Writing Tip: Begin With the Inciting Incident

June 19, 2023 ~ Libby Sommer ~ Leave a comment

The Inciting Incident is the event or decision that begins a story’s problem.

Writing Tip: Becoming a Writer

March 27, 2023 ~ Libby Sommer ~ 2 Comments

yellow sunflower bookcover of Becoming A Writer by Dorothea Brande

I highly recommend this book a friend from London gave me many years ago at the beginning of my writing journey. It’s an old one, but a good one.

‘A reissue of a classic work published in 1934 on writing and the creative process, Becoming a Writer recaptures the excitement of Dorothea Brande’s creative writing classroom of the 1920s. Decades before brain research “discovered” the role of the right and left brain in all human endeavor, Dorothea Brande was teaching students how to see again, how to hold their minds still, how to call forth the inner writer.’ – Amazon

‘Refreshingly slim, beautifully written and deliciously elegant, Dorothea Brande’s Becoming a Writer remains evergreen decades after it was first written. Brande believed passionately that although people have varying amounts of talent, anyone can write. It’s just a question of finding the “writer’s magic”–a degree of which is in us all. She also insists that writing can be both taught and learned. So she is enraged by the pessimistic authors of so many writing books who rejoice in trying to put off the aspiring writer by constantly stressing how difficult it all is.

With close reference to the great writers of her day–Wolfe, Forster, Wharton and so on–Brande gives practical but inspirational advice about finding the right time of day to write and being very self disciplined about it–“You have decided to write at four o’clock, and at four o’clock you must write.” She’s strong on confidence building and there’s a lot about cheating your unconscious which will constantly try to stop you writing by coming up with excuses. Then there are exercises to help you get into the right frame of mind and to build up writing stamina. She also shows how to harness the unconscious, how to fall into the “artistic coma,” then how to re-emerge and be your own critic.

This is Dorothea Brande’s legacy to all those who have ever wanted to express their ideas in written form. A sound, practical, inspirational and charming approach to writing, it fulfills on finding “the writer’s magic.”‘ – John Gardner

My short story, ‘Mother’

March 19, 2023 ~ Libby Sommer ~ 2 Comments

Have a read of my short story, ‘Mother’ first published in Quadrant Magazine. ‘Mother’ is one of the self-contained chapters in my book, The Usual Story (Ginninderra Press) – a delicately fragmented story of memory, intrigue and passion.

MOTHER:

The day is softening into night, my desk in shadow as the sun moves behind the building. Birds hover in the trees as the wind blows across the surface of the sea. It’s hard to know which way to go. Every day I fear that I can’t do it. So I’m watching as it gets dark.

Tonight I’m thinking about the saddest bits. Thinking, for example, that the night was alight with thunder. Lightening cracked the sky. Just a flash and then darkness again.

That I loved him, and sometimes he loved me too.

I’ll begin with the birds. Three birds flying in perfect but constantly changing alignment. So often there are three. And then a lone bird darts across the sky in the opposite direction.

On the radio a voice says: ‘We need to know the history, the history of the before, and then to know how the person chose to continue living, what baggage they chose to bring with them, to incorporate the memory into themselves or to leave it behind.’

A door bangs shut behind me; footsteps sound on the concrete driveway leading from the back door just a second or two after the door bangs. The flame tree throws a shadow on the cane chairs on the balcony. I stop working, put my hands and then my arms around my body and think of the feel of his skin.

How appealing, how irresistible that prospect of intimacy is, with the very person who can never give it.

After a day in which I have evoked Jack again, all the pain and disappointment and wanting him all over again came back. I try to guess where he might be and what he might be doing but cannot imagine it. His absence is still as heavy as the wave about to break above me, a wave that has appeared suddenly, and then it curls over me forcing me down to the bottom of the sea where I am helpless in the power and pull of its rip.

Last night I dreamt about a man with a hook for an arm. I didn’t realise at first that the man had a disability because he’d kept it hidden behind the counter. On the spur of the moment I told the man I was going to see a free film as part of the film festival and asked if he would like to come with me. To my surprise he closed up the shop, put on a freshly laundered shirt and said he’d come. That’s when I saw the hook arm. As the evening progressed I was surprised by how very quick and skilful he was in the use of it. He hooked me a chair and one for himself when we found the small cinema where the film was shown. He seemed interested in me but I wondered how I would cope with his disability.

Sitting at my desk this morning, trying to work, I saw the line of the horizon as the sun beat down, heating up something outside so that its taint floated in on a breeze. It was the dank scent of the earth after rain, entering through the open door. It reminded me of the smell of his hair in the mornings and it came between me and my work. I wondered why all of this has to go on for so long.

It’s dark tonight with only a small crescent-shaped moon over the sea. I’ve decided to take a walk to the house where I lived as a child. I put on a cardigan and step out into the night.

The house itself is no longer there. It has been torn down and a block of units stands in its place. As I walk down the steps towards the beach and mount the hill, waves loom in the fading light; streaks of white against the dark sea. Above me clouds gather against a starless sky. I walk up the steps then stand at the lookout as the sea rolls in.

When I was growing up, this suburb was full of large houses and blocks of art deco units. Some of the houses were very grand and others fallen into disrepair like ours. Mother was ashamed of our house. It was basically a mass of rooms surrounded on three sides by wide verandas and wooden painted rails.

Walking along my old street and its rows of gums and mix of glass and chrome home units and white-painted mansions, I see the stairs that connect this street to Birriga Road. Those stairs that I walked up every day to catch the bus to school until Mother decided it was important that she drive me to school before she went to work. ‘What will the neighbours think with you talking to boys at the bus stop?’

And there’s the house where the boy with diabetes used to live. The boy who used to double me on his bicycle. I can still feel the imprint of his ribs under my hands. ‘It’s not ladylike for a girl to ride a bike,’ Mother said. This boy’s house had seemed a long walk from mine but now it seems just a short distance as I walk up our old driveway.

Sixty apartments share our old address. Forty units across the back yard and twenty on the driveway. The trees I used to climb in the back yard are all gone. No wild foliage, just bricks, concrete and cement, although one scrawny hibiscus droops over garage number twelve. A couple of branchless tree trunks wedge between the units and the fence of the block next door. Nowhere for the trees to branch out. No sunlight. Suffocating. Vines strangling trunks. Trees choking to death. I feel a thudding in my chest.

Drowning again and again. A recurring dream. And then I would wake and lie there waiting for the sound of the birds and the light of the dawn. I’d count slowly: one, two, three on the in breath, one, two, three on the out breath until I would notice the waves lapping up and into my bedroom again.

It was already too late when I was eight. I grew old at eight. It came on very suddenly. I saw the blood spreading over my grey school bloomers. As the year lightened and turned hot, it got worse. ‘Don’t tell anyone,’ whispered Mother. ‘Especially your brother.’ January was too bright so I stayed in bed in the darkened bedroom. I was ashamed of how I’d changed. I wasn’t prepared for it. I leant against the pillow in disgust. I lost the desire to move. But as dusk came one evening in February, there was the gentle sound of the wind through the leaves.

I see my former self. The small child with hair pulled severely back at the sides of her large forehead revealing an open face that seems always to be frowning. I can bring to mind a tall gawky adolescent with pimply skin with her arms crossed over her chest. She wears dark wool skirts in the winter with long shapeless jumpers over the top, perhaps a long pendant, or cotton print dresses in the summer with a cardigan. Her hands would clasp and unclasp in front of her. Ridiculous. Her hair looked ridiculous. The hair must have been cut into a fringe but instead it bounced up into one tight little ridiculous ball in the middle of her forehead.

So I was eight and three quarters. Mother made me wear dresses with pleats and frills. I wore them with loathing. I looked fat and childish in the dresses that were gathered at the waist and had a Peter Pan collar at the neck.

That day my hair was in bunches hanging down to my shoulders, not cut short at the back as usual, but long enough for me to put an elastic band at each side. To my own hair I had added the hair of our housekeeper. I wore her hair attached to my own. I was using makeup already. A crème pancake base that Mother had given me. ‘Cover up those hideous freckles.’ I don’t know where I got the pink lipstick and the clear nail polish. Perhaps I stole them. I was wearing a little 4711 eau de Cologne.

Today the early morning light shines through the thick curtains, the mysterious light when it’s raining but the sun is still shining through the clouds. But there is the exhausting and suffocating heat of Sydney’s humid summer days and nights to cope with. It’s seven forty-five already. I have overslept. There is no sound in the building. No footsteps, no cars reversing. I guess that everyone has gone to work.

On the radio: ‘Just a couple of drops of rain during the night here and there.’

I’m remembering Mother reclining in bed. Her eyes closed and her hands crossed against her chest. Her mouth open. Now and then she’d catch her breath as if gulping the air. At that moment, she appeared to be asleep.

Beside her I pulled the dead bits off the flowers. I put the vase into place on the shelf above the bed and stared at a Picasso print of a woman’s body sectioned into geometric pieces. I smiled at its startling arrangement of shapes. I reached for another vase and began my pruning.

Mother leaned towards me, and in a rush of tenderness, unusual in her, tried to hug me. I recoiled, unable to check the repugnance I felt for the touch of her.

My half-sister entered the room quietly. I got up at once throwing the bruised and browning petals into the wire basket by the door. I went over to the bed, and looked at Mother, who kept her eyes closed.

‘She’s resting,’ I said.

My sister went over and turned off the bedside light until there was only the weak light from the window. She sat down so she could see Mother. She stroked Mother’s forehead; leaned down over the face, using her fingers to exert pressure on the place between Mother’s eyes, pulled the skin across her forehead, pressed gently into the sides of her face.

Mother opened her eyes. ‘You smell of garlic. I can smell it on your breath.’ But then she let herself sink again. ‘You are very good to me,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t deserve all the things that you do for me.’

Inez continued to massage her head and face until Mother fell asleep.

Inez said, ‘I think about Mother nearly every day. When Mother spoke to me in her clipped determined way, I often didn’t understand what she wanted from me. I tried so hard, but of course I never managed to please her. Then she’d show her impatience. She was always impatient. With all of us. She’d had a hard life and I forgive her. I loved her because she was so—I don’t know what to say, exactly—because she was always such an overpowering presence. But she could be so cold. I would come to her wanting some affection, some understanding even, she’d turn away from me and be so cruel or she was just too busy to listen. Yet I felt for her, I understood, and now that I’m older I forgive her totally. If only I could see her again and tell her I wish now that I had tried harder and that if I had, things may have turned out differently.’

‘Your sister has decided to smooth the surfaces and to remember her mother as a saint,’ Dr Ross concluded. ‘Her mother had a hard life and now she’s turned her into a saint.’

I’m imagining walking into the old house. Across a big enclosed verandah and in through the front door. A coat cupboard to the right, along another corridor to the maid’s room and bathroom, painted a light green, then out to the back porch and the lockup garage. To the left of the maid’s room is the large kitchen with a table in the middle and a pantry to the side. Behind the kitchen is the laundry, the room where I’d do the ironing.

Mother is at the table with Father in the dining room, with its mahogany furniture and red and gold flocked wallpaper. It is already dark and the thick lined curtains are closed. The silver candlesticks on top of the white linen tablecloth reflect the light of the chandelier.

Husband and wife are dressed formally. Perhaps they’ve been to synagogue, or else they’ve been to the Chevra Kaddisha to pray for a dead relative, or they may have been to an afternoon tea at a friend’s house.

Father is two years younger; his face jowled, his mouth relaxed, his eyes small and piercing; his smile is kindly but wary. His hands shake slightly. His hands are broad, with thick blunt fingers, and are mottled with pigmentation spots. The short moustache and the grey hair are neatly trimmed.

Husband and wife eat in silence. The silence is full of contempt—a shared contempt.

She wears white gold wedding rings that are simple in design, and two diamond rings. And around her neck is a necklace of marquisette with drop earrings to match. He has given her many presents of jewellery over the years.

He turns to Mother and tells her he’s going to adjourn into the lounge room with the newspapers, is she going to join him?

She shakes her head. He shrugs at this, confirming: Let’s see who will break first. Who will be weakest in this mutual destruction of each other.

‘What are you laughing at?’ he says.

‘Nothing. I’m not laughing.’

‘Will we listen to a record in the lounge or will we go upstairs to bed?’

‘I don’t want to hear any records, thanks.’

She knocks the sugar bowl over as she reaches for the teapot. The fine bone china dish breaks into pieces and the brown granules spread over the white cloth. She glances at him in barely disguised fear, but he keeps on stirring his tea, looks straight ahead. He finishes his tea, wipes his moustache with meticulous care then throws the creased napkin onto the table and stands up.

‘It’s getting late. See you up there.’

To the right of the top of the staircase is their bedroom. I imagine Mother sitting down at the dressing table and taking the pins out of her hair. It falls to her shoulders, the heavy weight of it released. She puts on her nightgown and then stands in the middle of the room.

‘It’s a man’s world,’ she says in an absent-minded, dispassionate voice.

Father enters the bedroom, walks towards her. He is wearing a navy blue satin dressing gown and is holding a book in his hand, his glasses pushed up high on his forehead. She walks past him, pulls back the sheet. The sheet is spotted with blood. He sees the blood. She smiles to herself.

At twilight the sky is a deeper darker shade of blue. The clouds are puffy but stagnant. Faint hush of the sea. Traffic noises in the distance. A brief hammering. The sea turns from blue to soft grey as the waves move south in lines of darker grey. Thudding music from the house in front starts up but then it stops. The rumble of a plane overhead as it nears and then recedes. Moves closer—moves away. Kitchen sounds from the unit next door. Another plane rumbles in the distance.

The heat is leaving the day although the leaves and branches of the trees are not moving. Then a breeze picks up. A dog barks; the cicadas start up. Street lights, headlights. The sea darkens and the thudding party starts up again in the house in front.

It’s enough for me now just to think of Jack’s face with that peculiar, stricken look. Was it only later that as I searched for the memory of his face and looked at it and then his whole body, so often motionless and turned in on itself that I either took his face out of my memory or returned it to when I stood looking at him still asleep in the bed?

If he is living around here, he may be beginning a day’s work just now, since he never was one for an early start, or he may be sleeping with the doona over his head, unable to face another day. He may be listening to the sounds of the people around him preparing for work. Or he could be with that woman with the three children. Or he could just as well be living out west again.

Mother thought that God was cruel and hard. But in her prayers she still turned to Christ. She converted to Judaism when she married Father. I’m imagining her long honey hair rolled in a bun, her fine cheekbones, her mouth held in an ungenerous curve.

Her eyes are red with lack of sleep. She had been lying for several hours wandering whether to get up or not. It’s better to get up, straighten out the body, turn on the bedside light, try and read.

She gets up and stands for a long time by the hospital window. There is moisture on the pebbles of the veranda outside. Everything out there in the garden is blurred and hazy.

‘Thank you dear Lord for giving me daughters. I needn’t worry so much about what will happen … sometimes I think I’ve had enough of this world. How am I to cope?’ She lets herself sink. There is only one solution.

She turns off the bedside light then hears footsteps in the corridor. A nurse comes in and takes her pulse and her temperature, makes notes on the clipboard before replacing it at the end of the bed.

Or this is how I imagined it.

Outside the window a bird clutches a branch. Leaves surround and envelop him as the wind moves through the leaves. He trills a contralto then darts off towards the sky, swift as an arrow. The wind heaves the branches and scatters the leaves as another bird with a flurry of wings and a nod of his head darts off.

I must have been five when I came running in with a painting to show Mother, the picture of the birds in front of the clouds, the red sun to the left with its rays of sunlight. ‘I’ve got a present for you,’ I said. ‘Close your eyes.’ I put the painting in her hands. ‘Open your eyes.’ She looked at it. I pointed at the birds. ‘One bird, two birds, three, four, five, six black birds,’ I said. ‘It’s alright,’ she said in her dismissive voice. ‘You don’t have to count them all.’ I showed her the swirls of blue. ‘And this is me with my feet in the water,’ I said. ‘And this is you standing behind me watching. And this is the purple woolly rug that we had on the picnic. This is you and this is me.’

This may be the last time that I make the effort of remembering Jack. The last time that I let him make me suffer. It’s the forgetting that takes so long.

Memories of Mother have almost faded altogether. I don’t remember if I ever loved her. In my mind I no longer have the feel of her skin, nor in my ears the sound of her voice. I can’t remember the exact colour of her eyes, except sometimes I can see them all misty and watery with some secret. Her weeping I can’t hear any more – neither her weeping nor her laughter. It’s over with her, I don’t recall the details.

That night in June a strong wind had blown through the leaves. So strong it blew small branches off the trees and on to the car. Dirt blew along the road. Thunder, louder this time. A car alarm sounded for three beats and then it was silent again. A plane flew into the grey, its lights flickering as the horizon blurred and the sea turned into deep dark grey. People had flocked to the beach during the 34 degrees but now they hurried home as lightning split the sky. The thunder grew louder but, strangely, the sky was still blue above the ocean still lit by the setting sun even as it began to rain.

I’d taken off my nightie and sunk into the hot salt and oil, stretched out as the phone continued to ring. I lay there and listened. He hung up without leaving a message.

I’d felt the grief rising up from my stomach.

A bird plummets to the earth and Jack is no longer here. I sometimes find it hard to bear. After all this time I am talking about it to be free of it all, although I know I never can be. Over there to the east is the same sky reflected in the same water. But I am not the same, not the same as I was then, and not the same after telling it.

Dawn through the curtains casts long shafts of light across the carpet. There is a gentle breeze through the bamboo as I step outside and notice a white sail in front of the low hanging cloud. I stand there and watch as the yacht progresses along the flat line of the horizon.

My short story, ‘Michael’

March 5, 2023 ~ Libby Sommer ~ 2 Comments

Have a read of my short story, ‘Michael’, first published in Quadrant Magazine. The story is part of my collection titled ‘The Crystal Ballroom‘ (Ginninderra Press) – stories of love and loss in the singles dance scene. Hope you enjoy the story.

Michael:

He’s waiting at the bottom of the ramp, just inside the steel fence that cordons off the entry to the station. He said to give him a ring from her mobile when the train passed Gosford. She quickens her pace, adjusts the overnight bag on her shoulder. She is close enough to see the soft fold of his graying hair, the clear smooth glow of his skin. In his white socks and slip-on loafers he looks very English.

It wasn’t easy to get herself on a train and up to the Central Coast. It took a lot of encouragement on his part and a steely determination on her side of things to get out of Sydney. But now she’s glad already that he kept pressing. ‘It will do you good,’ he said on the phone, ‘to get out of the city for a couple of days. It will give you a new perspective on things.’

He knows about her tendency to brood and her struggle to manage the drowsiness that follows. They talk about these things on the telephone. He also struggles to get through the days, suffers with the same lethargy. He says he prefers to tell people he has ‘chronic fatigue’. People understand the term ‘chronic fatigue’.

He sees the deepening of laugh lines around her mouth and eyes, her face browned by the sun, her hair spiked and in shock. He tells her that she looks the same as he remembers. She assures him he looks very well and living away from the city obviously agrees with him.

Would she like a coffee? Or would she prefer to have a shower first? Some people needed to have a shower before they could do anything.

For goodness sake. It was only a couple of hours on the train. She would like to wash her hands though. They smelt of the tuna sandwich she’d eaten on the train.

Sure, sure. He’s been waiting all day for a coffee. They’ll go somewhere close by.

She’d agreed on the phone that there’d be no post mortem. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I’m happy to be in the present. I don’t need any analysis. You’re the one who goes on and on … on the telephone.’

How well she remembers that first time she had seen him. He was at one of the Saturday night dances that she used to frequent. He was standing at the side of the hall, his thick blonde hair brushed back off his forehead. He’d asked her to dance, said she danced well. Then they’d met up regularly and got to know each other. He wanted them to hire a hall and practice their dance routines. ‘But we mustn’t get involved, you and me,’ he warned. ‘Too dangerous.’ They were sitting in his car at the time, so close in the front seat that she could smell the Palmolive soap on his skin. She watched his hands as he put the car into gear and reversed up the driveway.

Now, he opens the back door of his car and motions for her to get in.

‘Sorry about the mess,’ he says. ‘It’s easier if you sit in the back. Easier than moving all that stuff on the front seat.’

It’s the same car as last time, an orangy-red Mitsubishi with scratches down the side, the same cracked glass of the headlights. She slides across the vinyl of the back seat, her eyes dazzled by a blaze of early-summer sunlight passing through the spotted salt stains on the windscreen.

He puts her bag in the boot and she pushes the tapes and DVDs and beach towels a little more to the other side. She snaps on the seatbelt, looks through the window at an older man in loose baggy clothes slumped on a wooden bench staring at the concrete of the pavement between his knees. She imagines she can hear his sighs.

Michael opens the window across from the driver’s side as he drives, then rests his arm along the empty front passenger seat and turns to speak to her. ‘Is it too windy for you?’

She reminds him his fast driving makes her nervous.

‘I didn’t know that. I’ll slow down, now that you’ve told me. I’d better anyway because I’ve lost my license.’

‘Again? Every time I see you it’s the same story.’

‘That’s a bit harsh. It’s a lesson I still need to learn.’

It’s like being in a taxi in a way, sitting in the back like this, not too close to the driver. A memory flashes into her mind of when she was a child and had seen a taxi parked by the side of the road. She’d looked in as she walked past. The driver had his hand between a woman’s legs and the woman, an older woman, not a young woman, maybe the same age as she is now, had a funny glazed look on her face that she, Madelaine, had never seen before. She remembers it vividly. The man, the odd position of the two of them in the front seat, the look on the woman’s face.

‘How come you’ve lost your license again?’ she asks.

‘The twelve points were up,’ he says. ‘You lose three points for an infringement?’

‘Parking infringement?’

‘No. If you get an infringement in the holiday period they double the points, so it doesn’t take much from there to get to the twelve points.’

‘Speeding?’

‘You’ve got to be very careful where the schools are, which are forty. Six double demerit points.’

With one arm resting on the ledge of the open window he runs his fingers through his hair. He’d been ringing every few weeks since they reconnected. Sometimes she tries to ring him, to save him the expense of the long telephone calls, but he’s impossible to contact. It was only recently that he gave her his address. No answer machine, no mobile, no internet, and he doesn’t answer the telephone. In fact he said he pulls the phone out of its socket.

He belongs to some strange group that he won’t give a name. Calls it a meditation group, but she knows it’s something else. At first she thought it must be AA but now she thinks it might be some kind of a secret sect.

He honks his horn at the woman in front as they wait at a roundabout. ‘This wouldn’t happen in the U.K.,’ he says. ‘They don’t know how to use roundabouts here.’

It was always his dream to work hard and then retire young and live somewhere by the sea. He finds a place to park in the shade on the top floor of a shopping centre, so they can walk straight in. He takes her hand when they get out of the car.

‘We’re holding hands are we?’ she says. She lets him do it, passively leaves her hand in his. ‘Don’t forget they smell fishy.’

He shrugs.

They find a seat near the back. She had been looking forward to sitting by the water somewhere and breathing in the salt air, rather than sitting in a shopping centre, but doesn’t express her disappointment.

On the phone he’d said something about telling people in the cafe that she’s his wife. That they could read their newspapers while drinking coffee each day. She said they’d look like an old married couple if they drank coffee hidden behind their separate papers. That’s when he said he’d tell everyone they were married.

‘They only give you one shot of coffee at this place,’ he says. ‘Other cafes give you two.’

Shots? The word reminds her of the days when his drinking was out of control. Not that she knew him then.

Now that they are seated together he says, ‘I knew it would be like this. That we’d pick up from where we left off. No different from last time.’

How dull all sounds are by the water, she thinks. Dull but sharp, like the cheepings in the branches of the trees in front of the motel. It must be the serenity of so much water. She decided to take the motel option even though he said she could stay in the guest room at his house. His front door was broken and you had to climb in through the back, the water taps were temperamental, the sliding glass door on the shower needed to be handled just so, the carpet in front of the television only to be walked on with bare feet.

‘Why don’t you get the lock fixed?’ she asked when they walked back out to his car.

‘Not before I go away,’ he said. ‘When I go to Europe to visit my mother I’ll get the door fixed.’

His mother again. He’s been saying for the last two years that he’s going back to the U.K. to visit his mother.

Madelaine chose to stay at the first place he showed her, a motel across the road from the beach. It was just a couple of minutes drive from his house, so they could still meet up each day. It’s an upstairs room, with two beds and a view of the road and the palm trees in front.

She lay on top of the covers on the spare bed of the motel room, reading. He said if it was him, he’d sleep on that bed. You’d get more of a through breeze.

He’s been to the beach for a swim. He arrived unannounced at the sliding screen door, knocked and walked in. Now he is looking at himself in the mirror in front of the bed. He turns from side to side inspecting his body, admiring his reflection, bare chest above the white shorts, says something about her being a good five years older than him.

‘I’m not older than you,’ she scowls. ‘You say that every time. We’re the same age.’

He rubs her foot a little. It doesn’t really matter so much, does it? We’re friends, aren’t we? He was getting ready to say that they’d known each other for a long time, when she turns on him and says, If you say we’ve known each other a long time again and it doesn’t matter, I’ll scream.

The family, who own the motel, are very friendly. The old grandfather sweeps the leaves on the driveway each morning and the grandchildren go off to school with a bang of their screen door. The children’s father hands the local newspaper up to her through the railing when he sees her sitting outside her room eating breakfast. They probably watch when Michael picks her up in his car and she climbs into the back seat.

Now that she’s here on his home territory he won’t go on any walks with her, won’t show her where the tracks lead. Says it’s best if she finds out for herself.

She says in the city she wouldn’t head out on an unknown bush track on her own.

‘The city,’ he sighs from the front seat where she can’t see his face. ‘Ah … I keep thinking they’ll design a new Almanac Cognac.’

‘Cognac?’

He laughs.

It’s a shame he didn’t take her with him when he went for a swim, she would like to know the best place to go for a dip. She’s enjoying being a passenger though, being chauffeured around.

‘I tried to ring you at Christmas to see how you were going,’ she says. ‘I know it’s a difficult time for you, with no family here. I tried at least six times – in the mornings and in the night times.’

‘There’s no point in ringing in the mornings,’ he says. ‘The phone doesn’t go back on till after coffee.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I take it off the hook when I go to sleep, I don’t want people ringing from the other side of the world. They forget it’s an eleven hour time difference. So I don’t put it back on the hook until I come back from having a coffee. I don’t want the phone breaking up my morning routine. And at night time I don’t come back in from the garden until after eight.’

Probably avoiding his mother. ‘I’ve rung after eight,’ she says. ‘You’re so hard to contact. It’s a wonder you’ve got any friends at all. I sent you a Christmas card by the way. Did you get it?’

He shakes his head.

‘That’s a shame. I sent the card to your post office box, like you said.’

‘I’m going to get rid of my post box at the house. Every time the postman rides his bike up he ruins the grass.’ He sniffs deeply, with a heaving of his chest. ‘When I go to the shopping centre there’s nowhere to park in the holiday period and people park on the lawns. I guess it’s like that in the city?’

‘Probably. I try and walk everywhere. I’m trying to lose weight.’

‘That’s good. Cutting back on the pasta?’

Her eyes narrow at the back of his head. ‘I don’t eat pasta.’

He twists around and smirks. ‘That’s right. You’re into healthy foods.’

Back at his place he’d tried to play with her bare feet when he sat next to her on the couch. She’d pulled them away. On the bed in the motel room he’d hugged her and wanted to lie back on the bed.

When he turns off the motor she opens the door slowly and lets the strong salty wind flood into the car in one cool, cleansing breath.

His words are carried off into the breeze.

They’ve had an altercation, in a café down near the beach. The diamond in the nostril of the girl behind the coffee machine had flared beneath the fluorescent light. The girl was silently mouthing the words to a song playing in the background when Madelaine got up and walked out.

‘You should speak up sooner,’ he called after her. ‘You should speak up before it gets to this point.’

She has heard this before, or something like it. She turned around briefly but did not stop.

‘You send knives into the heart when you speak like that,’ he called. ‘Madelaine?’

She kept walking until she got to the bush track by the sea. She heard the echo of her own footsteps on the earth. He made her so angry. She wanted to be free of him. He made it so impossible.

‘You need to be careful,’ he’d said. ‘Or you’ll go under. All the way under.’

An insistent fly buzzed near her face.

She walks.

The track keeps weaving away from the sea and makes it difficult to keep close to the water. She has no idea where she is headed or how far she needs to go to escape her anger. Tree roots stumble away from her sandshoes. Flies buzz too close to her ears. She brings to mind a bird that she saw with friends recently. She can’t recall exactly who she was with and where she was, just that someone said, ‘Look at that bird. It’s so big.’ A black and white bird with a large wing span flying through a gorge. Maybe that’s where she was? Cataract Gorge, in Launceston. Walking along that track alone, but with all those other people going in the same direction. The best part was approaching the gorge and being so surprised to see such natural beauty in the middle of a city.

She walks. After all, she’s free as a bird. Her children are grown up and lead their own lives. He always said he prefers a woman who’s had children. There’s something about women who’ve had children that he finds very appealing. The sound of the wind in the trees; the setting sun over her shoulder casts shadows on the dirt track. The sweet smell of earth. So why did she come then? She wanted to get out of Sydney, that’s all. A change of scene. She needed a holiday and she didn’t want to be alone.

As she moves deeper into the bush of the landscape – the ebb and the flow of the waves to her left – she begins to forget his limitations … and her own.

Loneliness. That’s all.

In the mid-afternoon haze, she just feels the need to keep going, to keep moving on. When she’s ready she will go back and apologise for her behaviour. After all, they’ve known each other a long time.

She lets him diminish from her thoughts, and moves deeper into the tender late-afternoon light. The sea, always in motion, not too far away. She walks, and the great swelling of sound begins to recede behind her. Her feet at last on the ground. ‘Put your feet on the ground, sit up with a straight back,’ the counsellor had said in an attempt to get her to pull herself together. Perhaps the counsellor was uncomfortable with all the tears. But who knows? The last counsellor had let her cry, but not too much. Do they let you cry for a set period of time at those places?

They’d slept together only once. It took him five years to speak to her again. Five years. Later, he said something about her breasts reminding him of his mother’s.

The bird sounds have softened, got gentler, more mellow. As the sun makes its slow arch, she observes the changes in the bush, what is revealed, and what is hidden. It’s so peaceful she’s almost afraid to breath.

There is no specific place she is heading towards. She could stop at any time, turn around, go back. The stillness of it all. An insect flitters between the twigs.

The landscape of shrubs and trees she has been moving through is now more like a rainforest. She watches the filtered light between the long thin strands of fern. All around is a canopy of leaves – fern leaves, frond leaves, mossy leaves – bright green leaves skating on the breeze. And tree trunks: hollered out, split in two, grooved and gnarled.

She looks up. What direction are the clouds traveling? She’s lost her bearings. She forgot to look for the position of the setting sun before she entered the forest. It is so hot. She is sweating.

But, as she walks on she is happy in her own self. In a new self, not the old one that she’s left behind.

She looks back the way she’s come.

Is she lost?

She reminds herself not to panic and, standing there absorbing the landscape, breathes in deeply to the count of four, and then out again … four, three, two, one.

She sees another insect on a rollercoaster with the air. The web of a spider made visible in the glow.

In the humidity and sleepy afternoon light, she could keep going forever, all the way back to Sydney.

My Short Story, ‘Tango’

January 28, 2023 ~ Libby Sommer ~ 3 Comments

My short story, ‘Tango’ was first published in Quadrant Magazine. Have. a read. Hope you enjoy it.

TANGO:

Tango is a passionate dance. A conversation between two people in which they can express every musical mood through steps and improvised movement. (Source Unknown)

Just before nine o’clock in the evening, Sofya gets out of her car and looks up at the sky. She has sensed a shift in the weather. There is another breath of wind, a whispering in the air, but the clouds are stagnant against the dark night. She turns and moves downhill towards the club, ejecting the chewing gum out of her mouth with a loud splat into the bushes, feels the first drops of rain on her bare arms. She passes the public phone box where frangipanis lie on the grass, picks one up, sniffs at it, throws it back, then quickly enters the club.

It is not one of her best days. She doesn’t know why. Her dress is not uncomfortable, her skirt just right around the waist, the outfit not faded or balled, her black strappy shoes high, not too high, wrapped around her feet following the shape of her instep, and the new shampoo and conditioner make her hair curl naturally around her face. For reassurance she strokes the pearl and bronze necklace nestled into the groove of her neck.

At reception she pauses to flash her card and takes the lift to the third floor and then continues along the long hall, at the end of which is the thud and bounce of Latin American dance music.

She turns into the room, which is set up with tables and chairs in a horseshoe shape around the wooden dance floor, the dee jay on the stage above and a bar at the back of the room. She sees Nino down the front sitting with that older couple he usually sits with and wonders whether to join them or not. It is not easy coming to these places. It takes a whole day of psyching herself up.

‘Sofya, you’ll never find a rich husband if you’re fat,’ said Mother, raising her glass. It was Mother’s 53^rd birthday. Her hair was silvery with flecks of white now that she’d let her own natural colour grow through.

‘How would you know?’ Sofya’s older brother said picking his nose and flicking the snot across the table at his mother. Everyone said he was a radical, that boy. He did things a certain way. But somehow they still thought the sun shone out of his arse. Everyone laughed. The entire family – even the aunt and uncle and the two boy cousins – drinking the kosher wine at the seder table. The moment passed.

Alone in her room, Sofya sang along with the radio station, turned way up. The Happy Wanderer. ‘I love to go a wandering along the mountain streams, and as I go I love to sing, my knapsack on my back.’

She would practice her leaps across the room in front of the mirror. See how far she could cross in one amazing jump, her back leg extended behind her as she leapt into the air from a running start.

She dances with Nino at the Randwick dance every Friday night. Now that Nino is semi-retired he dances four nights a week, plays tennis and works out at the gym when he’s not working part-time as an accountant. He has grey hair combed back from a high forehead and around his neck is a brown leather thong with a small silver medallion. The leather thong makes him look more attractive, more unusual, more interesting. He likes to show the younger women how to dance.

The tall Portuguese man with the dyed black hair (she assumes it’s dyed), described Nino as a vampire. But then he is probably jealous of the number of different women that Nino is able to get to join him at his table.

Jordan, the taxi driver, who dances to keep his weight down, said that Nino only likes to dance the tango so he can feel the women’s breasts pressed against him.

‘He didn’t say that,’ said Sofya in disbelief. ‘Nino is a gentleman, he wouldn’t say that.’

Jordan was ready to wave Nino over to confirm the story.

Sometimes Sofya sits by herself with her coat on the chair beside her, pretending she is here with a friend, and the friend is on the dance floor and that’s why she’s sitting there alone.

Sofya works freelance and is working on a book of family history that she has been commissioned to write. Things have changed very much, several times since she grew up, and like everyone in Sydney, she has led several lives and she still leads some of them. Since she started the book she has gone out with two South American tango dancers, one Irish dance teacher, and a revolutionary playwright who patted her thigh and said, ‘Where is this relationship going? I would like it to be more. My wife isn’t interested in sex any more.’

Her children are grown up and lead their own lives. Sometimes the sheer unpredictability, the randomness of the way she is living, what she is doing, fills her with exhilaration.

For the past six months she had been seeing a man from Leichhardt. As far as she can see, this is over. She calls him J, as if he were a character in a novel that pretends to be true.

J is the first letter of his name, but she chose it also because it seems to suit him. The letter J seems to give a promise of youth and vitality. It is upright and strong, with very straight vertebrae. And using just the letter, not needing a name, is in line with a system she often employs these days. She says to herself, France, 1993, and she sees a whole succession of scenes, the apricots and salmons of the buildings and the turquoise of the Mediterranean Sea.

Dressed for salsa? said the doctor with a grin as he closed the door behind her.

I don’t remember telling you that I danced salsa, she said as he extracted her file from the drawer of the metal filing cabinet. I think you’re getting me confused with someone else.

In O’Connell Street or Liverpool Street. I can picture it.

I used to dance at Glebe Town Hall on Sunday nights, but that was ages ago.

Your salsa phase, he confirmed.

He moved from the filing cabinet to the large grey seat opposite her.

Any stallions beating at your door? he said with a note of expectancy in his voice.

They’re all pathetic. It’s hopeless.

He gasped in a pretending way.

Not all of them, she corrected herself. Just the ones I engage with.

He wrote that down.

It’s all over with the Fireman, she volunteered. He’s married anyway.

You can cross Fireman off the list now.

I’ve been through the list. It’s been so many years. I’ve met one of everything.

Z, he said with a smirk. Of course. Zookeeper.

She shrugged, remembering the organic gardener.

I’ve probably met one of those too.

The last time she saw J, or rather, what she thought would be the last time, she was standing at the turnstiles at Town Hall station and he came through the gate sweating, his face and body flushed, his hair damp.

It was a hot night in September. They’d had a meal together at a Spanish Restaurant in the city. She remembers how flushed his skin was, but has to imagine his boots, his broad white thighs as he crouched or sat, and the open friendly expression he must have worn on his face, talking to her, she, who wanted nothing from him anymore. She knows she was conscious of how she looked standing there under the neon light, and that in this glare she might seem even older to him than she was, and also that he might find her less attractive.

He went to get a cup of coffee, then came back out. He stood beside her and looked down with his arm almost around her. She sensed his hesitation to touch her. She kissed him on the cheek and he looked deep into her eyes and she knew what he wanted her to say. Saw the pleading expression he must have worn on his face.

Have you lost weight? she asks Dan, one of her regular dance partners as she flicks her foot back and behind his knee into a gancho. The movement is like a horse trying to shake its shoe from its hoof.

Make sure your heel is up when you do the gancho, Alfred had told her. Sweep your leg along the floor and out. Not up with the leg, but up with the heel.

She reminds herself to make sure her shoulders are down. Firm arms, shoulders down. She’s sure that’s why she gets so much neck pain.

Alfred, bald, shiny-headed Alfred, who Nino says looks like a gangster with his shaved head and black tee shirt, still thinks everyone on the dance floor sets out to block his movement around the room. There’s no doubt about him. At least he started out friendly enough.

Dan smells good for a change and he’s lost his big stomach that used to come between them. Sometimes she would gag with the smell of him.

Yes, he says as they bounce lightly to the beat of a milonga. I got sick with the flu for a couple of weeks last year and decided to keep the weight off.

During a break in the sets she sits down next to Alfred.

What do I look like? Alfred says inclining his head towards the dance floor. I wish I knew what I looked like.

I don’t know, she says. I wasn’t watching you.

He sighs with disappointment.

And he’s made up a step. She must tell him she doesn’t want to do his stupid made up step which is a cross with her left leg, but when she feels his opposite hip against hers she doesn’t know if it’s a gancho or not. But the main problem, which she must tell him, is that he pulls her off her axis, her centre.

Would you do it if it wasn’t made up? he says now they’re up and dancing a vals.

It’s not that I won’t do it, she says. I can’t do it. I’m not deliberately not doing it, she says unable to disguise her anger. Should she make a scene and leave the dance floor and leave him standing there because he’s being so rude and aggressive because she can’t do his stupid made up step?

Do you speak to the other women like you speak to me?’ She says not caring who can hear.

I can’t understand why you won’t do it.

I can’t do it.

I wish I knew what that little voice was saying in your head.

His hip pushes hard into her, very hard, so she is forced into the backward lock from the left leg.

Wheep wheep, wheep wheep, wheep wheep, went the big shiny knife against the hard grey stone. Father would carve the roast lamb each week for the Sunday lunch. After lunch they’d go to the hospital to visit Grandpa. Grandpa without his left leg, then without his right leg. Gangrene. He died piece by piece.

Left foot, left leg. Right foot, right leg.

The women at the dances look beautiful in a cruel way, with their blood-red lips and their nails long and sharp. They are not very friendly. Sofya is just a casual, after all. She hasn’t signed up for a ten week course and she doesn’t go to the beginners lesson at 7.30.

Things have not changed very much on the dance scene since she started there so many years ago. ‘Same old, same old,’ as she heard the Turkish woman describe the previous Saturday’s dance at Marrickville to the Egyptian woman with the red red lips.

What a beautiful smile you have, said the woman on the door who takes the money. Did anyone tell you that your whole face smiles when you smile?

She’s nice. She’s the partner of the man who runs the dance. She says she doesn’t mind that she doesn’t get to dance on the Friday nights because she dances nearly every other night of the week at the lessons. She’s very beautiful. Russian with long blonde hair against her tanned smooth olive skin, very long shiny legs and always one of her very short cut up the side skirts that she makes herself. She’s Sofya’s age.

10.

When Father came back from the factory in the evenings, the children, pale and silent, joined him for his dinner. After dinner, Father listened to the radio in the lounge with his newspaper, and at seven Mother, having washed up, joined him. The family were together only at dinner, after which Mother and Father sat behind their newspapers and the children went upstairs to their rooms. Sometimes a stupid child would pull the wings off a fly or even a butterfly and watch it suffer.

11.

A new man makes his way around the dance floor. Good posture. Straight back, strong arm position. Looks like he’d be a good strong lead.

The music stops and he comes over and sits on the spare seat beside Sofya.

‘It’s all too heat making for an old man like me,’ he jokes as he fans himself furiously with a Bingo brochure. ‘I’m a Postman from Perth on holiday in Sydney,’ he says by way of an introduction in a well-modulated English voice. ‘I could have had a two week holiday in Paris for the price of his three day trip to Sydney.’

She smiles. ‘Have you read The Post Office by Charles Bukowski?’

‘We’re not very cultural in Perth.’

‘You speak very well for a Postman.’

‘Well,’ he shrugs, as if that is a whole other story that he will not go into at this stage. ‘Dancing the tango allows me to meet famous people all over the world,’ he says. ‘In Paris, London, New York. My name is Fabian by the way.’

‘That’s a very romantic name. I grew up in the era of Fabian the pop star.’

‘In Perth we all live in one big Waiting Room,’ he adds. ‘We’re all waiting. Not much culture or adventure. There are many French and Italian speaking women who dress like the women you see in Paris. The tango community is very close. If one person learns a new step, then everyone learns it. Two weeks later, we’re all doing it.’

12.

‘You’ve lost weight?’ the doctor said when she’d walked in.

She shrugged. ‘It’s wonderful what black does. Just one item of black.’

He looked down at his shoes with the regular pattern of holes punched towards the pointed toes. ‘What about black shoes?’ he asked.

‘Your feet look smaller,’ she reassured him.

‘You know what they say about small feet,’ he laughed.

She assumed he meant small feet, small penis. She sat down opposite him, a box of tissues between them on the small square table. ‘It’s hands,’ she says. ‘Not feet. Fingers.’

He uncapped his pen, looked down at his notes.

‘You’re not going to start on that track already are you?’ she said. ‘Not so early in the session.’

13.

I grew up dancing the polka in Italy, says Nino as they turn into a Viennese walz.

How was your holiday? she says.

Very boring.

Didn’t you play tennis with your grandsons?

He pulls a face.

Did you meet any nice European men while you were away, he asks.

I was married to an Austrian. From Vienna.

Did you see him there?

He lives in Sydney.

She says this simply to establish that she had a husband once, that she had been married, and to a European man, an interesting man, a man of cultural heritage. She wants to assure Nino that she was not always alone, unattached.

Does Anthony ask you to dance? Nino asks.

No. He doesn’t.

He should.

There are no shoulds. I asked him once and he went off across the floor doing his own thing. It was very humiliating.

Nino nods and grins with no understanding in his demeanour.

Anthony has many choices, he says, as if that would explain it. He’s young and he’s a good dancer. A lot of the women are after him.

14.

She remembers Mother saying to her when she was a teenager: ‘It’s a man’s world.’ But Mother had two children by the time she was 17.

Sofya’s daughter is an artist. Sometimes Sofya minds Kate’s two children while Kate goes out painting. This afternoon she was over at Kate’s house looking after the baby and the two year old.

‘I feel like Superman when I mind the kids and then go out tango dancing,’ Sofya likes to tell her friends. ‘At three o’clock I’m on the oval kicking a football around with my grandson and then at 7.30 I’m changing into my tight skirt with a split up the side and my red top and my strappy high heeled shoes and I’m out the door again. Like Clarke Kent changing into his Superman cape.’

Have you got a dance partner? her friends, or maybe her brother, might ask.

Various, she’ll say. I’ve got various. Several.

Today when Kate got back Sofya told her she’d brought the washing in because it had started to sprinkle with rain.

Was it dry?

I think so.

You think so?

Well I was rushing to bring it in before it poured with rain and I had two children to look after at the same time and the baby was awake and the noise of the builders next door and the electrician with his ladder and his cords everywhere and I couldn’t even get to the toilet.

Well, when you brought the washing in did you do all the ironing? Did you iron all the clothes when you brought them in?

They both laughed. It was a joke.

15.

Sofya doesn’t really own a tight skirt with a split up the side, but she wishes she did have one. And nice long legs to show off. Instead she usually wears the same pair of black trousers that she hopes will slim her down, and one of her many pretty tops. Well, actually, that’s not true either. She wears the same black camisole top, or one of the two similar black camisole tops, and a sheer cardigan on the top to disguise, to cover, to conceal, to pretend, that her arms aren’t so fat, that her freckled skin doesn’t look so blotchy in the light. But usually it gets so hot she has to strip down to the black pants and the black camisole top with her hair pulled high on top of her head so it doesn’t hang in wet cats tails around her face.

16.

‘I think the baby looks like me,’ Sofya said to Kate as she reached for the old brown photo album.

‘Have a look,’ she said pointing to a photograph of herself in Class 8. ‘Here I am. Can you see me?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘I’m the one on the end. The little Miss Perfect sitting up so straight.’

‘You do look different to the others.’

‘I’m the one trying too hard.’

‘You’re the only one wearing a tie.’

17.

‘Can we get a photocopy of her,’ Alfred says as Jordan comes over and leads her towards the dance floor.

Jordan’s style is firm and masculine. She likes the smell of the mint that he always sucks or chews. After a good half hour of dancing in the hot auditorium, he speaks, ‘If they have a Latin bracket,’ he says. ‘Will you dance it with me?’

Afterwards they sit back at Nino’s table with the much older couple.

‘You and Jordan dance well together,’ says the man so stiff with arthritis it takes him a long time to stand up, to unwrap his legs and put his whole weight on his feet. But he does. He gets up each week to dance with his lady friend and they shuffle around over in a dark corner after a couple of glasses of white wine and they are into their second packet of potato chips.

‘You look like you should be married,’ the older man continues. ‘Like you should have babies together.’

‘Who? Me and Jordan?’ Sofya says, trying to sound casual about the possibility of her and Jordan. She quite likes Jordan. But only because he dances salsa and rhumba and rock and roll so well. He smells nice, he dances well, what more could she want? But of course Jordan has a regular girlfriend, but the girlfriend doesn’t come to the Friday night dances.

Jordan laughs. ‘She’s a grandmother already,’ he says with a dismissive flick of his hand towards Sofya. ‘We couldn’t have children together.’

18.

‘Here is a photo of Grandpa and me. I’m standing beside his wheelchair. It’s a black and white photo that shows him only from just above the knees, which is where the rug would have ended that covers his lap. I look about 13 in this picture. My tall gawky stage. Long hair pulled back severely, a cardigan to hide my developing breasts. Mother hated my hair. I think she must have spent her whole life telling me how dreadful my hair looked. I’m smiling in the photo and leaning down to put my face a little bit closer to Grandpa.’

19.

Outside a bird chimed in a cheerful tone and the leaves of the jacaranda tree whispered in the wind. The beautiful jacaranda tree. They had one like that once. She thought she’d miss that tree and that house but although she did at first, after a while she came to love the different place where she moved to. And then this place where she lives now, by the sea, the place where J came to live with her. The place where they pretended they could live together. Where he went off to work every day and she kissed him goodbye at the front door. The place where he’d come home to her at night.

20.

‘I’ll fill in a form for you to have a blood test whenever you want. You won’t have to come and see me first. You can go straight there.’

He walks over to his desk. ‘Anything else you want tested?’

‘You’d better add iron. And the test for blood sugar. A family history of diabetes.’

‘Those arms look like they’ve done a lot of work,’ said the nurse as she tightened the strap around Sofya’s arm.

‘What do you mean? How can you tell?’

‘The veins. You’ve got good veins. The veins are connected to the muscles.’

21.

When she was a teenager she’d wanted to have dance lessons. ‘I learnt to dance without lessons,’ Mother had said. ‘So you can too.’

There were huge waves out to sea after the winds of the night. The biggest she’d ever seen in fact. They really were magnificent. She’d listened to the winds as they’d thrashed the ocean waves through the branches of the trees.

22.

Step further across for the forwards ochos, said the visiting Argentinian dance teacher. Step further back behind me for the turn and swivel. Keep your left hip down when doing a forwards ocho. Caress the floor with your feet. No feet in the air. Relax your right shoulder. Keep your shoulders down. Do the cross whether the man leads you into it or not (she thinks that’s what he said). Be heavy on the front foot in the cross. Weight forwards.

Keep your knees together when you do an adornment. Keep the adornments simple. Just do one or two. Polish the leg and then down again; then step over. Slow down on the turns. Don’t run. Keep your right wrist firm. In the open embrace let your arms go up and down the man’s arm. Up to behind his neck and then down to his forearm.’

‘You’ve had a lesson with the best,’ said Pedro.

‘I’ve been saving myself,’ she’d said proudly.

23.

It was about 6.30 on a Friday. Early summer. The bougainvilleas and the jacarandas were already in bloom but no frangipanis yet. She’d been waiting for J to come home, looking forward to his return from the city, hoping they’d sit together with a drink outside on the balcony. He’d have a shower and get changed and then they’d go out for the meal that he’d promised her.

Instead he was on the phone, his face slightly in shadow but well lit enough for her to see the ever present cigarette. Half inside, half outside so he could exhale out the door. His voice droned on and on. The wind increased in force. A strong wind, blowing against her head, her hair, her hands. Her furious heart beat hard against the walls of her ribs. Then the wind died down again and she could only hear his voice ; not the sound of the birds anymore or the movement of the leaves on the trees.

It rained a lot that night. The sound of the waterfall below. The sound of water after rain.

24.

It’s all your fault anyway, she said to the doctor.

He looked puzzled.

You said to me, ‘It’s your body. You can do what you like with it,’ in that moralising tone of yours.

I would have only said that, he said gently, if I thought you were being too generous with your body.

After that bit of moralising I’ve turned that whole side of myself off. Anyway, I have no libido. So it’s not such an issue anymore.

Well, that’s good.

He took a sip of his coffee that surely must be cold already.

There’s more to me than you think, he said.

You’re very blinkered, she said. She held up her hands beside her face to imitate a horse with covers at the side of his eyes. Straight. You haven’t got an open mind, in some areas, she clarified.

He pulled a face.

I bet your daughter, or daughters, tell you that.

They’re too polite.

Your daughter looked lovely by the way. The one I saw last time.

The blonde?

Yes. I thought you had a son and a daughter.

No. I’ve got three daughters.

Three daughters? And a son?

Yes. So you think I need to open my chakras? he joked.

She shrugged. Chakras spin, they don’t open.

You might be surprised. I could be a Buddhist.

Is my time up? She said with an anxious glance at the clock.

It’s okay, he reassured her. I hadn’t noticed.

25.

At dusk the last of the brightness of the pink sighed above the horizon. The sea a woolly blanket of blue and white. The same four palm trees all in a row between the road and the beach. The pale face of the moon two thirds of the way to the sky. One eighth of the side of its face missing but still the moon looked down, almost expressionless. A woman flashed the blue of her helmet as she cycled with strong thighs up Bronte Road, head bent in concentration on the road ahead as a bus bellowed black dust. The pink of the sky turned into mauve mixed with blue as the French cook arrived with his pale blue scarve knotted like a boy scout tight around his neck. With his right hand he checked his balls for reassurance as he mounted the step into the café.

It is unusual for Sofya to be outside these days, but no more odd than spending hours inside at the Mitchell Library looking at microfilm or walking through Waverley Cemetry looking for graves, no more odd than her work, or the people stuck on hot trains and buses trying to get home from work, or other places where people find themselves as they struggle to get through their days.

Times change, your life changes and you need to shift.

26.

At our age we’re not going to improve our game of tennis, said the man on Bare Island.

Speak for yourself, she’d said.

The brown bird with a black triangle on his head jumped on the green see saw of a branch. Up and down he went, up and down, until he flew off again in a southerly direction.

27.

‘The bastards,’ the doctor said as a joke, with a tilt of his head and a puffing out his cheeks as if he was about to spit on the ground in disgust.

‘I love it when you do that,’ she laughed. ‘That’s the way it is exactly.’

28.

Back home after the dance, she’d gone straight to her room. She’d turned on the lamp and knelt on the bed to pile the cushions up. Tears came almost to her eyes, her stomach empty with sadness. It was all such a bloody fantasy. She stared around at the night silence, then huddled in her bed.

She had a box of 100 Dilmah tea bags that she’d bought especially for J. When the box is empty, she told herself, the pain will have eased.

Six months later, she walked outside to the balcony, sat on the chaisse lounge that they’d chosen together and looked down the gully at the grey sea. She drank the last tea bag from the box.

The tea was strong and hot, and so bitter it parched her tongue.

First published in Quadrant

My Short Story, ‘The New Baby’

January 8, 2023 ~ Libby Sommer ~ Leave a comment

Have a read of my short story, ‘The New Baby’ first published in Quadrant Magazine. Hope you enjoy it.

THE NEW BABY;

In the second month after the baby was born Kate came out to meet her mother wiping her hands on her grey tracksuit pants. Kate’s hair was tied back off her face revealing tiny white milk spots above her cheeks. Anny told her that already she looked so slim and good. Kate ran her hand over her rounded stomach, arched her back and stuck her belly out at her mother.

They both laughed.

Anny had rushed out early that morning to get to the supermarket before going over to her daughter’s house to babysit. But she was happy to be available to help Kate. After all, her own mother had been too busy to help her when Kate was born.

Kate had rung over the weekend and asked what Anny’s plans were for Monday.

‘I can fit in with you,’ her mother had said. ‘I can come over whenever it suits you.’

‘I’ll go to aqua aerobics then. I should be back by ten thirty. So if you can get here at nine. And bring lunch.’

‘Will I stay on and make dinner?’

‘No. Don’t stay on.’

‘We’ll see then. We’ll see how we go.’

After Anny had been to the supermarket she’d discovered that she’d forgotten to bring the Marie Claire cookbook and the soy sauce, the ginger and the vegetable stock cubes that she had already in her kitchen. So she had to quickly dash back home to Bondi. And then, just before the Cahill Expressway there’d been a breakdown and the traffic was lined up and she was stuck in a bloody traffic jam before reaching the Harbour Tunnel.

‘What kept you?’ Kate asked by way of a greeting as her mother lifted the shopping bags and the laptop computer out of the boot.

Anny’s own body shape was disguised in black trousers and a black vee-necked tea shirt, although she’d contrasted and softened the black with a long amethyst necklace.

Kate inspected the necklace around her mother’s neck. She picked it up, tugged at it. Banged it playfully against her chest. Is it new? Had she bought it recently? she accused Anny. Or did Anny only imagine it was an accusation? No. It wasn’t new. She’d bought the necklace at the markets in Beijing last year when she’d done that Cycling in China trip. She’d chosen the stones and had it made up on the spot.

Kate gave her a final inspection. Flicked her eyes up and down her mother’s body before giving her the okay to proceed towards the front door.

The windows of the red brick house rattled as a news helicopter vibrated in towards landing at Gore Hill.

Kate and Anny carried the shopping bags to the kitchen. They tiptoed along the wooden corridor past the closed door of the baby’s room. ‘Don’t use the doorbell anymore because the noise wakes the baby,’ said Kate. ‘Just let yourself in with your key.’ Anny breathed in the familiar smell of baby shampoo and fresh linen in the bathroom. The morning sun shone through the blues and reds of the leadlight window highlighting the plastic baby bath that was turned upside down inside the big bath.

Just weeks before the baby was born Kate and Anny had gone to choose a baby bath. They had already begun the habit of Mondays together. It had taken ages to find the right white plastic baby bath. They must have looked at every bath in Chatswood. Kate had wanted one that had a hole down one end and a plug so she could empty the bath without tipping the whole thing up. They’d walked the length and breadth of Chatswood.

Back home they’d re-arranged things in the spare room to make space for the baby. They’d emptied drawers, taken underwear and socks out of one place and stacked them in with others, re-organised the shelves of the laundry, re-located Kate’s husband’s wine collection.

Dan didn’t complain about his wine being re-located, but he did say he didn’t want his mother-in-law handling his underwear. ‘It’s all a matter of intimacy and certain things being private,’ he’d said.

In the weeks after the baby was born Anny had come over every day to help. She’d cleaned up the kitchen, unstacked the dishwasher, made lunch, folded up the clean linen, brought the washing in.

As Anny unpacked the shopping Kate gave her mother the instructions:

‘Don’t feed him before ten. Preferably not before 10.30. The breast milk is in a bottle in the fridge.’

‘Yes. I didn’t realise that it’s better to feed him later rather than sooner so he’s more willing to take the bottle from me.’

Last time Kate had come home early and he’d refused the bottle because he could smell his mother and knew he had a better option.

‘Run the water from cold to hot,’ Kate continued. ‘Then let it sit in the hot water for five minutes. Check it on the inside of your wrist. And don’t forget to give it a good shake.’

‘Yes. Yes. I know how to do it but show me again anyway.’

In the small bright kitchen two hand-painted ceramic plates were secured on either side of the wooden window that looked out on to the backyard. Anny put the food into the fridge and then set up the computer on the dining room table.

Kate waited by the front door for her friend.

She sat down on the steps.

The wind picked up flapping the blue and white awning of the house next door. In the front garden a pile of magnolia petals lay in a heap on the grass. Kate sat there at the top of the stone steps at the front door. She leant down. Rested her head in her hands. She felt the pounding of her heart against her chest, the cold sweat on her hands. She tried to breath in. Tried to slow her breathing. She’d never had this before. Gasping for breath. It would happen even when she was lying on her bed trying to rest. Her heart would bang hard against her. Bang, bang, bang. Expecting the baby to wake at any moment. The sensation frightened her. Was she going crazy? And the recurring nightmares. The house burning down and she couldn’t get the baby out in time. And the crying, wanting to cry all the time. And at strange times. Like when she was out shopping with the baby. She couldn’t even go shopping and get a couple of things without him putting on a performance.

Anny heard her in the hallway pacing up and down.

‘Why don’t you ring and check your friend is coming for sure?’ she said to her daughter.

‘Because we spoke only yesterday and confirmed the arrangement.’

Kate couldn’t keep the irritation out of her voice.

She walked down the hallway and into the bedroom to check the time on the

clock beside the bed. She sat down on the white linen bedspread. Looked across at the antique pine dressing table and her books piled high: “Settling Techniques, Newborn to 6 Months”, “The Baby 0-9 Months”, “Motherhood: making it work for you”, “Meditations for Women Who Do Too Much”, “The Baby Swings Book”, “Baby Love”. She got up and went back into the kitchen to look at the time on the microwave clock.

‘Damn it,’ said Kate. ‘Now we’ll be late for the class.’

‘Why don’t you go on your own and I’ll tell her that you’ve gone when she arrives?’

A car door slammed outside.

Kate picked up her swimming bag and hurried to the door. It was someone for next door. She came back in.

Anny suggested again that she ring her friend and say she’d meet her there.

Kate checked the time on my watch. Then picked up the cordless phone and dialled.

‘I thought I could meet you there,’ she said into the phone. ‘I thought you might be rushing and it would save you some time.’

Silence as she listened to her friend’s reply.

‘Tell her you’ll meet her there,’ Anny insisted.

‘I’ll wait then,’ Kate sighed into the phone. She hung up. With the phone still in her hand she moved towards her mother. Her eyebrows were pressed together in an angry frown.

She used the aerial of the phone to prod Anny in the arm.

‘Stop it,’ she hissed. ‘Just stop it.’

‘Stay out as long as you like,’ Anny encouraged when Kate’s friend finally pulled up in the car. “Make the most of it. If I need you I can ring on the mobile.’

Kate hoisted her swimming bag up on to her shoulder. Kissed her mother on the cheek.

‘I can handle him,’ Anny assured her. ‘I feel confident. The only thing I can’t manage is if he gets hysterical like he did last night.’

‘Take him for a walk in the pram if he cries too much. He got hysterical last night because he was overtired.’

Anny waved goodbye from the front door.

After Kate left Anny swung into action. Watered the pot plants, adjusted her rearrangements from last week – moved the wooden plant stand from the lounge room to the dining room, the blue and white porcelain plant holder to the top of the plant stand. Kate said it was okay. If Dan didn’t like the re-arranging he’d put everything back where it was.

Eleven fifteen and no sound yet from the baby’s room. Anny shut down the computer and went into his room to check he was still breathing. She opened his door moving quietly as she stepped over a teddy bear on the floor. She approached his white painted cradle and looked down at him as he lay on his back, his head slightly to the side and tipped down against his chest. His long eyelashes fluttered against his cheeks, the tip of his button nose catching the light from the window. His rosebud lips pulsed ever so slightly together.

When he woke up she warmed the milk and carried him into the lounge room. She held him close against her body for the twenty minutes it took him to drink the bottle. One of his tiny perfect hands stayed wrapped around her thumb.

The drought in NSW continued through the winter. ‘Even Sydney has experienced one of the driest stretches since European settlement,’ said Agriculture Minister, Richard Amery.

Anny had been to the gym and hoped to ease the aches in her legs by relaxing in a hot bath. The telephone rang while she was running the bath. She stopped and listened and then switched off the taps. She went to answer the telephone.

‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Anny here.’

‘Mum. It’s me.’

‘How are you darling? I’ve been thinking about you and wondering how you were going.’

‘I so much didn’t want this to happen,’ she said. ‘I was at breaking point. Things were getting worse and worse. But they’ve looked after me here. They’ve looked after me very well.’

‘That’s good darling,’ Anny said trying to sound calm and positive.

‘I expressed for the last couple of days and they gave him the bottle at 3.30 in the morning. He slept for seven hours last night. The first time ever. And the first time I’ve slept deeply since he was born.’

Anny could hear gentle classical music playing in the background.

‘Who wouldn’t go a bit mad with the sleep deprivation alone? said Kate. ‘Let alone all the other stuff. And the hormone thing. It’s like having PMT for three months.’

So what do you think you’ve learnt from the week?’

‘I suppose for me not to feel that I have to be totally responsible and committed to him twenty-four hours a day and being with mothers in a similar situation helps too. That there are a lot of people whose support I can utilise. I was able to hand over to the midwives and have a rest. It took the whole responsibility off me. They pretty much said that he’d picked up where I was at.’

‘Did they say anything else?’

‘Take a chill pill.’

‘A chill pill? How will you do that?’

‘It’s an expression. Try and go with the flow much more. They said it’s not good for the baby for me to be like this, which makes me feel great! They offered to show me more information about the effects on the baby, but I didn’t want to see. My counsellor said that people like me are much more connected. We are sensitive and intelligent people. Qualities that she really likes in a person. I asked her couldn’t I just do Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, and go to yoga twice a week. She said all those things will help, but they won’t change the brain chemistry. And she said I’ll bash myself up even more because I’m not able to change my thinking with the CBT.’

From the window, as Anny watched, a storm came in, rolling in across the dark metallic grey of the sea. She cradled the phone between her neck and her shoulder. Pressed her hands against the window. Felt the cold glass against her palms. Watched the imprint of hands recede as she held the phone to her ear.

‘So what can the people who love and care about you do for you?’ she said.

‘When someone is at my place that I can go out and have a break from him. Giving me time away from him. I was thinking of going home for a week or two and see how I feel before making a decision about going on medication.’

The first of the rain started to fall as Anny watched.

‘I always felt total love and connection to him,’ said Kate. ‘But I knew he was unhappy and there was nothing I could do. That was very painful for me. To see my baby so distressed and not being able to do anything for him.’

The wind blew the leaves on the trees in front of Anny helter skelter as the storm built up. Hail the size of small marbles landed on the railing of the balcony, bounced to the ground, hit the pot plants.

‘I may go into denial when I get home,’ said Kate. I need you and Dan to tell me if I get worse. I need Dan to say, “Honey, you’re getting worse.” You could say that to me too. So how’s the week been for you?’

‘Okay. I didn’t worry too much about you because I knew you were in good hands – that you were being looked after. I knew you were in the best possible place. I didn’t worry as much as I do sometimes. It’s hard not to because we’re so inter … inter- connected. You and me.’

‘Inter-woven.’

‘Yes. That’s a better word. Interwoven. We’re interwoven.’

The rain eased. The pot plants all wet and shiny.

‘How did the parents’ night go at the hospital?’

‘The idea was for the fathers to talk about how they’re feeling but it didn’t turn out that way. They got on to talking about settling the baby – and the conversation stayed on settling.’

Anny walked into the bathroom and turned the taps back on. She added a scoop of Radox, picked up a washer from the end of the bath. She warmed it in the hot water, pressed it against her face. Then lay back against the porcelain. She closed her eyes. Thought about her own feeling of helplessness as she’d watched her daughter in distress.

She remembered when Kate was a baby. Her own mother’s nagging. Was the baby getting enough to eat? Did Anny have enough breast milk? The constant worrying about why the baby was crying. And her mother undermining her confidence, telling her that the baby was crying because she didn’t have enough milk to feed her baby.

‘Shut the door and walk away,’ was her mother’s advice. But the doctor had said she wasn’t to leave Kate to cry. He said Kate was a sensitive baby and would withdraw from her if she was left alone to cry.

Anny rubbed the coarse fabric up and down her arms, then up and down her legs. She lay in the bath for a time and then got out. She looked in the mirror as she dried herself. Turned her body sideways to the mirror. Pulled her stomach in, tucked her bottom under, stood up straight.

A warm day. Anny watched the sun rise in the morning. Saw the red sun hidden behind a cluster of clouds. The colours of the clouds changed each part of a second as she watched. More pink. Less mauve. The glow extended out along the horizon. The sea flat. The birds making noises like soft percussion triangles.

Kate and her mother sat on the floor of the bathroom as Kate bathed the baby in the big bath. A deep old-fashioned porcelain bath perched above black and white tiles. Kate kept splashing warm water on to his back to keep him warm as he stood up inspecting the taps, investigating the exit of the water from the faucet. His back wet and shiny. His bottom dimpled.

Kate looked across at her mother, a frown on her face and a dipped inflection in her voice. ‘I heard a terrible story this week, she said.. ‘It’s a horrible story.’

Anny could tell by Kate’s tone that perhaps it would be better if she didn’t tell her the story. But she didn’t say this. She took a deep breath instead.

‘You know Vivian who lives across the road?’ Kate said. ‘Vivian from the mothers’ group.’

Anny nodded.

‘Well it’s a friend of Vivian’s. They’ve known each other since they were children and their mothers are friends. The friend’s mother thought her daughter seemed not herself after the birth of the baby. The friend’s mother had said to her son-in-law that she wanted to discuss it with him. Before she was able to talk to him the daughter tried to kill her husband. She attacked him. Tried to strangle him. Then she jumped off the balcony with the baby in her arms.’

‘Oh no! That’s dreadful!’

‘The baby died and the woman is in hospital.’

‘That’s a dreadful, dreadful story.’

‘She’d thought that if she killed the whole family then they’d all be together in heaven.’

The baby sat down in the bath, then picked up a blue plastic scooper and used it to drink the bathwater. He smiled up at Kate and Anny as they leant over the bath. He pushed some plastic toys down from the side of the bath and watched the toys splash into the water.

‘How will it be for her when she realises she’s killed her baby?’ said Kate. And what about her relationship with her husband?’

Anny and Kate looked at each other. Kate reached down and picked the baby up out of the bath. As she wrapped a towel around him he put his arms down by his sides and leant his head against her chest. She held him tight against her.

Anny could hear Kate and her friend and the friend’s baby as they came in the front door. Kate introduced the friend to her mother. Her name was Alice. Anny offered Alice a cup of tea and the three of them sat around the dining room table. They drank tea out of pretty china cups – half open buds and violets and forget-me knots. The midday sun slanted through the window.

Alice fidgeted with the teaspoon on her saucer. She picked the spoon up, turned it over, put it down again. ‘I wish my mother was here,’ she said.

‘Where’s your mother?’ Anny asked.

‘In England. She lives in England. England is so far away. I ring her up but she’s busy doing her thing. And my father complains about the phone bills.’

‘That’s a shame,’ Anny commiserated.

Alice’s baby watched her, listened, turned his head towards her. Her voice lowered. ‘It would be so nice to sit down with my mother and to be able to talk like this. To be able to say, “The baby did this or she did that. The baby rolled over.”’

Kate and Anny looked at each other and nodded in agreement.

Anny remembered the last time she had seen her own mother. Anny had always felt that her mother wasn’t any good at the business of mothering. Motherhood hadn’t come easily to her. Perhaps she should never have been a mother; certainly she was one too soon. But hers was not an age in which women felt they had a choice.

It was five years ago now since that afternoon before she died. They were sitting in the visitors’ sunroom of the Jewish Hospital in Woollahra. Her mother’s hair an immaculate coiffure as always. A pale pink dressing gown tied around her waist. Anny had rung her children and arranged to meet them at the hospital. What she remembers most clearly about that afternoon is her mother’s anger because Anny had taken so long to wash and dry one of her nighties. Taken longer than her older sister who usually took the dirty nighties home and who had a clothes dryer. Anny had hung the nightie on a clothesline in the sun in her backyard and she’d thought it smelt particularly fresh and clean. But her mother was angry with her for not bringing the nightie back sooner. What took her so long? Wasn’t there anything she could do properly? Couldn’t she get anything right?

The scent of spring jasmine in the cooling air. A row of cherry blossom trees blossomed soft pink against dark wooden stems. Anny stood at the front door and waved goodbye to Alice as Kate helped her out to the car. She looked across at a blood-red hibiscus in the garden next door. A dog asleep on the grass.

Kate came back and stood beside her mother at the front door. Put her arm all the way around her. Patted her on the back. They leant into each other. Then went inside and closed the front door.

To Plot Or Not To Plot

December 10, 2022 ~ Libby Sommer ~ 2 Comments

Plot means the story line. When people talk about plotting, they mostly mean how to set up the situation, where to put the turning points, and what the characters will be doing in the end. What happens.

Some fiction writers write organically, not knowing where the story they are writing is going. These writers say it would be boring to know what’s going to happen next and they lose their enthusiasm to tell the story because they know the outcome already. They prefer throwing themselves over the edge and into the void. This method can be very anxiety-producing. It means you need a lot of faith in your process.

Other writers plan the story before they begin. In detective fiction the story definitely needs to be worked out beforehand so information can be drip-fed to the reader.

In the past, when creating my short stories, I have worked organically and not known where my stories were headed as I wrote them. The shorter the piece of fiction, the less need for plot. You can write an interesting story in which not very much happens. A woman fights with her neighbour, a man quits his job, or an unhappy family goes out for a pizza. Simple structures work better than something too complicated when the story is short.

Now that I’m working on a new novel, I feel the need to plot.

“A plot can, like a journey, begin with a single step. A woman making up her mind to recover her father’s oil paintings may be enough to start. The journey begins there, as it did for Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment when he decided to commit his crime,” Jerome Stern Making Shapely Fiction

The plot grows and develops out of what helps and what hinders the characters’ progress toward their goals.

The Writers’ Workshop http://www.writersworkshop.co.uk/plot2.html ask:

But how do you know if your draft plot has the right amount of weight to carry an entire novel?
What kind of structures work?
Is there a quick way to design your own plot template?
And how do you handle a book with multiple points of view?

“A good plot has a clear motivation. It has a clear structure. It has an outcome. It has subplots. A good plot looks something like the plot structure template below,” The Writers’ Workshop.

Motivation	Lizzie Bennett wants to marry for love
Plot structure	She meets Darcy & Wickham. She dislikes Darcy, and starts to fall for Wickham. Wickham turns out to be a bad guy; Darcy turns out to be a good guy. She now loves Darcy.
Outcome	She marries Darcy
Subplot 1	Jane Bennett (Lizzie’s nice sister) loves Bingley. Bingley vanishes. He reappears. They get hitched.
Subplot 2	Lydia Bennett (Lizzie’s idiot sister) elopes with Wickham. She’s recovered.
Subplot 3	An idiot, Mr Collins, proposes marriage to Lizzie. She says no. Her friend, Charlotte, says yes.

Of course, there are a lot of things that the above plot template doesn’t tell you. It doesn’t say where the novel is set, it doesn’t tell you anything about plot mechanics – it doesn’t say why Lizzie dislikes Mr Darcy, or how Lydia is recovered from her elopement. It doesn’t have anything to say about character.

The Writers’ Workshop strongly advises us to build a template much like the one above before starting to write. “If you’ve already started your MS then, for heaven’s sake, get to that template right away.”

So I’ve decided to put myself out of my misery and create a Plot Template for my new novel. I already had my characters in place and knew what each character wanted. But now I’m forced into planning an ending, which isn’t a bad thing. Some writers don’t find the real beginning to their stories until they’ve written the endings.

So that’s all we need: a beginning, a middle and an end. Aristotle defined it like this: a beginning is what requires nothing to precede it, an end is what requires nothing to follow it, and a middle needs something both before and after it.

Easy peasy. Not.

What about you? Do you plot or write organically? I’d love to hear what works for you and what sends you straight to the Writers Block Corner.

Short Story or Novel?

November 1, 2022 ~ Libby Sommer ~ 5 Comments

Is a novel a short story that keeps going, or, is it a string of stories with connective tissue and padding, or, is it something else?

Essayist Greg Hollingshead believes that the primary difference between the short story and the novel is not length but the larger, more conceptual weight of meaning that the longer narrative must carry on its back from page to page, scene to scene.

“It’s not baggy wordage that causes the diffusiveness of the novel. It’s this long-distance haul of meaning.” Greg Hollingshead

There is a widespread conviction among fiction writers that sooner or later one moves on from the short story to the novel. When John Cheever described himself as the world’s oldest living short story writer, everyone knew what he meant.

Greg Hollingshead says that every once in a while, to the salvation of literary fiction, there appears a mature writer of short stories—someone like Chekhov, or Munro—whose handling of the form at its best is so undulled, so poised, so capacious, so intelligent, that the short in short story is once again revealed as the silly adjective it is, for suddenly here are simply stories, spiritual histories, narratives amazingly porous yet concentrated and undiffused.

When you decide you want to write in a particular form—a novel, short story, poem—read a lot of writing in that form. Notice the rhythm of the form. How does it begin? What makes it complete? When you read a lot in a particular form, it becomes imprinted inside you, so when you sit at your desk to write, you produce that same structure. In reading novels your whole being absorbs the pace of the sentences, the setting of scenes, knowing the colour of the bedspread and how the writer gets her character to move down the hallway to the front door.

I sit at my desk thinking about form as a low-slung blanket of cloud blocks my view of the sky. Through the fly screen I inhale the sweet smell of earth after rain as another day of possibility beckons.

The thing is, we might write five novels before we write a good one. I wrote five book-length manuscripts before one was finally accepted for publication, even though I’d published 30 short stories. So form is important, we need to learn form, but we should also remember to fill form with life. All it takes is practice.

My short story, ‘Around Midnight’

October 25, 2022 ~ Libby Sommer ~ Leave a comment

Have a read of my short story, Around Midnight, first published in Quadrant Magazine. The story is part of my short fiction collection Stories From Bondi published by Ginninderra Press (2019).

I hope you enjoy it.

Around Midnight

‘When are you open?’ Anny asks the woman on the telephone.

‘We have a party twice a day. Every day. Twelve thirty to four thirty and seven thirty to midnight.’

‘Oh. Every day? I thought it was Saturday nights only.’

‘No darling. Every day.’

‘So what’s the setup?’

‘$120 for a couple. Nothing if you come on your own. What’s your position. How would you come along?’

‘On my own.’

‘It would cost you nothing then.’

‘But what do you do? I mean, I know what goes on there.’

‘You’ve been here before?’

‘No. A friend told me about it. What do you wear? What’s the setup?’

‘It’s all up to you love. If you fancy a gentleman you invite him into one of the rooms.’

‘What do you wear though? My friend said something about robes.’

‘Towels. They’re towels love. You wear whatever you like. Normal clothes.’

Anny is sitting at a café at North Bondi having breakfast with her friend Dita telling her about it. Anny has ordered the scrambled tofu and Dita is having fried eggs and bacon.

I’m dying to know how you went, Dita says, pulling her chair closer to the table.

Well, Anny says, this is what happened.

It’s eight thirty on Saturday night when I approach a big steel gate with a street number in bold letters. I open the gate and go up the lane way beside the Thai restaurant and follow the fairy lights upstairs. There’s nothing else to indicate what goes on inside this three-bedroom apartment on a busy road in Bondi. I follow the fairy lights along a corridor until I come to a wooden front door with no number on it. I hesitate not knowing whether to knock or just walk in. I open the door.

Inside, draped around the room, are about ten men and women in various stages of undress sitting on stools beside small bar tables – the men bare-chested, the women topless or wearing bras. Some of them are giving each other neck and shoulder massages. And they’re all wearing towels. Not a very attractive sight in my opinion – a man in a towel.

It’s a large room with a pretend-bar, a kitchen on the right and sliding glass doors that lead to a covered balcony with an above-the-ground spa pool. Standing by the door are two Japanese men in black jeans and black tee-shirts. I walk over to the kitchen which acts as the Reception area.

The only other fully dressed people in the room are the man and the woman who run the place. She’s Czech, young and very attractive in a green lace figure-revealing dress. Her blonde hair cascades down her back. She’s in the kitchen and doesn’t exactly greet me but asks me what I’d like to drink. A glass of wine would be nice, I say. She goes to the fridge and from a cask on the bottom shelf pours me a glass. With drink in hand I stand near the door and look around.

And wonder what I’ll do next.

The two Japanese men avoid eye contact with me. They obviously want to keep to themselves. I don’t particularly want to join the group of men and women on the stools as I don’t intend to take any of my clothes off.

I ask the woman who runs the place to show me around. She shrugs without much enthusiasm then leads the way along a narrow hallway. The first bedroom on the right has a double bed with a bedside light on a table and white lace curtains on the window. She looks out between the lace peering around outside before pulling them closed. She shows me another bedroom at the end of the corridor with an en-suite bathroom. We stand at the door looking in to the empty bed but she doesn’t show me in. And then she leads the way to the third bedroom back along the corridor towards the front door.

This is the Orgy Room, she says from the open doorway.

I avert my eyes but I can see from the corner of one eye a double bed and several naked bodies doing things to each other. Backs and thighs and bums exposed. Not very becoming. It all seems tacky and I begin to doubt my wisdom in coming to a place like this. I clutch my handbag across my body and find myself a seat in the front room with my back to the wall.

There are corn chips and an onion dip on a platter that the women in the group hand around. I decline the chips and the dip. If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s the smell of onion breathe. A woman in a white lace bra and a towel around her waist stubs out her cigarette in the ashtray in front of me and asks if I’ve been here before.

No, I say. And you?

I come here all the time. What do you do for a living? She continues.

A bit of this and that.

She nods knowingly.

What do you do? I ask.

I’m a psychologist at a clinic at St Leonards.

I’m very surprised. For some reason I thought women with important jobs wouldn’t come to a place like this.

A man edges over towards me and tries to get in on our conversation. He asks the same things as she does. Do you come here often? What do you do for a living? In the old days, or, rather, in the olden days, as my children like to say, when I used to frequent bars from time to time, I’d answer the first question with “only in the mating season” and the second question with “I live off the income from my investments”. Both replies would be met with a stunned silence or an impressed “ah” or, sometimes, “is this the mating season?”

The man keeps smiling at me and I avert my eyes but somehow he is able to maneuver himself around so he’s constantly in my line of vision. It gives me the shits.

Not your type? Dita puts in.

No. Absolutely not.

What did you wear in the end? Dita asks.

Only four items of clothing.

Something you could take off quickly?

Yes. And no jewelry. Apparently the men have to shower and put on a towel as soon as they arrive. Although one woman kept saying to me, where’s your towel? She wanted me to get undressed and hang about in a towel like everyone else.

Another woman tells me I should leave my bag locked up in the kitchen with the man and woman who own the place.

You don’t know these men, cautions the woman. Lock up your bag.

I decide to keep my bag with me although I’ve left my umbrella beside the door. Another man edges his stool over towards me and we have a conversation. At least he’s got a brain in his head and got something to say for himself. He tells me he’s Dutch and he’s here in Sydney on business.

It’s my first time to this place, he says. But I’ve been to others in other cities in the world. I travel a lot for business.

We talk a little about travel and countries we’ve visited.

He lets me know in a non-threatening way that he’d be willing to go into one of the bedrooms with me. I feel embarrassed knocking him back seeing as we’ve had such a nice conversation and I don’t want him to be wasting time with me if he wants to be chatting up some other woman.

I’m not ready, I say politely. Maybe later.

The other man who’s been trying to catch my eye, the pain-in-the-bum-persistent-dag who listens in to my every word, leans over towards me and says, When you’re ready would you go into one of the rooms with me?

No thanks, I say. Sorry, I smile at him hoping all the same that I haven’t hurt his feelings.

The Dutch man tells me there’s no need to apologise.

A few new people wander in. A man and a woman, a couple, a few single men of various ages and shapes and a fat girl draped in layers of chiffon. Then two very well-proportioned young men. I remind myself that I’m the one meant to be doing the choosing here. One of the very well-proportioned young men is quite cute actually. The other young man is not very tall, a bit too muscle-bound for my taste, and has that short spiky hair almost- shaved-at-the-side that I find most unattractive. The two of them are younger than both my son – but that’s nothing new.

One of the women ushers them out into the back bedroom to shower and put on a towel. They don’t return to the main room where I’m sitting jammed up between various men and in front of me a blank video screen high up on the wall. The fat girl does some sort of disco dance in front of the wall under the video screen. She dances in time to the music but nothing special. Then the woman who owns the place uses her remote to turn on a video.

I’ve never seen such an explicit porn video before, Dita. I can’t watch but I glimpse the extreme closeups of women’s genitalia and pierced intimate body parts and things being stuck in and up and it’s all too horrible.

Why didn’t you go home then? Asks Dita.

I thought I’d wait just a bit longer. It had taken such an enormous effort of will to get there.

The Czech blonde who runs the place with her Indian husband enjoys the video immensely.

Look at that, she keeps saying.

I have nowhere to turn my head. In front of me the video, to my left the persistent dag. To my right is the smaller young muscley man who now also keeps trying to attract my attention but I’m claustrophobic and I just want out of there but for some reason I’m stuck to my seat. I don’t want to stand up and have everyone look at me – anything that moves is closely observed in this room. I look at the floor, at the space between my stool and the spa area, and the floor towards the front door. I’m willing myself to stand up, to walk into the spa room away from these men, or straight out the front door.

So that’s how come I end up talking to the young Italian muscley bloke. He reaches his hand out to me and invites me to sit in the spa room with him away from the noise of the video. I use his hand to stand up but then remove it from his grasp before walking outside to the balcony. I don’t want to look as if I’ve been claimed.

I tell the muscley Italian man that the men here are too predatory and I’m feeling guilty because I keep knocking them back and then find myself apologising. You don’t have to apologise when you knock someone back, he assures me. But I’m finding him intimidating right now wedged up beside me and I don’t know how to get rid of him.

We sit on the black vinyl lounge, me squashed in the corner beside him. The tang of chlorine from the empty spa assaults my nostrils.

Can I kiss your cheek? he asks.

No.

Can I hold your hand? he says.

No.

I wedge my hand that lays beside him under my thigh making sure he can’t hold it.

His friend, the cutie, comes out through the door and sits beside us. We smile at each other.

I was very nervous before coming to this place, he says to me. I nearly didn’t come.

I look into his open face and his nice round eyes and thick head of curly hair.

It was the same for me, I say.

When I came in, he says, I saw you sitting there and that woman in the green dress and I thought this looks all right and so I came in.

She’s very attractive, I say. That woman in the green dress.

I asked her husband if she participates but he said no.

Do you think it’s good value for money here? I ask in order to keep the conversation going. I mean it’s concerning me that the men have paid $180 each to come into this place and it’s free for me.

No, he says, I don’t think I’ve got good value for money. Not so far.

His friend puts his hand on my leg. I consider removing his hand but think it may seem churlish of me so I don’t. And anyway if I’ve come to a place like this what am I doing knocking all the blokes back?

What does it cost to have sex with a hooker? I ask the cutie.

He looks at me with horrified wide eyes. I don’t know. I’ve never had sex with a hooker.

I was just trying to do a price comparison. A value for money price comparison.

How many women have you had sex with tonight? I persist.

Two. One on arrival. A woman started massaging me when I had a shower and then we had sex. And then a second one almost straight afterwards. The fat girl.

How was that? I ask. How was the sex?

She had big bruises all over her body as if she’d been bashed up or drugs or something. Her arms and legs were all bruised. It was awful. I wished I was unconscious.

I nod with sympathy.

I noticed you go into the bedroom with the fat girl, I say.

He smiles at me and extends his hands towards me, palms upturned. I could give you a great massage, he says with enthusiasm. I’ve got very strong hands. I’m trained in martial arts.

Mm, I say breathing out with a sigh.

But the problem is I can’t get rid of his bloody friend. He’s latched on to me and has territorial control with his bloody hand resting on my thigh.

There are six of us in the spa room now. The cutie, his friend, a middle-aged Maori couple and the Indian husband of the Czech woman. I’d noticed some of the girls flirting with the Indian husband and then laughing. He stays close by the side of his wife. Now though, he chats to us.

We’ve only had this business for eight weeks, he says. We took it over from the previous owner who’d been here for six and a half years. It costs us $1000 a month in rent and $1000 for advertising on the web, in the Telegraph and in the Wentworth Courier. It isn’t easy to make money.

We talk about business and making money for awhile then he leaves us to it.

Do you think some of those girls are being paid to be here? asks the Italian.

Prostitutes?

Well, why would a single woman come to a place like this? says the cutie who’s disappointed there aren’t more women here. A single woman can go out any time and pick up a bloke at a pub.

I don’t say anything. I don’t say it’s probably safer here than to take a stranger home or to go back to his place in the middle of nowhere. And what are you meant to do anyway if you don’t have a boyfriend?

He complains that when he rang up to make inquiries they told him there is a huge spa that fits twenty people. They could fit about eight people in this spa, he says. And even then it would be squashed. Twenty people – they’d all be on top of each other.

I must say that when my friend Richard, who told me about the place, mentioned that there is a large spa I did imagine a Grecian-type setting with women and men reclining and relaxing around the edges of the water.

If he was a good businessman, says the Cutie, he’d offer to give us our money back at the door. That’s how you do business. Keep the customers happy.

There’s no privacy in the rooms here, says the Italian. People walk in all the time. The Japanese men paid $50 each just to watch.

We had to jam towels up against the door to stop people walking in, says the Maori husband.

Now that the Maori couple have joined in the conversation I use the opportunity to ask them how they’re going. What they’ve experienced so far. I’d noticed them come out of the bedroom at the end of the house.

The wife tells me in a quiet voice that they went into the room with another woman to have a threesome. But it didn’t work out, she says. He couldn’t do any good, she says indicating with a nod her husband’s lap and the area between his legs. We don’t like it much here. We’ve been to other singles clubs where it’s all couples. Much better. Not with all these men hanging around staring at you.

Why did you come here? I ask.

He wants to have sex with other women. So coming to a place like this, he’s not doing it behind my back. I know what he’s up to and I’m included.

Her husband glows smugly.

Why did you come here? I ask the cutie.

Curiosity. Why did you come here? He asks me.

Curiosity. We all came here for curiosity, I say summing up the conversation.

The Italian muscle-man gets up to go to the toilet.

Save me that space beside you, he instructs me. Promise, he adds loudly.

I nod.

When he leaves the room I ask the cutie if he’s been into the Orgy Room.

No, he says. What Orgy Room?

It’s up the hallway. I had a look around when I arrived. But an Orgy Room isn’t something I’m interested in trying.

Me either, he agrees.

I’m just waiting for him to finish with you, he says indicating the empty seat between us, and then I’ll be next.

I lower my eyes discretely and suppress a smirk.

The Italian returns from the toilet and takes his seat between us.

The cutie turns to me and says: You can give him a massage, indicating his friend, and I’ll give you a massage.

I laugh.

The Maori couple encourage me from the sidelines.

Go on, says the Maori husband. Give it a go. If you don’t like it, leave.

Sure, I think to myself. As if I’d be able to leave after going into a bedroom with two men and taking off all my clothes. Although I wouldn’t mind going in to one of the rooms with the cutie, if I could lock the door that is, and if it wasn’t so late already.

I giggle nervously. I have four people on my case now trying to pursuade me to go with the two young men, as if it’s my responsibility to keep everybody happy. Hoping they’ll understand and lay off I tell them I’m laughing because I’m nervous.

Would a drink calm you down? says the husband.

No thanks.

His wife smiles at me. In a gentle voice she says, Would you like me to calm you down?

Thank you very much, but no, I say, feeling guilty as usual.

Her husband makes some more noises along the lines of the two of them could help me out with my nervousness problem.

I sigh and then stand up brushing the hand off my leg. I walk over to the side of the spa where the Cutie is standing.

I ease two fingers into the water as if to test the temperature. Warm, I say.

Not warm enough, he says.

I move towards him then lift the corner of his towel to just above his knee. I dry my fingers.

His friend jumps up from the lounge and moves in front me with his bare hairy back just inches from my face.

My back is cold, he says. Warm me up, he commands.

I hold out one hand and lay it briefly on his shoulder, then take it away.

Let’s go for a walk, he whispers to me.

No thanks.

Give me your phone number and we’ll meet up another time then.

No.

Why not?

I don’t want to.

I laugh nervously. How I hate these situations I find myself in.

I’m now wedged into the corner of the spa room. My eyes fix on the door. I hesitate wondering whether I should be polite and say anything to the Maori couple. But I feel the need for haste. I’m worried he’ll follow me although a man in a towel isn’t going to get very far outside on the street.

Dita adds butter and a sprinkle of salt to her turkish bread and then mops up the remains of her egg yolk and the slimy gleam of the bacon fat.

And then?

That’s it. I leave.

There was a full moon. The silver glistened and vibrated on the sea as she neared the northern end of the beach on her walk back home that night. She passed the Bondi RSL club, the Bidigal reserve and the single Bondi sandhill up on her left. There weren’t many people around at that hour. Heading along Campbell Parade, it was quiet. The pub and the cafes were closed.

The surf was big, the waves crashed dramatically over the rocks, the reef and the swimming pool at the south end of the beach. In Notts Avenue she stopped at the surf viewing area just before the baths and watched the rising swell of the ocean for a few moments. She continued along Bondi Road walking fast up the hill pleased the steepness doesn’t faze her, not panting, managing it nice and easy, even in her high heels. She crossed at the lights near the pub on the corner.

A cold wind blew and then it began to rain.

She passed the laneway on her right and was heading for the shortcut home. She planned to cross the open car park of the block of units, and then down through the little park that leads to the hole in the fence that usually gets her home in no time. It was not until she was in the empty car park that she heard her own footsteps squelching on the wet surface and realized that there was another set of sounds behind her. Her shoes made a squench, squash noise and that’s why she didn’t realize at first what the other sound was – and that the sound has been there for some time.

“The man has a gruff, heavily accented Australian voice, his face was masked with a dark balaclava and he wore dark-coloured tracksuit pants – the same description given by his first two victims. His threats, including that he was armed with a knife, were similar to words spoken in the first two attacks and appeared well rehearsed. After each attack he casually walked away.”

Anny veered left as she changed course and retraced her steps without turning towards the footsteps. After moving some distance away and towards the safety of the lights of the units and a door that she could bang on in case of emergency she turned around to see if the person was still there. He was there all right. In joggers, tracksuit, medium height, average build. He’d stopped at the point where she veered left and was looking down into the empty park.

Sorry, she thought she heard him say as he looked over towards her.

She turned and hurried back towards the road and the street lights leaving him behind. She walked on the side of the road towards the on-coming traffic just like she does when she’s on her solitary travels in Europe and the man receded into the distance.

Dita’s plate looks so shiny clean now after her mop up with the Turkish bread it’s as if the plate has come straight out of the dishwasher. Anny tells her that before she went out that night she’d worried that she’d feel tacky when she got home.

You would have if you’d gone against your instincts and allowed those people to talk you into doing something you didn’t want to do, Dita says.

I feel bad though that this whole sex thing is such an issue for me when there’s all the killing going on in Israel and the Para Olympians in wheelchairs on the television every night.

You’re not going around complaining. You’re doing something about it. It’s better than those singles dances. I only went to a couple but I felt like a lump of meat being looked up and down.

But I’m such a wimp, Anny says.

No, you’re not. You went. You’re not a wimp if you can go.

I’m a wimp when it comes to getting rid of guys. Some boring man always latches on to me and I end up leaving just to get rid of him or some man attempts to follow me home.

Anny breathes out heavily and tells Dita that Richard was the one who’d told her about the place.

You know Richard, the one I met on the internet.

You met him in a chat room?

No not a chat room, Anny says sensing Dita’s disapproval. There are all sorts of loonies in chat rooms. No. A singles web site. Richard said the women at these clubs do the choosing and there’d be lots of young men for me to pick from and plenty who’d want to give me a massage. In fact I got so excited about the idea of me doing the choosing that I’d look at the men in the gym and sitting on the train and I’d think: would I choose you if you were there. Richard offered to come with me as my partner but why would I want to pay $120 to go as a couple when I can go for nothing. And anyway, I wouldn’t want to see Richard with another woman.

It wasn’t very complimentary to you that Richard offered to go with you, Dita says, a harsh satisfaction in her voice. Anny can see Dita is pleased somehow telling her this about Richard – as if Anny doesn’t know it already.

Dita pouts her lips to apply a tangerine lipstick to her mouth. The lipstick matches her perfectly manicured toenails that are revealed at the end of her stiletto sandals. She puts the lipstick away in her handbag, sits back and looks out to the ocean, then twists her wedding ring around her finger.

It’s a can that I’ve always wanted to open, Dita says. To see what goes on in these places.

She stands up decisively and pulls her tee-shirt down at the sides accentuating the waisteless bulge of her torso that protrudes for some distance from her body. She slides her hands up and down over her stomach like a proud pregnant woman, but Dita isn’t pregnant.

She thrusts her shoulders back and her chest out. Who cares if my gut hangs out, she says proudly. I’ve got a gorgeous husband, two mortgages, two kids and a great business. What more could a girl want?

Anny feels depressed. But she won’t tell her that. She’s said enough already.

Writing Tip: Narrative Momentum

September 18, 2022 ~ Libby Sommer ~ 5 Comments

The other day I was listening to someone talk about the craft of creative writing and she was speaking about the necessity of forward momentum in narrative in order to keep the reader engaged.

The speaker suggested keeping in mind the words: “but then …”

Using those two words, either on the page, or in your head, gives a twist or complication to the story.

Sound a good idea to me. What do you think?