Aurélie II: Head of a Woman

By Chad Taylor

When an art thief's identity becomes exposed she must use all her skills to evade her pursuers. Aurélie II: Head of a Woman is the second part of the noir novella Aurélie by Chad Taylor, the author of Shirker, Electric, Heaven and Departure Lounge.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chad Taylor
• Release date: Oct 18, 2019
• ISBN: 9781370288052

Chad Taylor

Chad Taylor is the author of the novels Departure Lounge, Electric, Shirker, Heaven, Pack of Lies, and The Church of John Coltrane. He was awarded the Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship in 2001 and the Auckland University Literary Fellowship in 2003. Heaven was made into a feature film, and his novels and short stories have been translated into several languages.Chad Taylor's latest novel is Blue Hotel.The New Zealand Listener named Blue Hotel as one of its Best Books of 2022: the "long-awaited return by Taylor is a dark and funny tale set in 1980s Auckland that veers from BDSM dungeons to corporate raider offices."– "Full of depth, striking characters, sparkling writing, and a rich sense of time and place" Craig Sisterson, Crimewatch– "Blue Hotel is darkest crime noir. It takes place in old fashioned newsrooms, questionable newsagencies, seedy bars, S&M clubs and cars. It's as New Zealand-as, but it's not." – Karen Chisholm, AustCrimeFictionBIOGRAPHYChad Taylor's first published fiction appeared in Other Voices: New Writers and Writing in New Zealand, Sport and Landfall. His debut novel PACK OF LIES (1993) was published in Germany as Lügenspiele. His second novel HEAVEN (1994) was made into feature film produced by Sue Rogers and directed by Scott Reynolds.Read NZ describes Chad Taylor as "a writer of contemporary short and long fiction. His novels and short stories often focus on urban transience and the shifting realities of the modern city. Unreliable or unattractive narrators are common in his writing which often deviates from the premises of genres such as futuristic fantasy, murder mystery and romance triangle. His work has a strong visual quality and often employs filmic devices and structures."The 1999 entry for the Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature describes him as "a writer of uncompromisingly contemporary fictions of transience and shifting realities in the modern city. Born and educated in Auckland, where his work is largely set, he graduated BFA at Elam and has carried that interest into the strong visual quality of his writing... The fictions often work on the edge of such conventions as the murder story ('No Sun, No Rain'), futuristic fantasy ('Somewhere in the 21st Century') or romance triangle (Pack of Lies, 'Calling Doctor Dollywell'), often through unreliable or unattractive narrators... As these literary norms are subverted, perceptions of reality and identity are challenged. Strong visual representations, especially of sex and clothing, and filmic treatment with fragmentary and mobile scenes and chronology, provide metaphorical access to these internal concerns."SHIRKER was published by Canongate Books (UK) in 2000. Rebecca Ascher-Walsh, writing in Entertainment Weekly said the novel "morphs from a mystery into an exploration of passion and mortality." Published by Walker Books in the USA, SHIRKER appeared in Italian and German editions and was published by Editions Christian Bourgois in France. The novel was praised in Stern, The Guardian and Livres Hebdo. Andre Meyer in Eye wrote that "Taylor's resistance to fashionable cynicism and the paucity of pop-culture references gives Shirker a timeless quality." The Sunday Telegraph hailed it as "a beautifully written and skilfully constructed nightmare from a writer of great imagination." He was awarded a Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship for literature in 2001.ELECTRIC was published in 2003 by Jonathan Cape (UK) and Editions Christian Bourgois. Electric received strong reviews in Le Figaro, The Observer and HQ magazine. The Australian's Clare Harvey applauded the novel as "rare and refreshing." Novelist Scarlett Thomas in The Scotsman described ELECTRIC as "blank, noirish, drugged-up - an intense juxtaposition of big ideas." ELECTRIC was London Time Out's Book of the Week in 2003. Roger Howard described it as a story of chaos and urban malaise:"His setting is a New Zealand you won't see in Lord of the Rings: a city suffering from the same urban malaise as glitzier metropolises on other continents. Our protagonist, Samuel Usher, is a drug addict who supports himself by recovering data from damaged computers. He falls in with a couple of drifters who occupy themselves with recondite mathematics. But the favoured activity for all three involves powders on polished surfaces. When Jules dies in mysterious circumstances, Usher sets off to find out why. Thematically, Taylor's concerns are twofold: the infinite extent of digitised culture; and the limitless flood of narcotics (not to mention the global industry behind it). Electric looks at what happens when chaos rises up to warp these apparently unassailable worlds."In 2003 Taylor was awarded the Auckland University Fellowship for Literature and appeared at the Auckland and Sydney Writers' Festivals. In the same year he was listed as one of New Zealand's Top Ten Novelists Under Forty by The Listener, which said:"What could be more topical than electricity failure? More than a device to reveal the rat underbelly of Auckland, Chad Taylor's Electric has taken service failure and its character exposing metaphors to an international audience. Secretly we are delighted to be on the map of inner-city decline. Taylor's writing is relentless, cool, focused like a police horse in a riot. "He was sustained, without knowing it, by the French refusal to accept poverty as a sign of failure in an artist" (Mavis Gallant) might be a credo, but fortune has a way of changing. Chad Taylor deserves it because he has real style." (Elizabeth Smither)"Chad Taylor's Electric confirms him as one of the outstanding novelists of his generation. His Auckland is a node in the global marketplace and a casino of possibilities. He writes about drug-enhanced chaos, about abundance, excess, choices - about everything grinding down towards entropy. His novels are as smooth and as aggressive as the best techno. He captures the way a whole trendy sub-culture of Auckland speaks and thus renders their mindset with satisfying, pitch-perfect precision." (David Eggleton)Chad Taylor appeared at the Hong Kong and Shanghai Literary Festivals in 2005. His short story 'Oilskin' reappeared as a short film adapted by director Josh Bridgeman. 1993's Pack of Lies was re-published in Peter Simpson's Nine New Zealand Novellas and reviewed in New Zealand Books in 2005:"Catrina takes her ex-lover Babe, now pregnant, to a surprise out-out-of-town birthday party that never materialises. There are no beaches here, only a hot pool at a seedy motel, and a relentless tone of grimy, urban nihilism that is pure Taylor. It's another clever selection on [editor Peter] Simpson's part, ending as he began with a challenging read, and implying in the trajectory from [Janet] Frame to Taylor both continuity in the NZ novella and a strong future for the genre."DEPARTURE LOUNGE (2006) was published by Jonathan Cape in the UK, Editions Christian Bourgois in France, in Italy by Edizione E/O and in the USA by Europa Editions. The novel received a starred review in the Publishers Weekly (20.02.2006) and was recently dramatised for National Radio. Jonathan Yardley of The Washington Post described it as "smart, original, surprising and just about as cool as a novel can get" and compared the novel's style to Raymond Chandler:His style owes a lot to Raymond Chandler and lesser apostles of noir, but at the same time it's very much his own. His prose is spare but with a strong undercurrent of emotion; "cool" certainly is the word for him, but there's a good deal of heat beneath.The Houston Chronicle's PG Koch described DEPARTURE LOUNGE as a crime novel that played with expectations of the genre:"New Zealand writer Chad Taylor plays with the crime/noir genre for his own philosophical purposes in an open-ended way that subverts reassuring convention. In Departure Lounge, we first glimpse a newscast tragedy – a plane that has vanished in Antarctica – before moving on to the book's narrator, Mark Chamberlain, as he shoots pool with Rory, a real estate developer who is short on scruples and whose apartment Mark later burgles... For all its nighttime street life of taxis and clubs, this is an oddly silent book. It is as if we move through its impeccable structure seeking resolution the same way that Mark ghosts through all those houses he breaks into. Taylor in effect has taken the not-knowing at the mystery genre's core and enshrined it, occupied its amorphous territory and made of it, as in this slight book's emotional peak, a luminous art."Chad Taylor was one of 12 New Zealand authors invited to tour France for Les Belles Etrangeres in 2006. His sixth novel THE CHURCH OF JOHN COLTRANE was published in 2009. He appeared at the Frankfurt Book Festival in 2012.In 2013 his original 2005 screenplay REALITi was produced as a feature film which premiered at the New Zealand International Film Festival and was selected for Fantastic Fest 2014. Harry Knowles at Ain't It Cool News said: "This is a deliberately paced mind-bender ... A societal science fiction horror film. The more you hang in there, the more you#re rewarded." REALITi received five nominations in the New Zealand Film Awards including Best Screenplay.Taylor's original work on Kurt Cobain featured in the art & text project Mythiq27 in Paris in 2014. In 2015 he scripted the radio version of his short story 'Close to You' for Radio New Zealand. The production was nominated for Best Drama in the Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union (ABU) Prizes 2016.

Book preview

Aurélie

PART II: HEAD OF A WOMAN

by Chad Taylor

Smashwords edition 2021

Aurélie

PART II: HEAD OF A WOMAN

6

The wave freeze-framed. A split-second as infinity, a frozen curl of blue: the world turned upside down.

Skip squinted it. Nothing moved. He tapped the monitor. The plasma screen went blank. Skip swore. The broadcast signal had failed because the card in the digital decoder was counterfeit. All the decoder cards on Bali were counterfeit. The barman kneeled under the counter to fiddle with the box.

In the back of the restaurant, a woman screamed.

Aurélie sat on the other side of the counter nursing her beer. While she waited for Skip to get the TV working she examined his art collection that hung around it on the wall. The art works were all the same format because there was only the one size of pre-stretched canvas available in the general store at Seminyak and they had all been painted using the same sized brush in the same standard colours to souvenir the magic of the close of day. All their skies were vermillion and crimson and orange and all the seas were flat to better compliment the light as the sole agent of change. None of the canvases were signed by the artist. Aurélie liked that about them.

The plasma TV flickered. A string of numbers appeared on the screen. Skip grunted and stood up, dusting off his bare knees. He straightened the open collar of his Hawaiian shirt around his pencil neck. The barman was clean now but he would never shake off his junkie’s physique. He eyeballed the screen as the decoder came to blue life and began searching for available channels.

‘Here we go,’ he said, not breaking his stare. ‘Here it comes.’

A second scream erupted from the seated dining area at the back of the restaurant but neither the barman or Aurélie seemed to notice.

The decoder was working again. The library news footage of the Japan tsunami had been replaced by a live feed that showed a thick white cloud masking the towers of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. The reactor’s cooling system was venting steam. The camera moved as the news helicopter skated above a plain of houses flattened like boxes. A grey and white Siberian husky wandered the streets of Ayukawahama.

Skip stared at the dog, worried.

‘Do you really want to watch this?’

Aurélie said nothing. The abandoned pet barked at the camera.

‘Nah,’ Skip said. ‘No way.’

He flipped to a sports channel. March Madness: Connecticut versus Butler. Butler were not doing well. He muted the TV and turned up the music on the laptop perched on the counter. The song was Gerd’s Vulcan Princess (Sensurreal New Funk Mix). Skip’s Dell Inspiron 600 contained only one three-disc chillout compilation which Aurélie had come to know by heart. Sitting in Skip’s Lounge counting the tracks was as reliable as watching a clock.

Behind her at the back of the restaurant came a third scream followed by the sound of breaking glass. The bridal party had been drinking for at least one and a half cycles of the two-hour thirty-two minute compilation. The woman who got up from the table and approached the bar was a redhead and the alcohol had turned her redder. Her cheeks were pink and her shoulders were freshly freckled. She gripped the counter edge to steady herself. She explained she was awfully sorry but the bride’d had a little accident back there and could they get another glass and could we get another bottle maybe a bottle of sauvignon blanc?

Skip said he was out of sauvignon blanc and the redhead asked how could that be and he explained patiently once more that Bali was an island and the government taxed liquor and every year the taxes went up and hoteliers refused to pay the higher price and the polisi held all the liquor at the airport until eventually a compromise was reached, always for cash.

‘You came at the wrong time of year. You need to come in the high season, or the winter.’

‘So what other wines do you have then? You must have other wines.’

‘White.’

‘Then I’ll settle for white, hon.’

She had lipstick on her teeth when she beamed.

Skip sold the her a seventy-dollar bottle of Australian chardonnay that would have retailed for fifteen in Australia. Exposed to the evening air the bottle broke out in a sweat. Skip wrapped an indigo table napkin around its neck and stood it on a plastic serving tray that was moulded to look like carved wood. The redhead raised her index finger and crooked it like she was tickling a child.

‘And would you mind also bringing us a broom and shovel? One of the girls has dropped a glass.’

‘Sure,’ Skip said and first carried the bottle over to the table, his flip-flops slapping on the boarded floor. The redhead remained at the bar, weaving. She kicked one leg back, triangulating her balance between her small hands and one tiny foot. Her perfume was ylang-ylang and wild cherry. She stared at the game.

‘I don’t know why you’d have a wedding here at this time of year. If it was up to me I’d never come here in the tourist season. I mean the tourist season is the worst. You get all the dregs. The rooms are so damn expensive. And it’s hot enough here already. I don’t know how you stand living here. You do live here, right?’

Aurélie said nothing. The redhead followed her gaze to the wall.

‘That’s quite a collection he’s got there.’

Aurélie sipped her beer. In the back of the room Skip presented the wine to the bridal party and the cheers went up to the roof. The redhead sighed.

‘My daddy wanted boys. All he got was girls. I never understood why he should complain until I got older.’

Aurélie picked her nose. Skip returned to get the brush and pan and slapped back over to the table. On the TV the basketball players were chasing the ball. The redhead blinked.

‘Why’d he change the channel?’

‘There was a