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Half Wild by Pip Smith Sample Chapter
Half Wild by Pip Smith Sample Chapter
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HALF
LF
author of The Last Painting of Sara de Vos
Pip Smith has always been an agent of change. With her
powerful debut novel, Half Wild, she will surely change the
way we read, write, think and talk about Australian fiction.
HALF WILD
Sam Twyford-Moore, host of The Rereaders podcast
and former director of the Emerging Writers Festival
WILD
across her body, nurses jab her in the arm with morphine, detectives
arrive to take her fingerprints. She has 100 in her pocket, but no
identification. Memories come back to hera murder trial, a life in
prisonbut with each prick of the needle her memories begin to shift.
PIP
is not who he seems to be. Who, then, is he?
FICTION
Brilliant . . . original and highly
provocative. Naomi Wood,
author of The Godless Boys
PIP SMITH
HalfWild_COVER.indd 1 26/4/17 4:49 pm
Praise for
HALFWILD
Half Wildis a triumph of novelistic paradoxa quixotic portrayalof
a subject whose life is a lessonin becoming. At the hybrid heart
of this work is an impassioned address to theNietzschean enigma:
how one becomes what one is.This debut signifies the taming of
an immense and soaring imagination in the figure of Pip Smith,
whowith cool command of formis here both the falcon and
the falconer.
LUKE CARMAN, author of An Elegant Young Man
Pip Smith is a writer full to the brim with brio and vim. Her
fiction leaves nothing behind: every sentence wrings language for
its emotional and aesthetic possibilities.Half Wild is a remarkable
work of empathy: Smith has committed herself entirely to the
imaginative act, plonking us right down into the shoes, skin and
mind of a person who shed these same things time and again. We
live in an era where the reinvention of self is common, and even
encouraged; Half Wildreveals to us in dynamic prose that these
concerns are timeless and universal, that one of historys most excep-
tional chameleons could have been you, me or anyone we know.
SAM COONEY, editor of The Lifted Brow
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Who is she?
Not sure. Female. Sixty, seventy maybe. Hit by a car up on
Oxford Street.
No purse?
No. Awad of cash, though. Ahundred pounds.
Stolen?
Probably.
Whats your name, Mrs... ? I dont think she can hear me.
No, her eyelid twitched. Did you see that? Her eyelid twitched.
Mrs? Can you hear me? What is your name?
JEAN FORD
Half Wild 1
They cant hear me.
And theres a loud white pain flaring out from my hip and
the back of my head that makes it hard to speak. Dont. No, stop.
Morphine will only make me slip further away. Iwant to be inside
this pain, because its mine, because it proves this broken bodys
still got fight.
They are pressing into my wrist with their cold fingers. They
are feeling for a pulse. They are saying numbers and writing
on paper. Ha. Do monsters have pulses? I can hear someone
fingering my banknotes. Dont you dare, dont you bloody dare,
thats everything Ive got.
What was italmost twenty years ago now?I was sent to die
under a different name. I travelled to Long Bay Penitentiary
like a celebrity, on a tram with tinted windows. Instead of a
destination, the tram said SPECIAL. The woman next to me
couldnt stop giggling. Never thought Id get called special, thats
for sure.
Inside the tram we didnt feel special. We got shoved ten at
a time into compartments with seats for four and clung to the
chicken-wire gates that fenced us in. Awoman moaned the whole
way there, like a cow torn away from her calf.
Ah shuddup Sandra, ya whiny bugger
Long Bay had never kept a woman about to hang and they
werent sure where to put me. They settled on a concrete cell,
thirteen feet by seven. Igot a mug and spoon, ashelf, and a single
bulb hanging from the ceiling. Icouldve wrapped the light cord
around my neck and jumped off the shelf I suppose, but what
if the cord broke and left me lying on my back, more alive than
dead, legs twitching like a poisoned cockroach?
2 Pip Smith
I lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling. The cell was like a
roomy coffin, and I was half convinced I was already dead when
I heard a warder whisper outside my door: Maybe theyll send her
to Hall B in the mens.
I could tell by the break in her voice what happened in Hall B.
They lowered their voices whenever they passed my cell, as
if I was a ghost likely to haunt any poor sucker who pricked
my ears. I probably wouldve, too, I was that hungry and sore
about it.
They say you eat whatever you want when youre about to hang,
but turns out this is a lie. Theyd fed me Ration One for supper,
the next best thing to dry bread and water. Isuspect they didnt
want to clean up my shit after I dropped. Aconstipated corpse
is a tidy corpse, and doesnt leave a trace.
But everything leaves a trace. You mightnt be able to see those
traces, but you can feel them, you can smell them. There are traces
of me in you, and mark my words there are traces of me in the
acid that burns the Crown Prosecutors gullet at night, keeping
him awake.
The warders bit their nails when I looked them in the face. They
barked occasionally, to remind me where I was, but it was hard
for them to keep up the gruffness when I gave them no reason
to complain. Mavis slipped a ball of tobacco into my pocket.
May gave me an extra scoop of hominy on Sundays, and in early
December a young warder slid back the hatch on my cell door.
Half Wild 3
Good news, love, she said. There was a cabinet meeting. Your
death sentence just got commuted to life.
What? Ididnt understand. What about the jurys decision?The
lawyers two-hour speeches? The months of preparation for
thetrial, and all along they could change their minds, just likethat?
No premier wants a hanged woman on his hands, not now we
can vote.
So it was life, then. Sentenced to life. It was worse in a way,
but the women in the cells began to clap. The sound was water
smacking stone; the drops accumulated and became rain. They
clapped harder, they whooped and holleredthe cheers of women
wild or poor enough to break the law are as close to rapture as a
person can get now that churches dont mean much.
My cheeks were wet, my throat choked up; Ihadnt cried like
that in years.
4 Pip Smith