FICTION
Roseghetto
Kirsty Jagger
UQP, $32.99
Rosemeadow conjures a suburban idyll, but as a character within Kirsty Jagger’s debut novel quips: “God ain’t coming to Rosemeadow, Shayla … Even the coppers don’t wanna come here.”
Chronicling the first 18 years of its protagonist Shayla’s life, Roseghetto derives its title from a public housing estate in western Sydney that was deemed an “urban design experiment that failed” and was subsequently demolished. At the heart of the novel is the relationship between Shayla and her mother – when Roseghetto opens, Mummy is a 24-year-old single parent of three-year-old Shayla, desperate to escape the clutches of her abusive ex-husband, barely making ends meet.
In the world that Kirsty Jagger has created, the most vulnerable in society suffer.Credit: Matthew Duchesne
There’s the unmistakable sense that something awful has happened to Shayla – it’s in the novel’s opening chapters that the inability of the family law system to protect those it purports to serve is most keenly highlighted.
It’s a bleak start and although things never get quite as desolate, they’re continually torrid and unrelenting. Shayla’s mother moves on with her high-school sweetheart Rob, having two more children whom Shayla effectively co-parents. The brutish, gormless, manipulative Rob’s only redeeming quality is that he doesn’t descend to the depths Shayla’s biological father did, but it doesn’t stop him from psychologically, verbally and physically abusing her.
We become so entrenched in Shayla’s world that Rob doing something as simple as acknowledging her is perceived as comparatively upstanding behaviour – the low standards of behaviour Shayla comes to expect becomes internalised.
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Jagger seamlessly inhabits the voice of a child, and as Shayla grows older, the way she converses changes. Yet time and time again, Shayla’s behaviour underlines she’s not an average child – when she meets a new peer at a party, for instance, she extends her hand outwards like her Pop taught her to, amusing her friend who’s unused to such formalities. Shayla was never allowed to be a child, and it shows in her dialogue, her mannerisms.
Much of the book is spent in Shayla’s domestic realm, where the cruelties appear inescapable and her life assumes a claustrophobic quality. But even when Jagger journeys outwards, the grimness lingers. Shayla’s poverty is encapsulated by school shoes so small “there are holes in the top where [her] toenails have pushed through”. A brush with a discarded used syringe precipitates a frenzied visit to the doctor. In the world that Jagger has created, the most vulnerable in society suffer: women, children, animals.
Shayla’s relationship with her mother is like a frayed rubber band, expanding and contracting less and less as her mother fails to parent her in fresh, new ways. Shayla’s mother’s relative youth and guilelessness are captured by, among many things, her wardrobe – which consists almost entirely of band T-shirts. But the romanticised pop-punk pairings she grew up with taint her idea of what a healthy, functional relationship looks like, which comes to the fore when Shayla is old enough to question her mother’s ingrained beliefs.
Debbie Harry and Chris Stein. Chrissy Amphlett and Mark McEntee. Tina Turner and Ike. All of them. They all had toxic relationships. Some were deeply violent. That’s nothing to aspire to for yourself, or to teach your daughter to aspire to, or your sons.
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The simplicity of Jagger’s language allows the violence to rise to the surface, but there are moments of joy among the relentless litany of cruelties: Shayla’s loving grandparents, her experience of first love, her friendship with Sean and Charlie, and the refuge she finds in books and her imagination. For all the adults who have behaved despicably towards her, there are as many who have her best interests at heart – social workers, teachers, counsellors.
Roseghetto is firmly anchored in the nineties and noughties. Shayla’s coming-of-age is signposted by the Living End, Silverchair and Aqua, Harry Potter, and the collective anxieties of Y2K and 9/11. The overarching sensation of Rosemeadow is one of stifling heat, uncompromising and constant. This same airlessness extends to living in Rosemeadow – Shayla remarks the only way out is “in a body bag”.
But Shayla escapes intact. Even though the prologue all but gives away the eventual fate of the character, when the fairytale turnaround does happen, it feels jarring, rushed and a little too neat. But perhaps by the end, we simply don’t care – the happy ending is sorely needed.
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