World of darkness mage, p.1
Stone Yard Devotional, page 1
Praise for The Weekend
Winner, 2020 Literary Fiction Book of the Year,
Australian Book Industry Awards
Shortlisted, 2020 Stella Prize
Shortlisted, 2020 Best Fiction, Indie Awards
Shortlisted, 2020 ALS Gold Medal
Shortlisted, 2020 Best Fiction, Prime Minister’s Literary Awards
Shortlisted, 2021 Christina Prize for Fiction, NSW Premier’s
Literary Awards
‘I plan to read this insightful, poignant and fiercely honest novel about female friendship and female ageing a second time, then seek out every other book its marvellous author has written.’
—SIGRID NUNEZ, author of the New York Times bestseller and National Book Award-winner The Friend
‘A compelling and vivid look at the friendships we make as women. Honest, unsettling and, like all good literature, had me asking questions about life and myself.’
—HEATHER ROSE, author of The Museum of Modern Love, winner of the 2017 Stella Prize
‘I read Charlotte Wood’s new novel, The Weekend, in one sitting. Here’s my verdict: wow, wow, wow, wow, wow … This is Wood’s greatest novel yet, and that’s saying something considering its predecessors … I had that strange feeling of realising my heart was beating too fast. Yet I hadn’t left the couch in a few hours, except to make a cup of tea.’
—STEPHEN ROMEI, Literary Editor, The Australian
‘An astute, tenderly funny novel about female friendship, ageing and loss.’
—Sunday Express
‘Friendship, ambition, love, sexual politics, and death: it’s all here in one sharp, funny, heartbreaking, and gorgeously written package. I loved it.’
—PAULA HAWKINS, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Girl on the Train
‘This richly textured novel is about so many things that it’s hard to do justice to all of them. Ideas about friendship, ageing and grief keep sliding kaleidoscopically in and out of focus … all the way from scenes of utter devastation to moments of laugh-out-loud comedy. But there’s something even deeper going on, something about existence itself, that circles around the ancient dog Finn … Wood’s technique in this novel is masterly.’
—KERRYN GOLDSWORTHY, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age
‘Authentic, funny, brutally well-observed … As with the novels of Elizabeth Strout or Anne Tyler, these are characters not written to please, but to feel true.’
—The Sunday Times
‘The Weekend by Charlotte Wood is acerbic brilliance … It is so great I am struggling to find the words to do it justice … Wood is an agonisingly gifted writer, so great at capturing micro-emotions, the complexity of friendship, love, mother-child tension, all done with breezy readability. At time it’s funny, thought-provoking, very moving. I care so much about the characters. I am now going to read all her other books!’
—MARIAN KEYES, author of Grown Ups
‘A witty, poignant portrait of female friendship.’
—Irish Independent
Praise for The Natural Way of Things
Winner, 2016 Stella Prize
Co-winner, 2016 Prime Minister’s Literary Award
Winner, Fiction Book of the Year, 2016 Indie Awards
Winner, 2016 Indie Book of the Year Award
Shortlisted, 2016 Miles Franklin Literary Award
Shortlisted, 2016 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards
Shortlisted, 2016 Barbara Jefferis Award
Shortlisted, 2016 Queensland Literary Award for Fiction
Shortlisted, 2016 Voss Literary Prize
‘It feels at times like a nightmare; but one in which women make serious pacts, take serious pleasures, and reimagine what it might mean to live in the world. I feel as if I’ve been witness to the most terrible injustice, but also the most astonishing beauty.’
—FIONA McFARLANE, author of The Night Guest
‘Exposing the threads of misogyny, cowardice and abuses of power embedded in contemporary society, this is a confronting, sometimes deeply painful novel to read. With an unflinching eye and audacious imagination, Wood carries us from a nightmare of helplessness and despair to a fantasy of revenge and reckoning.’
—The Guardian
‘It’s rare to pick up a novel and from the opening pages be not only gripped by the story on the page but also by the keenness of the intelligence and audacity of the imagination at work … one hell of a novel by one of our most original and provocative writers.’
—STEPHEN ROMEI, The Weekend Australian
‘An extraordinary novel: inspired, powerful, at once coherent and dreamlike … recalls all the reading you’ve ever done on the subjects of capture, isolation, incarceration, totalitarianism, misogyny, and the abuse of power. It’s thought-provoking in all directions.’
—KERRYN GOLDSWORTHY, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age
‘Riveting … the kind of book you inhale in a sitting. It leaves you woozy and disoriented, surprised to find yourself in mundane surroundings rather than sweltering in the desert heat.’
—The Saturday Paper
‘As a man, to read it is as unsettling as receiving one piece of bad news after another. It is confronting. Yet anyone who reads it, man or woman, is going to be left with a sense that a long-hidden truth has been revealed to them. A brave, brilliant book. I would defy anyone to read it and not come out a changed person.’
—MALCOLM KNOX, author of The Wonder Lover
‘Charlotte Wood’s book is a howl of despair and fury; but it is also that most rare and powerful of creations, a dystopian fiction that is perfectly judged, the writing controlled, the narrative engrossing and the language both searing and sensual. You can’t shake off this novel, it gets under your skin, fills your lungs, breaks your heart. As allegory, as a novel, as vision and as art, it is stunning.’
—CHRISTOS TSIOLKAS, author of Barracuda
‘A virtuoso performance, plotted deftly through a minefield of potential traps, weighted with allegory yet swift and sure in its narrative advance. As an idea for a novel, it’s rich, and to achieve that idea the writer has been courageous. Her control of this story is masterful.’
—The Sydney Review of Books
CHARLOTTE WOOD is the author of ten books – seven novels and three non-fiction works. She has won the Stella Prize and the Prime Minister’s Literary Award, among others, and her features and essays have appeared in The Guardian, New York Times, Sydney Morning Herald, The Monthly, Saturday Paper and others. She lives in Sydney.
ALSO BY CHARLOTTE WOOD
FICTION
Pieces of a Girl (1999)
The Submerged Cathedral (2004)
The Children (2007)
Animal People (2011)
The Natural Way of Things (2015)
The Weekend (2019)
NON-FICTION
Love & Hunger (2012)
The Writer’s Room (2016)
The Luminous Solution (2021)
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
First published in 2023
Copyright © Charlotte Wood 2023
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 the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.
Allen & Unwin
Cammeraygal Country
83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
Email: info@allenandunwin.com
Web:www.allenandunwin.com
Allen & Unwin acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the Country on which we live and work. We pay our respects to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elders, past and present.
ISBN 978 1 76106 949 9
eISBN 978 1 76118 781 0
Typeset by Bookhouse, Australia
Cover design by Sandy Cull
Cover photographs by Colin McDougall (landscape); Alamy (woman)
FOR JANE PALFREYMAN
‘I felt chastened by the world.’
NICK CAVE
‘This is what I have decided to do with my life just now. I will do this work of transformed and even distorted memory and lead this life, the one I am leading today.’
ELIZABETH HARDWICK
CONTENTS
PART I
DAY ONE
DAY TWO
DAY THREE
DAY FOUR
DAY FIVE
PART II
PART III
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
PART I
DAY ONE
ARRIVE FINALLY AT about three. The place has the feel of a 1970s health resort or eco-commune, but is not welcoming. Signs on fences, or stuck on little posts by driveways: NO ENTRY. NO PARKING. A place of industry, not recreation.
I park in a nondescript spot near a fence, and sit in the quiet car.
~
There is no lawn, just dusty dead grass.
To find my parents I had to recall the cold, unsheltered feeling I had – physically, I mean – at each of their funerals. There had been the sensation of too much space around me there, at the place where my father, then later my mother, were sent into their adjacent shafts of opened earth. (It seemed callous to me back then, to lower a person into a hole in the ground using ropes and cords instead of arms.) But walking around the cemetery now, remembering that sensation helped me find the spot again. I stood before my mother’s and father’s gravestones, two machine-cut and polished pieces of stone. The colour and design of the stones and the words on them seemed to bear no trace of either of my parents, though I must have decided on, approved of, them.
Someone had pushed some ugly plastic flowers into the small metal grate beside the headstones. Perhaps there are volunteers who go around leaving fake flowers at unvisited graves. Who else would want to mark my parents’ burial place after all this time? The plastic of the flowers had turned grey, every part of them, though they must have once been luridly coloured like those I could see sticking up from the little metal vases at other headstones: ragged synthetic petals in puce and maroon and white with dark green stems, angled here and there with artificial nodules and leaves.
I stood on the grass and looked at the ugly flowers, then at my parents’ names carved into each slab in front of me. And I realised: Your bones are here, beneath my feet. I squatted then, those few feet of earth between their bodies and mine, and I kissed my fingers and pressed them to the crackly grass.
~
Walking back to the car I remembered something else: a phone call, many months after my mother’s death. A man’s voice quietly telling me her headstone was ready. I recall standing by the laundry door with the phone in my hand, my outsides unaltered but everything within me plummeting. Like a sandbank collapsing inside me.
~
Near the end of the drive the sky darkened, turned drizzly. The road coiled up a steep hill, entering a tunnel of thick bush – my car struggled on the wet bitumen – and then on the other side it opened out into these endless, shallow, angular plains, bare as rubbed suede.
Place names I thought I’d forgotten returned to me one by one: Chakola, Royalla, Bredbo, Bunyan. Jerangle, Bobundara, Kelton Plain, Rocky Plain, Dry Plain, like beads on a rosary. Like naming the bones of my own body.
~
A little after I arrive, the sun comes out. I get out and look around me, trying to work out where I should go. There are some skinny pencil pines, a few dripping eucalypts, a lot of silence. Three or four small wooden cabins painted a drab olive; green peaked tin roofs.
I wander the grounds for a time, eventually finding a shed marked OFFICE, and knock on the door. A woman appears, introduces herself as Sister Simone. She pronounces it Simone, traces of an accent (French?). Indeterminate age, business-like but soft-looking at the same time. Scrawnyish. Quite yellow teeth. She apologises for not having come out to greet me; she is busy, but a housekeeper will show me around if I wait for a bit. She tells me with a teeth-showing smile – more a grimace – that she’s looked me up on the internet and that my work sounds ‘very impressive’. Her tone seems lightly insulting. I smile and tell her the internet is very misleading. She pauses, then says coolly that saving God’s creatures most certainly is important work. She’s slightly cross, I think. Not accustomed to disagreement. We bare our teeth at each other again and she closes the office door.
~
Anita, the housekeeper. Chatty and broad-bummed. Shivering a little in her maroon fleece vest over a turquoise shirt, navy pants. She leads me around the buildings and grounds, and I trot behind her as she rattles on. She could never be a nun – imagine getting up for Vigils at five a.m. In winter! Plus, they can’t watch Netflix: ‘That’s never going to work for me.’
She unfolds her arms now and then to point at something – shop, old orchard, guest cabins; gestures further off to indicate the paddocks, a small dam – then refolds them against the cold and we take off towards a little stone chapel. I open my mouth to say, It’s okay, I don’t need to see inside, but don’t want to be rude. We push through a big wooden door. Anita’s chatter doesn’t stop but turns to a whisper, though there is nobody in the church. She has just learned, she says, that this is not called a chapel – chapels are privately owned. This is a Consecrated Church. When they come in here it’s called the Liturgy of the Hours, she whispers, enunciating these words as if from a foreign language. Which I suppose they are.
Anita points to a corner: ‘This is where you sit.’
Four wooden pews off to the side, away from those in the centre of the church, which are presumably used by the sisters. The guest pews are smaller than theirs, more modern in design and made of a golden pinewood. Each place is marked with a flat, square, brown cushion, and a brown leather-padded kneeler runs the length of the pew. Anita waits for me to show her that I know how to sit. The seat is surprisingly comfortable.
There’s no altar. Instead, a simple wooden lectern in front of a huge carved wooden crucifix on the whitewashed wall.
As we leave, Anita pauses to show me a large angular flower arrangement set on the floor to one side, beneath the crucifix. It was made by one of the oblates, she says. I murmur some generic sound. Yes, says Anita, sighing with admiration. This particular oblate really thinks outside the box.
I don’t tell her I have no idea what an oblate is.
~
Next on my tour Anita stops at a double-doored fridge-freezer on a verandah. She yanks open the fridge door to show me the shelves containing eggs, milk, a few apples. Slams that door shut, opens the freezer to reveal individually packaged meat pies and four-slice packets of wholemeal bread. This food is for those who don’t want to take lunch from the dining room, she explains.
I will not see the sisters except in church, she warns, as if I will be disappointed. The nuns live in another long low building, fenced off by a hedge behind the church, a hidden part closed to guests.
At last to my cabin, which Anita calls by a saint’s name I immediately forget. The cabins nearby seem to be unoccupied, but who knows? I don’t ask if there are any other guests. The place feels pretty empty.
Anita unlocks my door and stamps about opening curtains, showing me the remote control for the reverse-cycle air conditioner. (‘It gets very hot here in summer, you’d be surprised, but look, it’s on “heater” – see the little sunshine symbol?’) She picks up a laminated booklet from the small desk – ‘Everything you need to know is in here’ – and slaps it down again. Waves a hand at the kitchenette with its canisters and cupboards, and then in the opposite direction to the unseen bathroom, then smiles at me and sighs with a bright finality, as if now the formalities are over we can settle down to a proper chat. I thank her briskly, stepping towards the door. She finally seems to accept that I am not looking for conversation, and leaves.
~
Alone at last, having flipped through the booklet and ferried my few things from the car, I lie on the floor in a patch of wan afternoon sunlight. The heating works well; the room is soon warm. The light from the window illuminates a small wooden crucifix positioned on the wall above the desk. The silence is so thick it makes me feel wealthy.
My phone vibrates, its buzz making me jolt. Alex has landed at Heathrow; his new colleagues are to collect him. I reply, then lie back on the floor again. Neither of us has said it yet, but we both know I won’t be following. We both know he’ll be relieved.
I realise that it would be possible here, once Anita had given you your key and trudged off in her sheepskin boots, to spend the entire visit without seeing or hearing another soul. It is accepted, the laminated booklet says, that guests might want total solitude, and they are free to decline joining others for eating or worship. Noise is discouraged. Nobody would have to know, until the end of one’s stay, that a person might choose to end their life here on this clean carpet in a warm, silent room. At this moment I cannot think of a greater act of kindness than to offer such privacy to a stranger.
