The Crimes and Punishments of Miss Payne (25 page)

PRESENT DAY

You pick up a sheaf of papers from the printer, and a sigh of satisfaction escapes your lips. It is done. Finished. You raise your head from your desk and look at a photograph hanging on the wall in front of you. It is a photograph of a red-haired boy and a flat-chested girl with glasses. They are leaning casually against the school railings. They look happy together. You smile even as you feel a hard lump of pain in your chest.

“Kiffo,” you say, “I think that in the end you'll find I kept my promise.”

There are two things that all writers need: encouragement and then more encouragement. I have been fortunate that so many people have supplied these unstintingly. Thanks to my family, local and distant, for their support. Kris and Kari, you always believed. Lauren and Brendan, thanks for reading the manuscript and providing important insights (and for water-throwing, Lauren!). My gratitude, also, to Peter Styles for checking certain parts of the narrative.

Jodie Webster and Erica Wagner, of Allen & Unwin, took a raw manuscript and transformed it. This book could not have been written without their expertise and belief. I would also like to thank Penni Russon for her intelligent and sensitive assessment of the first draft and Nancy Siscoe for the humor, enthusiasm, and skill with which she guided the U.S. edition.

Above all else, my wife, Nita, was a reader, critic and guide, and an unfailing support when things got tough. It is impossible to adequately acknowledge her influence and contribution. Beggar that I am, I am poor even in thanks.

Here is a special preview
of Barry Jonsberg's upcoming novel:

Excerpt copyright © 2007 by Barry Jonsberg.
Published by Alfred A. Knopf.

One

It was a wet-season day in the tropics. Swollen clouds swept in from the south and squatted over my house. A massive clap of thunder shook the floors and gave the signal for the clouds to discharge their load. A gentle drumroll of rain on the roof built to a thrumming crescendo. The temperature dropped instantly by ten degrees. Through the window I could see water flooding off the roof, a curtain enveloping the house. The roar of rain drowned out all other noises.

No one deserved to be outside in that.

The doorbell rang. It usually had the decibel count of a nuclear-warning siren, but I could barely hear it against the background clamor. I put down my book and peered out the front window. Even under the best viewing circumstances, you could see only a small portion of anyone standing at the door. Perhaps a profile of buttocks and, if you were lucky, the back of a head. But with the rain the way it was, I couldn't see anything.

I hesitated. Mum was at work and I was home alone. Not normally a problem, but the weather made me wary. Who would be out in such a downpour? To my mind, there were only two possibilities—a mad ax murderer or a religious fundamentalist. If I was really unlucky, it would be the latter. I suppose I could have pretended not to exist, but I'm a person with a social conscience. The weather
was
foul. I'd have let in a cane toad for shelter and a mug of cocoa.

So I opened the door.

The man was below medium height. Actually, well below medium height. He was wearing a white shirt and a broad silk tie decorated with Santa Clauses. He held a dripping bag in one hand and swept sodden, thinning hair from his eyes with the other. Niagara Falls flowed over him. His clothes stuck to his body, and as he shifted position I heard the squelch of rainwater in shoes. He looked at me and blinked rain. A small smile, hesitant, unsure, played around his lips.

“Hello, Calma,” he said.

“Dad!” I yelled. “My God! Dad! Don't stand out there in the pouring rain, Dad.”

His smile broadened.

“No,” I added. “Piss off!”

And I slammed the door in his face.

Two

My local grocery store glories in the name of Crazi-Cheep. It's one of those places that advertise on local TV channels by
assembling a cast of plug-ugly employees dressed in spectacularly nasty uniforms and forcing them to sing a song with banal lyrics, written by a tone-deaf lower primate. The employees all look embarrassed, and so they should. You could force slivers of red-hot bamboo up my fingernails and lash me with rusty barbed wire and I still wouldn't do it.

The employees are very young, presumably so the company can pay them about two dollars an hour and pass on the savings to customers. Crazi-Cheep closes the checkouts by degrees during peak times, so ultimately there is a line of fifty people at one register, staffed by a pubescent operator prone to pimples, lank hair, and narcolepsy. You can visibly age in one of their lines. Not that anyone would notice, because most of the customers are so old they'd be candidates for carbon dating.

Crazi-Cheep is not high on my list of not-to-be-missed shopping experiences.

This, however, was an emergency. I braved the depressing canned music—a compilation CD probably entitled
Major Manure of the Seventies
—and took my place in a line whose length might have been justifiable if they were handing out free hip replacements. The old lady in front of me was certainly a worry. It was only the fact that she wheezed from time to time that indicated she was still breathing.

Time passed. I grew a few centimeters and the old lady shrank a few. The CD was on repeat and a particularly
annoying track came on again. Finally it was almost my turn to be served.

In Sicily they call it the
thunderbolt.
I read about it somewhere. It's when you see someone and all these hormonal reactions kick in. Your heart thumps, you sweat profusely, your stomach dips to your shoelaces, and bits and pieces you didn't know you possessed start tingling like you've been plugged into an electric socket. Well, that's what happened to me when I saw … him.

I don't want you to think I am a shallow, superficial person, so I won't start with his physical appearance.

Stuff it. Of course I will.

He was tall and rangy. As I watched him scan a tin of Spam (and he did it so effortlessly, with such grace and ease of movement, like a balletic sequence), I caught the hint of lean muscles flexing beneath the uniform. I could picture him on a beach, the sun reflecting off defined biceps and pectorals you could graze your knuckles on. His face was classically sculpted, high cheekbones framing a pert and flawless nose. His eyes were deep brown, liquid with sensitivity and hidden passion; his olive skin gleamed beneath the overhead fluorescent lights. During a particularly tricky scanning maneuver, involving shrink-wrapped bok choy, he parted his full lips to reveal faultless, even teeth. Glossy black hair fell in a perfect curtain over his left eye.

Basically, he was all right, if you like that kind of thing.

As for his personality
(the
most important factor, of
course), well… hey, how the hell would I know? I stood there with a glazed expression on my face, like someone had smacked me around the head with a frozen chicken carcass. Luckily the old dear in front of me was not the most efficient of customers. The Greek god had finished scanning her groceries and she was gazing into the middle distance with rheumy eyes.

“That'll be twenty-five dollars and fifty-five cents, please,” he said.

I loved him for the “please.” What a polite and considerate young man! And his voice was like honey dripping over truffles….

“Hey?” said the crone.

“Twenty-five dollars and fifty-five cents, please.”

She looked amazed, like the last thing she had been expecting was to have to pay for the groceries. I knew what would come next. She'd burrow into her bag for her wallet, which would be right at the bottom. She'd pull out bus passes, framed photographs of her grandchildren, a prosthetic leg, and a packet of surgical bandages, and each item would be placed carefully on the counter. Finally, when she had accumulated enough material to fill a wheelie bin, she'd find the wallet, count out the sum in nickels, and painfully repack. Then she'd want her FlyBuys card, which would be in a secret compartment at the bottom of her handbag, and we'd go through the whole process again.

This time, though, I wasn't complaining. It gave me the chance to drink in every detail of Jason's appearance. Jason. He had a little name tag. I love the name Jason. Don't you love the name Jason? It's classical and conjures images of flashing swords, short tunics, and Golden Fleece. I was so struck I didn't have time to panic. It hadn't occurred to me that once the old lady had hobbled off, it would be my turn to be served and, for a moment at least, Jason's attention would be focused on me.

When he turned to me, my hair clogged up with grease and four pimples spontaneously erupted on my nose. I wanted to die.

And then it got worse. I remembered what I had been standing in line for half a millennium to purchase. It was clamped in my hand. I froze. I wanted to turn back, but forty-five pensioners were behind me and they didn't look friendly. With a sinking feeling, I placed my purchase on the belt and watched it slide toward Jason.

Feminine hygiene products. Or FHP, as I like to call them.

Hang on. Don't get me wrong. I know it's nothing to be ashamed of. The trouble was, it was Crazi Brand FHP. I mean, Crazi Brand. Not even FHP in a cool, sophisticated box that hinted at a high-flying businesswoman with a cell phone and investment properties on the Gold Coast. Just a tacky white box with
Crazi Brand
in big green letters. They should be labeled
Cheapskate Crap for Losers.
It would be more honest.

Jason smiled at me.

“How are you today?” he said.

It briefly crossed my mind to reply,
Great, thanks, Jason. In full flow and deliriously happy.
I didn't, though. Instead I mumbled, “Good.” Can you believe that?
Good!
Boy, I blew him away with wit and sharp repartee there, didn't I?

“That'll be two dollars twenty cents, please.”

I dug in my purse for a five. I could feel the pimples on my nose pulsing. They were probably flashing in sequence. If it had been dark, they could have used my face for disco lighting. Forty-five pensioners break-dancing in the aisles.

Look, by that stage, I just wanted to get out. With any luck, Jason might not have noticed me. Not properly. Not enough to recognize me in the future. I tried to keep my lank, greasy hair over my face. Thank God I wasn't wearing a name tag.

“Calma Harrison, is that you?”

The woman behind me tapped me on the shoulder. There was not much I could do. I turned. It was Mrs. Elliott from the library. I had known her since I was four years old—I virtually lived at the library until the age of eleven. She was well past retirement, but no one cared because she was popular with customers, sharp as a razor blade, and knew her books. The way she talked about Charles Dickens, you got the impression they had hung out together at the local mall. Normally I would have been happy to see her. Now I wanted to shrivel.

“Hi, Mrs. Elliott,” I said.

Jason handed me my change and I tried to slink away. Mrs. Elliott was having none of it. She piled the rest of her groceries on the belt and continued to talk.

“My goodness, Calma. Those pimples look angry. Are you washing your face properly, dear?”

Not knowing she was one remark away from hospitalization due to an unfortunate accident with my fingers and her eyes, Mrs. Elliott continued blithely.

“Ah,” she said, glancing at my purchase through the transparent supermarket bag. The plastic was so thin it could be measured in microns. They have expensive machines in hospital laboratories that can't cut as thin. “I understand. I always used to get a bad complexion at that time of the month myself.”

I was surprised she could remember that far back. I wasn't surprised things were getting worse and worse. An involuntary fart would have capped the whole experience.

“They're for my mother,” I said.

Calma, you are a sad, depressing individual.

“Look, Mrs. Elliott, I've got to fly,” I continued, backing away. “See you soon.”

“Get some ointment for those pimples, dear,” she yelled at me as I scuttled through the automatic door. “And resist the urge to squeeze them.”

I headed for home. There was a small crawl space in the roof and I was staying in it until I was forty.

Three

I'm learning heaps in English. Year 11 sure is a step up in complexity.

My class learned about unreliable narrators today.

Okay. Pin back your ears and pay attention. I'm only going to tell you once and there will be a test at the end. Ready?

I am a narrator and I am unreliable.

All narrators are unreliable, because all people are unreliable. We might not lie, exactly, but our narration is colored by our experiences, our prejudices, or our misconceptions. One person's truth is not another person's truth.

With me so far? Good.

Readers of a novel written in the first person, therefore, shouldn't necessarily believe that the “I” within the narrative is telling the objective truth. Because the objective truth doesn't exist. Try as the narrator might, he or she is bound to be unreliable because human frailties afflict us all.

Good stuff, eh?

So. Where does all of this leave us: you, the reader, and me, the narrator? Let me tell you. Unless I am much mistaken, you want to know about my father. You are probably curious about why I was so hostile toward him. Something has happened in the past, you are thinking. Well, take a prize off the top shelf. And guess who is going to tell you the nasty, sordid details? Me, obviously. I'm the narrator. But as a narrator, I'm unreliable, so how do you know if
what I'm saying is accurate? It's a problem. So here's what I'm going to do. I am going to try, really hard, to be as objective as I can. I'll let you know the facts in plain words, like a newspaper article. I will avoid:

1. Any display of emotion.
   

2. Any use of colorful language.
   

3. Reference to any event that is not historically (herstorically) accurate.
   

4. Any obvious subjectivity or personality in my writing style.
   

Here goes.

My father—that sleazy, two-timing, pathetic bag of shit—dumped my mother and me when I was in Year 6. Having the sensitivity of a hemorrhoid, and being of an age when his shriveled excuse for an ego was at its most vulnerable, he spent his evenings drooling over the cleavage of a twenty-year-old barmaid in the local pub. This woman, and I use the word in its loosest possible sense, already suffered from repetitive-strain injury through the frequency with which she removed her underwear. My father, led by his groin (marginally larger than his brain), suggested they destroy the lives of two innocent people by running off to Sydney together, where she could paint her nails and indulge a passion for skimpy Lycra outfits and he could comb his hair to hide his bald patch. Five years passed before my father, unable to survive without inflicting pain and misery on another human being, returned to the tropics and attempted to make contact with those he
had abandoned. This vile slug had not contacted us in five years, and now he oozed back in search of forgiveness, hot meals, and air-conditioning—not necessarily in that order.

Okay. Those are the facts. Now you can form your own judgment.

Four

I had a poem to write for English.

Most kids have to write poems for English, nearly all hate it, and even more are crap at doing it. But it is so easy.

So do you want the Calma Harrison foolproof guide to writing poetry on any conceivable subject in fewer than two minutes? It will change your life. Never again will you dread that assignment. I guarantee you'll pass, and if my experience is anything to go by, you'll probably get an A.

Okay, here goes.

Let's get rid of some misconceptions. Misconception number one: poetry has to rhyme. Wrong. Rhyming poetry is actually very old-fashioned (as well as a pain in the arse to write) and we are modern, up-to-date wordsmiths here. Misconception number two: rhythm is important. Wrong, wrong. Modern poetry relies upon the rhythm of the street, the natural cadences of the spoken language (memorize that and repeat it to any teacher who challenges you). Misconception number three: poetry has to make sense. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Let's be honest. How many proper poems have you read where you've known what the hell was going on? Few, if any, I'll bet. And the same applies to
your teacher. He or she will read your poem and nod wisely. They can't admit they don't understand it. They're English teachers, after all. In the unlikely event they ask you to explain, recite the following: “It was my attempt to rationalize the dichotomy between personal emotions and the pressures of modern-day living.” That'll shut them up.