The Feel of Steel

by Helen Garner

  The thing is, four and a bit months ago I saw her slide into the world. Her eyes were closed. Her tiny face was compressed into an expression of profound, unshakeable composure. At the sight of her I was pole-axed by an emotion unlike any I have ever felt before. The word love hardly touches the sides.

  At my age you do not expect to be consumed by a passion so intense. I can’t stand it when people say, ‘Grandchildren are wonderful!’ then add, in a roguish way, ‘because you can give them back.’ I don’t want to give her back. I am almost frightened by the ferocious love I feel for her. I have to discipline it, to ration my visits to her shrine, to relegate myself over and over to a secondary figure, a servant, a helper. If I’m not careful I could turn into a monster nanna, the sort everyone wishes would find a new husband or take up dangerous mountaineering.

  I understand now those people you read about in magazines who go crazy when their children’s marriages end and their contact with their grandchildren is cut off. A friend of mine, whose son was murdered, rages against the killer not just for taking her son but because ‘she has stolen the future from me. Now I will never have grandchildren.’

  When the baby was newborn I was on deck daily in the kitchen at her parents’ house. If their friends came to visit, if they picked the baby up and held her for too long, if she appeared to be at ease in their arms, I was obliged to go outside and take deep breaths in the back yard. A visiting four-year-old boy (a fellow-sufferer perhaps? – he had a small brother) spotted at once the black jealousy I was trying to conceal: he told his mother he didn’t want to see that nanna again, ‘in case she does something mean’.

  My jealousy shocked me. I’d believed that grand-motherhood would be a peaceful state, sunny, relaxed, benign, something one moved around in at will, maturely, being useful. Instead, this primal murk.

  Once I used to sing along earnestly with John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’: ‘nothing to kill or die for’. Then I had my daughter, and realised what wimpy bullshit that fantasy was. Now that I’ve seen and come to know my grandchild, our demented mother is not the only wild woman in the family.

  Occasionally a short-sighted person will assume on a tram or in the supermarket that I am the baby’s mother. Popular mythology supposes this to be a mistake that flatters a woman, but I don’t like it. I’m amazed at how urgently it matters to me that my real relationship with the child be known. Why? It’s not as if any particular benefit would accrue.

  Or would it? In a recent issue of the Australian Book Review, a Sydney writer and critic whose wife runs an upmarket secondhand book business conducted a casual survey: which successful Australian novels survive the generation of their first publication? Apart from those who’d succeeded internationally, he found very few. Hardly any. Almost none. And mine were not among them. Indeed, my name was mentioned among those writers whose first novel sells secondhand at insultingly low prices, even in hardback.

  My reaction was a double-decker. At first I felt bleak. A bit forlorn. Ah well, I thought with a sigh, sic transit gloria. One must bow the head, and be drearily splendid. But then into my mind flashed an image of startling clarity: a woman and a small girl walking away along a dirt road, hand in hand, talking pleasantly to each other of this and that. I knew them at once. They were my future. The vision was accompanied by a lightening of the heart that lifted me off my feet.

  I described the moment to a psychoanalyst friend. He called it ‘the collapse of ambition’. Collapse? It felt more like a flourishing, an opening out. Ambition may have collapsed, but not me. Not this nanna. She’s only just taking off.

  Das Bettelein

  I was washing my hands in the Concert Hall toilets when a trembly, middle-aged voice rose from one of the lavatory cubicles. ‘Is anyone there?’

  I glanced up.

  ‘Is anyone out there?’ called the voice, more urgently. ‘I can’t open this door!’

  The woman beside me at the basin moved uncertainly towards the cubicles.

  ‘I’m sorry!’ called the trapped lady. ‘It must be something silly I’ve done to the lock!’

  Outside, the bell for the start of the performance was ringing. I dried my hands. All I wanted was to hear the Windsbacher Knabenchor sing Bach’s Christmas Oratorio. But the invisible woman was beginning to babble: she’d come down from the country for the festival – she was terribly sorry to be such a nuisance – what a fool she felt!

  ‘Should I go and, um, find someone?’ the helpless Samaritan called to her through the locked door.

  A violent rattling and clicking exploded inside the cubicle. ‘It’s all right!’ cried the voice. ‘I think I’ve got it!’

  The door burst open and the entombed concert-goer stumbled out, red-faced.

  I dashed away to my seat. And as I watched the German choirboys filing on to the stage, I suddenly remembered something I hadn’t thought of for twenty years – since August 1980.

  It happened in Venice, where I’d gone on holiday from Paris with some gay boys I knew, one Australian, one French, two Americans – four cheerful, affectionate hysterics. Privately I disapproved of their obsession with fun, with youthful beauty and clothes and sex and cruising and special cocktails. For some reason they seemed fond of me, and they were adorable – ingenious, kind, always laughing – but in my heart I thought of them as moral lightweights.

  In a crumbling heap of a cheap hotel on the island of Giudecca we shared one long, high-ceilinged room. It contained nothing but single beds made up with coarse white sheets – austere beds, like the ones children sleep in. I’d wake early each morning and find the sun-tanned boys still asleep in a row, each on his narrow pallet.

  One hot siesta time we were all lying about in our room, reading and dozing. I got up, wanting to wash, and wandered along wing after wing of tiled hallways to the bathroom. It was windowless and damp, divided into sections by pebbled cement walls which almost reached the ceiling. I locked myself into one of these morbid cubicles, sat on the toilet, then stood for a while under a cool shower. When I went to open the door, the lock was jammed.

  I tried everything on that ancient latch: patience, jiggling, furious bashing. No point yelling. Nobody would have heard me. I started to panic. The boys would sally forth into fabulous Venice without me. They would forget me and go back to Paris. Winter would come and I would die there, locked in a dunny on a foreign island.

  Eventually I worked out that I could stand on the lavatory seat, get one foot up on the shower taps, hoist myself on my belly across the top of the wall, and drop painlessly on to the free side. I raced back to the dorm and found the boys, fresh from their nap, happily squabbling over their colourful shirts. I acted out the story of my daring escape. They turned from their suitcases.

  ‘You mean,’ said one of these libertines, ‘that you climbed out and left the lock jammed? You just walked away?’

  ‘What else could I have done? I was trapped!’

  ‘Helen,’ said one of the Americans. ‘I can’t believe you’d behave like that. It’s so selfish! Now you go straight back down there. Climb in, and pick that lock.’

  The others supported him in a chorus. I could not find an argument to dent their united front. Crestfallen, I took my nail clippers, scrambled back over the bathroom wall, and worked the latch open.

  We took a boat across the water, and went out eating and drinking in the beautiful city. They drove back to Paris. I came home to Australia. Twenty years later, as far as I know, only two of them are still alive.

  The famous German choir, some of them tiny boys, some almost men, is singing now about the birth of a baby. Their voices are controlled and clear. This is not grand, monumental Bach. It’s intimate. Something about making a ‘Bettelein’. A clean, soft little bed. Something about a heart, a place to rest? When I get home I’ll look up the words in the dictionary. Tomorrow I’ll go out and try to find the CD.

  Louis’ Barmitzvah

  The vestibule of the Temple Emanuel in Ocean Street, Woollahra,
five minutes before the barmitzvah was due to start, was milling with people, Jewish and otherwise. It is amazing how many non-Jewish men are totally transformed by a yarmulka: a man I’d known years ago in Melbourne came over with his wife and little girl to say hullo, and for a moment I couldn’t place him, rummaging in the wrong mental file. Then the barmitzvah boy’s auntie rocked up to him and said,

  ‘Hi! Remember me? We met years ago, in the party.’

  Mishearing, he looked perplexed: ‘At a party?’

  ‘The CPA?’ she said patiently. ‘The party we used to be in? That we’re all so embarrassed about now?’

  The barmitzvah boy was the son of an old Melbourne Jewish friend of mine and his wife, a grand beauty born in Birmingham of a Jamaican immigrant family, who has recently converted to Judaism. They sat, glowing in pale clothes, in the front row of the raked synagogue, backed by their families and friends – or, as the New Testament says, ‘compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses . . .’

  The boy himself, a famous mimic with bouncing dreadlocks and a slow, wicked smile, was strolling about in a large necktie emblazoned with South Park icons. What a complex spectacle! It was almost scary. Who on earth would be able to draw its many parts together and point it in the right direction, ground its hilarity, and drive it forward for a whole two hours?

  In she strode: a woman rabbi. A slip of a lass with a great mass of reddish brown curls flopping down her back, hair that she tossed out of the way whenever she rearranged the corners of her shawl over her slender shoulders. She turned to us a bright face, arched her brows, and set the whole thing rolling.

  Though I think of myself as a Christian, though I like to take communion, to pray and to hear the Bible read, this is one of those periods in my life when I feel a revulsion against going to church. I can’t hack the strained, dusty theatrics of Melbourne high church Anglicanism. At Catholic mass I am a stranger. But on Saturday in the shul I was swept away by the graceful ease and sweetness that the young rabbi brought to the ritual.

  They had a brilliant little choir – five good voices, two men, two women, plus the bloke who conducted them – which sang demurely, bringing gravity and beauty to the prayers. When the cantor got up to sing, his tremendous riffs were as fruity as opera. The whole celebration went forward with a bounding energy, full of poetry and chant, switching from Hebrew to English and back again in short grabs, always something new happening, constantly changing its mood and refreshing itself. Every moment of it was exhilarating.

  What moved me most was the vivid physicality of it, the freedom, the lack of pomposity. Even when the Torah was brought out of its hiding place and carefully unwrapped from its velvet before our eyes, when children, concentrating hard, seized and bore aside its tingling little filigree silver decorations, when the parchment scroll emerged, radiating mystery – even these moments of intense reverence were warmed by something almost affectionate: a mixture of awe and tenderness. When the boy’s grandfather, with the boy close on his heels, carried the Torah up and down the aisles, a wave of energy followed it. People surged forward to touch it with their shawl-tips or the spines of their prayerbooks, which then they kissed. It seemed so ancient, and yet so fresh and joyful.

  The boy stood up in a creamy tallit with a broad blue stripe, and chanted his way through his portion. This was no shrinking violet. He opened his mouth and his chest and he belted it out. We hung on his every note. People delighted in his triumph, even those of us who had only the vaguest clue what he was singing about. Some old, grand force was sweeping him along, and taking us all with it.

  ‘Isn’t this fabulous,’ I whispered to the ex-Communist Party member beside me.

  He replied behind his hand, ‘I might convert.’

  We laughed. I glanced at him in profile. He was smiling. His hair under the skullcap was grey. I looked down at my hands. The backs of them were speckled and veined. I thought, with a strange happiness, We are not old yet, but our youth has been over for a long, long time.

  Golden Sandals

  These summer mornings, when the birds wake me at five-thirty, I lie there thinking about sandals. Not just any old pair. The ones I bought in London in August 1978 and wore all that summer, in Paris.

  They were the best sandals I’ve ever had: flat, pretty, with fine rubber soles, suitable straps about a centimetre wide that buckled snugly just forward of the ankle-bone, and a broad, discreetly punched and serrated vamp-strap that held the foot firmly in place without cramping it. They were gold. Not a lairy gold that had to be beaten into submission, but a subtle, pale, dusty, almost silvery gold, like dawn light on clean Australian sand.

  Forget Elvis Costello’s red shoes: the angels in heaven wore my sandals. I used to wake up in the morning and watch them resting on the floor by the open window: I expected them to sprout wings. Yet they were the sort of sandals I could wear in comfort all day long, as I went about my ordinary motherly business. They looked elegant with anything – cotton pants, jeans, a flowery skirt. They were beyond fashion. They were perfect. They were the Platonic ideal of the sandal. And most astonishing of all, they only cost the equivalent of about forty bucks.

  Forty bucks! At this point I always begin to rage and tear my hair. Why didn’t I buy ten pairs? Is it a rule of life that you never know a thing is perfect till it’s too late?

  Like all sandals, they died. I don’t remember where or when. But I do recall the blue ones I bought in Cannes to replace them, just before I came home to Australia. By now it was the cusp of the eighties. We’re talking stiff net vamps, peep-toes, mean-spirited ankle straps, and low, angled heels that wobbled slightly under pressure but were perversely flattering: one day I wore them to the city and, as the 96 tram keeled round the corner into Bourke Street, a young man got up for his stop and whispered to me in passing, ‘Excuse me – you have beautiful feet.’

  Caramba! That was a happy moment. Nobody would pay me that compliment now. Feet cop life’s thrashing and start to wear out. Arches fall, joints get grindy, veins become visible. The day comes when the only thing that can relieve the pain is an orthosis. Then what sandals does one wear?

  One of my husbands once gave me a birthday voucher for the services of a fashionable shoemaker. He thought I didn’t know he was having an affair at the time with a chickabomba who tottered about in the towering, painful-looking heels that he had failed to persuade me to wear. ‘A real woman,’ he used to say, ‘doesn’t mind a bit of pain to please a man.’

  Be that as it may, off I went to the shoemaker and showed her a foolproof design that recalled my golden sandals, but with filled-in backs to accommodate the orthotic. I thought she had understood me, but the two large, stiff objects she presented me with, a month later, were so clonking, so darkly orthopedic in conception and execution, that I lost the power of speech. Weakened by dread as another marriage faltered, I lacked the stamina for a fight. I took them home and hid them in a cupboard.

  Now on my hurt feet I wear, all summer long, a certain plain white lace-up canvas runner made in China. They remind me of the light tennis shoes my mother used to wear in the forties. The minute I realised they were perfect, I rushed back to David Jones and cleaned out their entire stock: four pairs. I would have bought ten, and I will, if I can find them.

  Since I became a nanna, I’ve been hanging out in babywear stores. Now that is where you see great sandals, made in soft leather for toddlers. Foot-shaped and endearing, in a variety of appealing colours, they have firm rubber soles, closed-in backs, straps of exactly the right width, and neat curved buckles. And they come from Spain.

  Tell me why, in our country which abounds in nature’s gifts, doesn’t some enterprising citizen start to make wonderful sandals for middle-aged women whose feet hurt, but who haven’t yet dropped their aesthetic bundle? They don’t have to be made of gold: I’ve been humbled. I would settle for something simple, pretty and practical. I earn good money. I’ll pay. In this land of glorious summer, where, where are my sand
als?

  The Feel of Steel 2

  All winter our modest fencing lessons continued. Once in a while I’d blast through an opponent’s defence and bend my blade against her target. I was vain about the little bruises, like snake bites, that appeared in the flesh of my upper arms. The day came when I could attack and score without apologising.

  But then, a fortnight before the Sydney Games began, Olympic fencers from all over the world turned up to train at our Brunswick factory. We crept in to watch.

  They were springy-legged, slender, tightly clad – and fast. While we beginners, in class, carefully struck the correct pose, left arm bent and hand held loose at ear level, they carried their free arm flowing easily behind them, at waist height. They moved like pale streaks. I crouched against a wall, in awe of their speed and power. And the young women! They shrieked as they attacked, like wild beasts at the kill. It was unbearably thrilling.

  But when I heard I was expected to fence in the Inaugural Veterans’ section of the state competition, I panicked. Years ago I’d promised myself I would never, as long as I lived, sit another exam. I did my level best to wimp out.

  ‘I’ve been sick,’ I whined to Ernie, our teacher. ‘I’ve missed three lessons.’

  He shamed me into a catch-up lesson. ‘You may be swift,’ he said sternly, as I stood masked, gloved and panting in his garage at Meadow Heights, ‘but you’ve got to learn to retreat. Retire! Retreat! Retreat! And eat carbohydrates!’

  By noon on the day the air was muggy, the mercury sat on thirty. As I climbed the factory fire escape, I could hear the scampering and the thuds, the cries of protest and triumph, the raised voices of the referees, the soft rhythmic beeping of the electronic scorers. The young fencers, some of them Olympians and all of them as far above us so-called veterans as the famous Mount itself, sorted each other out, received their medals and went home, trundling great buggies of equipment behind them.