We’ve asked some of our favourite writers to tell us a Paul Jennings story – without going back to the source. Read their twist on his tales below.
Add your own unreal, uncanny or unbelievable memory in the comments.
Lorelei Vashti
‘No is Yes’ completely blew my mind. I read it one Saturday on our old salmon-pink couch. When I finished I jumped up to help mum, who had been hassling me all afternoon, in the kitchen. I had to whip the egg whites and as the peaks slowly formed I couldn’t stop thinking about the story. I was glad the father/professor got what was coming to him, but I was also indignant: if he hadn’t done the wrong thing he would still be alive. As I folded in the sugar something was crystallising in my mind: I was starting to understand irony, paradox—not that I had those words yet, but I knew I was drawn to whatever it was that wasn’t black or white, or right or wrong, or yes or no. I’ve only ever read that story once, but all these years later the memory of it is so sticky and chewy and crisp, one of those delicious, perfectly formed meringues of childhood I still fold over and over in my mind.
Read Lorelei’s ongoing memoir Dress, Memory here
Sarah Holland-Batt
The story that has always haunted me is the one where a boy feeds his grandmother’s glass-eyed fox fur at night with backyard lemons until it comes back to life. The idea of a hungry fox fur scrabbling blindly in a cupboard is uncanny in itself, but for me it was terrifyingly real, as I used to hear those kinds of scratching noises at night in my grandmother’s house. Although the scratching was probably just possums, my grandmother’s creaking Queenslander did have closets stuffed with creepy celluloid dolls and furs, an eerie grove of fruit trees in the garden, and a huge, dark wedge of space under the house that I would dare myself to creep into and then burst out of, heart racing. For me, that story echoed the weirdness of one of my own childhood places and the strange life my grandparents’ things had in my own imagination. I believed such things were real, were possible, in my own grandmother’s house. And still do.
Jessica Friedmann
The story that has always stuck with me is ‘Locked in the Dunny at Dusk’—‘Locked’ or ‘Trapped’—in which a sad young man, running away from the obese, domineering brother who takes his wages and makes him eat sheeps’ eyeballs for dinner, becomes locked inside a supernatural public toilet. He experiences a grotesque and harrowing night as numbered bits of graffiti scrawled on the wall begin to come true. As the sun comes up and the magic of the toilet starts to fade, he shakily scrawls his own line on the wall: ‘Fatty disappears at dawn’. This ‘disappearing’, not killing but a kind of unkilling, always gave me shivers that were equal parts fear, guilt and glee. But it was not until I heard the term unheimlich for the first time, and the sheeps’ eyes came rushing back, that I finally understood why Paul Jennings called his books Uncanny.
Editor’s note: This story is actually called ‘The Velvet Throne’, and it’s in the collection Unmentionable.
Jessica is the deputy editor of Dumbo Feather
Photo: Cory White
Comments
Christina 12 Oct 2:17PM
I was simultaneously horrified and delighted by Paul Jennings' story about the boy who turned everything he touched inside-out - the image of the inside-out sausage has never left me!
Harriet 19 Oct 5:59PM
Grandad's Gifts was my favourite story as a 10 year old. I recall it often when thinking about animals, death...or just lemon trees.