Escape Path Lighting

John Newton

• Publisher: Victoria University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781776563784
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

A drunken poet obliged to choose between Art and Love. What could possibly go wrong?Rock Oyster Island. It's a slack kind of place, but that's the way the locals like it: lifestyle farmers, pensioned-off bikers, seekers and healers, meth cooks and fishing guides. It's only a ferry ride to the city but the modern world feels blessedly remote. Working hard is not greatly valued. Mild Pacific sunshine pours down unfailingly.When Arthur Bardruin, fugitive poet, washes up on Marigold Ingle's beach, he dares to imagine he may be safe from the gaze of the Continence Police. With Marigold and her parrot, Chuck, he finds an indulgent sanctuary. But the reach of aesthetic decorum is long. A chill wind is blowing through Paradise.Meanwhile, at the local health farm, Juanita Díaz, Lacanian analyst, has problems with dissolute musician Frank Hortune, who has problems with his mother and a glad eye for Juanita's lover.Where did Chuck learn his bad-tempered Spanish? Can Juanita keep her man on the couch? Can Bardruin keep his trousers on? Will poetry be the winner on the day?John Newton's verse novel Escape Path Lighting is a throwaway epic, a romp, a curmudgeonly manifesto. The verse bowls along like a summer breeze. The satire leaves no target unscathed.

BOOK 1

CHAPTER 1

How much Manfred Singleton can see is

subject to dispute. No one on sleepy

Rock Oyster Island has ever observed

him without his shades, cumbersome Aristotle

Onassis numbers, with lenses like the butt ends

of plus-sized Heinekens. Mind you, Manfred

keeps to himself, he’s not the sort of person

you meet at the store. Talk to the locals,

you’ll learn there’s a lot not to know about him.

Like where he got four million bucks (give or

take) for a concrete monstrosity by Richwhite &

Crotch. Like whether the godawful squealing

noise that he pipes from a sound system

hidden in the spinifex really is some kind

of ‘difficult’ music or just meant to scare

the little shits who throw stones on his roof.

Cranky old Manfred! Where would the gossips

at the Bali Hai Tearooms be without him?

Just as well, really, they can’t see him now.

What kind of creep (they might plausibly ask)

needs to wear military night-vision goggles

to stare at himself in a mirror in

a darkened room? A room that resembles

an underground bunker, or some dire

modernist concert hall: off-form concrete,

mean leather couches, electronic

keyboards, a mixing desk. And a portable

clothes rack, on which he first tidily

hangs up his jacket and Hugo Boss shirt,

and then wheels aside to gaze neutrally

at the insensate void where his breasts

used to be. No one would call him a clubbable

fellow, you can’t blame the locals for

having their doubts. But fear not, amiable

reader: Manfred sees everything.

On the darkened headland, across the bay

at the Blue Pacific Wellness Farm,

scented tealights in thick glass tumblers

burn on the doorsteps of two dozen cedar

chalets. In 500-thread-count Egyptian cotton

the worried well sleep their dreamless sleep:

the well fed, the well stretched, the well

scrubbed and mud-bathed and rubbed and exfoliated,

punctured and pampered, heard and affirmed,

the chakra-balanced, the colonically

irrigated . . . Only the patients of

Juanita Díaz, Analista Lacaniana

(late of Buenos Aires, by way of Melbourne,

Australia), enjoy visitations through

the Gate of Horn. Dr Díaz insists

on this, and her patients know better than to

disappoint her. Likewise Sigrid Tupelo,

her quondam lover and co-director;

and so, for that matter, Sigrid’s husband,

cactus fancier, de-frocked scholar

and tacit third partner in the BPWF,

ex-professor Jonah (Joe) Bravo. Not

that Juanita is fierce, exactly, but both

would agree she’s ‘particular’. She is also,

Joe has just been reflecting, apropos

of something she was almost about to

say, quite possibly the most opaque

woman he has ever nursed a crush on.

This, mind you, with no disrespect to

Sigrid – Griddle, as he calls her in fun;

also Gridiron, Grid-search, Gridlock, Two

Pillow, Tuppence, and pet names more banal

still – a severely perplexing woman in

her own right. It is midnight in what is

informally known as the Farmhouse (a.k.a.

Sigrid and Joe’s), at the kitchen table

of which the three partners have been

knocking off a notable Malbec by Enrique

Foster. Juanita, now set to call it a night,

bestows her buenas noches kisses

and heads up the slope through the olives

to her separate quarters. ‘Something’s

bothering her,’ says Joe, as he rounds up

the glasses and rinses them off. ‘It’s always a bad

sign when Nita stays late.’ Sigrid looks up

from her spreadsheet. ‘Yes, I thought so too.’

The clinker-built dinghy rows like a bathtub

but Marigold Ingle doesn’t care.

When she digs on the oars she can feel her

core body converting the water’s inertia

to thrust. It makes her feel powerful like

nothing she knows: as strong as the make-believe

father whose hippie hands crafted it.

In the glare of the headlamp, garfish,

suspended, ride above the seagrass like slender

blue rods. The spotlight undoes them: held

by its gaze, they wait for the dip net

she slides underneath them. She does her work

crisply – a dozen is plenty – turns off

the spotlight, lies back and lets the boat drift.

Her mother – her lovely Aquarian name,

Persia, that’s what she always called her –

nights like this they’d play Constellations,

inventing their own: the Sunfish, the Cowboy Hat.

The stars haven’t changed. Or the smell of

the seagrass, drying in wave-sculpted ridges

along the high-tide mark. Commuters have come,

of course, overseas money, estates on

the headlands (helipads, ground staff with tasers).

But the gully: it’s much as it was when

they bought it – Persia and Sonny, in that

cheap scruffy decade – except, today,

greener and better loved. Or so Marigold

imagines . . . after all, it’s only a story.

The fact is, she can’t picture Sonny

at all, and even when Persia got sick

she was still just a teen. She remembers

them only in this life that she lives:

the dinghy, the garden, the alcohol.

The remedies. The kindnesses. And in

the tireless delight that keeps everything

contained, that no one has ever dug

deep enough to find the other side of.

A leaping mullet falls with a slap, then

another: there must be a kingfish about.

But now a small breeze comes snuffling;

she’s no longer warm, as she slips the oars

back in the rowlocks, takes a grip on the water.

As the evening winds down at

the Sandgroper Lounge, the action reverts

to the pleasure craft moored offshore.

‘Come and party with us, babe,’ the punters

implore as...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• BOOK 1
• BOOK 2
• BOOK 3
• CODA
• Acknowledgements