Read the first chapter of Trent Dalton’s new novel
Dark, gritty, hilarious and unexpected, Gravity Let Me Go is Trent Dalton’s deeply personal exploration of marriage and ambition.
My daughter Erin stands at the kitchen bench in her school uniform, reading Frankenstein for her Year 10 literature class and eating a slice of toast with crescent moons of an avocado that hasn’t fully ripened.
“Victor Frankenstein is a douche,” she says.
“Why?” I ask, wrapping my fingers around a stainless-steel coffee plunger resting by the toaster. It’s still hot: my wife, Rita, left enough brewed coffee this morning for me to pour into my favourite mug, the big white one that my other daughter, Clem, bought me for Father’s Day.
Darth Vader raising a celebratory pint of beer: Best Dad in the Galaxy.
“Total deadbeat dad,” Erin says. “Guy wants to play God. Guy makes himself a monster-slash-son. Then he abandons the monster the moment the monster starts acting a little monstrous.”
“Not the first bloke to create something he was repulsed by,” I say.
I step across to the fridge for milk. Clem’s stuck the latest edition of the Gecko Street Gazette to its door with a One Direction magnet. Poor kid’s got the journo bug. The story habit. She collects stories the way other kids in our street collect seashells and Barbie dolls. Kid’s got it bad. I still remember the look on her face when I told her about the little newspaper empire I created from my own bedroom as a boy on Bribie Island. The Bega Street Bugle. The first three editions were handwritten in blue Kilometrico pen.
Then I found my first typewriter, a $15 Lifeline thrift shop 1978 Olympia SM9, and the Bugle went pro.
“You read Clem’s latest edition?”
“Bravo, Daddio,” Erin says. “Looks like you made yourself a monster, too.”
“I think it’s inspiring what she’s doing.”
“Just what the world needs,” Erin says, “another nosy journo.”
“She’s reminding us what a beautiful street we live in,” I say.
“Poor kid’s had to hear about a few of the darker realities of the world lately. Maybe she’s reminding herself what a beautiful place the world can actually be.”
“Beauty is a lie,” Erin says.
Sometimes over breakfast Erin likes to pretend she’s Sylvia Plath.
“Beauty might be the only truth we humans have left in this world,” I suggest.
“Not the whole truth.”
“And what, pray tell, is the whole truth, according to Erin Eliza Cork, age fifteen years and seven months?”
First sip of coffee. I briefly consider whether raising a pessimistic teenager is a parental job well done or yet another sign of my fatherly wheels falling off. Second sip of coffee.
“We see what we believe, Erin,” I say. “Sometimes it’s impossible to see the truth of the world as it is, because we can only see the truths of ourselves.”
“Says the guy who found a dead woman’s bones in a kitchen oven and then spent six months putting together a book about it so the world could be further reminded of how sick it truly is.”
“Is that what you think I’ve done?” I ask, sounding more urgent than I intended.
“What?”
“Do you think my book only feeds the nation’s insatiable hunger for darkness?”
“I dunno, Dad. You’re assuming I read it.”
“I gave Tamsin a voice.”
“And I’m sure she appreciates it.”
My daughter snaps her Frankenstein shut and places it face-up next to her father’s first published work of longform nonfiction. Anonymous Source: The Disappearance and Discovery of Tamsin Fellows by Noah Cork. The book’s cover features a red tin suburban letterbox beneath the title.
We, the Corks of number 39 Gecko Street, Jubilee, Brisbane, in fact, have a canary-yellow tin letterbox. Same shape as the cover’s letterbox, a thin yellow pole supporting a rectangular container the size of a shoebox – with a keyless rear mail flap and an arched, open-ended compartment on top, where, every month, neighbourhood kids stuff a rolled Harvey Norman catalogue big enough to keep a baby warm in winter.
The book’s publishers wanted to feature our real letterbox on the cover but, in the interests of privacy, Rita insisted on a stand-in, coloured red.
“Is it not enough that the world knows what suburb we live in?” Rita asked. “Now you’re gonna tell them what our letterbox looks like, so every creepy true-crime obsessive across Australia can come crawling through Jubilee in search of Noah Cork’s life-changing letterbox.”
I remember what I said about that:
“I won’t bend for this butcher, Rita,” I replied. “A journalist never retreats from the truth. He charges towards it like a knight on horseback, knowing truth is an armour too strong to be penetrated by fear.”
“I fear the hole in your arse was just officially penetrated by your head,” Rita shot back. Rita knows I don’t actually believe that stuff about journalism and truth and fear. Rita knows that relentless hunger-quashing fear is the reason I rise in the morning.
“A red letterbox will work,” my publishers reasoned. “You know … red like Tamsin’s blood.”
It’s not the letterbox on the book’s cover that draws one’s eye. It’s the object shown resting ominously inside it that’s supposed to stir the average bookshop browser’s imagination. A small wind-up music box, no bigger than a pack of Redhead matches.
The music box’s rust-coloured machinery is uncased and exposed: the spring housing, the winding shaft, the hand crank that even a child’s fingers would struggle to grip, a metal drum dotted with strategically placed protruding pins that spin and pluck at a small vibration plate that reminds me of the stainless steel comb Rita used to remove Clem’s head lice in Year 2.
What can’t be shown on the cover, of course, is the giddy music box tune that severs my brain and freezes my tempered-glass heart every time I lay my eyes upon that book cover.
Truth is no armour.
Fear walks through walls.
Like memories.
Like curses.
Erin says something that I don’t catch because I’m taken again by the miraculous existence of my book, allowing myself a moment to reflect upon the speed with which the book was put together in six brief months and the blurred fever-dream transitions between thinking and typing and editing and printing.
“Whassat, honey?”
“I said I was thinking about the meteor shower.”
“What meteor shower?”
“What meteor shower?” Erin repeats. “Last night’s meteor shower.”
I remember now. The biggest meteor shower to ever soar across the Australian continent. An asteroid the size of San Francisco Bay was cracking and shattering as it swung by the fierce sun, leaving a burning dust trail that the planet I call home passed through last night. Rita and the girls were going to lie on their backs in the yard to watch it.
“Weren’t you lying beside Mum when it showered?” Erin asks.
“No.”
“That’s so funny,” Erin says. ‘I assumed you were there and were just being quiet.”
“I wasn’t there, Erin.”
“Where were you?”
“I don’t know.”
That’s not the whole truth. I suspect I was flipping through a copy of Anonymous Source. I suspect I was marvelling at how quickly I’d written it. I was lost in it. Who knows how long I lay on that bed before I nodded off?
I slide Erin’s Frankenstein five centimetres across the bench so its paperback edge rubs the spine of Anonymous Source.
“How about that,” I say, gently elbowing Erin’s ribs. “Mary Shelley and Noah Cork, united at last by the time-hopping miracle of literature.”
Erin scoffs. “Settle down, Dickens. Let’s see if anyone’s still reading your book next week, let alone two hundred years from now.”
Erin scrapes the crumbs from her toast into the waste bin beneath the sink. “Ants, Dad,” she announces. “We got ourselves a whole ant civilisation. They’re building 7-Elevens down here.”
The bin liner has been fashioned from a bag that once housed twelve rolls of two-ply Sorbent toilet paper, and it’s brimful this morning of used tissues and lamb forequarter bones and plate-scraped peas and carrots covered in cold gravy. The colony of tiny honey-coloured ants is busily building its empire out of its headquarters in a cupcake wrapper encrusted with hearty boulders of uneaten choc-banana muffin.
“Weren’t you on clean-up last night?” I ask.
“No, I did a double on the weekend,” Erin replies. “It was Clem’s turn.”
I tie the bag, hold it out from my waist, slugging my coffee. A fat cockroach leaps from the bottom of the swollen bag onto the polished wooden kitchen floorboards and runs for its life. It’s half a metre from the sanctuary of the crack beneath our fridge when the rubber sole of Erin’s black leather Clarks school shoe squashes it into a glob of caramel-coloured insect gut paste that looks, I realise, like the crunchy peanut butter resting on the middle shelf of the fridge.
“When are we gonna dynamite this house and build a new one?” Erin asks.
“Where do you suppose I might acquire six-dozen sticks of dynamite in Brisbane?”
“I know a guy in Logan.”
“What sorta house did you have in mind?”
“I dunno, something with taste and two bathrooms.”
“You’ll get your second bathroom.”
“When?”
“I’m guessing about six months after you move out.”
I pat my book the way one might pat a boy scout who has just received a bugling badge.
“I’ll get this book out,” I say. “Then I’ll pay a draughtsperson to draw us somethin’ with taste and two bathrooms.”
Erin reluctantly accepts a goodbye kiss on the thick brown hair that hangs over her right ear and I dig my right hand into the purple glass fruit bowl that holds everything from car keys to USB sticks to coins to a pair of black 3D cinema glasses.
“Mum take the Corolla?” I ask.
“She’s parent helper for Clem’s excursion to Pioneer Village,” Erin says.
I hate myself for forgetting this. You forget such things because you are as ambitious as you are self-absorbed. You have placed your lurid and public exploration of Tamsin’s demise above all other facets of your own existence, from physical health and mental stability to school excursions and pest control. Bravo, Noah Cork, you made another monster. You are the modern Prometheus. You’re basically Victor Frankenstein without the flair for science. But don’t let this truth interrupt your busy morning. Hurry now. Don’t wanna be late for your special book event. This book matters!
I take the keys for the Yaris and tuck the copy of Anonymous Source under my arm.
“You on the 804 bus?”
Erin nods.
Remember the rules for life, kid. “Be kind and don’t do drugs,” I say, one foot out the front door.
“I promise to be kind,” Erin says.
A thought strikes me and I turn back to Erin, a fist on the front door handle.
“Hey, by the way,” I say. “The words on the mirror this morning. That a Boy-genius song or somethin’?”
“What words?”
“The words on the bathroom mirror when it got all fogged up by the heat: Gravity let me go.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Erin says. “I didn’t have a shower this morning. What did you say the words were?”
“Gravity … let … me … go. One of Clem’s singers maybe? Taylor got any songs called that?”
“Don’t think so. Maybe Mum wrote it?”
I ponder this possibility for three seconds. “Nah, doesn’t sound like Mum,” I say.
“Oh, is that right, Dad?” Erin replies. “And what exactly does Mum sound like?”
Extracted from the first chapter of Gravity Let Me Go by Trent Dalton (HarperCollins), out this week.
To join the conversation, please log in. Don't have an account? Register
Join the conversation, you are commenting as Logout