New Australian Stories 2 (23 page)

Dad stuck around because he thought me and Meg would make him rich. He saw offers for film rights and royalties rolling in long before they actually did; had visions of a two-storey house, a speedboat. But after that initial fuss, Mum made the paparazzi bug off. She sent every journo packing and Returned-to-Sender all the wheedling propositions in their buff envelopes. And with Dad at the races or half-sunk at the pub most days, he was never home at the right time, so it was years before he figured out that we hadn't really been snubbed: we'd been snubbing.

Poppy came round in the end, round about the time we turned two. It's one of the stories Mum tells me at night when I can't sleep, but I swear I can remember it for myself. He was sitting in the shade of the jacaranda tree in the old camp chair, looking at nothing while Mum pegged our funny-looking clothes on the line, and Meg and I grovelled around in the dirt under her feet. I preferred to err on the side of caution when it came to bodily functions, but Meg always liked to push the envelope, so when I started off, heading back inside for the loo, Meg had other ideas, being not quite finished with her peg house and confident that the bladder could hold out a bit longer. So we set up a squabble, Meg holding grim-faced to the hoist, and me kind of rolling my way towards the house, and what with all the rumpus, Poppy looked up and beheld us, and for a wonder he didn't commence weeping like usual but laughed instead, a crusty bark that surprised him as much as the rest of us.

‘It's the push-me-pull-you!' he croaked.

And Meg, who always knew the right thing to do, beamed out a big Oh-
hello
-there! smile at him and tucked us straight into his heart.

We could move pretty fast by the time we were four. If Danny started across the room towards some toy or book, Meg and I could scoot round him and snaffle it before he got there or even realised there was competition. We were top-heavy, so walking was never going to be our locomotion of choice, but we could go lickety-split on carpet or grass, and we loved the sandpit. Mum used to shake her head in wonder and say, ‘Ah bubs, you're a blur of limbs, you make me head whirl.'

But most people were like Poppy had been in those first years, and it hurt them to see us living squished up together. The doctors were no different. Doctor Jack and Doctor Roseleaf started up again, first with Mum, then with Poppy once they saw that he'd come on board, but in the end, mostly with Dad. ‘With prosthetic limbs, both girls could walk independently. Run perhaps. Why they could even walk to school together!' It was the launch of the last campaign to separate us, and I don't doubt that it had a seductive tune to it.

Now I walk. I make my slow and lonely way across the room, and I never beat anyone to anything.

When we turned five the clamour from the outside world became a roar. We were going to school next year; how would we cope, how would we even sit at the desks, all skewiff like we were? How could they stop us cheating on tests? No matter that we were happy now, what about when we reached adolescence and realised we were
different
from everybody else? What about when we got interested in boys? (In sex?) It was selfish of our parents to deny us the operation — no, it was more than that; it was wrong. An infringement of our basic rights as human beings.

And Poppy, red-faced and just about inarticulate with indignation, would shove pictures of Chang and Eng under their noses and shout, ‘Both married! Both had kids!' and the doctors would smile patiently and turn their attention back to Dad, where they were at least making some progress.

‘It is imperative that it happen soon,' said Doctor Jack in his rumbly, assured voice. ‘The sooner we separate them, the faster their bodies will heal, and the more successfully they will compensate for any deficiencies.'

He turned his head, and we could see the frustration scrambling up those smooth, moisturised features. He muttered, ‘It should have been done years ago,' and Doctor Roseleaf threw him a warning look from across the room.

One time Doctor Jack turned to us and crouched down, all smiles, and said, ‘Wouldn't you girls like to be able to give each other a big hug? Play hopscotch together? Ride a bike?' but we just stared back at him, mute, for didn't we give each other hugs all the time? And only little kids played hopscotch; we played marbles and, what with my aim and Meg's grit, we were just about unbeatable in our street. And we rode Danny's bike all the time, with the trainers on, and with just a bit of help from him and Gretel.

Mum showed the doctors the door and hurried straight back to us. ‘It's all right,' she said, wiping away my tears and Meg's scowl. ‘I won't let them.'

And Dad banged out the door and went to the pub with a face like a pound of tripe.

Meg was the strong twin, so when it came time to say goodbye, out there in the prep room, Mum barely gave her the time of day. It was me she was worried about, with my tiny scrap of liver, my single kidney and dickey heart. It was me she thought she might not see alive again, so she wept all over me and kissed my face wet and gripped my hand, then at the last minute, as the nurses made to take us, she remembered Meg and pecked her on the cheek. ‘Take care of your sister,' she said to her, fierce. ‘You keep a good hold on her!' And then she was gone, poor Mum, with her sad face, grey and lined from all the months of court and fighting, and we were on our own.

They wheeled us through some metal doors into a room bright with overhead lamps and smelling badly of bleach, and Meg, the bold one, tucked her head under my chin as best she could, and whimpered, and it was me who had to be brave. With my good arm I reached around and cuddled her to me, tight as I could for courage, and with the hand we shared, I stroked her hair. Underneath the din of clanging and beeping and busy people turning knobs, I started up a humming, low and steady, a bit like the noise a fridge makes; and like that, we went under the gas.

Writing [in] the New Millennium

DEBRA ADELAIDE

Professionalising the Creative
(11.00 a.m. – 12.15 p.m. Sem. Rm 3): When someone in the audience asked how long it should take to write a book, all the authors exchanged glances. I expected the answer to be depressingly precise, but not this depressing. Nor this precise. Ten years, said one author, not missing a beat. Six weeks, said the author next on the panel. The first elaborated: ten years from early notes to final draft but another two before publication, so strictly twelve. Her book was a nervous-looking volume of fiction that sounded more like poetry. In the book display it sat disdainfully to one side of the embossed historical novels and the fiction with perky covers and one-syllable titles.
The Lonely Flight of the
Soul
. It looked a lot like its author, a lonely soul clad in muted tertiary shades, sitting apart from the rest of the panel. The author who said six weeks went on to explain that he only wrote in the evenings, as his real job was in finance. He held up his book, a fat action thriller well over 120,000 words called
Code Six
.

My evenings were spent in front of the television. Sometimes after Rosie and Jay settled down for the night, and Curtis and I were done throwing clothes in the washing machine or cleaning up the kitchen, there was no point even switching it on. If I ever got to bed with a book, I couldn't seem to stay awake. It had taken me three years to write my manuscript and it was still fewer than 30,000 words. I wondered how late the finance guy worked? Six weeks of 120,000 words came to 20,000 words a week, or 2,857.14 words per day. Not so bad if you said it quickly.

But I wondered how many words per hour he wrote. And were all those words good ones?

Hothousing New Talent
.
Mentoring and Marketing
.
Furthering
Your Manuscript
. I chose all the sessions that sounded like they meant business. I wanted action, results. When the assessor confirmed our details for the program, eight of us, all expenses paid, she added a final comment in her email. More like a warning. Our manuscripts had been chosen for their potential, but the rest was up to us. Even if we were to secure a book deal at the end of the conference, we had to understand that afterwards we would be on our own. With a deadline. She recommended we approach agents on the first day. Potential alone would not be enough.

The agents were all very tall. Twice, I lined up to speak to them after sessions (
Managing a Literary Career
;
Breaking
through the Paper Ceiling
), but even seated they towered over me. One of them had severe cheekbones and shorn white hair, under which her skull protruded. I could almost see her thinking how she would rather be back in her office overlooking the water while on the phone to New York finalising a deal for a client, a real author. Instead she was in this small town, which had doubled in size for the week of the conference, talking to people who thought that because they had been told they had potential they were special. Waiting in line, I overheard her saying something dismissive about potential writers. Potential started to sound less like a quality with inherent power, and more of a handicap. Each time I walked away before reaching the front of the queue.

At the first session after breakfast, someone said, ‘You know the Annals woman is still in her room? She's written a thousand words this morning!'

Oh, the Annals woman. So famous she did not require a name. Like a duke from Shakespearean drama, Norfolk or Gloucester, so powerful that she went by an abbreviation of her estate instead.
The Annals of the Golden Children
. Five or six books, all with two definite articles in their titles, just to make sure. A body of work almost legendary among fans even though she was still so young. She dressed like an extra in a fantasy film. She could have been Galadriel's understudy. Everything about her was bountiful: flowing hair, long velvet skirts, the thousands of words. Before breakfast.

Another writer, a bearded vegan from the mountains, said to no one in particular, ‘Apparently Trollope wrote three thousand words every morning. Before going to work. And he didn't even have a laptop!' He slipped a banana from the breakfast buffet into the pocket of his coat, which had telltale leather patches at the elbows. He looked like a nib-pen kind of writer.

Annals had a silver laptop. It really did seem made of precious metal. On opening night, when the rest of us were laughing and drinking too much wine, she clutched her laptop close to her chest, talking with head bent to her editor. She departed early in a way that announced,
I am going upstairs
to write now; that is what writers do
, while the rest of us quite obviously were not writing. Unless you counted the flirtatious text messages criss-crossing the room. Arts bureaucrats, literary professionals, let loose for a week together. Even I caught on to that.

And writers. A writers' conference is full of them. Why such an obvious thing took so long to strike me, I didn't know. There were books and people to sell them, but no readers. We were all writers. Dozens of people attending each session. Here to learn writerly things. I was so eager. A great sheet of blotting paper ready to soak up everything about the writing life. And yet all the writers, the ones with books on display, seemed a different species. Everything they told us was contradictory. Write no more than three drafts, otherwise you overdo it. At least ten drafts. Twenty. Write with your eyes shut and let the words flow. Don't censor yourself. Learn how to self-edit. Don't even
try
to edit yourself. Be ruthless. Cut, cut, cut. I began to suspect they were all telling lies. The thin nervous author and the mountains poet whispered over skinny soy lattes during the morning coffee break, though on stage they seemed to despise each other. Maybe they were conspiring to keep us potential authors out of the scene.

And for a writers' conference there was some very sloppy language around. I studied the program posted up at the information desk. I couldn't knock out thousands of words in a day but I did know my grammar. Why was everything a gerund?

‘A what?' Another Potential Writer, next to me.

‘
Writing the New Millennium
.
Professionalising
everything. All these verbs without subjects. And nouns posing as verbs.' She looked at me and moved away.

Streamlining and Storytelling
.
Approaching Publication
.
Writing the New Millennium
. That was the keynote session: only top-shelf authors participating, we privileged mentees up in the front row, part of our fabulous opportunity. The authors had hardcover editions and overseas agents and Commonwealth Prize shortlistings. The audience questions were vetted beforehand. I dared not offer mine. Writing about, writing in, even writing for the new millennium. But what was
writing
the new millennium? The missing preposition bothered me.

The top-shelf authors were all unsmiling males over sixty. They read from their books in wearied drawls, making comments about dead European writers I'd never read. They wrote historical novels, and somehow we all knew that did not mean Regency dramas or anything with a bodice on the cover. Everything they said was addressed to the corner of the room somewhere past our heads, as if there hovered a better quality audience, a more appreciative and deserving one. The writing life of the new millennium sounded like afternoon tea in the staff common room of a boys' school. I left the session early. The millennium wasn't even new anymore.

Again in the bar I knocked back two cold beers before moving on to red wine. Behind me on the wall was one of the conference posters. After my second drink I took out a felt pen and added the word
in
between
Writing
and
the
.