{"id":165276,"date":"2022-05-03T13:27:28","date_gmt":"2022-05-03T02:27:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/?p=165276"},"modified":"2022-05-10T12:48:31","modified_gmt":"2022-05-10T01:48:31","slug":"read-an-extract-from-bedtime-story-by-chloe-hooper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/2022\/05\/03\/read-an-extract-from-bedtime-story-by-chloe-hooper\/","title":{"rendered":"Read an extract from Bedtime Story by Chloe Hooper"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Chloe<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

When Chloe Hooper\u2019s partner is diagnosed with a rare and aggressive illness, she has to find a way to tell their two young sons. By instinct, she turns to the bookshelf. Can the news be broken as a bedtime tale? Is there a perfect book to prepare children for loss? In her new book, Bedtime Story<\/a><\/strong>, Hooper embarks on a quest to find what practical lessons children\u2019s literature \u2013 with its innocent orphans and evil adults, magic, monsters and anthropomorphic animals \u2013 can teach about grief and resilience in real life.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

We begin with chapter one.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\"Chloe<\/a>

Chloe Hooper (Photo by Susan Gordon-Brown).<\/p><\/div>\n

Chapter One<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Every night when the light\u2019s switched off, familiar objects in your room mutate. What daylight tames, the dark untames. Book-shelves, reading lamp, a dressing gown draped on the door, all gather a silent force. The stillness feels alive, as if each thing is deciding how to behave.<\/p>\n\n\n

At first, there\u2019s a thrill to this sudden chaos. You\u2019re not yet listening to the in-and-out of your own breathing, not yet decoding the noises in and outside the house. The shimmer of the dark makes climbing into bed feel less like surrendering. You\u2019ve used all your wiles to put off this moment, and yet it turns out your limbs are heavy and the sheets are cool.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You wait while we draw the curtains against the night (or any dawn waking). You wait as we straighten you and your brother\u2019s bedclothes; already he can\u2019t stop his eyelids from closing. You keep waiting and we reshelve the picture books. On these books\u2019 pages life is reduced to its essential elements. The sun is a yellow ball in the sky. The road a black ribbon leading to green. The woods are reliably timbered, and within them a monster is a monster; no need to factor in his childhood. The stories are soothing because the turnings of the plot are so well-worn, their surprises practised. Each night people are sad then happy. They get lost and found, and return to their houses that have a front door between two windows.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It doesn\u2019t occur to your father or me to tell you what is really happening here inside this house. Why the force between objects is charged differently for us too. We don\u2019t want to let dread through the bedroom door. And we don\u2019t want anything about these nights to change. All the most mundane tasks \u2013 tooth-brushes cajoled into mouths, limbs into pyjamas \u2013 are suddenly revealed as precious, and if we diverge from the nightly routine in any way, everything could break apart.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s a couch set against the wall between you and your brother\u2019s beds. Your father sits there in the glow of a planet-earth nightlight. If you turn you can see his profile. Glasses on a still boyish nose, but a forehead lined deeply; sometimes there\u2019s the win, even in the dark, of breaking through the thicket of his thoughts to make him smile.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Your father \u2013 Don, as you call him \u2013 is older than your friends\u2019 fathers, you know this. (I was born in the \u2018olden days\u2019, as you put it, but he in the \u2018olden, olden days\u2019.) One of the advantages of his age is that he knows more stories, and you prefer him to put you to bed because then the picture books are only the prelude. When he\u2019s finished reading, he makes up something just for you. Both of us are writers although the original bedtime tales are his domain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You lie in the fresh anarchy of the dark, waiting for his voice with an electric attention. But standing by the light switch, I know I need to find a way to talk with you about the shadows.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A child\u2019s fear of the dark may not even be about the dark. The heightened sense that something hideous waits in the dim-ness may be born when children start to learn there are mysteries they can\u2019t fathom. A veil is drawn back slightly: the child intuits the scale of things which cannot be controlled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The beginning of these hours alone in a closed and unlit, or barely lit, space becomes perilous. Even a heartbeat could give someone away. In the 1920s the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget recorded rituals that children devise to keep themselves safe, observing: \u2018A boy who lived in a somewhat lonely house\u2019 believed \u2018if he could succeed in drawing the curtains very quickly the robbers would not come\u2019. Other such \u2018rites to ward off danger\u2019 included \u2018hiding under the bedclothes, turning the back to the door, drawing the blanket up to exactly the chin, etc \u2026 Another felt protected if on getting into bed, the clothes were completely tucked in all around so that she could slip in without anywhere unmaking the bed. If by chance she found the clothes not tucked in, or, that they had come unmade as she got in, she felt herself threatened by danger.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perversely, adults set about peopling, or rather monstering, the dark for kids \u2013 to instruct or entertain or to control them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The bottomless, complicated evil of the world we codify into witches and ogres, into the grim figures that your six-year-old brain now imagines reaching out and grabbing you. Yet hob-goblins and bugaboos are dangers you\u2019ll never actually need to confront.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cancer is the bogeyman for adults. Later, in the pandemic, people will come to fear droplets of others\u2019 spit and snot \u2013 stuff kids trade in unblinkingly \u2013 but that contagion works by a series of links, a chain of contamination stretching back to an animal and a human\u2019s ill-fated encounter; the terror in this case is outside, potentially everywhere. Cancer comes from within and provokes a different form of panic. A person walks down the street, leading a regular life, and suddenly they are the one. Any part of a body is vulnerable. It can find a home in an eye, throat, ovary, bladder, testicle, brain, breast \u2013 one\u2019s most hidden or prized part \u2013 then spread.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before our recent visit to the hospital, your father\u2019s mood darkened: how seamlessly in these moments the surrealism kicks in. We\u2019d initially been told his leukaemia was not a dangerous one. The haematologist, a droll woman, swollen with pregnancy, assured us that fortunes had been spent to make certain blood cancers, common in older white men, non-fatal. But she ordered extra tests anyway, and we had walked to her office down a seemingly endless hallway to hear the results. In a luminous white room, she showed us scans revealing enlarged lymph nodes throughout your father\u2019s body. The cancer levels in his blood had risen in just a fortnight. The haematologist had never seen this particular strain of leukaemia, she told us, and was seeking her colleagues\u2019 advice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Don had the taciturn manner of an old farmer on a visit to the city. He was dressed like one too: a navy jumper over a shirt with a collar never sitting right. \u2018How long do I have?\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018You want this conversation?\u2019 she checked briskly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If it was one form of leukaemia, five years. If it was a \u2018feral\u2019 form \u2013 and her manner hinted that this was her suspicion \u2013 there would be far less time. To discover his fate, Don needed to sign a form permitting further tests, on his bone marrow. These results would take a month.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Four whole weeks. Twenty-eight days before he\u2019s to return to the neat purgatory of the waiting room so as to wait some more \u2013 and in the meantime I have to start to educate you about the real dark.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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