[Read] Hot Desk Extract: Jessie Perrin - The Two Girls

As part of The Wheeler Centre’s Hot Desk Fellowship program, Jessie Perrin worked on The Two Girls, a novella following a couple’s ‘not-divorce’ and their child’s experience of it.

It explores a ‘language of the body’ and how bodies form, change, experience language and in turn how language works through, around and comes into conflict with bodies. The beginnings and ends of things (relationships, bodies, experiences) are constantly called into question, intertwined and rearranged. It’s also (hopefully) quite funny.

Nothing happens

Forever and a day later, Danielle peeked around the family room door. She looked at her father and her mother. They were sitting on the two-seater linen couch in the family room. There was room for both of them in that room now that silence had decided that Danielle could look after it better. Her mother was sitting at the edge of the couch cushions as if she didn’t want to risk being accidentally comfortable. Her father was sitting with arms crossed over his chest and his back was buried deep in the couch cushions. He was jiggling his left foot like he was trying to shake it completely off his leg. She sat on the armchair opposite the couch.

“Mur mur mur,” her mother was saying to her father.

“Mur mur mur,” her father was saying to the corner of the ceiling.

Then Danielle walked in and her mum made a different sound.

“Do you want to sit down?” her mum asked.

Danielle did not. Her mother knew that she did not. Her mother wanted her to think that she was big enough to make her own decisions – about hometime, about having baths, about sitting down – but giving her a decision to make was a completely different thing from letting her make her own. She scrunched up the decision her mother had given her and flung it back.

 “Do you want me to sit down?”

Her mother nodded, looking at her messed up decision on the floor. Danielle sat.

Her father was looking at the sloping floor like he thought it was all he could hold in his eyes right now. He just wasn’t strong enough to pick up anything else that was happening around him and he didn’t want anyone to see him try and fail. 

But Danielle thought maybe, it was more that the floor was holding his eyes up and that maybe if they stopped doing that, then his whole body would ooze out of itself like a squashed fly on the shoulder of its squasher. 

“Gerrrrrrrrrrrr,” said her mum.

Made no sense. It was all just noise. But she noticed, as she turned to her father, that he’d not only lost the foot he’d been trying to shake off, but his leg too. It had disappeared into the couch where silence had been hiding for the past two weeks and the other one, seeing the first leg over and done, followed suit.

“Gerrrrrrrrrrrr,” continued her mum.

The words that shot out of her mother’s mouth were too big to fit inside her head. Instead, they rebounded back and forth around the room, crashing into each other and becoming so jumbled that they lost any meaning that might have been attached to them when they’d been sitting in her mother’s head, impatiently fidgeting and wondering why it was taking so long for her mother to find them and get them out of there so they could go do their own thing.
And part of their own thing was banging into her father’s arms, knocking them off his body onto the sloping floor where they rolled down the slope, getting smaller and smaller until they weren’t small anymore. Or even arms.

“Gerrrrrrrrrrrr.”

His torso - gone. His neck – vamoose. His ears – vanished. And soon all that was left was his eyes, and with no body left to do any seeing with them, they fell too and rolled between the cushions of the couch.

“Gerrrrrrrrrrrr.”

Sound stopped. Her father was nothing. Danielle felt the floor move under her feet. No, ‘move’ was the wrong word, or it wasn’t enough words, because she wasn’t feeling something just change position, she was feeling every single part of that change and then every single part of that part of change and then every single…

And despite how many words were flying around, she couldn’t find the right one to use for that.

There would only be her mum from now on. She held on tight to the edge of the armchair’s cushions not wanting the gust of words to sweep her up and away.

Now there was really nothing between her and her mother.

Her mother’s fingers had twisted around a loose thread in the couch cushions just next to where her dad had been. It was sticking up and her mother was gripping it tightly. The loose thread was staying right where it was. Danielle couldn’t work out whether her mother was trying to pull it out or whether she was trying hard to look like she was pulling it out, but was really trying to keep it right where it was.

“Do you have any questions?”

As her mother turned back from the space on the couch where her father had been, Danielle noticed that her mother’s shoulders had dropped slightly. She had a lot of questions.

‘Can Clara can come over next weekend?’ was the only one that she could find right now.

“Maybe.”

Danielle let her grip loosen on the couch cushions as she decided to wait until the other words were ready to find her. Silence settled in again.

Then Danielle stood up. Then her mother stood up. Then nothing stood between them. Then the loose thread stood up too. Her mother had decided not to pull it out.

And it hadn’t fallen out either.