Penelope Todd
Wild, Wild Women by Janis Freegard (At the Bay| I Te Kokoru, 2024), 188pp, $25; Below Ground by Sandra Arnold (Impspired Press, 2024), 198pp, $25
Unless a book’s title is subdued or general (After, Dark, Island) it invites speculation. Picking up Janis Freegard’s collection of 20 stories I wondered if the women living between the covers would be doing things that required unusual courage. Or be spectacularly angry, or have grown up feral. If they’d go bush or lose their inhibitions. Would they be wild as in virgin, in the native bush sense of the word: never cut down, gaining full stature and splendour, self-regulating? Or was there one story of very wild women from whom the title was taken? What I hadn’t considered as components of wildness, or wild terrain, were alcohol, drugs and youth. Sexual permissiveness and mental disorder. Old age. Imaginative acting-out, experimentation, unconventionality, feyness and fantasy. In Freegard’s fiction, all of these represent wildernesses that a woman can enter or inhabit.
In Wild, Wild Women, nobody goes bush. Only one woman roars in rage. A pair of siblings seem to be living without adults—a suburban iteration perhaps of feral—while others are neglected. Most are women like you or me, trying to make the best of things. Trying to stay true to self, or simply upright. And sometimes failing to manage either. They’re real women (though actually, not always, not entirely).
A widely published poet and a novelist, Freegard crafts her stories in prose that is energetic, precise and purposeful. She smartly delivers the economical detail that clues us into character and likely story trajectory. In ‘Taking a Ride with Dulcie’, the protagonist names her ’62 Daimler ‘Dulcie’ even before she’s made the impulsive purchase: ‘She was way out of my price range but I was already in love.’ On the first road trip she picks up Carly, the hitchhiker: ‘a young woman holding a sign that said “Nelson”. She had long black hair and looked too thin. Her eyes were a little bloodshot.’
Then there’s Ro in ‘Saturday Night’: ‘Ro parks the Anglia at a thirty-degree angle to the kerb, two feet away. We giggle, pile out. Good little Angle-box. Still going after a year of Ro’s lousy driving.’ And cars themselves offer clues: Zeph in the story ‘Moeraki Boulders’ drives an ‘evil SUV’ (forgivable though, given the mud on it); Agnes in ‘Fish over Mākara’ also has an Anglia—ancient—which she uses to transport across town her massive collection of sardine tins. The all-important car in ‘After’ doesn’t warrant a brand name because it’s a mum’s car, whereas it’s worth mentioning that Mick in the same story has a panel van, with a useful back compartment.
The lives of Freegard’s protagonists can be grittily real. There’s the wailing baby in ‘A Question of Bonding’; maggots in ‘Maggots’, manky flats and op-shopped clothes. Only in ‘Swimming in New York’ is there full gloss, which is patently and perfectly unreal.
The book’s opening story, ‘Moeraki Boulders’, is set up the coast from Ōtepoti Dunedin. A writer has to choose: do they name a place so readers can follow the contours, as it were, or leave the location vague? Imogen’s old flame, Zeph, takes her to Shag Point and I can’t help wondering on which secluded beach the ramshackle hut is tucked, where Imogen, our first wild woman, has a decision to make. When the boulders appear, late in the story, they take on a personal resonance: ‘cracked open by the force of the sea and smeared inside with fossilized honey.’
The next story, ‘Taking a ride with Dulcie’, is a trip into hot water. Dulcie’s usually disorderly owner (‘I am not a tidy woman’ … ‘I’d never kept anything spotless before’) finds herself fastidious in the case of Dulcie, in a set-up just begging to have a greasy spanner flung into it. This comes in the form of a young hitchhiker caught up in an opportunity for revenge, for which Dulcie might serve the purpose … Both women find themselves taking a short walk on the wildish side. A satisfying story of subversion.
Strong themes of nostalgia, regret and yearning run through the stories. As does the sense of possibility, which is as often as not deflated into a more realistic picture. Several smack of young-adulthood in the eighties: the parties, the pub scene, the skinheads, Brown Cows and casks of Blenheimer. In ‘Saturday Night’, on their way to the Rumba Bar: ‘Ro grabs my hand, drags me along the street, shrieking: “Sex and drugs and rock and roll,” we yell at the tops of our voices.’ The story portrays the muddle of the typical young person’s night out at that time. It hardly matters what kind of social scene you belonged to—repressed and churchy, or spinning about like Ro and her mates in search of action, preloading with flatmates (the Brown Cows) before grabbing whatever from the bottle store gave the best kick for least money (the Blenheimer)—the sense of powerlessness was pervasive: there was someone to hanker after, who was into someone else, who was also mooning after someone … It was like watching flotsam swirl into your corner, not knowing which bits would catch you on the shins or sink you. You were as likely to go home feeling clobbered as joyous. Freegard captures this optimism and effervescence, but also harsher realities, the hurt and bewilderment.
A few of the stories are domestic, with confined or intimate settings. ‘Split Infinitive’ makes a close, uncomfortably accurate study of a hefty tiff playing out between a lesbian couple: how one party withdraws without explanation. How the other works to calm themselves. How one becomes bloody-mindedly pedantic: ‘you can’t say “to deliberately make”.’ How sometimes, most times, one relents, then the other relents, and on they go. Prepared to try again.
‘The Visit from the English Cousins’ by its title seems to imply a clash of cultures, and there is, but not the one we expect. In the light of a new dynamic between the two families, divergent intentions and longings come under the lens. And this is where a short story becomes potent—in the sudden change in perspective, the insight that leads to a new conclusion, in this case devastating.
‘A Question of Bonding’ tracks the foreboding development of postnatal depression through a failure to bond. The mother’s mother is tripping around Europe throughout—‘“just let the baby cry”, she said. “You’ve got to show them who’s boss …”’—raising a question about that earlier bond as well. There is no wild woman here, until the very end, and she’s going too wild too suddenly for a happy ending.
Some of the most satisfying stories have fish in them. I’d heard the author read ‘Fish over Mākara’ aloud in a Zoom meeting. It’s whimsical, edgy and evocative, hinting at some truth about women and their souls, but leaving any specifics slipping around at the corner of the eye, yes, like fish. It’s a kind of morality tale touching on the need to heed one’s inmost demands: ‘We each of us have our own inner fish. Kim Lee now, she tried denying her innate fish-hood and that’s why, ultimately, it choked her.’ Flocks of fish souls make themselves visible to those open to such phenomena, as is Agnes, ‘a woman well-attuned to the fish within’.
‘Swimming in New York’ has no fish, but there’s a lot of swimming. In a controlled, pared-down stage set—a hotel room furnished all in white and a rooftop pool—Serena is contracted to swim three times a day. ‘Now the girl was climbing the metal rings and emerging from the pool. She was beautiful, like a mermaid. Sterling used the manual controls on the central, west-side camera to zoom in. Tiny goose bumps had formed over her skin.’ Everything here, in prose to match, is spare, elegant and desirable; so desirable, the reader is seduced into believing it will turn out well, that the wealthy voyeur’s fantasy will become Serena’s, that she can have it all … Real life isn’t like that, though. A girl, a real wild girl, needs to breathe.
In the wondrously inventive ‘Lorelei’, a ‘girl’ has been created, a human-dolphin cross, at the behest of her now-criminalised parents. This mermaid-like creature, kept thus far in luxurious isolation, has the world of opportunities opened to her by a selfless couple who ignite her imagination and so invite her towards freedom.
‘Mr Fish’ is not so much piscine as mercurial. The child protagonist’s pseudo-uncle was born with two souls. When he grins, ‘you can see that his blue eye is a man’s eye and the green one a woman’s.’ Which allows the child in this compromised domestic set-up (dad in prison) to entertain the possibility of enjoying their own apparently double-souled nature.
Freegard homes in accurately on the line of speech, the setting or stance that evokes emotional tone and temperature, and often the absurdity of a moment. Even the faintly batty stories hold more than enough emotional truth to sustain belief and empathy. In ‘Lamingtons’, the woman who looks like a walrus reads the protagonist like a personal diary. She tells her what to do next and voilà, after a little reflection she find herself back on track with her heart’s desires. So, it’s satisfying, right down to the lamington: ‘flamingo pink and filled with fresh cream’. It’s one thing to have a friend tell you about their experience of clairvoyance, another to read a fictionalised account. But here, we buy it.
Dalliance with cream-filled cake is followed by the slamming devastation of ‘After’. It’s booze that leads to the more-than-regrettable ‘after’. As it is in ‘Boudicca’, where mixing a friable sense of reality with lots of whiskey leads to a variation on the poor outcome: the fun of making one’s own reality becomes objectively nightmarish. ‘Maggots’, is another story that takes an unflinching look at uneasy states of mental health. It opens, ‘The day was infused with a relentless boredom. Cooper wished she could stick a pitchfork through its heart, just to make something happen.’ The story, like most here, is pleasingly unpredictable, subtly portraying a friendship and the potential for a healing trajectory.
In the nostalgia-driven and almost-tragic story of ‘Ruby’, there’s a near drowning, while impressions from the past collide with present truths. This is one of two stories told from a man’s perspective and, in each case, wildness lies in the unpredictability and complexity of the desired woman. ‘Skiver’ is a jilted young man wild with longing, wild enough to invent his own reality, in which his ex-girlfriend’s desire for him is as strong as his for her. He fails to see the obvious.
There are sad stories. In ‘Pelargoniums’ a woman, visiting the bedside of her only known relative, who is dying, meets a pair of young siblings living in the shadow of a harsh genetic prognosis; none of them seem to have much to look forward to. But the youngsters insist that the woman take from their garden a pelargonium cutting with a good chance of growing. The eponymous Baldy, in ‘My Last Night with Baldy’, is a kind, protective giant. He and the protagonist slide into a sibling-like friendship. ‘I think he just wasn’t a sexual person. Ace, they say these days, don’t they? Asexual … Personally, I like sex. But that whole time I lived with Baldy I didn’t seem to need it and I never missed it. It was like I was getting everything I needed from him.’ The big-hearted guy forgets, though, to look out for himself.
And experimental stories: ‘Love and Lust’ meet in a bar and contend over which of them is more necessary or effective—reminiscent of the wind and the sun bragging about which can sooner shed a person of their coat—except that in this case the obvious conclusion is inclusion.
Characters in Freegard’s stories, by and large, find themselves on the outside, trying to get in. In ‘Exposure’, 15-year-old Marina is exposed to lives beyond the one she spends with her alcoholic, unnoticing mother. She encounters women who live by their own lights, and is lured further yet by city lights, by their gloss and promise. She’s caught between the two worlds, deprived of her childhood but not yet permitted to enter the adulthood she imagines gleaming ahead of her.
Beyond the rich textures, the fizz, tug or gallop of immersion in each carefully crafted story in this collection, there might be another take-away: it’s as well to take into account any woman’s versatility, capacities and mutability; her wild self. Also: friends are gold.
Providing short, sharp thrills and spills in confident, competent prose, Sandra Arnold’s Below Ground delivers up 75 flash fictions which, taken as a whole, read like a catharsis. Quiet, ‘mousey’ young women crop up often, as do violent or ambiguously kind men, children who died, misunderstandings, harsh childhood memories (many set apparently in the UK), authoritarian rule/s, and bullies. The mousey girls generally get their come-uppance, and expectations are reversed. Children find ways to adapt to difficulties or transcend them. Revenge is cooked up. Some stories are fantastical, some puzzling. Less (than 75) might have been more, since the stories are more and less rewarding. Favourites include the micros, which summon a scene and have no particular point to make: ‘Brazilian nights’, ‘A Broken eggshell and a spider’.
Arnold’s stories are not so much character observations as tiny narratives, sometimes telling of the arc of a life, or a train of events, that constitute a kind of morality tale or a yarn. They conjure the quiet heroism of those to whom life has dealt a flimsy hand of cards in games with tough, ruthless opponents, who nonetheless find allies or manage to alter their perspective, who summon imagination, self-belief or perseverance in order to survive, to make good, or even to thrive. Take ‘A packet of seeds’, or ‘Ka mua, ka muri—walking backwards into the future’ where a woman reflects on the way she left ‘her father’s rage and her mother’s silence’; ‘brutish teachers and schoolyard bullies’ in order to fly ‘to the far side of the world’, where she has ‘found peace and grown wings’.
PENELOPE TODD is a Dunedin author. She writes mostly fiction but has also written a memoir. Her most recent publication, Nell, from Cloud Ink Press, is a novel of her grandmother’s life.
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