The Feel of Steel

by Helen Garner

  Right now, out to sea, a bank of silver-grey clouds is backlit and made glorious along its edges by the rising sun. A solo crow lets out its coarse cries somewhere down in the valley. A valley full of air, in which birds live their busy, purposeful lives.

  Last night after tea I walked along the top of Cooper Park in the dark to buy a Tropico at the video shop. As I turned the corner into Bellevue Road I caught a breath of sharp blossom. Is it spring? Could it possibly be spring? This morning I sidled over the low stone fence and looked for the blossoming tree. And there it was, a pittosporum. Tears rushed into my eyes. My sister teases me for loving this tree. She finds it gloomy, even ugly. But it’s so mysterious, so withholding. If you approach it directly, head on, even push your face into its foliage, it will not give you its scent. It prefers to take you unawares, to exude an aura into which you step on your way past, hurrying, your mind on something else. Nor can you pick the blossoms and take them home. The sap is sticky, the twigs tough, the perfume (electric, lemony, head-clearingly sweet) doesn’t survive the plucking. The tree exists. Its blossoming is brief. You have to be ready for the moment and accept it as it’s given.

  Why aren’t I writing fiction? Fear. Why don’t I just sit down with a clue, a thread, an incident, and follow it, as I did when I wrote The Children’s Bach? Back then it was natural. Now I’m stiff with self-consciousness.

  It’s raining. A hushing sound all over the landscape. Stillness. Birds working away as usual, with their busy twitterings and harsh cries.

  At half past three in the morning high heels clack sharply across the bare floor in the flat overhead. A heavy piece of crockery smashes. A woman begins to sob and rage. A man’s voice, softer, barely audible, replies; but she’s away, in paroxysms of anger and pain. Loudly she weeps. She drags metal, she flings china, she utters hoarse wordless cries. My heart is racing. I’m in her body. I’ve been there before. I don’t ever want to be there again. At last they settle, but I can’t get back to sleep. Long before dawn, a single bird gives out its cry, a limp wolf-whistle. Obstinate. Forlorn. Somewhere out in that large valley of leaves and air. In the dark.

  To Michael Kieran Harvey’s piano recital, at the Town Hall. In the first half he alternated Rachmaninov and Messiaen. Brilliant, dry music, brilliantly and drily played. When he bowed and walked off at interval, a blonde woman in the next seat, who’d been deeply absorbed in the music, turned to me and said with a sigh, ‘All that work! And it’s over in –’ (consults watch) ‘– forty-five minutes!’

  Martin, slow-moving on a walking stick now, takes me to lunch in Chinatown. He speaks with great warmth about how happy he was when the four of us, two couples, were all friends together.

  ‘Ten wonderful years,’ he says with passion, ‘but it’s gone now.’

  On his face the open softness of someone whose eyes are full of tears, though I can’t actually see any. He seizes my hand across the tablecloth and kisses it.

  ‘Last time you were at our place,’ he says, ‘M.B. had just sent us a photo of himself. When you came into the kitchen, I saw it lying there and quickly whisked it out of sight. That was when I knew what I’d lost. And when I heard that Text wanted to publish my book, I called M.B. and I called you, but what I really wanted was for all four of us to sit down together and celebrate, and drink some champagne. I suppose it’s selfish but that’s what I wanted, and I was miserable that I couldn’t have it.’

  At church today, a kids’ choir from Tamworth. My snobby heart sank, but shame on me, for they sang with thrilling freshness Vivaldi’s Gloria and some African songs. How small boys carol in choirs: their rapt faces, soft mouths opened in an egg shape, their heads tilting this way and that on their springy necks. The older boys with broken voices. The girls modest and composed. I wanted them to sing on forever.

  The cotton pin of my sewing machine snapped off last night, as I was about to sit down and start sewing my curtains. Normally, these days, I would have collapsed in tears, but I just looked at it with a cross, disappointed feeling, and found something else to do with my evening: a cocktail party at the French Consulate. The consul was a very sweet man. He led me away from the racket, through a heavy door into the kitchen, to show me the family dog. His daughter was sitting at the table neatly doing her homework.

  The boogyman was in the flat last night. He walked along the hall to my bedroom. I kept my eyes shut, and lay there with thumping heart, but before he got into the open space between door and bed he evaporated. Now it’s a cool, windy day. Across the sea off Bondi, parallel to shore, lie one or two long streaks of darker blue, for which I have no explanation.

  Rain in the night. Raining at dawn. I’m annoyed because my washing is down on the line, but I’m filled too with . . . wonder, really, at the quiet breadth of the rain, its long slow endless breathing, the enormous area it can cover without effort, its simple fallingness. Another cloud of it moves towards me from the sea. Now it’s here, softly hissing, blotting things out.

  This separation is a dull wound, aching dully, on and on. What I’m doing, month after month, is parting, inside myself, from my husband. Years ago he told me about having visited the painter John Passmore when he was very old. Passmore said to him that dying was ‘hard work’. Separation, too, is work that will not be hurried.

  Steve the builder came over for tea, took one look at my racked and scrawny person, seized me in his arms and gave me a hard hug. I served a roast chicken. It was under-cooked. He showed me some photos of himself taken twenty years ago, ‘before I was a builder – see? I had more hair but no shoulders.’ When he stood up to leave, we realised that for the entire visit he’d been sitting on my glasses, which like a fool I’d left on the chair before he arrived. I picked them up in dismay but to our amazement they were hardly even bent.

  To church at Advent. The imagery of the expected baby, the coming miracle. I didn’t know I was rostered to read the lesson, and found myself suddenly up there facing a slab of Isaiah and a psalm, studded with unpronounceable Hebrew names. I ripped into it with a will: ‘Restore us, O God, let your face shine!’

  And then the parish lunch to farewell our vicar, forced by a hostile diocese into early retirement. I saw three grown men cry. At the mike their voices choked and became faint, higher, weaker; their faces either distorted or broadened, clarified, sweetened.

  To Melbourne for Christmas and New Year. I go for a walk with S.H. round the elm-shaded streets of North Carlton. We make ourselves laugh so hard that we can barely stumble along. She leads me to the gate of a large, splendid old house at the top of Drummond Street: ‘Look!’

  We stand peering over the gate into a thick garden. A middle-aged man with his shirt off is working in some shrubbery at the far end of the drive. He is waist-deep in foliage, with his plump, pale back turned to us.

  She nudges me and hisses, ‘It’s X!’ – an old lover of each of us. She calls his name. He half turns, very slowly; gives us a squinting, suspicious stare over his shoulder – two beats – then turns his back again and continues his task.

  We stagger away, doubled over, then, once out of earshot, utter crazed squawks. ‘He turned away! He didn’t want to speak to us! Did he see it was us? Is he shortsighted as well as fat and white?’

  As we lurch along, sobbing with laughter, holding each other up, she gasps, ‘This reminds me of something Bill Garner said to me about you, right after you split up. He said, “If all there was to life was walking along the street, Helen’s the person I’d like to do it with.” ’

  Outside, now, rain falls in a sudden, huge, light cloud between my window and the horizon. The smell of dirt and wetness comes to me in gusts.

  Swam early at Bondi with Sally and Patrick. Crystalline waves toppled. We stood up to our chins in water of the palest, glassiest green and grinned at each other, speechless. A boy of the awkward age – thirteen – shot past us on a boogie board with a look of shameless ecstasy on his face.

  The happiness I felt yesterday, when I
came into the building, opened the door of my flat and walked through its rooms. A quiet evening, listening to the tango CD and hemming my remaining curtains – not eating a meal because I wasn’t hungry – sleeping on my firm bed, with pleasant breezes flowing over it through the window.

  Last night, five people here for dinner. I cooked two snapper. We played Ex Libris, the literary pastiche game, till after midnight. Mad laughter. Stretches of intense quiet while we fantasised and compressed our fantasies into sentences. As always, people began floridly, then simplified as they got the hang of it. A beginner will always betray himself by over-using adverbs.

  I loved the game, handling words, trying to make a sentence that was direct and clear. How on earth did I write the way I used to? How did I write Postcards from Surfers? I had no plan for any of those stories. I wrote one sentence, then another. The intellectual approach, long-range planning, doesn’t suit me. I don’t need any great structural idea. One sentence, then another sentence, and ‘let the unconscious take precedence.’ Later you think. At the start, you just write. If you have the nerve.

  I have lost my nerve.

  On Bondi Road I saw three young girls talking and laughing and gesturing together, all fresh and young. I envied them, as I sat there on the bench in my dark dress. And shallow streams run dimpling all the way, I thought, whereas I’m like a murkier stream, or a pool. A swamp. Water that doesn’t flow. My attempt at a long poem abandoned. My stories barely begun. Like the baby next door that I sometimes hear crying bleakly, before it’s attended to. Sometimes the soul is tested. Nothing I do seems good or beautiful. Everything I think of writing seems trivial, pointless. I compare myself unfavourably with every writer in the world.

  Still, I battle away at an essay about reading the Bible. I keep saying to myself, ‘OK – simple declarative sentences. Nothing fancy.’ It’s like exercising a stiff muscle. I’ve written a page. A page is better than not a page.

  Marie comes to stay. ‘Cancers are moon people,’ she says. She likes to watch the moon rise. One evening it sails free of a cloudbank: dusty straw-yellow, and squashed like a pickled onion. I call her and she comes running from the kitchen. She leans over the windowsill and murmurs, in a voice full of surprised tenderness, ‘Oh, there you are! Hello!’

  A flat in the building next door to mine, and one floor lower, has been empty for several weeks. The curtains have been taken down and I can see through window after window as I go about my business. In the front room there used to be a grand piano; now there’s only a patch of sunlight moving across a grey carpet. It’s melancholy, somehow. Then late this afternoon I glance across and see that in one of the quiet back rooms someone has made up a bed. Double, with crisp blue-and-white striped sheets, two pillows, a corner of the quilt turned back. All fresh and perfect. Otherwise, no human presence. I am thrilled by the bed. I keep kneeling up on my couch and leaning out to have another look at it. Order, intimacy, sleep, dreams – and waking in a new place, on a new morning.

  I’m so tired of moving. But I long to feel the dry air and drink the water of Melbourne. One day soon, when I’m a person again, when I’m ready, I’ll get my things together, and I’ll go home.

  Sighs too Deep for Words

  ON BEING BAD AT READING

  THE BIBLE

  It would be absurd to pretend that I have ‘read the Bible’. Ten years ago I sat down with three translations and toiled my way through it, taking months. It was an experience of weird, laborious intensity. But you can’t just read the Bible once. All that this endeavour did, in the long run, was to give me a sketchy map of an enormous, madly complicated territory (a map which passing time has blurred and distorted), and to offer certain touchstones of beauty or mystery which I desperately hang on to when life leaks meaning, or which leap spontaneously to mind when I’m ‘surprised by joy’.

  Every two months the reading roster from church comes in the mail: a list set out in boxes with dates. A helpful person at the parish office has highlighted my name in pink or green. I never imagined that I would be one of the people who get up and ‘read the lesson’. I used to think that the people who were allowed to do this had something I knew I didn’t have: unshakeable, worked-out faith. Well – there are people like that at our church. Or that’s how they appear, from outside. One morning a woman whose husband, I’d heard, had died only a few days before got to her feet nevertheless to read her part. She held the book out flat in the air in front of her and almost shouted: ‘The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away: blessed be the name of the Lord!’ Her face was shining, but tears were streaming down it.

  I have done a fair bit of reading in public; I can get up in most company and read without raising a sweat. But when I have to read the Bible at church, my knees shake and I can hear my voice go squeaky. It’s because I am having to struggle to get the meaning out of the words, and the meaning is often not clear to me. There’s a man at our church who lost his job at theological college because he left his wife; when he reads the Epistle, he does it with a lovely intelligence and excellent intonation. It is clear that he understands it syntactically and as an argument: he makes it sound as accessible as ordinary speech. I like the way the three readings in each communion service – Old Testament, Epistle and Gospel – are linked thematically. I like sermons in which these linkages are embroidered or explicated. Sometimes I take notes in the margins of the pew sheet. Often I think, ‘When I get home I will read these passages again and see what I can make of them.’ But by the time I get home the concerns of ordinary life have overwhelmed me again and I have forgotten my resolution.

  And anyway there is always this feeling of intellectual inadequacy: I don’t know enough to read the Bible. The job of it is so colossal and complicated and endless; I am already too old; whatever response I come up with will have been shown by some scholar somewhere to be feeble and ignorant – or so my thoughts run.

  In the early eighties, when I wrote theatre reviews in Melbourne, there were nights when I had to pinch myself to stay awake through turgid, self-important productions of the classics: my inner thighs were black and blue. But once, long before I realised I was interested in the godly business, I sat – and the punters, now I come to think of it, paid money to sit – in a dark theatre while an actor put his elbows on a wooden table with a book open on it, and read – or spoke – the Gospel according to St Mark. I can’t recall the expectations I had of this ‘performance’: just another job, I suppose I thought, and I must have had the critic’s notebook on my knee and the pencil in my hand. But Mark’s Gospel was such a story – so fast and blunt and dramatic, skipping the annunciation, the birth of Jesus, starting with his baptism, rushing headlong to the Cross – that by the end I was on the edge of my seat, thrilled and trembling.

  When I read in the paper, a few years back, that Rupert Murdoch was buying the publisher Collins, whose biggest seller is the New English Bible, I got hot under the collar.

  ‘Bibles should be handed round in typescript,’ I said crossly. ‘Every hotel should have one ragged copy, and if you need it you call up the desk and they bring it to you on a tray.’

  ‘But what if more than one person calls for it?’ said a passing sceptic.

  ‘Well – then they invite all of the inquirers into a special room, where they can share it. And maybe talk about why they feel they need it. Have you got a Bible?’

  ‘Yep. A bloke I know gave me one. It’s a Gideon.’

  ‘You mean it’s a stolen bible? He stole a Gideon?’

  ‘They want you to steal them. That’s the whole point of ’em. Isn’t it?’

  I used to have an American friend who’d been a nun in a French order that started in the Sahara, the Little Sisters of Jesus of Charles de Foucault. She got leukemia, and for a variety of reasons, including the fact that whenever she left the nuns’ house for a month or so her blood picture improved, she quit the order and went to live in a caravan at Wilcannia on the banks of the Darling River. She came to Sydney
one winter, when I lived in someone else’s house and couldn’t offer her a spare room; but somehow we managed. One morning the excitement of being in the city, plus too much coffee on top of her chemo pills, brought on an attack of enfeebling nausea. She stayed all that day under the quilt on my bed, lying silently behind me in the room, while I sat at my desk and worked. I suppose nuns have to learn how to absent themselves: I felt as if I were alone. Later, when we had set ourselves up for the night, with the French doors open on to the balcony – she with her aching bones in the bed, I with my menopausal ones on a foam strip on the floor – she read me Rilke’s ‘Ninth Duino Elegy’. She was such a pragmatic person, I was surprised – not only that she liked the Rilke, but that she read it with such ease: beautifully, with natural feeling for the syntax, so that it made sense as it left her lips.

  Look, I am living. On what? Neither childhood nor future

  grows any smaller . . . Superabundant being

  wells up in my heart.

  We lay there quietly. Then she said, ‘Read to me in French, Hel.’ She passed me her Nouveau Testament: ‘It belonged to a Little Sister in Peru who died. And they gave her Bible to me because they thought I was going to die too.’