Cirrus@Austlit

'When I was a young woman I walked through Paris in a grey woollen coat. It was secondhand with a tie-belt, and the arms were an inch to short. I was disappointed in this coat because I thought it made me look like a poor student, which I was, when really I wanted to look like a sophisticated woman in a smart navy dress, sporting dark glasses: someone who might sit in the Cafe de Flore and think of Simone de Beauvoir.' (Introduction)

(25125-25126)

A fresh new book. I didn't intend to start another but the anticipation if testing memory was too tempting.Since the passing of the year of anaesthesia and fears of oblivion, I need to patch up the great holes of omission. (Introduction)

1. As time goes by

'One day he was kissing me all over my willing body, the next day he was shouting at me to stop bloody moping around the house. Well, it wasn't actually a day between the kisses and the shouting, that's just an expression. You know, one day this and the next day that, when in fact it's been years, the long slow slide into misery. It was the same with my kids, one day cooing and patting my face with soft pudgy hands and the next day calling me a cow. Moo, I'd said, playfully, pretending to have horns. Cows don't have horns you moron, he'd said, the younger boy that is because the older one doesn't speak to me from one day to the next.' (Introduction)

'A story, naturally.

'That could be then right there...Ask your father...'

'Dad bites into his fish from his seniors special fish and chips. which I imagine is probably shark. My gaze drifts across the gently moving water of Fremantle harbour. It's always busy here - tourists.Yet oddly enough always relaxing. Dad finishes his shark and reaches for his coffee.' (Introduction)

'Sissy had never been on a holiday and didn't know a child on her street or a classmate at Sacred Heart School who'd travelled much further than the local swimming pool. At best they'd enjoyed a tram ride to a picture theatre in the city, maybe once or twice a year. A girl in the same year at school, Ruby Allison who lived behind the dry-cleaners with her mother and two older brothers, came back to school after the  previous summers holidays and told a story that she had been to the ocean over summer.' (Introduction)

'Westerly's inaugural Writers' Development Program was designed to guide and support emerging writers, and to aid them in developing work for publication . In partnership with Margaret River Press, and with the support of the Copyright Agency's Cultural Fund, the Program selected five emerging writers from applications and paired them with a relevant professional author as mentor.' (Introduction)

'Brown stuff settled in the water at the bottom of the pot. Jake stared at it. He know Mum was watching him from the balcony. he stared and she stood/ she had the wind in her ears; she heard it there, the dry-burble sounds as it passed, and she heard it in the trees. They were dry sounds too, the shushing together of brittle leaves, banksia and jarrah, the swishing of blood as it passed through the body. It seems a lifetime ago that she first heard the sound of her baby's blood, his heartbeat coming through the doppler in the doctor's office.' (Introduction)

'Her feet pound the pavement. she gasps for breath. her keys, iPhone, loose coins and work shoes thrash around in her handbag as it bounces off her shoulder and smacks her in the ribs. All she can hear is the dog's bark and the sound of its rapacious paws, as it closes in on her. Finally, the front door - locked.' (Introduction)

'Memory

'My only memory of Aunty Fenella is standing next to her on the warm pavement outside my Mum's beaten-up brown Datsun in Broome. I didn't want to have to sit next to her in the car and I was ashamed of feeling this way. Even though I must have been four or five, I knew I should disguise what I felt and pretend I felt comfortable sitting next to my Aunty. I was fiercely hopeful that Mum wouldn't make me.' (Introduction)