The Sunlit Zone Read online

  The Sunlit Zone

  Lisa Jacobson

  © Lisa Jacobson 2012

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of study and research, criticism, review, or as otherwise permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be made to the publisher.

  Published by Five Islands Press.

  F.I. Press Inc

  PO Box 4429

  University of Melbourne

  Parkville Vic. 3052

  www.fiveislandspress.com

  Cover design: Libby Austen

  Cover image: Copyright © Samantha Everton. Image supplied courtesy of Anthea Polson Art.

  Five Islands Press would like to thank the School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne, for their assistance.

  Digital conversion by Aleksandr Tuza, alektuza.com.

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publications entry

  Lisa Jacobson

  The Sunlit Zone

  ISBN: 978-0-7340-4746-5

  1. Title

  A821.3

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

  Acknowledgements

  I am grateful to Five Islands Press and its editorial team, Kevin Brophy, Lyn Hatherly, Michael McKay and Katia Ariel, for enabling me to bring this work to publication.

  Several organisations also require acknowledgement: The Marten Bequest, whose Travelling Scholarship took me to the shores of the Red Sea where the first few pages of the book were written, La Trobe University’s English Program and The Institute for Advanced Study at La Trobe.

  Many people who were instrumental in the writing of this book may well have forgotten just how useful they were. In particular, I want to thank Richard Freadman, Catherine Padmore, Alison Ravenscroft and Chris Wallace-Crabbe.

  Many friends, colleagues and family members have in various ways assisted with the manuscript’s development. These include Annette Barlow, Beverley Farmer, Catherine Harris, Antoni Jach, Steven Jacobson, Rosaleen Love, Lynne Kelly, Eric King-Smith and Ronnith Morris. There are others who, due to my flawed memory and the passage of time, shall have to remain unnamed – to you I also extend my gratitude.

  I would like to acknowledge my parents to whom this book is dedicated, as well as David Tacey and Hayley Austen who put their own needs aside so that it might be finished.

  An extract from The Sunlit Zone previously appeared in Refashioning Myth: Poetic Transformations and Metamorphoses, edited by Jessica Wilkinson, Eric Parisot and David McInnis (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2011).

  Biographical note

  Lisa Jacobson’s The Sunlit Zone was shortlisted for the 2009 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript. An earlier poetry collection, Hair & Skin & Teeth, was published by Five Islands Press in 1995 and shortlisted for the National Book Council Awards. She has been awarded the 2011 Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize, the HQ/Harper Collins Short Story Prize, a Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship, and an Australia Council Grant to complete her next poetry collection. Her poetry and fiction have been published in Australia, New York and London. Her work is represented in Heinemann’s Best Short Stories (U.K.), Peter Porter’s The Oxford Book of Modern Australian Verse, Scorched: Penguin Australian Summer Stories, Robert Adamson’s The Best Australian Poems 2010 and Adrian Hyland’s Kinglake 350. She has studied literature at Melbourne and La Trobe Universities, and remains an Honorary Research Fellow at La Trobe. She shares a bush block in Melbourne with her partner and daughter. Please refer to www.lisajacobson.org for further information.

  for my parents

  the sunlit zone:

  a shallow but complex layer of ocean in which vegetation

  flourishes most prolifically, and which the deep sea

  diver must keep in her sights

  if she is to return to it

  Contents

  Whale

  Salt

  Star fish

  Skin

  Cake

  Hair

  Boat

  Pier

  Fruit

  Bones

  Milk

  Ash

  Breath

  Teeth

  Soil

  Waves

  Home

  Sources for the epigraphs

  Part 1: Whale

  Angler’s Bay, 2050

  There are few, or no, bluish animals.

  Henry Thoreau

  1

  All Saturday afternoon I watch

  through my front window

  the blue whale that’s beached itself

  amidst drifts of kelp on the foreshore

  of Angler’s Bay. Volunteers stream

  in like diaspora, dissipate. Waverley

  will be there, for sure. She’d nurse

  a sea slug if it were beached.

  Already the tides are sliding back

  into a field of waves that reflect

  the darkness of Melbourne in July.

  A tensile wall restrains the sea

  but not the view. This flat is on

  the second floor. My skinfone glows.

  —north, cybes Waverley, where r u?

  This is the third whale stuck this week.

  I helped out with the other two.

  —sorri mate, I cybe, I’m doing stuff. c u.

  2

  The carbon counter on the wall

  reads –2. You have exceeded

  your carbon limit for this week.

  I drag a woolly jumper on,

  push back the too-long sleeves

  my mum knitted. Her house robot

  could easily crank out one of these.

  —But North, she says. It’s therapy.

  I sit amidst the rubble on my desk:

  heat sweets, God Junk, a lone earring,

  lilac pebbles from a resort beach.

  Words glimmer on my lobal screen

  I can’t quite, almost, read.

  I refocus until the text solidifies,

  notations made in my brain scrawl.

  I save the imprint and proceed.

  Soon dusk crawls in.

  3

  But it’s hard to work with that damn

  whale wedged in on sand. Poor blue

  bugger, big as a pub, stranded on some

  ancestral path. It’s just a clone, I think.

  No one’s sighted a real whale for years.

  The bay has been restocked since then

  with GM replicas, but they just keep on

  beaching. One whale calls the whole

  herd in. Five hundred Southern Rights

  were bled at Warrnambool last year.

  The sickly, death-sweet funeral smoke

  filled every home. The sand is thick

  with ash and bone.

  4

  I take last night’s leftover pasta,

  whack it in the Laser Wave

  and fill a bowl with dog pellets.

  —Sit, Bear, I say. Slowly, Bear sits,

  lowering his blue rump to the tiles

  and whumping his thick tail.

  Bear: designer dog gone wrong,

  unwanted f
ashion accessory.

  Best friend, bought cheap

  from a Gen Pets laboratory.

  There’s not much room for him

  but I have a Bear-sized flexi flap.

  Week days he spends in the garden

  below our flat with next door’s

  ultraviolet cat. I eat my dinner

  on the couch, tune in to Web City.

  Bear scoffs his meal and plonks down

  at my feet, eyeing my pasta mournfully.

  5

  Not much. Just crap. As usual.

  The news subedited by hackers

  before it even reaches me.

  On Beijing’s latest Dome Show hit,

  Man in the Moon, a bunch of pretty

  Chinese undergrads float weightless

  in their lunar home. By then it’s ten.

  I kill the screen and wake up Bear.

  —Come on, boy.

  He galumphs towards the flexi flap.

  I push him through. He sniffs night

  air and cocks a leg against the gate.

  We head down to the shore.

  6

  No moon tonight, just pale and rheumy

  stars. The desalination plant casts green

  light on a continent of gleaming sand.

  The tide is out. Bear snuffs at kelp,

  rubbish, leaps over luminous jellyfish.

  The beached whale looms ahead like

  a fabulous fruit the sea’s washed in.

  Bear gives a deep, full-throated bark

  and navigates it cautiously. A dozen

  rescue volunteers attend the whale’s

  boulder head. The mood’s funereal.

  I nod hello. But there’s not much

  that anyone can do, though Waverley

  persists, beetling along the whale’s

  flanks with her hydro kit like an extra

  terrestrial stick insect. Her hair springs

  up in a crazy frizz. When Bear spots

  Waverley, he leaps with ravenous joy and slobbers on her scrawny neck.

  —Oh Bear, my Bear, she croons.

  He flops, drooling.

  7

  The whale’s vast flank feels smooth

  and chill as long-life meat. The skin

  secretes a fishy smell that’s just a bit

  too strong, like bait in buckets

  stewing on the pier. It’s just a clone,

  I tell myself again. Waverley strokes

  its big grey head, the spout expelling

  ropey exhalations that diminish,

  fray and thin. Then, nothing.

  The whale’s eye, dark as a lake

  and sorrowful. Everything stops.

  Even the waves cease muttering

  and all is still. The eye empties

  as if a plug’s been pulled.

  We watch as it recedes

  into opaqueness.

  Part 2: Salt

  Angler’s Bay, 2020

  You do not have to be good …

  You only have to let the soft animal

  of your body love what it loves.

  Mary Oliver

  1

  Flora and Richard were pissed,

  stumbling out of the Wharf Hotel

  on a warm night in October.

  At the end of the pier’s long arm

  they sat and kissed, entwined

  in lapping darkness. Backwards

  and laughing my parents fell

  onto the wharf’s uneven planks

  that smelt of salt and whitebait,

  neither of them young or naive.

  Flora unzipped the blue dress

  bought especially for this evening,

  felt rough wood scrape her back.

  Saw or thought she saw twin

  moons through scraps of cloud.

  Everything ripe, a little hazy,

  she abandoned herself to the wild

  hard kisses Richard planted almost

  inside her, nuzzling her lanky thighs.

  Euphoric with wine and the stars,

  she drew him up beside her

  and slowly let him in.

  2

  After, on the salt-licked planks,

  they gazed at cumulus that glowed

  pinkish with dawn. Light spread over

  the swollen waves and Flora, her thighs

  gently damp, thought: that ought to do it.

  My mother was forty-four; too old

  for the minutiae of weddings,

  the white dress, frothing.

  She just wanted children.

  Already she felt spermatozoa

  twirling inside her, the way starlight

  twirls when reflected in water at night.

  3

  So much about Richard pleased my mother

  since they’d met in the school staff-room;

  this tall thin man with his half-tucked shirts,

  the hair he worried into ginger clumps,

  tapping at his keyboard out of fondness

  more than efficiency. At fifty-two,

  my father still held a wet-eared love

  of science contagious to his students;

  their chatter falling away the way a rope

  falls till its anchor finds the sea bed,

  hushed by the miracles he revealed:

  fish eyes, sheep hearts, bird embryos.

  Flora’s heart lifted.

  4

  Spring arrived late. November came

  and went before a fuzz of wattle

  decked the brittle trees. In Flora’s bed

  one sheet-strewn afternoon, my parents

  lay in a heat-struck swoon, listening

  to waves collapse upon the beach,

  the quark of gulls. My mother’s walls

  were crammed with art, mostly hers.

  —I love the way you paint, my father said

  and stroked her heat-damp hair,

  sunset-coloured at a new boutique.

  Synthetic implants? He didn’t care.

  I feel joyful, he said. Fluid, replete.

  My mother laughed and, feeling

  a new solidity, chose this moment

  to reveal what stirred inside.

  —I’m pregnant, she said.

  Richard inhaled a happy, half sobbed

  breath, his face buried into her neck.

  5

  Angler’s Bay was filling up

  with Queenslanders back then

  who’d fled, fearing more tsunamis,

  and fifty-something grand mums

  with their families who found

  the city compounds too restrictive.

  City kids were polished and expensive;

  their bikes too shiny, clothes too new,

  their parents grey-coiffed and retired

  or soon to be. Seaside sales dropped

  rapidly that year although the ocean

  here was calm, almost domesticated.

  The local residents were courteous

  but fixed. They did their shopping

  at the local strip while the new mob

  shopped online at foodie.net

  6

  Past quarter acre house blocks,

  newly sold, the local kids rode

  beat up bikes, rusty with salt

  and sand. The streets acquired

  a freshly painted, ice cream hue.

  Cottages rebuilt or subd
ued

  by owners desiring loftier views.

  The old salts hunkered down:

  Tom’s Fish’n’Chips, Pixie’s Café,

  Dot’s Frocks and Bayside Gifts.

  The rest sold up or acquiesced

  to pet salons, infant boutiques,

  chi gung cafés and sushi booths.

  Reluctantly, the town made room

  for them.

  7

  Flora and Richard were ring-ins,

  neither local nor brand new;

  the high school where they taught

  kept pace with the town, and grew.

  Flora had a bias for oil painting

  her colleagues found archaic,

  though they’d never say it.

  Richard was brought in to replace

  Prof Halliwell, the teacher who left

  amidst controversy to host a show

  on iTV. My father wasn’t looking

  but the principal was persuasive.

  And the sea beckoned.

  8

  Designer embryos had been novelties,

  expensive options for the privileged

  and popular amongst celebrities

  until a local company slashed

  the cost for each firstborn

  and threw in a new electric Ford.

  Dream Genes was spawned.

  Wistful parents could tick a box

  and order in a child who would excel

  in law, be strong or fast or just pretty

  like little Cello Green next door,

  born three months before Finn and me.

  She got her face on a swag of zines.

  9

  Dream Babies, they called them on iTV.

  Fertility Clinic and other soaps like this

  sprang up quickly. On Quantum

  and 60 Minutes, the older scientists

  thrashed it out with the newest wave

  of graduates, already rich on GM profit.