By Roderick Heath

The fifth and last in an exclusive excerpt series from Claudia, the author’s as-of-yet unpublished fifth novel.
Claudia left him with a smile pitched carefully to linger. She approached Rémy who was in temporary, appreciated solitude. He saw Claudia and straightened, a redeemed light rising to fatigued eyes. They stood momentarily jangling and puppet-like before closing so he could lightly wrap hands around her shoulders and she laid a solitary soft kiss on his hard-boned cheek.
“Hello Claudia, I’m very glad you made it,” Rémy Larquey murmured as she parted; he still held her shoulders, looking her up and down. “You’re looking better than ever. Except in the eyes. You look a bit tired.”
“I don’t feel tired. Maybe a dash of ennui. You look well.”
“No I don’t. I’m yellow skin and bone, like Miss Havisham.”
“No, really, you look much better than last time.”
“I am eating these days,” Rémy granted, and smiled. It was an unfamiliar shape for his face, especially this evening, and the strain showed. “You don’t look to be eating at all, you’re thinner than ever. I bet you go days without food trying to keep that ridiculous modern damn scarecrow look.”

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Posted on March 30, 2007

By Roderick Heath

The fourth in an exclusive excerpt series from Claudia, the author’s as-of-yet unpublished fifth novel.
In March of that year, four months prior to Claudia’s birthday, Rémy Gaston Larquey had been given the honour of a solo exhibition at the Herbert Bourne Memorial Wing of the New South Wales Art Gallery, to celebrate the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. It was a special event for the art community in general and Rémy Larquey personally, the crowning achievement of a long career riddled with both great success and abysmal interludes of private and commercial failure. Despite years of proven worth as a seller and exhibitor of paintings world-wide, Rémy had not yet become truly fashionable in his adopted homeland. This event was destined to make him at last highly popular with the mass-media whose gears he had failed so conspicuously to grease by reducing his work or himself to a fine homily, and his art retained its savage dignity so that even phrases like ‘enfant terrible’ still seemed apt, indeed could hardly encompass him. Rémy was now finding acceptance, perhaps because he was passing into a grandee age few had expected him to reach, and he could be safely categorized even as he remained a terrifying, terrific sage. The floodgates of society page money would now open to him.
Claudia Rossi had received her invitation by mail a week before the event. She had glanced at it casually, wondered how she had made it on that mailing list, then noticed it had been signed by Rémy himself, a detail which started Claudia’s belly boiling. Rémy meant very little to her and she had built good things for herself without him. She would not go. It would be easy not to go. Too easy, perhaps. It could not bring much pleasure, although the event might be looked upon as little more than an excuse to filch hors d’oeuvres and explore the finer entrails of the social scene. She had surely hovered around the edges of many of such events. There was the chance to inspect Rémy’s art, which defied all her anger. She still worshipped Rémy as a creator. She would at some point go to the exhibition, so it made sense to take this opportunity and step into a social centrifuge. The price she did not know yet. There was certainly a price.

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Posted on March 29, 2007

By Roderick Heath

The third in an exclusive excerpt series from Claudia, the author’s as-of-yet unpublished fifth novel.
When she was done with a client, Claudia would walk, feeling empty and hungry and lonely, enjoying the sense of money in her purse, the freedom, the knowledge she had bought her place in the world for another spell. She could march in any direction with confidence, hypnotise any man and any girl, and have herself for her self and whoever she wanted.
On this day there was a fair fresh wind waving in from the sea, shattered cloud rolling in, and the day had a dirty amber-etched tone. Claudia settled at an exterior table of the City Extra, under the Expressway’s vaults, having ordered a cup of flat white coffee and a slice of Chocolate Bavarian cake that looked fine under the glass. She sat and bantered with waiters and diners and slowly forked away chunks of cake and read the morning’s Herald. Though she had cleaned herself thoroughly before leaving Matsuo’s hotel room, she still felt a sheathe of divorcement from the world. It enclosed the heat of fine flesh and the smells and whispers that she carried into the evening cool and the grubby-toned days.
She took out Matsuo’s cheque and shook her head over it. She had friends, from university and from childhood, waiting tables, running the office photocopiers, temping, teaching, scraping by. She knew artists keeping themselves tawdrily alive, dole-cheque dilettantes, and here she was, for one night rolling with a pretentious Japanese prick, holding four thousand dollars worth of the Bank of Tokyo’s watermarked paper. The wages of sin? Merci fucking beaucoup. It could buy her the world. Tokyo, indeed? Perhaps. Matsuo’s suggestion was ripe. She studied, next, the card Matsuo had given. Joaquin Van Gelden, proprietor of the Red Curtain Club. A gentleman, not a sleazy pimp. Well, you’re a gentleman, Matsuo, but perhaps not all your friends are. I know many people that I like and would not trust so far as I might spit them.

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Posted on March 28, 2007

By Roderick Heath

The second in an exclusive excerpt series from Claudia, the author’s as-of-yet unpublished fifth novel.
Appointment at the Sheraton by Circular Quay. Walking the rim of the Quay studying the colour-daubed veins of the waving black waters, Claudia felt the harbour had welled out to flood the city, all the gleaming lights were the polyps and phosphorescent shoals and glowing-gutted fishes, the night wind swam upon her like the current, swooning as in inky dark, tendrils of human limbs thick and enfolding as the long wavering weed. The Rocks rose in twisted Georgian lanes and vaulted terraces of glowing sandstone and dew-bleeding granite. A white cruise ship sat with sharp thrusting bow and elephantine lines at the Passenger Terminal. In Campbell’s Cove a tethered sailing ship marked the beat of the tide with the creaking of its intricate rigging. The black arch of the bridge rode the gap of water with ribs of light, the spot-lit pedestals. The Sheraton in a half-moon of earth-coloured brick and gold-stained glass. Everything was alight and perfect and the people looked successful and seemed to be enjoying themselves. Some were setting off for voyages or had just arrived from them. They were drinking with fine-looking friends and eating within the silver and brass of the tourist restaurants.

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Posted on March 27, 2007

By Roderick Heath

The first in an exclusive excerpt series from Claudia, the author’s as-of-yet unpublished fifth novel.
Claudia Rossi had been working as a prostitute for nearly five years. She had come to enjoy, amidst the scattered pleasures of that line of work, the arts of dressing and painting herself for a rendezvous. It offered a sensation of transformation, of stepping out of her corporeal self, so badly washed by inconstant sleep, her menstrual cycle, her careening moods and psychic integrity. The bitter circles of iron oxide around her eyes spoke of burning herself in nightly arts of drinking and chasing good techno music. In her apartment, she began in the bath and scrubbed herself down until she had no smell, no dirt, just smooth and glistening skin, an embryo of possibility. Like all achieved simplicity and beauty, hers came from great effort and attention to detail. She read magazines and books on eroticism and icons of style. She found herself pulled to noir heroines, French starlets, waif singers, flappers. She was aware of her minatory charge of sexual ambiguity. Though her style was feminine, a coltish grace in the length of her body, her mouth turned a defiant pitch with an almost masculine tension. She could turn on all the girls and all the guys. Her eyes, black curves framing lucid green irises, were dreamy when still and studying, but sharp at the corners, curved and swinging with the efficiency and final intelligence of a sabre.

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Posted on March 26, 2007

The backstory

Claudia is my fifth novel and the first I am close to happy with. Its titular heroine is a high-end call girl, resident of King’s Cross, not an outcast or desperate case, but a well-paid worker who mostly enjoys her complete independence. The theme was inspired by several coincident sources – personal anecdotes, the accounts of some sex workers, and with a nod to some classic tales of courtesans and prostitutes, such as Nana and La Dame aux Camelias, with an eye to looking how attitudes have both changed and not changed.
The chief appeal for me was the chance to portray a transgressive, rebellious female figure, who tries to live by her own peculiar values well outside the norm, maintaining a form of combat both with society and family. Through Claudia, I could portray what could be a kind of straight-faced satire on our post-feminist ethos where prostituting one’s self, in whatever form, can be passed off as some kind of “empowerment”; the fate of figures like Britney Spears, I think, illustrates the contradictions in this beautifully. But Claudia is the butt of no cosmic jokes; she is herself aware of these contradictions, and the slow accumulation of frustration in her life, both those she causes for herself and those life thrusts upon her, finally drives her to almost lose everything she loves in the course of fighting for it. Claudia is essentially cool, a guarded and emotionally cautious woman who nonetheless chases erotic delirium and emotional enrichment. Her life careens from giddy romps with lovers to bleak confrontation with life’s limitations.

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Posted on March 26, 2007

My brother started school before I did-I guess my parents figured it was more important that he get back into the tenth grade than I get back to first, and he wasn’t as adamant about not going. He was socially accepted pretty quickly-he managed to achieve finding a best friend who lived around the block and a pretty girlfriend in what I consider record speed. It was a couple of days later that I was ushered to the door of my new first grade classroom. I remember that my parents didn’t come in with me, and that it was midmorning. As my mother gave me a gentle push into the classroom, it fell completely silent. The teacher announced my name, showed me where to hang my coat, and left me to my own devices-for some reason recess was inside that day. I scanned the classroom for a likely playmate. There was something funny about this place. For one thing, it was awfully quiet. No raucous laughter, no jive talk, no cussing, no fighting. For another thing, the class was utterly divided. Boys played with boys, girls played with girls. And finally, with the exception of one Asian girl, every single kid in the classroom was as White as I was. I was baffled. What was I supposed to do?
I was closest to a group of girls who were staring at me as if I was a specimen from another planet. There was a brunette, a redhead, and the Asian girl. I was about to walk into my first blonde joke.
“What do we do?” asked the brunette, Courtney.
“I think we’re supposed to ask her to play with us,” said the redhead, Lisa.
“Yeah, we HAVE to. She’s the NEW girl,” agreed Joy, the Asian girl, with a touch of irritation.
They all stared at me and I finally shrugged and joined their game of “house”-thank God I’d had some experience with Chace or I’d really have been screwed.
“It’s really quiet in here,” I commented.
“That’s cos of yesterday,” said Joy, who turned out to be talkative and always brimming with fun. “You’re lucky you came today instead of yesterday.”
“Why? What happened yesterday?” I asked, imagining one of the worst scenes from my old school, like the day Anthony played hooky, then tried forging a note from his Grandmama saying he was sick, despite the fact he didn’t yet know HOW to write. Miss Wilson came to get him and you could hear them both screaming (and him howling) all the way down the hall.
Courtney took up the tale. “See that boy over there?” She pointed to a tall, broad kid with shaggy dark hair. “That’s Justin. He’s ALWAYS in trouble.” She rolled her eyes.
Joy jumped back in. “Yesterday, he couldn’t get his boot off. He was pulling and pulling and he pulled real hard and it flew up in the air and landed up in one of the lights!”
All three girls giggled, but then Lisa said, “He really got in trouble. Mrs. D. was yelling forever. She yelled at all of us, and sent him to the principal. That’s why everyone’s so quiet today. The janitor had to come and get his boot back.”
I stared at them. “But he didn’t mean to!”
Joy shook her head, and echoed Courtney. “He’s ALWAYS in trouble.”
Things at this new school were going to be very different indeed.
At lunchtime, first through third grade gathered in the cafeteria. There were maybe as many kids in all three grades as there had been in first grade in Jacksonville. I scanned the crowd, which confirmed my suspicions. I was sitting with my first friends, and turned to ask them the inevitable question.
“Where are the black kids?”
They stared at me.
“There aren’t any black people here,” said Joy.
“At school? Why not?”
“Not just at school. In the whole town,” said Courtney. She lowered her voice. “I heard a black family moved in once. But then someone burned a cross on their yard and they moved away and never came back.”
I didn’t know exactly what it meant, but I knew enough to know it was a horrible, hateful thing to do.
“That’s real bad,” I said.
I can’t say I was completely tactful at six. I turned to Joy. “What about you? You’re not white.”
“Oh, well, there’s me, and there’s Job, he’s that boy over there. We’re both Korean. We’re adopted. But our families are white,” she said. “But we’re the only ones in first grade.”
“At my old school, there were hardly any white kids,” I said. “One of my best friends, Elliot, was black.”
Courtney wrinkled her nose. “That’s so weird.”

Posted on March 24, 2007

It’s funny that I have very little recollection of my father’s absence for nearly six months-the entire time I was at Hendricks Avenue. My dad had left academia for insurance in 1972 and worked at Blue Cross/Blue Shield in Jacksonville, but for reasons I don’t know desired a transfer. They transferred him to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Dad moved first, living in an apartment and teaching at the community college part-time while adapting to the job that would eventually carry him through to retirement. He visited us sometimes, but doing so was expensive, and with my sister in her first year at Princeton, it was just my mother, my brother, and me. I do remember a winter coat arriving one day-royal blue with a rainbow band at the waist and a hood. I was excited to try it on. I also remember loads of used and rather frumpy clothes from my mother’s cousin’s daughter, who was a few years older than I. I was horrified once to open a sack and find a dead Palmetto bug stuck to a flannel nightgown. I screamed and screamed (I was and still am pathologically afraid of roaches), and refused to ever wear the garment. It was pink and frilly, at any rate, and not at all to my liking. I’d have worn sweats or grubby jeans day and night if my mother hadn’t believed it was her task to at least attempt to make me look like a little girl.
The move itself seemed endless. Round after round of goodbyes. Alex’s family took the stray cat that had recently taken up with us, as well as our tropical fish tank, and we bade one another a sad goodbye. Incidentally, other than one short visit on our way to my grandmother’s in Orlando a few years after our move North, it would be twenty years before I saw my friend again, and we’re still as tight as ever. My father came down to make the drive with us, and to direct the movers. Slowly, my way of life, and my stability, disappeared into the giant maw of the moving trucks. I wandered through my empty house and wondered if my new bedroom would have tulips on the wallpaper (it didn’t), or whether the house would have a sun porch (nope).
We arrived in Pennsylvania in the middle of a huge snowstorm to discover that something rather important was missing-our furniture. One of the trucks had broken down, or something like that, in Virginia, and they had someone else’s furniture to off-load first, and our house was therefore uninhabitable for nearly a week, until the movers finally showed. We stayed in a hotel, and up on the bank of the highway, my brother helped me build my first snowman. It stood for some weeks, as it was a record year for snow and cold, and I loved riding by on the highway and looking up at him. The delay also prevented the thing I dreaded most-having to start school in this new place.

Posted on March 24, 2007

Alex, First Grade, and Hendricks Avenue
Sometime during kindergarten, my mother discovered that there was a boy around the corner who would be going to the same school I would as a first grader, and his mother and mine threw us together as playmates. It is one of the decisions that my parents made for which I am eternally gratefully. Alex was everything I could want in a playmate. Also the youngest (at the time-he subsequently had a younger brother) with significantly older siblings, Alex and I hit it off from minute one. He didn’t give a rat’s ass that I was a girl, for which I was thankful, and we pretty much spent every waking minute together, playing in my backyard, in his family room (he had TONS of Lincoln Logs), or hanging out in the park. I know now that Alex endured torment from the other boys in the neighborhood-as he headed to my house, he would be taunted with cries of “Hey Alex, going to your giiiiiiirlfriend’s?” At the time, he kept it from me, though he’s subsequently told me the desire to play with me always overcame the embarrassment-he would simply backtrack to his house, jump the back fence, cut through the neighbors’ yards, and sneak over to my place.
Chace had moved on to Catholic school and I saw her less frequently, but my relationship with Alex cemented into something that has lasted for more than twenty-five years, despite the fact we had less than a year together due to my family’s move to Pennsylvania. I’ve never been one to make or keep friends easily, but I know that if I needed him, Alex would be there for me. And though he has a wife, two great stepkids, and a beautiful daughter of his own, if Alex needed anything, I would be off to Jacksonville like a shot. Friendships like that don’t come along too often in life, and when they do, they’re miraculously wonderful.
When we headed off to Hendricks Avenue for first grade, things got really tough. Jacksonville had not solved desegregation in any useful way. Most of the kids from our neighborhood were bussed into the ghetto, while kids from the projects were bussed into our local school. Alex and I were placed in different classes and saw each other at lunch, on the rare occasions we had recess (classes were punished by the removal of recess), and at Gifted. It was the days before mandatory kindergarten, and my teacher was overwhelmed-she had thirty students, twenty-five of whom were from the projects and not only had never learned their ABC’s, but had never learned how to behave. John, from my preschool, was in my class. There were five Caucasian kids in the class-everyone else from our part of town had been sent to our classmates’ part of town for school. These kids were by no means dumb. They were street-smart, and if you wanted to live, you didn’t mess with them. But you could learn from them. One boy, Anthony, was sent to be paddled by the terrifying Miss Juanita Wilson, principal who took no shit, every day.
I had the good fortune to be seated next to Elliot. He came from the projects, but his mother had made sure he knew how to behave in school, and he was smart as a whip. He spent Mondays in gifted with me and we became fast friends, which made us both outcasts. He wore glasses and was bright-kids from his neighborhood bullied him. Furthermore, he hung out with a white girl. One thing I will say for my parents-they were never racists. They marched with Dr. King on Atlanta, and my mother had no problem having Elliot over to play, or driving him home to his atrociously dangerous neighborhood.
Elliot and I had our share of woes too. As our teacher was mostly occupied with trying to keep order in the classroom, we tended to chatter away about whatever was on our minds. Alex and Elliot were friendly, which was a plus. But the teacher, exasperated with our inability not to talk to one another during class, decided on a uniquely bizarre punishment. When Elliot and I were caught talking, we were made to sit under the table we shared with several other kids. This was, of course, ridiculously ineffective. Instead of talking above decks, we talked under the table. The first grade teachers were tough, and eventually resorted to banning recess altogether because their students couldn’t behave. Fortunately for Alex, Elliot, and me, we had tested Gifted, which was a day-long program once a week with a sympathetic teacher who made damn sure we had ample time to play outside.
Lunchtimes were a nightmare. Talking was utterly forbidden, as was looking around for friends. Lunch ladies and Miss Wilson, paddle in hand, patrolled the rows, intermittently screaming, “Turn around, sit down!” and jerking talkers out of their seats (Alex was a victim) to smack them with the paddle. One day following lunch, I hurried to get into line to go back to class. Miss Wilson took my haste for running and threatened me with a visit to her office for a real paddling. I was horrified.
I’m not sure I would have survived five years at Hendricks Avenue. My sister had not-it had been so awful for her (also under the administration of Miss Wilson) that a child psychiatrist told my parents to get her out of there, and she ended up in a private all-girls school where she eventually became quite successful. My more adaptable brother made it all the way through before being sent to private school. I might have made it with Alex and Elliot at my side, but there’s no telling. Mid-way through the year, my life changed forever.

Posted on March 24, 2007

The first person who noticed me to be withdrawn and socially inept was my kindergarten teacher. In fact, she suggested my parents hold me back, giving me time to mature another year, a suggestion they chose to ignore. But I still wonder why they did not question what had led an experienced teacher to notice that their admittedly dreamy but previously fairly content youngest child into a world of her own- socially isolated, fearful, and unable to keep up with the peers she’d blended in with just a year before? What did my teacher see that my parents did not? And why didn’t they see it?
I have only one answer for my personality shift at such a tender age. Sometime before kindergarten, we took a family trip to sunny California. My father had business in San Francisco, and they decided to combine business with family. My father had grown up in a suburb of Los Angeles, then promptly moved away following college, to the everlasting sorrow of his mother, who never forgave my own mother for stealing her son. My grandfather was an alcoholic with emphysema who spent most of his time in a home, but was brought to the house each day of our visit. We also spent time with my father’s sister, Gay, her alcoholic husband Leonard, and my California cousins, Carla, Darlene, Lesa, and Christina. Playing with my cousins was fun–I’d never met them before, and Christina was only a year my junior. But then my parents left my siblings and me with my grandparents and went up to the Bay area for Dad’s convention, and the nightmare began.
It took me until well into adulthood to understand why and how it happened. The house was by no means large, and there were three extra people in it. But my sister tells me she spent the majority of her time hiding out in the back bedroom, writing lengthy letters about how miserable the trip was to her boyfriend, Johnny, and my brother was likely off with my two oldest cousins, Carla and Darlene, who could drive. This left me on my own with my grandparents, and my grandmother, miserable with having to put up with my grandfather, stayed away from him when he was in the house.
I remember the day with vivid clarity. To my delight, I had discovered a lemon tree in the backyard, something I had never seen before. The California sky seemed like an endless blue arc overhead–maybe the smog hadn’t drifted to Rosemead that day. I remember my bare feet in the grass, and collecting the fallen lemons for my grandmother, who patiently pretended to be thrilled, and oohed and ahhed over them, while her cigarette ashes fell into the sink where she had been washing dishes. And I remember entering the darkened living room, with its blinds closed to the brightness outside. Grandad always sat in the same chair, his breath and the oxygen machine rattling away. Despite the machine, he still smoked, and drank from a flask. He seemed pleased to see me, and encouraged me to climb into his lap. I felt no impending sense of danger. I can still feel the confusion as his papery hand slid into my shorts. And my mind goes blank and black and there is nothing else to remember.
I did not leave California the same child as I arrived.
I did not tell anyone.
No one ever knew.
He died in 1982.
I broke my silence in 2005.
I don’t think my father believes me.
I wouldn’t want to either.

Posted on March 24, 2007