‘What, Ellis? Are you out of your mind?’
‘He might expect it.’
‘Don’t be revolting.’
‘He does have an eye for the ladies, you know. And there you are, all young and juicy and adoring . . .’
‘It’s not that kind of thing. Besides which, Ellis is past his philandering days. He said so in that letter he read out on the radio about not being able to get it up anymore.’
On my part, at least, the relationship was entirely innocent. I was in it purely for his cerebral cortex. The way Bob wrote split me open and connected to something valuable, something I had never possessed yet felt like I had lost. The older man/younger woman dynamic didn’t titillate or interest me at all. If anything, it felt as though my sex got in the way of an average, healthy, garden-variety hero worship. If I were a young man, I told myself, nobody would care that I had Bob’s picture up on my studio wall and would talk to it in the mornings before starting work.
The next day we took the dog for a stroll on the beach—Bob seemed to have forgiven her rather forward introduction of the previous afternoon—and went out for breakfast, where he spilled egg and coffee across the table and himself.
We said relieved goodbyes and made a vague date to go and see a movie in a few weeks’ time. In retrospect, the ensuing mix-up was entirely generational—I had said yes, presuming that we would confirm closer to the date.
It was still difficult to quell that frisson I felt when receiving texts from Ellis. There he was, a name in my phone, right between Blue and Booky.
Oh, just a text from Bob Ellis, I would tell people casually. I think we’re going to the movies together.
Friends had enjoyed a brief period of cracking wise when I first got the hound—I didn’t know your dog could text, etcetera. I had allowed them their levity. There was something about receiving a text or an email from someone you admired. For a brief moment you were catapulted up into their peer group, conversing with the gods. I had felt this way when I was introduced to Patti Smith backstage at the Big Day Out.
‘How are you?’ she had asked, politely.
‘Food,’ I replied, having clearly been confused as to whether I had wanted to say ‘fine’ or ‘good’ and settling instead for an interesting combination of the two. Patti Smith had walked away. The gods had closed the door.
The next I heard of our movie date was when Ellis called me. He was standing in front of the cinema, he said, and had travelled all the way from Palm Beach for the occasion we had specifically agreed on. Where the fuck was I?
Everything froze.
‘I thought you were going to text and confirm,’ I said feebly.
He hung up. He was furious.
‘Bob Ellis just hung up on me,’ I told my friend Lindsay.
‘I didn’t know your dog could use the phone,’ said Lindsay, tediously.
Man and dog became so commonplace people stopped making jokes. Bob Ellis was my dog, who I loved more than life itself. Bob Ellis was a writer. They were simply now two unconnected things that shared the same name.
Bob and I didn’t see each other for a while after that, me tentatively keeping my distance as he cursed me as a flighty youth to anybody who would listen. A gentle peace was eventually reached and yet months later when I was unable to help him launch his book he was almost apoplectic with rage all over again. ‘I suppose I shall have to ask Tony Abbott instead,’ he bellowed, and he did. The book was launched roughly twenty-four hours after Abbott had taken over the Liberal leadership and the eyes of the nation were trained upon Gleebooks. In hindsight I had done Bob a favour.
I insisted on his being on the bill at the inaugural Men of Letters event I was co-organising, amongst more commercially well-known types like Matt Preston and Tim Rogers and Eddie Perfect. He was obviously uncomfortable, pacing in the foyer before the show, complaining about sharing the stage with ‘fucking comedians’. I sent Gabi to placate him, but he was growing tetchy and impossible. He insisted he wanted to leave, he should never have come. Gabi returned to me with a worried look.
‘I got him a glass of red,’ she said. ‘But he seems fairly pissed off.’
‘He’s always pissed off,’ I told her.‘That’s why he’s a genius.’
When it came time for him to speak he lumbered to the lectern, took a breath, and within moments had silenced the room. He spoke, from the heart, of his wife. He spoke of their many miscarriages, the trials and tribulations of their marriage, his mistakes, his regrets. It was a piece rubbed raw with honesty, and Bob delivered it in the patented ‘cadence of the King James Bible’ that David Marr had once admiringly fashioned as his oratory signature.
He received a standing ovation. Everybody wept.
This, I thought to myself. This is why.
I felt like my hoarse devotion of Ellis had culminated in that moment. I actually went around to various people at the event saying, ‘See? See?’ I wanted to sing him from the rooftops.
He knew he had done well and looked like a prince backstage afterwards, accepting congratulations, beaming delightedly and passing opinion on everyone and everything in the room. When he saw me he swept me up in a big sweaty toxic embrace. All was forgiven. His eyes were glistening with proud tears.
‘That was brilliant, Bob. Thank you.’
He leaned into my ear.
‘If that’s not worth a blowjob,’ he whispered. ‘Nothing is.’
Our relationship seemed to level out after that. Perhaps now that sex had made its ugly presence felt it created the necessity of distance. He would send me a text once every few months, or I would see him at a book launch, and I would hug him and nod and smile and listen to his latest spray on Kevin Rudd. And then I would go home and read his novels and diaries and his articles on the ABC website and I would seamlessly re-enter that world of infatuation where he remained infallible, he remained distant, and would never, ever suffer the indignity of being human.
TO MARIEKE, FOR HER MEMOIR
I’d had some trouble with a younger single female in recent years. She kept me waiting for nine hundred and twenty-seven days for the return of the sex we began with, and came late, or didn’t turn up to, a hundred of the writing sessions—in Adelaide, the Adelaide Hills, Melbourne and Sydney—of a film based on her life called Honeymoon Girl and didn’t turn up to meet the producers, actors and funding bodies either.
So when I learned, six years after the event, that Marieke Hardy had named her dog after me, after I had met her and she had said, ‘You write like Hemingway,’ at the 2020, I was attracted to her chest and her intellect—in that order—but feared she’d be like the previous one, a glittering tease.
And when I drove from Gosford to see Hunger with her, grope her and force her down on my dick and SHE DIDN’T TURN UP and couldn’t be reached on her mobile, this seemed to be true. Her excuse, that I hadn’t confirmed it, was either valid or not, but I was very angry, not just because of my geographical inconvenience but because she was, or seemed, exactly like Tracey Rohrsheim in all aspects including beauty, wit and insanity, and I wrote her off.
Things changed a bit with her texts of apology and her continuing public utterance of her adoration of me.
She broke up with her bloke and bought me a superb meal she paid for in three figures, but there were three panes of clear glass between us and it was clear no sex would occur though she was famous for spreading it around, like Jacki Weaver when young, with good humour and great intelligence.
I decided to leave her alone, in every sense. I did this three or four times. Then I thought she might be helpful in getting me on television and kept in touch with her. I gave her a book she hadn’t read, and a play she still hasn’t read, and a series pilot with a role for her in it she hasn’t read either.
What is a coquette?
Well, like Audrey Hepburn, a similar girl with a smaller chest, in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. What one character calls a real phoney.
It would be different if we lived in
the same town. We’d be meeting regularly on Monday nights and reading out paragraphs of great books to each other.
But geography, old age, fatness and (yes) intermittent impotence has intervened.
Disappointed? Oh yes. Still keen? Less so. Think she’s gorgeous? Yes. And brilliant? Absolutely.
And so it goes . . .
An afterword
by my ex-boyfriend Tim
When I first went to her place, she sat me down with a premixed can of gin and tonic and pulled out a book by Ivan Brunetti—the graphic artist. She said,‘I like how beautiful this is . . . he writes about suicide the whole time.’ I looked up at her. How strange it seemed to me to find these things beautiful. Where I was from suicide was sad, dark and troubled, not really associated with beautiful. But this small woman, with deep brown eyes and a cluttered flat that looked like Sherlock Holmes’s place mixed with the British Museum, was pulling me into a strange sort of fix.
We fell in love not long after, propelled by a shared interest in the people who railed against and defied the mundane. Writers like Bukowski and Fante, Flannery O’Connor and John Cheever. The ones who write about the sad, the bad, the mad. I certainly was exposed to many things I normally would have missed if not for her—and, I hope, vice versa. We travelled together, lived together, moved houses together, moved interstate together, all for a long while. She is one of my best friends.
We had a sometimes difficult relationship, two personalities that clashed, but I don’t want to talk about that here—that is for us. And, though the harder moments were hard, we both knew we had found something very special together and the sweet times will be with me always.
In any relationship, you see people very closely and I had been witness to a lot of her trouble, but the task of writing a book was something I strongly kept urging her to do. And so, stories started taking shape and some were finished, which was wonderful. When talking about this book she was to write, she kept telling me she wanted to write about the truth and the ‘hard’ things—again, something we both admired in others’ work.
Some things you can only do alone, I guess, and there are secrets inside her, still hidden from me. I have tried to learn not to shy away from her because of that; she has told me so many secrets already.
Late last year, we broke up. It was complicated and tiring—mostly achingly frustrating. I had to go and find someplace else to live. I was through with the thought of perpetual and confused heartbreak. I had to try and move on. Which involved a lot of drinking and it was a sad time. It still is some days.
To see myself in print feels like I’m a ‘character’, and that’s a strange feeling. Going to Bob Ellis’s home was hilarious, probably because we were both a bit nervous. I was in hysterics for the most part. I find the prostitute story very funny too, and I admire the strength of truth in her words.
The potential reaction from friends and family to some stories makes me feel uneasy sometimes, probably because I don’t want them to misjudge her. To be brutally honest and frank takes a lot of balls and it’s very easy for other people to sit safely on the other side and judge. But it’ll be okay. It always is, somehow.
The darkness, I’ve learnt—after that first time at her joint with Brunetti—is as present as the light, and the mundane and ‘normal’ get too much attention. Some things won’t go away and they should be celebrated.
Thank you, darling Marieke.
Acknowledgements
Heartfelt thankyous:
Tim, Gabi, Gen, Mitch, Sugar, Fluffy, Booky, Hotman, Slam, Luscy, Sime, Bel, Alice, The Conti, Michaela McGuire, Lee Sandwith, Benjamin Law, Lorelei Vashti, Kirsty Fisher, Dan Kelly, Larky, Claire Collins, Women of Letters, Lindsay McDougall, Edgar’s Mission, Ben Ball, Ronnie Scott, First Tuesday Book Club, The Bubble, Jo Lyons, Jane Palfreyman, d.a. calf, The Book Grocer, and a dog named Bob Ellis.
Oh, and Mum and Dad . . . if we’re still on speaking terms. x
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