Me, Myself and Lord Byron

by Julietta Jameson

  I had felt such resistance to coming to stay in Venice. I couldn’t make my five-star expectations meet the reality of my budget. The greater proportion of Venetian accommodation is overpriced and underwhelming, unless you have the dollars to do it well. My timing was terrible, too. It was the lead-up to Biennale, Venice’s two-yearly arts extravaganza, and the city was full.

  But the resistance was deeper than that. It was the romance thing, no question. Being solo in a city of honeymooners was not enjoyable. As much as I ended up loving the Villa Margherita down the road, each morning I had been the only single person at breakfast, let alone the only solo woman. Every other table had been taken up with couples. Not even groups. All couples.

  At least I’d managed to find myself a modest apartment in Venice, which meant no confronting breakfast situations. And a place to retreat to without running a gauntlet of having to say two good mornings or afternoons to people joined at the hip.

  It was no Palazzo Mocenigo but, though small and basic, it suited my purposes and had some charm. Essentially it was two rooms: a kitchen with a table to eat and work at and a bedroom with a couple of little beds and an old oak chaise. There were glazed terracotta plates on the walls and exposed wood beams and tiles on the ceiling. I had a tiny bathroom, too. I could see the water if I stuck my head out the bedroom window. I was on the third floor of an old, skinny, typically Venetian apartment block accessible by a killer steep stairway with low head clearance and very little width. The block was on a narrow laneway, a dogleg between the Cannaregio Canal and a small campo where a deconsecrated church was busily being decked out for a Biennale exhibit.

  I unpacked and did some washing, hanging it on the clothesline strung outside the window. The cats on the same level but in the block next door peered at me across their window boxes with looks of mesmerised curiosity. It was about to kill kitty: one of them began investigating ways to get across to me, of which there were none. And a drop of about twenty feet. I ducked back inside giggling. It was a bit ridiculous how delightful all that was for me.

  I was in working class Cannaregio, right on the famous bridge, Ponte delle Guglie, that joins the residential neighbourhood to the railway station. The Cannaregio Canal is one of the main access points between the Grand Canal and the lagoon, so vaporetti and service craft came and went with blasts of air horns. Barely thirty seconds would go by without another urgent, self-important sounding. Along Rio Terra San Leonardo, the main thoroughfare with which my laneway joined, there were fruit and vegetable stalls, butchers, fishmongers, grocery stores and other general amenities. There were old ladies talking loudly and dogs out for walks. This was not couple Venice. This was residential.

  I stepped out for a walk and came across the pasticceria Le Café at Venice’s second-largest square, Campo Santo Stefano. Two things I am a sucker for: ice cream and cookies. Boy, was I in the right country. Or wrong, depending on your perspective. Le Café had my favourite Italian biscuit, the occhi di bue, or bull’s eye, the round, jam-filled shortbread sandwich in apricot and raspberry. I couldn’t decide between fillings so I ordered both. And a caffè lungo, a longer version of a black espresso. I could have made do with one cookie. But heavens, they were amazing. The pastry was soft but firm enough, not crumbly. They were golden brown, and buttery mouth-watering. And the jam filling was fresh, fruity and chewy. They were made all the better because I consciously enjoyed them. Not so long ago I would have wolfed them down as fast as I could, hoping no one would notice I’d ordered two. Or I would have berated myself with every bite. In my life I had wavered between this ‘shovel as fast as you can’ mode of eating or despising every bite, or both at the same time.

  I did believe my weight issues had not been about what I ate, but how I ate. Likewise the drinking. It was not what I drank, but how. In the great scheme of eating, mine was actually not too bad. But I had made food a confusing mix of enemy and comfort and somehow, in the middle of the two, my body lost the ability to deal with it.

  I ate too much dinner. I drank too much at night. It was nighttime, not the food, not the booze, that was at least part of the issue. I hated night. The encroaching darkness in the evening was like the shadow of the devil falling on me. I was going to say the shadow of death, but I didn’t fear death. I feared night, and an undefined evil it contained for me. Emptiness was caught up in it somewhere, I just wasn’t sure where.

  Emptiness. I hated emptiness.

  At eight o’clock that night as the sun was going down, I was sitting in a crowded bar by myself. This was the first time I had felt uncomfortable, excruciatingly uncomfortable, about the fact that I was drinking again. I didn’t know if it was the bar or the drink. Or me. But I was there because I wanted to change my routine, to embrace a bit of evening. I’d already had dinner at home, then gone out. I was sitting there in that bar and I didn’t like it. I felt intensely exposed.

  This was not my time. It was not my rhythm. It was someone else’s. I was not frightened but I couldn’t pretend I was enjoying this. I was here because I thought I should be. And because I was looking for him. Him being my, what, soul mate? Partner? Husband? I kept looking. It was an ingrained, habitual tic, like food and drink became.

  I had been doing it constantly on this trip so far. I looked at men by themselves and wondered. Ran the checklist. Moved on to the next one. I didn’t know what the motivation was. I would have liked to say it was the need to be loved and to love. But that didn’t ring true because, here was the thing: since I had strengthened my connection to God, I had never felt more loved, nor felt more love back.

  Was it that I felt embarrassed about being single at forty-six? I hated being pitied. I hated being perceived to have failed at such an enormous part of life’s equation.

  So what did I need to do to stop this? Why was it that I cared so deeply what people thought? There was something at the core of this and I couldn’t see it for the life of me. Body issues. Booze. Food. Being single. Searching for ‘the one’. Caring what people thought. Easily swayed from what suited me … Those things all seemed superficial to me. There had to be something far more immense lurking somewhere.

  But I did know that sitting in a bar by myself in Cannaregio was not who I was. It was not. I’d done my tour of duty through bars and nightclubs and as sure as Lord Byron knew he would one day outgrow his days of excess, I, thank God, had long outgrown mine.

  When I got my journalism cadetship it was almost by default and against the backdrop of six years of making it onto various shortlists but losing out in the end because I was a hopeless examinee and, back then, in the early 1980s, you would have to pass a general knowledge twenty-questions pop quiz to secure an internship. There’d be a panel of three or four male journalists staring at you as someone fired this very serious version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? at you. I would get stage fright, my brain would freeze and I would fail spectacularly. After wowing them with a tap dance of personality and wit, which is the calling card of the people-pleaser, there would be shrugs of shoulders, shakes of heads, some heartbreaking we-think-you’re-terrific-but platitudes and then, ultimately, rejection.

  Fortunately, a formidable character at The Herald and Weekly Times who had a reputation for hiring Catholics and people who barracked for Collingwood was very supportive of me. I fitted one of the criteria, the Catholic bit. I danced around the second bit because I adored the St Kilda Football Club and always would. (I also failed to mention I was what is kindly termed a failed Catholic …)

  It was before the days when buildings were locked up for security and I would occasionally take the day off school with my mother’s blessing, dress myself in a smart outfit I would have spent weeks making on the Singer especially for the moment, jump on the train from Ringwood to Flinders Street and go sit outside this man, Bill Howie’s, office.

  That is remarkable to me from the vantage point of over twenty-five years later. I had such conviction and determination and no fear at all of seeing him. He was
the editor-in-chief of the city’s newspapers, The Sun and The Herald, in his office at the end of the hallway of shiny black and white linoleum tiles and wood-panelled walls that they called mahogany row. I remember the amused look on his face when, after I’d been sitting with his secretary a good while, he would stick his head around the door and say, mock resignedly, ‘All right, come in then. Gawd, you’ve had more returns than Dame Nellie Melba.’

  Eventually, he took pity on me. Granted, I had got to the top five for a few years but only four were taken. The poor man, he’d have to face me in his office afterwards. Towards the end of 1984 and in between intakes, the cadet at the HWT radio station, 3DB, resigned. Mr Howie, I think, told the head of the radio newsroom to hire me. I did the interview, did a news-reading audition and passed it particularly well. My mother was an amateur but very good stage actress, trained in speech, a stickler for elocution and correct pronunciation, and of course I loved to read out loud and show off how good I was at it. More to the point, I didn’t have to do twenty questions and all was well.

  My sister Erin had become the publicist on Prisoner and a little show that had just started called Neighbours, and after I finished my night shift reading news, I’d sometimes go out on the town with her and a few budding stars. Melbourne began to open up to us. We always laugh that before the Hilton sisters there was Erin and me, without the inheritances—and with a modicum more of modesty.

  I was made morning newsreader on 3DB and the 4.15 a.m. starts nearly killed me. I applied to finish my cadetship at ABC Radio and was accepted.

  Mr Howie was sad to see me go after such a short time in the HWT building. My dad was happy. He had worked at the ABC also. Unfortunately, this not only meant I was surrounded by a lot of his mates, but also his second wife, who worked there as a typist. It was uncomfortable and weird sometimes, but I was on a career high. I was all over the radio doing live crosses and special reports, and I’d very quickly moved into high-importance reporting.

  I was working at Trades Hall covering industrial relations in the days when Norm Gallagher and the Builders Labourers Federation were sticking it to the state government and when nurses would go on strike for days on end. It was riveting. I picked up cigarettes, my first brand being Silk Cut—not a readily available brand in Australia then—because a boy who reported for a newspaper and on whom I had a brief crush smoked them.

  The drinking was big. It was what you did.

  And then I moved into business reporting, without any thought or consideration. The business round came up. No one senior to me wanted it. It was anathema to the newsroom’s then lefty leanings. I put up my hand and got it, leap-frogging from a cadet to a B-grade journalist (which was a good thing: gradings went from D to A) practically overnight.

  Newspapers were being bought and sold. Television stations were changing hands. Tycoons were rising on stacks of, in the end, worthless paper. And long boozy lunches were the norm on a gravy train that had no end in sight. I was there and then not. Though I kicked goal after career goal, I lived with this constant, terrifying feeling that I would be found out as not belonging, as not smart enough. I felt like a fraud. I had no interest whatsoever in the business world but I’d been seduced by it because, in the 1980s, there was no more influential place in the journalistic lexicon. Here I was, on a flight of ego’s fancy, not from any real motivation or interest. It kept me awake at night, this feeling of being not good enough, not real enough, which I see now was the intuitive knowledge that I had no business being there because it was not who I really was. The outside world saw an achiever, a girl on the rise. I saw a person who did not belong, who had fooled everyone, and who any minute now would be found out.

  Meanwhile, my sister’s social cachet was rising, as she became the person who could bring celebrities to nightclubs. Mine rose with hers. Wherever we went we would get limitless free drinks. There was a time when at one particular club we were drinking only Veuve Clicquot all night long. Complimentary.

  Over the next decade, or a bit less, I did lots of weekend, what they called ‘recreational’, drug using, but it was a lot more than that tippy-toeing phrase implied. Lots of cocaine, lots of ecstasy, some speed and the occasional trip (often inadvertently; it would be mixed into the ecstasy tablet), and a bit of hash, though marijuana and its related products never did sit well with me, like the aforementioned LSD. It was horrible for someone who had lots of things to hide from herself and who needed to hold together a particular persona to function.

  One Monday night, spent from the weekend before, I asked our housemate, Julian, a sweet boy from Perth who played bass in a then huge band, to go up the street to Toorak Road and buy us a bottle of wine and some lasagne. As I had every Monday night for probably months, I offered to pay for his share if he’d run the errand.

  ‘Okay,’ said Julian. ‘But when I get back we’re going to sit down and work out how much you’ve spent this year on drugs, alcohol and buying me dinner when you’re messed up like this.’ Uh-oh. We did it though. I’d spent over half my wage, a wage that was very good for that time. Half of it. Despite getting a lot of drugs and alcohol for free.

  I let American Express cards default though I had a new outfit every Saturday night, and sometimes every Friday night too. I had expensive dinners on other people’s credit cards, promising to pay them back but never doing so. I owed friends money and they became not friendly.

  I had a succession of cars, cute-looking British things like Austins and Triumphs, but all bombs because I didn’t do research or checks and would fall in love with how they looked, then not look after them and drive them till they broke down. Then I would abandon them in the street somewhere, walk away, leave them there till they were towed and sold by the council. I’d ignore the parking fines, not answer the door to the sheriff (till he once came to my workplace, a proud moment), and still manage to hold down a high-responsibility, busy, high-profile job.

  A succession of them, that is. I skipped through five jobs in about two years, leaving each one on a whim. Someone would say, ‘Hey, Business Review Weekly needs a reporter,’ and I’d go and do it. The Herald? Sure. Channel Nine needs an on-air business reporter—that became me. All this climbing, despite that dreadful insecurity. With each skip, it became more persistent, more troubling.

  I was retrenched from Channel Nine when Alan Bond went belly up and I got a job as publications manager for a huge commercial law firm. I had a corner office in a prestigious high-rise and nothing to do because I was a trophy employee and answerable to six partners, all of whom had differing opinions of the job and none of whom would let me actually do anything. So I sat and wrote my first novel, getting my secretary to type it up for me.

  They leased for me a BMW 323. I cracked its sump driving over an embankment while on the way home from a nightclub, leaning over to kiss the one-night-stand in the passenger seat. I once lost that expensive car in the city somewhere, because I was driving it while tripping. The city became like a pinball machine with me the ball but somehow reason broke through and I told my four passengers we’d have to seek alternative arrangements for transport to the next nightclub. I found the car behind the art gallery days later, having pieced together clues and vague information from others on the scene. Its windscreen wipers were jammed with parking tickets, which I of course ignored.

  I was lucky to be alive. Lucky not to have killed someone. Lucky not to be in jail. Lucky. I mean, lucky. On this front, they did not come much luckier than me. I honestly did not know how it happened that I was in Venice, a healthy, relatively sane human being whose only scar from those times, save the emotional ones, was a fairly terrible credit rating.

  So we’ll go no more a roving

  So late into the night …

  Lord Byron’s ode to the comedown after Venice’s Carnivale conjured up bittersweet reminiscences from that time for me. I did need to remember I met some great people then, had some great times. But I was haunted by the notions of choice and succu
mbing to weakness. In living this high life, had I forever forsaken any real chance at the more conventional relationships I now craved? Had I lived too much? I’d endlessly drifted into situations and experiences, or at least, felt like I had, not consciously choosing them but I suppose allowing my infirmities and influences to choose for me. It came down to this: was I a victim of my circumstance or a willing participant who had made her bed and now had to lie in it? Or was there a third option, one that included the first two but which was potent with the opportunity to integrate them fully and, in so doing, open up new possibilities?

  11

  A Sunshiny Day

  Ecclesiastes said, that all is vanity–

  Most modern preachers say the same, or show it

  By their examples of true Christianity …

  Don Juan, Canto VII

  Lord Byron’s sense of persecution had a push–pull effect on his level of attraction to spirituality, Christianity in particular. He spoke in the House of Lords on civil rights for Roman Catholics in Britain. He described Catholicism, not altogether straight-faced but not altogether facetiously, as ‘assuredly the eldest of the various branches of Christianity, what with incense, pictures, statues, altars, shrines, relics and the real presence, confession, absolution—there is something sensible to grasp at.’ And he would tell his closest friends he might possibly be devout by the time his life ended. And if the weather was nice. ‘I am always most religious on a sunshiny day,’ is another of his famously kooky quotes on the subject. At other times, he was critical to the point of causing accusations of atheism, considered a fairly heinous moral transgression in the England of the time in which he lived.