Rosie Little's Cautionary Tales for Girls
PRAISE FOR
THE ALPHABET OF LIGHT AND DARK
‘An impressive debut …Wood’s assured sense of place and her confidence with language single her novel out as a distinctively mature work …translucent prose.’
—Sunday Age
‘Absorbing, subtle, impressive writing.’ —Debra Adelaide,
The Australian
/Vogel Literary Award judge
‘Wood writes with a strong sense of place, bringing alive the landscape, and threads this through themes of colonial history and personal family drama …beautifully written.’
—Sunday Telegraph
‘The author has that special quality which just jumps off the page. The voice is strong and the sense of place so powerful.’ —James Bradley,
The Australian
/Vogel Literary Award judge ‘Wood’s style is breathtaking at times …Without sentimentality
The Alphabet of Light and Dark
powerfully conveys the importance of finding a place within history and the timeless craving for a sense of belonging.’
—Good Reading
‘Wood’s writing is sinewy, physical and elemental.’ —Liam Davison,
The Australian
/Vogel Literary Award judge
‘A real talent …written with clarity, authority and restraint.’ —
Herald Sun
Danielle Wood’s first novel,
The Alphabet of Light
and Dark
, won the 2002
The Australian
/Vogel Literary Award and the 2004 Dobbie Literary Award. A recovering journalist, Danielle teaches writing at the University of Tasmania.
Rosie Little’s
C
autionary
Tales
for
Girls
DANIELLE WOOD
First published in 2006
Copyright © Danielle Wood 2006
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording or by any information storage
and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the
publisher. The
Australian Copyright Act 1968
(the Act) allows a
maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever
is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for
its educational purposes provided that the educational institution
(or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to
Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.
This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth
Government through the Australia Council, its arts
funding and advisory board.
Allen & Unwin
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Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218
Email: [email protected]
Web:
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National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Wood, Danielle, 1972–.
Rosie Little’s cautionary tales for girls.
ISBN 9781741149302.
ISBN 1 74114 930 4.
I. Title.
A823.4
Internal design by Design by Committee
Set in 11/16pt Sabon by Asset Typesetting Pty Ltd
Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group McPherson’s
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Xanthe (when she is older)
and in honour of
Saint Heather of the Immaculate Suitcase
CONTENTS
The Deflowering of Rosie Little
Rosie Little in the Mother Country
Rosie Little’s Brilliant Career
These are not, I should say from the outset, tales written for the benefit of good and well-behaved girls who always stick to the path when they go to Grandma’s. Skipping along in their gingham frills — basket of scones, jam and clotted cream upon their arms — what need can these girls have for caution? Rather, these are tales for girls who have boots as stout as their hearts, and who are prepared to firmly lace them up (boots and hearts both) and step out into the wilds in search of what they desire. And since it cannot be expected that stout-booted, stout-hearted girls will grow up without misfortune or miscalculation of some kind, they require a reminder, from time to time, about the dangers that lurk both in dark forests and in the crevices of one’s own imaginings.
Rosie Little
The Deflowering
of Rosie Little
T
he trouble with
fellatio
, in my view, is its lack of onomatopoeia. Take more honest words like
suck
, or
gargle
, or
gurgle
and … ta-da! Their meanings are all neatly wrapped up in the way they sound. Whereas
fellatio
, all on its own, could leave you clueless. Especially in the week before your fifteenth birthday.
Fellatio
could lead the uninitiated to envisage something ornate, baroque even — perhaps some sort of decorative globe, or a wrought-iron birdcage encrusted with stiff black vine leaves. Placed in a sentence: ‘What a lovely
fellatio
you have on the sideboard, Mrs Hyphen-Wilson!’. Not, of course, that I had the opportunity to make such a mistake. Because although Cécile Volanges got Latin terms on the occasion of her deflowering, I, Rosie Little, did not.
I witnessed the seduction of Cécile Volanges more than once in the year I turned fifteen. Nightly for three weeks, the actor playing le Vicomte de Valmont in the local repertory theatre company’s production of
Les Liaisons dangereuses
whispered to the ingenue Cécile — with the utmost delicacy, and from within the chintzy confines of a four-poster bed —
I think we
might begin with one or two Latin terms
. And nightly for three weeks, I suspended my disbelief, more than willingly, endowing the set’s plywood four-poster with all the solidity of pre-Revolutionary French oak, and thoughtfully touching up the dark stripe which, with each performance, was becoming incrementally more obvious in the parting of Cécile’s yellow hair.
Le Vicomte would whisper and Cécile would squeal with pleasure and toss her blonde curls as she yielded into the softness of huge white pillows. And from various dark corners of the theatre auditorium I would watch, rapt, a stack of unsold programs just inches from my beating heart. I wanted desperately to hear the words that le Vicomte was about to trickle into the innocent ear of young Cécile. But each night, just as these spellbinding incantations of seduction were to be disclosed to me, the scene would fade to black.
So, although I ripped tickets and sold programs,
gratis
, for the entire season of
Les Liaisons dangereuses
, I did not learn the word
fellatio
. Neither did I learn the two neat, clipped syllables of
coitus
(a demure game played upon the decks of ocean liners?). And now, some years later and knowing one or two things more than I did in the week before my fifteenth birthday, I strongly suspect that even if my own seducer’s vocabulary had stretched to
cunnilingus
, he would not have been terribly interested in its application.
In another country, in another time, a young man as well-off as Gerard Hyphen-Wilson (as I like to call him) would certainly have been schooled in Latin. His red-necked father would, with a little of his pocket change, have engaged a governess. Solemn of face and solemn of frock, she would have led him briskly through his first verbs. And later the little thug would have been sent away to boarding school, where he would learn to recite his Virgil, and perhaps utilise a few elementary Latin terms in his dealings with younger boys.
But not being in another country, or another time, Gerard Hyphen-Wilson had no Latin. In fact, the most interesting word I learned from the young lord of the manor was
snatch
. Placed in a sentence: ‘Christ, your fucking
snatch
is tight’. For such was his eloquence as he clumsily ruptured my hymen while I lay beneath him on the splintery bed of a jetty in one of the better riverside suburbs.
I found myself in this rather unenviable, Latin-less position because my friend Eve had a boyfriend at Grammar, the exclusive boarding school that purported to educate all the thick-wristed, thick-witted farm boys within a 700-kilometre radius of our provincial centre. It was at a party to which we were invited by this prematurely shadow-jawed boyfriend that my deflowering was to occur.
Eve’s father was an artist, which is no doubt why she knew Greek words like
phallic
and was able to deploy them, casually, in conversation. The time she described a rosebud in my mother’s garden as ‘a bit phallic’ wasn’t the first time I had heard her use the expression, or the first time that I had nodded and giggled, pretending I knew what she meant. But it was the time that compelled me to seek out the dictionary, from which I came away no wiser, since I had been searching under F.
I loved the painterly chaos of Eve’s father’s home, and the hippie-chic disorder of her mother’s, every bit as much as she loved the fluffy white towels, hospital corners and tidy nuclear unit of mine. I scrambled to keep up with her, trying to learn the adult words that she knew, trying to match the distance that she would go with boys. But always, I found myself five steps behind. Even her body was ahead of mine, morphing into a desirable and womanly shape while mine remained painfully open to my father’s taunt that you wouldn’t see it past a matchstick with all the wood scraped off it.
The physical differences between Eve and myself were duly noted by a classmate of ours, Geoffrey Smethurst, who sat with us at lunchtimes when the other boys played handball, and who unkindly repeated to me a suggestion from one of the bitchier girls that I would be a wonderful presidential candidate for the Itty Bitty Titty Committee. Geoffrey was thin, with boofy black hair and a habit of doodling with biro on his forearms. His eyes fixed on the mounds in Eve’s school jumper, he would remind us almost daily that all his out-of-school friends called him Skywalker, not Geoffrey. Still, I have him to thank for my early understanding of such important words as
prostitute
,
masturbate
and
franger
.