Our Tiny Useless Hearts Read online

  PRAISE FOR TONI JORDAN

  NINE DAYS

  WINNER, Indie Awards, fiction category, 2013

  NZ Herald on Sunday Best Books of 2012

  ‘[Toni Jordan’s previous] books were notable for originality

  and verve, yet although these qualities remain, are indeed

  amplified, neither work could have prepared us for the

  ambition and achievement of Jordan’s brilliant third novel,

  Nine Days…The grisly scene in which Jack Husting’s parents

  introduce him to a prospective marriage partner is worthy

  of Patrick White….This novel is a triumph. Another signal

  career in Australian fiction is well under way.’

  Australian

  ‘Every now and then a book comes along that’s brilliantly

  conceived and tightly written, yet there’s nothing flashy about it.

  I think Australian writer Toni Jordan’s third novel, Nine Days,

  falls into the rare and wonderful category…Each of the nine

  voices is distinct and brimming with personality and by the finish

  every part of the jigsaw fits perfectly and you see the whole sweep

  of this romantic, thoughtful, heartbreaking story…More serious

  than her previous work but with the same astute observations,

  brightness and wit, it’s a sensitive and beautiful novel, a slice of

  Australia’s working-class history, that is a joy to read.’

  NZ Herald on Sunday

  ‘Jordan’s triumph is in the structure and scope of this novel…

  It’s a clever concept, carried out with confidence and compassion.’

  Adelaide Advertiser

  ‘A beautiful novel which captures the loves and fears of an

  ordinary Australian family through hard times and better times.’

  Australian Bookseller & Publisher

  ‘A warm, uplifting story about love, sentiment, strong emotions

  and life-changing decisions. But the novel manages to evade

  sentimentality by using its form and structure to make a larger

  point. By disrupting the chronology and by scattering shared

  events and objects across the nine narratives, Jordan creates

  multiple links between people, times and events.’

  Canberra Times

  ‘Ebullient sense of humour…wonderful dialogue.’

  Sydney Morning Herald

  ‘Reading Nine Days, you will laugh, even cry, but you will be

  in no doubt that Toni Jordan uses the modern novel to reflect

  those tensions that exist for many of us between duty and desire.’

  Australian Book Review

  ‘A brilliant piece of writing…compelling, engaging and will

  bring tears to the eyes of readers without iron constitutions.’

  Sunday Star Times

  ‘Toni Jordan’s characters beautifully frame a story

  of compassion, fun and poignancy.’

  Launceston Examiner

  ‘Not a million miles away from Kate Atkinson’s Behind the

  Scenes at the Museum in the way it blends wit and cruelty,

  comedy and tragedy…the characterisation is superb.’

  NZ Weekend Herald

  ‘The suspense is frequently nail-biting…

  beautifully constructed.’

  Daily Mail UK

  ‘A witty and wise family saga…a small treasure, from the

  author of the wonderful romantic comedy Addition.’

  Kirkus (starred review) US

  FALL GIRL

  ‘Intelligent romantic comedy at its deft best.’ Age

  ‘Jordan’s sexy second novel takes its inspiration from the classic

  romantic comedy, with sharp and funny dialogue that tackles

  some serious issues…An elegantly orchestrated romance with

  some sizzling sexual chemistry…Simply a joy to read.’

  Courier-Mail

  ‘A laugh-out-loud read crackling with satire.’ Australian

  ‘Jordan doesn’t merely imitate a well-worn genre here. Her

  characters are full and detailed, their relationships and history

  suggestively drawn…Fall Girl is there to surprise and delight.’

  Sunday Age

  ‘A delightfully entertaining, light-hearted story.’

  Launceston Examiner

  ‘Full of set-ups and comedic riffs that will make you

  squirm with delight…a witty and readable novel,

  set against the lush Australian landscape.’

  Big Issue

  ‘A sparkling rom-com bearing all Jordan’s trademark wit

  and shiver-inducing sexual tension.’

  Good Reading

  ADDITION

  ‘Toni Jordan has created such a real character in Grace that you

  are cheering her on, willing her to get to the top of the staircase,

  intact and unharmed. Jordan’s voice is distinctive, refreshing and

  very Australian. Her debut novel is juicy and funny, just like its

  protagonist…this is a gem.’

  Sydney Morning Herald

  ALSO BY TONI JORDAN

  Addition

  Fall Girl

  Nine Days

  Toni Jordan has a BSc. in physiology and qualifications in marketing and professional writing. Her debut novel, Addition, was shortlisted for the Barbara Jefferis Award and longlisted for the Miles Franklin in 2009, and has been published in sixteen countries. Her last novel, Nine Days, won the Indie Award for fiction in 2013 and, in the US, was named as one of Kirkus’ best historical novels of 2013. Toni lives in Melbourne.

  tonijordan.com

  @tonileejordana

  facebook.com/authortonijordan

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  Copyright © 2016 by Toni Jordan

  The moral right of Toni Jordan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published in 2016 by The Text Publishing Company

  Typeset in Granjon 13/18 by J & M Typesetting

  Cover and page design by Imogen Stubbs

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  Creator: Jordan, Toni, author.

  Title: Our tiny, useless hearts / by Toni Jordan.

  ISBN: 9781925355451 (paperback)

  ISBN: 9781922253910 (ebook)

  Subjects: Man-woman relationships—Fiction.

  Dewey Number: A823.4

  To Robbie, with apologies for the poor geopolitical analysis

  and unacceptably low number of explosions in this book.

  1

  The morning after my sister Caroline’s wedding to Henry, our mother smashed every dish in the house. Every plate, every glass, every saucer. The bone-china platters etched with roses that she’d piled with sandwiches and little cakes when she was president of our high school mothers club—these she cracked over her knee like kindling. The flutes that were a gift from some great-aunt for her engagement to our father, the set with stems like twigs that lived on the top shelf—these she hurled sideways with her old softball pitching ar
m and watched spear against the walls to explode in a shower of crystal. She shattered the glass in every framed photograph with her elbow, she overturned vases and fruit bowls. Apples thudded and rolled to all corners of the room, peaches cascaded and liquefied on impact.

  I watched her from the doorway of what had been my room and I felt like a small child again, one who would never understand the currents beneath the surface of grown-ups. She advanced from cupboard to shelf to the divider above the kitchen bench, sometimes pausing to stamp on something particularly offensive and grind it into the carpet, and all the while her face was soft, without any trace of the tight wrinkles that sometimes framed her mouth or the tension stockpiled in her jaw line. Perhaps it was this gentle face, or maybe it was the occasional twist of her hips—it all seemed less Texas porcelain massacre and more avant garde interpretive dance. The early light through the big eastern windows made each individual shard glitter, like a mirror ball dying in a tragic disco explosion. And the noise! I’m amazed the neighbours didn’t come running, but that’s the whole point of the suburbs, I guess. Nice big yards, lots of space and privacy to start your own hydroponic weed farm or take up nudism or destroy all evidence of whatever it was my mother was trying to erase. When you know people too well, it’s difficult to give them a friendly wave as you put the bins out.

  When she stopped and everything was quiet again, she wiped her brow with her sleeve. A thread of blood inched down her temple from where some flying chip had grazed her.

  ‘It’s all been for nothing,’ she said to me. ‘All of it. The last fifteen years.’

  Caroline and Henry were in Bali by then. When they came home, tanned and massaged and pedicured with their pupils transformed from the usual circles into tiny love hearts, I told Caroline that Mum had been burgled by a well-known criminal bric-a-brac gang. Caroline was living in NewlywedLand, where the air smells of roses and tiny invisible string quartets lurk in every room waiting for your husband to arrive, then launch into ‘I’ve Had the Time of My Life’ on their tiny invisible violins.

  ‘Who would want that old rubbish?’ Caroline said. ‘People are morons.’

  Not long after that, Mum sold everything and moved to an ashram in Uttarakhand where she’s known as Saraswati, and it was as though our past had been papered over.

  Caroline and I haven’t seen her since, but every year birthday cards arrive in the mail, randomly. One year it might be August 6th and the next, January 31st. None of these dates coincides with the anniversary of my actual birth, even though my mother knows the date of my birth. She was definitely there at the time. These non-birthday cards all have a colourful Hindu goddess on the front—often wearing gold and red and a great deal of jewellery, sometimes with many arms—and inside Mum writes something like:

  Dear Janice (or Dear Caroline, when it’s my sister’s non-birthday, or Dear Mercedes or Paris, when it’s Caroline’s girls’),

  Happy Birthday! I love you! I miss you! This is the daughter of Lord Shiva, who was created from the tree, Kalpavriksha! Her name is Ashokasundari! Remember, don’t be too good! Free yourself from expectation!

  GIVE IN TO THE REVOLUTION IN YOUR SOUL!!!

  Love, Saraswati (Mum) (Grandma)

  When Caroline married Henry she was twenty-six and I was twenty-three and Mum was forty-nine. Fifteen years, then, was the amount of time that Mum raised us by herself after Dad left.

  I thought Mum was unduly pessimistic. I’d always liked Henry. He was a different breed from the boys in my microbiology lab who strove all year, with some success, to grow colonies of bacteria in the shape of boobs. Henry was not only employed, he owned a suit. He was the most dashing of Caroline’s boyfriends and the only one she truly fell for, this big blond rugby player with thighs like legs of ham and sharp blue eyes and a degree in electrical engineering who drove a fourth-hand red BMW with enough dents to make it ironic instead of pretentious. Henry was on the fast track to success at Telstra. They adored each other.

  Now it’s another fifteen years later. I’m in Caroline’s kitchen at ludicrous o’clock on a Saturday morning, leaning against open shelves filled with Caroline’s elegantly, eminently smashable dinner service, and I’m beginning to see Mum’s point.

  Henry waved goodbye to solid some years ago when he swapped rugby for pinot and Foxtel. Now he’s soft, with an indoor pallor, and the blond hair is mostly a memory. He’s squatting on the floor of the dining room, balancing on the balls of his feet and his leather shoes are squeaking and the seams of his trousers are straining and his bones are creaking. He’s looking even paler than usual and his face is damp: a chubby vampire with a fever. He’s doing his best to eyeball his girls. My nieces, Mercedes and Paris. Henry, envisaging the world from the perspective of the four feet and under.

  ‘Let me put it this way,’ he says to them. ‘You like bananas, right? Everyone likes bananas.’

  Some conferring is required. Paris stretches on her tippy toes and whispers in Mercedes’ ear. ‘Bananas are for school but at home we like mangoes better but only when Mummy cuts them up or else we have to sit in the bath,’ Mercedes says, after advisement.

  ‘Right. Mangoes. Sure. Well, marriage is like a mango.’

  Henry folds his arms as he delivers this gem and from where I stand in the kitchen, it’s clear he expects it to make his case. His daughters, though, are a tough audience. None of us got much sleep last night and they are still pyjama-clad with tousled hair and that intoxicating warmth that small children have when they wake, but they’re solemn little people, staring steady and blue.

  Henry runs his fingers through his strands. ‘Imagine if mangoes were all you got to eat, breakfast lunch and dinner. Even if mangoes were your favourite food, you’d be pretty sick of mangoes after fifteen years, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Are biscuits allowed, for little lunch?’ says Paris, through Mercedes.

  ‘Mangoes or nothing.’

  ‘Can we have ice-cream on top? Just a tiny bit.’

  ‘Only mangoes. That’s it. Forever. You’re surrounded by other fruit all right, everywhere you go. Strawberries brushing against you, mandarins slinking around the office in their tight little skirts, bending over the photocopier to fix paper jams. And the lychees. Don’t get me started on the lychees.’

  ‘Henry,’ I say.

  ‘What’s a lychee?’ says Mercedes.

  ‘It doesn’t matter. What I’m trying to say is: can either of you comprehend the kind of discipline it takes to be married for fifteen years?’

  ‘Not really,’ Mercedes says. ‘I’ve never been married. I’m seven.’

  ‘Right, of course. Marriage, girls, is hard time, that’s what it is. Monogamy, monotony. Mangoes. They sound the same, right? That’s no coincidence.’

  ‘Henry,’ I say.

  ‘Seeing the same face every morning, every single morning, day in, day bleeding out. If I took a sawn-off shotgun down to the 7-Eleven and waved it in Raju’s face and spent the contents of the cash drawer on crack and hookers I’d get less than fifteen years.’

  ‘Henry,’ I say. ‘That’s a little above their pay grade.’

  Paris whispers in Mercedes’ ear. ‘She wants to know what crack is,’ says Mercedes.

  ‘It’s an illegal drug, sweetheart. It helps take the peaks and troughs out of the day, like Mummy’s sav blanc.’

  ‘Henry.’ I walk over and squat on the floor beside him. ‘Age-appropriate, remember? I have a great idea. Why don’t I take them to the park? I’m desperate to push two little girls on the swings until my arms fall off and if you don’t lend me these two, I’ll be forced to kidnap a couple off the street.’

  Henry holds up his palm. The girls don’t move.

  ‘Janice, please,’ he says to me. Then, to the girls, ‘This is no reflection on any particular mango. Your mango is a wonderful mango. Wonderful. But that’s not the headline. The headline is: is it fair to be on an enforced diet of mangoes when the world is an enormous fruit salad?’

&n
bsp; Mercedes and Paris squint like talent-show judges. This is an important question, they can sense it. ‘Mummy makes us cheese on toast,’ Mercedes says finally. ‘We like that. And lamb chops. And noodles. And sausages. The skinny ones, but.’

  He slaps his beefy thigh and attempts to pivot out of his squat but unbalances and instead lurches to his knees, which crunch on the floorboards. ‘That’s my girls. Anyway, Mummy and I still love you very much. That’ll never change. Despite the archaic cultural construct that your mother and I find ourselves trapped in.’

  All the while he’s been talking, I’ve been aware of a faint clicking and whirring; I wave my hand to deter non-existent mosquitos. Caroline and Henry live in an outer-suburban pocket of dream acre-block farmlets where every home has space for a few chickens and the occasional orchard or kitchen cow. It’s the semi-rural 4WD idyll belt and I almost open my mouth to say the crickets are loud this morning, when I feel a sneaking dread. I tell Henry to keep it G-rated until I get back.

  When I get to Caroline and Henry’s bedroom at the end of the corridor, I’m faced with a scene of devastation. Henry’s suits are spread out over the unmade bed like a two-dimensional gay orgy: here a Paul Smith, there a Henry Bucks, everywhere a Zegna. The trouser-half of each and every one of them is missing its crotch and Caroline, chip off the old block, is peering over them with her reading glasses on the end of her nose and the good scissors in her hand.

  She’s still in her nightie, freshly foiled hair loose and a silk kimono draped over her shoulders. She looks forlornly at her symbolic castration and sighs, just like Mum did all those years ago. ‘What a waste,’ she says, as she shakes her head.

  ‘Maybe not super-helpful at this point, Caroline darling,’ I say.

  She shrugs. ‘These trousers failed in their primary duty, which is to contain the penis. They have only themselves to blame.’

  ‘Nothing’s been decided yet. People make mistakes, Caroline. Marriage is a marathon, not a sprint.’

  ‘Earth to cliché-girl: do you know who took these suits to the drycleaner?’ she says, as she smooths and folds the legs of a maimed Henry-surrogate and sits on the bed. ‘Who washed all these shirts? Did the ironing? All right, Toula does the ironing, but you get my point. See this tie?’ She reaches for a pale blue serpent nestling on the pillow. Crotch-butterflies flutter to the ground at her feet. ‘I bought him this tie when he got his last promotion. It was a congratulatory tie. A tie that said your wife loves you. A chastity tie. It was not a tie to preside over the shagging of some schoolteacher young enough to be his much younger sister.’