An excerpt from Australian author Trent Dalton’s hotly anticipated new novel, ‘Lola in the Mirror’

“She said my father was a good man on the outside, but it had taken her too long to see his insides.”

‘Mirror, mirror, on the grass, what’s my future? What’s my past?’ People think magic mirrors are found only in fairytales. I found mine last summer on Lime Street, Highgate Hill, in a Brisbane City Council kerbside collection. ‘Mirror, mirror, please don’t lie. Tell me who you are. Tell me, who am I?’ My magic mirror was resting on a mouldy ping-pong table beside a Cavendish banana box full of baby dolls with limbs and eyeballs missing.

My mirror has a matte-gold frame, arched at the top like the entrance to an Arabian princess’s bedroom. The family at 36 Lime dumped the mirror because there was a thick
diagonal crack across the middle of it. There was a sales sticker on the back: Temple & Webster: Amina Arched Mirror, $299.

At first I thought that was a bit much, dropping three avocadoes on some place to look when you’re brushing your mop, but now, in the thick of this lilac jacaranda spring of my seventeenth year on earth, I consider this mirror that I stare at in the dawn light – the best light for staring into a magic mirror – the second most valuable thing in my life.

It’s all the places I’ve seen inside it. The pyramids of Egypt. Ornamental gardens in Shanghai. That little bar three blocks from Alexanderplatz in Berlin. That Hindu prayer spot by the banks of the Ganges River. And now this cream pink-sky place I see in there this morning. Darned if that ain’t Paris, France. Round green metal coffee table in a public square at the base of the Eiffel Tower. The square is empty because magic mirrors pay no mind to time zones and it’s dawn there, too. And there she sits. The girl in the red dress, at the coffee table.

Same woman who turns up in all those exotic places in my mirror. Back turned away from me like always. Sipping coffee. Impossibly poised. Effortlessly cool. My faceless friend. My muse. I get how screwy it all sounds. But this here is the truth of my youth. And if I am to properly document these difficult early years of what is sure to be a wild and long and ground-breaking life as an international artist, then I am compelled to document the big screwy in all its shaky wonder and peril.

These moments at dawn in the Tinman’s scrapyard are as relevant to my art as all the dark, real stuff that presents itself later in the day: the girls on the lam stuff, the hunger stuff, the bad smells, the violence, the fear, the work, Mum’s drug slinging for Lady Flo. And these notes on the screwy are just as valid as anything I can tell you about the running. Sometimes it’s the screwy that pulls a girl through.

Before I found my magic mirror, I used the side mirrors on the HiAce to see myself. Never needed any reflection bigger than that. Sometimes it’s good to settle for the side-mirror view of life. Sometimes we don’t want to see the full picture. It wasn’t always a magic mirror. For months it was just another way for me to see all the freckles on my cheeks, my button nose with the small sunburn scab at the tip, and my cracked lips. Plain ol’ mirror it was, for the longest time.

Then, at 3pm on 23 April 2022 – my seventeenth birthday – Mum finally decided that I was old enough and hard enough to hear all the gory details about why we’d legged it across the country. She told me the whole blood-curdling story while we shared a round green metal coffee table at Starbucks, beneath the Myer Centre on the corner of Albert and Elizabeth streets. She drank iced tea and I guzzled a strawberry frappé so quickly my brain froze.

She said my father was a good man on the outside, but it had taken her too long to see his insides. She said you gotta be married to a man at least five years before you really see his insides. She said sometimes you can find a light inside a feller that burns so bright that it starts to burn inside you, too. But all my mum found inside my dad was black monster blood.

That’s the shit that bubbles because it’s hot and troubled. Acid monster blood. My dad’s blood coulda cleaned your oven. You could pour that stuff on the bonnet of your Subaru Forester (best car I ever slept in: ample leg room, good high interior with plenty of space for changing your dacks) and it would burn a steaming hole right down to the engine block.

‘Do I have the monster blood in me, Mum?’ I asked.
‘Nah,’ she replied.
‘But he’s my father,’ I said. ‘You said I got my gentle art side from you. What if I got a monster side from him?’
‘Nah,’ Mum said, ‘you got more Monet blood than monster blood.’
‘Do you have any monster blood, Mum?’ I asked.
‘Yeah, I think I got some,’ she said. ‘How do you think I did what I did to your father?’

But that’s just the thing. I know for certain she hasn’t got a trace of monster blood in her. I swear it. So how does a woman with not a drop of monster inside her do something so – what’s the word for it? – monstrous.

This is an edited extract from Lola in the Mirror by Trent Dalton. You can get a copy here.