Schadenvale Road

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He doesn't have money. Why would he think that she would be more interested in him if he had money: He doesn't even want a woman who is the sort who is interested in money, but he goes on and on and on about it anyway. She doesn't know what to say. She's not interested in money either, or rather she's trying to be but, up to this moment, has not been. Now she thinks she probably should be. Her mind is sashaying and she can't seem to stop that either. If you're over this way you should visit sometime I'm not often over that way, but I'd love to — if I'm around that way.

I've been quite successful He is cringing at himself as he continues to praise his meagre accomplishments. That's interesting, she says. She gets off the phone and can't believe that she has turned into a raving caricature of a s tammy and, as she's thinking this, her disapproving face is smiling to itself and her voice is light and flirty and those hips are doing it again in the privacy of her own lounge room. For years there had been only a few poles stuck into the ground up the hill from the caravan. He had cut them himself out of the surrounding bush.

The idea is that you use local materials so that the wood would be immune to the local pests. Echidna has no idea if this is true but it's cheap. He carefully selected a number of the stoutest looking trees which he cut down and more or less dressed before burying them deep into the ground.

He didn't need to worry about council permits up here. No one except the census bloke came unless they were invited or knew you well: There were the logs planted in the dirt that he had levelled out to form the floor of the studio. He'd already made the footings and poured a rough sort of slab — mixing the concrete by hand and shovelling it out one cold day in May. It had rained shortly thereafter and he had worried that the cement would not set but his friend Ben had told him that rain was good for concrete and that it was a chemical reaction, not a drying action that made it hard.

Sounded all right to Echidna so he gave in and watched from the caravan as the cement hardened in the light rain.

Schadenvale Road - Chris Mansell - Google Книги

He wished that he had made it smoother but he'd done his best. Once the floor was more or less done and the posts were up he began to make the mud bricks. This is not easy work and he had a slim back for it. There was plenty of clay soil about if you knew where to look.

This was not a problem, but as he loaded up the mould and put the newly formed bricks out to dry he could see that this was going to take longer than he thought. There was only enough shelter to build a few bricks at a time, and, although they were big, the progress was slow. He would have asked Ben for his help on the weekends except that he could not have stood being lectured through every brick. It kept him saner to do it himself.

Over the years the walls had grown. The western wall was complete and he smeared it over with more mud and whitewashed to see the effect. He liked the idea of a studio that was white on the inside and on the outside. Then there were the big rains, torrential fallings out of the sky and some hail and he went out one morning and even he could see that his wall was starting to deliquesce.

He must have done something wrong. All the work he had done was beginning to be washed away. He was ashamed that he didn't know to cover the walls, or perhaps he had not let the bricks dry well enough to begin with. He left the wall for months while he thought about it, or did not think about it. He avoided the eroding white wall as much as he could when he came out of the caravan and refused to think about it. Keeping warm was more important. He went to get the firewood out from under the blue tarp and found that some of it was wet as well and he felt like a failure.

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Inside the caravan the living was cramped and smelt of linseed oil. He had tried to do a few small paintings while he erected his studio but it was a summer occupation. He could not stand the stench at such close quarters during winter. In the winter, his hands were cold and he found it hard to sketch as his mind focussed on the small things of the winter more and more. He felt as though he were becoming an animal — worrying only what he would eat and when and how he would keep warm.

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There was something comforting in that and he almost didn't mind, except when he saw his failure of a wall. Now it had eroded even more and he could discern where he had packed some of the mud more effectively than elsewhere. Some bricks were strong and some weren't.

Echidna knew that he would have to knock it down and start again. Maybe he would put the roof on first. Big eaves to protect the earth from the direct weather. He would have to earn the money for the iron or find some second hand.

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And this is what he had invited that Eleanor woman to visit. He must be crazy. He didn't see how he could achieve any of the work he knew had to be done, so he sat in his caravan and pretended to himself that he was reading or thinking but he was avoiding the job that he knew he wanted to do, but not how to do it. It was best to avoid people, anyone at all if possible when he was feeling like this. Before he moved here, when he was still in the city, he would paint when he felt like this and somehow the painting made him feel better and as though he knew what he was doing in the world.

There were times when he hated the bush — even though he had given up everything to move here, he had never thought of himself as becoming an old man here — when the winter would make him cower indoors like an arthritic dog. The bush started to take him over in ways that even he would not have anticipated. There were whole days when he could do nothing but look at the pattern that the leaves of a tree made when you looked towards the sky. He knew the fascination that he felt was supposed to have something to do with chaos theory and the human brain's recognition of chaotic patterns implicit in natural formations.

This is why we liked ferns and waterfalls. He was sure that he'd read some analysis of Pollock's Blue Poles that showed that it wasn't just a mess of paint after all. When Echidna had tried to render this complexity in paint he had come adrift. The paint had seemed too clumsy and the closest he could get to the idea of implicit, pure, order in random event was a white on white abstraction in which the surface of the paint was the random element and the white pure order.

This was too simple a resolution and did not satisfy him. He knew that these white paintings were the sort that meant a lot in the execution but not much in the viewing. He had painted them over and over again.

He made sure that he did not show them to Ben who would have had a theory — as Echidna did — but a theory that would have become prescriptive. Echidna looked more and more at what was around him and became more and more paralysed with ideas and the impossibility of moving onwards towards anything else. If Echidna thought about things too much it stalled him. So first thing he did was to clean the caravan thoroughly. He always found that if he was going to make a decision he needed to have order around him. There was nothing much to clean, but he did it anyway.

Airing the mattress, washing sheets, running a damp cloth over the windows and along their narrow flat aluminium sills that seemed to collect black mould no matter what he did.

It wasn't the right weather to clean in. Too much moisture in the air. He should have waited until spring. Read more on Google Booksearch. Store Orders Home Contact Us. For the most part they live outside the city or towns, or if they do live in town they are physically cut off from their neighbours, like Vorzetser, the writer stuck in a town called Paradise: But even then she was an outsider: Of course the quest for the panther becomes a metaphor or another journey and we begin to suspect that maybe the quest has become an internal one: Then suddenly one night she senses something in the garden: Almost like a metaphor for the story nothing appears to have happened on the surface but approached from a slightly different perspective the narrative is heavy and rich with meaning.

The characters in this collection are mostly outsiders. For the most part they live outside the city or towns, or if they do live in town they are physically cut off from their neighbours, like Vorzetser, the writer stuck in a town called Paradise:.

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The townspeople could have been alien plants for all the notice he took of them and he was utterly unaware that there were people living in the surrounding hills. They washed past his door and handled his personal correspondence without making a ripple in his life. He wrote to important friends who lived anywhere but in Paradise and complained about the parochialism of the place without ever speaking much to anyone, He was as prejudiced and wilful as it was possible for a poet to be without exploding. There is something almost Dickensian about the wilful poet living in almost self-imposed exile in a town called Paradise.

He realises he can move forward or simply disappear in the crowd, not answering to his name. Like the early Carey, Mansell creates a detailed narrative, we feel as we can almost recognise some of the towns and landscapes she describes.

Schadenvale Road

At the same time, however, there is something just below the surface, something that knocks our perspective just a little off centre. Something disconcerting and delicious. On first reading this story appears to revolve around a woman who starts hearing voices in her head and is confined to an institution. She can, however, remember a time before the voices: But even then she was an outsider:.

And then she remembered the people who came. Not good, but she supposed they loved her. In truth, she had very little idea what this might mean. She tried to figure it out. It seemed to be some sort of obligation. When she first starts to hear the voices she tries to understand them as they are often in different languages.

She studies and learns many different languages in order to understand them.

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