<Dark, unsettling but told through brilliantly lyrical language, One Foot Wrong is a story of coming of age in a nightmarish domestic world. This is the first adult novel from Melbourne children’s writer Sofie Laguna, and with its deftly crafted balance between macabre detail and beautifully constructed prose, it certainly earned its place on the 2009 Miles Franklin Literary Award longlist and Prime Minister’s Literary Award shortlist.
The story is told through the eyes of Hester, a young girl growing up in unusually bleak circumstances. The opening pages lull the reader into a deceptively gentle world, filled with charming, childlike imagery brought to life through Hester’s vivid imagination, The naïve, innocent meandering of her thoughts at first appears like any normal childlike way of seeing the world. She describes, for example, falling asleep with her cat with a kind of delicate joy:
Cat was there and together we’d wait for the bird dream. Cat’s bird dream was hiding in the long grass, a fast chase and a jump. In my bird dream everything was white without walls. Bird sang and flew and so did I.
But it only takes a few pages to discover that there’s not much that’s joyful childlike about this story. Slowly, the layers start to be unpeeled, and we realise that this child has lived her whole life confined to her home. “Outside was forbidden,” Hester has learned. “It was dangerous because it had no walls or roof telling you where to stop.”
Besides Cat, Hester’s only companions are her extremely religious parents, who she calls Sack and Boot, and the simple household objects like Handle, Spoon and Broom that speak to her and keep her company in her isolation. Handle in particular plays an important role – he opens the door to the outside, allowing Hester her first exhilarating experience with real light and space and her new mystical mentor Tree.
Being held captive isn’t the only way Hester suffers. As the narrative progresses, we start to piece together fragments of a world that is increasingly nightmarish, filled with rituals of horrifying abuse, from her father’s “night visits” to “the hanging room” where her mother punishes her for her misdemeanours. Because her knowledge of the world is so severely limited, Hester relates these incidents with painful naivety when she does get the chance to interact with people:
I walked past the desks to the front of the class. I held up the painting of God the Bird. He was flying around my head where I hung. ‘He’ll talk to you when you’re hanging.’
A cloud of quiet came over the room.
‘Thank you, Hester.’ My teacher’s lips closed in a tight smile.
‘He comes to me when I am hanging for my punishment.’
‘Thank you, Hester, that is enough,’ my teacher says, no smile now.
‘He talks. He says, it will be alright, it will be alright.’ Nobody in the room spoke or moved. The cloud of quiet held them.
Hester does later form brief friendships with real people – there’s Mary, from the special school she briefly attends when authorities intervene, and Norma from the institution where she ends up when she gets too grown-up for her parents to handle. Whether anything was actually wrong with Hester to begin with is unclear, but as more and more secrets begin to be unearthed, the story becomes saturated with a feeling of dread and sorrow, a realisation that after so many years of abuse, Hester doesn’t have a chance in hell of any kind of normal life.
It might sound like the kind of story you would never want to read, and there are definitely details that are sickening. But Laguna makes this awful story somewhat alluring through her careful interplay between the horror of Hester’s world and the light, innocent beauty of the language. It’s a terrible situation, but the brilliance of Laguna’s prose adds flecks of startlingly original light and play, like in this description early on in the book of Hester completing her chores:
I was cleaning the toilet on my knees on the hard floor. It was my duty. When I went to put my brush in the bucket of water I saw a face. When I dipped the brush in the bucket the face spread and broke into pieces – the pieces swimming away from each other as if they were enemies.
The tension between the simple beauty of such images and the ugliness of the events that makes this story uniquely gripping. The reader is pulled in both directions, invited to be both entranced and repelled by the story.
It’s impossible to tell how reliable Hester’s narration is, and towards the end the story dips more and more into the surreal. Hester’s final attempt at catharsis is unlikely to bring any relief from the tension and horror that has been built up – but nevertheless, it’s an ending you won’t soon forget.