For my first post, in gratitude for your patronage and as a teaser for your curiosity, I offer you the opening pages of my novel-in-progress, Children of Wrath.
Please understand—this is part of a first draft, meaning it may change, or move to later, or disappear altogether. At this stage, all those possibilities are unlikely, but nothing is certain when you’re writing a novel.
Enjoy.
Mary Magazine
Hawkesbury Haven, Darkinyung country, 2021
In the beginning Jezebel was the one into God; I was a card-carrying atheist. But I never knew anyone as focused in pursuit of divine truth both deeply through and far beyond religion as Jezebel St John. She was meditating in Victoria Park, the first time I saw her, sitting in a half-lotus with her hands sweetly folded in her lap, the sun slanting through the great ficus trees onto the dark curtain of her hair, sparking red highlights in the sheeny black, touching the pale angle of her cheekbone, tipping her lowered lashes with gold. I thought she was a goddess. When she opened her extraordinarily blue Eurasian eyes they were calm and deep as the Harbour on a perfect day.
She totally caught me staring—a rabbit in her headlights—and the smallest smile flickered on her lips. My mouth had dropped open; I felt myself transfixed, seen—skewered like a skinned rat in my miserable, more-or-less-masculine, midlife inadequacy. I literally couldn’t move. She blinked slowly, breathed (lord, the way her lungs filled and her breasts lifted) and said, “Hello.”
And in that breathtaking, bedazzling, quite befuddling moment, Jezebel St John changed my life. Of course, darlings—I choked. I was Harry, forgodsake—a nerdy, disillusioned, desperately lonely, semi-retired high school English teacher, still living with my mother who was by then in utter and often preposterous denial of galloping dementia. I was a forty-two-year-old virgin whose romantic experience amounted to a series of unfortunate obsessions with a string of variously annoyed, alarmed, indignant, outraged and exasperated music teachers, one of whom took out an AVO—though I absolutely never dreamed of hurting her. My sexual experience was zero, unless you count a couple of confoundingly paranoid fumblings with confused and frustrated prostitutes. Women like Jezebel didn’t say hello to me. Women like Jezebel didn’t even see me.
And yet she didn’t stop at hello. She unfolded herself and stood up with the ease of an athlete and held out her hand. When she told me her name, I giggled like a girl.
It all seems so very long ago—ten years, almost… and—heavens, three lifetimes at least. I was on long-service leave, hanging around the University of Sydney taking a few humanities units; I rather fancied the feminist philosophy professor, despite clear indications she was in no way the kind of woman attracted to forty-two-year-old virgins living with their mothers.
But Jezebel cured me. Healed me.
She took me under her wing—I didn’t know or care why at first—and took away my madness. I had few friends, and none anything like her. At first I was utterly obsessed, though far too timid to importune. We hung out, studied, argued ideas, drank coffee, went to the cinema. Somehow, without more than hugs and chaste, affectionate kisses, her preternaturally wise encouragement and her steady, sometimes disconcertingly direct blue gaze, Jezebel gave me licence to be myself, whoever—whatever—that might be. She was twenty years my junior, but she was like the big sister I never had. And so, in a very few weeks, I found myself confessing to her my innermost, darkest, terrible secret.
It was winter, and we were sitting on her bed in a share house in Chippendale, drinking chai she had brewed in the kitchen with half soy and half cows’ milk. It was surprisingly tasty, the balance of wood and cream, tea and spice. Jezebel’s room was spartan as a monk’s, except for the luxuriant coverlet of quilted sari silks. I kept my eyes on it, tracing the radiant colours with a trembling fingertip, knowing with terror that I was about to speak the unspeakable. My voice cracked as I told her that ever since I first hid in my mother’s wardrobe to escape my father’s roars and the buckle-end of his flying belt, as I curled there cocooned and hopefully safe, breathing the scents of her perfume and her body, slipping my little feet into her high heels and squatting silently among her skirts, oh, since I was three or four… I have loved women’s clothes.
And can you blame me? I am slight for a man, 168 centimetres, five foot seven, with a pointy chin and a mop of honey curls that no amount of scissoring and greasing could ever prune to a convincing short-back-and-sides. I never felt more myself, in fact I never felt truly myself at all, until I stood before a mirror in a bias-cut skirt and slingbacks.
The first time I put on a dress in her company, Jezebel climbed astride me, painted my face with her own makeup, kissed my mouth and took me to bed.
She was not like any other lover I might have stumbled against; indeed, from this later vantage point I can aver: she is not like anyone anywhere. She warned me, the very next morning, when I attempted, with an awkward joke, to frame the possibility of a future proposal of marriage. She smiled, stretched like a cat, jumped out of bed and put on a robe, then came and sat beside me. She took my hand in both of hers and met my eyes intently, as if to ensure I paid great attention to her next words.
“Harry, darling, I will always love you. I will always care about your wellbeing, and I will try to help whenever I hear you need help. But I cannot be yours, can never be—I’m no man’s woman. I belong to…” she hesitated, half-smiled, “my spirit’s mission—to the universe or Gaia or God—whatever fate or force or deity has mapped my path since before I was born.” I watched her lovely shoulders as she shrugged, more in acceptance than mystification. “I was both gifted and raised to be an agent of change,” she said, “and it’s my life’s work to understand that mission, and to realise it to the best of my ability.” She paused, but I only gazed at her, my brimming heart no doubt in my eyes, so she continued. “It is my one true passion, so while I hope we’re friends for life, I’ll only be your lover in passing.” Her smile was achingly sweet and distant as the moon. “I have love enough for all the world, but there’s no room in my heart for romance.”
Another man might have laughed at such a speech from a girl of twenty-two, but with Jezebel he’d soon have learned the hard way. She was gentle but absolutely rigorous, brilliant, already well-travelled, profoundly independent and singularly well-informed; she had a quiet humility but a lucid tongue, a confident spirit, and a directness that could be lacerating. I lacked the arrogance of high testosterone to be offended by her confidence and besides, even then she had the gravitas of a young prophet. I never thought to doubt her.
As I got to know her, my wonder only deepened. The world would later grow to know a version of Jezebel St John—a thousand versions, and perhaps as many more corrupted to utter falsity—but I knew her intimately, long before all that.
I just wish I knew where the hell she is now.
She was supposed to meet us here, two hours north of the city in our Hawkesbury River haven, after speaking at that awful Pentecostal megachurch in the south-west. The Starbarn. We begged her not to go, but she was on some rescue mission and wouldn’t be swayed. That was on the 27th of December—the day they’re calling #Armageddonoutahere. She was supposed to be out of town hours before the meteor hit.
That’s a week ago now, and the body count is still rising. I don’t know if she’s even alive.