LITMIR.BIZ

      Published by Hybrid Publishers

      Melbourne Victoria Australia

      ©Howard Goldenberg 2014

      This publication is copyright. Apart from any use

       as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be

       reproduced by any process without prior written permission from the

       publisher. Requests and inquiries concerning reproduction should be

       addressed to the Publisher, Hybrid Publishers,

       PO Box 52, Ormond 3204.

      First published 2014

      National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

       Author: Goldenberg, Howard.

      Title: Carrots and Jaffas / Howard Goldenberg.

      ISBN: 9781925000122 (paperback)

      9781742983325 (ebook)

      Subjects: Twins – Fiction.

      Kidnapping – Australia – Fiction.

      Dewey Number: A823.4

      Cover design: Gittus Graphics ©

      Cover painting by Craig Penny ©

      The characters and events in this book are fictitious and any

       resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

       For Miles and Toby

      Author’s Disavowal

      With two exceptions, nobody you know, living or dead, appears in this work; the characters are otherwise entirely imaginary. The exceptions are Talcum Malcolm, derived from ‘Talc Alf’, sculptor, philosopher and amateur etymologist of Lyndhurst, South Australia; and Sahara, the whippet-Staffordshire terrier cross who belonged to my late brother Dennis. Although I have tried, I have fallen short of creating on the page the true aggressiveness and malice of this real-life bitch. Sahara menaced everyone she met but she adored Dennis, whose charity exceeded even Sahara’s malignity.

      Nature …

       Why hast thou made us but in halves –

       Co-relatives? This makes us slaves …

       What Cosmic jest or Anarch blunder

       The human integral clove asunder

       And shied the fractions through life’s gate?

      From ‘After the Pleasure Party: Lines Traced Under an

       Image of Amor Threatening’, by Herman Melville

      My mother groaned, my father wept,

       Into the dangerous world I leapt …

      From ‘Infant Sorrow’, Songs of Experience, by William Blake

      ‘Are the twins identical, Peter?’

      ‘One is, Rabbi, one isn’t.’

      Snatches of conversation overheard at a double bris ceremony

      My heart and my mind, my bones and flesh and all the organs of my

       body are bound together with the cords of the stories I was told.

      From The Honey Thief, by Najaf Mazari and Robert Hillman

       Part 1