Intimate Antipathies

by Luke Carman

  On the final day of the tour we reach the festival proper. In a clubhouse on the opening night the managing director cries into the microphone when he thinks of the love and faith the volunteers have shown over the twenty years he has been in charge. At a panel in an enormous tent on a rainy day with muddied footprints smothering everything in sight, Gabbie makes an audience of hundreds break into tears and applause when she shares her heartache at having to give away teaching, and the students she so dearly loves. Zacharey chairs our final panel together, asks us to reflect on the experiences of the tour. In the crowd, three rows from the marquee door, I notice my book editor, Alice, and I cannot wait to tell her, through the microphone that is going to be passed into my hands, how profoundly this trip has changed my life. I will say, ‘I know how trite this will all sound’ – but before the microphone comes to my hand she glances at her watch, rises from her seat and walks out of the tent, her long black coat clutched tight against the rain.

  Of course, all spells are temporary, though they may come back from time to time. What I couldn’t know, sitting at my desk and wondering if I should take one path or another, or in my seat on the stage at Byron Bay, watching people come and go as we talk to them about how strange it was to feel so much for each other in our rental van, is that eventually a new present will arrive in time, and I will sit at a screen with these impressions and images moving through me like a series of dreams – not quite sure how much of it can be salvaged from the past, how much to leave behind, and how to alight the ride at some final, permanent stop.

  On the long road north my wife and I parked in the shade between two cafés on a wide street in Bellingen, with purple banners staked beneath an enormous oak tree, to spray ‘Just Married’ on the back windscreen of our Holden with a can of shaving cream. Two hippies and a limp dog, the latter anchored to an awning post, watched us, and I shrugged my shoulders at them all to apologise for advertising the institution of marriage in their bohemian grove. The dog put its calico head to its bowl and shut its tired eyes. The sun was saturating. We’d had a few drinks at a pub on the highway, where I came upon a book of old photographs tucked into a wire stand on an empty window sill, and I flipped open to the image of a broad-shouldered man in thick boots and a heavy coat standing beside a foal-thin lad that we took to be an apprentice. Both men were looking up into the camera from inside a deep pit, and the bigger man’s thick hands were wrapped solidly around a sledge hammer dripping with gore. Pig’s blood covered the apprentice’s white overalls, and was smeared across the curved walls of the pit. We put the book away and drank in the sun.

  So grim, sometimes, the melancholia of all these images. I get up and leave the essay for a final time, check the pile of books beside the bed. Just inside the covers of Bitter Greens, I run my hands over the inscription inked inside that reads, ‘May the Marquis live in your heart forever!’ For a while I am back in Byron Bay, in the wet tents and the muddy fields, the treetop resorts and the luggage-heavy van, by the river with the worms, under the strange charms of a Northern Rivers romance.

  AN INTIMATE ANTIPATHY

  When I was a married man with all the usual pathologies of my time and place, I lived in a converted bakery on a street in St Peters where for some nights each year a vagrant would settle his body on the sidewalk outside our house. I’d see him in the surrounding suburbs when he wasn’t camped on his bundles under our window, wandering by the Princes Highway some nights, or near the Officeworks driveway in Petersham, with his swollen trousers and blackened toes, and so I figured he travelled from point to point by some strange nomadic rhythm, coming back like the flowers on the jacarandas via a springtime of his own arithmetic. Often times there was so much dried vomit and spittle congealed in his beard that the drooping knots of hair looked like tree roots growing out from the cracks spread across his sun-ravaged face. The top of his skull was scalped red and white with welts and blistering burns from the long disassociated meditations he made sitting in direct sunlight by the roadside, hunched and motionless as an ancient ascetic petrified in prayer.

  Though he never caused me any harm, I sure didn’t like him hanging around. My wife would sometimes claim to have given him a drink of water or a piece of fruit, and once I thought I heard her asking him if he fancied an apple or a glass of milk while I was asleep upstairs. When made aware of my wife’s charities I’d make my disapproval known, and ask her to leave the man to his own deranged devices, worried that by her influence he’d become like a stray cat that has reckoned on a reliable source of nourishment, and is forever afterwards pawing around the doorway for scraps of feed or some other attention. Worse still, though they say there’s no link between deranged folk and violent crimes, I feared that he’d lock his whirling mind on my wife, on account of her kindness, and concoct a fever-dreamed reason for doing her harm. It didn’t matter, my wife never listened to me about him or any other thing, and took my fears about the man camped under the window as the logical extension of her husband’s fearful temper, prone as I was to paranoias and needless fretting. The more I pressed these concerns the more she responded with an expression which, though ostensibly blank, expressed through some subtlety an air of patient exasperation. I admit, too, to being disturbed by the low cries he used to make at night when what I took to be delusional fits of schizophrenia would transport him into an inner world of his own private imagining. Some nights, when sleep would not come, I’d sit in the dark of our bedroom, on a wicker chair by the window, listening to his cries. They put me in mind of the ejaculations a yelping animal caught in a trap might make, and I’d shudder and wonder what he was seeing in his night journeys into illusion. The other thing his cries reminded me of was my mother, who when I was a boy used to find herself attacked by malevolent spirits in her sleep, and the eerie moans she’d make in those paralysing nights were awfully similar in their character to the vagrant’s yelping, in the sense that you could tell the sound coming from her half-open mouth was a shadow of the real cries taking place in some other plane of private experience.

  Whatever it was the rag-man had going on in his alternate reality, the next morning, sitting out in the full sun with his eyes cast down into the tatters and stains between his knees, and with fresh vomit and drool drying in his beard, it was clear he had suffered deeply for having lived through his nocturnal picture show, and on those mornings I was determined to avoid his presence. The more ordinary madness began to get me down in that house on the street in St Peters, the darker my own thoughts became under the everyday strain of domestic discomfort, the more I started to take his dispiriting appearance outside our house as a portentous and unwelcome omen.

  On nights when things were really bad at home in those married years, I’d go out into the park at the heart of St Peters and sit on the steps where there’s a monument to residential misery built in memory of all the homes they had to buy out and bulldoze when the airplane traffic drove the whole neighbourhood crazy and reduced their property values to zero. I’ve never read into the facts of what happened to the residents there when the council bought the homes and replaced them with a park, but if you look closely at the sculpture of the giant couch they built in the middle of the park there, which I suppose represents a living room exposed to the planes that come flying so close overhead that you can feel the shake of their engines in your chest, and the vapour-slick belly of their fuselages looks like the smooth undercarriage of some airborne mammal, then you can see hundreds of crude little sculpted faces covering their ears on the couch like little Munchian screamers. I don’t know much about sculptures, or any other art – not even obvious art like the kind an 1893 expressionist might paint. It’s all double-dutch to me. But I can say that I’ve always liked the big couch in St Peters with its little screams, and I enjoyed being reminded by it of ‘The Scream’, which fascinated me even as a teenager with no interest in paintings or art at all. When I was young I read that Edvard had once written somewhere that when he passed over a river bridge
at sunset on some long gone evening in Nice, he felt an infinite cry sweep through all of nature, and he sensed the cry would keep on passing through all of us for all of time like an eternal wave. ‘There was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city,’ he supposedly wrote later in his diary about his walk across the bridge when he had the idea of his shrieking colours of blood and existential dread. If I were a painter, I would perhaps have wanted to paint blood-red tongues of fire above blue-black fjords, or some other local version of whatever a fjord looks like, but painting takes talent and practice and I have wisdom enough not to waste time with the latter in the former’s absence.

  In Renata Adler’s book Speedboat, which many people who try to paint with words claim to love, she wonders about the people she sees on the streets who go picking out the scraps of things from bins and gutters. We’ve all seen these odd tinkers who bend down suddenly like machines and snatch at discarded butts with a heron’s curled dexterity. Renata thinks these wandering recyclers might be writers trying to get through their strange confusions with the world and their own little screams the way writers do. I have never been one of those people on the street who are looking for butts and cans, and I find it a strange idea to compare the occupations of writing and scavenging, but then, I know that when Leonard Cohen’s father died, Leonard claimed to recall going into the parental bedroom on the day of the funeral, opening the wardrobe where his father’s suits were hung and inserting into the collar of one suit jacket a note he’d written. He claimed he could not recall what was written on the note, only the act of inserting it into the collar itself. It was all Leonard could do in the face of an awful internal commotion, the external cause of which he was helpless to affect. And he never really stopped putting those notes in the collar, so to speak. ‘I followed the course’, he wrote in one of his little notes, ‘from chaos to art / desire the horse / depression the cart.’ I’m no longer a married man, no longer live in a converted bakery on a street in St Peters, but I still see the vagrant around sometimes, living rough on the streets of the inner west, though I don’t live out that way anymore. Someone in Newtown told me his name one afternoon when we walked past him together, though I can’t remember what it was. ‘How do you know his name?’ I asked, and she looked at me like the question itself was mad. ‘I asked him,’ she told me, shaking her head.

  These days I’m only ever passing through those parts. Most of the time I’m out there to look after my son and to play in the park with him. One afternoon, coming home from a park in the inner west, not long after I left my wife and child, I made my late transition from ordinary, everyday madness into genuine lunacy at an intersection between Bonnyrigg and Badgery’s Creek on Elizabeth Drive. The intersection where I first began to lose my mind completely was declared the worst in Sydney when I was a young man. Its notoriety was not due to the frequency of accidents occurring there, but a spate of carjackings that took place over a period of two months at the turn of the century. There were more carjackings at this intersection at that time than anywhere else in Australia. On a walk home from work at the plaza one afternoon, I saw the journos there, setting up their cameras to capture the scene. It didn’t look anything special to me, just a regular set of traffic lights. I was coming home in my stepdad’s tie and a four-dollar shirt and the clouds to the west were wild grey over the mountains. They put the intersection on the cover of the paper the next day, but it still didn’t look like much to write about to me.

  I think of this moment of newsworthiness whenever the subject of madness arises, even if I am the one who brings it up in the first place. I think it’s strange that it was this ordinary but notorious place where I lost my plot completely and became a raving loon.

  Like the stranger in Camus’ novel, the sun was (sort of) in my eyes that afternoon when things warped inside. It was red and pink and setting over the distant Blue Mountains. I happened to be heading for the mountains because, having left my little family, I had retreated to live out there with a still-married couple of friends, who let me put my bed in their spare room because they were Christians who wanted to help people out when they could. I’d spent the whole day in Newtown, playing with my son on the swings and slides in Camperdown Park until we saw the trees were filled with stink bugs. My father always said stink bugs can send you blind with their spray so we left the park, though I don’t know whether that is true about stink bugs blinding people, since no one else has ever mentioned such a thing to me, and my dad can exaggerate. There wasn’t really anywhere for us to go after the park was ruined, so my son and I just sort of wandered around and looked at the graffiti and the people lying in the grass and on blankets drinking beers and smoking. Some dogs were going by and my son patted those and I said we’d go inspect the ice-cream shop but it was all shut up and he said his legs were tired. ‘I’m half dead,’ he said about his tired legs. What I really wanted was a beer, but kids don’t go for that sort of thing and anyway I had to drive, so we just sat around for a while. When it was time to take him home, I got there just in time to be only a little late, but there was trouble in the doorway anyhow. It isn’t easy to be calm and rational when you’re dropping off your child and you’re suffering from the normal sorts of disorders and you’ve got to be driving away as soon as the door shuts. It takes a lot of work to keep your composure, and I’m not really composed in the first place. I admit that I sometimes made it harder than it needed to be, and when his mother and I started to disagree about what a young man ought to experience to make him grow up strong and healthy of mind, she started to win because she’d been reading books about the subject, and so I just said, ‘Well I don’t need a book to tell me how to raise my son.’ But I had to slam the door to get the last word in and I’m pretty sure that’s not the right thing to do whether the books agree or not.

  The sound of the door crashing into the frame, the empty windows on the houses of the street in St Peters, the slicked spiked hair of the cat sitting and staring from behind the weeds and bars of my old neighbour’s yard. You know that high and mighty feline look they give you. ‘What are you looking at?’ I actually asked the cat that question. And the look of his smug yellow eyes and the smell of the paint factory on the corner there and my Dad’s face when he was pointing out the stink bugs in his orange trees – these things kept playing round and round in my mind as I was driving away to the mountains. There was this bad pressure in the centre of my head. It was always there when the ex and I did any fighting, and nothing seemed to push it away except getting home and drinking in the spare room of my friends’ house with the lights out.

  I came to the intersection between Bonnyrigg and Badgery’s Creek after an hour or so of peak-hour driving, and the pain was so bad I could feel it moving like a metal slug under the skin of my forehead. The lights had me stopped there for a minute. I looked into my rear-view mirror. There was a man in a green Camry behind me. I couldn’t make out much about the guy because the sun was in my eyes, except he had dark shades on and his hair was slicked back. I was looking at that guy sitting there in his Camry, and I had an astonishing idea. It started slow and small, like a dot of dirt on the rear-view mirror that you’ve suddenly noticed, and since it blots out such a tiny portion of your vision you might not bother to clean it away for years. But I let the little idea sit there for a moment and suddenly it was all I could see. The idea was this: the man in the Camry with the shades and the slicked back hair was going to kill me.

  I have never been a confident man, and I’ve had my share of irrational ideas. When crossing a one-way street I look both ways, when walking into the next room I have to check if my fly is still up and my shirt is still buttoned, when the barista asks my name I say ‘um’ before I come up with the answer. I’ve never been certain of anything more complicated than my phone number, and even then I can only recite it correctly when I say it with the usual rhythm. I can count the number of certainties I’ve ever experienced on one hand, and I’ve lost track of h
ow many irrational things I’ve entertained. Once, when my younger brother was four, we were sitting in our kitchen drawing on scraps of paper with our pencils, and I heard my brother say ‘bonsai’. When I looked over, I saw he was drawing a little tree on his piece paper. It occurred to me that no four-year-old boy ought to know what a bonsai is. Yet, I’d heard him say it with my own ears and could see him drawing a little tiny tree with my own eyes. I concluded that my brother must be a cyborg. For the next few months I kept close watch on him to see if there was any further evidence of his being a robot underneath all that chubby skin. But he never did anything else suspiciously clever like that, so I decided he wasn’t a cyborg after all, or he was going to make a decent brother whether he was or wasn’t and I might as well go along with the charade.