When the bright young student started reading from Garner’s book, the crowd at the State Library of New South Wales fell silent. The chosen passage was grim: the testimony of the female police diver who was the first to reach the submerged vehicle and feel, in the darkness, ‘slightly protruding from the car, a small person’s head’. I looked around at my fellow lunch guests. People had their heads down, their faces set. The room was still and tense. We were waiting, quietly, politely, for something deeply unpleasant to be over. It strikes me this may be the prevailing attitude towards Garner’s book, which has been in the running for several awards but so far won none (the Kibble went to Joan London for her fine novel The Golden Age). I wonder whether judges see the power of this book but in the end hesitate to celebrate it. We respect the author – she’s one of our best – and admire her previous works, but why this story? Why ask us to think about the unthinkable?
It’s a question she tackles in a recent piece for the Monthly. In the book, she quotes perceptively from the 2007 60 Minutes interview with Farquharson’s wife, the boys’ mother, Cindy Gambino: ‘Most parents who’ve never lost a child can’t fathom the thought of it. They get to a certain point in their thoughts and they just go, “Nuh. Not going there.”’
I admit to having done exactly that. When Garner’s book came out I skimmed its pages, but I didn’t want to read it. I relied on trusted critics – Peter Craven said it was some sort of masterpiece – to tell me it was a work deserving serious attention. Garner understands this reluctance: late in the book, when she has decided Farquharson is guilty, she says she still ‘would have given anything to be convinced he was innocent’ because ‘in spite of everything I knew about the ways of the world, it was completely unendurable to me that a man would murder his own children’.
It may be clear now that I have read the book. I decided to do so after the Kibble lunch, and read it last weekend. It is as harrowing as I knew it would be: we will never know how long it took the boys to die, and so in this work of non-fiction our imagination has space to torture us.
And it is indeed some sort of masterpiece. Surely I am not the only reader who will think of Dostoyevsky’s great novel Crime and Punishment. It is a deeply human work, touching on the lives of the dozens of people affected by a terrible crime. It stares into the dark side of love. It is also a tribute to our judicial system, flawed but magnificent. Garner’s eye for people is so sharp – in a few lines we know them, or someone like them – and she records the toll on the participants, including herself. ‘What was the point,’ she writes towards the end. ‘What was the truth? Whatever it was, it seemed to reside in some far-off, shadow realm of anguish, beyond the reach of words and resistant to the striving of intellect.’
It’s an important book and I’m glad I read it.
Two weeks after this essay was published, This House of Grief received the Ned Kelly Award for best true crime book. Garner said: ‘The Neds are the only people with the guts to give this book a prize.’
The Weekend Australian Review
The Insults of Age
Helen Garner
The insults of age had been piling up for so long that I was almost numb to them. The husband (when I still had one): ‘You’re not going out in that sleeveless top?’ The grandchild: ‘Nanna, why are your teeth grey?’ The pretty young publisher tottering along in her stilettos: ‘Are you right on these stairs, Helen?’ The flight attendant at the boarding gate: ‘And when you do reach your seat, madam, remember to stow that little backpack riiiight under the seat in front of you!’ The grinning red-faced bloke who mutters to the young man taking the seat beside me: ‘Bad luck, mate.’ The armed child behind the police station counter unable to conceal her boredom as I describe the man in a balaclava, brandishing a baton, who leapt roaring out of the dark near the station underpass and chased me and my friend all the way home: ‘And what were you scared of? Did you think he might hit you with his umbrella?’
Really, it is astonishing how much shit a woman will cop in the interests of civic and domestic order.
But last spring I got a fright. I was speaking about my new book to a university lecture theatre full of journalism students. I had their attention. Everything was rolling along nicely. Somebody asked me a question and I looked down to collect my thoughts. Cut to the young lecturer’s face surprisingly close to mine. ‘Helen,’ he murmured, ‘we’re going to take you to the medical clinic.’ What? Me? Apparently, in those few absent moments, of which I still have no memory, I had become confused and distressed; I didn’t know where I was or why I was there. He thought I might be having a stroke.
The rest of that afternoon I lay at my ease in an Emergency cubicle at the Royal Melbourne, feeling strangely light-hearted. I kept thinking in wonder, I’ve dropped my bundle. All scans and tests came up clear. Somebody asked me if I’d ever heard of transient global amnesia. I was home in time for dinner.
Next morning I took the hospital report to my GP. ‘I’ve been worried about you,’ she said. ‘It’s stress. You are severely depleted. Cancel the rest of your publicity tour, and don’t go on any planes. You need a serious rest.’ I must have looked sceptical. She leant across the desk, narrowed her eyes, and laid it on the line: ‘Helen. You. Are. Seventy-one.’
I went home and sulked on the couch for a week, surveying my lengthening past and shortening future.
I had known for years, of course, that beyond a certain age women become invisible in public spaces. The famous erotic gaze is withdrawn. You are no longer, in the eyes of the world, a sexual being. In my experience, though, this forlornness is a passing phase. The sadness of the loss fades and fades. You pass through loneliness and out into a balmy freedom from the heavy labour of self-presentation. Oh, the relief! You have nothing to prove. You can saunter about the world in overalls. Because a lifetime as a woman has taught you to listen, you know how to strike up long, meaty conversations with strangers on trams and trains.
But there is a downside, which, from my convalescent sofa, I dwelt upon with growing irritation. Hard-chargers in a hurry begin to patronise you. Your face is lined and your hair is grey, so they think you are weak, deaf, helpless, ignorant and stupid. When they address you they tilt their heads and bare their teeth and adopt a tuneful intonation. It is assumed that you have no opinions and no standards of behaviour, that nothing that happens in your vicinity is any of your business. By the time I had got bored with resting and returned to ordinary life, I found that the shield of feminine passivity I had been holding up against this routine peppering of affronts had splintered into shards.
One warm December evening, a friend and I were strolling along Swanston Street on our way out to dinner. The pavement was packed and our progress was slow. Ahead of us in the crowd we observed with nostalgic pleasure a trio of teenagers striding along, lanky white Australian schoolgirls in gingham dresses and blazers, their ponytails tied high with white ribbons.
One of the girls kept dropping behind her companions to dash about in the moving crowd, causing mysterious jolts and flurries. Parallel with my friend and me, an Asian woman of our age was walking by herself, composed and thoughtful. The revved-up schoolgirl came romping back against the flow of pedestrians and with a manic grimace thrust her face right into the older woman’s. The woman reared back in shock. The girl skipped nimbly across the stream of people and bounded towards her next mark, a woman sitting on a bench – also Asian, also alone and minding her own business. The schoolgirl stopped in front of her and did a little dance of derision, flapping both hands in mocking parody of greeting. I saw the Asian woman look up in fear, and something in me went berserk.
In two strides I was behind the schoolgirl. I reached up, seized her ponytail at the roots and gave it a sharp downward yank. Her head snapped back. In a voice I didn’t recognise I snarled, ‘Give it a rest, darling.’ She twisted to look behind her. Her eyes were bulging, her mouth agape. I let go and she bolted away to her friends. The three of them set off at a
run. Their white ribbons went bobbing through the crowd all the way along the City Square and up the steps of the Melbourne Town Hall, where a famous private school was holding its speech night. The whole thing happened so fast that when I fell into step beside my friend she hadn’t even noticed I was gone.
Everyone to whom I described the incident became convulsed with laughter, even lawyers, once they’d pointed out that technically I had assaulted the girl. Only my fourteen-year-old granddaughter was shocked. ‘Don’t you think you should have spoken to her? Explained why what she was doing was wrong?’ As if. My only regret is that I couldn’t see the Asian woman’s face at the moment the schoolgirl’s head jerked back and her insolent grin turned into a rictus. Now that I would really, really like to have seen.
By now my blood was up. At Qantas I approached a check-in kiosk and examined the screen. A busybody in uniform barged up to me, one bossy forefinger extended. ‘Are you sure you’re flying Qantas and not Jetstar?’ Once I would have bitten my lip and said politely, ‘Thanks. I’m okay, I think.’ Now I turned and raked him with a glare. ‘Do I look like somebody who doesn’t know which airline they’re flying?’
A young publicist from a literary award phoned me to deliver tidings that her tragic tone indicated I would find devastating: alas, my book had not been short-listed. ‘Thanks for letting me know,’ I said in the stoical voice writers have ready for these occasions. But to my astonishment she poured out a stream of the soft, tongue-clicking, cooing noises one makes to a howling toddler whose balloon has popped. I was obliged to cut across her: ‘And you can stop making those sounds.’
After these trivial but bracing exchanges, my pulse rate was normal, my cheeks were not red, I was not trembling. I hadn’t thought direct action would be so much fun. Habits of a lifetime peeled away. The world bristled with opportunities for a woman in her seventies to take a stand. I shouted on planes. I fought for my place in queues. I talked to myself out loud in public. I walked along the street singing a little song under my breath: ‘Back off. How dare you? Make my day.’ I wouldn’t say I was on a hair-trigger. I was just primed for action.
I invited an old friend to meet me after work at a certain city bar, a place no longer super-fashionable but always reliable. We came down the stairs at 4.30 on a Friday afternoon. Her silver hair shone in the dim room, advertising our low status. The large space was empty except for a small bunch of quiet drinkers near the door. Many couches and armchairs stood in appealing configurations. We walked confidently towards one of them. But a smiling young waiter stepped out from behind the bar and put out one arm. ‘Over here.’ He urged us away from the comfortable centre of the room, with its gentle lamps and cushions, towards the darkest part at the back, where several tiny cafe tables and hard, upright chairs were jammed side-on against a dusty curtain.
I asked, ‘Why are you putting us way back here?’
‘It’s our policy,’ he said, ‘when pairs come in. We put them at tables for two.’
Pairs? Bullshit. ‘But we don’t want to sit at the back,’ I said. ‘There’s hardly anybody here. We’d like to sit on one of those nice couches.’
‘I’m sorry, madam,’ said the waiter. ‘It’s policy.’
‘Come on,’ said my pacific friend. ‘Let’s just sit here.’
I subsided. We chose a slightly less punitive table and laid our satchels on the floor beside us. With tilted head and toothy smile the waiter said, ‘How’s your day been, ladies?’
‘Not bad, thanks,’ I said. ‘We’re looking forward to a drink.’
He leant his head and shoulders right into our personal space. ‘And how was your shopping?’
That was when I lost it.
‘Listen,’ I said with a slow, savage calm. ‘We don’t want you to ask us these questions. We want you to be cool, and silent, like a real cocktail waiter.’
The insult rolled off my tongue as smooth as poison. The waiter’s smile withered. Then he made a surprising move. He put out his hand to me and said pleasantly, ‘My name’s Hugh.’
I shook his hand. ‘I’m Helen. This is Anne. Now, in the shortest possible time, will you please get two very dry martinis onto this table?’
He shot away to the bar. My friend with the shining silver hair pursed her lips and raised her eyebrows at me. We waited in silence. Soon young Master Hugh skidded back with the drinks and placed them before us deftly, without further attempts at small talk. We thanked him. The gin worked its magic. For an hour my friend and I talked merrily in our ugly, isolated corner. We declined Hugh’s subdued offer of another round, and he brought me the bill. He met my eye. Neither of us smiled, let alone apologised, but between us flickered something benign. His apparent lack of resentment moved me to leave him a rather large tip.
On the tram home I thought of the young waiter with a chastened respect. It came to me that to turn the other cheek, as he had done, was not simply to apply an ancient Christian precept but also to engage in a highly sophisticated psychological manoeuvre. When I got home, I picked up Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead where I’d left off and came upon a remark made by Reverend Ames, the stoical Midwestern Calvinist preacher whose character sweetens and strengthens as he approaches death: ‘It is worth living long enough,’ he writes, in a letter to the son born to him in his old age, ‘to outlast whatever sense of grievance you may acquire.’
I take his point. But my warning stands. Let blood technicians look me in the eye and wish me good morning before they sink a needle into my arm. Let no schoolchild in a gallery stroll between me and the painting I’m gazing at as if I were only air. And let no one, ever again, under any circumstances, put to me or any other woman the moronic question, ‘And how was your shopping?’
The Monthly
My Granny’s Last Wish
Anna Krien
It was my grandmother’s last wish that I get rid of that car. I thought it was a bit manipulative to use a dying wish on my poor defenceless V8 mag-wheel bench-seat 1978 HZ Holden panel van. I tried to negotiate.
‘Granny, I won’t get another tattoo, or any new holes in my face, and I’ll keep my hair the one colour from now on, but I’m not getting rid of the panel van. Deal?’
My granny sighed and turned away. She closed her eyes, pretending to be asleep. When her dinner came she wouldn’t let me help her eat it, and the nurse cut the meat into little pieces instead.
My parents bought me the panel van when I was eighteen. I’d decided that was the car I wanted – not that my parents were in the habit of buying their children cars, but since I wanted such a cheap one, it didn’t seem too decadent to help me out. I had no real knowledge of the Sandman and its cult status; none of that was what drew me to it. Six months prior to deciding on a panel van, I’d had a car accident. I crashed my best friend’s dad’s green Ford Falcon. We’d left the city packed for a road trip. We were going for months, maybe even a year – we had no idea – but in total we were gone for about eight hours.
On the Bass Highway I lost control of the car, fishtailing for a hundred metres or so before swinging off the road, up over a ditch and airborne, then skidding into a paddock and stopping snug between two trees. All our shit in the back seat flew forward: socks, shoes, undies, cassettes, a Coles plastic bag full of marijuana that spilled all over us. Suddenly people were all around the car trying to get us out, but the doors wouldn’t budge. We had to climb into the back seat and crawl out.
It was after that I wanted a panel van.
Every other car on the road looked unsafe to me, fast and loose and flimsy. The Holden panel van struck me as reliable and heavy, like a big steel whale – steady even in a stormy sea. Plus, I went to raves at the docks or out in the bush, and there was always a moment when the drugs and the night started closing in on you, when people’s faces, their jaws grinding, started morphing into snarling hyenas and you weren’t sure if you’d said something or if you’d thought it, and all that connecting that was happening a couple hours prior was
suddenly one big disconnection. In other words, there were no drugs left, and I wanted a safe place, somewhere that was mine, a cocoon. I needed the back of a panel van.
She was white with surf stickers, meticulously looked after by her previous owner, a mechanic. I painted her with house paint, a ritual I repeated every few years, a splattered outline left on whatever street I was living on at the time like the chalk outline of a dead body in a homicide investigation. In the back was a mattress, a doona, pillows and cushions, books, lighters, stashes of snacks and rolly papers.
In one of my first share houses, where the kitchen floor had sunk from people dancing and the speakers had memorably burst into flames at our housewarming, I’d gradually moved from a bedroom, then into the laundry nestled next to the hot-water system, and finally into my panel van, chipping in $20 a week to come into the house in the morning.
In the dark hour just before dawn, I’d watch through the window as Vietnamese fishermen trudged past with buckets and rods on their way to the Yarra River, sucking in the glow of their cigarettes. Sometimes a housemate would come out with a cup of tea for me, other times I’d crawl out in my PJs to the disapproving scowls of our neighbours. But winter broke me, and I started sleeping inside the house with one of my housemates, telling him to kick me out if he got lucky. He never kicked me out – well, not until four years later.
Boyfriends had to learn that the panel van was mine – as I did, in a way. I remember once a boyfriend tried to drive off and leave me on the side of the road, but the panel van wouldn’t start. Not a sound. Calmly I hopped in, put on my seatbelt and said, ‘Okay, I’m ready,’ and she started, her beautiful purr just for me. A couple of times, however, I’d yield to a man’s confidence, his ‘Don’t be silly’ when I’d voice doubts, and trust he knew what he was doing, that he understood the breadth of my car when driving her – only to get stuck in a laneway, scraping her sides along people’s back fences.
The Best Australian Essays 2015 Page 27