Diving Falling – Kylie Mirmohamadi

Up until then I had, in my relative innocence, thought that it was something to do with him being, technically, single. Even his obvious physical intimacy with Anita. The way they shared cigarettes, from her mouth to his. By the time she finally told me about them — clutching at my arm, almost desperately, saying it was something apart, something unfathomable, nothing to do with Giorgio or me, only something to do with itself, and she loved me, Ken loved me; ‘Don’t make him choose, he can’t, it’s not a choice, he loves you, he chose you, let’s not talk about it, it’s all too precious what we all have’ — I already knew.

And I knew by then, too, that she was one of many, while I was the only wife. Whenever Ken was pissed off with Giorgio or Anita, or both, he called them Lady Muck and King Cuck. But it was not all casual cruelty from him. I also remembered how Ken had said and done exactly the right thing in that very bedroom, the night that David died.

After Marian had called, her voice hollow with shock, and I had cried in the shower until the water ran cold, Ken dressed my unresponsive limbs in a nightgown, gave me a tablet — after what David had done! — and carried the sleeping boys from their beds into ours. We had all spent that night curled around each other like puppies. ‘Life goes on, sweet Leila,’ he had told me when we woke up and I was lying, with the silver sky above us, and my nose against Sebastian’s hair.

Its warm, yeasty smell. ‘His life is going on right now, in these little beating hearts.’ I sighed and told Magnus that I was going to get up and make some tea. ‘Oh, but it’s also a Danish tradition that the mother of the groom gets a nice slow fuck on the wedding morning.’ ‘Really?’ ‘It’s a little-known tradition.’ ‘As in non-existent? Anyway, I should get up. Seb might want to talk on his last morning.’ I had been so touched when Seb told me that the only tradition he and Lola were going to observe was to stay with their mothers on their last night as single people.

A slight homage to home. ‘He’s getting married, Leila, not going to the gallows. I wouldn’t mind doing it again myself, some day.’ ‘Shall I bring you in a cup?’ ‘No, I’ll get up, too, I suppose. I want to go to your herb garden, if that’s ‘I thought I already said “no” to that.’ I was quite pleased with myself for that piece of wit, on a fraught morning.

Kylie Mirmohamadi is a writer and academic whose research spans domestic Australian landscapes, online fan fiction, and 19th-century English literature. She has a PhD in History and is currently an Adjunct Senior Research Fellow in English and Creative Writing at La Trobe University. Kylie lives with her family in Melbourne, where she often finds ideas for writing when walking among the tree-lined creeks of her inner suburb with her poodle. Kylie has published widely in the academic sector, most recently on the long afterlives of Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters.

She was the recipient of a Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellowship in 2022 and her unpublished manuscripts have been highly commended in the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards and shortlisted for the Dorothy Hewett Award (2020). Diving, Falling is her first novel. OceanofPDF.com OceanofPDF.com Scribe Publications 18–20 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria 3056, Australia 2 John St, Clerkenwell, London, WC1N 2ES, United Kingdom 3754 Pleasant Ave, Suite 100, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55409, USA Published by Scribe 2024 Copyright © Kylie Mirmohamadi 2024 All rights reserved.

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book. The moral rights of the author have been asserted. This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously.

Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events, places, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Scribe acknowledges Australia’s First Nations peoples as the traditional owners and custodians of this country, and we pay our respects to their elders, past and present. 978 1761380 66 2 (paperback edition) 978 1761385 92 6 (ebook) Catalogue records for this book are available from the National Library of Australia.

scribepublications.com.au scribepublications.co.uk scribepublications.com OceanofPDF.com For my two sisters and my spirit sister. OceanofPDF.com and then he died. And then I wrote his obituary. The one that ran in The Guardian in London as well as The Age and The Australian. The piece that summarised his reputation as a significant Australian artist, his body of work suddenly and irrevocably complete. The Two Boys Series. The House at Kew. Swimming. Melbourne Morning.

His manifesto, Antipodean Abstract. The familiar names were summoned again, from my desk at the big window on the second floor that looked out onto the river. But all the windows in our house were large.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: 5dbe905f88353528
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 1,931,479 bytes (1.842 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• ISBN: 9781761380662, 9781761385926
• Pages: 242
• Language: English (en)

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• Estimated Reading Time: 346.57 minutes
• Total Words: 69,314
• Total Characters: 381,316
• Average Words per Page: 286.42
• Average Characters per Page: 1575.69

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