The Furies

by Mandy Beaumont

Genres: Literary Fiction; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

'beautiful and lyrical' The Conversation

Cynthia was just about to turn sixteen when the unthinkable happened. Her mother was taken away by the police, and her father left without a word three months later. After that night, Cynthia began to walk in slow circles outside the family home looking for traces of her sister Mallory - she's sure that she must be somewhere else now, wherever that is.

Cynthia knows that she doesn't belong here. Her mother never belonged here either. This is the place of violence. Despair. The long dry. Blood caked under the nails. Desperate men. Long silences. The place where mothers go mad in locked bedrooms, where women like Cynthia imagine better futures.

As a threatening wind begins to dry-whirl around her, seldom seen black clouds form above, roll over the golden-brown land - is that Mallory she can hear in the growling mass? In the harsh drought-stricken landscape of outback Queensland a woman can be lost in so many ways. The question is, will Cynthia be one of them?

Defiant, ferocious and unyielding - The Furies is a debut novel by Mandy Beaumont that explores the isolation felt by so many women, and how powerful we can be when we join together. It puts her firmly on the literary map, blazing forth from the terrain of Charlotte Wood, Margaret Atwood and Carmen Maria Machado, with a unique and breathtaking power.

'Expect this debut novel to collect a swag of awards' Courier Mail

'a rallying cry . . . vivid, visceral, ferocious' Carmel Bird, The Age

'stays with you . . . Beaumont's prose shines' The Saturday Paper

'The Furies is unapologetically feminist in its preoccupations' The Conversation

'Mandy Beaumont . . . firmly places herself in the same league as Australian contemporaries such as Charlotte Wood, Sophie Laguna and Hannah Kent. As beautiful as it is gut-wrenching, this is a debut that pulls no punches' Newcastle Herald

Release date: January 26, 2022

Publisher: Hachette Australia

Print pages: 208

Sample

AFTER IT HAPPENED, I’d walk in slow circles outside the house looking for her, my feet hardening and my skin turning a deep brown. My hands a trapped and heated burn. My knees wrapped and seeping. Three months after it happened, my father left me alone with the memory of it all. Left. A house we once called home. Left. A stack of bills, a dinner that I made for him sitting on the dining room table. I was just about to turn sixteen.

When my hands healed and the heat had cooled into a numbing ache, I got a job at the abattoir nearly an hour away from home: the one where my father used to work in the summer, when the cattle couldn’t be fed anymore, when men’s hopes were dashed. A last-ditch attempt for money. Feed the kids. Some water in the tank. Fix the back fence. Trucks lined up for kilometres, waiting. Bones sticking out from the beasts’ stomachs, their eyes pleading, their moaning grouped as they were herded out into the pens behind the abattoir. Their previous owners driving away with their stomachs grumbling, thinking of sausages and mash for dinner, maybe a bottle of beer snuck in on the drive home.

ON MY FIRST DAY OF WORK, Pat, who knew my father, handed me a sledgehammer and told me that if the cattle didn’t die straightaway after you hit them, that they could thrash, could knock a man unconscious. He’d seen it happen before. Legs slipping in their own blood. Men moving around them, their arms raised, the look of fear in their eyes. And Pat laughed, stood close, too close, as the first one fell and I raised the sledgehammer, slammed down hard on its head, its ribs collapsing into a heavy-moaned breath, the air relaxing around its mouth in its final moment, and. Bleach, warm blood, the mighty dead all around us. Pat didn’t ask about my father, my mother. Didn’t ask about what had happened. On that first day, he stood close enough so I could watch the way his knife moved, the way he held a beast’s leg, the way to talk to the other men. And as the knock-off bell went that afternoon, he nodded at me as I walked into the tearoom to punch my card, walked to the long basins to scrub my arms and hose down my boots and my heavy plastic apron. Hang it up. Head down. Don’t-look-any-of-them-in-the-eye. Walk outside and light a smoke. Jump in my father’s ute and drive home. Feel the dry heat hit my face. Think of all the ways to leave this place, to forget that look on my mother’s face the night it happened. That fire. That booming gold. Me running down to her. Run – I’m coming. On my hands and knees. The hair on my skin singeing. My father kneeling over, vomit falling from his mouth and already a shadowed sorrow against the dark land behind him. Three men grabbing me. Up. Out. Away. There’s nothing else to do, sweetheart. There’s nothing else we can do.

LATER THAT WEEK, IN THE TEAROOM, a group of young men sit around me, ask if I’m enjoying the job, if the drive in is all right, if the big dam out my way has dried up yet. They don’t ask about my mother. They’ve all seen the news. They’ve all heard the whispers.

Simon, the youngest of them, stays behind when the others go out for a smoke. He moves next to me and asks if I’ll be staying closer to town now that I’m working here. I don’t respond. I know what he really wants to ask is how I can stay in a house that holds so much sadness. He tells me that lots of the men live at the local caravan park at this busy time of year. (I imagine their mothers sending them clean clothes, homemade biscuits in the mail, aftershave for those occasions when they drive into the city for the night.) He touches my arm as I get up to go back to work and tells me he’d be happy to come with me to the caravan park to meet the owner, if I want. He says he can meet me at my house just before breakfast tomorrow, that he knows where I live, that he’ll get a lift out there from his sister Michelle. She can swing past on her way to work. She won’t mind.

THE NEXT MORNING HE’S WALKING DOWN THE DIRT DRIVEWAY towards the house as I drink the last of my coffee. I’ve already packed, already moved two boxes to the bottom of the front stairs. Clothes. Toiletries. A gold-framed photo of my sister and me. Her small toy rabbit that she’d called Bunchy after the way his little soft cotton face bunched up together when she held him tight. It’s all I’ll need from this place, I think. I rinse my cup in the sink as he stands at the bottom of the stairs. And, I’m out the door and down the steps before he can come up. I lean down and grab a box and start walking to my father’s white HQ Holden ute. You’re keen for a Saturday morning, Cyn, he says, half laughing, but more focused on where he is and searching the ground for where it happened, for the charcoaled ash, for police tape, for my father’s dried vomit. By the time he lifts his head to ask me about it, I’ve already put the boxes in the back of the ute and jumped in the driver’s seat. He walks to the HQ and jumps in too, starts rolling us both a smoke and puts his feet up on my dashboard like we are going on a date or down the store for a carton of milk. He asks if he can turn on the stereo. I start the engine. Sure. He stares at the house, at the garden my mother once planted (dead now), at the land around us that I’ve always known (flat red land, the mountain behind us, old sheds, trees and small yellowed shrubs reaching for salvation), at the dark spot in the front of the house. The radio blares, and. He coughs once and looks over at me as I put my hand on the gear shift. Three on the tree, love, three on the tree, I remember my father telling me when he first taught me to drive, his hands on mine trying to move the gears in a seamless H. Left, up, put it in reverse. All the way down, and I’m in first and driving out the dirt driveway. Don’t look. Don’t look back at that spot, I think to myself. Smoke your smoke. Eyes on the road. You never have to come back here again.

AN HOUR LATER, we’re pulling into the caravan park, we’re pulling our skin off the hot vinyl seats and walking together into the small office behind the main gates. The woman behind the counter is scratching her arse and looking me up and down. The ends of her hair are bleach-blonde-dry and her breasts are large (large, as large as a bag of flour falling-fat over the kitchen bench). She stands up and nods at Simon, asks me how long I want to stay for, tells me none of the men here are allowed in my caravan after nine. (A slut just like her mother, probably.) No weed. No bright lights. No towels or toiletries left in the shared shower block. I’ll usually have the ladies all to myself. Not many women stay here. (Slut.) I smile at her (so close to a smirk) thinking of how her husband, small and wiry in the photo on her desk, would most likely fuck her. How, late at night and in the dark, he would like to think of himself as Napoleon, pushing her body into submission and fucking her from behind (with a receding hairline, on the back of a horse, with an army behind him ready to start the revolution). She stands up and gives me a key and a map of the caravan park. On the back of the map is a dot point list about how to use the washing machines, about how to use the detergent dispensers, the times when they’re available for use. She turns her back to me, sits down and goes back to watching her television, laughs at the screen as Murphy Brown stands in a bar with Jim playing a piano – both drunk and singing ‘Don’t Get Around Much Anymore’. Simon walks me out into the morning sun. Past a group of drunk old men. Into the smell of garbage bins lined up and overflowing, and.

At the back of the lot, between the waste drain and a toilet block that smells of burnt plastic and chlorine, is my caravan. On bricks. With a worn yellow annexe. Simon nods towards a larger caravan across the path and tells me it’s his, laughs and tells me he can keep an eye on me. I don’t respond. He tells me that an old woman lived here before I did, that she had crystals hanging in the doorway, the smell of Camel cigarettes and dope always floating around her, her thick accent the first piece in the puzzle of her history. I am still silent and unlocking the door to the caravan, can smell her smokes in everything. He stands behind me and tells me that she would sit in an old canvas chair out the front of the caravan on weekends when the boys from work would get together and have barbeques (What’s better than meat fresh off the floor, bloodletting, your own doing, knife on the bone, knife tight up against the skin, eh?), yell at them that the smell of burning meat reminded her of the dying mounds of humans she remembered from her foreign childhood. I look at my new home.

Simon brings my boxes from the ute and I stand beside him under the annexe, cursing him for his chivalry, lean in on him with my weight to show him that my body is made of gristle, as tough as the inedible tissue in meat. As tough as any man. As tough as him. Certainly, tough enough to carry some boxes. We stand together under the annexe leaning in on each other as the small specks of sun stream through the rips in the canvas and land on our skin. We step up. Move into the caravan. Stand together and look at its dirty grey lino floor, the brown veneer cupboards skirting the top of the walls, a fold-out red laminex table at one end and an old worn bed covered in a ripped plastic sheet at the other. Simon moves his hands to my elbows – moves me, moves in towards me as I reach up to open one of the cupboards. I tell him this isn’t what I want from him. He grabs me and turns me to face him, moves his mouth to mine. (My body is made of gristle that can’t be chewed through.) I push my breasts hard up against his chest and remind him quietly that I don’t want this, that I am indeed my mother’s daughter, and. He moves backwards, his mouth at the ready to kiss, to talk, to yell, to love, to hate. I don’t know. I don’t care. He tells me he will see me later, and walks across the path and into his own caravan.

That afternoon, I unpack my boxes and place the framed photo of Mallory and me on top of the small bar fridge. I look at myself in the long mirror beside the bed, see the squareness of my jaw, the tan lines on my shoulders, my hair wild and copper-gold-rusted steel, my shorts falling loose around my waist. I fold my shirts and my mother’s underwear (why buy new pairs when hers are perfectly okay?), and place them on the shelves meant for tins of beans and cheap white bread. I pull my hair back into a fat bun on the top of my head and walk across the road to the pub, where I buy a carton of cheap wine and Marlboro cigarettes from a thin man with long greasy black hair. His hands shake as he passes me my change.

Back at the caravan, I sit in my annexe until the sun goes down, until the night sky is streaming through the canvas opening. I drink my wine from an old plastic cup I find at the bottom of the fridge, and know that Simon is watching me. I don’t care. I open my legs and with my index finger slowly draw the outlines of the shadows of the moon onto my inner thighs and wonder what my mother is doing.

AT THE ABATTOIR THE MEN AND I ARE VIOLENT. Violent to the beasts, and. I wonder if the men are like this with their women. With their children. If someone will be like that with me one day – this place out here hushing fear and folding the echoes of wrongdoings under the cracking soil. I stand with the knife in my hand and watch the other workers around me; blood splashed on the bottom of their long white pants and caking in their skin, laughing with each other. A stab. A punch. A blow. The breaking, the butcher, the boning, the carving knife. Into eyes. (Alive, dead, doesn’t matter, Cynthia; they don’t know what the fuck is going on. Dumb fucks.) Into their ears. Chase it up the line if you have to. The young men’s cocks hard with excitement. Break. A leg. A backbone. Slide off the skin in one go. Slow. Slow. One. Tragic. Blow. The sounds of, death. Forever, and. I find myself sometimes pushing my body up against a beast’s hanging-heavy-weighted-pleasure for refuge. (There is safety in the small corner of the coldroom, skinned shoulders up against my chin. My body curving, my hips against the weight of hanging rump. Hold me.)

MOST DAYS AFTER WORK the boys and I drive up the road to Jerry’s arcade. It’s not far from the caravan park, right beside the local pool. We play air hockey, eat deep-fried food, sit in the back-corner booth and drink wine the owner sells to us in bottles. Girls younger than me (they come in after school, necks pale under the fluorescent lights) sit on the boys’ laps, giggle at each other. Sometimes I feel Simon’s hand on my leg and his wined breath at my ear. From time to time, a group of older men (skin olive-dark, hair oily with permanent waves) come into the arcade. I’ve never seen them around before, have no idea where they’ve come from. And they walk past us with their eyes low, with their hands in their tracksuit pockets, walk into the back office, look over their shoulders at me as they close and lock the door behind them.

ONE DAY, I’M SITTING IN THE BACK BOOTH drinking wine from a plastic cup with Simon, his best mate Cameron and a handful of other boys from work. (Silent. I’ve not spoken all afternoon. I’ve been thinking about the dreams I keep having of my mother. Of her calling the caravan park office looking for me. Of the woman in the office saying that her job description doesn’t entail passing on messages to residents. Of my mother calling my name.) One of the older men, the one with the darkest skin, comes over to us, stares straight at me, raises his finger and points. Come with me. I don’t say a word. The boys I’m sitting with, drunk and laughing at the thought of what these foreigners might want me for, slap me on the back as I get up. I push my breasts out (made of gristle from the toughest part of the beast) and stagger towards the office door, my mouth warm with wine and my work pants ripped and dragging on the dirty white floor. I stand at the door and listen as Simon tells me to come back. I don’t. I enter the smoky room. Lamps in every corner. Glasses full of whisky, in. Their hands, on the tables, on the floor at their feet. Three men. A huge television with the sound turned down, showing a schoolgirl sucking on an enormous dick. Her head. Up and down, and up and down. The long shots showing that they’re on a yacht and her left elbow has grazed to blood against the fibreglass that’s flaking near the front seat. The men in the room all look up at me as I stand there watching the schoolgirl. They shift in their seats as a man with a lazy eye pours me a drink. I hear the groan of the man on the screen, watch as he slams into the schoolgirl’s mouth, makes her swallow him whole. I’m watching as Jerry, the arcade owner, gets up and hands me a fist full of plastic-feel ten-dollar notes, points over to the oldest man sitting in the corner in an armchair. This is my mate George, sweetheart. Tells me that George wants to spend some time with me, that a hundred dollars is a lot of money for a young woman like me, that fucking is just plain fucking. Make some money out of it while you’re young enough to, darling. Henry Lawson’s face looks up at me from the palm of my hand, as Jerry leans in so close that I can feel the air from his nose on my forehead. He moves closer, the air between us thickening, and tells me that he knows who my mother was. And I don’t move. Don’t flinch. Don’t move an inch, my throat constricting, closing, begging for fresh air. I look over at his friend George, who’s slowly wiping his hands along the arms of the chair and looking at me. I fold my fist around old Henry’s ten-dollar moustached face as George gets up and nods at me. I feel my breath release as I step back from Jerry, as I follow George towards the arcade’s front door. One foot in front of the other. Look straight ahead. Don’t make a sound. I feel all their eyes on me. I hear Simon call my name. Once. Twice. A young man sighing. Whore, one of them says. Let her go. Just like her mother. I keep walking. Outside. Sixty-eight steps to the old toilet block that’s next to the local pool, and, how bad can this be for a hundr. . .