The Year of the Fruit Cake Read online

  This meeting had been called for Trina. The love of her life had sent her something from a distant city. That was all the other women knew. All she would say. That, and that Trina wanted to marry her.

  Trina was torn between the rule of law forbidding their marriage, and the fact that her love wasn’t quite certain about a permanent relationship in any case. They shared lifegoals and were a very political couple, and Trina’s love was always travelling to persuade this person or the other that marriage rights were not something that could be delayed. That equal rights counted for all.

  “I’m not quite ready,” was her excuse when asked about her own marriage. Trina’s excuse was that this didn’t stop her being in love or having a relationship. Trina found this exceptionally ironic.

  Diana found it puzzling. Diana found a lot puzzling. The others found themselves forever explaining their actions to her until they had wiped the confused look off her face. It was a hobby. They had descended on her table, and that carried with it a burden of explanation ever after. Just as she was most likely to find a table and hold it for the others, they were prone to explaining. Their tiny set of specialisations.

  Diana understood a lot of things in a general kind of way, but didn’t find it easy to apply her knowledge with any kind of understanding. She didn’t understand why Trina put on makeup and went on the town like a young thing. Having a good time wasn’t something she’d done when she was young, she explained, with slight diffidence.

  “Your voice is too gentle,” Antoinette said, that night. “I fear as if the wrath of heaven will rain down on me.”

  “I know what you mean,” agreed Janet, who had finally arrived. She put down her bag and other accessories and slumped into the vacant chair with a sigh. “Just like it’s raining down on me now, outside.” The water rose from her in a faint breath. “My favourite teacher in school was just like that. Sweet and soft, and gave us all detention. So much detention.”

  “I bet it was the best subject in the universe,” said Trina.

  “Of course it was. If it weren’t for the detention.”

  “Teenager wrestled?”

  “For now. I’ll have to reinforce the edict later.”

  “How long later?”

  “An hour, I’m afraid.”

  “Just enough time for a chat,” said Diana.

  “Just,” agreed Janet. “And to get a bit dry before it rains on me again. Even the wood I carry is soggy.”

  I still can’t believe that these conversations were consequential. Honestly. Look at them. Take your time.

  Nothing important was said. Even if you count these intimate lives of small people as world-shaking (which, for the most part, intimate lives of small people aren’t), nothing important was said. And yet, we know the outcome of these ordinary conversations between five very dull people.

  We know the outcome, but we’re not sure it was the conversations.

  That’s what I’m here for.

  I want to write about super-technologies. About drama and the moment before death. About cliffs and people hanging from them. I want to write action and suspense and thrills and… murder. I’d love to write about murder. Also, mayhem. Mayhem would be entertaining to write about. All this story stuff is exciting. Alien and cool and rather fun. Why don’t I have exciting things to write about?

  Instead of mayhem, murder, thrills, chills or spills, I have been given an assignment so important that I can’t see where the interest is. It’s not that I’m bored (or maybe I am, just a little bored), it’s that I’m writing down the actual real-life conversations of five middle-aged women. I’ve travelled across a galaxy-and-a-half to obtain them. I’ve learned their native language in order to write precisely. I’m embedded in their culture. Doesn’t make me less bored. I’m like Janet’s half-wrestled teenager.

  Pivotal moments should not rest upon mugs of steaming chocolate and glasses of café latte and small pools of water turning a walking stick into a bridge across unplumbed depths. Except that, in this instance, one seems to. That moment was epochal. I know this for a fact. The numbers prove it.

  I don’t doubt the decision, I just wish I could see something interesting in the moment. And I’ve been deputed to write it. “With human style,” I was told. “As fits the story. Before you do your analysis. Or maybe as an aspect of your analysis. We need to understand. It’ll be easy, since you’re researching in a human language.”

  That’s how important this is. It’s become a story. Something so change-inducing that we have to narrate it in a friendly and approachable and alien manner, lest we scare ourselves and everyone else. When did stories become acceptable? Sixty-one years ago they were unknown.

  It happened sixty-one Earth years ago. Still sending shockwaves today. And so we research and we write and I compose chatty notes for the English version, in the hope that it’s not too worrying. In the hope we find answers. In fact, I’ve been told to find answers. Make recommendations. Fix things. The tale is but a tool. Most of the records so far have bogged down in analysis, or in entertainment. They want results this time. We need results.

  We’ve reached a changepoint: we’re in trouble if we can’t find out how and why this thing happened. Terrifying trouble.

  Conversations about chocolate and children and lovers and the small details of ordinary lives. They can’t turn six civilisations upside down. Except they did, and I must tell you of them.

  Maybe we’ll understand this time. It’s what I’m here for, and I’ll keep myself out of the story as much as I can (except when I forget), and I’ll use narratives from the files when I can, but I’m not promising excitement. I’m also not promising that I’ll keep myself out of the story, since I’m here, anyway, and I’m expected to develop opinions.

  It would still be more fun if there were mayhem.

  The Observer’s Notes

  To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up.

  —Oscar Wilde, read online (quotation not verified)

  Hair. I hate it. I want to depilate forever and never have to get it cut, or walk the aisles in search of shampoo, or comb it down after sleeping, after a breeze, after sitting in a tall chair: I want it gone.

  Today, someone stupid suggested I get the colour changed. Purple streaks would be nice, she said. Make me look younger, she said. Make me less intimidating, she said. Once you reach a certain age, she said, it’s better if you look approachable.

  When I told my husband, he half-agreed. Thought it might be nice. I wondered if colouring my hair would turn me into the wife of his heart rather than the wife of his preference. If hair-colour changes something as profound as that, we shouldn’t be married. And yet we’re happy, in our way. This means he’s wrong. He does that from time to time. Says wrong things because he thinks they’re what I need to hear.

  That woman is even more wrong. Why would I want to look less intimidating? It’s possible to be both civilised and feral, and my face should show this. Not always. Just when it counts. Like in that moment when a young woman suggested that looking less intimidating was a path one should travel. This one should not travel that path. Ever. It’s important my face be able to communicate, since the other parts of my body have limited capacity to politely express disagreement.

  I hate that woman. She has a name, but I do not deign to use it. She is many years junior to me and she knows everything. Her life is easy, so of course she knows everything. It’s easy to know everything when one lacks experience. The kinder life is the less one knows and the more judgements one makes.

  She made many judgements about me. We talked for a whole evening, and she never stopped judging and judging and judging. Expecting me to act on her judgements. All of them. She left no room for me to negotiate or discuss or reason. All she left me was outright refusal.

  It wasn’t only the hair. It was the career. The marriage. The oth
er marriage. The loss of a child. The illnesses. My child would still be alive if my child were her child, she implied. This makes me wonder whose child it was. It also makes me wonder how anyone can live with so much judgement inside them. How they can hate so easily while being so very friendly?

  I got the feeling that everything would have been well between us if I only made a bit more of an effort to look the way she expected. Less like one of the crowd. Except that she also wanted me to look more like one of the crowd. Less like A Woman with Issues and Almost at Menopause. Less intimidating. More rebellious. Less my own age. More hers. She judged my life by how I look. Such a shallow young lady. So condemnatory.

  I don’t want to look different.

  Even if I wanted to, I’m not allowed to. I’m stuck with shoulder-length hair because women my age have hair this length and in this style if they have faces the same shape as mine. I have to go into the hairdresser and tell the young lady to “keep it simple.” And she does. Simple and within the tenets of normaldom. When she tells me I should change, it just makes me hate her as well as my hair. It doesn’t give me permission to draw attention to myself.

  Right now I wonder what I had before I had hair, why my hair is such a damned nuisance now. Fur? Scales? Bone ridges? Something other, that’s inconceivably alien to me as a human?

  I know there was something, because half a memory breaks through from time to time. Half a memory. The bad half. The half that tells me: “This bit of life was easier back home. You could change colour and you had those limbs to communicate with.” What colours was I changing? What limbs did I use to help me be rude to fools? How were they articulated? There’s a joke in there, about articulation enabling articulate and polite put-downs. There’s no hair in that memory of mine.

  It lets me remember just enough to know that I didn’t need a bloody hairdryer. Nuisance memory.

  My life was easier when the memory had been completely effaced and I lived in this body as if it were natural. I wasn’t less angry then. I didn’t know where the anger came from. That was the only difference. Now I know where it comes from, I have options. I don’t need to feel guilty at looking ordinary: I can plan revenge.

  I’m going to pretend I had spikes once upon a time. Long ones. Sharp ones. Golden ones. Attack spikes.

  And we’re back to humans I hate. It would be so much easier to not hate, to just be left alone. Except being left alone is what causes the isolation, the despair, the hate. I bet I had attack spikes and I bet I knew how to use them. I am a unicorn among women.

  Notes towards an

  Understanding of the Problem

  “What do you hate today?” This was Trina’s favourite question. She began conversations with it, given a chance. It had become a bit of a ritual, like Janet bringing daisies. When neither of these happened, the rest of the group felt that their luck was out. Superstitions are, I think, bits of fragmented culture that have lost their ancestral links and not yet found a home in the new order. Stray integers without an equation. Some are fading and will soon be lost. Some attach themselves elsewhere and confuse the cultural streams. Story is problematic in this way—it produces superstition. Stray integers are safer, to my mind.

  Trina didn’t hate much at all, as a rule. She just liked the question and its answers. “I express myself so forcefully that there’s no room in me let for hate,” she’d explained once. “It’s all in the clothes.”

  “But you hate the Federal Government.” Leanne was bewildered, for Trina had spent almost the whole of their previous meet-up being angry at a vast array of current political decisions.

  “That’s different,” Trina said. “How could I even come close to approving of what’s being done to people in our name on Manus?”

  Diana nodded and said, “Sometimes, we have to be clear.”

  “Totally,” said Trina. And so began the “What do you hate today?” conversation, which became a tradition very quickly. Trina’s normal opening gambit became everyone’s.

  Today the first hate was Donald Trump, followed narrowly by the suffering the Syrians were still enduring.

  “There are some times in our lives when something evil trumps even our personal issues,” said Antoinette.

  “You and your puns,” Janet smiled across, complicitly.

  “Personal hurts are important, though,” said Leanne.

  “I only talk about them when I’m ready,” Antoinette shot in a reply before anyone else, as if she were staking a claim or avoiding being put on trial. More the latter, I think. Although one can never be quite sure, when one is reliant on human faces and body language. It tells as many lies as truth. Or as many truths as lies, for that matter. Maybe she meant what she said literally? “I can tell you now my parents disowned me, but…”

  “Not ready to tell us why,” said Leanne, wryly.

  “May never be ready to tell you why. There are too many uncert­ainties.”

  “Friends can be counted on for this sort of thing. Even when family can’t.” Leanne wanted to pursue the thought. The moment when personal hurts had to be talked about because they were important.

  “Just proves,” said Trina, “that all of your hurts are things that you feel safe talking about. I have a friend who can’t talk about his childhood. He can’t talk with anyone. I only know about it because we were at school together. I saw him beaten up and ostracised by everyone but me, and he has scars on top of his scars. The beating-up was because of his ancestry, but the thing from his childhood is abuse. I’d never ask him to talk about it. His trust has eroded.”

  “He’s Catholic,” said Diana, almost tentatively.

  “Well, he is, but that’s not the point. He didn’t have to be. Just because we’re talking about those paedophile priests now doesn’t mean that there isn’t abuse elsewhere. And he ought never be pushed on it.”

  “Surely nothing like that applies here.” Leanne was confident for her friends.

  “Other people hurt. Other people were endangered. Not people you know?” Diana turned to face Leanne directly. It was obvious to the others that she was hiding her own hurt and that she was trying to make this clear without admitting anything.

  Trina replied for everyone. “It doesn’t matter whether we do or we don’t. It’s wrong to push a person into talking about it. I’m volunteering to talk about my hurt, but I’ll never, ever make someone else talk about theirs. How do we know—” she said, her hands beginning to speak in the same key as her voice—“How do we KNOW that our friends aren’t on the edge of suicide?”

  “We can help them.” Leanne’s voice echoed vast confidence in her ability to solve the world’s problems.

  “Only if they’ll let us,” said Janet, quietly. “Pushing help on someone is taking advantage of their defencelessness. It’s another form of abuse. I’ve been there and will fight it, every time, even if it means I act like a disobliging bitch.”

  “Only if they’ll let us, yes. And only if they’re ready. That’s why you always, always wait.”

  “I don’t get it,” said Leanne, stubbornly. “Why shouldn’t we help whenever we can?”

  “Manus Island is what the government thinks of as help,” said Diana, unexpectedly. “It’s cruel and…and…”

  “Inhuman,” Antoinette provided.

  “Yes, inhuman.” Diana took up this word with relief. “But it’s being done to help Australia, and to help other refugees by preventing them from coming here. And it’s a complete failure on all grounds. The ‘help’ hurts.’”

  “While this is all very nice and ethical,” Leanne abruptly changed her tone, “I didn’t come here to be lectured. I came for chocolate and light conversation.”

  “Light,” said Janet. “Not like the bread I made on Sunday, then.”

  “Tell us about that bread,” said Trina.

  This is another problem with the human record.
I can’t know what they would have said if the conversation had not been turned aside. All I know is that one of them has secrets, and that these might be the secrets that damned the human race. If Antoinette had spoken honestly, at that moment, would there be no problem now? And what was Janet referring to?

  Maybe not. Perhaps what was too big for these women to talk about was nothing at all in the reality of what was happening around them. Humans are like that.

  My problem with writing about humans is that, in order to write about one, I virtually have to become one. Alien studies require changing, chameleon-like, the way our neighbours change their genders. It’s supposed to be effortless and natural. God, I wish it were. Sometimes I’d exchange my few difficult gender shifts for their many, easy ones, and the way they turn each into a lifestyle with new body parts and different coloration.

  Humans judging other humans for the hurt they’ve inflicted would be very useful for my needs, thank you. This whole project ought to be about all the damage inflicted by humans on themselves and on each other. Like the Hitler study. That presented us with our approach to humanity—the need to interpret from inside in order to understand. It was a neat and classic study of an obvious evil.

  The classic study was wrong. Humans don’t see themselves the way the Scholars did when they were bringing it together. They don’t act that way for the most part. The Hitler study points to something so nasty that a whole species was easily condemned by its outcome, but it also might point to something that’s an aberration for the species. It translated into mathematics easily enough, but I’m not convinced we understood that humans don’t use mathematics the way we do. I’m worried we went astray by making that translation at that point.

  The study was completed well before the twenty-first human century, and was one of the major reasons humans were listed as potentially in need of Judgement. Would everything have been such a mess if the Hitler study had been the great success everyone claims? Would I be evaluating an event that’s technically dead and gone if we’d had any idea how that event actually unrolled?