Back before Airmail had attracted publishing interest from Black Swan Press, Driftwood Manuscripts wrote a review*, in which they said really nice things. You should have seen my smile back then. I just re-read it, and I'm still grinning now. Here's an excerpt: “If the meaning of life is a giant game of marbles, and if our identities are composed of the stories we craft our memories into, then Airmail is of course, like all good metafictive tales, playing by the rules of the storytelling game it describes: shooting its character’s stories/marbles into the ring with the aim of demonstrating superior skill. Given this factor, and the tendencies to glibness of style that it so frequently results in, it is particularly refreshing to find that neither Anouk nor GL are ever reduced to mere stock pieces to be moved about in an intellectual exercise. Rather the author succeeds in developing this odd couple beyond mere types (the stranger; the old man) or figures in a game, so that they arouse our interest as persuasive, funny and touching individuals. Anouk’s accounts of both her past and present oscillate between passion and pathos and her distress in losing her marbles – and with them her identity – is palpable whilst at the same time, given its bizarre symbolic articulation, maintaining a certain comic edge. Most significantly, Mr GL’s renaissance is fleshed out in such a manner as to convey the slow radiation of warmth from within, as if he is gradually coming back to life. “This is, undoubtedly a clever piece of writing – too clever no doubt for some, although others will enjoy decoding the clues and picking out the intertextual puns. Nevertheless, in its blend of the real and fantastic it is also powerfully resonant of complex emotional states – loneliness, delusion, anxiety, confusion, humour, numbness, excitement and tenderness. It is this combination of mind and heart that serves to make it so appealing.” If you want to read the full review, download it here >>*(You can't request a review from Driftwood. What I paid for was professional advice on how to get through some of the challenges I was facing in the manuscript, which I got. The review was an unpaid extra that they chose to send along with the advice, because they believed the book had some merit).
Not so long ago in the spring I sat in my favourite cafe on West Broadway and, on a whim, I drew little stick figure scenes from Airmail on napkins. Ok I'm clearly no artist. But I hope you enjoy them. AIRMAIL (p3): On Sunday afternoon, I’m catching the subway with two friends, and we’re heading up to see the Yankees play the Tampa Devil Rays from the eleven-dollar seats out in the bleachers. I notice her as we go to board the train, just in front of us, and we end up sitting three seats down from her. And she’s still wearing the pink tracksuit! I don’t look sideways, so I don’t catch her eye, but I know she’s watching me. It’s starting to freak me out. We lose her at the stadium, but I know she is there somewhere, probably in the bleachers.
AIRMAIL (p9): Four o’clock in the afternoon was post time. As soon as the mailman motored away up the hill, the old man shuffled out to the boxes. He opened his and found nothing. Closed it. He opened it again and felt around inside in case a letter was lying flat in the box, and he missed it the first time. Nothing. Closed the box. Gathered all the detritus of junk mail that lay scattered over the top of the boxes and sticking out of the slots and on the ground around them, picked it all up, and took it to the recycle bin.
Hissed and stomped at the tabby on his way back inside, sending it scuttling into the laundry to hide.
AIRMAIL (p13): Bats flapped low in the Sydney dusk, fooled by the light rain into thinking the clouds were night. From a distance, each was a silhouette, black and evil shaped, sharp. But as they drifted over The Colonnade, the old man could see the fur on their underbellies, tiny feet tucked back, wings translucent, almost blending with the storm clouds (blue, grey, white, he noticed). They emerged in haphazard bunches from The Domain park, flying crookedly, still groggy with sleep. In drowsy formation, they swooped around the tall buildings, crossed William Street without waiting for the green, aimed straight along Yurong and Riley, and then made a left into Stanley Street. It began to rain.
AIRMAIL (p18): That night, though, once again, Anouk couldn’t sleep. She read a fashion magazine for a little while, and then she sat up in bed with the two cats and watched reruns of The Bachelor on TV. There was a knock at the door.
AIRMAIL (p24): The old man slowly traced his fingers over the small video library on the bottom shelf in his lounge room and pulled out The Great Escape. He settled back on the chair to watch, and the portrait could almost see him consciously not thinking about the letter in the box underneath.
AIRMAIL (p34): Something has just occurred to me: I don’t know where to get stamps. How will you receive my letter? Maybe there are thousands, or millions, of dead people all writing to their loved ones – or to strangers – that they can never send because there are no stamps in Hades.
AIRMAIL (p59): The girl emptied two sachets of sugar into her coffee and stirred without looking at the cup before she sipped deeply. Joseph watched her small back and her long, dark hair tangled in curls past her shoulders. He wasn’t really thinking about much, although whatever was in his mind was pleasurable when she spoke again. This time, though, it wasn’t to him.
AIRMAIL (p79): When the old man grew tired, he returned to room 23 at the top of the stairs, dragged the room’s vinyl chair under the window, and watched the city pass by. One day, the old man pulled out his camera. He carefully dusted the lens, adjusted the settings, and even cleaned and oiled the leather strap, using olive oil gleaned from the hostel kitchen. The next afternoon, he leaned out of the window and started taking pictures of people as they walked underneath him.
AIRMAIL (p84): The old man kept finding marbles in the street, especially around Midtown. True, he had trained his old eyes to see them; they were fine-tuned to respond to the quick flash of glass in the sunlight despite the transformation the marbles gradually underwent, dulled by months of dirt and smog and grease. Some were just plain marbles, lost debris of a child’s forgotten game, but most belonged to Anouk. She was alive and inhabiting the entire lower half of the city.
AIRMAIL (p96): I am presently an old man, although I believe I am growing younger. I was born in 1935, and I am sure you are capable of making the necessary calculations.
By the time I was old enough to go to war, it was over, but I spent several decades preparing for the next one. Not as a soldier, but as an observer. I make an excellent, thorough, fastidious observer.
Dear Marrickville Council,
Don't fret, my family did your job for you. Cleaned the whole street. Gathered up the old McDonald's wrappers, the beer bottles, the coffee cups, even the white and fossilised dog crap.
We swept up the leaves, the dirt, the shards of broken glass and the cigarette butts. We weeded around the spindly trees you planted and then deserted to the mean streets of Enmore.
After months of your neglect, it came to this. Meg got dirt on her heels and a ladder in her stockings. Shocking, I know. And child labour: Em is only 12. How could you? Does it disturb you that just one side of the street on one block resulted in seven bags of disgusting, putrid garbage? I had to carry these bags THROUGH MY HOUSE. And a liquid, brown and sticky that I hope to god was Coke, spilled on my jeans.
Perhaps a little street cleaning on behalf of the Council to whom we pay our rates would be in order?
Just a thought.
Anyhoo, would you mind picking up the garbage from the back lane? We'd be terribly grateful. Yours sincerely,
Rate-Payer Who Wishes She'd Cleaned Up and Spoken Out Before the Election
My nieces Olivia and Alexandra, aged respectively four and seven, made this for me and Scott on Sunday (with a little help from Emily).
We live in a beautiful, 100-year-old house in Enmore with decorative ceilings, stained glass windows, French doors, a sweet kitchen garden, and an increasingly famous blue door. The cat and dog like to sleep on the old Persian-esque rugs that cover the floorboards and wind up the original oak staircases that curve in two directions. Antique gilt mirrors sit above the marble fireplaces in the lounge room and our bedroom. Both the rugs and mirrors were left behind by the previous owner, and we love to keep his history in our house. The previous owner also left behind a painting over the dining-room fireplace that we call “ the pus painting” (pus is the only word to describe the colour of this painting, which defies description in its hideousness). We tried to remove the pus painting but nothing else worked: it belongs with the house. We love our house. We really love it. And it was even better on the weekend, with the laughter of our friends and family ringing from every room. But each Monday, my husband flies back to the Gold Coast, Queensland, for his job, and the dog, cat and I are alone in our super house. And without Scott, my house is not really a home. I once read that clichés only become clichés because they are the best way of saying something… So I am moving to the Gold Coast, which scares me on so many levels. I will miss my beautiful house. I will miss my parents and brother. I will miss my amazing friends, who are true family. I feel like I am constantly leaving people behind. First I left everyone I loved in Sydney, then I left everyone I loved in New York, and now that I’ve barely been back in Sydney, I’m leaving it again. Not to mention, it’s… THE GOLD COAST. But Scott and I will live together again. At night we will cook dinner, and argue because he’ll want more carbs and I’ll want more veges. We'll breathe the sea-salt air. We’ll walk the dog at dusk. I’ll sit in front of the TV and write blog posts while he massages my feet. A girl can dream. I will learn to cope with the humidity, and the schoolies, and I will find where the more artistic scene hides. It has to be somewhere, right? And in the meantime, because Scott is as sad as I am to say goodbye to our house in Enmore, I had it made into a snowdome. Now he can carry it with him everywhere.
If you're in a book club and think it might be fun for me to come and chat about Airmail, let me know. I'll get baking, and bring you some of my mum's famous lemon slice, or chocolate mint slice, or possibly Aunty Bev's delicious chocolate-and-licorice-allsorts-brownies if she will give me the recipe. I'm in Sydney right now but I'll be travelling to Melbourne shortly, and moving to the Gold Coast / Brisbane in a little while, so if you're in any of those places I'm sure we can work something out. Yours truly, Naomi
Do you remember reading when you were a kid? The Narnia series were the first 'grown up' (read: non-picture) books I read. I was six when my parents gave me The Magician's Nephew, and I can still remember the thrill I felt when Polly and Digory explored the tunnels behind their neighbour's houses and first met the magician...
We were big library-users when I was little, and one summer holidays I converted our music room into my own personal reading room. I would climb the ladder out the back in the morning and pick a giant bowl-full of the purple grapes that grew on the fence. Then I'd take the bowl to my makeshift reading room, lie down on the 70s-brown-and-orange divan, and devour that week's pile of library books with my eyes and heart.
The upside of being a library devotee is the variety of books you can read. Another is the old paper smell of the books. I still love that. One of the downsides, however, is that you don't own the books to visit and revisit in the years to come.
Below are the top five library books that have haunted me since childhood. In most, I don't even remember the basic plot or the characters' names. I just remember the sense of wonder and enchantment they gave me. So I've placed my orders on Amazon and while I wait for them to arrive, here's what lasted more than 30 years.  Swallows and Amazons
Arthur Ransome
What I remember: two sets of children in two boats have big adventures. It starts with a race but turns into something more. From memory, there is a pretty exciting island they get to explore. I also remember the sense of freedom, and of wishing I had my own boat and that if I did, I would be allowed to sail it without adult supervision. I wasn't allowed in the above-ground swimming pool without supervision. I also remember there were more books to follow, with the same children involved (and their boats). They were some kind of series. I think.
 The Owl Service
Alan Garner
What I remember: Spooky, beautiful, not like the other fantasy books I was reading at that age. For years and years I've remembered "that book with the owls" and that was it.
Then when the movie Legend of the Guardians came out last year, though I didn't see it, it reignited my desire to hunt down "that book with the owls" and read it again. I can't wait.
 Tom's Midnight Garden
Phillipa Pearce
What I remember: this one's a little more clear in my mind. There's a grandfather clock that strikes 13. When it does, the tiny little plot out the back of the house where Tom is staying (an aunt or grandmother or some other elderly member of family, I think) turns into a magnificent Victorian garden.
He meets a bossy girl there (Hatty, maybe?) and they become friends. Sometimes she gets older but he always remains the same age. It's like he's travelling back in time but not always to the same time. Way cool.
 A Wrinkle in Time
Madeleine L'Engle
What I remember: Dad was a mad scientist and he was missing. Everyone at school teased them ("them" being I'm not sure who. YA kids? Not sure how many). They go searching for him and find out he discovered some way to get through time. In my head, I am picturing time tunnels but I don't know if that's accurate or if I made that up from the cover art. BTW I used to think the 'time tunnel' at Old Sydney Town would be AWESOME if they made it longer and twisty-er and added some freaky coloured lights and made you change into period costume before you got through the other end. I'm just saying.
 The Weirdstone of Brisingamen
Alan Garner
Another Alan Garner book. Until I looked this one up, I didn't realise it and The Owl Service were by the same author. But it just shows how his writing must have impacted me as a child.
What I remember: There's some kind of pendant and it is the key to a mystery. I picture a scene at night or dusk, where there are just rocks and it's cold, and spooky beings are chasing them, but maybe I'm making that up. I think I remember cliffs and a kind of beautiful bleakness. I remember loving this book. That's a powerful memory.
YOUR TURN NOW: What are your favourite books from childhood days?
Signs your husband has been watching too much Masterchef: he cooks burgers for dinner and plates up with a flourish of tomato sauce. Signs you have been watching too much Masterchef: you just wrote "plates up" and then photographed your dinner.
Yesterday our daughter Emily invented a game in the garden for her little cousins. She hid bunches of flowers in vases all over our back garden, and the little ones had to search through and find them among the 'real' flowers. They had a ball. (This is Olivia and Mia returning with 'found flowers'.) Continuing the "awesome cuteness of family" theme, we had a quadruple birthday party at our house on Sunday and, not for the first time, the kids saved the day.
Aunty Alma, Aunty Bev and Baz, as well as little Mia, all turned a year older this week, so I organised a kick-arse Adriano Zumbo V8 Diesel chocolate cake for them. But after battling the Balmain traffic and lining outside in the pouring rain for over an hour, I discovered that the Zumbo folk had somehow "not received" my order, despite the giving and taking of credit card details online. I returned back to a house full of birthday-bbq-goers feeling deflated, sorry and soggy. And minus a cake.
Not to worry: Emily, Alexandra and Olivia (with a bit of secret input from Nanna) set to work and made an absolutely delicious chocolate cake that I think was better than anything Adriano could have concocted himself. This is Alexandra with the masterpiece. Did you ever see a cuter chef? Oh and also, we got hitched. In our garden that my mother fixed up, in front of the Notting Hill blue door that my father painted, followed by 10 courses of deliciousness with a very small group of beloved family and friends at Bistro Ortolan in Leichhardt. All in all it was a pretty darn good weekend!
That night, though, once again, Anouk couldn't sleep. She read a fashion magazine for a little while, and then she sat up in bed with the two cats and watched reruns of The Bachelor on TV. There was a knock at the door.
Anouk didn't answer because it was well past midnight, and she wasn't expecting visitors. The walls in the boardinghouse were thin, and the knock could well have been on a door across the hall.
There was a second knock, and one of the cats woke up and started chasing a discarded marble across the dusty floorboards. Through the peephole, Anouk could see the top of a short, dark head and a glimpse of pink velour. She felt the orange cheese rise in her throat. Slowly, quietly, she stepped away from the door and sat down on the edge of the mattress, absently stroking the other cat. The Bachelor went into an ad break. Anouk sat still while the ads finished, and when the program came back on, she didn't move during the whole time it took Bachelor Randy to give six red roses to six blonde clones. There had been one more knock during an ad for asthma medication, which she had ignored, and no more. Then, just as The Bachelor gave way to a show about celebrities playing practical jokes on one another, she hear a shuffle behind the door. It was a stealthy scratching that sounded like leather softly sliding on floorboards.
- Excerpt from Airmail by Naomi Bulger
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