The Year of the Fruit Cake Read online

  What they definitely did together was working for equal opportunities. Their focus was on marriage. Not just theirs. Just not theirs. It depends on which narrative I follow.

  And the personal price for these politics was vast. They didn’t see each other often. Their children had one local parent. They worked the equivalent of two jobs each. Trina’s partner had initially accepted an interstate job for a period, because it gave her the oppor­tunity to lobby a different group of politicians. They were sacrificing their daily happiness for the common good. They were growing apart. And it hurt.

  This is why Trina was not religious, she claimed. What god would permit such irony and such pain? This reading of their narrative supports both narratives. Whether they were in a long-term relationship or not, they were growing apart. And it hurt.

  Just as she accepted the religion of the others in my group, so my group accepted Trina’s agnosticism.

  They each talked about their pasts and their present and their plans with astounding honesty. I know so much about these women. I can’t pull up several conversations to review because they hurt too much. They demonstrate without doubt that humans are cruel and deserve to be destroyed. Leanne’s life alone would cry for that outcome. I can’t even talk about it.

  So many incidents are left out of this compilation because I cannot face those moments again.

  The closer I get to these women, the more grateful I am not to be the Judge. The more I know about the cruelty of humans, the less I understand why it all went so extraordinarily awry.

  I do, however, begin to understand why chocolate took on such importance. It was a subject to return to when matters became dangerous. It was a sanctuary in a world that was sometimes beyond bearing.

  The Observer’s Notes

  Those who follow unique paths tend not to be followers. Mind you, they’re often not leaders, either. They can change everything, or they can change only their own lives. It’s very hard to know.

  —said in a meeting

  Popular culture is a terrible thing. It helps me understand, because I can see the cultural unreason that lies beneath apparent logic when I am aware of what to look out for. That woman over there, for instance, is dressed for Parliament House. I know this, for here I sit in a committee room at Parliament House, attending a meeting in my guise of ordinary citizen of this world, and her clothes make her nearly inconspicuous. It takes the eyes of an anthropologist to spot the importance of the clothes.

  I visit this building ironically often, considering my real self.

  Every time I go through Security, I’m tempted to look an official in the eyes and say “Take me to your leader.” That’s not how it works, of course, but it’s always tempting. I always resist the tempt­ation.

  I seldom resist popular culture.

  I’m not dressed to reflect my inner self, and neither is this young lady. She is dressed to reflect a character in a popular TV series. Very current. Bright and cheerful and slim and intellectual and a superhero or a superhero’s sidekick-in-the-making. Geek glasses, a trim figure, hair tied back in a single pony tail. Not quite decorous. Not quite professional. Ready to be turned into fiction.

  The secret worlds of humans can so often be seen through their clothing choices.

  “I’m going to be a superhero,” these clothes say. “I belong here, in Parliament House, even though I’m fifteen years younger than everyone else in this meeting. I don’t need dignity, for I have story.”

  The speaker, on the other hand, has long white pearls and a long white blazer, and is a long white woman with shoulder-length grey hair. Her voice is produced with effort. The attempts she makes to sound important tug at her tone. It transforms a naturally warm voice to a pale voice. A white voice. A long white voice, even for the effort of the speaker, makes it an effort to hear, and time slows to a halt. She ought not try so hard.

  It is in this moment of no-time that I wonder if my records about these people will ever be useful to anyone else.

  Why am I recording this culture? Why am I recording it doubly? Why do I write these notes as well as sending the material back home? I must be crazy. I ought not try so hard. I should be like the young woman and be ready to shuck off my outer layer and turn into a superhero at a moment’s notice. Yet here I sit on the comfortable chair, eyeing off the biscuits (for they always do good biscuits here) and wondering why I bother.

  Something nags inside me. I feel as if change is imminent.

  Notes towards an

  Understanding of the Problem

  It was the day of disasters. It was signalled by Janet forgetting to bring daisies (which she never did) and all of the women forgetting their chocolate entitlement (another thing that never, ever happened). Diana was the worst affected.

  Diana was late because she came from home, where she’d been sent to work when the office caught fire. This in itself was bizarre. “It wasn’t the office itself,” Diana explained to her friends when they compiled their various miseries over lunch. “It was the machine room downstairs.”

  “That’s a pity,” said Janet. “I had a wonderful image of an open plan office spontaneously bursting into flames. I detest open plan offices.”

  “It would’ve been nice, wouldn’t it?” said Antoinette. “A glor­iously fiery end to a sick building.”

  For Diana’s building was notoriously sick. The sickest, they were told, in the region. This wasn’t the first time she had been sent home and it wouldn’t be the last. The number of illnesses produced by the building was notoriously high, too, but no-one wanted to take the blame or spend enough money to find out what was wrong, and so things continued and continued. Except for today, of course.

  “I was lucky that we’d planned lunch,” Diana said. “It’s the only good thing today.”

  “So what else has happened,” asked Leanne, “besides spontaneous combustion?”

  “More a meltdown, I think. The fumes were terribly plastic and foul. Though possibly started by spontaneous combustion.”

  For a few minutes, the five played around with the details of how the building caught fire and what might have happened. Diana hadn’t been sent home until the smell became unbearable. Eventually, they decided that since she could smell them from the fourth floor, the ventilation ducts were probably to blame.

  “For everything?”

  “Nah, just for you being sent home. The chemicals you would’ve breathed in if you’d stayed.”

  “Let’s get back to the critical question,” urged Leanne. “What else has gone wrong? You said there was more.”

  “My printer died before work. And my saucepan melted. All over the stovetop.”

  “Your saucepan melted?” Trina was disbelieving.

  “I was making jam,” Diana defended. “Finishing it off. Last night it just wouldn’t finish and I wanted to go to bed, so I turned it off and decided to finish before work this morning. Except I didn’t turn it quite off.”

  “My God,” said Leanne, “You were lucky that you didn’t get more than a melted saucepan. In fact, congratulations on being alive today.”

  “Maybe your work’s machine room took the heat?” suggested Trina.

  “Either way, it was shocking to wake up to. Then I burned my toast while I was trying to fix the printer and I spilled coffee all over the floor. Not just coffee, wet coffee grounds. It was an awful mess. Then I made tea instead and nearly scalded myself. I gave up and went to work and everything was fumes and the lift wasn’t working and the electricity was out and everything was soggy and they sent us home. Except home was dreadful.”

  “Soggy?” Antoinette was fascinated.

  “Firemen, I think. I can’t be sure, though. Explanations were not forthcoming. Nor was time off. We were told to work from home for the rest of the week.”

  “They gave you time to collect everything?”
<
br />   “Not really.”

  “Then maybe it wasn’t the ventilation ducts?”

  “I bet it was, and I bet they were worried about fumes. You know, and people’s lungs?”

  “I didn’t think of that. Still, you can’t work without stuff to work on and with.”

  “I can do some,” admitted Diana. “I do work in the evenings, so I have some material I had with me, and there are a couple of things I can get on with. Not without a printer, though.”

  The group batted the idea around and came to a conclusion, which Diana resisted strongly, but which she was very relieved about. Trina, being the group chronicler, summarised it: “So we’re going to all play hooky this afternoon, find Diana a printer and make sure nothing more goes wrong.”

  “And that she’s OK,” added Janet, anxiously.

  “I thought that was a given.”

  Diana made one last attempt at protesting. “But I’m already OK. I said that before.”

  “And we’ve said twice that you’re in shock and shouldn’t be left alone. Too many crises. Too much happening.”

  “Think of it this way,” Antoinette had the last word. “We’ve been saying for a while that we needed to do stuff together apart from eating chocolate and getting fat. This is it. We’re taking you shopping, spending the afternoon on the town, and then installing your printer and cleaning your kitchen.”

  “I’d rather go to the art gallery than paint the town red,” said Diana wistfully. “I’ve not been for longer than I care to remember.”

  “I like this much better than painting anything red,” said Leanne.

  And so it was decided.

  The art gallery was enlightening for Diana, and the printer shopping for everyone else. Let me start with the printer shopping. It happened that same day, for one thing, because of Diana’s state, and it was short and sweet and won’t take me a morning to describe.

  Have I ever said how much I love our technology? I love that I can access all these details from the record. It might cost a fortune, but I’m not the one who’s paying and it makes writing this narrative possible. Turning events into the sort of analysis methods that Earth uses would be so much harder without this level of detail. And then the only way of describing and analysing events would be our own. Our own works nicely for us, but one can’t take a high level of decision about another race without understanding how they see themselves and how they analyse themselves. That is why, in this case, story is important. I don’t see how humans can write story and leave themselves out, however. Unlike maths, the individual has to be in there somewhere. I choose to make it obvious. Now. That’s all.

  OK, so that’s not all. It’s because I can’t see how they do it. I’m copying Diana’s techniques and her writing style partly because it’s useful for analysis, but mostly because otherwise the culture is beyond my understanding. Diana is my bridge into the alien. And I’ve never said how very alien it is on some of the matters I address here. You can see that for yourself.

  On so many other things, humans are just like us, but on this matter of story, they’re…strange. I need every tool I can get to write this up. Then I’ll do the usual analysis, but it has to be coming from an Earth point of view, for the sake of understanding and justice.

  So, in human narrative terms, I’m not writing this chronologically. It’s printer first, because of the focus on Diana.

  In an ordered world, the women would have shared their opinions one after another, in a hierarchical way. The hierarchy between those five kept shifting, however, and as they went to the electronics shop, it shifted at least three times. All of them knew how to buy a printer and all of them wanted to advise, and only one didn’t want to lead in the advice. While they walked, Diana listened and nodded and tap-tapped on her mobile phone.

  “What are you doing?” Leanne finally asked. “Should we be quiet?”

  “Not at all,” said Diana, equably. “I’m not only listening, but taking your advice on board. I’ve narrowed it down to two choices, both of which are in-store.”

  “I thought,” said Trina, slowly, “that you were more passive.”

  “I’m an observer,” Diana observed, “I like watching and seeing what goes on. That’s not the same thing as passive. And I’m not in shock over the printer. It’s a nice focus, in fact, and is stopping me melting down entirely. I didn’t know how close I was to the edge until I stopped running. I’m more worried about the melted saucepan. Also, I’m not sure I know how to set the printer up. New electronics bewilder me. My brain works differently to them.”

  “I can set it up for you,” suggested Janet.

  “And I’m certain the rest of us can take care of the stove and any mess,” Leanne volunteered.

  “That would make the biggest difference,” Diana said. “If I can keep it together for long enough to get this printer, then I can stop. My husband’s interstate right now, and out of phone reach until five, so I can’t even ring him.”

  “Another of those national park things? Bad timing,” consoled Trina. “I love his job, but hate that he’s not here when things go wrong.”

  “They wouldn’t be quite so wrong if he’d been home. He’s the sort of person who double checks to make sure everything’s turned off. I just do things and assume I’ve done them properly. This isn’t the first time bad things have happened because of that,” Diana admitted.

  “Do you still want the Art Gallery?” asked Antoinette. “For we can always meet there tomorrow after work, instead. It’s late night opening tomorrow. And maybe today has left you a bit tired?”

  “I think that’d be sensible,” said Diana. “If you don’t mind. I really want to have a break, but if I have to face today’s mess tomorrow…and he’s not home until Sunday. I don’t really want to deal with it alone. I didn’t know this.” Her voice was full of self-wonderment.

  “You already look as if today’s mess is too much.” Leanne’s face and voice gave the same message: sharp, but caring. “Let’s get you that printer, get you home, and sort you out. Then you can have some quiet time.”

  Diana asked the sales assistant to recommend the least-returned from her final list of machines. She bought it and some ink, and the group arranged to meet at Diana’s house. Jane went back with Diana, to set up the printer and get rid of the dead one.

  “I know a primary school that could use it. The kids take it apart under supervision. It gives them confidence with electronics, I believe,” she said. “Unless you have other thoughts…”

  “That sounds like a good place for it to go.” Diana’s voice was tired, her mind was almost beyond thinking, so she sat in the comfortable chair and let the fatigue roll over her.

  Trina and Leanne arrived at that point and took charge of the kitchen, setting it to rights. Neither of them was judgemental. They were purely practical.

  Halfway through, Antoinette finally turned up. Diana half rose from her chair to open the door, but Janet said: “Stay seated, I’ve got this.” And she did.

  With Antoinette came afternoon tea. “I thought it might help you sort the jitters,” she explained, as she handed Diana a hot chocolate and a pastry.

  When Diana’s friends were all done with afternoon tea, they tidied everything, washed dishes, took out the rubbish, and left Diana to rest. Diana decided that the afternoon tea would suffice for dinner and she prepared for bed. There were still fumes in her clothes from the machine room meltdown and still fumes in her kitchen from the saucepan meltdown, so she opened her bedroom window and let the cold in. Then she had a hot bath.

  Her day ended a lot better than it began.

  The woman’s slow voice...

  was counting again

  One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty
-three, twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five, thirty-six, thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty, forty-one, forty-two.

  Some numbers have a significance in and of themselves. We try to find something in our lives at that moment that enhances this significance. This is me at forty-two.

  If my life has a real story, it belongs somewhere in Douglas Adams’ imagination, apparently in the section that deals with normal people who undergo strange, extraordinary experiences. This is why forty-two is important to me. It’s a Douglas Adams number and me, I’m a science fiction fan. I’m not sure I know where my towel is. I’m reasonably sure I’m not being experimented upon by mice. I do know that I calculate my existence and count my life, and maybe also measure, in coffee spoons. Numbers are important. I don’t need special events to make them so. Symbolism, however, helps. Attributed values.

  All I did the year I turned forty-two was change jobs. I moved from one job to another. Nothing externally exciting. Nothing for anyone who doesn’t see symbolism in numbers.

  I always remember turning forty-two. It’s one of my important years. It’s the year I name aloud when I want to list how false my life is. The number balances precisely all the different things that I am and that I should be.

  The Observer’s Notes

  There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.

  —Elie Wiesel, read online (quotation not verified)

  There are terror attacks in France. I don’t know the specific places.

  That’s not true. And it’s very true. I know each location in one way. I visited when I was in my twenties. I wasn’t just a tourist, either. I stayed with Micheline, who had been my pen friend since I was ten. I look at the pictures of Paris and think “I know this”, but I don’t. My memory knows these places, but it’s artificial memory. I hate artificial memory. It always leads me astray.