The Feel of Steel

by Helen Garner

  HELEN GARNER was born in Geelong in 1942. She has been publishing novels, short stories, non-fiction and journalism since 1977 when her first novel, Monkey Grip, appeared. Her most recent books are The First Stone and True Stories, and her selected short fiction My Hard Heart. She lives in Melbourne.

  OTHER BOOKS BY THE AUTHOR

  Monkey Grip

  Honour & Other People’s Children

  The Children’s Bach

  Postcards from Surfers

  Cosmo Cosmolino

  The Last Days of Chez Nous (screenplay)

  The First Stone (non-fiction)

  True Stories (non-fiction)

  My Hard Heart (selected short stories)

  All reasonable attempts have been made by the author to obtain permission to quote from material known to be in copyright; any copyright holders who believe their copyright to have been breached are invited to contact Pan Macmillan.

  First published 2001 in Picador by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited

  1 Market Street, Sydney

  Copyright © Helen Garner 2001

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the Publisher.

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication Data:

  Garner, Helen, 1942– .

  The feel of steel.

  ISBN 0 330 36289 5.

  1. Garner, Helen, 1942– -Anecdotes. 2. Garner, Helen, 1942– -Attitudes. 3. Garner, Helen, 1942– -Family relationships. 4. Women authors, Australian -20th century- Political and social views. I. Title.

  A828.309

  Typeset in 11.5/15 pt Granjon by Midland Typesetters

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  Cover and text design by Gayna Murphy, Greendot Design

  These electronic editions published in 2007 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd

  1 Market Street, Sydney 2000

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.

  The Feel of Steel

  Helen Garner

  Mobipocket format 978-1-74197-471-3

  Online format 978-1-74197-672-4

  EPUB format 978-1-74262-547-8

  Macmillan Digital Australia

  www.macmillandigital.com.au

  Visit www.panmacmillan.com.au to read more about all our books and to buy both print and ebooks online. You will also find features, author interviews and news of any author events.

  TO RUTH, AND TO O.M. BOWERS,

  WITH LOVE AND GRATITUDE; AND TO MY GENEROUS SPIRITED NEPHEW, KARIM.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  My thanks to the following publications, in which versions of most of these pieces first appeared: the Age, Best Australian Essays (ed. Peter Craven, Bookman and Black Inc.), the Bulletin, Good Weekend, Heat, House & Garden and Women’s Weekly.

  I found the poem on page 37, ‘Life, friends, is boring’, in John Berryman’s Selected Poems 1938–1968 (Faber); the lines on page 44 from Alexander Pope’s ‘Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot’ in The Norton Anthology of Poetry (Norton); the poem on page 45, ‘Friends’, in W.B. Yeats’ Selected Poetry (Papermac); and the lines on page 72 from R.M. Rilke’s ‘Ninth Duino Elegy’ in the Stephen Mitchell translation (Picador Classics).

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About Helen Garner

  Also by Helen Garner

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Writing Home

  The Goddess of Weeping

  Regions of Thick-Ribbed Ice

  Woman in a Green Mantle

  Tower Diary

  Sighs too Deep for Words

  Melbourne’s Famous Water

  Tutto Sereno

  A Spy in the House of Excrement

  Baby Coughs

  Our Mother’s Flood 1

  Moon-Gazing

  My Blue Glasses

  Into Thin Air

  Baby Goes to the Movies

  Charlie’s Match

  Tess Bows Out

  Pie Boy at the Fracture Clinic

  At Freedom

  Auntie’s Clean Bed

  Have Respect

  The Feel of Steel 1

  Our Mother’s Flood 2

  The Ukelele Club

  Who Spilt the Wine?

  The Nanna-Mobile

  Das Bettelein

  Louis’ Barmitzvah

  Golden Sandals

  The Feel of Steel 2

  Arrayed for the Bridal

  Writing Home

  In the summer of 1996 my parents moved from a townhouse in the Melbourne suburb of Kew to an eighth-floor apartment right in the middle of the city. One forty-two-degree morning my father and I made the final trip to the Kew place, loaded up the car with the small items that the removalists had left behind, and set out for the new apartment.

  As we backed out of the drive I said to him, ‘How does it feel to be moving again, Dad? You’ve lived here for nearly ten years.’

  Looking straight ahead, he said in a defiant, resolute tone, ‘I don’t feel anything in particular. I’ve never had any attachment to anything I’ve ever owned or anywhere I’ve ever lived.’

  Months later I am still pondering this extraordinary statement. It can’t possibly be true, of course (though I suddenly understood why he had burnt the family’s slide collection), and a whole novel could be written around what it means that an old man should say such a thing. But the fact that he thinks it’s true, or wants it to be, must have something to do with my lack of a sense of home.

  What’s home supposed to be, anyway?

  Is it the flat in Sydney where I live now? That’s where my husband lives, the place we go back to after we’ve been out. It’s where we sleep every night, where we eat and bathe and talk and laugh and keep our things, where we get letters, where people call us on the phone, where we can be found if someone is looking for us.

  But at fifty-four can I really call home a place I’ve lived in for barely three years? No matter how beautiful and adventurous, Sydney is still foreign. Place names here don’t chime for me. St Kilda, Hawthorn, Keilor, Thomastown – I know what they mean. But Cronulla? St Ives? Gladesville? – Blank.

  My husband, in morbid vein, says to me, ‘The minute I drop off the twig, I bet you’ll move straight back to Melbourne.’

  Most people think that’s where I belong. But Melbourne’s not mine, and I’m not Melbourne’s – not in the deepest sense – not from childhood. I never even travelled on a tram till I went there in 1961, at eighteen, to start university. It became home to me, and is still the city I know best in the world, but it took me years to learn it, to stop feeling like a hick and a stranger.

  To find home, will I have to go further back into the past? How far back? Could this become painful?

  It’s a well-known fact that as people grow older, their memories of their earliest life become clearer and stronger. Somehow I never imagined this would happen to me – not yet!

  My childhood memories used to be narrative. Sparse, but good enough to serve as a basis for a few anecdotes and a bit of day-dreaming. They tended to centre round a small Victorian coastal town called Ocean Grove, where our family li
ved for a little while and which we left in 1952, the year I turned ten. Beach. Roller-skating. The flounder my father and his friends speared at night in the shallows. A cubby house where I hid to write by candle-light in an exercise book. Some pansies I planted and on which my father inadvertently dumped some sheets of corrugated iron. The path to school, playing under a row of pine trees, ‘loving’ a Hungarian boy called Valentine, swapping cards, skipping with the long and the short ropes.

  Yes, I had that stuff down.

  Then, about two years ago, I was dully walking along a Sydney street, worrying about nothing in particular, when – boom! I was small. I was turning the corner past the tankstand and putting my hand out to push open the back door of the Ocean Grove house. It was made of diagonal latticed slats painted dark green and rough to the touch. I nearly keeled over with the vividness of that door. It came from nowhere. It hadn’t entered my mind for over forty years.

  So this is what old people mean about memory! And now it keeps happening, completely at random. Over a couple of months, the whole Ocean Grove house hit me, blow after blow – the shape, the smell, the air. Then came the yard, the ‘tin garage’, the hedge, the cane couch, a tree with a low branch.

  No sooner had I got my breath than I was yanked back in a ten-year leap to the house my parents lived in when I was born, in Strachan Avenue, Manifold Heights, Geelong.

  Now this is really home. So far away and sunk so deep that no conscious act of remembering can seize the exact feel of it. If I wait for it, it won’t come. I have to be thinking about something else. It wants to sneak up on me and stab me between the ribs.

  A tree with trembling leaves. A striped dress made of floppy material, must have been Mum’s. The turn of the passage towards the lavatory. A secret possy behind the lounge room door, something to do with the Hoyts Suburban Theatres jingle. Some chooks? Mint, a foot crushing it. And someone holding me up to a night window packed with stars.

  Was there ever such a star-clogged sky, or was it fireworks? Guy Fawkes? A bonfire? I’ll never know, I can’t know, I don’t want to know. I could ask my mother and my father – but what if they’ve forgotten? What if their memory of that starry window has been blotted out by their five younger children? What if they don’t remember that night, when in all the world there was nobody but them and me?

  Is this why my father made his sweeping, defiant statement? Is this why my parents kept on moving all their adult lives? Has life taught them that it hurts too much to have the past thrust at you again and again, when it’s gone, gone, gone?

  The Goddess of Weeping

  After work I went along the hall to Tina’s flat for a game of Scrabble.

  I took some champagne to drown whatever private troubles each of us might have had, but we agreed we’d get the game moving before we cracked the bottle. Tina is a brilliant player. My only ambition in Scrabble is elegance of vocabulary, but hers is to whack down seven-letter words and pass four hundred. She always thrashes me. It’s restful. Also she’s got a Lazy Susan so you can spin the board to face the next player without disturbing the arrangement of the tiles. I like a neat board, and so does Tina.

  As she was digging out the set and I was sliding the champagne into the fridge, I heard a weird sound.

  Our building is in the most densely populated suburb in Australia, or so they say. Summer comes, the windows go up, and it’s shocking what you overhear. Neighbours curse and smash crockery, or make love loudly, or fart in front of the TV, or pedal busily on a squeaky exercise bike. Eventually you adapt, and go about your business quite serenely. It’s a selective deafness.

  But in Tina’s kitchen that day, I couldn’t identify the noise I was hearing. Was it even human? It was spaced out into groups: every five seconds or so, a slow downward run of vocal sounds, like barking. Was it coughing? An asthma attack?

  ‘Can you hear that?’

  We cocked our heads and stood still.

  ‘Is it a dog?’ said Tina. ‘Where’s it coming from?’

  We hurried out barefoot into the hall. In the booming acoustic space, we could tell at once that the sound was coming from the flat next door to Tina’s. We tiptoed up to its front door. It wasn’t a dog, or a sick person, or an asthmatic. A woman was in there, and she was crying.

  We froze on the landing.

  ‘Who is it?’ I whispered.

  ‘They only moved in yesterday.’

  ‘Do you think she’s all right? Should we knock?’

  ‘But we don’t know her,’ said Tina.

  On and on went the invisible woman, letting out her dropping runs of lamentation, rhythmic and regular as musical scales. We stood there with our hands over our mouths.

  ‘Is anyone in there with her?’ said Tina.

  ‘I hope she’s not suicidal.’

  We each pressed an ear against the door panel.

  No voice spoke, in the closed apartment. No one was abusing the woman, or comforting her, or urging her to pull herself together, or telling her it wasn’t worth having these feelings. She wasn’t trying to be discreet, to spare anyone embarrassment, to muffle or discipline or ironise her howling. She didn’t care if her puffy eyelids and distorted mouth were making her ‘ugly’. And her crying wasn’t the feeble snivelling you sneak away into the spare bedroom to do, or the sly, self-pitying tears you squeeze out in secret over the ironing board and scorch away. No, it was open-throated, deep-chested, full-voiced, solitary weeping.

  She was not a woman in need of help. She was a woman in luxury. Shameless, unabashed. Facing sorrow and paying it full, slow, thorough attention. It was leisurely. It was impressive. It radiated the authority of a religious ritual whose origins are lost in time.

  ‘Don’t let’s knock,’ said Tina in a low voice.

  But we dawdled outside the locked door, leaning on the wall, not looking at each other. The weeping and sobbing rolled majestically, tirelessly forward.

  ‘I can’t remember the last time I bawled like that,’ said one of us.

  After a while we crept back to Tina’s dining room table, set up the Scrabble and began to play. She surged ahead of me within two moves and we settled into our accustomed hierarchy. Usually we wise-crack in foul language and screech a lot as we play, but on this day we laid down our tiles quietly and gently. Every now and then I would get up from my chair and hold a tumbler to the wall and put my ear to it, the way spies do in books. The sobbing gradually became softer and less urgent. The spasms spaced themselves further apart, and finally they stopped altogether.

  ‘We could put a note under her door,’ said Tina. ‘We’ve got some champagne, when you’re ready – Tina and Helen.’ We began to giggle. I went to the fridge for the bottle, pulled the cork and poured three glasses. Tina and I looked at each other. No way was I going to knock on the door of the goddess of weeping, to hand her a tumbler of cheap champagne. Neither was Tina. It would be impertinent. Some things are beyond the social. We returned to the game. The third glass stood there pointlessly fizzing.

  The intercom gave a muffled squawk. Tina buzzed the visitor in and opened her front door. Two sweating removalists in singlets thumped up the stairs and barged in, lugging the furniture of a bloke who had just rented Tina’s spare room. It abuts the one in our flat where I have my desk. I flicked my eye over his sparse belongings as they were carried past, and noticed with vague concern a bass guitar and a powerful-looking amp.

  The new lodger himself appeared. He looked cute, with his buzz-cut and ear-ring, and also neighbourly. He sat with us at the table and accepted the third glass, while Tina began to tell us the story of how she’d heard ghastly screaming, a couple of days before, and had rushed out into the lane and seen through the second-storey window of the building opposite, in broad daylight, a bloke systematically bashing another bloke over the head with a baseball bat.

  It was the kind of city story that ‘made one gasp and stretch one’s eyes’ – and yet at the same time I felt that, if I lived round here long enough, I w
ould cease to be surprised. I would have to acknowledge something that I already knew in my heart was true: the fact that people, even the ones you trust, the ones you are closest to, are capable of anything. Anything at all.

  Regions of Thick-Ribbed Ice

  They say that tourist ships to Antarctica, even more than ordinary human conveyances, are loaded down with aching hearts. Deceived wives and widowers, men who’ve never been loved and don’t know why, Russian crew forced to leave their children behind for years at a time, grown women who’ve just buried a beloved parent, people with cancer travelling to the cold before they die. They say people come here looking for ‘solace’. And then there are the married couples: how calm the old ones, how eager the new! – but isn’t a couple the greatest mystery of all?

  The hats. Oh, they’re terrible. One woman broaches the deck pulling on a thing shaped like a sponge-bag, made of purple polypropylene. A little old lady is wearing a grey wool bonnet straight out of a Brueghel painting. A young bloke in spectacles sports a cap of multi-coloured segments, topped with a twirl and several small silver bells.

  My own headgear, a hideous borrowed job featuring red earmuffs and a peak, is still stuffed into a corner of my suitcase, down in cabin no. 521 which I’m to share with a perfect stranger called Robyn (and I’ve forgotten my earplugs).

  So far, an hour after we’ve embarked from Ushuaia, an Argentine port in Tierra del Fuego, I am still stubbornly refusing to believe in the cold, though my fingers have shrunk so thin that my wedding ring keeps sliding off, and my eyes and nose are streaming. If you fall overboard, states the Lonely Planet Guide grimly, you will die. I’m not the Antarctic type. I’m hanging out for a short black. I’m not adventurous, and I’m too sad to be sociable with strangers.