The Golden Book Read online

  Contents

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Epigraphs

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The Golden Book

  Kate Ryan writes fiction and nonfiction. Her work has appeared in publications including New Australian Stories, The Sleepers Almanac, Meanjin, Kill Your Darlings, the Griffith Review, and Best Australian Stories. Her picture books have been published by Penguin and Lothian. She won the Writers Prize in the 2015 Melbourne Prize for Literature and the novella category in the 2017 Lord Mayor’s Creative Writing Awards. Her work has been recognised in other awards including the Josephine Ulrick Prize, Calibre Prize, Elizabeth Jolley Prize, and Boroondara Literary Awards. As well as a writer, she is an editor, teacher, manuscript assessor, and writing mentor.

  Scribe Publications

  18–20 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria 3056, Australia

  Published by Scribe 2021

  Copyright © Kate Ryan 2021

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

  Scribe acknowledges Australia’s First Nations peoples as the traditional owners and custodians of this country, and we pay our respects to their elders, past and present.

  978 1 922310 08 8 (paperback)

  978 1 922586 02 5 (ebook)

  Catalogue records for this book are available from the National Library of Australia.

  scribepublications.com.au

  A small chosen library is like a walled garden where a child may safely play.

  Stories Old and New

  We are always looking for absolutes and not finding them.

  Wildlife, Richard Ford

  It happened this way.

  It was so black on the track that you could hardly see in front of your face. Night.

  But first they had to get there. Cal would have come down all paternal and disciplinarian, and Matty could never be persuaded to do anything, so Jessie asked Eli. Everyone in Bega had their licences at seventeen, and Eli almost did. He reluctantly took them in Matty’s ute, windows down, a warm, dry breeze. Tim Buckley growling out desire, the three of them squashed together, Jessie in the middle jiggling her bony knees and throwing her head around, singing along loudly, embarrassingly to ‘Get on Top’.

  Even with Jessie between them Ali was freaked out by Eli’s proximity. She stared out into the dark and thought of once seeing him do a perfect swan dive into the Merimbula pool. He’d come up shaking his head and smiling wide, and at that moment she loved him more than any of them.

  ‘You sure about this?’ he asked as he pulled up to the path leading to the falls.

  ‘Yes,’ Jessie said. She gave a little toss of her head and stared straight ahead.

  They got out of the ute. Eli left the door open so they could see what they were doing in the cabin light. He pulled Ali’s bike off the back and wheeled it over to her. Jessie leaned over to grab hers, dragging it so the back wheel jarred and banged the tray. She dropped it to the ground with a crash, and then leaned over to get Ali’s backpack, and her own bathers and towel, which were stuffed into a Safeway bag. She scooped up the sleeping bags in a slack, disdainful way. She had scoffed at this luxury but Ali, this time, had prevailed.

  ‘What about a tent?’ Eli said.

  ‘Won’t need one,’ Jessie muttered. ‘It’s warm.’

  Ali stood clutching her bike, feet planted, wishing she was home watching the footy replay with her dad.

  ‘Might be a bit uncomfortable.’ Eli looked at Ali as if to say, Do you really want to do this? but she looked away. Out of the corner of her eye she saw him shrug. ‘Oh well, don’t do anything stupid.’ He waited for a second or two, standing by the driver’s side, and Jessie made her dopey clown face. ‘Too much to hope for, I guess.’

  He got back in the ute. Tim Buckley started up again. ‘Sweet Surrender’. ‘Okay, catch you adventurers tomorrow then.’ He paused, looking towards them in the light of the still-open cabin door. ‘What time d’you reckon you’ll be heading back?’

  Ali looked towards Jessie, who frowned, silent, irritated by any hint of constraint.

  Eli gave a minuscule sigh. ‘Fine. See you when I see you.’ He turned away and pulled the door shut.

  Ali watched the tail-lights glowing until he turned out of sight.

  They stashed their bikes in the scrub. They would need them to ride back to town tomorrow. At least twenty ks. The day before Ali had tried to say it was too far but Jessie had just mumbled, ‘It’s practically all downhill.’ That wasn’t true, but Ali went red and didn’t reply.

  They moved along the path slowly. Jessie’s torch was running low; little glimpses of things, a curving trunk, a scrunched bush, the explanatory signs that she never read. Behind her, Ali’s torch gave a steady beam, but even with this anchoring she had a sense she was moving inward, away.

  You could hear little scratchings in the bush, and their runners sometimes snagged on stones and twigs in the dirt. Once Ali stumbled and grabbed hold of Jessie’s T-shirt. It felt warm and rough under her fingers, and she could smell Jessie’s juniper shampoo. Aggie always managed to get that, even when there was no money.

  ‘Can’t be far now,’ Jessie said.

  Ali steadied herself and looked down at the back of Jessie’s legs. As her eyes adjusted, their pallor caught the light. She heard her own breath. She thought of her dad, a glass of red beside him, watching TV, thinking she was at Jessie’s, not in the dark in the middle of nowhere. She thought of her mother’s outrage if she knew. She would have vetoed the plan before Ali had the chance to step out the door.

  Jessie had said they should go at midnight. ‘It’s the gods’ time,’ she said, narrowing her eyes dramatically. ‘Anything could happen.’

  1

  Ali was pegging out washing on the line, a hot, ticking day. She dropped the clothes back into the basket to rush inside to answer her phone.

  It had been another morning of sitting at her desk, trying to write, the new/old her, revised, reinvented.

  The class itself was wonderful. The teacher’s name was Clara, and Ali found her endlessly fascinating — mid 60s, wavy copper hair with silvery streaks. Was she really a redhead or was this a late artifice? Of course she was, Ali had decided, staring at her while listening to the mini-lecture on characterisation. There were faded freckles and a pale, creased-looking neck. A striking silver necklace, too; a bold, amulet th
ing, encasing amber. Ali was by turns rigidly attentive and dreamily wondering about Clara as a young woman. She thought of her as a bold ’70s type, Vietnam moratorium, lots of lovers. She was a poet, but also the author of several acerbic collections of short stories. ‘I want you to imagine two people who are very connected,’ she said. ‘Perhaps they are siblings, perhaps they are lovers, perhaps they strongly dislike one another. Maybe they are an old man and a young man caught in a lift together. It can be any two people. They may not even know each other. The point is, even if temporarily, they need one another somehow or are bound together. Imagine their lives, where they live. How do they feel about their connection? Who are they separately and together? Maybe it’s a couple you glimpse on the train on the way to work, a man in a suit reading Anna Karenina while his girlfriend stares at her phone. Who are they and what is their relationship like? Maybe one of your characters is the homeless person outside the bank in the city with their doona and their little dog, their cap out for change. Who are they? How have they come to be there? Who are the parents who couldn’t look after them or the teacher who tried to help them? Or maybe it’s someone you’ve known all your life but not known. Not really. Put them together in a scene. What will happen?’ Clara had paused for effect, her round, expressive blue eyes encircled with smudgy blue eyeliner. Ali was transfixed.

  ‘I’m going to get you to write about a couple, any kind of couple, for twenty minutes or so, and then we’ll see if someone would like to read,’ she had said.

  Murray shuffled and opened his laptop.

  ‘No,’ Clara had said firmly. ‘We’re going to write in longhand today. I have extra paper and pens if you need them. I want to get you out of your usual habits.’

  There had been a general murmuring and stirring, the odd self-deprecating comment — ‘Two characters! God, one is hard enough!’ — the opening of water bottles and picking up of pens. Murray looked a bit doubtful. Still, he was very diligent and not opposed to an audience either. He always perked up at the idea of reading out loud. He was a retired high school teacher, Australian history, but his passion was boat building. His daughter suggested he come to the class: ‘All you do is work on that boat every spare minute!’ Murray had reported this, and they’d laughed dutifully. Then there was Ruth, the scientist. She was a thin woman in her late 40s who wore a lot of navy, like some kind of uniform. To Ed, Ali referred to her as the Nurse, though equally she might have been the Scientist, the Officer, the Scout Leader. The point was she frowned and wrote down absolutely every word Clara said. At the latest direction she squared her elbows, arranged a notebook, a pen, and a small Tupperware container of almonds directly in front of her. Murray was next to her, but there was no question of offering him any. Mike was a retired lawyer. He had some idea of writing interlinked stories about his former clients. Disguised, of course. ‘Don’t want anyone suing me!’ There had been another dutiful laugh. Mila was Ali’s favourite, early 30s, Indian background, intense and beautiful, dressed elgantly in layers of black silk. She said intelligent things, very quietly, so that even in that small group you had to lean forward to hear what she said. She wanted to write about her grandmother as a young woman, a proto-feminist figure in Mumbai. ‘The right for women to be seen as human,’ Mila said in her beautiful soft voice. ‘She was unlike anyone else at that particular time.’ Everyone leant forward again, nodding vigorously.

  Ali had known immediately which couple to write about. Jessie was doing badly, had been doing badly for a few months. She had come back into Ali’s life, as if she had ever left it. Ali’s mother phoned in from Bega with concise little reports, like a small-town war correspondent. ‘Fading. Giving up. I suspect it won’t be long now.’

  The day she got the call Ali had eased her way into the writing as if into bracing water; it was both exhilarating and terrifying. She had been Jessie’s scribe, her manipulator of words. The ridiculous quests of the Experiential Club, written in Ali’s best cursive, a curious mishmash of influences: The Tales of the Greek Heroes, King Arthur and His Knights, a bit of the Famous Five. The quests were agreed upon, and this was where it had started.

  Quest 1: the golden apple and the Hound of Hell

  Quest 2: ascending the highest place in the land

  Quest 3: laying an Unquiet One to rest

  Quest 4: a test of love

  Quest 5: pulling the sword from the stone

  Quest 6: the coming of the Immortals

  It was just an exercise, she reminded herself. She didn’t have to read it out loud. And if she did, for all they knew she had made it up.

  Jessie had conceived of the first quest. She said the words, made the plans, and later Ali wrote it all down in the Golden Book.

  2

  Where to begin? How to be twelve again? A small rural town, not far from the coast but without coastal glamour. Two girls: one raised to be responsible but trying not to be, the other, without trying, exactly the opposite. The sinewy charm of the second one, the irreverence, the big smiling mouth, the bare dirty feet.

  Unteachable, they called her.

  Quest 1: the golden apple and the Hound of Hell

  A Saturday morning in Bega. Dust motes in a sun-patched bedroom with thin greyish carpet, bumpy in places over warped floorboards, two girls lying side by side on their backs, legs raised to rest feet against a grubby wall. Always the attempt to allay boredom. A plan. Jessie’s idea. They would break into old Hoffman’s place. Find a golden apple. ‘Doesn’t have to be an actual golden apple,’ Jessie said. She looked up at the ceiling, nodded her head slightly, gathering momentum. ‘Any old one’ll do, or just something small from the fridge … If he has one … Something edible anyway. And we have to eat it. In a … ceremony. He’s the Hound of Hell, so maybe he doesn’t have a fridge … maybe he only eats raw meat or kids .… But he has to eat something. Or maybe it can just be a prize, you know a talisman.’ She swished her feet against the wall, smiled and turned to look at Ali. Her grey-green eyes danced with light. ‘Anyway, let’s check out his miserable joint …’ She laughed. ‘Ye gods! Who knows what foul-ness it may contain!’

  Maybe all small towns have one. Big ones too. But in bigger towns they might be invisible, just one of many confused and lonely people caught up in their own particular struggles to live. Bega’s was old Hoffman.

  Was he even that old? Probably not.

  He was a big, ragged man, at least six foot, with a halo of grey-white hair and circles of pink on his cheeks. Sometimes he wandered around with his shirt off, his chest with its patchy grey hair exposed, purple and mottled with cold, or his back and shoulders raw with sunburn, raving about the corrupt world order, a woman he once knew. Sometimes he had imaginary arguments with her in the street, turning this way and that in fury and appeasement. Other times he drove around picking up stuff people didn’t want. Then his demeanour was different, less chaotic. It was his occupation, and he took it seriously. His main collection time was Saturday mornings. People left things out the night before on their nature strips, their front lawns, for when he would rattle past in his rusty white ute. Bega’s unofficial hard-rubbish collector, people called him, along with weird, lonely, tragic, touched.

  In between holes and mounds of dirt, his front yard was crammed with junk. There were prams missing a wheel or two, rusty swing sets, washing machines, fridges, warped folding tables with splintery seats and mouldy plastic cushions, torn floral umbrellas, dead, brown Christmas trees. All these things lay scattered like alien creatures, divorced from their original function, amid assorted unidentifiable scraps of metal, wood and plastic.

  Adults tried to hush up the kids — ‘He’s harmless,’ they said, ‘just a harmless old man’ — but kids, Ali and Jessie for instance, were harsh.

  ‘He’s a murderer! A pervert!’ Jessie liked to say. ‘He’s got the bodies of kids in those holes. The bloodshed will start again soon, just you wait.’

>   The Saturday-morning collection took two hours at most, so there should have been a sense of urgency, but from the beginning Quest 1 had an air of anticlimax. Jessie wanted it to be transgressive, thrilling, but it was far from that. They didn’t even have to break in.

  They simply opened the back door, the only disturbance the flywire coming away from the frame, the wind making the door clack behind them.

  Inside, out of the bald, bright day, the kitchen was tame, the light muted, the smell closed-in, like a cupboard rarely opened. It was clean and empty — just a Laminex table, and one wooden chair painted a murky brown. In the drying rack, one knife, one fork, one spoon, one brown mug and plate.

  ‘Brown and more brown,’ Jessie said. ‘Clearly brown is his colour.’ She moved across the room, her steps light, opening and closing cupboards. They were lined with floral contact and only half-full — a few bowls and plates in one, packets of cocoa and flour, cans of beans and tomatoes, and empty jars in another. Jessie didn’t waste time with this stuff, disappearing instead into the small living room that led off the kitchen.

  Ali moved towards an Australian wildlife calendar on the wall. She thought of Hoffman choosing it. The pictures of koalas and kangaroos with their babies failed to match Jessie’s hyperbole, and seemed oddly sad and not remotely scary. Now they were inside she felt the judgement of her mother, silent, unknowing. ‘He’s just a lonely old man,’ Diane had said once. ‘And he’s not well. That stuff might seem like rubbish to us but it’s all he has.’

  ‘What appointments has he got?’ Jessie said, appearing beside her. ‘Appointments with death?’ She rolled her eyes upwards and laughed like a hyena.

  ‘Nup.’

  Ali flicked through the pages, staring at the few entries written in a round, childish hand. ‘Mum’s birthday’ on September 26, ‘hospital’, October 3.

  Hoffman had a mother somewhere. All at once this was obvious but somehow shocking too. She must be ancient. Did she tell him to clean up the yard? Was she in an old people’s home and too old and weak to come and see him? And what was the hospital appointment? Was the illness her mother had mentioned actually terminal, and no one knew?