Yellow notebook, p.20
Yellow Notebook, page 20
‘I bet he only shaved an hour ago. Once, he decided to grow a moustache. Next day, he had one.’
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Spring. The curtain moves all night on fitful streams of air.
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The house auction. My father bid for me, late, twice, and with contemptuous authority. His astonishing exhibition of cool. A merchant in his element. A life of buying and selling. ‘Gawd. What a lotta mucken around. We’da bought a million dollars wortha wool by now.’ My sister stood beside me uttering a stream of hard-nosed opinion and theory. I sank down on to the asphalt with my knees up and my back against the fence and stared at the ground. The agent, a blue-eyed Greek called Koletsos, jogged back and forth between us and the vendors who remained inside the house: ‘He’d sell. It’s his wife.’ Dad refused to raise, shrugged and turned away. So we lost. My sister drove away to Kew. I trailed him back to the car. ‘Don’t worry, Miss,’ he said. ‘They’ll be in touch. My bids were the only two genuine ones they had.’ How could he tell? ‘What’ll I say if they ring?’ ‘Push the faults forward at ’em. The rotten roof on that loose-box. The kitchen. The bathroom.’
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I cook dinner for M and serve it. ‘To think that this time last year I had a broken heart. Do you remember how we used to eat together and play Aretha Franklin records?’
She looks blank, and slightly embarrassed. ‘No. I don’t remember.’
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Randolph Stow, To the Islands. He wrote it when he was twenty-three. It’s a man’s book, a young man’s book—about the Big Things—death, trying to die, murder, wanting to murder—the land; myth—actually it’s brilliant, but there’s something grim about it, and deathly serious; he’s got no lightness in his personality. There’s almost a kind of grinding quality. It’s an Important Book. Maybe he’s been mad, or something terrible happened to him that crushed all lightness, airiness, wit. Maybe people are born without these.
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Ran, Kurosawa, with the born-again. As usual in these manly dramas I feel distant and excluded. But a fabulous spectacle.
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‘If you do meet someone you like,’ says the tough Polish GP, ‘for goodness’ sake use condoms.’
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I’m supposed to send a story to an anthology. I haven’t written a word. I was in that intolerable state of having cleared the decks and finding how far inside me all the real obstacles are. But this morning an hour’s work. Two typed pages and the tremulous sense of having hit a vein—that sensation of recognition—as if it were all formal, I mean as if all one were seeking was form, and the rest came after.
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School concert. M played with plenty of attack, rhythm and feel the prelude from Bach’s Unaccompanied Cello Suite No. 3 in C major. So difficult—she made a lot of mistakes and was white, but there was guts in her playing and I was proud of her.
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Another ratbag from the seventies comes to visit. ‘Remember when—remember how—’ His memories of me seem skewed and even invented, though this of course is the Rashomon principle. ‘Remember when I told you I went to bed with X and Y, the three of us? And you acted not jealous, but for tea you gave me two burnt chops?’
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When I have begun to carve out the little country of a story in which I will make my home for the next few days (or months, if it should be a novel) I feel a secret power. I don’t need to chatter.
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There’s no romance going on with L, just a kind of racketing friendliness. Or maybe it’s a smokescreen of shyness.
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Darryl Emmerson’s The Pathfinder—John Shaw Neilson’s poems set to music. His sweet tenor, so lovely. Most of the audience was old. I found the story of the poet’s life, his lonely struggles, terribly moving. A woman near me pushed up her glasses and wiped her eyes with a shuddering sigh. Her husband saw she was crying and put his arm round her shoulders. Thinking of Neilson’s solitariness I wondered if I would be solitary for much of my life from now on, and whether I would find the comfort he did ‘in song’.
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I dreamt that a man whose beauty was gone—his face had been burnt—brought me a present. I opened it and found first one pigskin glove, then two, as if it had doubled in my hands. They were brown, flexible, seemingly worn in but with the price tag still on them. I slipped my hands into them. They were a perfect fit. The man walked me across a deep meadow, French, high green grass, bordered by a line of poplars.
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‘I had a dream last night,’ said T, ‘about cocks. There were three. And I was testing them, to compare and contrast. And the one I chose was the one that went best with its own body.’
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At Primrose Gully, a night visitor: a bloke from up the road. Unblinking eyes, ocker manner. Glad not to have been alone when I saw his tall figure stooping to come under the creepers. Q and I tried to hide our boredom, tried to be sociable, while a splendid silver moon rose over the gully and moved steadily up into a cobalt sky through cloudbanks and then wraiths of gossamer. We kept exclaiming; he showed no interest.
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A letter from V. Charming, I suppose. He says my handwriting is ‘nicely childlike, and yet not’.
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I read his first novel again. Before I’d heard his voice I never got it, or saw what the fuss was about. It never made me laugh. But now I can hear its tone, and it’s so funny that waiting in the foyer of the Con while M does her cello exam I keep giving grunts of laughter and having to sink my mouth into my jumper neck. My response to this is a kind of panic. Why would anyone so brilliant (and giving the appearance of casual brilliance) want to have anything to do with me?
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She comes out of the exam all flushed. ‘Guess what happened! I had to sight-read a Bach sarabande! The teacher told me the prelude was all I had to do—but they pointed to the syllabus! And it said “TWO pieces”!’ In the evening the teacher rang to apologise. His voice was trembling. I was astonished by his distress. I said, ‘Look—she came through it all right. If she’d come home in dark despair maybe I’d feel differently—but she handled it well—and it’s the quality of the teaching she’s had over the past four years that enabled her to handle it.’ He seemed relieved, and calmed down. Later she told me about the ambitious mothers of many of the music students: ‘They live through their daughters. I hate them.’
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Stomach cramps, attributable only to the fact that L is speeding down the Hume in my direction. I’m jumpy, I can’t hide it. I’m a free woman. He’s a free man. I like him. He likes me. What am I complaining about?
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I wake up early to get M off to school. When I return L is sleeping soundly—‘sweetly’, I think, looking at his head of brown curls half buried in the yellow sheet. I stand by the door and watch him with that respect one feels for completely silent, still slumber.
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‘God,’ says the law student, ‘he’s a hunk, that guy. I saw him coming out of the bathroom’—he makes a two-handed gesture from shoulder to waist—‘and I wanted to say, “You can be in my video clip! You can mime my part!”’
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I manoeuvre the complicated intersections that lead off the Westgate Bridge and listen with a burning curiosity to L’s tale of heartbreak. ‘I can’t even use her name! I’ve had a terrible year. Probably the worst year of my life. Thousands of dollars worth of phone calls. Always rushing from one country to another. The strain of everything. The language problem. The only happiness I’ve had this year’s been with you.’
I look up sharply. Me? Have I got the dates wrong?
He’s addicted to drama, glamour, pain. He’s almost totally un-self-examined, at least in the sense in which I mean it.
——
I sneaked a look in his address book when he was out of the room. There she was. I had expected beauty but was shocked by what I saw in her face: a delicacy of emotional tone that was almost frightening. Wide face, wide-set eyes, an enormous mouth that still looked childlike—it was the mouth that was terrifying—it looked as if it was quivering, the shape of its top lip was irregular in a way that was too sensitive for life. I felt a stab of fear—I mean for her—and for him too because he’s put what happened in a little shrine, with a candle burning in front of it, and he worships it.
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He wakes panting from a dream. He’s had a phone call. It’s her; but her voice fades away and is disconnected—it’s a nightmare, I feel the shock of it, how it hurts him.
I see that I’ve actually lived a quiet life.
In the restaurant he asks me how my marriage ended. He shudders with horror, picks up a knife and mimes operatically stabbing himself in the heart.
‘If something like that happened to me I’d—I’d—I’d never have seen them again—I’d have wiped them out of my life! I’d have—’
‘You’d have to kill something in yourself, to achieve that. That’s revenge. That’s useless.’
‘But you can’t be an emotional wimp about it. You’ve got the right to feel things.’
‘Are you kidding? Do you think I didn’t feel anything? I was wounded. I was bleeding.’
With him one can use that sort of language.
He leaves me a Gilberto tape. I play it over and over, in the car. What on earth can come of this? Nothing but the pleasure of what it is. Let it be what it is, then. And be grateful.
——
Deeply embedded in V’s novel are turns of phrase of an Australianness I’ve never before seen on paper. Someone describes a collection of railway stations, of which one was ‘completely rusty. The platform, benches, even the ticket office…were all made from old railway track. Passengers would always come away with orange hands.’ ‘Come away with.’ This could be my mother speaking. I laugh again and again, and at times shudder at what awfulness he sees in people.
——
Having a beer in the kitchen with the law student while I cook dinner. We talk about falling in love.
‘Do you learn how not to,’ he asks, ‘as you get older?’
‘You learn what the process is, and you recognise its stages.’
‘Do you mean you can stop yourself?’
‘You can discipline yourself. You can feel the moment at which it would be possible to let go another string of yourself, and you can choose whether to or not.’
‘I’ve said “I love you” about a thousand times.’
‘So have I.’
‘Have you?’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘A million times.’
‘And I always mean it.’
‘Me too. Or—hang on—I’ve probably had to force it out two or three times.’
‘Force it out?’
‘I mean I said it when it was no longer true. Just to make someone feel all right.’
‘I know exactly what you mean. When Donna used to come round here, remember? All I had to do was say “I love you” and she’d stop crying. It was the only thing that’d make her stop.’
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Three teenage suicides in the news: a boy hangs himself after an argument about eating too many biscuits; a boy shoots himself because he wasn’t allowed to have a motorbike; a sixteen-year-old girl shoots herself with a shotgun and they don’t know why. ‘Don’t anyone out there even think of doing it,’ said the mother of one of the boys on TV. ‘You don’t know what you leave behind.’
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A sunny day. I am wearing a floppy skirt with hyacinth and white stripes. The psychological effect of wearing stripes. They move, and cross each other, with an audible whirr.
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Dreamt I was wheeling my bike towards the uni through an unfinished two-storey building. I was wearing a thin white nightie but also a black jacket that meant I was reasonably modest. Workmen whistled at me but in imitation because I was singing as I went along. In a garden I asked a man, ‘How deep is that compost heap?’ The compost heap was beautiful. It had a coating of green moss and did not look ugly or messy: it contained a substance, it seemed, already smooth and broken down.
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I thought of volunteering at the Children’s Hospital. But there are huge nurses’ strikes on.
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Watching ‘experimental’ movies is terribly cheering—makes one feel more daring.
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Lying in despair on the couch in my work room I noticed in the wire shelf a forgotten notebook. Pulled it out. It was a sort of diary I had kept back at the beginning of writing The Children’s Bach. At first I thought, I’ll be able to sell this one day. Then I read it and saw with astonishment and relief the HOPELESS MESS my mind was, back then. I thought of the shapely thing The Children’s Bach is, and remembered that writing a novel is a process of refinement. Out of chaos comes the fine thing; out of chaos comes form.
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In an essay Fay Zwicky quotes Germaine Greer about Henry Handel Richardson’s ‘provincialism’ in being unable to see that The Getting of Wisdom is superior to Maurice Guest: ‘…for in a country which is utterly philistine, people who are genuinely excited by the arts tend to distrust any art form which seems close to ordinary life and to adopt paranoid, overblown concepts of the artistic personality’.
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Worked on the bandaid story, wept over it a bit—it’s still lumpy and clumsy, but I am working on it.
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The house vendors have accepted my offer. I signed a contract.
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I used the expression ‘a beachhead’ about the steadiness I’ve worked out for myself over this year. The Jungian sat up. He quoted Freud—‘Where id is, there ego shall be’—and said he thought ‘beachhead’ was a better image than the strict idea of the ego descending right over the id (he made a covering, seizing movement from above with one claw-like hand). ‘The ocean’s still there. Nothing’s permanently reclaimed. It can all be washed right back in.’ He said, ‘Now you’re back in contact with that part of yourself you’d lost, you must feel reluctant to lose it again in a big projection—which is what falling in love is—letting your whole peace of mind be dependent on someone else.’
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My forty-fourth birthday (and La Stupenda’s sixtieth, I heard on the radio on my way to the pool). M won’t come out with me for breakfast. The law student, embarrassed perhaps, offers himself as company.
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I told L my husband gave me a lemon tree for my birthday.
‘A lemon? Sour fruit. Couldn’t he have chosen a peach?’
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Dreamt I was standing on a bridge over a canal, looking down into the water. A black, hairy, slimy creature surfaced and swam away down the canal. I screamed, ‘A rat!’ but it was too big to be a rat. I watched with revulsion as it swam away from me, its shoulders working, and then dragged itself up on to the bank. I saw it wasn’t a rat, it was as big as a cat and had a thickness at the root of its tail that made it unidentifiable.
Trigger for this: a dead thing near the tram stop the other day when the law student and I were driving.
HG: ‘It’s a rat. It’s huge.’
LS: ‘I don’t think it is a rat. Go back, let’s have another look.’
U-turn.
HG: ‘You’re right, it’s a baby possum.’
We both made sentimental noises. Whereas when it was a rat we thought, Good riddance.
——
Clowning with M on the couch, actually having her in my arms and making her laugh by teasing her about the trumpet player in the band, who is six foot three, pale-skinned, handsome, with a WWI face and brow, hair pulled back in a ponytail.
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V’s piece about Borneo in the National Times. An efficient piece of writing without any sign that his emotions had been engaged. And why should they? It’s only journalism.
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Dreamt my sister and two other women gave me, in a huge cinema, baskets of flowers and herbs to plant in the garden of my new house. In exchange I wrote out for them the words of ‘Praise My Soul the King of Heaven’.
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Went to work and wrote a short story about a ‘luminous boy’. It poured out in a rush and then I spent a timeless couple of hours fiddling with it, changing this and that, cutting, shaping etc—utterly enjoyable. Now I must discipline myself not to spoil it with my cumbersome afterthoughts.
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R rang and offered me their house in Sydney for three weeks while they’re down the coast.
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M came home from her HSC English exam in excellent spirits. Her father called her at dinnertime from America and after this she was radiant with happiness.
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A cheque arrived from the lady in Queensland. Stunned, I accepted. I gave half of it to my sister so she could see a shrink.
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L sends me an account of his latest struggles to extract himself from emotional entanglements (‘you must think I’m a walking basket case’), plus a drawing of his just-planted garden. I wrote back, taking a breezy tone: ‘You are much too charming and good-looking for a tranquil life, and in this respect we belong to different species.’ Told him I’d be in Sydney in summer. ‘But you’re overloaded. The last thing you need is more female attention. You sound like a man who’s going down for the third time in a sea of consequences.’
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Mass-murderers of girls arrested and charged in Perth. A married couple in their thirties. Shallow bush graves. Stranglings, suffocations, sexual assaults. What does this mean? The devil, A would say. The rottenness in people.
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While M slaves in her room for tomorrow’s exam the law student and I drink beer downstairs and listen to Miles Davis and Mink De Ville. I’m fascinated by the power that beauty has over him. ‘On the beach, Helen, I’d look at this creation—the colour of her, and the skin of her arms—and I’d be nearly passing out—thinking, How can God have made something this perfect?’
——
At Brunswick Baths I was alone for an hour against a brick wall in the sun reading J’s new stories in proofs. His terrifying prolificness. I read until I felt trembly, hypoglycaemic, and had to go home.
