Below is an outline of Nicholas John Turners’s novel Let the Boys Play I set down for my own use after I had read the novel once and realised I needed to read it again if I was to have any hope of understanding of what it was really about.
I am sharing it here in case it will may help others in a similar predicament locate a particular passage or two which they may wish to look at again more closely.
For my more considered response to this novel, see Let the Boys Play: Nicholas John Turner’s vision through a glory hole is a masterpiece of defamiliarisation.
Part 1: The Crimes
Section 1: 3 – 29
Field observance officers Ron Tsolkas (aged 74) and Richard Foley (aged 34) attend a scene where a blue hatchback has pulled up in the middle of the road. Crammed inside the car, in a position requiring “contortion, if not morphosis” (p. 17) is an extremely tall man whose slowly blinking eyes appear “tortoise-like” (p. 19), and whose feet appear to have been crammed into “a very small child’s football boots” (p. 29). The “leniency” that has so far existed in the mind of a magpie contemplating Richard Foley is “exhausted” (p. 29).
Section 2: 29 – 43
At 7:00 AM, Len Hansen, still groggy after participating in a drug-fuelled orgy the night before, attends a junior rugby match held on a playing field adjoining wetlands. He is wearing “black leather pants”, an “extra-dermal codpiece”, a “salmon pink triple-breasted jacket”, a “sleeveless ski jacket” and “a frilly, collarless pirate’s shirt” (p. 32). Len has come with his one-legged step-sister Jenny, an “ageless witch, pregnant with gnarly secrets” (p. 35) and her unnamed husband, who is wheelchair bound. Len has come to watch his 7 year old nephew Milo, along with his one-legged sister and her wheelchair-bound husband. Len’s main interest is getting himself a feed. When Milo is seriously injured in the game, the game’s young referee “with thin, off-white, softly spiked hair and darkly-tinted, wire-framed glasses” (p. 42), slinks away, accompanied by an older woman.
Section 3: 44 – 50
Richard Foley recuperates at home from his significant “volucrine injury” (p. 44) in the care of a nurse, mostly sleeping. Getting up to shower, he tears off a catheter inserted in his penis and collapses, unconscious, in a pool of urine. Coming to, but dripping wet, he opens his door to Len Hansen, whom he has not seen for years, before collapsing again.
Section 4: 50 – 68
Melanie Hodge masturbates Richard Foley in bed. She reflects on their relationship. She accepts Foley “is entitled to audit her” (p. 63) She sees him as “a thing forever flying into its glass enclosure” (p. 63), “inexhaustibly sincere” (p. 64) but “perpetually defensive”, solely interested in being “a pain in his own ass” (p. 65). Melanie recalls the recent and humiliating defeat of her own previously successful netball team in the finals by an otherwise relatively weak team who happened to have among their number two very tall “physical freaks” (p. 53). We learn Melanie “had always felt comfortable in the realm of physical intimacy no matter who joined or forced here there” (p. 59) whereas Richard Foley “had elevated her — and, she presumed, all — private nodes and their carnal functions to the status of inestimable things” (p. 60). Melanie is wearing a shirt bearing the slogan “What Happened To Suzie?”, a relic from days past when the whole community went searching for a little girl called Suzie Merlo who had disappeared, and whose memory even now haunts Foley “like a miscarried sister” (pp. 60-61). Melanie reflects at length on how different her attitudes to Richard are from his attitude to her, and wonders how hard it would be for her to leave him.
Section 5: 68 – 75
Len Hansen has been spying on Richard Foley in his apartment for a week, watching Foley and Melanie Hodge have sex. Hansen has need to “mutilate himself” (p. 73). When Foley emerges from apartment riding a bicycle, Hansen opens his car door and causes a collision.
Section 6: 75 – 114
Rocky Morant describes a conversation he overheard at a overseas diner between two men eating what smells like “the sickness of something” (p. 76). One diner with a mouth like a catfish (p. 76) tells the other how a blind boy reported to police that his neighbour, a “hooker” called Lula, is missing. On investigating, detectives Hong and Ling find the wall between the blind boy’s apartment and Lula’s contains holes created for the purpose of sexual gratification (p. 79) Peering through the lower hole, Hong sees Lula’s dead face on the other side. A bloodied rat crawls out of her mouth.
Rocky is telling this tale to Len Hansen while both men are under the influence of a powerful drug. We learn Hansen is a “scribbler” (p. 81).
Rocky says Lula had been “gutted” and “her significant openings made more significant” (p. 82). There were signs of “perpetual healing way up inside her. Adaptation, maybe” (p. 84)
We learn Rocky was identified at boarding school as a promising rugby player, but that he tried to get his school “to abandon its foremost desire to have him play” (p. 86).
Rocky says the cops called in someone called “The Goldfish” to check out the crime scene (p. 87). Rocky visited Lula’s dark, unlit room and hid in a cupboard while The Goldfish searched the room with “a tiny pin-light of a torch” and found “a pair of feet with no-one attached to them” (p. 91).
We learn that following his mother’s death, Rocky gave away rugby at his boarding school and started dealing in drugs (pp. 100-102).
Rocky followed The Goldfish, who beat him up then told him “You are not from here. Not the way I am. The nature of the violence here you cannot know” before reciting a list of horrific but credible examples of domestic crime with which he is accustomed to dealing. The Goldfish gives Rocky a pea found in the body of a rat inside Lula, describing the pea as “what makes a mouth whistle trill. An instrument used to direct attention” (p. 112). The Goldfish suggests five rugby referees who stayed near Lula’s apartment just before she died may have some connection with her death (p. 112).
Section 7: 114 – 119
Richard Foley is present as L. Gato, a “cash sweeper”, smashes the window of his apartment and enters, injuring his arm (p. 115). L. Gato smears blood on a diagram of the incident involving the blue hatchback and the tall man (p. 116). Returning from a “wilfully self-flagellating” training run, Melanie Hodge stands between Foley and L. Gato. L. Gato eyes her with seemingly lustful interest.
Part 2: The Questions
Section 8: 123 – 156
Len Hansen attends a regular weekly dinner gathering of rugby referees at the Old Dining Room at The Pineapple. Present are Leena Pilwinke (“rakish as a mantis”), Jerry Pilwinkle (a “deeply invasive and slippery ideal of masculinity”), Jill Knox (“with the effervescence of something way over-carbonated”), Rory DeWitt and his wife Madelyn DeWitt (over whom Rory appears to have “some kind of inexplicably total psychological hold”), Owen Lane (who “has the look of something abandoned by its animating force”) and 20 year old Corban Archer, the referee we saw officiating in section [2], who “looks like someone’s doll dressed up”. The interactions and eating habits of the diners are described in a way that makes them seem highly ridiculous.
A week earlier Len Hansen quizzed Owen Lane about Corban Archer, whom Lane regards as refereeing “prodigy ” (p. 144). Lane tells Hansen the best referees “have learned to forget the rules” and to “know right and wrong in our hearts” (p. 145). Lane has reservations about Corban Archer’s refereeing, and cites an example, recorded on a videotape he can’t give Hansen, where Corban Archer “can be seen calling the infringement, and the infringement can be seen taking place, sequentially” (p. 148) — that is to say, presumably, after Archer called the infringement.
Les Hansen visits Leena Pilwinkle, hoping to blackmail her into giving him the videotape. He finds Leena in the company of a very short man with an erection (p. 149), “his nostrils as thinly slit as gills” (p. 150). The man tells Hansen that he has got for him the videotape he wants. However, in a state of “instinctual, total irrational fear”, he has taken to throwing off his chinos and returning to his house only in his underwear (p. 152) and, in so doing, has thrown away the videotape. A couple of days later, sitting in a toilet stall beneath a playing field, Len Hansen finds a small pair of chinos on the floor, and the videotape in one of the pockets (p. 156). Len puts on the chinos, which barely extend to his knees.
Section 9: 157-193
Richard Foley and Melanie Hodge visit Ron Tsolkas’s house to spend a little time with his almost-blind dog while Ron is away. The house is almost completely overshadowed by an adjacent Organico “Node” which “produced the the more-or-less undeniable implication that would could be seen above the ground was a mere suggestion of its true dimensions” (p. 157) Tsolkas’s dog lives most of its life in a cage, and “demonstrably preferred his confinement to it” (p 162). At a young age, Melanie Hodge lived for a time with an aunt who kept, in a small tank, a shark with which she seemed to be in love (p. 164), and ever since, she has tended “to see pets in their owner’s image” (p. 165).
We learn about the early days of Foley’s and Hodge’s relationship, after Hodge, intoxicated, more or less threw herself at Foley (p. 169-173). Hodge asks Foley if he’s fertile (p. 180). He says yes, that he once got a girlfriend pregnant (p. 181).
We learn Foley lost his virginity to Christine Mapp, a teenager who was regarded as “not exactly unplundered treasure”, but with whom he thought, wrongly, that he had achieved a more uniquely intimate relationship (pp. 184-187).
Foley’s next relationship was with Bridget Mackenzie, whom he met during orientation week (p. 187). They dated for six months, having sex in Foley’s car. Foley understood that Bridget’s “heightened and persistent sexuality” was “a kind of socio-evolutionary petition to fall under his identity and care” (p. 188).
Hodge tells Foley that it’s Foley’s mother’s opinion that he and she are “in a cul-de-sac” (p. 189). Holding the paper L. Gato smeared with his fingerprint, she asks Foley what it is evidence of, and why he drew it (pp. 190-191). We learn she had earlier asked L. Gato why he had “smeared his blood with obvious deliberateness and specificity upon the original sketch and alluded thus to some sort of action or incident beyond the page’s geographical purview and preceding it temporally” (p. 192). We learn that on the day of the hatchback incident, L. Gato had been following the car’s last movements until Foley had “entered the whole scene like a finger in an eye-socket” (p. 193).
Section 10: 193-227
At the same time every Wednesday for two months Len Hansen has been travelling in a train carriage to Beechgrove. During his hour in the carriage, accompanied by passengers “each in his or her own way, curious”, the “cyclone of his thinking” is “overcome by a vacuum” and becomes “briefly available… for a reasonable inspection” (p. 194). On this day, Len is wearing a mauve cape and black lipstick, and is carrying an eggplant into which two eyes have been carved (p. 196). He is travelling to be near Corban Archer, to whom he feels drawn “as a moth to a flame” (p. 196) carrying with him the pea that “has begun to feel like the sole evidence of some hidden reality” (p. 199).
We learn Len’s purpose in attending the local referees’ weekly social outing at The Pineapple has been to “crawl into their heads” (p. 199), insinuating to them that they are connected with “a meticulous crime… determined to have been sexually fatal” (p. 200). Len’s recent visit to his step-sister Jenny, where he has told her about the pea, only to have her shuffle papers and “probe() the screen before her expressionlessly” (p. 205). An observation that “it had only ever been in the eyes of Jenny that Len Hansen registered his existence” (p. 205). We learn that some days earlier Len, describing himself as a “journalist” (p. 207) phoned Rory DeWitt, whom he imagined to be in some “boardroom or classroom or chapel” among chairs “filled with souls for him to manipulate via one or another form of enlightenment” (p. 208). Len is trying to piece together “times and dates” (p. 210) regarding the movements of the referees when they were in Lula’s vicinity. While he says “I’m not going to contradict you and your evidence” (p. 213), Rory rules out himself, Owen Lane, Jill Knox and Jerry Pilwinkle and finally Corban Archer as possible suspects, though he notes with apparent suspicion that Corban Archer was “showered, like scrubbed looking. And worn out maybe” (p. 214).
Visiting his injured nephew in hospital, Len finds the young referee Corban Archer and the “spindly woman in pedal-pushers and pale pink zip-up microfibre cardigan” he assumes to be Corban’s mother hanging about the hospital (pp. 217-219).
Len walks half an hour from Beechmere station, past where Organico divers in a river for the remains of Suzie Merlo (p. 220) through wasteland to a “small low grey block building” (p. 220) behind which is “the great, pyramidic pile of grey concrete building blocks that were obviously the material of which the small building was made” (p. 221). “The blocks were shaped like large, rectangular figure-eights, or else thick, capitalised letter Es, or else hollow squares half the size of the rectangular ones” (p. 222) It seems to Len that “(t)he pile, evidently haphazard and random, had been arranged and amassed so with incredible care, block-by-block, as some great, quixotic contrivance for the amusement or appeasement of someone he could not begin to guess at the strange sense of humour or eccentric standards of” (p. 222). The low building is the home of Corban Archer and his Aunt Jacqui, and when Len enters “in a state of relative sobriety”, the experience is “a genuinely non-suspicious one… the kind that Len had always assumed that the arrival at one’s own home is supposed to affect (sic)” (p. 224).
Section 11: 227 – 265
Two weeks after smashing Richard Foley’s window and injuring his arm, L. Gato spends the early part of his Saturday in a garage, lounging on a recliner, slurping buttermilk, eating “a log of caterer’s sized lunch meat” (p. 229), reading “familiar pages of fiction” (p. 227) and then washing himself with the help of “a length of garden hose… plugged into a rusty metal tap” (p. 231). With a loud screech, his garage door begins to open (p. 232).
Melanie Hodge goes for a tough cross-country run past the local rugby club, the Fairfield Mynahs. She treats her body as no more than an “elaborate tool” which she has “long deployed to do her bidding, oftentimes like a tired old nag she was willing to whip to death” (p. 234). There has never been “any spiritual component to her physical training” (p. 236) In the past, Melanie has submitted willingly to what sound like acts of gang rape in the football clubhouse (p. 235). To both her training and her drinking there has always been “a kind of auto-sadistic savagery” (p. 238).
We learn Melanie sees Foley as beset by a “sense of essential loneliness” (p. 239) In the past, she has tried to make sense of his time at the private all-boys boarding school where he shared a dormitory with Len Hansen, “prodding and probing in the hope of drawing a little psychological sap from his anti-sentimental accounts of all-boy dormitory life” (p. 240). The more questions she asked, however, the more it all seemed “like a model world that (Foley) was intricately staging” (p. 240), a “static arrangement of soulless things, mechanical people set to their tasks, hundreds of tiny wooden boys doing the rounds of a cuckoo clock’s balcony, splitting pre-split timber with toothpick axes and tolling bells like thimbles” (p. 241). Determined to know “what had happened to him as a boy that turned a big part of him to wood”, she asked Foley if he had ever been bullied at boarding school. Foley replied, presumably ambiguously, that he had never “been sodomised, beaten or humiliated in a way that wouldn’t sound playful to you. Or to anyone, really” (p. 243).
Heading back, exhausted from her run, Melanie spots Len Hansen peering through the window of Foley’s apartment, assaults him, and demands to know what he wants (p. 246-248). Hansen says he wants to know “some things about the crash” (p. 249) involving “that little green hatchback”. Melanie corrects him: the hatchback was blue (p. 250). Hansen tells her the driver of the car is dead (p. 251) and sneers “I don’t suppose it’s of interest to you”, saying Foley is “professionally disinterested in this sort of thing. A kind of highly-trained master of non-interest in things” (p. 251). Melanie hits Hansen with a chunk of brick (p. 252).
As the garage door falls silent, Melanie Hodge confronts L. Gato in his garage, wet, naked and holding his penis (p. 252-253). She tells L. Gato the driver of the blue hatchback is dead (p. 254). “The driver was wearing footballl boots,” she says. “His feet were broken. To get into the boots, which were small. Not a child’s boots, but small.” She agrees that wouldn’t have killed the driver, but “it might explain why he was driving like that. How he ended up. There, I mean” (p. 256).
Len Hansen asks Melanie if she will admit that the tall man’s demise in such circumstances “amounts to something that there is no practical choice in having an interest of some kind as to the connectedness or implications of” (p. 257). Or, he asks, “(c)an you just decide not to think about something ever because you’re not supposed to?” She answers “yes” (p. 258). Len hands her the pea and tells her the tall man in the hatchback was wearing “a referee’s uniform from late in the previous century” that was also too small for him, and explains that he hopes to find near where the hatchback ended up “a pea just like the one you now are holding. And when I do, a connection between this incident, this crime, and another will be confirmed” (p. 259). Len wants Richard Foley to help him find this other pea (p. 261).
Part 3: Organico
Section 12: 269 – 290
The traumatic entry into the world of Edward, “delivered in the care of Organico” of a biological mother who poisoned, beat and abandoned him “before his eyes even opened to the world”, even taking to his head with a hammer (p. 269).
We learn Edward’s mother was dependent on a “perpetual psychochemical infrastructure” (p. 269) which she learned to make by placing something rotting “that resembled mould” (p. 270) into a boiling kettle and inhaling the ‘ever-thicker cloud” the kettle spewed forth (p. 271).
Edward’s mother was a virgin (p. 273). She wakes one morning “in a state of fear that had no context and would never find one” and with a sense that “her world had been reduced to nothing; lives lived totally, everything knew, belittled over and over by her waking from her ignorance of them, like a great Babushka doll of reality consuming its imitations” (p. 274). A fugue of taut predicates extending over two pages conveys her experience: “Weathered judgement. Cried hopelessly. Set a cup down precariously. Tripped over herself. Touched a spider under plastic. Was felt from under a chair. Baulked at a cliff’s edge. Promised not to forget something. Arrived late. Felt misrepresented. Was the cause of waiting” (pp. 274-276). In this state, Edward’s mother kills her boyfriend with a knife (p. 277), then wakes in hospital to learn that she is pregnant (p. 278). Over the next few months she slowly recovers, though much of the time on very strong drugs, and at one point she tries to kill the foetus within her with a knife (p. 282).
Section 13: 290 – 297
We learn more about L. Gato, including that his real name is Leonard Francis Gatling. He lives on the third level of a “gutted warehouse” without any kind of furnishing, and spends much of his time down in the building’s basement, where lies in a recliner randomly sampling books from “an unordered pile of vintage crime” and “washes himself weekly with a hose from the basin” (pp. 290-291). L. Gato is “considerably tall and categorically obese” (p. 291) and his manner of moving distinctive. “Possessed by slow waves of momentum after any sort of movement, his very passing is cause for suspenseful wincing, as for a truck wildly overloaded. He is given, for this reason and others, a wide berth generally” (p. 292).
L. Gato spends some of his time at the bar of the Fairfield Mynas, having long ago helped this club win its fourth premiership, exhibiting, in his playing style, “the apparent pain indifference required to spend a great deal of time at the uncomfortable bottom of lightless rucks, impenetrable to the gaze of a sole local referee” (p. 292-203). He makes his living as a “cash sweeper”, extorting “side rent” from people living in brick tenements (pp. 294-295). Current players see him as “a kind of conscience” that presides over the Fairfield Mynahs (p. 296). However, weeks often pass without L. Gata saying a word. His “menace is cultivated by reputation alone” (p. 297).
Section 14: 297 – 333
Len Hansen pays another visit to where Corban Archer lives with Aunty Jacqui. He is wearing an “oversized business shirt” that looks like “some exotic bird’s egregious white wattle” under a pin-striped jacket, and “a pair of avocado green cycling nix” that terminate well above his knees (p. 297-298). Len waits for an hour or more in the kitchenette with Aunty Jacqui, while Corban Archer “in plain if partial sight” coughs, in bed, in the next room (p. 298-299). Finally, Len is admitted into Corban’s presence.
By now, Len has given up his notion that Corban or the other referees are somehow connected with the crimes (p. 299). Even thinking of the other referees has become “a kind of spiritual poison” (p. 300) Len has now watched the videotape to which Owen Lane directed him “perhaps fifty or a hundred times… initially with a sense of bafflement that melted into general bewilderment, and ultimately toward a kind of inward searching that emerged as awe” and now regards Corban “with the reverence of a thing that follows no natural laws” (p. 301).
Aunty Jacqui places between Len and Corban a “dried out, olive green cake and butter knife to subdivide it” (p. 301). Twice Len reaches for the knife, but both times Corban restrains him from cutting the cake (pp. 301-303).
Len clings to everything Corban says to him during these visits “with desperation, that of something that one has waited forever to witness, that one cannot help but presume may at any moment tracelessly rescind itself” (p. 304). Len wants, he tells Corban, “(t)o understand” (p. 305) In the course of the many silences that intersperse their conversations, Len feels the need “to consult some alternative and significantly under-developed part of himself for the procurement of an honest answer, which was like using his wrong hand to sign his name” (p. 306) These silences are, indeed, the reason he keeps returning, the “awkward gear changes and cul-de-sacs of actual thinking that reminded if not simply informed him that he was really there, participating, in a shared reality” (p. 306) Len recognises he is on a “quest for an explanation for his fixation with Corban Archer”, but at the same time, he finds he is “simply happy” (p. 308).
On another day, Len and Corban discuss Corban’s remarkable rise through the ranks of referees at such an early age. We learn referees are ranked by game reviewers who rewatch recordings of games “enjoying the benefits of multiple perspectives and manipulable time”, generating a ‘true’ account of each game, against which the on-field referee’s decisions are compared and ultimately reduced to a single-decimal number (p. 311). Corban’s low rating makes him “unofficially but effectively, the second highest ranked referee in the country” (p. 313).
Aunt Jacqui continues each week to present the cake and butter knife. Finally, without any intervention from Corban, Len attempts “not so much to divide as to traumatise” the cake (p. 316).
Corban seeks to correct that “confused ideal” that referees are “ultimately an obstruction”. When you consider all that the players of the game agree on, he says, “(b)y orders of magnitude, they are more in agreement than conflict… This sort of conflict, the sporting kind, is after all a game. Momentarily combative, but only via a history of cooperation” (p. 316). It is the players who “must ultimately be capable of adjudicating their own small conflict” — but this is just what those who scream from the sidelines, as the referee trills his whistle, “let the boys play”, fail to understand (p. 317). The real right that the referee is there to protect, Corban says, is “the right to dispossesion. The protection, indeed, of conflict itself” (p. 320). Far from being a cold and humourless censor, the referee “is the only person on the field for whom violence is not a means but an ends (sic). Not a way to succeed, but success itself (p. 321). Man’s impulse to violence, Corban says, “comes and goes quickly, overwhelmed by impatience, or exhaustion, or fear of what it has stirred in others.” The role of the referee is “(t)o say; you must endure this impulse now, as though it were all of you, and of everyone. You must exist in conflict as I have arranged it for you. As, in fact, you have asked me to.” (p. 322).
Len recalls being interrogated by Melanie Hodge over his time in boarding school. She wants to know if he was ever beaten (“(m)ostly play”, he tells her), or sodomised, and why neither he nor Foley “can give me a straight answer on any of this”. He tells Melanie he is almost certainly infertile, is fluid in his sexual orientation, and is also a drug addict (pp. 324-327).
Aunty Jacqui tells Len that Corban is dying (p. 331), that he’s “tired, like an old man” (p. 332) and has “always been compromised… Autoimmune” (p. 332).
Section 15: 334 – 353
Edward, aged three months, is “released from Organico’s post-natal care” and adopted by Glenda and Willis, two “mid-level Organico employees” (p. 334).
Willis has brain damage and has been left with a mechanical right leg after being involved in a “subterranean armoured-vehicle accident” and appears to be effectively impotent (p. 335). His partner, Glenda, was herself adopted as an infant by two “meta intellectuals” who helped to oversee an expansion of Organico’s scope through a “reinterpretation of the paradigm of ‘health’ and of the means most economical and effective for its insurance” (p. 335). These intellectuals raised Glenda to be “pathologically carefree” and to observe “no forms or incidences of sacredness” (p. 337). An “obsessively studious… rigid and humourless child” (p. 338), Glenda became “increasingly nauseated by the study of text that were at times so far beyond her understanding as to appear like gibberish” (p. 339) and took to puncturing herself with a safety pin. Tied up in knots of liberal-sounding gobbledegook, her parents initially declined to intervene under “any notion that made it claim under the rubric of ‘gut feeling’ or instinct” (p. 341), but eventually “descended… into plain, unorganised and embittered argument… wailing and stomping their feet from either side of the room like animals contesting crude and limited resources” (p. 343-344) — behaviour to which Glenda responded by giving up her self-harming (p. 344). Glenda continued to develop what her parents regarded as a “forged intellect” (p. 345), “sourcing and reading texts that were well beyond her natural intellect”, until at last, right before her adoptive parents’ “dissuadingly uninterested eyes, Glenda had adopted many of the ineffable nuances of a compelling and authoritative orator” (p. 346). A few weeks after Glenda finally leaves home, her parents are found dead in their bathtub, though whether as the result of suicide, murder, or murder-suicide is not clear (p. 348).
Following the death of her adoptive parents, Glenda resumes self-harming. She is found to have “malignant tumours in her sinuses” (p. 349), the treatment for which leaves her with severed nerves on one side of her head, and a face like “a mask, in effect” (p. 350).
With the surprise entrance of Edward into her life, Glenda again feels “driven to pursue a kind of personal transcendence”, and she engages in “mind-abandoning self-harm… ultimately freeing her to unconsciousness” (p. 350).
Section 16: 353 – 367
Richard Foley is nearly recovered from the magpie’s attack (p. 353). Melanie Hodge has decided he is not “redeemable” and has “set into motion a ritual of separation” from him (p. 355). The two pull up together in a car at night near the Fairfield Myna’s clubhouse. Melanie tells Foley to stay in the car (p. 354). Another car pulls up nearby, and the naked figure of Len Hansen is “poured out onto the embankment” (p. 357). Melanie enters the crowded clubhouse. She finds L. Gato “dressed in a black, silky, hooded bodysuit” with a “small yellow cone” protruding from his forehead amidst “a small flock of naked women” whose faces are obscured by similar yellow beaks (p. 359). She asks L. Gato to come with her to see Foley because “if there’s something to know, he knows” (p. 360). Foley, however, won’t go “there”, she says. “He won’t go. Not for me. And not for himself. He would never go. Never. They say he can’t. He won’t” (p. 361).
L. Gato declines to go with her. She recalls the fiction L. Gato likes to read, “stories he read over and over again, as raped of possibility as overworked soil. An emptiness for him to disappear into without closing his eyes” (p. 263). She suggests to him “It’s all got something to do with impotence, doesn’t it” (p. 364). L. Gato insists “I’m fertile”, and grips her until her world seems “to be spinning out from under her” and there is “no sense in orienting herself at all” (p. 365-366).
Section 17: 367 – 372
Although teenager Bridget Mackenzie has been raised by her widowed father with “a petrified sense of what his temper might imply” (p. 367), she does nonetheless venture into the club district one night, where she meets Richard Foley, at that time attending a training academy (p. 369). The two begin a sexual relationship. Foley is unaware, until Bridget has a miscarriage, and the two break up, that she is only fourteen years old (p. 372).
Section 18: 372 – 383
Edward Doyle does not walk until he is seven, or speak until he is ten, but he is “exceptionally tall well before puberty” (p. 373). In his early years at boarding school he is “practically unstoppable” in rugby games (p. 373). By the age of fifteen, he is “just over seven feet tall” and “(i)n terms of rugby, as crudely efficient as ever”, although “(i)n practically all other developmental terms” he is “stunted” (p. 374). Once he reaches senior school, however, the reign of Edward, who “grasped practically nothing about the game he’d long been playing unwittingly… came to an abrupt end” and, on one infamous occasion, he “emerged from a pile of bodies… with one of his eyes hanging from its socket and the greater portion of his cheek’s flesh folded down to his chin like neatly carved meat” (p. 375). Edward is approached by a boy, Rocky Morat, who offers him a drug to smoke “when things get heavy” (p. 378). Rocky continues to supply Edward with the drug until school is over, at which point he passes Edward over into the care of a drug dealer whose rear stairs are “obstructed by a small blue car with its rear hatch gaping” (p. 381).
Section 19: 384 – 390
As a child, Melanie Alison Hodge looked, to be intelligent, docile and happy (p. 384), but by puberty her face seemed suffused “with a look of irrepressibly shameful desire”, and even before legal adulthood she had “narrowly diffused or else conceded unwelcome sexual advances, many of which bore the essential characteristics of rape” (p. 385). Melanie “never considered these interactions to be anything but typical”, and later she tended to chide herself “for guarding something that did not seem anywhere near as precious to her as to those who coveted it” (p. 385). Later, in various clubhouses, she “courted men in multiples for the realisation of a curious impulse she could not have known the source of” (p. 386). One night, on the Toob, she happened to see “a pair of naked men exchanging mutual oral sex beside a docile Irish wolfhound”. The sight struck her “as a spectacle of flesh rhythmically engulfed and engulfing, as amazingly neutral as an octopus complexly furling and unfurling the many parts of itself simply to remain unmoved” (p. 386), “a kind of neutral and consenting playfulness expressed as violence” (p. 387).
Melanie was never interested in pornography, as such, but was “suddenly transfixed” one afternoon as uniformed players on a field “rushed to amass around a grounded white object like cold men at a fleeting fire, contorting themselves in desperate confusion of closeness” (p. 388).
Later, “from the sidelines, the moment a captured player fell to the ground, the white ball thereby released into pure and dispassionate contest, instantly holy according to the game’s spiritual code, she sat on the cusp of tears as body after body rushed to the sacred site, making a kind of fabric-and-flesh housing for what neither party was permitted to touch. It came to seem to her that this was what the players really wanted but could not elsewhere or without arbitration bring themselves to ask for or agree upon; to build something among themselves, of themselves” (p. 390).
Section 20: 391 – 393
Ruth Morat accidentally and unawares creates a leak in the pipeline that feeds gas to her oven as she prepares a meal. The day is hot, “a not untypical forty degrees” (p. 391). Ruth, we learn, is an intelligent woman, “imbued with extreme pragmatism as well as a gift for mathematics” (p. 392) and fond of solving printed puzzles. When she lights a cigarette, triggering a massive explosion she is not immediately killed, and indeed does not panic (p. 392). She is not even “in pain in the traditional or communicable sense” (p. 392). It is some hours before her husband returns from the far reaches of their agricultural property. Even then, he only registers that he has never seen her “so quiet before” (p. 393).