This is my last story.
“I’m never going to write another story. I don’t like writing stories. I don’t like putting he said she said he did she did, and telling people, the small dark woman who coughs into a silk handkerchief and says excuse me would you like another soda cracker. Mary, and the men with crease all over their clothes and lunch tins in their hands, the Hillside men who get into the tram at four forty-five, and hang on to the straps so the ladies can sit down comfortably, and stare out of the window and you never know what they’re thinking, perhaps about their sons in Standard two, who are going to work at Hillside when it’s time for them to leave school, and that’s called work and earning a living, well I’m not going to write any more stories like that. I’m not going to write about the snow and the curly chrysanthemums peeping out of the snow and the women saying how lovely every cloud has a silver lining, and I’m not going to write about my grandmother sitting in a black dress at the back door and having her photo taken with Dad because he loved her best and Uncle Charlie broke her heart because he drank beer. I’m never going to write another story after this one. This is my last story.
I’m not going to write about the woman upstairs and the little girl who bangs her head against the wall and can’t talk yet though she’s five you would think she’d have started by now, and I’m not going to write about Harry who’s got a copy of We Were the Rats under his pillow and I suppose that’s called experience of Life.
And about George Street and Princes Street and the trams up to twelve. I’m not going to write about my family and the house where I live when I’m Oamaru, the queerest little house I’ve ever seen, with trees all round it oaks and willows and silver birches and apple trees that are like a fairy-tale in October, and ducks waggling their legs in the air, and swamp hens in evening dress, navy blue with red at the neck, nice and boogie-woogie, and cats that have kittens without being ethical.
And my sister who’s in the sixth form at school and talks about a Brave New World and Aldous Huxley and DH Lawrence, and asks me is it love it must be love because when we were standing on the bridge he said. He said, she said, I’m not going to write any more stories about that. I’m not going to write any more about the rest of my family, my other sister who teaches and doesn’t like teaching though why on earth if you don’t like it they say.
That’s Isabel, and when it’s raining hear outside and I think of forty days and forty nights and an ark being built, when it’s dark outside and the rain is tangled up in the trees, Isabel comes up to me, and her eyes are so sad what about the fowls, the fowls I can see them with their feathers dripping wet and perches are such cold places to sleep. My sister has a heart of gold, that’s how they express things like that.
Well I’m not going to do any more expressing.
This is my last story.
And I’m going to put three dots with my typewriter, impressively, and then I’m going to begin …
I think I must be frozen inside with no heart to speak of. I think I’ve got the wrong way of looking at Life.
- Janet Frame, “My Last Story.” From Prizes: The Selected Stories of Janet Frame, 2010.
