The Weekend, page 1
Praise for
The Natural Way of Things
Winner, 2016 Stella Prize
Co-winner, 2016 Prime Minister’s Award
Winner, Fiction Book of the Year, 2016 Indie Awards
Winner, 2016 Indie Book of the Year Award
Shortlisted, 2016 Miles Franklin Literary Award
Shortlisted, 2016 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards
Shortlisted, 2016 Barbara Jefferis Award
Shortlisted, 2016 Queensland Literary Award for Fiction
Shortlisted, 2016 Voss Literary Prize
‘It feels at times like a nightmare; but one in which women make serious pacts, take serious pleasures, and reimagine what it might mean to live in the world. I feel as if I’ve been witness to the most terrible injustice, but also the most astonishing beauty.’
—FIONA McFARLANE, author of The Night Guest
‘Exposing the threads of misogyny, cowardice and abuses of power embedded in contemporary society, this is a confronting, sometimes deeply painful novel to read. With an unflinching eye and audacious imagination, Wood carries us from a nightmare of helplessness and despair to a fantasy of revenge and reckoning.’
—The Guardian
‘It’s rare to pick up a novel and from the opening pages be not only gripped by the story on the page but also by the keenness of the intelligence and audacity of the imagination at work … one hell of a novel by one of our most original and provocative writers.’
—STEPHEN ROMEI, The Weekend Australian
‘An extraordinary novel: inspired, powerful, at once coherent and dreamlike … recalls all the reading you’ve ever done on the subjects of capture, isolation, incarceration, totalitarianism, misogyny, and the abuse of power. It’s thought-provoking in all directions.’
—KERRYN GOLDSWORTHY, The Sydney Morning Herald/The Age
‘Riveting … the kind of book you inhale in a sitting. It leaves you woozy and disoriented, surprised to find yourself in mundane surroundings rather than sweltering in the desert heat.’
—The Saturday Paper
‘As a man, to read it is as unsettling as receiving one piece of bad news after another. It is confronting. Yet anyone who reads it, man or woman, is going to be left with a sense that a long-hidden truth has been revealed to them. A brave, brilliant book. I would defy anyone to read it and not come out a changed person.’
—MALCOLM KNOX, author of The Wonder Lover
‘Charlotte Wood’s book is a howl of despair and fury; but it is also that most rare and powerful of creations, a dystopian fiction that is perfectly judged, the writing controlled, the narrative engrossing and the language both searing and sensual. You can’t shake off this novel, it gets under your skin, fills your lungs, breaks your heart. As allegory, as a novel, as vision and as art, it is stunning.’
—CHRISTOS TSIOLKAS, author of Barracuda
‘A virtuoso performance, plotted deftly through a minefield of potential traps, weighted with allegory yet swift and sure in its narrative advance. As an idea for a novel, it’s rich, and to achieve that idea the writer has been courageous. Her control of this story is masterful.’
—The Sydney Review of Books
‘At once brutal and beautiful … Surreal yet intensely vivid … disturbing and enthralling … An absorbing plot, lyrical prose, and discomfiting imagery makes Wood’s novel decidedly gripping.’
—Kirkus Reviews
‘Few other novels have captured the stain of misogyny quite like this. Wood’s is a tale of survival in a world where captivity takes many forms; where power is a negotiation not just between prisoner and persecutor but of how far some women are willing to go in order to be free. Terrifying, remarkable and utterly unforgettable.’
—CLEMENTINE FORD, author of Fight Like a Girl
‘A prescient feminist horror novel you need to read.’
—Jezebel
‘Beautiful and savage—think Atwood in the outback.’
—PAULA HAWKINS, author of The Girl on the Train
‘One of those unforgettable reading experiences.’
—LIANE MORIARTY, author of Big Little Lies
‘Margaret Atwood meets Wake in Fright.’
—The Guardian
‘A haunting parable of contemporary misogyny … The Handmaid’s Tale for our age.’
—The Economist
‘Exactly what we should be reading right now.’
—Full Stop
‘The fury of contemporary feminism may have found its masterpiece of horror.’
—The Guardian UK
‘A Handmaid’s Tale for end times.’
—The Believer
‘You won’t read another novel like it this year. Or ever.’
—TEGAN BENNETT DAYLIGHT, author of Six Bedrooms
‘A stunning exploration of ambiguities—of power, of morality, of judgement.’
—ASHLEY HAY, author of The Railwayman’s Wife
‘A fully imagined dystopian parable, vivid, insightful, the voices of young women echoing through the gum trees …’
—JOAN LONDON, author of The Golden Age
Charlotte Wood has been described as ‘one of our most original and provocative writers’. She is the author of six novels and two books of non-fiction. Her bestselling novel, The Natural Way of Things, won the 2016 Stella Prize, the Indie Book of the Year and Indie Book Award for Fiction, was joint winner of the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction, and was published throughout Europe, the United Kingdom and North America. She has been twice shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, as well as many others for this and previous works. Her non-fiction books include The Writer’s Room, a collection of interviews with authors about the creative process, and Love & Hunger, a book about cooking. She lives in Sydney with her husband.
The characters and events in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
First published in 2019
Copyright © Charlotte Wood 2019
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.
Allen & Unwin
83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
Email: info@allenandunwin.com
Web: www.allenandunwin.com
ISBN 978 1 76029 201 0
eISBN 978 1 76087 256 4
Internal design by Sandy Cull, gogoGingko
Set by Bookhouse, Sydney
Cover design and illustration: Sandy Cull and Shutterstock
For Sean,
and my friends
Dreams and beasts are two keys by which we are to find out the secrets of our own nature.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
CHAPTER ONE
It was not the first time it had happened, this waking early in the pale light with a quiet but urgent desire to go to church.
Cognitive decline, doubtless. Frontal lobe damage, religion, fear of death, they were all the same thing. Jude had no illusions.
This longing—was it a longing? It was mysterious, an insistence inside her, a sort of ache that came and went, familiar and yet still powerful and surprising when it arrived. Like the arthritis that flared at the base of her thumb. The point was this feeling had nothing to do with Christmas, or with anything in her waking life. It came somehow from the world of sleep, from her dreaming self.
At first when it came it would trouble her, but now Jude gave herself over to it. She lay in her white bed on the morning before Christmas Eve and imagined the cool, dark space of a cathedral, where she might be alone, welcomed by some unseen, velvety force. She imagined herself kneeling, resting her head on the ancient wood of the pew in front of her, and closing her eyes. It was peaceful, in that quiet space of her imagination.
Frontal lobe shrinkage, doubtless. At this age it was inevitable.
She pictured the soft grey sphere of her brain and remembered lambs’ brains on a plate. She used to enjoy eating brains, it was one of the dishes she ordered often with Daniel. But the last time she did—three tender, tiny things lined up along a rectangular plate—she was revolted. Each one was so small you could fit it in a dessert spoon, and in this fashionable Turkish restaurant they were unadorned, undisguised by crumbs or garnish: just three bald, poached splodges on a bed of green. She ate them, of course she did, it was part of her code: you did not refuse what was offered. Chosen, indeed, here. But at first bite the thing yielded in her mouth, too rich, like just-soft butter; tepid and pale grey, the colour and taste of moths or death. In that moment she was shocked into a vision of the three lambs, each one its own conscious self, w
Of course she did not say that. Instead, she asked Daniel about the novel he was reading. William Maxwell, or William Trevor, she often confused the two. He was a good reader, Daniel. A true reader. Daniel laughed at men who did not read fiction, which was nearly all the men he knew. They were afraid of something in themselves, he said. Afraid of being shown up, of not understanding—or more likely the opposite: they would be led to understanding themselves and it scared the shit out of them. Daniel snorted. They said they didn’t have time for it, which was the biggest joke of all.
Jude pulled the sheet up to her chin. The day felt sticky already; the sheet was cool over her clammy body.
What would happen if she did not wake, one of these mornings? If she died one night in her bed? Nobody would know. Days would pass. Eventually Daniel would call and get no answer. Then what? They had never discussed this: what to do if she died in her bed.
Last Christmas Sylvie was here, and this one she wasn’t—and now they were going to clear out the Bittoes house. Take anything you want, Gail had said to them from Dublin, in an email. Have a holiday. How you could think cleaning your dead friend’s house a holiday … but it was Christmas and Gail felt guilty for flitting off back to Ireland and leaving it to them. So. Take anything you want.
There was nothing Jude wanted. She couldn’t speak for the others.
Sylvie had been in the ground for eleven months.
The memorial had been in the restaurant (unrecognisable now from the old days—everything but the name had gone), and there was beautiful food and good champagne; good speeches. Wendy spoke brilliantly, honestly, poetically. Gail lurched with a silent, terrible sobbing, with Sylvie’s poor sad brother Colin beside her, unable to touch Gail for comfort. He was eighty-one, he’d been a greenkeeper at the golf club in their home town, stayed long after the rest of the family left. Never managed to get over his sister being gay.
In the end Sylvie went where nobody expected: an old-fashioned burial in Mona Vale, next to her parents. To this part Jude and Wendy and Adele went with Colin, and Gail, and Andy and Elektra from the old days. There they all stood in the hot cemetery with a sympathetic priest (a priest! for Sylvie!) and Jude had picked up a handful of dirt and thrown it down. Strange that in all these years it was the first time she’d ever done that, or even seen it done outside a film. She felt silly squatting in the dirt, scrabbling in the dry gravel with her polished nails, but when she stretched and flung and let the earth rain down on Sylvie’s coffin, a breath of awful sorrow swept through her, up and out of her body into the deafening, glittering white noise of the cicadas.
Sylvie was dead and felt no pain. They had said goodbye. Nothing was left to regret, but she was still in there, in that box, under the weight of all that earth, her cold little body rotted away.
Gail said she looked peaceful at the end. But that wasn’t peace; it was absence of muscle tone, of life. Being dead made you look younger, it was a fact. Jude had seen six or seven dead faces now, and they all, in the moment after life left, smoothed out and looked like their much younger selves. Even like babies, once or twice.
How long did it take a corpse to rot? Sylvie would screech at a question like that. You’re so ghoulish, Jude.
The ceiling fan in her bedroom rotated slowly, ticking, above her. Her life was as clean and bare as a bone, bare as that white blade, its path through the unresisting air absolutely known, unwavering. This should be a comfort. It was a comfort. The rooms of her apartment were uncluttered by the past. Nobody would have to plough through dusty boxes and cupboards full of rubbish for Jude.
She lay in her bed and thought of cathedrals. And she thought of animals: rats beneath the floorboards; cockroaches bristling behind the crossed ankles and bleeding feet of plaster Jesuses. She thought of dark, malevolent little birds, of the muffled small sounds of creatures dying in the spaces between bricks and plaster, between ceilings and roof beams. She thought of their shit drying out and turning hard, and what happened to their skin and fur and organs, rotting unconsecrated in roof cavities.
She would not go to church, obviously, for she was neither a fool nor a coward.
She would go instead to the butcher and the grocer and then the hardware store for the few remaining cleaning things, and she would drive without hurrying up the freeway to the coast, and this afternoon the others would arrive.
It was not a holiday, the three women had warned each other, but the warning was really for Adele, who would disappear at the first sign of work. Adele would be useless but they couldn’t leave her out.
It was only three days. Two, really, given that most of today would be taken up with the shopping and driving and arriving. And on Boxing Day the other two would leave and Daniel would come. She watched the fan blade’s smooth glide. She would be like this: unhurried, gliding calmly through the hours until Adele and Wendy left. She would not let the usual things get to her; they were all too old for that.
It occurred to her that one of them could be next to go. Funny how she’d not thought of that until this moment. She threw off the sheet in a clean white billow.
After her shower, though, while she was making the bed, already some little flecks of annoyance with Wendy began creeping in. It was like dipping a hand into a pocket and searching the seams with your fingers; there would always be some tiny irritant crumbs if she wanted to find them. Why, for example, had Wendy refused a lift, insisting instead on driving up in that terrible shitbox of hers? Jude snapped the sheet, fending off the affront that would come if she let it, about Wendy’s secretive refusal to explain. Jude’s hospitality, not just in the long-gone restaurant days but in general terms, was well known. People said it about her, had always done so. She guarded her generosity even more as they all grew older and she saw other women become irrationally fearful about money, and turn miserly. Pinching coins out of their purses in cafes, bargaining in charity shops. Holding out their hands for twenty cents’ change. It was appalling. It was beneath them.
But now, folding hospital corners—her bulging disc threatened to twang, but she manoeuvred carefully and eased around it—she considered the possibility that hidden within the compliments about her largesse might be needles of sarcasm. Once her sister-in-law murmured, ‘It’s not that generous if you have to keep mentioning it,’ and Jude had burned with silent rage. Burned and burned.
If she told Daniel about any of this, if she complained about Wendy and the car, he’d shake his head and tell her she had too much time on her hands.
She yanked another corner of the sheet.
If Sylvie was here Jude could ring her and find out what the matter was with Wendy, and they could be exasperated together and then agree that it didn’t matter, and Jude would be able to compose herself for when Wendy parked her filthy, battered car in the driveway at Bittoes, and she would be calm and welcoming, and free of grievance. Now she would have to do it by herself.
This was something nobody talked about: how death could make you petty. And how you had to find a new arrangement among your friends, shuffling around the gap of the lost one, all of you suddenly mystified by how to be with one another.
With other circles of friends, a death meant you were permitted to quietly go your separate ways. After the first shocks, the early ones in your forties and fifties—the accidents and suicides and freak diseases, the ones that orphaned children, shook the ground beneath cities—when you reached your seventies and the disintegration began in earnest, there was the understanding, never spoken, that the latest—the news of another stroke, a surprise death, a tumour or Alzheimer’s diagnosis—would not be the last. A certain amount of withdrawal was acceptable. Within reason, you did what you must, to protect yourself. From what? Jude stood, looking down at the flat, white space of the bed. From all that … emotion. She turned and left the room.
It was true that time had gradually taken on a different cast. It didn’t seem to go forwards or backwards now, but up and down. The past was striated through you, through your body, leaching into the present and the future. The striations were evident, these streaky layers of memory, of experience—but you were one being, you contained all of it. If you looked behind or ahead of you, all was emptiness.
