Ah! What complex souls find themselves weaving their way into the SGWB: like Myrtle, the 65 year old permed temporary ceramics teacher at St Albans High School, who indeed chose this country weepy by Juice Newton only because the more emotionally abstruse Stay With me Till Dawn by Judy Tzuke wasn't on the duke box...in fact ideally she'd like to combine the 2 songs into an amalgam called Angel Of The Dawn by an unlikely named singer called Juice Tzuke: but this will have to suffice.
For this is a tale spanning continents and decades, beginning on a kibbutz in 1973, which is where she met the main protagonist: Gideon Leaf ( real name Gregg Belcher) which is fair enough as at the time her assumed name was Willow. Their eyes, and destinies, locked while they were assigned to fix a tractor together, but just got high, and talked about Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet instead.
And thus began a sort of world poverty tour as they aligned themselves with different cults: The Children of God, Shiva Lila, Jonestown ( leaving, luckily, before that whole Kool-Aid 'thing') swamped in enough peyote and LSD infused mantra to drown a herd of nipple time share confused pachyderms.
The exact number of offspring she had sired throughout these experiments is vague: between 3 and 7...maybe 9...the spermicidal causalities are even vaguer: At least 4 gurus for sure (who all seemed weirdly obsessed with golf) Gregg 2 definitely (maybe?) The Jesus-looking dude with the bent cock, and maybe that ginger-haired guy who lived in a tree?
Whatever, many a volunteer orphan/originator agency case worker was kept busy with the paperwork over the ensuing years. And she regularly revived confirmation or denial documents as regular as tax returns.
In the meantime Gregg and her had come back to Oz and opened one of those shitty, sort of dusty, sort of really shitty B&B-cum-backpackers-cum-lodge-cum-whatevers in Warburton. One of those multilevel disappointments, that don't quite meet anyone's requirements vis a vis comfort and/or spiritual nourishment. Imagine the Great Northern in The Shining: but without the grandeur, just with the empty spookiness.
Wherein enters the second protagonist: William ( Gregg's brother) a no-nonsense salt of the earth type, who just tucked in to get this travesty of a business into some sort of reasonable order, and almost immediately found himself (despite being married with children of his own) also tucking in to Myrtle's own ravaged version of Noah's Arc.
Complicated? wait, it gets better: Enter the 3rd protagonist: Miriam (her 22 year old daughter by bent cock guy) who also rocks up, and proceeds to have an affair with...yes!...her step father!
In Short: Myrtle is now at the centre of the sort of novel Peter Carey used to write when he actually wrote good ones. The host of a vagina with the complications inherent visited back upon it.
How will it all end? Well according to Carey, when he was good: horribly, obviously.
No comments:
Post a Comment