COVER - LILY

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michelle de Kretser was born in Sri Lanka and lives in Sydney. Her fiction has attracted numerous awards. She is an honorary associate of the English Department at the University of Sydney, and Scary Monsters is her sixth novel.

The state is the coldest of all cold monsters.

Nietzsche

How does it feel to be a problem?

W.E.B. Du Bois

WHO DECIDES HOW TO READ A NOVEL?

This one can be read in two ways and this e-book provides you with both. In one version, LILI precedes LYLE. In the other, LYLE precedes LILI.

Their stories are the same in both versions, just in a different order.

The choice is yours.

LILI

That was the year we went to Sardinia to meet John Berger’s mistress. The night train travelling along the Côte d’Azur was packed. The heating in our compartment was fierce, so Minna and I took turns to stand in the corridor, where the windows opened, and blocks of raw spring air moved in. People were sprawled there, most of them teenage soldiers with freshly shaved heads. It was necessary to step over their kitbags, and there was grumbling about that. The soldiers spoke louder than was required and shoved one another. I remember the impatience in their faces. One of them was a stocky Corsican – the others called him Bonaparte with good-natured jeers.

The train was running late, with long, mysterious halts between stations. Back in our seats, Minna and I shared a packet of chocolate-coated shortbread, leaning forward to pass it to and fro. Later, thick with sleep, I stumbled over someone’s legs and went out into the corridor. The soldiers were playing dice like soldiers from the Bible, and the toilet was foul.

The Corsican asked if I knew the red chestnut beer brewed in his village. He was offering me a cigarette when the train dragged to a stop. The window showed a Meccano city, its towers and cubes lit by big golden stars; a different soldier explained that it was an oil refinery. Napoleon said that to understand a man you had to know what the world looked like when he was twenty. I was twenty-two and Minna was twenty and it was 1981.