Nothing to See

The trouble with reading an exceptional book like Philip Salom's new novel The Fifth Season is that one can't help but expect whatever comes next to be a disappointment. But not so... Pip Adam's new novel Nothing to See is exceptional too...

In a pleasing way, it takes a while to work out what's going on. There are three parts to the novel: 1994 when Peggy and Greta aged 24 are learning to be sober; 2006 when they have jobs; and 2018 when Margaret is working in a specialised field and struggling with both obsession and depression. It sounds banal, but here's the thing: Peggy and Greta used to be one person. Before coming out of rehab and attending sobriety meetings three times a day for something to do so that they don't drink, they came show more round from a catastrophic blackout to find themselves duplicated. Not cloned, more like twins with separate identities, but so perfectly identical in appearance and mannerisms that people recognise them for what they are, and despise them. Because they are not alone, the same phenomenon has occurred to other young women who've drunk to sordid excess, including their flatmates Heidi and Dell.

Such terrible things happened to them when they were drunk, stealing from their friends, sleeping with men for money and getting gang raped — they don't ever want to go back to that so they do everything together to support one another. Unlike Heidi and Dell who are always at odds, Peggy and Greta are in harmony. But that is their only advantage: everything is so hard for them, it's enough to make you weep. They have some kind of sickness benefit, but it's not enough because the bureaucracy doesn't recognise them as two people. They have only one birth certificate. They can't get a driver's licence, or a passport, or get tertiary entrance or qualifications. That kind of future is slammed shut, but for now the immediate priority is to survive.

It's not hard to see that this is the plight afflicting all kinds of undocumented people in modern society. (When I was moving my father from aged care in Qld to be near me in Melbourne, I had to do it through Centrelink even though he was a self-funded retiree. He could not meet Centrelink's identity requirements because he didn't have a current document with a photo on it. He hadn't had a driver's licence or a passport for decades. This meant that all his paperwork got jammed in the system and went nowhere, and they couldn't answer questions about it because he didn't have a Centrelink number to locate him in the system. To say it was a nightmare is an understatement of how distressing this was. How people with limited English, limited money for phone calls and limited access to a bricks-and-mortar Centrelink office get on, I can't imagine.)

Peggy and Greta have to think very carefully about buying food — and they are so ignorant about cooking, they don't even know the most basic things like how to store potatoes or that food can overcook if you delay taking it out of the oven for some reason. They have a cookbook, Alison Holst's Meals without Meat, and they use it to make a quiche for a picnic organised by their sobriety support group. They are baffled by the crust, they don't know what a flan tin is, and they don't know if they have enough money to buy the ingredients. They decide to take the cookbook to the supermarket with them so that they don't buy more than they need:

They all turned out their pockets and wallets. Between them they had about eight dollars and there was seven in the jar for flat expenses, like toilet paper. They convinced themselves it would be enough, but they had no idea.

'If we get there and it's not enough we'll just get what we can — the things that'll keep — and then get more tomorrow. ' No one wanted to ask how they would have more money tomorrow, because the quiche was the most exciting thing that had happened in ages. (p.79)

Clothes are another problem. They have incinerated their thermals. They only had one pair so they needed them to dry quickly and had put them too close to the heater. (They're clueless about how often clothes should be washed as well.)

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2020/10/01/nothing-to-see-by-pip-adam/ show less