The Art of Persuasion
Page 24
He was looking so tired, poor lamb. She bent to talk to him.
‘Would you like me to carry you?’ she said.
He nodded.
‘You’ve been very patient, Jessie. How about a piggy-back?’
She lifted him up, hoisted him onto her back. God, he was getting heavy. Adam shot her a guilty look and she told him they could take it in turns. Because Jessie belonged to both of them, she knew; he belonged to the whole wide world. And when he looked back, maybe decades later, if he wasn’t slowly withering in a desert or drowning in the ocean or burning in a raging fire, raging like the panic in people’s hearts, he would be able to say, quietly, proudly: I was there. I was there with Adam and Hazel, and the thousands of people who marched in the streets, determined to save the planet.
He needs to know. He needs to understand. Adam had been right to insist. He ruffled Jessie’s mop of hair.
‘Don’t do that,’ snapped the boy, whose legs were growing longer by the month.
‘Sorry, buddy.’
‘I don’t want you to call me buddy anymore,’ he said. ‘I’m Jessie.’
‘Indeed you are,’ said Adam.
He raised a Greens flag, watched it flutter in the breeze: Take Action Now among all the other flags and placards and banners.
‘Can I have an ice-cream, Dad?’ said Jessie, in his best-manners voice. ‘Hazel said I’ve been real patient.’
Hazel was poised with a maxim, something about patience being its own reward. Or was it goodness?
‘We’ve all been very patient,’ said Adam. ‘So I deserve an ice-cream too. Mango, I think. Or maybe strawberry.’
‘I’m going to have a triple decker,’ said Hazel. ‘Chocolate, toffee and blueberry.’
Adam gave Jessie the nod. ‘Hazel’s very greedy,’ he said. ‘Like a pig?’
‘Absolutely, my son. But I’m one too. A pig contented.’
‘That’s Aristotle,’ said Hazel.
‘Socrates, actually.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘One hundred percent.’ Adam flashed her his charming smile. ‘You’re not the only one who knows about ancient Greece.’
She poked out her tongue, to prove her adult credentials.
As they began to follow the crowds, Hazel thought about tomorrow, when the family would take the train to Cottesloe Beach and she would have to endure the biting sun and the spectacle of bodies frying to a crisp, turning over like glistening chooks on a rotisserie. But she needed to be there, because Adam was teaching Jessie how to swim in the sea. She could already picture it: she would dabble in the shallows of the Indian Ocean or sit waiting on the shore, as Adam taught Jessie how to negotiate the waves, holding onto him, showing him not to be afraid. Then he’d hoist him onto his shoulders and throw him into the air and the boy would scream with hysterical delight and plunge into the water and come up laughing and screaming for more while Hazel’s chest would tighten as she waited for that sudden shadow, a swift and deadly creature with a hideous cavernous mouth and rows of vicious teeth that could tear off a limb and leave the victim screaming and bleeding, maimed for life. Or dead. She would watch and watch like a hawk, like a mother, until Jessie came running ashore and she would laugh and chatter as she rubbed him with a towel. They would build a castle, too, and Jessie would press the shells into the walls, drape seaweed on the turrets, squeal when the water rushed into the moat, and she wouldn’t say a word about the fear that had risen inside her. Because her child was safe and Adam was safe and she could breathe in her love and be grateful.
‘Hazel.’
Jessie’s squeaky voice behind her back. A pair of clammy hands around her neck.
‘It’s your turn to read me a story at bedtime.’
‘Most definitely.’
‘If you read me two, I’ll try real hard to sleep through the night.’
She smiled to herself.
‘Or maybe three,’ he said.
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Fremantle Press for their faith in my first novel, and for including me in their fine history of local story-telling. Special thanks to Georgia Richter for her astute and meticulous editing, for her patience and good humour. Thanks, too, are due to Amanda Curtin, Linda Martin, Josephine Taylor and Terri-ann White, for feedback on a much earlier version of the novel. And thank you to Nada Backovic for her elegant, lovely cover. Thank you to Michelle de Kretser and Ryan O’Neill, two writers I greatly admire, for their generous endorsements. As always, I am indebted to Dan Midalia, for earning the money, conquering technology and cooking the dinners. Most of all, I thank him for his love.
Thank you to Fremantle Press for permission to quote from Dorothy Hewett’s poem ‘Wanderlust’ from Wheatlands (edited by Dorothy Hewett and John Kinsella, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2000). Thank you to Rosemary Sayer for permission to use the story of an asylum seeker recounted in her wonderful book More to the Story: Conversations with Refugees (Margaret River Press, 2015). And of course, special thanks to the asylum seeker in question.
Finally, thank you to the Uniting Church, Steve Biddulph, three hundred community groups and children from across Australia, all of whom were instrumental in creating the deeply affecting SIEV X Memorial in Canberra.
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‘…a ravishing achievement, a dazzling work of art in its own right.’ Dominic Smith
‘Goldbloom’s is a work of imaginative intensity but it is spun from an armature of facts…Her re-creations of London and Paris at the turn of the century are as compelling as the louche sexuality of the narrative. The reader can smell the chill, sooty London air, be mesmerised by the shrill choruses of spring in the French countryside and smell the turpentine and wax in their threadbare, unheated Paris lodgings.’ The Australian
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‘The minutiae and messiness of family life as it comes together and unravels time and time again are delicately rendered in Tracy Farr’s second novel.’ Australian Book Review
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‘This intricately stitched story…casts a spell over the reader. with its flawed family making magic and meaning from the vagaries of the weather, the landscape, and their own hearts.’ Myfanwy Jones
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First published 2018 by
FREMANTLE PRESS
25 Quarry Street, Fremantle WA 6160
(PO Box 158, North Fremantle WA 6159)
www.fremantlepress.com.au
Copyright © Susan Midalia, 2018
The moral rights of the author have been asserted.
This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.
Cover image: Elena Miloslavskaya
Printed by Everbest Printing Company, China
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Midalia Susan, author
The Art of Persuasion / Susan Midalia
ISBN 9781925591033 (paperback)
Midalia, Susan, author.
The art of persuasion / Susan Midalia.
ISBN: 9781925591040 (epub)
Romance fiction. Australian fiction
Fremantle Press is supported by the State Government through the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries.
Publication of this title was assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
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