Snake
Praise for
Snake
â
Snake
can be read in a single sitting. In fact, this is the ideal
way to absorb Ms Jennings's stunning narrative ⦠The brief
scenes ⦠possess what feels like a holographic shimmer â¦
Snake
is clearly the work of a powerful imagination.'
âC
AROL
S
HIELDS
,
The New York Times Book Review
âA taut, poignant story. That she makes your heart ache
for both her protagonists is a testimony to her artistry.'
â
The Sunday Telegraph
âJennings's black humour is distilled into a potent, bitter brew
that transforms her melodramatic subject matter â adultery,
lesbian love affairs, teenage pregnancies, car crashes and
suicides â into a novel of extraordinary, if bleak, beauty.'
â
The Times Literary Supplement
âThis snake of a novel is lethal and fast-moving â and
so spare it will leave readers wishing for more.'
â
Publishers Weekly
âA novel that simmers with energy, passion, and thoroughly
unresolved tensions.'âD
EBRA
A
DELAIDE
,
The Sydney
Morning Herald
âKate Jennings's style is as spare and compelling as the landscape
of her native country. The reader can feel the heat
and smell the disillusionment of this Australian rural scene
captured in breathtaking detail.'âJ
ILL
K
ER
C
ONWAY
âSuperbly assured ⦠evocative, unexpected and hard to
forget ⦠Jennings has an unerring eye for the unexpected,
telling detail; her novel holds a wonderful balance
between deft, dry comedy and genuine heartbreak.'
â
The Sunday Times
âIt's hard to believe a full-blown family tragedy can be told
so wholly and well in such small, deft snatches, but then
rarely has a poet's skill at compaction been put to better use
in prose. You can easily read the entire book in one sitting
â and only upon standing be struck by how much pity and
terror you've consumed.'â
The Los Angeles Times
âNot a word is misplaced, the colours leap out from the
page, and characters are sketched with a deft and terrible
economy.'â
The Financial Times
âA book that will come to be regarded as a classic account
of the realities of Australian rural life.'â
People
âWhat astonishment, stimulation, refreshment, enjoyment
is to be found in this short novel by Kate Jennings â¦
Snake
makes various current challengers in the fiction
race look simply awful.'â
The Bulletin
âJennings's detailed character studies and her beautiful use
of language create an uplifting and wonderfully satisfying
work.'â
The Canberra Times
âBeautifully written, exquisitely painful, insidiously
memorable.'â
The Adelaide Advertiser
âHow often do you find a book that seizes you and doesn't
let go until it has finished its assault?
Snake
does that,
quite painfully and beautifully.'â
Australian Book Review
âJennings lays bare the anguish of the mismatch at the heart
of the story ⦠This slim, unyielding and yet poetic book
portrays a desperate marriage with great depth of understanding.'
â
The Weekend Australian
Snake
K
ATE
J
ENNINGS
Published by Black Inc.,
an imprint of Schwartz Media Pty Ltd
37â39 Langridge Street
Collingwood Vic 3066 Australia
email: [email protected]
http://www.blackincbooks.com
First published 1996 by Reed Books Australia.
This edition published 2011 by Black Inc.
Copyright © Kate Jennings 2011
A
LL
R
IGHTS
R
ESERVED
.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.
e-ISBN: 9781921870125
Book design: Thomas Deverall
When the dog at morning
Whines upon the frost
I shall be in another place.
Lost, lost, lost.
ELIZABETH RIDDELL
CONTENTS
4. In the Stream the Shadowy Fish
3. I Will Walk Within My House with a Perfect Heart
2. The Moral Is the Universal One: âLet Us Irrigate'
3. Who Would Live in a Country Town?
4. Pseudonaja Textilis Textilis
7. You Know Bert I Sometimes Marvel Women Can Go Sour Like That
8. Home Is the First and Final Poem
9. I Am Not a Slut, Though I Thank the Gods I Am Foul
10. In Sicily, the Black, Black Snakes Are Innocent, the Gold Are Venomous
12. For the Term of Her Natural Life
15. Sex Is the Big Preoccupation of My Life, and Why Not?
18. Sticks and Stones and Wallaby Bones
21. Secret to the Earth, Sowed by No One
22. The Bravest Thing God Ever Made!
24. And You Alone Can Hear the Invisible Starfall
25. The Pleasant Place of All Festivity
26. Alive As Fire, and Evilly Aware
30. I Love My Love with a Dress and a Hat
35. Love's Always Been My Game
37. They Say All Things Are for the Best
40. The Brief Lives of Insects
44. A Laughing Woman with Two Bright Eyes
45. The Imperative: Snakes May Not Live
47. Telling Tales Is Telling Lies
48. The Little Bearded Governess Gazed Sadly at Her Basket of Tulips
50. âHello? Hello Out There?'
54. My Mother Has Grown to an Enormous Height
55. Dawn Comes Slowly and Changes Nothing
62. Oh Hold Me, for I Am Afraid
63. Heavy Stones and Hard Lines
1. The New Life I Demand of My Bones
2. Oh, I Could Live with Thee in the Wildwood
3. Idiocy Is the Female Defect
E
VERYBODY LIKES YOU.
A good man. Decent. But disappointed. Who wouldn't be? That wife. Those children.
Your wife. You love and cherish her. You like to watch her unobserved, through a window, across a road or a paddock, as if you were a stranger and knew nothing about her. You admire her springy hair, slow smile, muscled legs, confident bearing. If this woman were your wife, your chest would swell with pride.
She is your wife, she despises you. The coldness, the forbearing looks, the sarcastic asides, they are constant. She emasculates you with the sure blade of her contempt. The whirring of the whetstone wheel, the strident whine of steel being held to it, that is the background noise to the nightmare of your days.
She passes on the loathing she feels for you to the children, solemnly, as if it were an heirloom. They grow up ignoring you. They are not your children; they are hers, with her hopes, virtues, faults. When they were born, you stood over their cots and wished for them sturdy bodies, strong bones, and a sense of fairness. Now you look at them and think,
foreigners
.
Every reason to be disappointed, although that word implies expectations, and you never had many of them.
Y
OU GREW UP
on a farm, a thousand acres of chalky soil, a rainfall to break the strongest spirit. The days always began with your father, shoulders hunched against the half-light of dawn, trekking across the yard, past the clothesline, to the rainfall gauge. Any kind of precipitation, even a heavy dew, was marked with ceremony on the calendar that hung on the back of the kitchen door.
You were a taciturn child, skinny, with freckles, and you looked at people with a shy, sideways squint. You had a younger brother who was your opposite: a plump bully. One day your brother â he was ten, you were twelve â whacked his pony with a piece of wire, and the beast bucked, for the moment made as vicious as her master. As your brother fell, his boot snagged in the stirrup, and he was jounced against hard ground from the sheep shed to the house.
He didn't scream; he squealed. You all heard him. Who knew a human could produce a noise like that? By the time the horse reached the house, your brother was unconscious. The pony stood quietly, flicking her tail, spittle looping from her mouth, ignoring the inert boy with the bloodied head and arms that dangled from the saddle on her back.
Broke every bone in his body, your parents told neighbors when they came to commiserate. As with all disasters â hailstorms, foot-and-mouth disease, miscarriages â their tone was reverential, boastful even, as if his accident had been an achievement.
They set up a bed in the living room and waited for gangrene to set in, as it must, things always went from bad to worse in their world. Your parents were familiar with gangrene; in a similar makeshift bed in the same room, your grandfather had died piece by piece, the smell of his rotting flesh perfuming the air, a magnolia blooming in hell.
For once, events were in their favor; your brother's wounds healed, his bones knit. His luck was your misfortune. The farm couldn't support two sons, one of you would have to go into the world, and it had to be you, you were fit, capable.
The decision broke your heart. You would have been happy to spend your life in that small wooden house on its stony hill, the sheltering stand of ironbarks, the paddocks spread below, the dams with their chocolate water. You are one of those people who take comfort from the sameness of their surroundings.
It seemed all the more unfair as your brother's brush with death had not humbled him; if anything, he took up his career as a sly tyrant with renewed vigor. They should have called him Rex, not you.
T
HE YEAR OF
your brother's accident, you stayed home from school to help with the wheat harvest and never went back, which was no loss, or so you thought, only a step toward becoming a man.