The Wilful Eye (33 page)

She came anyway. She stood beside him and put her hand to his mouth.

‘Thirty days of fever – if we get through them we live. Satcho will get us through,' she murmured and looked at him with great intensity as if she knew she could lead him through if he would only come. He would have stopped her but she was already bending towards him moving deliberately and steadily, without pause, as if she had decided before she even said it. Her head was on his shoulder. He could feel her breath on his neck, the weight of her leaning into him. His arms, without him even asking, had moved to hold her. Her face came to his so he could see her green eyes shimmering with the tears sliding down her face. Like one window onto another, he thought. Only he didn't have to jump; he was there. She said his name and he heard it and they held each other and Soldier knew he was not alone.

I
didn't actually choose ‘The Steadfast Tin Soldier' straight away. My first choice was ‘The Little Mermaid', but it was already taken, then I tried ‘The Ice Queen', but that also was taken, so I set upon ‘The Ugly Duckling' thinking it was a nice outsider story, which always resonates with me, but I got some way into it and thought:
Could I make anything harder for myself than writing something from the point of view of a duck?
I then plunged back into my copy of Hans Christian Andersen and came across ‘The Steadfast Tin Soldier'. In this tale, a tin soldier is the only one of twenty-four identical tin soldiers to have just one leg (another outsider). He can't take his eyes off a paper dancer in a paper castle, wishing she could be his wife but worrying he has nothing to offer her. It is uncertain whether he is pushed – perhaps by a goblin – or falls from the window, but after a series of adventures he ends up back in the nursery, where a boy throws him in the fire. A gust of air blows the paper dancer into the fire with him and they burn together, though I suppose she burned quicker than he did.

I immediately felt a kinship with the steadfast tin soldier. I'm neither steadfast nor one-legged, though I do have a load of other injuries to contend with, but I was recently in Paris with my then-two-year-old daughter doing a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts, and the room I lived in looked directly onto a dance studio, so that I would find myself, every night, ‘trapped' in my small room, while my daughter slept in the cupboard. From my window I watched all the different dance classes, and gazed at the dancers with some longing. I longed to be dancing as they were, and all the while the city of Paris lay beneath me, loud and lively and mostly out of bounds. I may as well have been made of tin, or swallowed by a fish . . .

I didn't plan a way to treat the story, I just started with the idea of a young man locked up and lame, and looking out at someone he longs to know, but can't. I didn't at first know why he was locked up until Gollub entered. I expect I made Gollub up out of the remnants of the slightly nasty Goblin in the original fairytale. The tragic note also appealed to me, as it is always such a neat ending when someone dies; it's perfectly final. But once I wrote it, I felt I couldn't really kill him off because I had become quite fond of him and I wanted to reward his courage and his steadfastness, if only to believe that life would do the same.

Margo Lanagan's
fantastical writing includes four short-story collections and two novels, and she is a four-time winner of the World Fantasy Award. She is currently researching and scrapbooking towards another novel, as well as writing short stories. She lives in Sydney, works as a technical writer and constantly wishes there were more hours in the day.

Isobelle Carmody
has had over thirty books and many short stories published. She is now working on the last book of her award-winning fantasy series, The Obernewtyn Chronicles, and on a second collection of her own short stories, titled
Metro Winds
. She lives between Prague in Central Europe and her home on the Great Ocean Road in Victoria, with her partner, a poet and jazz musician, and her wild sprite of a daughter.

Rosie Borella
spent ten years working in journalism and fifteen years in public relations, marketing, and science writing. Her short stories have been placed in national writing competitions run by the ABC (Bicentennial Awards), the City of Brisbane and the City of Glen Eira. At present she is finalising work on an eco thriller called
Whisperland
. She lives on a farmlet on the Bellarine Peninsula near Geelong, Victoria, with her mum, boyfriend, horse, and two dogs.

Richard Harland
was born in the north of England and migrated to Australia at the age of twenty-two. After several years as a folk-rock musician and more years as a university lecturer, he became a full-time writer. His fifteenth book, the steampunk fantasy
Worldshaker
, became an international success in 2010 and was followed soon after by its sequel,
Liberator
.

Margaret Mahy
wrote her first story when she was seven, and has gone on to publish well over a hundred picture books, novels and short-story collections. She has won several major awards, including two Carnegie Medals in 1982 and 1984 for
The Haunting
and
The Changeover
, as well as both the Order of New Zealand and the Hans Christian Andersen Award for her contribution to children's literature. When she was a child and said she wanted to be a writer, people told her she just could not do that, but she is pleased to have proved them wrong.

Martine Murray
lives in an old house with her daughter Mannie and her dog Maude and a hive of bees who have no names but have been known to sting. There is also a chicken who lays blue eggs. Martine's novels and picture books are published internationally and she has won several awards, including the Queensland Premier's Literary Award for Young Adults for
How to Make a Bird
, and the Patricia Wrightson Prize for Children's Books for
The Slightly True Story of Cedar B. Hartley
.