The Misanthrope

By Salome Nabainivalu

The Misanthrope is a novel that explores what it is to be an individual, the nature of relationships, race, otherness, class and the oppressiveness of small town life. The Misanthrope is an absurdist, coming of age novel set in the late 1990s when the coldest summer on record descends over the Australian coastal town of Menninda. The protagonist is Artemis Armstrong, a peculiar soon to be sixteen year old high school student of Australian and Fijian heritage with an obsession with all things Japanese. Living with her Aunt Alexandra, both are considered misfits, having to contend with the oppressiveness of small town life. Aunt Alexandra has raised Artemis to be highly individualistic, providing her with an extra-curricula list of readings to aid her intellectual development. Artemis becomes fascinated with the work of Epictetus, a Stoic philosopher born in 55AD, and attempts to follow his manual, The Encheiridion adapting it to her contemporary life. Aunt Alexandra lives in self-imposed exile, after self-immolating on account of a man. Artemis also has reclusive tendencies, having no friends to speak of. Rather she has the characters in books and films with whom to find an affinity. Her friendless state alters when a boy called Blaxland moves into the house next door.

Artemis looks back over the past year to when her mental health issues began, after a stint at work experience at Harpers Bazaar in the city. Walking up Oxford Street, she finds herself unable to share the footpath with anyone else. A bout of claustrophobia sets in and she steps out in front of a bus. The accident results in her being admitted to a Child and Adolescent Mental Health Ward. Artemis survives as best she can navigating her way around the other patients and staff in Ward 3A. Rendered unable to read or concentrate she develops a strict routine of pacing around the courtyard for hours a day as an alternative to watching daytime television.

Blaxland, her only companion, is concerned about how she is going to function in the real world when leaving school, given her inability to engage in everyday discourse with people. She is unable even to manage to pick up the phone when it rings or open the front door. Artemis makes the decision not to work in fashion but rather to become a philosopher, just focusing on her own work and not worrying about the mundane every day things with which people concern themselves. The relationship developing between Artemis and Blaxland proves somewhat problematic for Artemis who is altogether unaccustomed with intimacy and friendship of any kind. Deciding to research abnormal psychology in order to make sense of her peculiarities, Artemis goes to the library to consult the DSM-IV, discovering that she has a Schizoid Personality Disorder. This explains her aversion to sex, her isolated tendencies, detachment and her grandiose fantasizing which continues throughout the book.

‘The Misanthrope’ is a journey through the reflections and observations of an eccentric and inquisitive teenager’s mind as she attempts to manoeuvre her way through the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Aug 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9781922440082

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Copyright 2020 © Salome Nabainivalu

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Disclaimer

This story is entirely a work of fiction.

No character in this story is taken from real life. Any resemblance to any person or persons living or dead is accidental and unintentional.

The author, their agents and publishers cannot be held responsible for any claim otherwise and take no responsibility for any such coincidence.

For Stuart

WUTHERING HEIGHTS

The sultry summer to which we were well accustomed on the coast had all but vanished only to be replaced with what the overly bronzed Channel 5 weatherman referred to as, the coldest December on record. The sweltering heat of late November which falsely promised a summer of languid leisure had given way to three solid weeks of unseasonal rainfall and chill southerly gales accompanied by temperatures which seldom exceeded 15 degrees. Huxley Beach though not officially closed was deserted. Even the ever disciplined middle-aged morning dog walkers had collectively abstracted the scene, wary of the obscure conditions to which Mother Nature had chosen to subject us. The only other warm blooded presence in the proximity of the shoreline was that of the lifeguards and their futile attendance. In their civic display of enduring chivalry they perched precariously upon the wooden facade of their fortress surveying the desolate territory under their charge. It was an existence now exclusively counterfeit, like a faded sepia photograph capturing a moment long forgotten, in a place which no longer exists. Still they waited.

I wandered along the deserted beach, the wind blowing sand in my face. The beachside cafe had closed for business, due to the absence of customers. Waves pummelled the shoreline choppy yet forceful, the water grey and almost indistinguishable from the sombre sky. I kept thinking of that old Wuthering Heights video clip where Kate Bush is dancing alone on the misty moors in that red dress. I don’t quite know why I am thinking of this but I am. For a moment I am starring in my very own video clip, only I don’t sing, I am not that ambitious. Rather I am just walking along like a character in an old black and white foreign language film, steadfast and stoic. The gulls squark. The film sequence rolls on. More walking, this time arduous as the wind turns against me with fervour and fierceness, flattening my hair and offering resistance.

Today I am a mudlark scrounging around the banks of the River Thames at low tide searching for treasures of a bygone era. I seek a connection with the lives of Londoners who came before me. I discover an elaborate 17th century watch, a medieval badge of the type worn by religious pil­grims, a Roman coin and a 16th century clay tobacco pipe.

TREVELYAN

Home is Trevelyan. Trevelyan is one of the oldest buildings in Menninda. It was constructed in 1895 and has been in our family for four generations. I am proud of Trevelyan, of its defiance. Many of Menninda’s older buildings had been subject to demolition since the 1970s only to be replaced by modern houses without history. Trevelyan is quite a majestic dwelling perched atop Windmill Hill overlooking Huxley Beach, a grand vista. The building is an ornate single storey Queen Anne Federation style with turrets, bay windows, leadlight glass, elaborate fretwork and an abundance of character. Home is where Aunt Alexandra and I live.

Settled in my bay window seat, I gazed at the trees on Windmill Hill, branches swaying to and fro. How I loved the novelty of this weather, the exhilarating chill. Typically summer for me was tedious. I moved with the vigour of a handicapped sloth dragging a pile of bricks. In the absence of air-conditioning we relied upon fans to relieve us from the insufferable heat. Previously I had often hoped for some freakish lurk of nature, perhaps the chance of snow in our humid sub tropic climate, some form of respite from the heat. I was certain that such aberrations occurred. That there was indeed a precedent for such things. It was easy to imagine our Town Green covered in a fine layer of snow. The majestic palm trees silvered with white sprinkles like icing sugar on a biscuit. The bronze statue of Edmund Barton our nation’s first Prime Minister rendered anonymous by the delicate white powder. Menninda’s climatic peculiarity descended unexpectedly as though I had invoked Boreas, god of the chill north wind, harbinger of winter and he had answered my prayers.

Today I chance upon an elderly Barbadian woman knowledgeable in the ways of folk magic. She casts a spell to determine the identity of my future husband by placing an egg white in a clear glass before exposing it to the light of a candle to ascertain the face that appears. My fortune teller begins to behave in a strange and irregular manner, staring blankly into space as though in a hypnotic trance, and uttering foolish and ridiculous speeches unintelligible to others. It is as though the woman is bewitched. I think of the Salem witch trials where Puritanism was to blame for the superstitious beliefs and a lack of rational thought. The woman lashes out as though she is being pinched by invisible personages, experiencing an epileptic fit of sorts, her limbs decimated and tormented. The afflicted woman appears to be in league with an evil spirit. ‘Oh dreadful, dreadful,’ she cries as unseen hands clasp her throat choking her.

CHAMELEONS

Summer renders me completely and utterly useless. I try not to spend too much time in the sun during summer because I end up resembling burnt toast. That’s on account of me being half-Fijian. In all honesty I don’t know much about being Fijian, nor does Aunt Alexandra. She is half-Fijian like me, my father was her half-brother, same father, different mother. Alexandra shuns the sun entirely. She looked foreign and exotic like she was perhaps from one of the French colonies, Italian or maybe even South American. Neither of us have frizzy hair. We are both of us chameleons. Well we were before Alexandra’s accident.

If someone asked me what it was like to be Fijian I couldn’t really say. Once a strange man came up to me in the street and asked me where I was from. I shifted awkwardly and told him I was half-Fijian. I don’t like to be put on the spot like that, especially not by a complete stranger. When I replied he nodded his head and said you ought to be proud. Only I failed to see what there was to be proud of – a savage history of cannibalism and a genetic pre-disposition to obesity and type 2 diabetes.

Today I visit the tomb of Udre Udre, a notorious Fijian cannibal. Natives of what sailors referred to as the ‘Cannibal Isles’ were renown for having a voracious appetite for human flesh, however Ratu Udre Udre distinguished himself as a man with a remarkably insatiable appetite. Ratu Udre Udre was a chief from Rakiraki who collected stones to maintain a tally of the number of bodies he ate. In 1849, nearly ten years after Udre Udre’s death a missionary made a gruesome discovery at his tomb – a row of more than eight hundred stones. One of Udre Udre’s sons confirmed that he had indeed consumed that number of human beings. Most were victims killed in war and Ratu Udre Udre ate them all. He didn’t share. Rumour has it that the chief ate nothing but human flesh. What he failed to consume in one setting would be preserved in a box, ensuring a steady supply was always at hand.

MEMORIES

I was orphaned at the age of six when my parents died in a car accident in which they were not at fault, not that it matters I suppose. I was a passenger in the car and survived. I don’t remember the accident at all and I remember even less of my parents, merely a lingering absence that haunts me sometimes, an emptiness for which I cannot quite account. False memories of my parents are fashioned from old photographs, where I conjure up imaginary scenarios and play them out in my mind. My father pushing me on a swing, walks by the harbour, learning to ride a bicycle, swimming at the beach. All these fragments pieced together, the invention of a life. After the accident I migrated and came to live in Menninda with Alexandra. Even though I lived in Fiji until I was six, I have only retained fragments of memories, like random pieces of a thousand piece jigsaw puzzle. I recollect running around playing in my garden which was dense and vast like my own private tropical rainforest where I would pick fresh star fruit from the tree and chase the resident mongoose. Memories of sitting on the mat upon the floor in the housegirl’s quarters drinking sweet tea have stayed with me. Also, less idyllic I can recall dead cane toads, their corpses dried and dehydrated by the sun laying haphazardly upon the bitumen.

Today I am on board the Lady Escott on a sleepy afternoon. All of a sudden a great fish … near sixty feet in length … came up under the vessel, almost capsizing it. The crew poured a strong libation of kava into the sea … and the monster slowly submerged. This creature was thought to have been Dakuwaqa, the Shark God. According to Fijian myth Dakuwaqa attempted to conquer the island of Kadavu when he was challenged by Sulua a goddess in the form of a giant octopus on the Great Astrolobe Reef which surrounds Kadavu. A battle ensued and before long Sulua wound her tentacles around the Shark God immobilising him. In order to gain his freedom Dakuwaqa made a number of pledges all of which were rejected by Sulua. Eventually the Shark God pledged that he would never attack the inhabitants of the island of Kadavu. Sulua accepted Dakuwaqa’s pledge and even today it is said that the people of Kadavu are protected by the Shark God.

SARDANAPAULUS

Madness and tragedy are synonymous with Aunt Alexandra’s family, well on the paternal side anyway. We are Menninda’s resident eccentrics. My Great Grandfather Henry Armstrong was a notorious philanderer who abandoned his family and ventured off to the wilds of Papua New Guinea searching for gold reportedly in the company of a young Errol Flynn. Then there was Great Aunt Zola who was known for wandering around Menninda engaging herself in conversation, thinking that the whole world was tuning in. My memories of Zola are fleeting at best I remember she possessed a mercurial manner and she always wore a large floppy straw hat with loose fitting mannish shirts and wide linen pants, never skirts or dresses. Her madness was a very public affair, it didn’t occur within the confines of the home or an asylum rather, she was out there promenading for everyone in Menninda to see. How the gossips appreciated such ripe fodder – the downfall of the matriarch of a prominent old family. Then of course there is Aunt Alexandra, whose exquis­ite beauty was much adored, but who self-immolated on account of a man. The tragedy occurred before I came to live in Menninda.

When Alexandra explained to me what had happened she retrieved her volume of The Louvre: All the Paintings and turned to the page featuring The Death of Sardanapalus by Eugene DeLacroix, a painting inspired by Lord Byron’s play. The story of the painting was that in the seventh century BCE, Sardanapalus the King of Nineveh in Assyria on the eve of his death decreed that nothing he considered dear to him should survive and pass into the hands of his enemies, so a massacre ensued. In Byron’s play Sardanapalus says ‘Fate made me what I am – may make me nothing. But either that or nothing must I be I will not live degraded.’ That quote really resonates with me.

DeLacroix’s painting is not as gory as it sounds. There is no actual blood on the canvas just a crimson cloth covering Sardanapalus’s bed which flows to the ground symbolising the blood that was spilt in order to comply with the King’s demands. I enquired what all this had to do with the disfigurement of Alexandra’s face and she replied that in Paris years ago she had lost the person she was meant to be with, her kindred spirit, and that it disgusted her to have other men’s eyes upon her so she destroyed her own beauty. It wasn’t a straightforward suicide attempt by any means. In preparation Alexandra filled her bath full of cold water. Slowly and methodically she doused herself with kerosene and proceeded to ignite herself. Shortly thereafter she stepped into the bath to quench the flames and the damage to her face was done. Everyone in Menninda knew what had happened but Alexandra didn’t appear to care much about that. She once told me that she felt much the same way about gossips as she did rabid dogs.

Alexandra still held her head high when she ventured into town. Some people laughed openly at her, others smiled slyly but none of it affected her, she was immune. There was something otherworldly about her. Despite her burns and scarred face she remained composed, and maintained a presence by virtue of her height, she stood six foot tall in her Gucci loafers and was always dressed with care. I wondered often about the kind of person who delights in the destruction of beauty. I imagined one would have to be a cruel, bitter and jealous person to revel in such a circumstance. Anyway I could relate to the story of Sardanapalus in part because it reminds me of a short story I once read by F Scott Fitzgerald. It is the story of a tremendously wealthy family who reside in the height of luxury in a clandestine abode somewhere in the woodlands of Montana. Their home is built upon a mountainous diamond. The location of their home remains invisible as the family bribed surveyors over