The first water swirled pink and silver across the roof. Figuro was disappointed to see it, but still he had to admit that it was beautiful, it was right, just as when you washed yourself in the sacred river you had to immerse yourself completely, not merely splash water up onto your head-top but go right down, hold your breath and be part of the river for a moment. Figuro had opened his eyes under there, seen the pale misty water and the brown level of stirred-up mud, and his Uncle Pooti’s trousers flapping in the current as in a strong wind full of dust.
Down so went this creature entirely, piece by blockish piece, following itself ungainly into the sea. And behind its last legs and trailing tails, Figuro ran back and forth at the water’s edge, his cries lost in the sluicings of the shallows, in the up-bubbling blasts of air and wreckage. The mystery muttered against the sea-bottom; on the surface it left a slick path, edged with ragged fountains, from Figuro to the new sun a bright peck-mark out of the horizon, from the new sun a golden fingernail, across all of the sea, to the milk-man running on the shore.
I reach the edge of the world. There are no lice here, and no louse-carriages. Soft fur strokes my sore torn paws, and then even softer stuff, a kind of cloud-ground. It gives somewhat before holding, relenting.
Out there beyond are two skies, both shining full of hope. The gentlest colour creeps upon the upper one, colour of Ladies’ Underwear, and with a lace of clouds there, yes, a trim, accents. The same kind shade swims upon the water, cresting its night-darkness, spilling forward on its foam.
I step off into space, all itching. It’s cold, the morning, the water. It clings close in my crevices; it climbs up my outsides and into the lower beginnings of my innards, the first rooms there and the cavities; it soothes the broken places; it lifts the grit and grain off me. The loose pieces wag and break off and are gone from their dangling and banging.
Ah! I open my face. It rushes in, the morning, the light, the universe, the cleansing sea. I sink into the relief and it laps and laves me all around, hurries across the top of me to cover me, and rushes and spurts in all my compartments, soaking and floating the disordered goods there, dousing the memories of my electronica, pouring ruin along my walkways, tossing and tumbling my shelves, my stacks, my store-rooms of louse-ephemera.
Down farther I sink, quite covered now, quite gone from the world’s sight, from the world’s crawlings. Collected airs bleed upward through me; gouts and threads of bubble stream lightward. Everything is blurred here and stirring; every sound is muffled and closed in; the hollows resound differently, deeperly; nothing is sudden. Temperatures trail slow strings across my face, and softness sucks below. Rocks crack my underparts over themselves; growths lie down and make matting for my wounded belly.
I lie, all my itches gone or going, shifting this wing or that corridor to blub up a bubble, to complete my skin of cool, of wet, to drown the last louse-traces, any eggs they might have left, any irritants. Around me the vast blur moves, out and empty of those scraping creatures and those squalling. Instead come smoother others, moving without benefit of flooring, arriving on the slow treacly winds of the sea, eyeing me, kissing and nibbling my surfaces, rolling into my foyers and uncoiling, shy upon my travertine and my piled sharded glass. I lie and breathe of the free-moving tides, and let the sea-beasts have the run of me.
There was too much sky altogether, thought Sendra, stepping out onto Commercial Row. Too much sky and too much wall and pavement—where had everyone gone?
It was so quiet that she heard her own gasp twice— once from her mouth and again bounced back to her from the shopfronts opposite, a tiny moment later. Commercial Row was long and wide, inviting your eye, your feet, to wander. But today it didn’t end as it should, at the shining promise of Chumley Mall. Gone were the chrome and glass doors three times man-height holding in the cooled air, the giant billboard-faces with their intimate smiles, the ant-people passing in and out. Today only sky filled the street-end, and the inconsequential buildings beyond where the mall ought to be, and on the ground a crowd milling, excitement, indeed like stirred-up ants.
Slowly she walked towards the difference. It was as if her own head had suddenly changed shape; it was as if someone important had died—had anyone died? Would she see dreadful things? Still she walked. Nuri was tied onto her back, like goods, silent and warm, and she was a grown-up now; she was a mother, and she could bear anything; she could look any horror in the face.
Slowly the nothing approached her, towering and teetering emptied sky, with a fuss, a froth, of people below. She stood a little way back from them, catching between their heads and movements glimpses of torn earth, of a pipe gushing, concrete slabs stacked, or leaning in the clay crater-sides.
A tiny old woman was brought out of the crowd by her scolding daughter: ‘Well, by heaven, the suit is gone now, isn’t it? Gone to smithereens along with the rest. Come, mama. I need a cup of tea, I am so shocked.’
‘How can it be?’ said the old woman, bewildered. ‘All that explosion, and yet it woke no one. Nobody heard a thing.’
All sounds fell silent to Sendra then, although the mama and others continued to mouth, and a vehicle, a small type of digging machine, parted the crowd almost at Sendra’s elbow. The night-silence clutched her close, and the machine’s trundling reminded her feet of the apartment floor last night, of being bare and tired by the window.
She pushed through the crowd behind the machine. When it turned right she went left, and found the concrete apron everyone used to cross to reach the cool of Chumley Mall. Beyond its broken far edge, the ground gaped, the ground yawned, a muddy mouth full of broken teeth, broken grey biscuit, and tubes and piping slumped or poked cockily up, fountaining wires or dribbling water. On the far rim of the crater all the town’s levels of wealth were lined up in order, from the white Shogun Apartments with their flags at the hill-top, down to the woven-walled huts and lean-to’s along the river’s filth.
Right before her eyes men put up a barrier, a wire fence that broke up the crater-view into diamonds. People pushed around her and clustered to the wire, hooking their fingers in, and some of the children their toes. Sendra was glad of them, that they hid that again, that they began to fill the great be-furred silence it had been yelling forth, with their exclamations, the children with their questions, and everyone with their ordinariness—a man eating a banana as he stared through the wire, a child or two sidling up with their begging-faces on.
Sendra pushed back, so as not to be wedged at the front of the crowd. She was on Commercial Row again, walking away from everyone, with nowhere to go now, her market bag loose in her hand. ‘I dreamt it,’ she said to the empty street. The paving and the litter passed her eyes unseen. The memory of the woken thing lumped up out of the possible. Her footsoles crawled with its wrenchings, with its breakings, with its pullings free.
Acknowledgements
Publication history
The stories in this collection were first published during 2006–2009 in the publications listed below. I thank the following people in particular for their help and support: Simon Spanton of Gollancz for championing Black Juice in the UK; Jonathan Strahan for his efficiency and straight dealing as an editor; Patty Campbell for her input during the editing of ‘Heads’; Sharyn November for accepting ‘Ferryman’ almost before I sent it; Nancy Siscoe for putting forward the possibility of adding some lovingkindness to the collection, in response to which I wrote ‘Into the Clouds on High’, which is published here for the first time; Kathy Gollan for the conversation that gave ‘Into the Clouds on High’ its final form.
‘The Point of Roses’, Black Juice, Gollancz, London, 2006.
‘The Golden Shroud’, Picture This: 2, edited by Annabel Smith and Helen Chamberlin, Pearson Education, Melbourne, 2009.
‘A Fine Magic’, Eidolon I, edited by Jonathan Strahan and Jeremy G. Byrne, Eidolon Books, Perth, Western Australia, 2006.
‘An Honest Day’s Work’, The Starry Rift, edited by Jonathan Strahan,
Firebird, New York, 2008.
‘Night of the Firstlings’, Eclipse Two, edited by Jonathan Strahan, Night Shade Books, San Francisco, 2008.
‘Ferryman’, Firebirds Soaring, edited by Sharyn November, Firebird, New York, 2009.
‘Heads’, War Is... Soldiers, Survivors and Storytellers Talk about War, edited by Marc Aronson and Patty Campbell, Candlewick Press, Somerville MA, 2008.
‘Living Curiosities’, Sideshow: Ten Original Tales of Freaks, Illusionists, and Other Matters Odd and Magical, edited by Deborah Noyes, Candlewick Press, Somerville MA, 2009.
‘Eyelids of the Dawn’, New Australian Stories, edited by Aviva Tuffield, Scribe, Melbourne, 2009.
The Literature Board of the Australia Council for the Arts, the Australian Government’s arts funding and advisory body, funded my writing with a Fellowship in 2006–2007, during which time many of these stories were written.
Where the stories started
These stories were inspired, as far as I can recall, in the following ways.
‘The Point of Roses’ started when two things came together in my head: a BBC documentary, ‘Gypsy Wars’, about the community response to gypsies in Cottenham, Cambridgeshire; and my nephew Finn inventing the verb ‘to pumft’, and naming a soft-toy dog he owned ‘Pumfter von Schnitzel’.
The whole point of Pearson Education’s Picture This anthologies was to show school students how stories could grow from visual images. The picture they sent me to work from was of a stone stairway in what I took to be a castle interior. I’m not sure how Rapunzel’s hair managed to animate itself, but as soon as I saw it unlocking the door of the prince’s cell, I had ‘The Golden Shroud’.
‘A Fine Magic’ started off with a note to myself: a carousel made of ice. Also with my attraction to the word ‘fascinator’, used in the sense of a person who fascinates or bewitches people.
‘An Honest Day’s Work’ was inspired by a documentary about shipbreaking in Bangladesh—there’ve been several of these, and I couldn’t tell you which it was. When I did some follow-up research, I found Edward Burtynsky’s photographs of the Chittagong shipbreaking yards to be a further spur to the writing. These can be found at www.edwardburtynsky.com (follow the links works SHIPS SHIPBREAKING).
‘Night of the Firstlings’ happened when I first heard Paul Kelly’s song ‘Passed Over’ on his album Foggy Highway.
‘Ferryman’ sprang fully formed from my reading a little article called ‘The River Ferry’ written by the eight-year-old son of a ferryman, Harrison Fridd, of Waikerie, South Australia, and published in Living Landscapes: Writing and art by children of the Murray–Darling Basin (Primary English Teaching Association/Murray–Darling Basin Commission, Marrickville and Canberra, 2005).
I’m not quite sure where ‘Heads’ came from, but news coverage of the effects of war on the citizens of the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s was probably responsible.
‘Living Curiosities’ came from the same source as my junior novel Walking Through Albert (Allen & Unwin). I can’t remember where I read or heard about the idea that ghostly events play themselves out over and over again, like video loops but with added goose-flesh, but it’s prompted three stories already and it still isn’t worn out. Also, walking past Bullen Lane in Melbourne’s CBD, I started thinking about a character who was Circus personified (Bullen’s Circus toured Australia from the 1920s to the 1960s), and who hid himself away in just such a lane during the winter months.
‘Eyelids of the Dawn’ grew out of my commuting by train through Burwood in Sydney’s inner west, looking across to Burwood Plaza, seeing how big it was and how uncomfortable it looked crouched there among all the other shops and houses. Visiting Chennai (as part of the Asialink Literature Touring Program 2007) and walking from the Park Hotel to Marina Beach on our first afternoon in India, and later seeing Spencer Plaza, added significant detail to the story.
Also by MARGO LANAGAN
WINNER
Victorian Premier’s Literary Award,
Young Adult Fiction
Ditmar Award, Best Collection
World Fantasy Award, Collection
Michael L. Printz Honor Book,
American Library Association
Black Juice is a book of breathtaking stories that defy boundaries. They are dazzling, ruthless, tender, fierce, unique – ten deeply moving stories from an exceptional author.
‘A good short story, a really good one, is deceptively difficult to write. Which is why Black Juice is such an outstanding collection. Because every single story in it is, quite simply, perfect. That’s what I said: perfect.’
OUTLAND, UK
WINNER
CBCA Book of the Year,
Older Readers
SHORT-LISTED
Commonwealth Writers’ Prize
LONG-LISTED
Frank O’Connor International
Short Story Award
‘Lanagan is in a class of her own.’
THE WEEKEND AUSTRALIAN
‘The genius (not too strong a word) of Margo Lanagan is her ability to reach into darkness and return with something both different and powerfully convincing. It’s astonishing enough to be introduced so abruptly to a writer this good, but even more extraordinary is her seemingly effortless mastery of the short story form and what she proceeds to do with it.’LOCUS, USA
WINNER
Aurealis Award, Best Best Young Adult Story
‘The Queen’s Notice’
SHORT-LISTED
New South Wales Premier’s
Literary Award, Ethel Turner Prize
Ditmar Award, Best Collected Work
Aurealis Convenor’s Award
‘Ten more compelling stories from the author of the much-lauded Black Juice. Taut, vivid, original: another winner.’
THE HORN BOOK, USA
‘Dazzling’
JHON MARSDEN
Table of Contents
COVER PAGE
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT PAGE
CONTENTS
{ THE POINT OF ROSES
{ THE GOLDEN SHROUD
{ A FINE MAGIC
{ AN HONEST DAY’S WORK
{ INTO THE CLOUDS ON HIGH
{ NIGHT OF THE FIRSTLINGS
{ FERRYMAN
{ HEADS
{ LIVING CURIOSITIES
{ EYELIDS OF THE DAWN
Margo Lanagan, Yellowcake
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