Intimate Antipathies Page 4

  The body forgets itself in a rather final way: most nights, the world is very quiet, and the bed feels to my everthickening body like an examination table for the gods. Books pile up on the bedside, but there is nothing much to be found in those: more strangers in the sunken carriage. The doubt of memory runs so deep that I am compelled into the dark side of this room I am writing in to look through the drawer by the bed and find, sandwiched by a court summons and speeding fine, a little black case containing a wedding band. I am required to run my finger inside the rim, to feel the inscription which reads ‘Ma armastan sind’. It means ‘I love you’ in a rare antipodean language. The words, etched in white gold, help to hold the disparate dimensions of memory together. But the ring must go back to its tiny leather snare, and I have stepped away from the bed. Certainty climbs into a bed of fog and fades under its covers. Who is it, after all, at this table in a room in a house on a hill – who is it taking this strange tone of voice, who goes about believing the inscriptions inside a ring, or the impressions of images all lined up in a row like a stitching of feathers in the Mycenaean crown on the dry skull of an old chieftain, alone in his honeycomb tomb. For what it is worth: I recall that my new wife screamed when she fell into the river, and her knees were bleeding when we limped back to the room to pull the leeches from her wet body, with mud and blood on the bedsheets that night of our honeymoon.

  I googled the five writers listed in the email in order to discern what it might look like to be trapped in the cramped confines of a rental with them for five days, and in doing so discovered a dispiritingly pleasant array of faces. Gabbie, Miles, Jesse, Zach, Kate: looking at their cherubic smiles and happy eyes, it occurred to me as I sat at my dishevelled desk in Bankstown that I could not have concocted a less compatible collection of fellow artists if asked to hand-pick them from an industry line-up.

  The first potential van-mate I investigated was Gabbie Stroud: self-described as a ‘lapsed teacher’, Gabbie was easy to track down, a plethora of articles having only recently been written in praise of her essay ‘Teaching Australia: Fight or Flight’, which detailed the traumatic effects of an education system in crisis. The media consensus painted Gabbie as a courageous hero, speaking out with skin in the game, but I had my suspicions. Despite media support for her efforts, or perhaps because of it, I didn’t trust some feature of her beaming smile, and the erratic curl of her hair in images online made me nod my head as though a dark flaw had been uncovered.

  Miles Merrill, the second writer I studied, seemed even less commendable. A Chicago-born ‘tour de force’ performance poet, Merril’s claim to eternity – the thing for which he will no doubt be included in all the history books of Australian literature in the twenty-first century (supposing any are written) – was having single-handedly transplanted the proud American tradition of poetry slamming to our southern shores. For that alone I figured he had a great deal to answer for, since poetry slamming, I considered, smug in my office in the western suburbs of Sydney, is a literary strain of cultural disease without redemption: a derivative, unlettered, poetaster’s impression of art.

  The novelist Zacharey Jane, a young-adult author with picture books about a willowy slumber-jack called ‘Tobias Blow’, was to be our tour guide on the road. To her name was also a novel, The Lifeboat, no doubt an artistic response to the ‘children overboard’ horrors of the Howard era. Accompanying these accomplishments was a distinguished career in the film industry – Zacharey had apparently not only met George Lucas, but designed light sabres for the much-maligned Star Wars prequels. If these things were not evidence enough of villainy, then there was the issue of her looks: rather too blonde and potently cheek-boned for me as I sat there glowering into the laptop screen.

  Jesse Blackadder, meanwhile, who specialised in ‘landscapes, adventurous women and very cold places’, was another writer of children’s books about mythical brumbies and Antarctic dogs. Her latest adult novel was set in the open sea with an eye on whaling in the 1930s. Jesse, like all the other writers assigned to the van, had the smiling face and bright eyes of people who have lived lives punctuated by joy, love, sadness and enthusiasm in ordinary measure, a look I considered, sitting at my desk, to be other than the ideal form the writer’s visage ought to take. Somewhere in my decades-long study of the literary arts, I had come to believe, in my secret heart of hearts, that the author ought to be, in person, a vision of wrack and ruin – with a face as flat and deflated as an old leather-bound book kept in a cellar, the nerves in cheeks and forehead atrophied by long states of abstraction, the muscles of human expression never having been needed on what Jacques Derrida calls the long march into the world of dead, ‘returning with bloodshot eyes and bleeding ears’.

  At my desk in Bankstown, as I considered these faces, I saw a copy of Gerald Murnane’s A History of Books, his perfect writer’s face on the cover: a doleful lack of liveliness to his countenance, grim and fully deflated. Googling Gabbie, Miles, Jesse and Zach had revealed these potential road-tripper colleagues to be far from the morose Murnane ideal – but Kate Forsyth, the final van-mate, turned out to be its very antithesis. Not merely an unabashed writer of historical fictions with fairy-tale roots, the sort of writer who no doubt meets her characters in dreams and considers these collisions part of the profound mystery of fiction’s magic, but a woman with luxurious raven hair framing an almost elfin face with loud dark eyes and a smile as might suit the characters in one of her enchanted stories. She was a writer, to my mind, unthinkably opposed to the deranged figure of the artist who must grapple with the entanglements of words between worlds, and the supreme enigmas of literature.

  Upon the landscapes that had already been summoned up by the email – the white-gold beach with surfers and sunbathers, the frothing blue immensity, the fervid roads between the towns and rivers and bays, on which my wife and I had so long ago honeymooned – I projected a van full of the faces I’d found on the web, and amongst them placed an avatar of myself: seatbelt tight around the shoulders, the smiling faces of the other writers in their open intercourse, trying, occasionally, to bring me into their conversations with sympathetic looks and doubtful glances of pity when I seemed unable to return to them a signifier of relationship. The luggage crowded into the back of the van would be rocking and vibrating, the road rolling backwards in a nauseating spillage between the masses of gum trees glowing to a sunset filament. We unload at community halls in empty coastal towns, where gatherings of elderly readers sit plangent in plastic chairs, patient with our ramblings then thronged around book-signing tables after the applause, buying books and insinuating their own talents to us. I project those expectant faces and guide them into familiar foreign rooms, seat them, make them smile and stare. They are almost real, an imaginary audience with slumped shoulders in rows before an aching stage. I think, unfairly, of Patrick White’s curmudgeonly face, and his line in Voss, ‘All human relations are a lunge, the direction of which seems inevitable’, and as I breathe out a highway of these thoughts, it feels as though the road and its memories have already been paved by them.

  What I cannot see, what it is impossible for me to know, sitting at my desk in my office in Bankstown, dreaming of strangers and the distance between towns in the Northern Rivers, is the look of recognition that will cross Gabbie Stroud’s face some months from now on the rattling shuttle bus taking us both out to the plane to fly north from Sydney. She is sitting at the back of the bus, and I am standing by a pole with one foot on my carry-on. Do I mouth hello or merely nod and smile? We lose each other in the crowd alighting the plane, but I see Kate Forsyth up ahead, her raven hair and full red lips like any prince’s debutante in her lordly novels. Watching her toss the luggage overhead, I will hear Murnane’s syllogism about two distinct types of writer – those fanciful kinds who make imaginary scripts for the reader’s delight, and those who deal with the universal mind for the sake of an autotelic truth – reverberating in my mind like a mantra, but when the six of us meet at
the airport in Coffs Harbour, corralled around our wheeled suitcases, shaking hands and asking how the flight felt for each other, the mantra will begin to lose its frequency. At a café close by, Kate will reveal a small chest of trinkets – crow claws, meteorite rings, jewels from distant places made from the tiny bones of extinct animals. A cappuccino warms my nervous hands and Jesse Blackadder talks to us about her latest novel while the sound of cups clink by the counter and three men in hi-vis stare quietly out the window. My inner monologue whispers a few lines of Murnane’s that I’d committed to memory to keep me secure on the road with strangers, a long way from the consolatory estrangements of lofty words, frozen safely on pages in books:

  In earlier years, I had used makeshift terms such as film-script fiction on the one hand and meditative fiction or true fiction on the other hand whenever I had tried to point out the differences between the sort of writing meant to bring to the reader’s mind events such as might be witnessed in the place we call the real world and the sort of writing meant to disclose to the reader some of the memories or reflections or imaginings of the narrator of the fiction.

  The current of those lines lifted the burden from space and time in the café, as if all my little sins might be abstractions, and all the slips and stumbling to come only a kind of dance. Not long after, hearing Miles and Gabbie talk about their lives, I say to Kate as if talking to everyone, ‘To be honest, I am not sure what we do has any kind of meaning at all.’ To which, tilting a pot to fill her cup, she says in a sweet lilting tone without taking her eyes off the pouring tea, ‘Oh darling, but of course it does.’

  All of this, though written in the chalked stone of the present as I sit at this computer in the dark and write these lines, was beyond me as I sat at the desk in my office and played with numb projections in the dread anticipation of the Byron Bay experience to come. Running the possible contours of the trip through my head as though the world itself were a mere simulation, proliferated by the idiosyncrasies peculiar to the conscious subject, I could not hope to image the look of delight on Gabbie’s face when we walk into the lobby of our resort in Coffs Harbour, dragging our luggage behind us like monks devoted to luxury. It will make us all laugh quietly to see her wide-eyed wonder at the palatial glimmer of the marble slate floor and the wide expanse of windows open to the crashing ocean views and a fountain bubbling in the centre of the lobby which takes the form of a peacock’s fan. She will communicate with her eyes that she cannot fathom what it is we have done to deserve such rich treatment: my inner monologue slowly ceases its whispering – though I am far from noticing its absence as we file into our rooms.

  Gabbie and I walk at dusk through the hotel grounds, her curled hair glowing red at sunset. We emerge from a border of shrubs at the edge of the hotel’s garden, and step through a static field of sandflies and out onto the talc-soft sands. Gabbie laughs the flies away from her face, and then we find ourselves between the waves and a lagoon lying still behind the dunes. Lost completely in the present, like a child, I throw a series of stones across the water and the gold light catches in their locutions. ‘Not great at that, are you?’ Gabbie says, and we agree to walk along the beach again in the morning and take photographs of the sunrise over the cliffs surrounding the resort. It will be late that night, when I sit in the heavy armchair by the hotel bar, with a champagne flute and tired eyes, that Zacharey, our blondehaired tour guide, will say to me, ‘Shut your mouth, you!’ when I begin to discuss the troubles of literature. I tell Kate, ‘There is no way to know what good, if any, fiction does for anyone at all, and all this talk about generating empathy is an ideological act of wishful thinking.’ Kate, listening intently but smiling, says, with the dim lights of the bar still shining on her porcelain skin, ‘I promise you, by the end of the tour I will change your mind.’ I laugh, but the inner voice is quiet, and there is a vast silence in the room, as if a spell has been cast, and I say, ‘We shall see’, but do not hear the words. Kate will end the conversation with one last recitation from her story of the Succession of Kings – this time the tale of Charles II. She begins, ‘This is the story of the king who ran.’

  If I could see – sitting at my dismal desk in the western suburbs, with a heart beating erratic for the suburban world around me – the recitation in the hotel bar coming towards me from the Byron Bay tour, I would have declined, I am sure of it, if only, perhaps, because change is a frightening habit. But if I had not gone north, if I had stayed at the desk in Bankstown, I would never have walked into a classroom with Miles Merrill, and seen the subtle hysteria of the boys and girls in uniform as Miles stands before them in his full height, long-limbed and moving as if some infernal ecstasy has touched his blood; and I would never have noticed the looks on the two boys’ faces, who turn to each other and ask ‘What is happening?’ as Miles begins his poem about a night camped out in the riverlands with storms passing over the trembling skin of his tent. I will see this, and watching closely, observe a subtle electrical storm rising up from the carpet around the feet of the students, bringing with it an eerie charge that pulses through the bodies of the children while the green of Ballina seems to glow brighter and louder out the classroom window. I am almost able to see the synaptic charge generated on the young faces as he performs the popping of rain drops on a tent at night that leaves the air without breath around us, and the sheer amazement on the English teacher’s face as he shakes Miles’ hand and thanks him for giving his kids such an unfamiliar gift.

  This strange experience will stay with me, and later, when I ask about the electricity I saw seeping into the room when we are both back at the hotel and the sun has long since set, Miles will tell me that when he sits to write his poems, he feels a force of energy flow into the top of his head from some unknown dimension, and in the act of recitation, an equal and opposite energy comes up through the floorboards from the earth and enters his body, spreads out through his fingertips and into the atmosphere of the room. He says this to me and I strain hard to hear him over the rockabilly band playing in the bar, and just as he arches a finger to emphasise the magic, a drunken bridesmaid collapses around his neck and says, ‘Can I please touch your hair? I’ve never seen hair like that around here!’ I see a sorrowful look of resignation enter his eyes. Simultaneously, on the far side of the bar, Jesse invites us to have dinner at her home. If I had not been there to go along, on the snaking drive away from our hotel to Jesse’s house, I would never have seen the storm-slashed bunches of banana trees by the waterhole of her property, and the shadowy shape of sacred mountains stacked on the night’s horizon. In her dining room, surrounded by half the books ever written, Jesse shows me slides of adventures in the Antarctic – a white immensity beneath an endless sky punctured by the mirage of lightning-blue glaciers as large as cities, and bearded men with icicles clinging to their determined faces, and while I wonder at her private world, our tour guide Zacharey practises an elevator pitch for her latest novel before Miles and Kate, whose advice seems to have no limitations, and rolls on in laughter and nods of approval.

  The next night, under a golden chandelier in a Coffs Harbour restaurant, Kate, with another glass in her hand and the endless stream of bubbles rising between her fingers, will say to me like an apparition from a cinematic dream, ‘Sometimes a person will come into your life and give to you precisely what it is that you need to hear, exactly when you need to hear it.’ I will reply to her, with the bell toll of the flutes between us across the round table, ‘But I don’t believe in gurus.’ The inner monologue will know this is a lie. With bookshelves at our backs and white-haired readers thronged around us at a long set of tables with our respective books standing at attention, Kate rises like a siren to tell the story of her face. A dog savaged her when she was just a child. So badly did the animal make a mess of young Kate Forsyth, the doctors had to remake her. ‘I was the first person in Australia,’ she tells the crowd in her casual serenity, ‘to have an artificial tear duct inserted.’ In the time of her rejuv
enation, tied to a hospital bed in a wrapping of fevers and blankets, she held on tight to the story of Rapunzel – from a book given by her mother – and the strange tale of the long-locked girl trapped in her tiny tower revolved obsessively through her consciousness as the doctors and nurses made their rounds and her torn face remade itself. I realise, listening to this story, as facile as it sounds to offer it here, as though all I am is the awed provincial walking through the gates of an ancient city, how feeble all my ideas have been to leave no room for all these other readers who have made sense of themselves and their place in the world through the messiness of words and stories re-remembered in their bedrooms and hospital beds and daydreams by the fire. There is, I saw in the embrace of the white-haired crowd and the sun-slicked Coffs Harbour street glowing at us through the window, a deep force in the workings of words that all my useless philosophising had left out altogether. Jesse warns me, as I confide some of this to her on the walk back to the van, the crowd walking with us, that I am coming under the spell of a master storyteller.

  I watch these writers perform themselves night after night, hear their tales and bear witness to their stories of bookish life. At last, in a burlesque theatre in Brunswick Heads, with purple walls and abstractions hanged from the ceiling, Kate will ask me to take the stage with her, to play a role in one of her stories. She rewrites the scene to suit me, taking out the complicated words and all the French. It is a scene from her massively successful novel Bitter Greens. She wants me to play the role of the Marquis, to seduce her on the stage for everyone to see. ‘I’ll help you out,’ she says. ‘I’ll fill you full of Veuve Clicquot,’ and by the time it comes to stand before a full house of faces half-obscured by the bright lights angled at the stage, there are four empty bottles of champagne by our feet. Kate stands close to me and after we play out our game of chance on stage I say, ‘I don’t think I can resist you. I’ve never met a girl like you.’ She says, ‘I’m not that unusual.’ I reach out for one more kiss, and she says, ‘You’ve already taken more than we ever wagered!’ I look into her eyes and say in a voice I didn’t know I had, ‘You will not be so cruel, Charlotte-Rose!’ The crowd, when the debt is paid, cheers and claps and we toss our scripts into the dark behind the curtain. I realise, glancing at her red-lipped smile in the stage lights, remembering all my old maxims about the nexus of art, truth and fiction, that I’ve been set free from a naïve web of illusions.