Read an extract from Two Daughters by Alison Edwards.
For Ava, heading to university in Sydney is her escape from a poverty-stricken upbringing. Her mother is long gone, her father able to provide love but little else. On the other side of the world, Laurie tolerates university only at the insistence of her father, a Marxist professor. Her mother died in childbirth, and Laurie dreams of freedom, far from the Cambridge cloisters. It is within these college grounds that Ava and Laurie cross paths. They could not be more different, and yet as each grapples with the lasting effects of losing a mother, their lives become entwined in ways neither could have anticipated.
Start reading Two Daughters by Alison Edwards
PROLOGUE
It is the week an all-white panda is born at the London Zoo, and a public debate erupts as to whether pandas are normally white with black markings, or vice versa. The controversy devolves into an ugly row over the semantics of the term deviant, and pretty soon everyone is a racist.
Ava takes the birth as a bad omen. Hovering beside the buffet during the annual gala of the All England Lawn Tennis Club, she can’t help but feel weirdly close to the patchless cub: both of them fully formed, yet somehow lacking.
As Colin’s wife—she’s Ava Byrne-Beaumont now, not plain Ava Jacobs; wife of a longstanding club member, an establishment man, Mr Politics—she ought to be mingling, working the room on his behalf. The problem is that she is spectacularly unsuited to the role. Her gown feels like a compression device. The hors d’oeuvres are intricate micro-artworks that she barely registers as food. Even at the best of times, she is at a loss for what to do with her hands, how to arrange her face. What to respond when people ask, ostensibly in jest, when she intends to produce an heir. She nods when she should be shaking her head, makes all the wrong noises in all the wrong places. There is a spatial logic to these events that she has never quite mastered, unlike Colin, who began accompanying his aristocratic but moderately bonkers mother to cocktail parties as soon as he could toddle around in a cloth nappy and miniature waistcoat. He would never find himself—as Ava does now—cornered first by an ancient, longwinded personage named Peregrine, and then by the club treasurer, who pulls up a spreadsheet on his phone to demonstrate exactly how VAT receipts ought to be entered into the system to satisfy Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs.
She flees the reception and takes refuge in a subterranean courtyard, an indoor Zen garden intended to be calming. But the angst remains, a low-level hum between her ears, and over this omnidirectional static comes a soft bleep; an almost inaudible ping of her phone that may as well be the atomic boom of a nuclear warhead.
The bleep is an incoming email.
The email is from a journalist.
Somebody knows what she did.
Not just any somebody: a journalist who is now pursuing her, demanding comment.
The journalist’s name is Laurie Mélenchon. Ava doesn’t know any Laurie, but the surname is all too uncomfortably familiar. For days Ava has been wallowing in agony, in fear of this very moment. Now that it is upon her, she can’t stick her head in the sand, can’t beg for female solidarity, can’t even proclaim her innocence. After all, she is guilty.
And Laurie Mélenchon knows it.
PART I
BEFORE
AVA
New South Wales, Australia
Ava dressed quietly. Her father was still asleep on the narrow couch on his side of the caravan. When she cracked open the screen door, he stirred and waved groggily; a weak salute that ended in a spasm.
That was the MS—if it wasn’t spasms it was stiffness, numbness, tingling. When Ava was little, the thought of him dying used to make her hyperventilate.
‘I’ll cling on till you bump me off yourself,’ Jim would say airily, passing her a paper bag. ‘You just watch out for trains.’
Watch out for trains. A morbid quip born of her mother’s collision with an Intercity Express, shortly after she had run off for the city. Jim always pointed out that he could hardly leap in front of the 11.02 to Penrith with his manky legs, could he? In any case, there were no trains around here. The tracks stopped a few towns north, as if reluctant to venture any further from civilisation.
Outside, pink arcs bled across the sky. Ava crossed the dirt path to the toilet block and yanked the hose inside. She made three dollars a day hosing out the cubicles, morning and night. They stank regardless. The concrete floor was cracked, the f lush buttons broken, the porcelain bowls yellowed—though they probably weren’t porcelain at all, but some cut-price substitute that was giving them all rectal cancer.
The term caravan park conjured up sun-filled holidays, children frolicking on inflatable pool toys. In reality, it was a parched, windswept place, vans strewn across the craggy headland, wheels bedded into the weeds, doors hanging from single hinges. There was a decrepit playground with a seatless seesaw and a sand-blown, colonial-era pub the colour of pumice stone. The sole shop sold dented tins of baked beans and, belatedly, newspapers about goings-on in impossibly faraway worlds: Bill Clinton’s impeachment, the Good Friday Agreement.
Now the sun was up, gold and ferocious. She shaded her eyes with her hand. In the distance, Patrick was already leaning against the payphone. She wound the hose back onto its hook and crossed the headland towards him.
‘Ladies first,’ he said. He was wearing his favourite singlet, the one reading LOVE MOTHER EARTH.
‘You go. I’m too nervous.’
He picked up the receiver as she recited the phone number she had committed to memory the moment exams were over.
Seventy-five-point-oh, said the robotic voice on the line.
Enough for the biology degree she knew he would never do.
‘Sure you won’t go?’
‘All that debt.’ He shrugged, holding out the receiver.
‘You’re up.’
She keyed in the number, fingers clumsy with anxiety.
Ninety-nine-point-nine, said the voice.
Shaking her head, she pressed 1 to hear the score again.
Ninety-nine-point-nine.
She jabbed at the buttons. ‘It’s not working.’
‘How d’you mean?’
Ninety-nine-point-nine.
‘I think it’s jammed. It keeps saying the same thing.’
He listened for a moment, his face breaking into a grin. ‘It keeps saying ninety-nine-point-nine.’
‘That’s what I mean.’
‘That’s your score, idiot.’
Ava’s jaw fell open. It was enough for political sciences at her first-choice university. It was enough for any degree, anywhere in the state. She was enough. Patrick grabbed her hands, danced her out of the phone booth, spun her around until she felt like the giddiest version of herself, buoyant and careless.
‘Celebratory swim?’ he said.
They raced to the tip of the headland, the rock ledge that jutted over the water like the bow of a ship. Up here she felt like Kate Winslet on the deck of the Titanic, the scene where Leo holds her as she leans into the wind, arms outstretched like Jesus on the crucifix. Following Pat’s lead, she stripped to her underwear and leapt, whooping, into the bay below. Normally Ava never jumped; had grisly visions of herself landing on submerged rocks, being knocked unconscious and dragged out to sea by the tide.
Today, she felt invincible.
_
The feeling didn’t last long. As they bobbed beside the cliff, the sky turned dark and threatening.
That was how things worked around here: in extremes. Everything volatile, unpredictable. Flash floods, bushfires, the threat of eviction, a switchblade on the school bus, a constant, low-level hunger. Last year a fisherman had been swept off the outcrop during a storm, his body dashed mercilessly against the cliff.
Fat drops began to fall. Ava flailed, trying to keep her head above the swell. Tugging her towards the headland, Patrick yanked her onto a rock shelf. They scrabbled upwards and hauled themselves into a cave carved by centuries of gusting easterlies.
On their backs, they lay gasping until they caught their breath and began laughing, the sound reverberating around the cave. Sitting up, Ava wrung out her hair. She was soaked through, but not cold; the cave had trapped the summer heat. She could already feel her underwear drying, hard and scratchy with salt.
A scuttling in the shadows made her jump.
‘It’s just a mud crab.’ Patrick always knew things about crustaceans and insects and trees. It was hard to say whether his environmental bent or merely casual racism rendered him as much of an outcast as Ava. The other kids all lived inland, near the school in town. Like Ava, Pat lived out at the coast, but on the old Aboriginal reserve where gubbas could only go as guests.
She gazed out at the waves. The headland protruded into the bay, chalk-white beaches yawning off on either side. Somewhere out there lay the Tasman Sea; beyond that, the vast Pacific.
Pat nudged her. ‘Daydreaming about afar again?’
‘Always.’ Through the narrow gap at the mouth of the bay, she occasionally glimpsed ships passing by on their way up to Sydney.
‘You know that elsewhere isn’t, like, necessarily better than here?’
This was a conversation they’d had many times. Sometimes Ava worried that she was being materialistic, griping about her home being on wheels. But what she was really seeking, what she so keenly wanted, wasn’t material as such.
‘It’s just—’ She exhaled slowly, imagining her breath wafting off towards the open ocean. ‘Surely things are more stable out there.’
‘Security’s inside, I reckon,’ Pat said unselfconsciously. His self-possession was alien to Ava, and in its absence she was liable to attach herself to it in others.
She was acutely aware of their shoulders pressing together, the hairs on his forearm against hers, his body radiating warmth. It occurred to her that she felt a bit manic, full of adrenaline. A recklessness reared up within her, and before she could rein herself in, she had climbed into his lap.
‘Whoa,’ he said.
Ava had done it twice before, a couple of years back, with two different boys from school. Both times were silent, fumbling encounters—one in the caravan when her father was out, the other in a bedroom while the boy’s brother slept—that left her feeling as though her presence hadn’t been strictly essential. Now, as the wind blew a fine, salty spray into the cave, she dug her nails into Patrick’s back with an intensity that must have been buried inside her all along.
With him, she had always held off, careful to avoid anything that might trap her here. But today felt different. It was a day of exhilaration and finality—and she was on the cusp of escape.
LAURIE
Cambridge, UK
At last the light went off in her father’s study. Sometimes it stayed on all night, and Laurie would find him there the next morning, head slumped on a dog-eared copy of The Permanent Revolution. To everyone else, Eric was Professor Mélenchon, noted scholar of Marxist thought; to her he was a generalised pain in the arse.
Thankfully, this evening she only had to wait until midnight. She heard the floorboards creak as he shuffled to his room in his tartan slippers. He was young, for a father—barely middleaged—but honestly: he acted ancient.
She padded across the hallway. The stairs were worn down at the tread, the bannister cloaked in a fine film of dust. Eric was either too absent-minded to think of hiring a cleaner, or too hapless to make the requisite arrangements. For her part, Laurie had no intention of taking responsibility for their household upkeep. She was the child here, thank you very much, even if she was eighteen now.
Ife and Naomi and Celia from school all felt sorry for her, like she was borderline neglected, but it wasn’t that. Eric had an unorthodox approach to parenting, that was all. He treated her as if she were simply a small adult, instigating long, philosophising discussions about the nature of society and the meaning of life. When she was little, he’d fetch her from school with a placard still draped around his neck—JUSTICE FOR BOSNIA or THERE’S NO EXCUSE FOR ANIMAL ABUSE—or drag her along with him to protests: demonstrations for Mandela, marches for Palestine. Afterwards they’d watch the evening news, and there’d be Eric lobbing a custard pie at a politician, Laurie clutching her Paddington Bear in one hand, his shirt tail in the other.
Shrugging her coat on over her pyjamas, she stepped out into the garden. A frigid mist enveloped the house, which was far too big for just the two of them, but in its context, it made a certain sense. This end of Cambridge was dotted with mansions set back from the road by circular driveways and sculpted hedges. Some were still grand and well-maintained, like the Bellmans’, where Laurie used to go for twice-weekly piano lessons until she had revolted, aged ten, in favour of joining the neighbourhood kids in warlike games involving nerf guns and water bombs. By contrast, THE GRANGE (as Eric had painted on the letterbox—unimaginatively, since this was Grange Road, but he was ambivalent about private property) was in a constant state of disrepair: thatched roof dishevelled, chimneys crumbling, flowerboxes colonised by weeds.
She followed a trail of stepping stones to the old wooden gazebo. Ricardo was waiting for her on the bench seat, glass bong gleaming in the moonlight.
‘Olá, amor.’ He pushed up his hat, a vintage aviator beanie with furry earflaps.
Ricardo had recently relocated from Porto, moving in two doors down with his genome-scientist parents. Last month he had won the International Maths Olympiad while ‘higher than the upper boundary of the exosphere’ (his words). The first time Laurie met him out here, he had lit the bowl for her, and she had laughed with her mouth still clamped around the pipe so that all the weed blew out of the bowl and scattered across the ground. Since then he had rolled joints for her instead.
She took a drag of the spliff he was holding out. It tasted faintly like the salt and vinegar crisps he was always eating; the packet lay discarded on the seat beside him. Then she leant against the wall of the gazebo and picked up where she had left off last time, explaining the plot of Neighbours.
‘So Sarah bought the exact same outfit as Susan, which was hideous by the way, and then Karl accidentally kissed her because he mistook her for Susan—’
‘Isn’t Sarah his wife?’ Ricardo held the lighter to the bowl until the bud sparked.
‘That’s Susan. If you’re going to integrate here’—she coughed a little, puffs of white in the frosty air—‘you need to know this stuff.’
Ricardo nodded gravely. ‘Although,’ he said, ‘isn’t Neighbours Australian?’
She fluttered a hand dismissively. ‘The cinematic values are vastly superior to EastEnders. Also, this is what Brits do: pretend we live on Ramsay Street where it’s summer all year round.’
‘Maybe that’s just you.’
Taking another hit, Laurie shook her head solemnly. ‘The only person it’s not is Eric.’
‘Why do you call him by his first name?’
She contemplated this. ‘I don’t know how we come from the same planet, let alone family.’
‘Non seq-uit-er,’ Ricardo intoned in a singsong voice.
‘What? You know I don’t speak Portuguese.’
‘It’s Latin,’ he said, as if this made a difference.
She stretched out on the floor under an old plaid blanket. The smoke hung thick under the rafters, an earthy smell, something sweet about it too. For a while, time stood still, everything perfectly quiet except the sound of elves pumping the ventricles of her heart. Then he said, ‘Tell me a secret.’
She rolled onto her side, cheek pressed to a splintered floorboard. ‘Don’t have any secrets.’
‘Everybody does.’
‘What’s yours?’
‘I stole my father’s phone.’ Ricardo tended to get earnest and confessional when stoned. ‘He’s got all these videos of naked anime women vacuuming.’
Laurie gave a high-pitched giggle. Her piercings—six in each ear—tingled. She was absorbed in the grain of the wood an inch from her nose. A couple of dark-blonde hairs snagged on a plank and she shook her head in slow motion to release them, her brain sliding back and forth in her skull.
She had her mother’s hair. Recently she had stolen a Polaroid, taken before she was born, from the bottom drawer of Eric’s desk. Her mother, the epitome of late-seventies cool:
feathered fringe, dressed head to toe in black, one elbow resting nonchalantly on the table. And seated opposite, Eric: pre-facial hair, painfully awkward in his argyle V-neck. They looked like an odd pair: she way out of his league, he gazing at her in adoration. Laurie had stuffed the picture in a shoebox under her bed, along with reams of tortured childhood diary entries and a spliff Ricardo had rolled artfully into the shape of her initials.
‘The Mélenchons—’ Suddenly her surname struck her as hysterical. ‘The Mélenchons,’ she hiccupped, ‘don’t do secrets and lies.’
‘Please.’ Ricardo rotated his hands in the air as if playing an instrument. ‘You think your father tells you everything?’
He had a point. Eric supposedly sought an atmosphere of radical openness, yet whenever Laurie asked about her mother, he darkened and said, ‘Some things you’re better off not knowing.’ Clearly he was holding back, but she didn’t know what or why, and it struck her that whoever had said that thing about known unknowns was an unqualified genius. Or was it unknown unknowns, and was he not a genius but a maniac? Must be one of the two, but her thoughts were tilting and she was hallucinating now, seeing her father as distinctly as if he were right there in front of her—
‘Are you two out here getting stoned?’
It was Eric, standing at the foot of the gazebo in his striped pyjamas, ludicrous in combination with a full beard.
She giggled. ‘Uh-oh.’
‘We are seeking transcendence,’ Ricardo said.
‘All right—party’s over.’ Eric held out a hand to help her up.
‘Seems it’s time I made some changes around here.’
Extracted from Two Daughters by Alison Edwards, published by Atlantic Australia.
Two Daughters
by Alison Edwards
A brilliant debut reaching from the picturesque South Coast of NSW to the cloisters of Cambridge, following two young women's lives as they become entwined in ways neither could have expected.
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