Louise Milligan’s follow-up to Pheasants Nest is vivid and haunting

CRIME
Shellybanks
Louise Milligan
Allen and Unwin, $34.99

Smart-mouthed journalist Kate Delaney is a survivor. This we discovered in Pheasants Nest, the excellent first foray into crime fiction from Louise Milligan, herself an award-winning journalist. In Pheasants Nest, Kate was raped and abducted, but survived to tell the tale and has since won a Walkley for her account of the experience. She is, however, far from doing well when we catch up with her in Shellybanks.

Given unlimited time off by their sympathetic bosses, Kate and her lawyer partner Liam are now lodged on a Greek island. Clad in 1950s sundresses, Kate is endeavouring to recover from her trauma by evoking the Charmian Clift-George Johnson dream and writing the great Australian novel. Except she can’t. Kate is suffering from PTSD and barely able to string a sentence together.

The call for help from Aunt Dolores in Dublin therefore comes as a welcome excuse to escape the failed idyll and to submerge herself in someone else’s grief. After a life of solitude, the hard-swearing, nicotine-addicted, middle-aged Dolores is about to be married to her beloved Kevin when he suddenly dies, his innards turned to “mush” as Dolores woefully laments.

So Kate and the loyal Liam rush to Dolores’ side. While Liam deals with the formalities, Kate accompanies Dolores through the ceremony of “the removal” in which Kevin’s unrecognisable, badly made-up, artificially bronzed and clean-shaven body is laid out to rest for the inspection of family and friends in an overheated room. While this might seem grim, it’s also darkly funny. “Dubliners”, as Milligan tells us, do “a very good line in death”. Meanwhile, the fancy soda bread and soup go down a treat while the increasingly anxious Liam escapes to the pub.

Not only is the death of Kevin a trigger for Liam, but more importantly for Dolores whose past, Kate knows, has always contained “a big gaping something”. What that something might be, begins to surface as they all head off on an ill-fated walk on the Shellybanks beach, a beach Kate well remembers from her own childhood as the site of unexpected terror.

While Pheasants Nest belonged to Kate and Liam, Shellybanks belongs mainly to Dolores whose “big gaping something” clearly began at home. One of 11 children, Dolores was largely ignored and half-starved by her exhausted mother and poor excuse for a father before being sent away to an elite cooking school that was anything but.

Part Two of this haunting novel is all about Dolores and her life in the Group, a cultish organisation with religious pretensions. The outfit is ruled by the alarming Directress and two sinister supervisors, Miss Nuala and Miss Róisín, who smile, “but not with their eyes”. Never has a Laura Ashley frock and a lemon angora cardi been more terrifying.

Confined to the role of “help”, Dolores performs domestic drudgery without pay from 4.30 in the morning until 9 at night, seven days a week, while being reassured that The Father knows best. She’s stays because she is occasionally showered with affection (love-bombing) and seduced by the promise of a trip to Rome, but she’s also subjected to sexual and physical abuse.

As becomes clear, both Kate and her aunt Dolores are survivors of significant trauma, but it is only in facing this together that they will find a resolution. To say more would be to give away just too much of the compelling plot as journalist Kate rediscovers her “story-lust” and determines to expose the crimes committed against Dolores. It is therefore in the muddy waters of Shellybanks, rather than in the blue waters of the Aegean, that Kate’s healing and that of Dolores, begins.

While Kate’s Walkley Award-winning account of her experience was acclaimed for its prose, described as “... tight. And bright. And unflinching”, this could well be a description of Milligan’s own prose style, which is also fresh, spare and vivid. Here’s Kate observing Dolores after the death of Kevin, “shrunken and pale and wearing grief like a drab anorak”.

And then there’s the dialogue, so there is, which had me inadvertently adopting an Irish brogue as I read it, so it did. But enough of the blarney. Shellybanks is as powerful as Pheasants Nest and just as haunting.

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