Living at home made things easier. By the time she landed in Australia, she had twelve thousand pounds to be going on with. For the first two nights, she had booked a hotel room down by the quay, an expensive hotel, an international chain. She intended after that to find a cheaper one, and then, if things seemed to be working out, some sort of flat, and then—what? A job. She denied it even to herself, but when she was to look back, she had no doubt that as soon as she bought the one-way ticket for Sydney, she’d always known she would get here and stop here. (The voice in her head, how much of her unused, under-practised Sheffield voice it was!)
That first morning, she knew she would never forget a moment of it. She never knew whether, in fact, she had arrived at six in the morning, or six in the evening; she had either gone to bed and slept for thirteen hours or for twenty-five straight. There seemed no way of ever knowing. But she woke at eight in the morning, and when she opened the curtains what met her dazzled eyes from the nineteenth-floor window was, rushing up to greet her gaze, the great dazzling sweep of the harbour, what was, she knew, the Opera House, so different from almost above, the great bridge and a clean blaze of sun and sea and shining glass like nothing else she could ever have imagined. She had had only the vaguest idea that her room was so high up, she’d been so exhausted when she arrived. But her long sleep had wiped all that quite clean, and she felt like going out and seeing what the city held for her.
She had seen it all so many times in photographs, of course, but it still surprised; the ice-cream scoops of the Opera House so edibly the palest brown and from this position, on foot, not quite the shape you thought it would be. She went on walking, with the shine of the city already deep within her, and smiling quite stupidly at everyone she met, and found herself in a park that ran over a substantial hill. It was a botanical garden, apparently; she looked up into the heavy gloom of the trees, and there were vast fruit hanging there. She wondered if they were breadfruit—jackfruit—but then one moved somewhat, stretching out a membraned wing, and they were—what? Flying foxes, enormous bats? She had no idea. Amazing. And there, most marvellous of all, was a yellowing Greek-pillared building exactly like the old Graves Art Gallery, placed on top of a perfect green hill underneath a perfect blue sky. And it was an art gallery. That was absolutely hilarious. She didn’t go in; she had a lifetime to go in. Over and over again, that beautiful first day, she felt as if she were in a Sheffield which had died and gone to heaven. So many times in Sheffield, toiling up a gloomy Victorian street, she had had the illusion that just over the brow of the hill it would give up its teasing seriousness and show some glorious expanse of sea. She had never known why she had always felt this; it never made the slightest ounce of sense. And here she was, and it looked so much the same, with its soft yellow and blackened buildings, its ambitious stabs at skyscrapers; but the people made it beautiful, getting around their lives in ways themselves beautiful—transporting themselves with wheeled heels, irresistible tugboats hooting as they set off from one wharf after another. And look—there—like the irruption of festive pleasures into an urban life, like the boys pounding up the hills with their rollerskates on, there was a supercilious white ibis stalking along the waterfront, like a bird that had lived its life among sand, in ancient Egypt, and had now earned its reward; and then—suddenly she was in a different place, and looking all the way across the harbour at the Opera House—quite at once there was, of all things, a parrot, just sitting there, eyeing her, like someone’s escaped pet, a vivid green and red and, as it stretched and shook its wings, a beautiful sunset pink underneath. She stood there, entranced; it took off, and as she followed it with her eye, she saw something perhaps even more marvellous, a scrubbed-clean white hanging railway making its futuristic way through the high sandstone buildings. She looked at it all, from the far glitter of the open sea, the little huddle of cottages on one side of the bay, buried among dense greenery, the whole city, and could not believe that people walked through here looking nothing but happy; could not believe that they did not give way to their daily astonishment. She felt like buying presents, here, for—oh, she didn’t know, but for everyone.
She sat on a wall and watched the people go by. Behind her was the sea; in front of her, a sort of promenade. After a few moments, a boy stopped—he was wearing a vest, a pair of vivid red shorts and, round his ankles, legwarmers. He had glided up on a skateboard, flicked it up with his toes, and now held it to his chest. He smiled as if he couldn’t help it, could do nothing else, and his teeth and eyes shone like the day. “You wanna go?” he said.
“No, that’s fine,” Alexandra said, but smiling in helpless response. She didn’t care whether he stayed or went: he’d contributed enough in three words.
“Suit yourself,” the boy said, but in a perfectly friendly way. “Catch you later,” and he was off.
Her first days in Sydney were just like that, spent wandering around, striking up conversations with any number of people, mostly as short but amiable as that first one—people of any age, they all talked to her, and they talked to her as if she were their oldest friend. She simply followed her instincts, and one day, down at the harbour front, saw on the board a destination: “Manly,” it said, and it seemed like the continuation of a huge joke that everyone was in on. She bought a ticket, and took a seat at the front of the boat, on a green-painted seat like a park bench. It wasn’t busy; it was the middle of the day in the week, and there were only a dozen or so other people on the boat. It set off, and Alexandra watched the landward sights, the glass palaces downtown, the Opera House, the bridge fall effortlessly into new vistas. A tiny island in the middle of the bay; a pair of scarlet speedboats, apparently racing each other round the harbour in effortless leisure; a yacht with sails of perfect whiteness. She tried to remember that there were sharks here, there were spiders that could kill you, crocodiles in the sea, even, but it all seemed impossible to imagine. There was nothing in this country that could hurt you.
Manly was a thin strip of land, carved up into tiny blocks of brilliant white and glass, and the joke seemed to be continued by its inhabitants; the Manly Grocers, the Manly Fishing Club, the Manly Supermarket. There were few people about, and their smiles seemed to suggest that this was a joke that had never palled. It must, in reality, be ordinary to them; their pleasure must come from a more deeply rooted place. The Manly Fishmongers, even; she enjoyed that. And in a few blocks more, there she was at the real ocean, roaring away. It was winter, she knew that, but the air was as fresh and full of promise as a lovely English May, and there were even surfers in the sea. She couldn’t believe how perfectly all this was living up to her expectations; if she’d known how to draw a picture of an Australian surfer, they would have looked exactly like that. It was nearly one o’clock. Resolutely, she retraced her steps to the Manly Fishmongers, and there she bought a bag of cooked prawns, asked them to open a dozen oysters, and took them, slopping about in their juice in the bottom of a plastic bag, back to the beach, and ate them in sheer pleasure, feeding one every now and again to the shrieking demands of the seagulls. It was all too perfect, and when it was done, and she had wiped her hands by rubbing them in the coarse clean sand, she rewarded herself with a beer.
The perfection of the day surely heralded some big positive alteration in her circumstances, and on the way back, Alexandra paused outside the Manly Dress Shop. It wasn’t really called that; it was called, just like Mrs. Grunbaum’s shop in Broomhill, Belinda’s. It was a proper dress shop, though, with a beige summer suit and a pink-and-black striped cocktail dress in raw silk in the window, the mannequins canted backwards as if recoiling from an explosion of light. She looked down at herself: although she had sat on a beach for an hour, her dress was elegant, and she could feel her hair might have been styled by the wind. She went in; she talked to the manageress; she asked for a job; and they gave it to her, just to see how it would work out. She told them her name was Alex, and they agreed to pay her, for the moment, cash in hand.
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Any kind of ambition had, it seemed, been drained entirely away from her, and, within weeks, she was more happy than she had ever known, just advising rich girls from Sydney on the perfect look for them. It made her laugh; she couldn’t believe that, even now, the way she had learnt how to talk gave her some kind of edge in this place full of beauty. They actually thought, some of them—and Marion, whose shop it was, was one—that Alex had some kind of innate sense of elegant European style because of where she came from and how she talked. Marion made suggestions to her customers nervously, looking over at Alex for frequent confirmation. “That’s simply gorgeous,” Alex would say, or, every so often, “It’s a nice dress, but I don’t think it’s exactly—let me suggest—” And they were grateful. It was preposterous to Alex; she would have sacrificed a good deal to have been one of those people, dress sense and all. And yet she was utterly happy in her ill-paid job, with no responsibilities, and her sunny little flat, on the second floor of a building three streets from the ocean. It was utterly enough.
Though she had made her way by being English—“terribly terribly” was the phrase they used of her, she couldn’t understand it—she was damned if she was going to spend any time with the other English in Australia. Every single one she met seemed to drink like a fish, and to be regarded by the surrounding Australians with a kind of jocular terror, which tended to come out in tentative forays into insults. She was taken to an event at the modern art museum—she still hadn’t made it to that transported Graves on the hill. She went with a group of those friends who, here, seemed to accumulate from nowhere; they’d suggested it, thought she’d enjoy it because it was an exhibition of new British painting, shipped all the way over here, classy. They’d lasted fifteen minutes of gazing into their glasses of free wine before Alex let them off the hook by saying, in her most pukka tones, “This is bloody awful, let’s go to King’s Cross and get awfully pissed.” They liked that. She wouldn’t care if she never saw another English person again.
Before long, she had to remind herself that she had any kind of family, and what had been a commitment to write every single week without fail was sometimes put aside. It wasn’t that there was nothing to tell them; it was more that she didn’t really want them to be tempted to come over here. She could feel herself shedding her ties like a dog shaking itself after a bathe. Even the question of getting in touch with Chris, who was supposedly the reason she had come, seemed repulsive, as if he were part of her English life; her letters home always contained a short paragraph, steadily growing shorter as the months went by, of plausible lies about the dickhead. She couldn’t even remember what he had looked like. After six months, her voice, which was such a benefit to her in her pleasantly crummy job, started to grate on her.
She had a love affair; she enjoyed even its eventual unhappiness. He was older than her, and tanned into a leathery sort of state beyond his thirty-five years; the dry skin at his neck tasted like heavily salted crisps, and you expected him to dissolve under the tongue. He’d been married once; she’d moved back to Perth, his wife, with the nine-year-old twins, and he was putting too much weight on the relationship from day one. She didn’t care; she gave it five months, and it took five months.
One weekend, he took her to a friend’s house in the Blue Mountains. She hadn’t been outside Sydney since she’d got there, and amused him by asking if they were in the outback yet as soon as they were clear of the suburbs. It was a glass and wood ranch house, way up a back road, bone-shatteringly bumpy by night, and when she woke in the morning, a vivid slash of red clay through the eucalyptus groves and, incredibly, full of kangaroos. She’d never thought of seeing such a thing, but he laughed at her when she woke him up to come and look at the kangaroos in the mist of the morning. “There’s plenty to spare,” he said.
She wandered out on to the veranda; there was a mother and a baby, grazing a couple of feet apart. They stopped when she came out, and beadily observed her. She took a step closer, and another, and another, stopping only when they thumped off in their laborious way. “It’s all right,” she said. “I’m not going to hurt you,” but with one more step, the baby took a single leap and—she couldn’t see how it was done—was feet first back into the mother’s pouch, just the end of a foot and the black snub nose and a lumpiness under the fur to show that anything was there. The mother lumbered off. Alex had never seen anything so wonderful in her life.
But the weekend was a matter of grey tinned food and dried preparations and endless boring beer, and the television was up the creek, and by the end of it she was pretty sick of Dirk. It wasn’t his fault. They were perfectly polite in the car going back—he talked, as he often did, about the ways his first marriage had failed—and a couple of weeks later she ended the relationship, badly. She couldn’t mind anything; it was all just fantastic. And immediately afterwards she regularized her position with the authorities, left the dress shop and went to do exactly the job she’d been doing in England for one of the biggest insurance companies in Australia. Their billboards were everywhere—you couldn’t miss them; and after three more years she spoke like any Australian, and she lived in a flat with a terrace in Manly.
Alex had heard once of a way of life that had tempted her: a girl she had met at a party at university, somebody’s elder sister, who said that for four years, she’d worked each year for six months at an office job, and then with what she’d earned and saved, she took off to some really low-rent part of the world—Greece, India—and sat there for the next six months. She’d been a confident, drawling sort of girl, and her existence seemed better organized and better planned in its concentrated pleasures than any other Alex had ever heard of. “Like cocks and box,” the girl had said, to an admiring but uncomprehending audience at the party. It seemed to Alex that, though she couldn’t plan a life like that, hers had quite naturally, in some respects, fallen into similar rhythms. When she looked back over the five years since she had arrived in Sydney, it turned out that her life divided into two, and she alternated between two positions. For five months each year she would be with a man; it would come to an end, and she would be single again for seven months before she started thinking it might be nice to have a boyfriend again. Both had their pleasures; the pleasure of discovering somebody, of the sex, of giving yourself over to somebody, of settling into domesticity, of anticipating the end, of looking forward to being single again; or on the other hand the pleasure of being able to do exactly what you wanted, of being able to go out on a Friday night with whoever you felt like asking, of undertaking small domestic improvements, of staying in and trying out face-packs, and, finally, of anticipating the pleasure of meeting someone new again, to have someone dopy to go to bed with and to take you out for dinner. The rhythm had reached a kind of steady level, and it was surprising that the qualities of the man himself weren’t reflected in the length of the relationship. It always ended up being around five or six months, for some reason.
She went on writing a letter every few weeks, but with less and less to say; she got herself a camera, and in the week before she was going to write, she generally took it out with her and photographed a beach party, a night out, lunch with some group of friends or another, just to have something to send and something to explain. She photographed, too, those small domestic improvements, once even sending a photograph to her parents of a new iron she had bought. Most of her letters were just accounts of one or other outing, giving not much away. After three years, she sent a letter saying that she and Chris had decided to call it a day; she thought it might grow awkward, never sending her parents a photograph that included the long-forgotten figure.
To her surprise, a week or ten days later, the telephone rang, and it was her mother, full of concern; it took her a moment to remember what she had to be concerned about, and she took three minutes to work out, from her mother’s delicate questioning, that she might be under the impression that, without Chris, there was no point in Alex staying in Australia. That she might
, incredible as it seemed, be thinking of going back to England. But England was dead to her or, as she put it, “I’ve really got my whole life here now.” And once a year, towards the end of November, she always cleared an entire day, and sat down with an old list, and sent a pile of Christmas cards to anyone she could think of in England. In the first three or four years, she included a photocopied letter with the cards, saying what she’d been up to and how she was getting on, with a photocopied image of herself looking tanned and happy in a swimsuit on a beach. It would arrive in an England sooty and harsh, stripped of any colour. After a few years, she stopped including this, and her cards just said Love from Alex, and if she was sure there was no possibility of the invitation being taken up, she might add, to Daniel Glover, for instance, “You must try and come out some time—it’d be a blast …”
In reality she never thought of England. When she first arrived, she had thought immediately that this city was like a Sheffield that had died and gone to heaven. If, on the other side of the world, there was a city that was rooted deep in its geology, hauling up blackened shapeless treasure from the depths of the earth and turning it into money, here was a city that seemed to float on the surface of the water. She had no idea, really, how Sydney made any money; it just seemed a matter of unrooted confidence, exchanging sums, one for another. She learnt, too, a notion of family that suited her, however new and strange it at first appeared.
“I haven’t seen them for years,” Toni said—she was a journalist on the Sydney Morning Herald, decisive and punctual in her judgements. “It’s stupid to keep it up when you’ve nothing in common with your parents.”
“Do they live in Sydney?” Alex said. It was a late-night conversation; they were lying on a pile of beanbags on a veranda, overlooking the blue-black warm summer of the sea, a trail of silver leading across the surface to the huge moon and the silver Southern Cross Alex always looked for, as once she had looked for Orion and his belt. It was a party of some guy Alex had never met before; Toni had told her to come along, and she had.
The Northern Clemency Page 67