Jane Eyre (#116)

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

What I said then:

Because I should, I suppose. (side note --- sheesh, can you sense my reluctance?)

What I say now:

Fucking Jane Eyre. 

Okay, before I start ripping into an acknowledged classic, I should at least own up to the fact that it was absolutely the wrong book at the wrong time. I doubt I'd have loved it no matter when I read it, but coming at the height of my Christmas-retail-insanity inspired snarkiness, I don't think I'm going to give it a very fair hearing. So please, take all these criticisms with a grain of salt, I'm almost certainly gonna bag it way more than it deserves.

So Jane, the titular character, is an orphan who's looked after by her mean aunt. Then she gets sent to a badly run school where her best friend dies. Then we skip ahead about eight years, and Jane leaves the school to become a governess, working for the mysterious, brooding Mr. Rochester. She falls in love with him. But (gasp!) Mr. Rochester has a dark secret that will keep them apart. Etcetera, etcetera. I bet you can't guess how it ends.

The novel is written in the first person, from Jane's point-of-view. Unfortunately, I found Jane to be a very dull character. She is, in her own quiet way, entirely good ... which is a fact that doesn't really lend itself to a dramatic narrative. While Jane has many obstacles placed in front of her, it's utterly predictable how she'll react to all of them, because she's entirely good. She has no inner turmoil, no personal demons to face, because she's entirely good. She's boring as hell, because she's entirely good.

Mr. Rochester, on the other hand, is kind of a prick. Sarcastic and mean, there's never any hint of a reason why Jane should fall in love with him (except for the fact that he's the only adult male she's ever had any prolonged contact with). Jane herself goes out of her way to inform us that he's ugly, ill-tempered, callous and cruel. So, to me, the entire 'romance' was without foundation, and therefore hopelessly compromised. I could feel nothing for either of them, because I couldn't see any reason why they'd feel anything for each other.

Huge chunks of the book have no bearing on the rest of the story. There's a very long sequence at the beginning with Jane as a young girl, first at her aunt's house and then at school. This takes up nearly a quarter of the book, yet has no real bearing on the movement of the narrative. In my edition, (spoilers ahead) Jane and Rochester attempt to be married for the first time on page 380. That could easily have been page 80, for all the import that the early scenes had on what followed.

Also, there's a 'mad' character. And I know Bronte was writing before the whole science of psychology even existed, but her treatment of insanity was unsympathetic and inane. It really annoyed the hell out of me.

And THEN, if all that wasn't enough to piss me off, about three-quarters of the way in to the novel, the whole story turns on a narrative coincidence so preposterous, so ridiculous, so unlikely, so ... well ... so fucking STUPID, that I consider it an unforgivable sin on the part of the writer. It was so dumb it actually made me laugh aloud. And if Jane Eyre hadn't lost me yet, it sure did then.

Ugh, I'm going to go read some sci-fi to get this stain out of my brain.

Yours in frustration, JC

about to read: The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson

books to go: 115

2010: The Year of the Geek! (uhh, in movies, anyway...)

Sheesh, so 2010 has finally finished. Fina-bloody-lly. Sorry for the relative silence on here for the last few weeks, but hey, I work in retail and it's been Christmas. When I haven't been stuffing books into the hands of a desperate, crazy-eyed horde, I've been conked out asleep. I'm sure you can understand.

On a side note, Jane Eyre was absolutely the wrong book to try and read over Christmas. It's nothing against the book itself, it's just that I really should have gone for something A) Dumb and B) Contemporary, that's all I've had the stamina for. Oh well. Somebody remind me of this when we hit next December, would you? I can read something with vampires in it. Or zombies. Or, I dunno, ponies. (Idea! 'Vampire Ponies' ... sexy, brooding, [possibly glittering] Vampire Ponies ... I'll be a millionaire in a matter of months!)

Being as I am a huuuuuge movie buff, but I haven't written too much on cinema on the blog yet, I thought I'd do a wee 'favourite films of the year' post. I'm not gonna make it an official 'Top 10' or anything, that'd be too much like hard work.

Clearly the Geeks have inherited the earth, or at least, have inherited the offices of power in Hollywood. The best (adult) American movies of the year where all either by, about, or for geeks of all shapes and sizes. Without a doubt the film of the year was Kick-Ass, a raucous, joyous ode to the comic-books of our youth that also managed to be the revisionist superhero movie that we've been crying out for. How many Iron Man sequels and X-Men prequels was it gonna take before somebody had the guts to ridicule the whole pumped-up, 'roid-raging genre?

Ordinary schmo Dave Lizewski wonders why nobody in real life has ever tried to emulate their comic-book heroes ('Everybody wants to be Paris Hilton, how come nobody ever wants to be Spiderman?' he moans). So he goes for it, with results that range from shudder-inducing (first time out fighting crime, he gets stabbed) to hilarious (spawning a copycat named Red Mist whose Flock-of-Seagulls hairdo is the best piece of design in any movie all year). But it's when he comes to the attention of a Dad-and-Daughter team of psychotic vigilantes that the shit really starts to hit the fan. From its witty deadpan humour to the violence that was so over-the-top that laughter was the only possible response, Kick-Ass was simply the most fun I've had in a cinema for years. It's not for the squeamish though: if hearing an eleven-year-old girl call a drug dealer a cunt and then kill him with an enormous sword doesn't sound awesome to you, then maybe you should steer clear.

The Social Network, on the other hand, proved that really great dialogue is as compelling as anything else you can put on screen. And significantly more compelling than, say, blue alien warriors, or enormous robots that can turn into gaudy cars.

Like any previous piece of design genius (think: steam engine, television, nuclear weapons, etc.) a great website can reflect who we are and where we're at as a species, and there's no better website than Facebook. Whatever your personal thoughts on Facebook, it clearly taps into something important in the present state of humanity: whether that's a desire for greater connection with each other, or a cheapening of all human connections through a process of simplification and reduction, or a curious combination of both. David Fincher's film, however, carefully avoids any editorial comment on the website itself, focussing instead on the personalities and private tribulations of its creators.

The storyline, in case you've been in a coma for the last seven or eight years, runs thus: Mark Zuckerberg, after one or two false starts, thinks up a cool idea for a website, and makes it. He gets help from some friends, screws over some of them pretty badly, gets sued, and his idea becomes the biggest website in the entire world. Pretty slender stuff to base a film around, ain't it? What is exceptional about the film is not the dialogue, or the performances, or the direction, or the music, though all of those things are absolutely top-drawer. It's the picture it gives us of the pure joy of creation, the uninhibited love that Zuckerberg has for typing out lines of code and twisting new programming languages into new things, things that couldn't be imagined, let alone created, less than his own lifetime ago. Computer programmers are todays explorers, or astronauts: they get to go places nobody's ever gone. In the film, Zuckerberg's key line is: 'We don't know what it is yet. We don't know what it is.' And it's that 'not knowing' that makes the film great. In my opinion.

I know some people who have bitched about The Social Network's playing fast and loose with the facts, particularly with regards to Zuckerberg's motivations. Frankly, I couldn't care less. Films are only ever 'based on a true story' anyway, and the only responsibility any movie has is to be the best movie it can be. And The Social Network is great, so what's the problem?

My other favourite films of the year all used the shiny new cinematic toys of CGI to push the boundaries of what is possible in the world of film, but all did it in very very different ways. Scott Pilgrim vs The World was like a densely jewelled box of wonders, but where every jewel was won at the end of a level in some 1980's videogame. The (ridiculous) plot in a nutshell: if Scott Pilgrim wants to date mysterious, beautiful indie girl Ramona Flowers, he must defeat her seven evil exes in battle. I don't know if there's ever been a film in which every frame was so frantically packed with useless, throwaway information.

Film audiences are becoming more and more sophisticated, are sharper, are able to take things in in an instant ... and director Edgar Wright takes a seemingly sadistic delight in putting them to the test. Constant visual and aural allusions pepper the entire film, to the point that I don't believe anybody could take everything in on first viewing. Like a good videogame, there's always more to be discovered, more laughs to be unlocked. Though the film is a textbook example of style over substance, it's the sheer pop-genius of the style (Jason Schwartzman has a sword of pixellated blue light! It rules!) that makes it a must-see in my book.

Christoper Nolan's Inception is, in a weird way, a similar experience to Scott Pilgrim. You don't really come out of it feeling anything other than 'Man, that was cool', it's essentially nothing more than a giant exercise in style ... but what style. Memento and The Prestige are probably superior films for that reason - they have more in the way of a beating heart underneath their glittering facades - but Inception ain't far behind. It's almost a shame that Nolan has to go away and make another Batman film now, because it's what he does after that that's gonna be fascinating. 

In a world where corporate espionage has invaded people's dreams and thieves can steal knowledge from a sleeper's subconscious, expert 'extractor' Cobb is charged with doing the opposite: implanting an idea into a sleeping man's mind. Borrowing heavily from action movie cliche, Cobb has to perform this one last job by recruiting a rag-tag team of experts (so far, so Stallone), which will only be possible by venturing deep into the mark's mind, constructing dreams within dreams like a Russian doll of memory and psyche (hmmm ... not so Stallone after all).

I think it'd be fair to say that there's never been a movie this expensive that has also been this intellectually challenging. Usually, the higher the pricetag, the more simplistic. Nolan's skill is in presenting a fractured, complicated scenario with such unerring precision that (though you might need a second viewing to pick up on every little thing) you're never lost for a moment. He also gives cinema one of its great 'ticking clock' images in the super-slow falling van. All the performances are exemplary, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Tom Hardy standing out as soon-to-be stars, it's beautiful to look at, and - best of all in a mainstream blockbuster - it insists that you use your brain.

Now, I wouldn't feel right if I didn't have something a bit obscure on here: at MIFF I saw a mad, brilliant, surreal, Japanese slapstick film called Symbol and, if it ever comes out on DVD, please track it down. It's a work of demented genius.

 A man with a terrible hair-do (which he might have borrowed from Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men) and bright polka-dot pyjamas wakes up in a featureless pale blue room. There are no doors or windows, and no indication of how he got in, or how he'll get out. Suddenly, thousands of cackling cherubs (fat naked male babies with wings) emerge out of the walls and surround him, laughing maniacally. When they sink back into the walls, however, they don't completely disappear: their little penises stay sticking out. When the man (after a few minutes thought) experimentally touches one of these multitude of penises, it becomes clear that they've transformed into buttons, and that each button performs a different bizarre function. One penis drops a deckchair from the ceiling, one makes a Masai tribesman run across the room, and so on. Finally our hapless hero discovers a penis that makes a door open on the other side of the room ... but as soon as he lets go of the penis, the door closes. He has to utilise all the stuff he's collected by pressing the other penises to figure out a way to escape. Oh, and I forgot to mention that there's another story intercut with this one, a story about a lowly Mexican wrestler taking to the ring for one last bout.

It's a really strange movie.

But it's great. Writer/Director/Star Hitoshi Matsumoto is a latter-day Chaplin, or Buster Keaton, or whatever, and his gift for physical comedy is a wonder to behold. And, weirdly for such a bonkers film, the way the two story strands eventually coincide, and the journey that the protagonist ultimately goes on, is actually quite moving in the end, a bizarre celebration of life and living and all that's wondrous in the world. It's well worth tracking down.

There you go, that can be my top 5. Put them in any order you like, just make sure you see them. Other highlights were The King's Speech which is such an old-fashioned, heart-tugging sort of a movie, but it's made so well (and so brilliantly acted) that you can't help but be swept up in it. There were a few really good kid's movies this year too. Toy Story 3 is probably the worst of the Toy Story movies, but that doesn't mean it wasn't great ... and it had me wiping tears from under my 3D glasses on more than one occasion. I'm a Wes Anderson fan and a Roald Dahl fan, so it's no surprise that I loved Fantastic Mr. Fox, but How To Train Your Dragon came out of nowhere a bit. Strip away all the fire-breathing 3D blah and it's basically a story about a kid and his (oversize) dog, but done with smarts and sensitivity.

If you look over to the right of your screen, I've added a new feature to the blog, which I'm calling itty-bitty film reviews. I see way too many movies to do full reviews of all of them, so I'll be doing pithy little one or two sentence summations. Once I've done a few I'll probably start an archive for them as well.

Cheers, JC

currently reading: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

books to go: 116

He's Making a List ...

One of the curiousities of this ridiculous challenge I've set for myself is that I (almost) never read new books. Going back through everything I've read this year I wasn't surprised to discover that I haven't cracked open a single book that was published in 2010. So my 'Best Books of 2010' list has a very personal flavour: these aren't books from 2010, they're books from my 2010. I hope that's okay ...

My best books of 2010 are:

10. The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester

Fast, brutal, funny and thought-provoking ... all that good science fiction should be.

A lot of 'classic sci-fi' turns out to be kind of crap, because, well, those guys were churning out stuff to make a buck and had, for the most part, turned to sci-fi because they weren't capable of writing anything else. Not Bester. He can write. Gully Foyle, his protagonist, is bitter, obsessed, thoroughly unlikable and utterly magnetic. He starts out seeking revenge on those who left him stranded in space to die, and ends up a fully-fledged revolutionary fighting to overthrow the whole damn system. It's awesome.

9. Columbine by Dave Cullen

I went through a phase between the ages of about ten and thirteen when I read a lot of (pretty sensationalised) true crime books. Man, they don't make 'em like they used to. Cullen's book was ten years in the writing and astutely examines the Columbine high school shooting from every conceivable angle: from the tales of the victims and survivors to the ensuing media frenzy, to a painstaking reconstruction of the events themselves. All of this journalistic work circles around a horrifying vortex: the portrait he paints of the killers themselves, and their motivations. With access to huge amounts of documentation they left behind (notebooks, videos, etc.) that have hitherto been seen only by police, Cullen is able to offer some explanation for an event that, until I read this book, seemed utterly inexplicable. Not pleasant reading, but pretty amazing nonetheless.

8. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

 Two sisters live with their feeble old uncle in a decaying mansion just outside a small town. Something terrible happened in the past and the girls, left entirely to their own devices, have constructed an elaborate make-believe mythology to rule over their every waking moment. The younger sister, Merricat, buries charms and totems around the property to ward off change, but when their cousin Charles arrives wanting to get into their safe, her delicate world crumbles in sublimely spooky fashion. An itty-bitty masterpiece, I have to thank my friend Hannah for putting me on to it.

7. The System of the World by Neal Stephenson

This is the third and final volume in Stephenson's 2500-page Baroque Cycle, and he saved the best for last. It's fiction on a staggering scale. Basically, the novels together (roughly) cover the years from 1650 to 1720 in Europe. Stephenson weaves together the earliest beginnings of modern scientific thought (Isaac Newton is a pivotal character), the beginnings of modern politics (religious views --- Catholic or Protestant? --- were slowly solidifying into political views --- Whig or Tory?), and the beginnings of modern finance (the great change when lumps of precious metals turned into standardised coins, which led to paper money, which led to stocks and bonds) ... in a nutshell, the template for our modern lives was being written in those times. And Stephenson jumbles all that amazing history together with a rip-snorting adventure story. With pirates. It's extraordinary.

6. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

In my Year 12 Literature class we studied Dickens' David Copperfield, and I hated it, and never finished it. So I was dreading reading Great Expectations ... it ended up on my shelves as one of those 'I really should read that one day ...' books, that I never thought I actually would read, and which could stay on my shelves and make me look smart until judgement day. Until I was foolish enough to take on this stupid challenge ... and I'm so glad I did. Because Great Expectations is wonderful. Dickens writes with such warmth, such wit, such sympathy. Pip, a young man who imagines himself above his station, is suddenly removed from that station and brought up as a 'gentleman'. What follows explores all the faultlines in traditional notions of class with a curious mixture of savagery and tact, that no writer of today could ever hope to ape. Some classics are over-rated. Not this one.

5. The Corner by David Simon and Ed Burns


I've already sung the praises of this book on my blog. Check out my review here.

4. The Plot Against America by Philip Roth


Hee hee, I've already waxed lyrical about this one as well. Next years 'Best of' Blog will be so easy to write ... nothing but links!

3. Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan

Anyone interested in stories should, at some point, read the original Brothers Grimm fairytales. They're dark, funny, archetypal, and hint at a centuries-old tradition of oral story-telling that is the skeleton of every (western) fiction ever written (I'm not knowledgeable enough to comment on non-western story-telling traditions). What the Grimms are missing, however, is complex characterisations ... there's only so much nuance you can get into the stepmother, the woodcutter and the wicked witch. Lanagan, an Australian author, re-tells a Grimm fairytale but populates it with credible, complicated, real people. It's a startling imaginative feat, and what she's ended up with is rare and beautiful: an entire novel that glows with the tender simplicity of a fable. It's a dark book, about how to live with the knowledge that darkness exists, and that your children will one day know it too. A wondrous book. More of these, please, Australian publishers!

2. The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber

And here's the book Dickens would have written if not for those pesky social mores that meant he couldn't really tell it like it was. Crimson Petal is a Victorian novel in everything but sensibility: it's sprawling, it covers a range of social classes, some of its characters have humourously onomatopoeic names ... but it's honest. Early on, Faber recounts in exquisite, unflinching, horrifying detail just what Sugar, his prostitute heroine, has to do to keep herself from getting pregnant, and you know you're in for something out of the ordinary. It's difficult to define what's great about this book: the research into the reality of day-to-day Victorian lives is one thing, but it's the way it's presented that makes the book spectacular. Faber's writing treads the fine line of pastiche with consumate skill, and is never less than enthralling. I couldn't put the damn thing down, and Faber is close to making the very short list of writers of whom I will, before I die, read everything they've ever written. It's that good.

1. The Complete Short Stories by J.G. Ballard

The first spot on my 'writers-who-I'm-going-to-read-everything-of-before-I-die' list belongs to J.G. Ballard. He is my favourite author in the world, and reading this enormous collection (1200 pages long, spanning more than 35 years) is as near as little ol' agnostic me will ever come to reading a religious text. So many brilliant ideas! The man's imagination was frightening. At their best (Billenium, The Drowned Giant, The Ultimate City) these stories have as much to tell us about the world as any art I've ever come across. I can't think of any higher praise than that.

I should stress that Ballard is not for everyone, though. Start with his novel Crash ... if you like that tale of people who get sexual release from deliberately crashing their cars, then maybe he's for you.

And that was my year. Oh, the worst books I read? I hated Devices and Desires by K.J. Parker, it was everything that was bad about contemporary fantasy: turgidly written and ludicrously plotted. And, heresy of heresies, I read The Picture of Dorian Gray and simply cannot understand why it is so beloved. It's not witty, its characters are dull dull dull, and it criminally squanders a great concept. Please, if you're a fan, enlighten me: why?

Merry Christmas! JC


currently reading: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
books to go: 116

The Woman in the Dunes (#117)

The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe

What I said then:

"A bonkers-looking Japanese book about a man who gets taken hostage in a desert."

What I say now:

As a fan of all things Japanese and bonkers (in my estimation, 'bonkers' is high praise indeed), I was really looking forward to this, but it didn't quite live up to expectations.

An amateur entymologist, who remains unnamed for nearly the entire length of the book, travels to a tiny beach-side village to look for insects in the sand dunes. He notices that the village is arranged curiously: each house sits at the bottom of a deep hollow in the sand, almost as if the dunes are crashing over the village like waves. Having missed the last bus, he accepts the villagers' hospitality, climbing down a rope ladder to share a woman's house at the bottom of a sand-pit ... but when he wakes up, the ladder is gone. The sand is too steep to climb or dig out, and he finds himself a prisoner. The villagers force him to work, shovelling sand all night lest the house be buried, and the bulk of the plot is concerned with his attempts to escape and his curious relationship with the woman who's stuck down there with him.

This book swings wildly between being pretty great and pretty dull. Once the man is in the hole, it works best when it concentrates on being a micro-drama of man versus nature, as the man tries to figure out a way to escape with the extremely limited tools available to him. As Abe methodically takes his character through different stages of anger and depression and hysteria, and lets him try scheme after scheme to make his escape, the book is strangely exciting.

Unfortunately, it's marred by a couple of things. One is Abe's insistence on philosophising about the meaning of the man's predicament, and about the meaning of sand itself. I've never been a big fan of jamming non-fiction essay-type writing into the middle of a story (eg. the annoying section in 1984 where Winston Smith sits down and reads a book about how his world works), and either Abe or his translator does it without a whole lot of elegance. Supposedly it's a classic of existentialist literature, but for a brilliant example of a novel that contains philosophical themes without being weighed down by them, check out The Plague by Albert Camus, one of my very favourite books --- yes, I am a wanker, but at least I didn't say The Outsider.

There's also a large-ish section in the middle of the book where the character has a mental and physical breakdown and, for a time, the book stops making any sense at all.

Take those sections out and it's probably not long enough to call itself a novel, but it would have been a much better story. Oh well.

Cheers, JC.


about to read: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
books to go: 116

'A Bachelor's Fridge' --- short story

I had another 20 Melbourne Writers meeting last night. The image/challenge for this month was simply: "The Fridge," which I found lovely and vague and really difficult to write about. The story I ended up with works as a kind of companion piece to 'The Piggery', my last 20mw piece, but this time showing everything from the point of view of one of the horrible guys.


A Bachelor's Fridge

Caitlin always did the cooking. I helped out a bit, cut up vegies or grated cheese or whatever, but she was the wizard in the kitchen. I’m not a misogynist or anything, I’m just hopeless. Left to my own devices I’ve still got the tastebuds of a twelve-year-old, and the skills to match. If I don’t eat out, or don’t have cash left to order in, I’ll usually end up having Doritos for dinner, or something like that. If I’m feeling really virtuous I might bung in a microwave pizza or something. That’s about as good as it gets.

When Marieke woke up this morning and checked out the fridge, she laughed her head off. There was nothing in there but a half-empty tub of Meadow Lea and some mayonnaise that’s about four years old. So we went out for breakfast instead.

*

I was at Toff last night with my mates Brendan and Phil. First Saturday night I’d gone out in a while. I was thinking of piking, but Phil knows me too well: he rocked up at my apartment with a bottle of Jameson’s and bullied me into getting ready. I was feeling a bit more up-for-it with a few shots in me.

The fucker even picked out my clothes for me, wouldn’t let me wear the nice black and purple shirt that Caitlin brought back from Holland for me. He said it made me look like a pussy. Then he played Xbox while I showered and shaved.

We got into the city about midnight. Normally a bunch of guys with no chicks would never get into Toff that late, but Brendan’s cousin Jenna came down with a couple of her friends and helped us past the bouncers. Once we were inside, Phil decided straight away that Jenna’s friends didn’t cut it, and dragged us away. ‘They’ll still be there at the end of the night,’ he said. ‘They can be the backup plan, for if we strike out.’

And that was all the action we got for about three hours. Phil tried to buy a drink for a cute little Asian chick, but she was the DJs girlfriend. Every girl that caught my eye had a boyfriend bag hanging from her arm. The only single chicks were the fucking eighteen-year-olds, wobbling about on the heels they don’t know how to wear yet, having three drinks and passing out. As Phil said, any one of them was probably a sure thing, but I’ve still got some standards.

‘What about that one?’ he asked, pointing to a redhead wearing a bad-fitting op-shop dress and a bright green cardigan.

‘I don’t want to go to jail,’ I replied. Just looking at her made me feel old. I’m not sure when it happened, but now I’m always one of the oldest people in the bars I go to. Next thing you know I’ll be having afternoon naps. Brendan and Phil’s master plan to make me feel better wasn’t exactly working.

Then the Germans arrived. Three of them for three of us, all of them skinny and blonde, it was perfect. In tatty denim skirts and t-shirts, they were obviously backpackers, and lining up for Cowboys the instant they arrived, they were obviously out for a good time.

It was hilarious, watching the attention of every unattached guy in the place zero in on them. Hell, even the boyfriends in the room were shooting glances at them. Elsa, the one with the long hair, leaned way over to tell the bartender a joke and the whole place stopped to stare at her arse. Course we did: it was a fucking good arse.

Now, there are times when having a mate like Phil is about as much fun as being shot out of a cannon into a net made of glass. But there are times when he’s a magician, and this was one of those times. ‘I’m not fussed, you guys pick your favourites,’ he said, then got up and strolled over to the laughing girls.

‘Is he … ?’ Brendan muttered under his breath. ‘Oh fuck, he is.’

Phil walked straight up to the long-haired one and pulled out his wallet and told her to put her money away. She looked him up and down. Phil’s not the best-looking bloke in the world, but he goes to the gym and that, and he dresses well, and he obviously passed the test. The girl smiled and laughed and leaned in to his ear to say something. Phil handed the bartender a fifty, and I doubt he got much change back from it.

Then he pointed us out to the girls. Brendan and me probably looked ridiculous, just gaping at them like slack-jawed morons. ‘You got a preference?’ Brendan said to me in an undertone as Phil herded the girls back to our table.

‘What? Nah, you choose,’ I said.

‘Leave it up to the gods then …’

I stood up and cajoled a chair away from the guys at the table next to us. They tried not to look jealous of our luck, but jesus, they failed miserably. I think they left pretty soon after that, with their tails between their legs.

Anyway, it’s way too loud in that kind of bar to have a group conversation, so the six of us just naturally turned into couples.

I was pretty happy: Marieke was the cutest of the three girls in my book. Smaller than the other two, who were total glamazons, Marieke had her hair cut short into a neat little bob, she was wearing glasses with thick black frames, and her t-shirt read ‘Weyland-Yutani Corp’ which got me on side straight away. She was stoked that I recognised it and we spent about half an hour debating which was better out of Alien and Aliens, and bitching about the crappy fourth one with Winona Ryder. And fuck me, we drank a lot. German girls can seriously party.

Phil pulled first. Of course. He escorted Elsa out to the balcony for a cigarette, even though he’s never smoked in his life, and they never came back. The four of us who were left all got texts at the same time. Phil’s message to me and Brendan read: “If we dont get a cab soon im fucking her in th street!!!” I dunno what Elsa wrote to her friends, but they fell off their chairs laughing at it.

Well. Honestly, the night gets hazy after that. I remember that the last girl, the one whose name I never caught, ended up sitting on Brendan’s lap. I remember that I finally got drunk enough to get up and dance, Marieke leading me by the hand. I don’t remember making a dick of myself on the dancefloor, but that’s probably what happened.

Then I lost Phil and his chick, then I was pashing Marieke in a dark booth, then we were pashing in a cab, then I was outside my apartment fumbling for my keys. Somewhere in there I must have said the right thing, but I don’t know what it was.

The sex was pretty good, what I remember of it. She didn’t mind being on top; some girls hate it, I don’t know why. She was real different to Caitlin. Rougher, in a weird way. Her bony arse kept slamming down on me, I thought maybe I’d be bruised in the morning. Caitlin liked a slow build, the foreplay and all that – she liked me to undress her. Marieke didn’t even bother taking her clothes off, she was still wearing her skirt and her bra through the whole thing. And everyone’s sex noises are different, obviously, but it was still weird hearing Marieke choofing like a marathon runner when I was so used to Caitlin’s cute little high-pitched yelps.

Still, different can be good. Y’know?

*

We didn’t go out for breakfast the next day. I lied about that.

I’d gotten used to sleeping in an empty bed, so the heat of her body woke me up earlier than I would’ve liked. I couldn’t get comfortable, and eventually my tossing and turning woke her up as well.

We made out a little bit, in a lazy kind of a way, but we both had shocking breath from the night before, so it wasn’t sexy like it should be. I couldn’t really suggest we both brush our teeth then hop back in bed, could I? Anyway, Marieke didn’t really seem like she was into it.

She got up first, tracking down her clothes and pulling them on roughly. I’d managed to get her skirt off her eventually, but only right before we went to sleep. So she got dressed again, and that was when she went looking for some food.

‘Jesus,’ she called from the kitchen. ‘This is the saddest fridge I’ve ever seen. There’s nothing in here.’

‘Yeah, sorry,’ I yelled back.

‘And … you don’t even have anything stuck to the outside …’

I needed a piss, so I rolled out of bed and into the bathroom.

‘… It’s terrible,’ she was saying through the door. ‘You have all these little silly magnets, but they’re not holding anything up. Did there ever used to be anything?’

Well, fuck. I just wanted her to shut up. I finished pissing, but I didn’t go back out there. I couldn’t. I sat down on the dunny and put my head in my hands. I don’t know how it started, or why, but all of a sudden I was crying. Fucking sobbing actually. For the first time in … in years.

‘Are you okay?’ she asked softly. She’d come right up to the bathroom door. ‘Is it about last night? Don’t be sad, that happens sometimes to every guy, I didn’t mind …’

I wasn’t even really listening to her by then. I was thinking about my fridge. About my sour milk and ancient mayonnaise. And about the empty fridge door. Caitlin had taken all the photos when she left, and for the first time I realised how much I missed them.

THE END

Story notes:

• Writing this story was like birthing a rhinoceros. Anyone who knows me at all well knows that this whole 'nightclubs/booze/random sex' milieu is just not my thing. I got about halfway through the story and found it really difficult to continue, probably because A) I didn't want to reward my narrator's neanderthal-ness by letting him actually pick up a cute German, and B) because I'd always planned that I'd try and win some sympathy for him in the final section, but I personally hate him and his meathead mates so much that I didn't especially want to. That's why (to me, at any rate), the ending where he starts crying and stuff feels really tacked on. I just wanted to end the damn thing.
• His fridge is modelled on my own. I don't stick shit to the outside of my fridge and, because I only tend to buy food as I need it, there are times when it gets pretty darn empty. Any other similarities between me and him are purely coincidental, I promise.
• Oh, except I have been known to have Doritos for dinner, on nights when I'm feeling particularly hopeless. (Oh God, I've ... I've revealed too much ... *begins sobbing*) 
• The issue of my machine-gun approach to profanity raised its head again at the meeting last night. My excuse, of course, is that it's written in the first-person. When I write in the third-person I don't go dropping F-bombs like Slim Pickens. For this guy, though, I'm just trying to keep it real. If anything, I overwrote him: "I'm not a misogynist ..." isn't really a thought I'd consider him capable of having, let alone expressing.
• I was experimenting with having an unreliable narrator, where what you can read between the lines is just as important as what's actually written. However, given the limits of the short story form, I'd say that's likely to be more successful in a novel, where you've got the room to build the audience's trust in the narrator's voice, then have the revelations of his unreliability come in a more subtle way.

Well, I hope that hasn't ruined anybody's day!

Cheers, JC 


currently reading: The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe
books to go: 116