This Devastating Fever by Sophie Cunningham

Author:Sophie Cunningham [Cunningham, Sophie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ultimo Press
Published: 2022-07-11T00:00:00+00:00

2020

In the month after the fires Alice pulled together another draft of her manuscript. She wrote with the urgency of a woman who thought she may not have long to live. She marched. She visited Hen three times a week and took the two hours it took to feed her lunch. She organised a fundraiser for animals affected by the bushfires. She sat down and wrote a list of ACTIONS under the heading WHAT I CAN DO TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE.

A few days after she’d emailed the manuscript to Sarah, Alice’s phone rang.

‘Hello!’ she said, preparing to make light chat before being cut short.

‘Okay, I’ve read it,’ Sarah said. ‘It’s closer, so congratulations. But you’re not there yet.’

‘It’s been a gazillion drafts. Where is there? How do I get to it?’

‘Are you saying that nothing is new?’—Was Alice saying that? She didn’t know what she was saying—‘Are we doomed never to appreciate or learn from the past? This would seem to be a central question in the novel and I’m not sure it’s been answered effectively.’ Before Alice had time to take this in, Sarah had moved on. ‘I have another concern. I know we have argued about the matter of sex before, but the only books I seem to be able to sell at the moment are books about young women having bad sex.’

‘But this book is about young women having bad sex.’

‘Olden-days young people,’ said Sarah. ‘It’s different.’

‘Do you think things have changed?’ Alice said. ‘Or are we all destined to be young people having bad sex? Or worse, just being flat out assaulted.’

‘Well I’m an old woman having good sex, and not being assaulted,’ Sarah said. ‘So I don’t know about that.’

‘Oh,’ Alice said. ‘That’s great. Though perhaps not the point here. Sexual trauma. War. Political upheaval. Environmental destruction. Radical gender politics. All happened then. All happening now. And maybe I want to say this as well: we need to harden the fuck up. Things have been worse in the past, but they’re going to be far worse in the future.’ Alice spoke unusually forcefully and was taken aback. She hadn’t realised until that moment that she thought this.

‘You haven’t mentioned plague. The Woolfs lived through the Spanish flu. I want more of that,’ Sarah insisted. ‘It’s timely.’

‘Do you really think this new coronavirus is going to be such a big deal?’ Alice asked. ‘I just don’t see it.’

__________________

* Sir Harold George Nicolson was married to the writer Vita Sackville-West. He was a diplomat early in his career, and a politician in later years. He was also a writer, prolific letter writer and diarist. Alice liked the drawings he did on his letters to Vita, and also admired his flexibility when it came to marriage, and his devotion to his wife. She did not admire his politics.

* Clearly Forster should have been footnoted before now. Edward Morgan Forster went to Cambridge with Leonard. His novels include A Room with a View (1908), Howards End (1910), A Passage to India (1924) and significantly, Maurice, which dealt with homosexuality.

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