The Year of the Fruit Cake Read online

  His desk is 132 centimetres away from mine.

  He puts on this act whenever he decides I have invaded his sacrosanct workplace, whether the invasion is for social or work reasons. If I get even a half inch closer to him, he barricades himself with dripping put-downs.

  His desk is 132 centimetres away from mine.

  And my desk was there first. As was I. I have seniority. And we work together. Today he put on this act simply because he saw from my email to our boss that I’d finished the job in question. First he talked to our boss in front of my desk, as if I wasn’t there (not at his own desk, four feet away) and then… I cannot detail it. Humiliation.

  It’s not the first time. I need more fingers to count the times each week he pulls stunts like this.

  Enough with going to the toilet to hide, and examining my middle-aged female self in the mirror to see how this face could provoke such behaviour. To the firing line with him!

  I’m writing this in the library toilet (of course) and thinking that the library should be a stronger influence upon me than its toilet. I need to be a better observer.

  When I barged through the library to get to its safe, work-free toilet (the only place immediately accessible by me that is free from chattering gossip), there was someone already here. While I waited, I noticed a librarian pushing a trolley of red and blue drawers from one end of the room to the other. He walked jauntily, as if he had the best job in the universe. Maybe he does. My mindwipe means I have a restricted idea of what jobs there are. That’s why I need to retrieve more. It’s why every day in every way I push to find more memories.

  It’s not all about me. The error they made in deleting so much is affecting my ability to do the job assigned to me. Like the bloke on the next desk. I am not alone.

  This bloke, the librarian, may not be happy at all. He may have walked jauntily because of bio-mechanics. This is insider-thought. What I should be doing, only more knowledgably. The amazing lack of memory, the passionate hate (to the wall, I say!), the damned middle-aged body and its needs. I wish it were my friend on duty. She would understand.

  When I was first placed in this human suit, before traces of me myself returned, when I was home on sick leave due to an “emotional breakdown”, I read the work of anthropologists. I wanted to know what to think, how to act as a human anthropologist. It appears I am an extraordinarily dutiful person, in whatever skin.

  It didn’t work. It will never work. I am here in this bloody chocolate-addicted meat suit, two days (if I’m lucky and it comes on time) before my period, and I have to deal with too many turds, and I suddenly realise I don’t understand a thing. I have no special status. I have nothing. Normally I don’t have quite northing. Normally I have obscene levels of patience. Today, however, I have nothing.

  Unless I count being put down and ignored and treated as unreliable: I have that in spades.

  Next time I’m debriefed, I’ll give in all my reports, but I’ll also ask:

  Why me?

  Why here?

  Why on earth does this planet need misogynists?

  Am I permitted to shoot poison through my little finger at those who offend me?

  May I have a wall, please? And control over the line-up. And my very own ray gun.

  Notes towards an

  Understanding of the Problem

  These women astonish me, over and over. This is the third time I’ve checked those key episodes, and there are still surprises.

  It just goes to show how different the official view of humans is from the way this group lead the parts of their lives that we see. I watch human visual stories (am addicted right now to superhero narratives) and realise that the X-Men and Avengers films have nothing in common with the way these women tell their lives. The public face of humanity is exotically different from their private. No wonder we fell into the hole.

  This note isn’t about one of the episodes that have been identified as critical. It’s on the list that my predecessor regarded as “unjustly neglected” when the equations were redone. I’ve never been able to see why until now, though I did check the workings and they were right and this episode is, if not critical, at least rather important. This is why I’m noting it. No-one has given an explanation of it previously, and this means that it becomes more and more “unjustly neglected” and we fail to see the actual picture. Anything that remains so silent to me may help me get past this impossible sticking point.

  The notes on this episode now all declare that this is a transform­ational moment. It’s like that public/private face of humanity. It’s not listed as critical, and yet it’s transformational. This is one of the reasons for revisiting it.

  In my previous analyses, I couldn’t see its importance because I saw the personality attributes previously for each and every woman and also because it was in a place they had visited before, on a wet day (they meet for hot chocolate when it rains, or when someone has bad PMT—of course I’ve seen it all before, it’s cyclical) and both of these mean that it doesn’t fit with human public narratives. These things just aren’t important to the way humans describe themselves in their stories. What I realised today is that this is the first time that four of the women have demonstrated astonishment at something the fifth has said. And that human stories are misleading.

  Scene-setting: café with hard plastic table tops (fake marble), a clattering lino floor where the rain refuses to puddle, small cold draughts that peek around corners and surprise people.

  Too little space. Not even the regular daisies brought by Janet fitted on the table—the women had them in their buttonholes and their handbags and, in Trina’s case, decorating her mobile phone. Getting past anyone else to go to the counter or to check the weather outside is to beg bruises from those hard table tops or the jutting-out corners of the chairs. Janet’s stick has been tripped over four times since they sat down. To give an idea of this as an indicator, Janet’s stick is normally not a problem at all (she wields it almost as an extension of her body), so it creating a problem four times is significant.

  “It’s days like this I most need the stick,” said Janet, gloomily, “and it’s days like this where it most gets in the way.”

  “I’ve often thought that a stick would be handy,” Trina half-dreamed, “because then I could hit anyone who annoys me. Hard. On the shins. Or, even better: on the ankles. Or maybe the knee caps. All the places.”

  “Human reality,” replied Janet. “We never do. It’s a comforting thought, though, particularly when someone tries to talk over me and tell me what I think.”

  “Mansplaining again?” asked Diana, sympathetically. “I’ve been getting it all week.”

  “Not this time. A young, bright thing who feels that anyone over thirty must have lost their brain. Any woman over thirty,” she corrected, “for the guy after me didn’t get the condescending garbage, nor the kindergarten-level explanation. I’ve been in IT all my life, have gone to that shop for five years, and still no-one there accepts that I might possibly know what I’m doing. That I might be after a power cord for a machine I already own, and that I know what kind of machine it is and what kind of cord I need. And that the one I’m being handed has entirely the wrong plug.”

  “I know the feeling.” Diana’s body-language was emphatic in its agreement. “I’ve never been tempted to whack someone with a stick, but I’ve…er…withheld information.”

  “What do you mean?” Leanne was puzzled.

  “I give the guys one free pass. They can talk down to me one time a week. After that, I pretend their explanation is a story. I sit back and admire the way it’s told. I thank the teller-of-inventions very politely, and explain—using your experience today—that all I needed was a cable, but that I can get it round the corner if they don’t stock them. I vary the explanation to meet the story, of course.”

  “And you do? Go around the
corner?”

  “I normally go online,” admitted Diana. “One doesn’t have to face judgements of age and gender and IQ online. My bank balance is the only thing that’s judged.”

  “I’ve been buying online for years,” Antoinette said, “for the same reason. Shopping ought to be fun, not a series of humiliations.”

  “Oh, the joys of being a middle-aged female,” said Leanne.

  “What about you,” Diana asked her. “What do you do?”

  Leanne was silent for a moment, then said: “This is oddly difficult to explain. Give me a moment.”

  The small table was a pond of quiet in a busy café until Leanne was ready to speak again.

  “It’s such a small question,” she began, “But it triggered something I never talk about. “

  “You trust us,” breathed Trina, as if she’d been given the world’s greatest gift.

  “I do. Finding words is difficult when it’s something I never talk about, though.”

  “Take your time,” said Diana.

  She not only took her time, she wasn’t eloquent. Stops and starts and stutters and going back to the beginning because she missed something. What she spoke about wasn’t important to me. It was religious, for one thing, and not something that was important in and of itself. We don’t do religion. It’s a human thing. More story, really.

  I won’t transcribe or even fake-transcribe (which is what I do when I want to indicate what the women say, but don’t want to get bogged down in oh and um and ahs and oh—human language isn’t tight or controlled and it’s no use pretending that it can be got down literally and still make sense) so this will be quick.

  She believed in a deep, complex unity in the world. A profound unity to everything. When people are stupid and explaining in that way, they’re working against the goodwill that binds everyone. “It’s like climate change—we were thinking of ourselves and in not seeing the bigger picture, we damaged Earth and its other inhabitants.” She therefore took extra time with these poor souls and helped them realise what they needed to learn to be part of the wider good.

  Leanne meant none of this sarcastically. Her eyes shone with her genuine love of humankind.

  She then added that her explanations started off sympathetic but had been known to move to the sarcastic. “For educational purposes, of course. I can tolerate mansplaining by putting it in perspective, but I can never tolerate intentional stupidity.”

  I felt it should perhaps make the other women feel a bit queasy, but it didn’t. They were surprised, however. Janet had an instant explanation for the surprise. “You’re a scientist and one of those really pragmatic country women. I didn’t expect Gaia from you.”

  “No-one does.” Leanne was acerbic. “It’s why I don’t talk about it as a rule. It’s not Gaia in the normal way, anyhow. It’s a way of seeing the world. The universe. Complex and difficult to explain and I just made a terrible hash of it, but my theory and understanding of it is substantial. I don’t like talking about it because so many people think that the short summary is the whole, when all it indicates is that my philosophy exists.”

  “It’s a good approach, I think,” said Diana. “Turn a humiliating moment into a teaching moment.”

  “Creating a balance where none existed before,” Leanne nodded.

  “And this just proves that none of us are what others assume we are,” said Janet

  “And that we’re safe for each other. You wouldn’t believe how rare that is,” added Antoinette.

  “That’s why I can say this,” said Leanne. “I can’t talk about any­­­thing religious. What is it about our country, anyhow, where admitting to a sense of the numinous is either betrayal or the sign of a flittering mind?”

  And this puts a finger right on why Australia was chosen as the place from which to render Judgement. I’m not sure my people understand this thing humans call religion (in fact, I’m certain we don’t), but at least my people realised that religious countries would present an unnecessary obstacle to understanding humankind.

  Unless this is yet another mistake we made. Just how typical was this Australia? And was its capital city identical to the other places? This is something I have not yet explored. I shall give an order to have these questions researched. They are almost definitely immaterial, but, to be safe, we will check.

  Also the religion matter. I’ve no doubt it’s an issue of small concern, despite Leanne’s personal caution in bringing the matter up, but it never hurts to be careful.

  “You’re the wrong person to betray anyone or wander about with your mind a-flitter,” said Diana. “You’re the most practical person I know. Despite all the science and stuff you do.”

  “CWA-central, that’s you,” Trina suggested. “Makes it easy to see your belief and to accept it. Easier, anyhow. I’m not certain I get deep understanding of the universe. I get that you have a big mind and can see things I can’t, is all.”

  “You get people, though,” said Antoinette.

  “People…” scoffed Trina, “People are easy. In so many meanings of the word.”

  It might have been my imagination, but it seems to me that the laughter was uneasy. Between Gaia and sex jokes, the conversation had veered into dangerous regions. UnAustralian directions.

  This explains the surprise. No-one was expecting religion from Leanne. Any religion. If I had intervened as a time-traveller (in human form, of course), and said “Religion! Leanne!” they’d have assumed she could be described using a standardised denomination: Church of England, or maybe High Church Catholic. At a stretch, Methodist. All Christian. All common enough in Australia. This is normative, as far as I can discover.

  The official statistics are unreliable on this subject, as Australians tend to turn their answer to the religious question into a joke and label themselves Pastafarians or Jedi Knights, or they put an answer that they believe gives what’s expected, which is either Church of England or Catholic.

  My assumptions on what is normative rely on indirect evidence. There must be human studies of this, but my aides can’t find them, which means they weren’t collected for the earlier studies, and, of course, I need strong cause to seek out more information, given the circumstances.

  My assumptions will suffice.

  Leanne had a religion that looked to the others as woo-woo. Not something normative. “Woo-woo” is what it was called at the time, popularly. Pagan, half self-invented, half borrowed. Emotive rather than intellectual. “Gaia” was not entirely a neutral description of it. And yet…this was Leanne. And she had intellectualised it, being Leanne.

  After the surprise, they accepted it. They found explanations for it. They tried to understand.

  “One day I’d like to know how you came to where you are,” commented Janet. “One day.”

  Leanne laughed at the comment. “One day I’d like to know that, too. Today is not that day.”

  “You really don’t know?” asked Diana.

  “I was making a Lord of the Rings joke.” Leanne sat up tall to reinforce her dignity and the fact that she’d expected her friends to get the joke, and that she was deeply, deeply disappointed in them. When Leanne sat up tall, everyone else was diminished.

  This is what properly dispelled the surprise. From then on, Leanne’s religion and, later, when she talked about it, Janet’s more codified Wiccan belief, were accepted as simply part of their lives. I thought for a while those flowers Janet gave out were religious in nature, but the evidence is clear that she just happened to have them with her the first time they met. She even said once: “I like creating traditions, and this is a nice one to create.”

  Although the others were rather normative in their Christianity, they all admitted that they had no real religious belief, that Christianity was more cultural to them. Herein lies the reason I didn’t question the whole human/religion thing earlier. Really, it�
�s not that dramatic an issue for these women, and they are central to the fate of humankind, so one would expect that they’d be representative.

  “An excuse for Christmas,” Antoinette said.

  “An excuse for Halloween,” Trina added.

  “It’s all about dress-up and food and presents. I do those with the family,” Leanne agreed. “That’s not religion. Not unless you have maybe a morsel of belief and admit that there are other things.”

  “I believe in aliens,” suggested Diana.

  “Religiously?” asked Leanne.

  “No, factually.”

  “Doesn’t count. I have a Jewish friend who says that Santa Claus existed as a person, and that doesn’t make her a religious Christian either. It makes her a destroyer of belief, for she tells everyone that Santa died some time ago.”

  “Fair enough.” Diana was not worried about this at all. She was also not worried that she appeared to be the only one who believed in aliens. In this group, they accepted differences. Some of them deep, some shallow, but differences. That, I knew. Maybe the surprise came when the differences didn’t fit in with the personality of the speaker. Like the time Diana ordered herbal tea.

  I think I’m getting the hang of humans. And I think I understand why this particular episode is on the list of ones that were influential. If I were religious in a human way, I would believe in miracles.

  It opens many doors for research.

  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.

  I’m so lonely.