Polack - The Year of the Fruit Cake: or Aliens with Irony

Dr Gillian Polack is a writer, editor, historian and teacher, with doctorates in both history and creative writing. Several of her books have been short-listed for awards. She is a member of Book View Caf and also blogs for the History Girls and for Medievalists.net. In her copious spare time she practises sarcasm, cooking, reading and narrative analysis.

From her very first novel readers told her that her fiction reflected her life, when it really didnt. To make up for this, she generally includes at least one real episode in each of her novels. She vows to stop doing this after The Year of Fruit Cake .

The Year of the
Fruit Cake

or

Aliens With Irony

by
Gillian Polack

This is a work of fiction. The events and characters portrayed herein are imaginary and are not intended to refer to specific places, events or living persons. The opinions expressed in this manuscript are solely the opinions of the author and do not necessarily represent the opinions of the publisher .

The Year of the Fruit Cake

All Rights Reserved

ISBN-13: 978-1-925759-92-1

Copyright 2019 Gillian Polack

V1.0

This ebook may not be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in whole or in part by any means, including graphic, electronic, or mechanical without the express written consent of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

IFWG Publishing International
Melbourne

www.ifwgpublishing.com

To Vonda

The Observers Notes

I AM OTHER

My experiences as a Human, for the most part in Canberra around the Year 2016, chronicled in a bastard form of the English language.

These are my personal observations, made for private purposes only, and should not be taken as part of the official documentation of my work on the species. They reflect nothing more than my passing responses to my circumstances.

The Observers Notes

I try.

Every day, I try.

Some days I like this planet. Some days I despair.

Every day, I try.

Some days I am trying. Some days the human race is trying.

Every day, I try.

Im more grateful than I can say that Im not human, though every day, I try.

Notes towards an
Understanding of the Problem

D ont stop me now!

It was a Queen kind of night. The bright, forever-in-the-moment Queen. So different to the quality of their friendship. Yet it brought them together.

That was the moment of wonder. Not the joys and terrors of life. Not even meeting an alien. Having a great time out, as if they were entitled to joy. Normal stuff wins, hands down, always.

Normal stuff is way harder than meeting aliens. Its also something we try for, every day. Meeting aliens is a meh ! kind of thing. We might be kinda-sorta interested, but we hardly spend our whole lives striving for it. Not unless were astrophysicists, really. And astrophysicists dont tend to meet aliens. Aliens try to meet aliens from time to time. I speak from experience. Life is more ironic than it ought to be.

It comes down to who the alien is, really, and what theyre trying to achieve.

An astrophysicist once tried to meet me. I refused. End of story.

Also, its not this story, and not this planet. The Research Branch and normal human culture were neither of them involved. It was, in fact, not related to human culture at all. The problem is that human culture and my own, when we meet in the middle, provoke digression.

Humans claim there are many human cultures, but I only know this single one. The one represents the many. We always focus on knowing something well by drilling deep down into it, rather than by general understanding. Its who we are. Its also easier to represent mathematically.

Enough wittering. Back to middle-aged women. Theyre important. Another thing that ought not be ironic at all and yet is pretty ironic. Given the cultural contexts of middle-aged women, and given the circumstances Im writing about, irony is unavoidable. Given the language Im composing in, wittering is also unavoidable. Its vocabulary and structural potential encourage enhanced wittering. Let me say now, before I go any further, that this language is not the strangest Ive worked with, but it comes close.

Middle-aged women often remind themselves that theyre permitted happiness. They could remind themselves that theyre normal, too, but thats harder.

Normal is what appears in ads and in focus groups. Normal isnt a woman over 45, however successful and however interesting and however precisely she reflects demographics or belongs to an average family. Its easier to be permitted happiness. Thats why normal stuff wins, hands downits so damned difficult.

Ive been struggling with this subject for years, and it never gets easier. I dont know how they get through life, myself. I possibly should find out, but its not essential. All this learning is to address a far bigger question.

Todays set of notes covers how they bonded. Five women who, for their own reasons, had developed a broken record of Im allowed to be happy and who, one night, one cold night when the wind was off the snow and the golden wattle lined the streets, all decided I am doing this thing called happiness, now, with a group of people Ive never met in my life.

If theyd met the Devil that night, he wouldve been included in the group. A bit more reluctantly, mind you, because its harder to relax in a group thats not all women, but he would still have been welcomed. Unless he was a jerk, of course. That would have prevented the hunt for happiness even before it properly got started.

These women became each others good luck trinkets. When things went too bad, they met and distracted each other, supported each other, talked it out.

All the crises. All the time. Because nothing was going to stop them. Not now.

How they met is almost irrelevant. The mood that the meeting carried with it, thats what transformed their lives. Nevertheless, how they met possibly needs to be chronicled. In case its important. Even the smallest things can change worlds, after all, and at the very least, this evening on the town changed five lives. Maybe it changed the human world. Maybe it changed a lot more than that. And if this moment had a backing tape, it was Queen, being unstoppable.

This voice echoing my ideas in someone elses words is also unstoppable. Youll just have to accept it for now. Im immersed in my subject.

Humans tell story and music, and the story is music and the music is story. They seldom understand the purity of music but then, only a few of them have an inkling that purity is even possible. This intrusion by music, then, is one of the large differences between them and us. Music is not a social activity. And narrative is not at the core of our being. Im writing about aliens, in their own language, using their own constructs. And, sometimes, those constructs are exceedingly alien indeed.

The citys pub scene isnt that friendly to middle-aged women. Trina was fine there, most of the time, for her makeup and hair and clothes demonstrated that she was really twenty. Inside and outside matching. The body-age itself lying. Her makeup suggested borderline vampire, and her outfit suggested Rocky Horror. Her hair was coloured into submission, and those dark blue and purple streaks also suggested that she wasnt forty-nine. This is where her unstoppability came from that night. She knew she rocked her outfit and she was determined to do so in town, along with the teens. Only the teens were drunk and didnt care.