can’t have flown to wherever it is that you eat a cobra or its heart. She’s crying; that’s the effect he has on her. Or it’s the rain, the rain always makes her melancholy. She wipes at her eyes. She can’t cry here, not in a phone box on Ipswich Road.
He likes to use the phrase straight from the horse’s mouth and each time he does she pictures it. It’s there, paining her, right inside her head: all wet and glistening and crammed with oversized teeth. Morrie has tiny teeth, like a baby’s, nicotine and coffee stained. She remembers three of them wrapped in a bloody handkerchief like pearls. In that memory he’s small, crying though trying not to, staring straight ahead, arms folded, holding his breath. She walks to the bus stop trying not to think of these things.
At the bus stop too many people are under the shelter so she has to stand outside with her umbrella. The rain has turned squally and the umbrella tugs at her arm. All the spindly sidewalk shrubs have gorged themselves and grown plump. Everywhere green things are sprouting new leaves. The trees in front of the hospital thrash their wet heads in ecstasy.
There’s a woman with a red scarf and red lipstick beside her now. An expensive scarf, the sort that would come wrapped in tissue paper yet she wears it out in the weather without a care. The woman’s umbrella is patterned with black and white cats, the sort you buy in a museum or some upmarket boutique and her shoes, they’re a sight, red as her lipstick with fabric flowers on the toe, ruined by the rain.
‘My shoes are ruined,’ the woman says because she has noticed Lou looking at them; she holds one foot up and laughs.
Those shoes would have cost a pretty penny, Lou thinks. Those shoes probably cost half my pay and here she is walking them through mud and water.
‘You don’t know where Felix Street is, do you, in the city?’ the woman asks, as though just looking at someone’s shoes opens up a door to any sort of question. The woman’s lips are curled up at the corners. Like a cat that’s eaten cream, Lou thinks.
‘No. No I don’t. Sorry.’
‘I’m taking a class there,’ the woman says, as though they’ve been friends for years. Lou stares out across the six lanes of traffic, ignoring her.
‘It’s all about dream interpretation,’ the woman continues. ‘But I can’t find this Felix street anywhere on the map. It’s supposed to be near the river.’
Dream interpretation? You’d be the sort, Lou thinks. She wants to say I’m going to meet my insane brother. Then I’m going to work to clean some toilets. What do you think of that then? But she doesn’t. She wouldn’t. The bus arrives anyway. All the way down the slippery aisle she prays the woman won’t follow her to her seat. She wonders if it will rain for ever. It’s that kind of rain, end-of-the-world rain, great flooding build-an-ark type rain. The red-lipped woman is talking to the driver, holding up a long scowling queue.
‘Don’t be stupid, Lou,’ Morrie would say. ‘Of course it won’t rain forever.’
He’s always said he’s the more practical one.
The day he held three teeth in a handkerchief there was a lady standing with them. They didn’t know her, had never met her before. That lady said many things there on the street in the sunshine. There on the street in the sunshine that woman was a magical fountain of words: it’ll be all right, kids. You don’t know it now but it will be. Don’t worry now. Stand right here. Don’t move from this spot. I know I can trust you. Stay here. Do you understand? Don’t take your eyes off these suitcases, not even for a second, that’s your important job you two, I know you can do it, you’re both big kids. You’re both big strong kids. I’m just running back inside.
Lou had watched her suitcase and counted the seco
nds but Morrie was agitated. He’d paced up and down as though he was going to break into a sprint. He said, ‘even if they take us, we can find our way back, you see.’
The woman for Felix Street gets off on George. She stands on the footpath in the rain looking lost, umbrella pulling at her arm, hair blowing across her face. Lou watches her as the bus enters the traffic again, watches her until they turn the corner and she’s gone.
Morrie is already waiting in the grimy little café that is his favourite haunt. She would prefer to go somewhere cleaner, just once. Everything in this café seems greased in a thin layer of cooking fat. He stands up and kisses her on the cheek, his beard bristles, he’s always bearded for his adventures. He hitches up his jeans because he’s lost more weight, motions to a seat.
‘Thought you mightn’t come,’ he says. ‘I only really just remembered how you hate weather. Makes you morbid.’
Morbid isn’t the word she’d use. She doesn’t like that word at all. She doesn’t feel morbid when it rains. When it rains she can feel her own heartbeat and her thoughts toll like bells inside her head. Her sadness, her normal everyday sadness, is gloriously amplified. She doesn’t say anything. She sits down and twirls the rings on her fingers three times.
‘So, how are you?’ he asks.
‘I’m all right,’ she says.
All the tables are yellow Formica and the chairs are red plastic. On the walls there are vintage car prints.
‘I’ve been overseas.’
‘With what money?’
‘I did some work. It paid well.’
She doesn’t know what sort of work he’d do. He’s not much good at anything. He used to fix up cars before he started getting the pension for his back. Once he worked on the main roads. That was a long time ago. He probably does bad things. He’s done them before. Deals drugs or sells his tall wiry body. He told her he was queer once. He said, you know why, don’t you Lou, you know why, insistently, digging, digging, digging with his words, until she needed to get up and leave. He’s good looking, Morrie, good looking in an angular, aching, Jesus-on-a-cross way. He always looks as though he’s suffered. Today his eyes are very clear.
‘Why should I believe you?’
‘Why wouldn’t you?’ he asks, genuinely surprised.
He rubs a hand over his beard.
Once he told her he went to Japan and ate poisonous blowfish in a small restaurant that specialised in the dish. The restaurant was a long way off the main road, small and secret, and its decor, apart from cheap white paper tablecloths, almost entirely red. Like stepping inside a vital organ, he said. Two or three people died in that same restaurant each year. They bowed to him before he took his first bite as though they were saying goodbye.
‘You can get cheap tickets nowadays you know, to anywhere,’ he says in the café. ‘Although you wouldn’t know I suppose, you live in your own little world, Lou, going to work, coming home. Never going anywhere. Just sitting there watching your telly.’
‘At least I’ve got a job,’ she says. They’re on the edge of an argument, already, only three minutes in. She feels the tears again.
The day of the pearl teeth in the handkerchief, the day of the car, he had stopped crying. The fountain word woman returned. The car door was held open for them and they climbed inside. That moment is small in time yet vast inside her. She struggles to breathe just to think it. The door was shut. They sat in the back seat on brown upholstery heated by the sun. The city moved past the windows in a faltering pattern of light and shade.
‘What’s gotten into you?’ Morrie asks while he stirs his tea. He has left sugar strewn across the table and the sugar packets crumpled in his saucer. ‘All this bad weather I suppose.’
She shrugs. Stirs her coffee.
‘You should tell me then,’ she says.
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Yes, you have to know. I’ll start. Where do I start, Lou? We were deep in the city.’
The way he describes it she can see it. He has always been good at telling stories. She watches the waterfall of rain tumbling off the awning outside and imagines it while she listens. There are woven baskets bobbing on backs, thin dogs roaming between legs, the stench of open sewers and rotting food. Old men are squatting on their haunches smoking. Chickens strung upside down have frantic eyes. It’s an overcast day; dark clouds casting shadows over streets, his feet are dirty in his thongs.
‘You would hate it, all the mess, it would drive you mental,’ Morrie says. ‘But anyway, the street is a long one, full of little restaurants but I know which one it is because a cobra is painted on the outside, colourful, rainbow coloured, not the way a real cobra is. They come outside to meet me like they always knew I was coming and they nod their heads when I say I wish to partake in only one particular delicacy.’
‘Poor cobra,’ she says.
He expects her to say it.
‘Lou,’ he says, deadly serious. ‘You don’t understand these things. Since it happened I’m…’
Maurice has the saddest eyes. Blue-green, long lashed, forlorn. He shifts in his chair and adds another sugar to his tea.
Once he told her he went into the jungle somewhere, South America perhaps. He went with other men. He told her he saved for two years to be part of that expedition. They were looking for a certain rare blossom, the nectar a form of liquid enlightenment. At first she believed him, it wasn’t hard, the story was so compelling; the tiny flower, satin-petalled, all the steaming mist and brilliance of parrots and the women’s black faces so beautiful they made him want to weep. Yet all that time he would have been in a share house somewhere, doing bucket bongs, moving slowly between the grimy rooms, only dreaming of it.
‘Are you listening to me?’ he asks.
‘Of course,’ she says.
‘So they take me inside the restaurant,’ he says, ‘and they seat me at a table and there is no-one else there. Some little children come out of the kitchen to watch. The head honcho comes out and he has this visa card machine and I have to swipe my card. God knows what I paid for it. Still, they said I had to pay first. Outside the clouds have broken up. They bring the snake, a big one, a cobra all right, all golden, gleaming in the afternoon sun. You see?’
She sees it perfectly.
His first trip had been to the foothills in Nepal. That story at least was true. Before he went she had visited him somewhere in a huge old house and seen his borrowed backpack opened out on his bed. He wasn’t going for any dangerous culinary experience or on any scientific expedition. He could have only been twenty, in that room, talking to her about what he hoped to do, how he needed to go, how he wanted to find some kind of peace. He was like that; always looking for something.
When he came back he said he had found himself.
‘Fully,’ he had said. ‘I fully found myself.’
He realised in the shadow of the giants that he was nothing and this knowledge of his nothingness was liberating.
‘You see?’ he had asked. He was wearing a Nepalese hat and had grown his first beard. It had made Lou feel such a terrible aching tenderness for him.
‘Yes,’ she had replied.
That day in the car Morrie put the handkerchief containing three teeth in his pocket. The woman driving had white powder on her face and thin lips painted pink. She had turned her fountain of words off now she had them.
‘Are you right?’ the woman asked them over her shoulder as she drove, ‘You’re as quiet as mice back there.’
They had nodded their heads, the city slipping past. They had turned countless corners and crossed bridges. In Lou’s mind they drove in circles. Finally, high up on the freeway they saw the maze of suburbia laid out to the horizon, shimmering and winking in the heat.
‘You’re both scrawny little things,’ the woman driving said. ‘Aren’t you?’
Lou had agreed because she had been told it before.
‘Never mind, we’ll soon fatten you up,’ the woman said.
It sounded like a threat.
The woman turned and smiled but all Lou saw was the baring of teeth. She hoped and wished with all her might that the woman was not their new mother.
‘They pick the cobra up out of the basket,’ says Maurice, and she is brought back again, to where they are, the small grimy café, her milky coffee growing cold. ‘And what do you think they do with it?’
‘I don’t know Morrie, what do they do with it?’
He holds his arm up to demonstrate, slowly, dramatically. He runs the imaginary knife through the air.
‘They slit it open, right there in front of me, head to tail. The heart is removed, still beating, placed in a little blue bowl. I down it, one swallow. Don’t even stop to think. I can feel it inside of me, Lou, sliding, still beating, you have no idea.’
She finds she has been holding her breath.
She remembers the day they left was unbearably bright. The woman in the car drove them to the first in a long line of homes, delivered them to Pam, the first in a long line of mothers. Pam had made a cake. It was out of the oven, a little sunken in the middle, sitting on the table as a welcoming gift. It made Lou’s mouth water, against her will. Pam’s husband Vern made model cars. They sat in a gleaming line on top of the buffet hutch in the living room. It was a neat house. There was no dust. Everything was freshly painted as though they were covering up an old stain.
‘Lad,’ Vern said to Morrie. ‘Would you like to come and see the model cars with me?’
‘Pam,’ Lou had said quietly, just practicing. ‘Pam.’
‘That’s my name. Don’t wear it out,’ Pam had said to make her laugh but she couldn’t. There was no room, the huge bright day and the act of leaving squeezed so tight inside her.
She had her own room. Morrie was allowed to come at night and sit for a while on her bed. They were used to sleeping together, entwined like wild animals. She was used to Maurice’s breath and his boy-smelling hair. She was used to how he twitched in his sleep. When things were bad she was used to holding his hands. They would hold hands together at the level of their hearts, his two calloused palms clutched around hers.
