KIRSTEN KRAUTH Almost A Mirror: extract
Welcome to the first of our new series of Friday extracts – a little something for the end of the week. If you like the idea, please let us know! We’re delighted to launch with an extract from Kirsten Krauth’s new novel Almost A Mirror.
This is a novel saturated in the music of the 1980s. It is a story of love and grief, of memory and the power of music. From teenage fandom in the 1980s and Nick Cave and the Birthday Party performing at the Crystal Ballroom, to 2010 band reunions and how to make a wooden flute, it moves back and forth in time as it tells the stories of Mona and Jimmy, and Beñat and his brother Guy.
Mona grew up in Castlemaine in rural Victoria, and she meets Jimmy there while she’s still at school. Jimmy, her first love and father of her child, who, like her, is drawn into the dark world of the photographer Dodge. Beñat grew up in the outer suburbs of Melbourne and in the 1980s his big brother’s room above St Kilda’s Crystal Ballroom is another world.
In this extract a heavily pregnant Mona is back in Castlemaine, settling into her old room in the bungalow at the back of her mother Kaz’s house. Beanie the dog is in attendance.
Extract courtesy of Transit Lounge Publishing
IN YOUR EYES
Castlemaine, 2010
The hallway still smells the same. Stewed apples and clove cigarettes and a dustiness that makes Mona feel cold. The photos are gone. Just the ghosts of two frames, a slight fading of the dark red paint.
Kaz bends down to help unzip Mona’s boots. Mona can’t even see her feet now.
Kaz heads out to the bungalow, Beanie in front as if she owns the place.
The grass and camellias have been ripped out, cottage neatness transformed into the boxed-in rambling of rusty brown natives and ground covers acclimatised to the late afternoon heat.
Mona is so dry her tongue feels fat in her mouth.
Kaz moves over to the back gate to smoke.
I know I promised I’d quit before the baby comes. Can I touch your tummy?
When you’ve finished your smoke. You know, those Indonesian cigarettes are worse than regular tobacco.
They’re healthy! They’re herbal!
The scent of cloves makes Mona feel queasy.
Mona lets Kaz’s palm rest under her belly button. A quiet pressing of heat.
Are you okay to go in? You can lean on me if you want.
Kaz holds her steady as she opens the bungalow door.
It’s still the bright purple she painted it. The red ceiling that only Jimmy could reach. The bookshelves are empty. It’s neater than it ever was when they lived in it. Storage boxes stacked in a corner and her double bed made up with a cream waffle blanket.
Scott Carne looks lonely up there, blu-tacked.
Kaz turns on the ceiling fan. It ruffles Scott’s floppy fringe.
The fan still works pretty well, but you can sleep inside if it’s too hot, or if you want company. Are you sure you want to stay out here or is it too much?
Mona lies down on the bed.
I’ll probably have to sleep inside tonight so I can get to the loo, or I’ll need a potty. But I might have a nanna nap now.
Kaz pokes her in the belly.
I’ll be able to say that and really mean it soon.
*
When Mona was a kid, Kaz would put two sets of PJs under her pillow: one for hot and one for cold.
Now Mona lies sideways in a sarong, dancing with the body-length pillow, soft, one leg splayed over and wrapped around. An XXL pole dancer.
Kaz’s hospital-corner sheets are too tight and Mona’s too tired to prick her finger for the diabetes test. She can count carbs in her sleep.
The pillow smothers her with the scent of tea-tree as she overlays a new map of Castlemaine onto her old one.
The streets where her friends lived.
The blockies in her first car looking for an escape route, Jimmy yelling out the window.
Pinnies and Pacman at the Austral and the waiting, waiting for something to happen.
The underage drinking and dancing at the club.
Hunting for possums in the botanical gardens and Jimmy climbing trees to catch them.
He never got close.
She looks at the sky out the window. A storm coming.
In summer Jimmy would drop in to the bungalow at night and watch the air of the fan touch her skin. He’d ride his bike along Campbells Creek at dusk. They’d sit up on pillows and reach out for the cool change.
The lightning.
The hot touch.
Sudden rush.
The first time, he stood outside with his cassette player and sang The Clash. Should I stay or should I go?
His dark mouth. Eyes laughing and confident of the answer.
The first time, it had hurt more than expected. But she wasn’t sure if it had hurt more than it should.
The first time, he had been gentle. Even when his skin was rough.
The first time, that was all that mattered.
*
At Dodge’s first exhibition, she had roamed the images in the gallery, waiting for someone to point, to recognise her, to call out.
Jimmy had been there that night, sitting in the shadows, smoking cigarette to cigarette, black clothes and craggy hair like a bird.
They’d shared quiet corner kisses.
In Dodge’s deserted wastelands.
In abandoned buildings, in the heat, in gathering blackness, in the crisp starlight, in hunger.
All of Dodge’s photos were Untitled. She wanted to be named.
It was the week before her birthday party.
The week before Jimmy cried and scratched his face so hard it bled. Nails raking hate into skin.
He wanted it out of him, he said. The taste of shame.
His cheeks wounded with scars of light.
*
Her body learnt to orgasm before she caught up with the word.
She read books, grabbed randomly from Kaz’s shelves, left behind at holiday houses – The Dice Man, Fear of Flying, Forever – that taught her new ways.
An arrow pointing straight from her belly button shooting hot sparks to her toes. Light and heat.
She’d crossed her legs and rocked in bed and kept on rocking until large pink marks, tender shapes, shadowed the insides of her thighs, and she’d taken her time watching them disappear to white.
They looked like they hurt but they felt so good.
And she rolled over and switched legs and started again.
Kaz said she could always ask her anything anytime. Kaz talked about the clitoris and vagina and vulva and masturbation.
Mona wasn’t sure whether that was what she was doing exactly but she didn’t know what other questions to ask.
She read more books – boys and their penises and ejaculations and nocturnal emissions.
But nothing she read quite matched this secret part of her.
She wondered if she was the only girl in the world who’d discovered it.
*
Mona sets her phone to Nature Sounds, scrolling through six hundred renditions of rain. Oregon Rainforest. Downpour on a Japanese Temple.
She lights the bamboo candle. At first all she can smell is dust.
In the reflection of the magiplug past her toes, the golden flame surrounds her head.
She perches the washcloth on her cold belly button jutting out of the bathwater.
She plays the game.
If she was an artwork, she’d be a Byzantine Madonna holding her child, a mosaic halo of blue and gold.
Her face glows.
A fire inside. Pushing her out to look for new bodies to touch. To bury herself in grooves in the dark. Feet on pavements. Move move move.
Grief. Lust. Shame. They all taste the same.
She runs palms around her stomach in circles, feeling the ripples of her baby extend out through her skin. A constant game of hide-and-seek now.
So physical, like a contact sport.
She chucks the Pears soap out of the bath. A bolt of morning sickness. Always-sickness.
The after-scent of Jimmy. He’d never really been convinced that he needed to buy another brand, even though being near him after he’d had a shower made her gag.
The dog scratches at the door, claws planing the old wood, and she yells at her.
*
In the bungalow now she rocks and rubs until it’s sore. If she keeps going she might erase herself from the scene entirely. For it’s only in the moment she comes that Jimmy’s weight, imagined, conjured up, is lifted off her. It’s only a moment but it’s the moment she’s allowed to – her body even lets her – fall asleep.
*
Kaz knocks on the bungalow door, then drags the trunk in. She marches back into the house, her strong body in singlet and shorts. An affront to Mona. All jellyfish wobble.
The box is shaped like a coffin.
Always the way. All thoughts align.
The box is an excavation of mother pride. Mona’s reports and first drawings and shaky handwriting on red-drawn lines and contact sheets of geraniums and bits of Russian dolls that have lost their tops and bottoms.
But they are not what she is looking for.
Dodge’s images are out of their frames. Kaz has folded them up and crammed them in. The bodies are creased.
They’d be worth thousands by now.
Mona turns the light off so she can line up the two photos in the dark.
First, the naked girl dreaming, legs wide open to the night above. A sweet cherry taste of her.
Then the triptych of gathering loss. A layer of grunge swept under the majesty of the Ballroom. The chandeliers and opulence. The girl, defiant. The boy, a disappearing act.
Wearing matching robes of pain. His and hers.
Mona searches in the drawer of her bedside table. The drawer where everything that didn’t fit was always stuffed. Matches. Spare change. Rubber bands. Blu Tack.
The drawer where you could never find what you needed in a hurry.
But it’s still there.
The camera. The box with the original instructions.
Kaz is outside whistling to the chooks as it gets dark and Mona waits until she hears the screen door slam. She grabs the phone, scrolls through her playlists and finds the song.
Mona can never look at Dodge’s photos without hearing it.
She turns the fan on and stands with her back against the door.
Mona first sets the match’s flame to her young naked body in the dark, an elegant makeover of oranges and blacks, Medusa curls in and outwards.
She holds up Dodge’s other photo and strikes it down too.
The ruined buildings, the dead desires, the marble bodies, the bloody filth. Jimmy’s muddy feet, burning now, falling through the floorboard cracks.
It was playing at Mona’s birthday party, this song.
But she could never play it when Jimmy was around.
Janet Baker’s voice fills the space in the room and Mona turns it up as loud as it can go.
Was dir noch Augen sind in diesen Tagen: / In künft’gen Nächten sind es dir nur Sterne.
What are only eyes to you in these days: / In the coming night shall be your stars.
She wishes that, just this once, she could reach out and touch Jimmy’s face.
Mahler drifts out the window, evaporating into the breathless night, and leaves her alone.
All that’s left is smoke.
From Kirsten Krauth Almost A Mirror Transit Lounge Publishing 2020 PB 304pp $29.99
Like to keep reading? You can buy Almost A Mirror from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW here or you can buy it from Booktopia here. You can also order it direct from the publisher with free shipping here.
To see if it is available from Newtown Library, click here.
