Pat Jacobs, author of 'The Chrysoprase Plain'

What song would the narrator/protagonist of your story sing at a karaoke bar and why?

The protagonist of my story does not sing; she listens. Her husband might break into song at the karaoke bar, but she would stay home, listening to Satie. I think the extract below from my story explains this:

‘Her life was no different from the other women in the cool beautiful houses by the river. Women who waited ... And herself? Lavishing tenderness on the azaleas, the orchids, in a cloister, light filtering through leaves, listening to Satie; a shadow existence. They were like bees in amber, the flow and movement of their lives congealed in an exotic entrapment. Come with me, he’d said, just the two of us. It was at Nullagine, at the pub, when Constanza and Geoff flew in, that she’d doubted Charley. They had something on. She’d begun watching, looking for the signs that would confirm a minor betrayal: his casual use of her loneliness for his own ends.’

At one point in the journey this character takes an action that puts her at risk. Alone in a plain dominated by spinifex, she must calculate the odds, reflect on the possibilities of her position; weigh the outcomes. The Chrysoprase Plain is real – but hard to find.

‘She sat up, inclined to laugh out loud at the image in her mind of the precisely mapped squares, filled with a multitude of round shapes; the certainty that each square must contain a number of spaces, gaps in which she could be. They wouldn’t find her using squares.’