After the Carnage
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About this ebook
Tara June Winch
Tara June Winch is the Wiradjuri author of two novels and a short story collection. For her first novel, Swallow the Air, she was named a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist and received mentorship from Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka as part of the prestigious Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. Her second novel, The Yield, won Australia's highest accolade, the Miles Franklin Literary Award. She was born in Australia in 1983 and currently lives in France with her family.
Read more from Tara June Winch
The Yield: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Swallow the Air Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
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After the Carnage - Tara June Winch
Tara June Winch is an Australian (Wiradjuri) writer based in France. She was named as one of The Sydney Morning Herald’s Best Young Australian Novelists for her first novel, Swallow the Air. She has gone on to win numerous Australian literary awards, and in 2009 she received the prestigious Rolex Mentor and Protégé Award.
Praise for Swallow the Air
Winner
David Unaipon Award
New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards
Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards
Dobbie Award
Rolex Mentor and Protégé Award
Shortlisted
Age Book of the Year
Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards
Australian Book Industry Awards
‘I love the restraint with language and her control, and the way she makes small observations count. It’s spare, thoughtful writing, clever but never about showing off.’ The Weekend Australian
‘Her writing is raw and sparky, her prose so charged with energy that it bursts, Melville-like, into occasional poetic firestorms …’ The Age
‘Tara June Winch’s heartfelt Swallow the Air (UQP) is the work of a writer blessed with great natural talent and a good ear for dialect.’ The Sydney Morning Herald
‘… Tara June Winch’s writing is startling: visceral, fresh and poetic.’ Vogue Australia
‘… her grasp of language and the pictures she draws with words are livid and uncompromising.’ Townsville Bulletin
‘Winch’s prose is gloriously idiosyncratic … it works triumphantly.’ Adelaide Advertiser
‘Sometimes in life you are lucky enough to stumble upon a book that irrevocably changes you and profoundly changes how you experience the world. Tara June Winch’s Swallow the Air is one of those rare books.’ The Courier-Mail
‘Extraordinary, too, is her economy of language and her ability to take the reader to the heart of a matter swiftly on the wing of simple words – I was weeping by page nine …’ The Sunday Telegraph
for Arnaud
Contents
Wager
The Last Class
After the Carnage, More
Happy
Failure to Thrive
Baby Island
Easter
Meat House
It’s Too Difficult to Explain
Mosquito
Longitude
The Proust Running Group of Paris
A Late Netting
Acknowledgements
They knew nothing of the past and its holiness.
James Salter
Wager
By morning someone would die, but at that moment I couldn’t have known. The only thing I did know then was that I was feeling overwhelmingly out of place in her bathtub. A set of horse hooves brushed against the back of my head before the plastic animal dropped into the lukewarm water. She had her very own bathroom now; I felt a pang of something like pride, seeing how the tiles fitted all the way along the walls. This was my mother’s Act Two, Scene One, and I had come into possession of unwanted tickets (the reviews had been unforgiving in the past). She’d invited me in the hope I would rewrite my companion guide to us.
I was always going to come and see her, of course; it was so rare, the invitation. Despite the circumstances I still loved her.
‘Tommy, just come on up, I’ll have your stepdad collect you at the depot, you can stay the weekend, I’ll cook you hot meals, you can meet your little brother. Will you, bub, for him – do it for little Joe.’
I told her I had never met Darryl and he wasn’t my stepdad and she said, ‘Well, technically he is,’ and then I thought it best not to argue her logic since I was paying for the interstate phone call.
I arrived a week later at the bus depot; Darryl was there, waiting in a button-down that was tucked into jeans. My mother had told me he’d be waiting at the red ute, which he was. He was wringing his hands as I approached him and for a moment I thought he might be readying himself to clip me around the earhole or throw me an uppercut; my best defence was striding toward him with a hand outstretched to shake his. I never knew what to expect with her man of the moment.
There were rock ballads wafting on low volume, almost imperceptibly, on the stereo. Besides some unruly sideburns, Darryl was clean-shaven.
‘Your mum talks about you heaps, Tom.’
‘Oh yeah?’
‘Deadset.’
I leant back into my seat and closed my eyes and listened to the V8.
In the bath, I remembered the ocean roaring when I was a kid; most nights I’d dreamt of riding my BMX down my street, riding toward the sun being blocked out and a tidal wave coming toward me, I never turned back in the dream, I just kept riding and then woke up on impact. I remembered everything my mother didn’t. I remembered when my sister was being born in the hospital and the midwife said to push, push, push, and then she pushed and the midwife cried and my dad ran out of the room and some other woman’s baby was born at the same moment, and that woman’s baby was crying instead. Mum just looked at the midwife and said, ‘Isn’t that the most beautiful sound?’
I remembered the taste of coins, house keys, zipper ends – sometimes I could lick a brass key and all of my childhood would return. I remembered I used to pry conch shells off the reef, collect hot wattle flowers and suck out the honey inside; I used to feed the possums that came near my bedroom window at nights. They’d scratch at the fly screen until you pushed a bread crust out, I’d save them from school lunches. I remembered coming in from playing late, this time of night, then I would see my mother standing in the hall, leaning into the wall – she was always like that, she never rushed forward for an embrace, never bent down at the knees.
I remembered my real dad would come back after working seasons in the bush and bring huge gifts; once, I got a massive soft serpent and draped it on the end of my bed, it was taller than me. Our life on the coast was good, on our land. Then after I was initiated and Dad hadn’t come back for three years and I was twelve, Mum said I was all grown up then, said I was a big man and didn’t need her anymore and then she left. That was the cruel summer before my new life at the new school, the one that I got sent to in Sydney, the boarding college. I went to bed at 8.30 every night and woke at 6.30 every morning. I did homework almost every day, I graduated, and now I was halfway through university and the only thing that had ever been more than ordinary was visiting Mum every other summer. Wherever she was.
‘You done in there?’
‘Getting out now,’ I hollered back.
I stepped out of the bath, dried myself with the stiff towel, put the same clothes back on and went into the kitchen.
‘Listen, bub, the fuc— the stove is on its last legs, like the showerhead, THANK YOU HOUSING COMMISSION! So Darryl and Joe are going to stay in and have micro stuff. How bouts you and me go to the RSL for a baked dinner?’
‘Sounds good to me,’ I said.
‘Alrighty, gimme five,’ Mum said as she nipped into the bathroom.
‘So how’s university, mate?’ Darryl asked.
‘It’s good, it’s different a bit.’
‘Yeah? Lots of parties – I hear they have big parties at university?’
‘Not so much,’ I said, wiping steam out of my ear with the towel end as I leant down and tickled Joe on the tummy.
‘Don’t!’ he screamed at me and ran to the TV.
‘You want a beer?’
‘Alright, thanks,’ I said.
‘So you studying science?’
‘Biochemistry.’
‘What job you get after that, mate?’
‘Hopefully, um, become a doctor.’
‘Waah, that’s huge!’
‘Hopefully,’ I said in a little voice so he wouldn’t think I was trying to be a big man under his roof.
‘Let’s go then.’ Mum appeared with dark lipstick on and a nice floral dress.
‘Watch out!’ Darryl yelled, eyeing Mum.
Mum clip-clopped in her high heels to Darryl and put an arm around his waist and said, ‘I bought it for Tommy! You know Tommy here, when he was a little fella he always used to cry when I picked him up from school, he’d say Mummy why can’t you wear flower dresses like all the other mums – hahahaha I’d always be in me snooker shark gear, tight black jeans and stuff – he hated it!’
‘Did ya, mate? Was she an embarrassment?’
I laughed with them and acted as if my young self was an idiot.
‘Give us a lift, hun,’ Mum said, grabbing her handbag.
‘Alright, alright, but get a cab home, okay.’
‘Course, be good, Joey,’ Mum said, leaning down and putting lipstick on the top of his forehead.
‘He’s staying here?’ I said at the door.
‘Yeah, just be two minutes, mate, he’s watching telly.’
‘Let’s bring him in the car?’
‘Honest, mate, two minutes, he’ll be fine.’ Darryl and Mum were already out the door. I looked back at Joe watching a DVD of Nemo about a metre from the screen.
I pulled the door behind me and heard the deadlock click between my half-brother and me. I climbed into the ute next to Mum and the whole world felt out of place.
We arrived at the RSL quick enough and I went to the bathroom while Mum stood in line to order the roasts. In the bathroom I called the latest house number that I had of hers.
It rang for a long time, too long, and then finally someone was there yelling and out of breath: ‘Yeah?’
‘It’s me, Tommy, Mum just asked me to call and see if you got back to Joe alright.’
‘Everything’s fine, mate.’
‘Okay, bye then,’ I said and quickly hung up.
I joined the line, next to Mum, and she handed me a tray with cutlery.
‘This is like school.’
‘Is it? Whattya gunna have?’
‘I dunno, rissoles and chips?’ I announced it as a question to see if she approved.
‘Good as, Tommy, the rissoles are killer here.’
We took our food and schooners out into the beer garden so Mum could smoke.
‘So, whattya think of Darryl?’
‘I don’t have an opinion yet, he seems nice.’
‘He’s nice, Tommy, I promise you, not like the others, this one. Good as gold.’
‘That’s nice to hear.’
‘So cheers.’ She lifted her beer toward me and we clinked glasses. ‘Cheers to your first visit since high school!’
‘Yep, cheers,’ I said, making eye contact with the head of the beer.
‘You remember everywhere you visited me?’
‘I think so,’ I said, cutting open the hard, dry rissole while Mum lit a cigarette and took a good go at her own beer.
‘The first place I went for work was the rig, but you couldn’t visit me there.’
‘Tell me about the places you lived at, I’d like to hear.’ It was true, I liked the past, I liked remembering it and letting it go; it was like bringing down the walls of a dilapidated house, salvaging the frame.
‘So the first place I went to was the rig, it was board included, had to pass the test first, but passing wasn’t easy – I was up against men; even though my job was just going to be in the kitchen you still had to pass the training if there was ever gunna be an emergency – had to know how to escape from a helicopter, see, since that’s how we went there from land. We were in a simulator one, and