West Girls, page 1
WEST GIRLS
LAURA ELIZABETH WOOLLETT is the author of a short story collection, The Love of a Bad Man (Scribe, 2016), and two novels, Beautiful Revolutionary (Scribe, 2018) and The Newcomer (Scribe, 2021). The Love of a Bad Man was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction and the Ned Kelly Award for Best First Fiction. Beautiful Revolutionary was shortlisted for the 2019 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, and the Kathleen Mitchell Award. Laura was the City of Melbourne’s 2020 Boyd Garret writer-in-residence and a 2020–22 Marten Bequest scholar for prose.
Scribe Publications
18–20 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria 3056, Australia
2 John St, Clerkenwell, London, WC1N 2ES, United Kingdom
3754 Pleasant Ave, Suite 100, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55409, USA
Published by Scribe 2023
Copyright © Laura Elizabeth Woollett 2023
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.
The moral rights of the author have been asserted.
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events, places, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Earlier versions of ‘Physical Education’ and ‘Women and Children First’ were published in KYD’s New Australian Fiction (2019 and 2021); an earlier version of ‘Hati-Hati’ was published in Overland in 2019.
Scribe acknowledges Australia’s First Nations peoples as the traditional owners and custodians of this country, and we pay our respects to their elders, past and present.
978 1 922585 90 5 (Australian edition)
978 1 761385 24 7 (ebook)
Catalogue records for this book are available from the National Library of Australia
scribepublications.com.au
scribepublications.co.uk
scribepublications.com
Contents
Malta
Physical Education
Women and Children First
Ver Says
Blue and Gold
Wild West
Ecstasy of Gold
The Year of Living Commonly
Hati-Hati
True Face
Fortress
Acknowledgements
Malta
The year my dad married a former Princess of Indonesia finalist, Mum bought a Lonely Planet guide to Europe and pulled me out of school to get a real education. In Toledo, I saw a man in a sparkly white suit turn a bull into a pincushion. In Rome, sixteenth-century boys with shadowy torsos and sickly faces, brandishing spawn-like clusters of grapes. At a lonely seaside station outside Naples, an old man followed me into the toilets and kissed me, with tongue. ‘Why did you wander off like that?!’ Mum cried as the train lulled us back to Piazza Garibaldi. Later, she lay her head on the frozen black lake of the window and made me promise I wouldn’t tell Dad.
I hadn’t seen Dad in months, though once a week we’d talk about the art I’d seen and the food I’d eaten until Mum ran out of coins. I wouldn’t tell. The next day, Mum and I took the ferry south to the limestone archipelago where we had blood.
It was June when we arrived, a month of feasts. Standing in the town square, we watched rings of fire, red awnings, a crowd-surfing St. Catherine made of plaster. The town watched us. After, a smiling woman with impacted canines tapped Mum on the shoulder and announced, ‘Hel-en-a! I am your cousin Lu-ci-a!’ and gave her a big hug.
‘How do you know that lady is really your cousin?’ I pestered Mum that night — not because I doubted it, but because I didn’t like Lucia’s teeth, or her assumption that I’d like to play with her eight-year-old daughter, Stefania.
‘We have cousins now,’ Mum told me. ‘Be nice.’
Even for an eight-year-old, Stefania was scrawny. She had thick hair, cut to her shoulders, and an eyebrow-scraping fringe, like a Scooby Doo character. Her canines were crowded into her gums, the same as her mother’s. Her dad, Lorenzo, looked like a donkey. I wondered if Dad was right when he said all Mum’s relatives were inbred.
Either way, they fed us almond biscuits and refilled my Coke like waiters wanting tips. At one point, Lucia pointed to a corner and told me, ‘That is where your Nannu was born!’
‘I don’t call him “Nannu”.’ I drained my third glass of Coke. ‘I say Grandad.’
Mum knifed me with her eyes. ‘Why don’t you and Stefania go play outside.’
‘I don’t “play”,’ I told Stefania, in the sunwashed laneway. ‘But I’ll show you our house.’
We walked in silence through the maze of limestone terraced houses, punctuated by twisty olive trees and exclamations of prickly pear. Stefania gave a wide berth to one of them.
‘A man called Grezzju did live here,’ she whispered. ‘He did kill three old women.’
I played it cool. ‘Three isn’t that many.’
When we reached our rental, which had a green door and window shutters, Stefania lowered her voice again. ‘The old woman who did live here died.’
‘Did Grezzju kill her?’
Stefania shook her head. ‘She was very old.’
‘Well, just so you know, it’s haunted.’ I opened the front door, which Mum hadn’t bothered to lock. ‘I saw a ghost the other day.’
Before crossing the threshold, Stefania took a deep breath and crossed herself.
I wasn’t surprised the house had belonged to an old lady. The town seemed overpopulated with them: hobbling down the cracked footpaths with bags of fruit, or shouting at each other across the flat rooftops, or gossiping inside the stinky corner shop. Every time Mum and I went into the shop, they stopped talking, as if we could even understand their language.
Also, all the furniture in our rental looked about a hundred years old.
‘Your room is very clean.’ Stefania admired the neat edges of my floral bedcover, which was as scratchy as a hairshirt. ‘You are very good at making your bed!’
‘So? I’m not a baby. I can make my own bed.’
Truth told, after months of creaking stairwells and overnight train rides, I preferred sleeping in Mum’s.
I picked up my Tamagotchi, waving it in Stefania’s face. ‘Cool, hey?’
‘Is that Tamamagogoshi?’ She looked hungry. ‘From Japan?’
‘You can’t touch it.’ Creeped out by her drooly mouth, I hid it in the pocket of my cargos. ‘Dad’s wife gave it to me.’
Her hunger switched to horror. ‘Your father is not married to your mother?’
‘I’m a bastard.’ I opened my copy of The Prisoner of Azkaban, bookmarked by a photo of my stepmother in a sunshiny kebaya with a jewelled black bun. ‘Her name’s Indah. It means “beautiful”. She was in a pageant. Do you think she’s prettier than my mum?’
‘She looks Chinese.’
‘For Your Information, she’s Indonesian, from In-do-ne-sia.’ I closed the book. ‘They have lots of traffic jams. And squat toilets. Wanna see me squat?’
Stefania shook her head. I showed her anyway.
‘You have to keep your feet flat on the ground.’ I came up from my squat with hot cheeks. ‘Once, in Jakarta, I saw a man with no legs.’
‘When my class did go to see Il Papa in Valletta, there was one man with no legs or arms.’
‘I’ve read all the Harry Potters. The best is where he talks to snakes.’
‘My priest says Harry Potter is of the Devil.’
Flicking my hair, I made a ‘W’ with my fingers. ‘Whatever.’
‘Friends now, hah?’ Lucia flashed her messy teeth when we shyly wandered back in.
Stefania nodded, sat on the edge of the plastic-covered couch beside her mother and gingerly bit into a biscuit. A lanky teenage boy came slouching downstairs.
‘Daniel! Shay-mon-yoo!’ Lucia called out. ‘Come, meet your cousin from Australia!’
‘Hello, cousin,’ Daniel said. He had spiky hair and a gold neck-chain. He started towards the door.
‘Dan!’ Lucia winced at the slamming. ‘He is fifteen. It is all about the girlfriends.’
Stefania put down her biscuit.
Over the weeks, more cousins showed up on our doorstep. Vito, who was taller than any man I’d seen on the island, but just as wide, and who bragged about the rare birds he shot as they migrated south to Africa. And Leli, who resembled a Mediterranean Mr Bean, and looked at Mum the way a lot of men who weren’t related to us did. And Angela and Teresa, the chipmunk-cheeked sisters who brought us cannoli and invited us over for rabbit stew, then to a Holy Communion, then to see some beautiful churches, until after a while Mum began making excuses.
The only cousin I really wanted to impress was Julia. Her parents didn’t come to the town; instead, they had us over for lunch at their bayside ‘apartment’, which was actually a three-storey house. Julia’s parents wore linen outfits with leather sandals, and watches that glittered like the sea. Their teeth were neat and white. Julia had braces, cute ones, with lilac bands. She wore a stained grey United Colours of Benetton tee with no bra and stripey pyjama pants. Her eyes were sleepy and sexy.
As we
‘Ah, another brain wants my attention!’ he announced, folding his napkin as he stood.
We all laughed, except Julia, who made a face like he’d just done a silent, deadly fart.
In the time it took me to eat half a bowl of spaghetti, Julia ate two. When she reached for the stainless steel pasta spoon to serve herself a third, her mother said, ‘Enough, Ju. You are a young lady, not a vacuum cleaner.’
Julia didn’t laugh, so neither did I, though I wanted to.
I saw Stefania more than I saw Julia. But I talked about Julia whenever I was with Stefania, so she’d remember that she was — unlike Julia and myself — ħamallu, common. With each retelling, my Julia stories became more elaborate, and I took care to leave out certain details. Like how the time some boys followed us up an escalator at the Plaza in Sliema, they only wanted Julia and her tal-pepé friend’s numbers, not mine. Or how, when Julia let me pluck her armpits that bored weekend at her family’s farmhouse in Gozo, she’d also called me a lesbian for offering to do so. Or how the pile of outdated British teen magazines Julia gave me weren’t a rare treasure, but ‘rubbish’ that her mother was making her chuck out.
I loved everything about the magazines: the clear-skinned girls in baby-tees and butterfly-clips, the confusing Pommy slang (‘Dreamboat Danny!’ ‘Dishy Ricky!’ ‘Five foods that’ll give you a whiffy botty!’), even the ads for Clearasil and Tampax. But the best bits were the confessions that I tortured Stefania with, on the flat roof of the old lady’s house.
‘See? Girls write in and confess things that happened to them. Really gross stuff.’
Stefania shut her eyes tight. ‘I’m not allowed.’
‘Look: this one girl has s-e-x with —’
‘Magazines are of the Devil.’ Stefania clutched her cross. ‘My priest says.’
‘If you love your priest so much, why don’t you just marry him?’
‘He is already married.’ She blinked her solemn eyes open. ‘To Alla.’
‘Why are you even Catholics here? You know, you all sound like Arabs when you talk?’
Shrugging her bony shoulders, Stefania scratched at a flower of dried pigeon poop.
‘God is for ħamallu.’ Abandoning my magazine, I slithered to the roof’s edge. ‘Do you think we’d die if we jumped from here?’
Towards the end of July, I overheard Mum snivelling to Lucia in the kitchen about the man who’d followed me into the train station toilets. ‘Uwejja,’ Lucia grunted. I forgot to be annoyed at Mum for crying over my personal business, though, when later she rapped on my door and asked how I’d feel about starting the new term at Stefania’s school.
‘Would I have to speak four languages?’
‘Not four. Two or three, maybe. You already know English; that’s the hardest.’
‘Would I have to go on excursions to see the Pope?’
‘Well … maybe.’ She laughed. ‘You don’t have to believe, though. You can just pretend.’
‘I don’t know.’ I touched the scratchy bedcover. ‘Why?’
‘You’ve missed a lot of school. And you seem to have settled in here.’
It was true. I wasn’t sleeping in her bed anymore, and I’d started stressing my consonants, saying bomba instead of cool.
‘It’s just an idea. Think about it.’
I thought about it. How maybe I’d be a freak from Kangarooland, taller than all the other kids. Or maybe I’d be cool and exotic. Maybe I could be anything I wanted.
We went to the Mdina Cathedral that weekend, stared at the frescoed ceilings and the five-hundred-year-old baptismal font. A pair of nuns noticed us, then noticed my mother’s tattooed wrist and bare ring finger, and had questions: where was my father, was I baptised, why not? Mum never mentioned school again. She spent more nights in her room with the green-shuttered windows open, summer breeze blowing the gauze curtains, thumbing through her Europe on a Shoestring and smoking. Her eyes like smoke.
Lucia was the one who got Mum all excited about North Africa. She had a friend who worked at a travel agency in Valletta, could get us a tour package for under five hundred lira.
‘I’ll get to ride a camel,’ I bragged, bumping along in Lorenzo’s van. All the roads on the island were bumpy, like they’d been made for mules, not cars.
‘Bomba!’ Stefania breathed.
‘A camel will spit on you,’ Daniel said. The song by that year’s Eurovision contestant came on the radio. ‘This singer is a poofta.’
‘I like him,’ I protested, though I wouldn’t have if I were with Julia.
‘Me too,’ Stefania parroted.
‘This song is only for pooftas and girls.’ The van hit a pothole and, as if to demonstrate his point, Daniel lurched forward, grabbed at my chest.
We ate at a pizzeria, water lapping nearby. Mum talked about cousin Vito’s cabinet full of birds. Lucia tut-tutted, ‘Animal cruelty at its best.’ Some younger cousins, Lorenzo’s side, materialised. As the adults sloshed wine, the cousins multiplied. A game of mass hide-and-seek began. I hid behind the van. Daniel found me, though I hadn’t known he was playing.
‘It is very dark,’ Daniel said, checking the locks. ‘Someone could steal this.’
‘Can you drive?’ I imagined my feet on the dashboard, wind kissing my cheeks.
Daniel nodded. ‘But I would not steal this. I would steal a Ferrari.’
We sat on the hood. I stared at the moon on the water and thought it was just like the Eurovision song, romantic. Daniel picked up my arm, examined it.
‘Fat,’ he said. ‘You eat too much pizza.’
The day before we left for Africa, we visited Lucia’s with a heart-shaped nougat and a bottle of Amaretto. Lucia smiled her crowded smile and my heart panged. ‘Stè I think is upstairs! She will be happy to see you.’
Stefania’s room was boring and babyish: musk-pink walls, frilly bedcovers, a menagerie of stuffed animals, including a mustard-coloured koala she’d shown me, thinking I’d be impressed by this avatar of my homeland. I idled among the animals, poking their glassy eyes, rearranging them into poses of conflict, sexual gymnastics, facedown despair. I picked up her beloved Pope John Paul II prayer card, from when she saw him speak in Valletta. I made an ugly face, though Stefania wasn’t there to appreciate my sacrilege. I got bored. I wandered across the hall, to Daniel’s room.
Back downstairs, our mothers were nibbling nougat. ‘I couldn’t find her,’ I mumbled, fixing my eyes on the pistachio-scabbed slabs of confectionary.
Lucia furrowed her brow. Did she know nothing, or was she just a very good actress and a very bad person? Mum caught me eyeballing the nougat.
‘Alright, Hungry Eyes.’ She laughed. ‘You can have some.’
I took a piece. Cupped it in my palm like a naked baby animal. Stefania appeared in a rumpled orange singlet and grey marle shorts, indentations on her cheek.
‘Stè!’ Lucia glowered, and began ironing her daughter’s clothes with her hands, chastising her for dressing ħamallu.
Bad person, I decided.
Daniel came down soon after, hair gelled into its little spikes, jeans and grey T-shirt. ‘Going to his girlfriends!’ Lucia taunted, and Daniel said something about boyfriends, which made Mum laugh again. Stefania took me to look at some beads she’d found, the way they shone in the sun, but all I could think of was frogspawn, and the moment to say anything passed. I was glad when Mum said we still had packing to do.
It was easy not to mention what I’d seen, once we left the island. There were plenty of sights to blot it out: Sahara sunrises, the blue-green blaze of the Ionian, a race riot outside an internet cafe in Munich. Sometimes something would remind me — a T-shirt in a crowd, a bowl of beads in a souvenir shop — and I’d peer at it like a scientist through a microscope. I never expected to return.
We did, though. Christmas, the year my grandad became a pile of ashes. Dad and Indah had three-year-old twin boys, by then. Mum only had me. We flew economy, but there were no backpacks this time, no red light district pensione: just a sleek apartment in the modern part of the island, where nightclubs nestled like jewels among the rocks, reflected pink and green in the bay’s glassy black.
‘He’d be happy to be home,’ Mum said, clutching the urn on the craggy beach south of the saltpans.
