Demons

PRAISE FOR WAYNE MACAULEY

THE COOK

‘Each time you think you’ve reached the limits of this thought-provoking and brilliant
novel, it just gets deeper.’
Guardian

‘Irresistible—
The Cook
reminds us just how exciting it is to read a wonderful and
original novel.’ Lloyd Jones

‘The orgiastic pretentiousness of high-end cuisine is a world that’s ripe for satire,
and that’s just the starting point for this original, ambitious and disturbing Australian
novel…What begins as a succinct skewering of culinary pompousness...turns into a
scathing commentary into the failings of consumerism… [a] focused, rapier-like attack.’
Glasgow Herald

‘A writer who is quintessentially of his place and time…
The Cook
, a darkly satirical
reply to Australia’s
MasterChef
-driven reality cooking show obsession, was one of
the most surprising and vivid fictions of the year.’
Australian

‘A compelling read…as tightly structured as a thriller… hilarious…consistently entertaining,
often shocking…a serious critique of the moral vacuum at the core of a society that
values money and novelty above all else.’
Irish Examiner

BLUEPRINTS FOR A BARBED-WIRE CANOE

‘Wayne Macauley has the soul of a poet and his surreal novella is stunningly written…It
is a satire of exquisite poise and confidence…If more Australian literature was of
this calibre, we’d be laughing.’
Age

‘Tapping the hidden heart of a different Australia…this is original Australian writing
at its best.’
Courier-Mail

‘A salutary fable about the horrors awaiting our disaffected modern citizenry…lasting
visual images and resonant symbolism.’
Sydney Morning Herald

CARAVAN STORY

‘In an age of corporate excess, of truth distorted by commercial demands, of the
triumph of utilitarianism, Macauley’s warning, albeit in satirical form, sounds a
clarion call.’
Sunday Star Times

‘Wayne Macauley’s first novel,
Blueprints for a Barbed-Wire Canoe
, showed that a
real talent had arrived and his second confirms the promise.’
Age

‘Mixing elegy and whimsy, satire and black humour, language becomes pliant under
Macauley’s command.’
Australian Book Review

‘A lament but also a call to arms,
Caravan Story
is a thrilling piece of satire,
a compulsively readable, extremely well-wrought Orwellian fable that I believe announces
the arrival of Macauley as a major Australian writer.’
Readings Monthly

Wayne Macauley is the author of three highly acclaimed novels:
Blueprints for a Barbed-Wire
Canoe
,
Caravan Story
and, most recently,
The Cook
, which was shortlisted for the
Western Australian Premier’s Book Award, a Victorian Premier’s Literary Award and
the Melbourne Prize Best Writing Award. He lives in Melbourne.
waynemacauley.com

textpublishing.com.au

The Text Publishing Company
Swann House
22 William Street
Melbourne Victoria 3000
Australia

Copyright © Wayne Macauley

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of
this publication shall 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 permission of both the copyright owner
and the publisher of this book.

First published in 2014 by The Text Publishing Company

Cover and page design by W. H. Chong
Typeset by J&M Typesetting

The quotes from
Three Sisters
and
The Cherry Orchard
are from Peter Carson’s translations
in
Anton Chekhov: Plays
(Penguin, 2002); quotes from Dostoevsky’s
Demons
from the
translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (Vintage, 2006); and the epigraph
from a letter written by Kleist to Wilhelmine von Zenge, November 16, 1800. The translation
is by Peter Wortsman, from his Afterword to
Selected Prose of Heinrich Von Kleist
(Archipelago, 2010).

Printed in Australia by Griffin Press, an Accredited ISO AS/NZS 14001:2004
Environmental Management System printer

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Author: Macauley, Wayne
Title: Demons / by Wayne Macauley.
ISBN: 9781922147363 (paperback)
ISBN: 9781922148391 (ebook)
Dewey Number: A823.3

This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia
Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

For my sisters

It holds, I replied, because all the stones want to cave in at once…
Heinrich von Kleist, on observing an arch at Würzburg

FRIDAY

They were going to tell stories. Let’s go away for the weekend, said Megan, and leave
our phones behind and turn off the computers and the television and stop time because
time is moving too fast and soon we’ll all be saying where the hell did our lives
go? We’ll cook some food and drink some wine and each tell a story.

There would be no kids. No pets. No devices. The house belonged to Megan and Leon’s
younger sister, Lucy—she and her husband, Tom, had moved to Sydney for work. A two-storey
perched high on a hill overlooking the sea, just off the Great Ocean Road. A steep
driveway, a carport at the top, three bedrooms up and one down. Same road in and
out. A cantilevered balcony looking over the trees.

Megan and Evan got down about four, Adam and Lauren just after half past, Leon and
Hannah a bit after that. They were living in the bush near Halls Gap now, in the
stone cottage Leon built. By five o’clock the smell of slow-braised lamb already
filled the house and the wood heater was blazing.

It was the middle of winter, and the forecast was for rain.

Megan was a filmmaker, documentaries mostly. Strong-boned, olive skin, no makeup,
short brown hair. She’d been working with the communities up in the Territory, interviewing
old people, editing down the footage and sending out group emails about how amazing
it was to watch people tell their stories like that. We don’t know how to listen
any more, she said. Well? What do you say? We’ll go down Friday night, come back
Sunday. Maybe a couple of days together will be enough to get back to something real.

She was with Evan, a musician; short, lean, fit-looking but lately gone a bit to
seed. He used to make his money as a cash-in-hand builder but was now doing up and
selling. He was younger than Megan, forty-two, and still had all his hair. They had
five kids between them, late teens to early twenties, including a daughter, Aria,
from Evan’s first marriage.

Adam and Lauren had three kids. Their oldest, Oliver, a problem child, was in his
last year of school. Adam was a lawyer, intellectual property, specialising in litigation.
He wore his grey hair swept fashionably back, was pale, medium height, with not much
fat on him. Clients commented on his pianist’s fingers. Lauren was in advocacy and
travelled a lot; short, compact, dyed red hair and red lipstick. She went to the
gym four nights a week no matter what city she was in. She wore rings and bangles,
sensible shoes, had a pointed energy about her and a clipped way of speaking. They’d
been together since uni.

Next there was Leon, Megan’s younger brother, stocky with a round face that had in
its time been ravaged by drink but was now showing good signs of recovery. A journalist,
retired. He was bald on top and what was left around the sides was razored to a shadow.
There was something a bit distant about Leon. He’d beaten the grog with naturopathy,
meditation and yoga and the cure had clung to him almost as persistently as the disease.
Hannah, his girlfriend, his
new
girlfriend, was the youngest. She had long legs,
Hannah, a long torso and long red hair. She was either wistful or stupid, depending
where you stood. She wore a bit of dark around the eyes and a smear of gloss on the
lips. They had no kids, together or apart.

The last of that group to agree to put aside that cold weekend in winter were Marshall
and his wife, Jackie. Marshall was a politician, newly-elected; Jackie worked in
events promotion. But by eight o’clock they still hadn’t showed.

Megan and Evan took the main bedroom, with the view of the sea. The other rooms were
down the hallway past the bathroom with a view up through the trees. The latecomers
got the bedroom downstairs. After everyone had unloaded their stuff and dropped the
bags of food and drink in a row on the kitchen floor, Megan suggested a walk. The
dark was coming down. She and Lauren, then Leon and Hannah, put on their hats and
coats and scarves. Put the meat in the fridge! said Lauren, from the bottom of the
stairs.

Evan found the cooler bag with the beer in it and twisted the top off two. Are you
into this? he said. Adam put his beer on the bench and started unpacking the meat.
I reckon we should have themes, said Evan, like politics or the environment or technology
or love or something, otherwise everyone’s just going to rabbit on about any old
crap. We should write down half-a-dozen and put them in a hat then someone chooses
one and we tell stories about that. Then, if we’ve got the energy, we choose another
one later.

They unloaded the shopping and went into the living room. It was warm in there now.
At one end was a big set of windows and a sliding glass door that opened onto the
balcony that looked out over the treetops to the sea. Two couches, four big armchairs
and in the centre a low table of sea-worn timber with a stack of magazines and picture
books on it.

Adam stood by the fire. On the wall behind was a painting in pastel tones of sky,
sea and dune, the paint dripping from the border of one into the body of the other.
Out in the real world, beyond the glass, the ocean was gunmetal grey with a violet
sheen and a silver ripple and above it a sunset sky already deepening into dark.
Adam slid the door back. The sea was loud, you could feel the
thud
of the waves.
Rosellas screeched in the treetops, flew up, wheeled, then hurtled down the hill.

What do I think? said Adam, belatedly. I think the idea of having themes and taking
turns is stupid. This weekend we should throw away the rule book, let time stretch
out before us. A different kind of time. Story time.

Story time! said Evan.

Yeah, said Adam, closing the door, because that’s the kind of time we’ve lost; everything
now is frantic time, desperate time, snatched time. So this weekend we lie on the
couch, smoke our pipes, let the pot bubble on the stove.

Evan nodded but he wasn’t listening. He was looking back through the living room
to the rest of the house.

It’s a dog’s breakfast this place, isn’t it? Ad? He was pointing with the neck of
his stubby. The kitchen’s all wrong for a start; they should have incorporated it
into the living area and orientated it towards the view so while you’re cooking you
can still talk to your guests and they can see out the windows. You’ve got more natural
light then, too. I’d knock out that wall, he said, and run the bench and cupboards
along there, turn that space into a walk-in pantry and take the dining room out through
there. And it’s stupid having the fourth bedroom downstairs, that should be the recreation
area, then you incorporate the downstairs bathroom into it so you can have showers
and dump your sandy things when you get back from the beach. Then in the open area
there you have your table tennis table and so on. Then up here, you extend the whole
joint out that way—he pointed again—at the end of the hall, to create the fourth
bedroom. That’s just wasted space back there, behind the house, with the washing
line and that. Then I’d knock down the carport and turn it into outdoor entertaining,
take in the new wet area, reroute the driveway so the cars go round the back and
plant it all out, all that area along the fence and up the embankment, with low to
medium local natives so it becomes the intermediate space between beach and house
and the upstairs part, the big space here, becomes more like a chill-out zone for
eating, drinking, reading, watching telly, listening to music. Then I’d pull down
that balcony—it looks like the fuckin’ prow of the
Titanic
—and put up something
quarter-size so you actually take full advantage of the view.

The downstairs door opened and the walking party made their way upstairs. Lauren’s
got one! said Megan. Suicide, or attempted suicide.

Is that a theme? said Evan.

Megan took off her scarf. Is that your second? she said.

The lamb was brilliant: slow-braised in a big Chasseur with a side serve of Leon’s
kale. He’d brought broccoli too, and spinach. The wines were top-notch. That’s the
Heathcote, said Evan: Ad, try that, that’s the Heathcote. Everyone except Leon tried
the Heathcote.

Evan reckons they should knock down that wall, said Adam, and make all this kitchen
and living; move the fourth bedroom up here, knock down the carport, turn downstairs
into recreation and open it out onto a landscaped barbecue area with natives.

I can see that, said Lauren. Not in summer though, said Leon; that’s a fire hazard,
that. They started eating. Because of what Leon said Lauren told a story she’d heard
from a friend about a volunteer firefighter who was actually the arsonist who’d started
the fire that burned down his town, including his house. The friend was there when
the arsonist made his confession. That’s called impulse-control disorder, said Adam.
Leon told a story he’d heard when he was still a journo about a social worker who
was found molesting her young male clients and that set off a discussion about facades
and secrets that took them through to the end of the meal. They cleared the dishes.
Megan told one about her and Leon’s cousin who got mixed up with another cousin,
a girl called Philomena, and how it was discovered by—it took Megan forever to explain
this—their uncle, but, she said, not the father of Philomena or the cousin but the
father of a different cousin again, Megan and Leon’s mother’s younger sister’s husband.
Leon said Hannah had a similar story, and she told it.

It was generally agreed, then, after that first round of impromptu stories, that
when the real storytelling began they would try not to make them all about family
and forbidden sex.

All right, said Lauren, once everyone was seated in the living room. The sky had
darkened and a full moon was rising over the water. The sea was loud, but faraway
loud. All right, she said, I’m going to start. My story is called
Woman Killed By
Falling Man
.

Are we going to give them titles? said Evan.

Adam, said Hannah, do you think we should give them titles?

Titles are good, said Adam.

Wait, said Megan. She handed Lauren the piece of driftwood she’d brought back from
the beach. The story stick, she said.

Well, said Lauren, I heard this story from a friend of my sister’s. (Adam, don’t
spoil it.) It was about this friend of hers. Her name was Carly, Carly Ashburton,
she worked in cultural programs for local government. My sister’s friend worked in
council too. An awful story: do you want to hear it?

Everyone nodded.

Well, she said, it seemed Carly Ashburton was going through some sort of marriage
crisis. They
should
have been happy, this couple: the children had left and were
happy, a son in Europe, a daughter in America. But they’d been married a long time
and they weren’t happy, that’s the truth. The husband was on sleeping pills and anti-depressants
and had actually tried to kill himself. He’d spent the last year in therapy.

Wait, said Evan; the couple, the couple. Has the other half got a name? Tim, said
Adam. Tim, said Lauren—he ran a consultancy business in the city, contracts with
state government, getting infrastructure into new housing projects. Can I go on?

So, anyway, said Lauren, the husband, Tim, had got it into his head that the main
cause of his depression was the quiet of the suburbs (they had a house in Auburn).
He wanted to buy a city apartment—he was making bucketloads, after all—and be closer
to work. He wanted to live the city life—cafés, bars, restaurants, movies, theatre—and
he wanted Carly to live it with him. But Carly wanted different. She wanted to get
away from the rat-race, not closer to it. She wanted a treechange.

Well, eventually she wore Tim down; he could see it was going to get messy otherwise.
They found a country place out past Sunbury, an old bluestone church on a couple
of hectares tucked in off the road in a stand of cypress trees. They picked it up
for a song, gutted it, and started rebuilding: a big open-plan living area and kitchen
downstairs, mezzanine bedroom upstairs. But does real estate bring happiness? Really?

Everyone looked at Evan. Evan shrugged.

Lauren: Woman Killed By Falling Man…

With her husband working long hours in his office in the city, said Lauren, and she
‘between jobs’ while they renovated, Carly Ashburton spent her days watching the
fine body of the carpenter working. He was Tim’s cousin, Jay, and he was doing it
cheap. He was not much older than her son.

Oh no! said Hannah. Lauren smiled.

After she’d bedded him once she couldn’t stop; it was like a disease. Meanwhile,
Tim drove home from work every evening to the sawdust and the offcuts and the water
for the pasta bubbling on the two-burner camp stove and kissed Carly’s cheek without
giving anything away. He was at it every lunchtime with his work colleague, Adele—a
marketing manager not much older than his daughter—who lived, ironically, in a high-rise
apartment just like the one Tim had dreamed about, with even a view from her bedroom
window of their office building across the river.

But of course, said Lauren, it was just a matter of time. Carly was already wondering
where her infidelities would take her, her husband where his would take him. He was
certainly getting more brazen. He and Adele sometimes even stood out on the balcony
in their bathrobes smoking a post-coital cigarette (at home he never smoked), watching
the seagulls rise and fall on the updraft from the river, their office just a stone’s
throw away. It was like they were asking to be seen. As for Carly, she knew her affair
with Jay the cousin-carpenter couldn’t last (he was already fitting the benches)
so with one eye on the clock and one hand on her heart she started to go at him more
furiously, in places and positions more outrageous than before, with a kind of reckless,
catch-me-if-you-can abandon.

Tim and Adele, meanwhile, had begun to share their after-sex cigarettes in silence.
Eventually he had to tell her: he thought his wife knew. Adele’s first reaction was
to laugh. What difference does it make? she said. What do you care? Tim tried to
explain how, in spite of his strong feelings towards her, his very strong feelings,
he said, he was still a married man, still had obligations and, he was not afraid
to say it, still had feelings for his wife. Adele wasn’t happy, naturally. She thought
she had Tim to herself and soon let him know about it. He said he understood how
she felt, really he did, but, he continued, pleading, surely she could see it from
his point of view? He never said he’d leave his wife, on the contrary, he went home
to her every evening. But Adele wasn’t listening. I suggest you go home, she said,
and sort a few things out—if, that is, you have any intention of seeing me again.