Portable Curiosities (18 page)

‘That guy in the water,' I say. ‘I think he was coming on to me. I also felt like he might be a paedophile.'

‘Oh,' says Jiao, ‘I thought he was just making conversation. He seemed like a nice guy.'

I am dying, climbing up these stairs. At the top, I try to control my panting so it seems that I'm breathing regularly, like a fit person. I almost keel over.

On the way back to the car, Jiao gives me life advice.

‘If I were you, I'd write genre fiction to fund your literary fiction. Vampires or something. And get back on OkCupid. You can't find a partner if you're locked away writing every day. How is anyone going to marry you if they don't know you exist? I don't want to come back and see you when you're forty years old, bitter because all the good guys are married off and you've missed out on finding the right one for you.'

‘I hate OkCupid. It's so unromantic.'

‘Oh, no,' he says. ‘You're not still in love with the Kerouac guy, are you?'

I've had a multi-year crush on a dark-haired guy who's a fan of Jack Kerouac
.

He's three years younger than me. I barely know him. Nevertheless, I've tried to woo him with clever variations on the metaphysical love poetry of Andrew Marvell. Unfortunately, the romantic success I pictured when writing those poetic variations far exceeded their real-world reception.

I ask my crush what he likes to read.

‘I like
On the Road
,' he says. ‘I like that the style was based on jazz.'

I neglect to tell him that I didn't enjoy
On the Road
, and that I like actual jazz – not jazz fiction.

My crush mostly ignores me, most of the time. I wonder if he'll start liking me if I become more like Jack Kerouac. I send him love letters filled with sharp fives and flat nines.

All he says is, ‘Thanks.'

Eventually, I realise that he won't start liking me if I become more like Jack.
He
wants to be Jack. He doesn't want
me
to be Jack.

In a surprising and upsetting turn of events, he ends up falling madly in love with my mother, the Chanel model.

He can't stop texting her. He develops RSI in his thumbs from texting her so much. He texts her even while I'm talking to him about the beauty of
On the Road
, and how my fiction could one day be as cool and famous as Jack's.

In practically no time, my mother asks him to move in with her. This means that I have to move out.

‘Aren't you troubled by the age difference?' I ask her.

‘You're thirty-two,' says my mother. ‘You've always had a hard time dealing with reality. Wallowing in dreams is not going to improve your circumstances. It's time for you to wake up and learn to support yourself financially. I am having my second wind. Go and have your first.'

My mother and my crush, a glamorous item, have a big booze-up at their place to celebrate Australia Day. All their smug couple friends are there.

They party all night, but they push everyone out by sunrise. It turns out that, despite my crush's baby-face, he's a four-hundred-year-old vampire. The age difference between him and my mother is no longer an issue.

On my way out the front door, he shakes a long, bony finger at me.

‘If you dare write about me in your genre fiction,' he says, ‘I will suck you dry and chuck your body in a Woolworths dumpster.'

I tell Jack Kerouac about my woes when he turns up in the front yard of the apartment block where I'm living.

He has reincarnated, and is currently a forty-five-year-old who owns a one-person company that mows lawns in our neighbourhood.

The landlord hates listening to Jack blather on, so I've volunteered to go out into the yard on a fortnightly basis to give Jack the envelope with his thirty-dollar mowing fee.

The beauty of Jack is that he knows all the gossip about all the people on the street. He just offers it without me asking as I'm giving him the cash – as if it's part of the trade. He tells me who's moving in and out, how much all the apartments have sold for, who is having an affair with whom, and who has gone on holiday and killed themselves.

I tell Jack about my struggles as a writer. I remind him of the paper scroll he typed on to produce
On the Road
, and how the scroll sold at auction for more than two million dollars.

‘That's about right,' he says. ‘But that was literally a lifetime ago. Get with the program.'

Jack isn't interested in Genius or Literature anymore, only Gossip.

I complain to Jack about being a woman and a writer.

I tell him that men are brought up to be bold. That they become the sorts of people who'll put on a pair of boxing gloves, dip the gloves in paint, and then punch art across a canvas. They blaze through and fall down and pick themselves up.

I tell him that women are born bold but then people chip away at them. ‘“Don't do this, don't do that,” everyone says, “or you'll make mistakes. And if you ever get important enough to sit on a stage in front of an audience, for God's sake, close your legs.”'

‘Stop bitching,' says Jack. ‘Start producing.'

I suddenly decide that Jack is handsome, and ask if he'd like to go out on a date.

‘I'm in love with Joan slash Laura,' he says.

‘Who?'

‘You didn't read my book properly, did you? Should've known. Even the way you make me talk isn't natural. If you think
On the Road
's a mess, this story's even worse. Where's the cohesive narrative? Where's the structure? It's just a bunch of anecdotes about being fat. It's a fucking mélange.'

‘Like a mélange à trois?'

‘What are you even saying?'

I think Jack is being unfair. I don't know much about him but I know a lot about other writers. Salinger, for instance. I watched a documentary about Salinger once. If Jack were Salinger, this conversation would have been a lot more historically and linguistically accurate.

‘Well, this is my advice,' says Jack. ‘If you want to succeed, you first have to identify which writers you are having a dialogue with in this country.'

‘I'm not sure I'm having a dialogue with anyone.'

‘You think you're hollering into the darkness but you're not. You're having a conversation with someone but you just don't know who it is yet.'

‘Maybe it's Peter Carey,' I say. ‘People say I remind them of Peter Carey.'

‘He must be after my time.'

‘I haven't read any Peter Carey.'

Jack walks back to his lawnmower and starts it up. ‘If you sound like Peter Carey but you haven't read any Peter Carey,' he shouts over the roar of the machine, ‘maybe you're reinventing a perfectly good wheel.'

I stand there thinking about what he's said. I decide that the writer I must be having a dialogue with is actually a guy called Tom, basically because I stalk him and we literally exchange words as a result. I also talk to another writer called Eric, who sends me creepy stories about terrariums, and tells me that if I want to be a proper writer, all I need to do is stand on a desk and declare that I am one.

I conclude that making note of actual conversations I've had is probably the best way to keep tabs on who I'm talking to.

Over breakfast, I'm reading an article about current trends in fiction. The author contends that society is now in the throes of autofiction. Everyone is writing it; everyone is reading it. Everyone wants to read about
real
alcoholic fathers, and
real
divorces, and
real
stay-at-home dads. No one wants anyone to make shit up anymore.

The author also claims that the days of postmodernism and pastiche are over.

I don't even know what pastiche is. It sounds like a type of pastie filled with Clag.

I skim the rest of the article and finish my porridge. I decide that I'm going to write an autofictional essay called ‘The Fat Girl in History'.

I'm following the hip literary crowd. I'm deliberately in vogue.

I'm selling myself out but at least I'm selling myself to you.

I'm invited to the wedding of one of my best friends.

Everyone is shaking hands in the foyer, waiting to proceed into the ballroom. The women around me are wearing stacks of bangles and beautiful make-up. I can't understand a word they're saying. I used to go to school with them. We used to speak the same language.

‘Umf umf umf,' they say, kissing me on both cheeks. The bangles rattle around me.

‘Fug fug fug,' one of their husbands says, putting an arm around my shoulder.

‘Ik ik?' I ask, trying to blend in. I don't know what I'm trying to say.

They look at me like I'm not making any sense.

I try a different tack.

‘Audi?' I say. ‘Lexus gucci prada tiffany?'

They smile and nod, and I smile and nod.

I look at them and my brain is a blank field below a blank sky. No thoughts appear; no ideas for conversation occur to me.

They proffer a camera, and I take a photo of them and their husbands and babies. Their arms are very toned, and their teeth are very white.

The bride puts her arm through mine and leads me to the bathroom. We stand at the mirrors as she fixes her hair.

‘Am I losing my mind?' I ask. ‘Do you understand what I'm saying?'

‘Og og
quog
og,' she says, adjusting her sari and refreshing her lipstick.

‘Shit,' I say. ‘My life is over.'

She smiles at me in the mirror. ‘Kidding.'

I smile back. She has the most beautiful face in the world.

‘But,' she adds, ‘you should stop telling people about Jack and Judy.'

‘What?'

‘At least Jiao's real, right?'

‘You're all real.'

In bed, I watch a documentary on my laptop about women who are extremely fat, and deliberately continue to make themselves bigger. Many have skinny romantic partners who become their ‘feeders'. The feeders enjoy feeding their women to fatten them up.

Men make appointments to spend time with these women, just so the women will sit on them.

It's a smart idea. There are a few people out there whom I'd be happy to crush, especially if they paid for it.

When the documentary is over, I lie down and look into the very core of my nature. I discover that I am simultaneously extremely ambitious and extremely lazy. It becomes apparent to me that an ambition appropriate to this core nature is to be the fattest person that ever lived, and to achieve this by being too lazy to exercise.

So I eat. I fatten myself up like a Wagyu cow.

Each roll of fat gets bigger and bigger until it rolls over the previous roll, grows downwards, and puts down roots.

My rolls spread out over the front yard and the whole apartment block.

I work harder at eating and soon the rolls extend across the country. Kangaroos hop across my knees. Black cockatoos make their nests in the crooks of my elbows. Koalas climb up and hug themselves around my pinkie fingers.

I can see how big I'm getting relative to the people who come around to visit. They lift up my arm fat and pop under it and say hello.

They're all so small that I have to squint to see them. Although they start out chatting to me in an upbeat mood, every one of them ends up lamenting my weight. It's like someone's died. Their tears form puddles around my ankles. Platypuses paddle in the salt water.

I continue to expand in ever-multiplying concentric rings of fat, which move outwards across the world. Soon there is no more room for oceans, let alone tears. I am one big beach.

I begin to grow extra limbs and heads and breasts. Nevertheless, my Paunch to Penis Ratio remains nil.

I have so many fingers and arms and legs and necks now, that I am able to wear truckloads of statement jewellery. I adorn myself with malachite and onyx, moss agate and lapis lazuli, citrine and smoky quartz. My jewellery becomes beautiful armour.

I become the face of Fat Chanel, and they send a team of photographers to shoot me from every angle. They do so even though they're in the middle of a stressful trade mark dispute over the unauthorised use of the Chanel name.

I wear a backless dress for the key promo shot. The dress is also frontless, shoulderless and arseless.

They build a white temple to contain me. The walls are made of square panels that interlock in an ingenious way, so that new sections of wall can be added easily as I expand.

I grow faster than the little people can build the walls.

Around the temple, under an orange sky, a field of yellow peonies springs up.

Millions of ant-sized people pick the peonies and bring them to me as offerings. They lay them at my feet. They are here to get my blessing – for their newborns and marriages and assorted happy occasions – because I have become a goddess who doesn't care about shit, and people really respond to that.

I gather up all the tiny worshippers and their fragile peonies. I pick up all the people I love and the people I hate – Jack and Judy, and Jiao and the Paunch, and Tom and Eric, and my mother and her vampire, and my friend with the beautiful face, and all the little women with their rattling bangles and words I don't understand.

I wrap my fat arms around all of these little people, and hug them to my breast. I drug them with a lullaby, and nurse them all to sleep.

Snow begins to fall.

In their dreams, the little people call out to me. They call me the Goddess of Mercy.

Because I can nurse them or I can crush them, and the power is all mine.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to my parents and sister, unwavering sources of love and support.

Particular thanks to my kind and incredibly gifted editor, Ian See, who made this book happen. ‘Sight' is dedicated to him.

Thanks to Madonna Duffy, Rachel Crawford, Lucille Cruise-Burns and everyone at UQP, for bringing me in from the wilderness. To Josh Durham, for his crazy cool cover design. To Amanda Lohrey, for her generosity and guidance.

Thanks to the first editors and publishers of stories in this collection, especially Louise Swinn and Zoe Dattner of Sleepers Publishing, who put me on the literary map in Australia. Thanks also to Sam Cooney and Johannes Jakob at
The Lifted Brow
; Kalinda Ashton; Suzanne Kamata at
Kyoto Journal
; Emily Stewart, Alice Grundy and David M Henley at
Seizure
;
The Best Australian Stories
team at Black Inc.; and Khairani Barokka, Ng Yi-Sheng, Amir Muhammad and the Fixi Novo team. A wink and salute to Matt Huynh and Gee Hale, who illustrated a number of these stories when they were first published.

If you hate my wild slash bland writing, attribute partial blame to schoolteachers of mine who nurtured it in its infancy – including Greig “Grobbo” Robinson, Annette Wright, Diane Alchin, Matthew Wood, Eleni Tatsis, Jan Roberts and Barbara Stone. Lay some additional blame on my writing teacher, Dr Stephen Carver, to whom ‘Inquiry Regarding the Recent Goings-On in the Woods' is dedicated.

My gratitude extends to the following people for their encouragement and support during the transition from law to fiction, and in relation to this book: Jiao Chen, Tara Sarathy, Alexandra Marie Brown, Michael Camilleri, Gary Lo, Brett Millar, Eric Yoshiaki Dando, Andrew McGovern, Jane Chi Hyun Park, HK Tang, Anna Zhu, Alison Cole, Dave Smith, Philip Amos, Grant Scicluna, Bethany Bruce, Donna Chang, Xin Li, Stephanie Han, Tom Cho, Tash Aw, Haline Ly, Jacqui Dent, Vasudha Srinivasan, Suchitra Krishnan, Clem Cairns, Dr Kevin Walton, Geoff Orton, Laurie Steed, Luke Thomas, Daniel Young, John Fenech, Elisabeth Kramer, Tiffany Tsao, Kenny Leck, Renée Ting, Jon Gresham, Karma Chahine, Nicola O'Shea, Natalie Kestecher, Alex Adsett, Bridget Lutherborrow, Tara Cartland, Darby Hudson, Pierz Newton-John, the Betts family, John Bell and Ben Wood, Jack and Judy. I'd also like to thank Andrew and Patricia Su, Hagen Bluhm, Chua Boon Ching, Angie Lee and my extended family, as well as Todd Hodgson, Eronnie Samuels, Oskar Henning, Andrew Nott, Mouse Maroney and the gang at Soundworks Studios.

Many more people have crossed my path than are listed here. Thanks to those who've believed in my writing, and have done their best to help me on my way.

Publication details

‘Sight',
Kyoto Journal
, Issue 80, 2014.

‘Civility Place',
The Sleepers Almanac No. 9
, eds Louise Swinn and Zoe Dattner, Sleepers Publishing, 2014; and
The Best Australian Stories 2014
, ed. Amanda Lohrey, Black Inc., 2014.

‘The Three-Dimensional Yellow Man',
The Lifted Brow Digital Edition
, Volume 5 Issue 1, 2014.

‘Two',
The Sleepers Almanac No. 8
, eds Zoe Dattner and Louise Swinn, Sleepers Publishing, 2013.

‘The Procession',
HEAT
, eds Khairani Barokka and Ng Yi-Sheng, Fixi Novo, 2016.

‘The Sister Company',
Seizure Online: Editions
, Edition 1, 2015.

‘The Fat Girl in History',
The Sleepers Almanac X
, eds Zoe Dattner and Louise Swinn, Sleepers Publishing, 2015.