by Gail Jones
Ellie moved then to rummage through trestle tables piled high with discarded clothes. They gave off a slight whiff of naphthalene flakes and were remnants of every era and style, mostly retro-shaped and of fabrics one no longer saw, velveteen, chiffon, Crimplene. She extracted a cheongsam dress of a dense woven silk, covered by tiny emblems of cranes and pagodas. It was of shiny teal blue, with cloth fasteners at a slant and a small mandarin collar. Ellie stretched it across her breasts and hips to gauge if it would fit and decided yes, it was worth a try. She would wear it when next she met James so that he might remove it slowly.
Though he had looked nerve-wracked and bloodshot James still carried timeless appeal. Ellie was not sure how much this was overcoded by memory, but there was a charge to his presence and an arousing promise. His proximity in the restaurant had made her want to lean closer. She could feel her naked thighs beneath her thin skirt and had imagined his hand there, gently exploring. Her sexual fantasies all had this efficient simplicity. She would ring him in the morning and arrange another meeting, possibly at her apartment, with a bottle of wine. She would have indirect lighting and a melodious CD.
At fourteen they had been inept but lusty lovers: they didn’t know what was what. But they knew that there was a world of feeling awaiting them, and the opportunity to talk. The space of disclosure, when they lay in a sweaty embrace in late afternoon, was a sort of second home, so that they were homesick when they were apart, needing the wrecked foundry to rest in, and their own rug upon the floor, and the way light flowed and settled there, needing the bare talkative intimacy of one other person. The meaning of their meetings eluded them, but there was a sufficiency, a self-sufficiency, and a kind of sensual arrogance. Some afternoons they had thrashed about, in sheer heedless pleasure, and it took months before they each learned to slow down and take their time, and for Ellie to learn that she might instruct and more fully participate.
She remembered when James first discovered that women menstruate. He had not known how clandestine women were obliged to become, how curved around their own bodies. He told her then of the terrible shame of his nosebleeds and how he feared that he would never outgrow them. Imagine an adult, he said, bleeding from the face like that. Ellie had gently reassured him. It would pass. Everything passed. They were kids, just kids. No one, she told him, would remember his nosebleeds.
They had sex, but they did not know what ‘sexy’ was; their responses were untutored and without any deception. They shared pleasure and discomfort. They told each other funny stories. They discussed books they had read and whacky teenage ideas. Together they enjoyed unusual words, those that described something in the world of ravishing or antique particularity.
The word ‘clepsydra’ became a kind of code between them, an erotic trigger and a flag of assignation. No one else knew. When she leant over in class to whisper it, James would respond with a little nod, and sometimes reach, surreptitiously, to squeeze her hand. Neither she nor James had ever uttered the word ‘love’. Both were too shy. Both were troubled by what might dissolve if they dared to name it. Neither wished to alarm the other, or to reach and find their hands empty.
Clepsydra, the water clock, time rendered continuous. Time in transient light, talking softly about everything they were and might be. And now he was returned, her James, the body remembered above others, and in the saturated time of his return Ellie felt something open before her, another scale, a refashioned future, the glimmering of something half-concealed up ahead. She had always hated driving along country roads in the dark, seeing only in the pale stereoscopic limits of the headlights, sure only of things weakly illuminated, shapes, barest presences, rushing forward in the dark, atomised, gone. Now, looping back to the past, everything had changed. It was like recovering sight. It was like moving more slowly, watching objects solidify, and seeing the way. With her father they had driven cautiously, to avoid hitting kangaroos. ‘See?’ he once said, when they braked in time. ‘They rise up in the dark and you have to be careful.’ From the passenger seat she had watched the animal bounce off into the night, a silver outline, a mobile arc, energetic and unharmed.
Some of the stallholders in the market were beginning to pack away their wares. There were Turks selling Gözlemes; they had turned off their hotplates and were scraping leftover tabouli into plastic containers. There was an African man wrapping wooden statues, elongated human figures and animals with horns; there was a Hungarian baker, over-supplied with poppyseed cakes, and a Thai woman who sold jewellry made from sea shells. Merchants of many parts of the world were here, in a hippy leftover rehearsal of united nations. Ellie found heartwarming this Sydney of mixed populations. As she left the market – how everything converged – she saw a little stall behind which a Chinese woman sat. It occurred to Ellie she might discover a trinket to go with the mandarin dress. The woman was sixty or so, and sitting by her side was a girl about eight, who was likely her granddaughter. Her stall was a foldaway table covered with oriental odds and ends. There were jade charms, pink coral ornaments and a few hexagonal coins; there was a row of brass-handled magnifying glasses of different sizes; there were small cut-paper pictures in crimson and embroidered silk dragons. Objects from another world. Objects from Communist China.
Ellie picked up a magnifying glass. No reason, really.
The little girl said gravely: ‘you can make fire, as well as see,’ and she held a glass to the fading sun to show Ellie how rays might concentrate. Ellie pretended she didn’t know and tried to sound amazed. The girl was pleased. She beamed at her grandmother. So Ellie left the market with a hammer, a Chinese dress, poppyseed cake and a magnifying glass, and walked up the hill and a few blocks further, back to her apartment. She was sweating when she arrived and unlocked the door. The air was heavy with the threat of a coming storm.
It was difficult to filter all she had remembered that day, all that circulated around seeing James again, after so many years. Ellie took a shower, dressed in a sarong and prepared herself a gin and tonic. Then she sat for a while in front of a small electric fan, letting it blow cool over the damp surface of her hair. Miss Morrison had taught them about birds that came from Siberia, migratory birds that flew through China, then continued all the way to south-west and south-eastern Australia. These birds curve around the planet, that’s what she had said. They had chanted out the names of the birds in a sing-song fashion, the way they had been taught their maths times-tables, and Ellie had loved the way the listing and repetition became a kind of music. She must ask James if he remembered the chant. She would ask him to do the sing-song of the birds that curve around the planet, to give voice to the vectors Miss Morrison had described. James had talked of this once as they lay on the blanket; he had chanted the names and then turned to embrace her. These fragments they shared. They were more plausible, more secure, less private and idiomatic, now that he had returned to her. And it seemed to Ellie that there was an unexpected profundity to these recollections, as though they portended the completion, at last, of something long ago begun.
Ellie found the print, an old one and foxed, of native Australian flowers, and standing balanced on a chair hammered a nail into the wall, taking care not to make the plaster crack. Then she hung the picture. It was the simplest of pleasures and she loved the feel of the hammer in her hand, the warm wood, slightly concave for a labourer’s grasp. Lovely old bloke, he was, who wanted his hammer to go to a good home. And the print of a bunch of flowers, dryandra, another item she had rescued from obscurity at a market stall, here glowed in the pallid twilight and was suddenly redeemed and beautiful.
Ellie made herself a snack of cheese and poppyseed cake, opened a bottle of red wine, and decided against turning on the television for the news. Instead she stretched on the couch and resumed her reading of a Russian novel, one she was hoping to write about in her thesis. She took notes as she went, placing tiny coloured stickers on significant pages, so that the book was already looking half-transformed, an oddball art o
bject, sprouting a rainbow of rectangles. If she were to write on this book, she reflected, she would have to learn Russian, and in a casual half-serious way entertained the idea of looking up courses on the internet, before the weekend was over. It appealed to her, the idea of learning the Russian language. There might be curiosities of translation that would remake the novel and transport her to a different kind of European otherworld. The novel was called Petersburg, by Andrei Bely. It was written in olden times, in 1913. The young revolutionary, Nikolai Apollonovich, must assassinate his father, Apollon Apollonovich, with a complicated time bomb. Wonderful names, these Russians. Ellie would compare it, she thought, to James Joyce’s Ulysses and find intelligible links between cities rendered in words. The intellectual adventure of comparison excited and moved her, so that when she returned to her Sydney world it was thundering outside and it was eleven, perhaps, or nearing midnight. Time had leaked as she read, time had lost its authority, the peculiar duration of reading had entirely taken over.
Ellie stood up and slowly walked to the window. In the distance she heard the low rumble of a storm, and saw flashes of lightning tearing the sky. There was sublimity to thunderstorms and a sense of barely withheld threat. She watched for a while as trees sparked into seconds of existence, then fell back into darkness; she saw the ragged skyline in electric shock; she saw the undersides of clouds illuminated, like surreal creatures floating there; she saw the city take on a quality of abstraction, doused with crude light. Then the rain broke and fell heavily, in loud-roaring sheets. The air was filled up with noise and agitated presence. Each raindrop a small lantern.
Ellie closed away her book, undressed, and went to bed. In the darkness she lay listening to the sound of the flooding rain. It was a betokening, somehow, of another kind of engulfment, one of time, of memory, and of James returned.
And they are sinking now, all of them, into the wet sleep of the city. Rain is falling all over Sydney.
Catherine is still mourning her dead brother and still speaking to him in silence, summoning his company in the torrential night. An altar boy swinging a censer and smoke filling the transept of the church, and her mother’s face, and Brendan’s, like faces in an old film. She is remembering the summer he made a trolley-cart from a broken-down pram; it was the summer, light-lit, of her holy communion, and her little communion bag with the rosary beads in it, and a fiver, a gift from her parents; and everything then was white, her knee-socks were white, and her dress was white and her gauzy veil, white as those petals at the Quay, perpetually subsiding; and now she is seeing no floral emblem to carry her feelings, but enormous white eyelids, one resting upon another, the rims overlapping in a bulbous, rhyming fold, and the eyelids are closing, slow-motion, closing into dreaming; and she is thinking, so she will remember, so she will remember in the morning, must Google Woolloomooloo, must Google Woolloomooloo …
Pei Xing is preserving the lost child on television by magical-thinking the number five: Wu, wu; wu, wu; wu, wu; wu, wu; and remembering ancient men painting with water on the footpaths of People’s Park, practising calligraphy. The signs disappeared almost as they produced them, elegant broad flourishes with oversized pens. And returning half-sleeping in rain-sound to the park in Shanghai, she remembers old people performing cloud hands, swaying their bodies in the air, then walking backwards, stepping carefully, stepping beautifully solemn. It was another Tai Chi practice, walking backwards, backwards. And before she slips into dreaming Pei Xing realises this is her: some of us walk backwards, always seeing what lies behind; and she falls asleep like this, reversed into her own history, seeing her own childhood and what she has lost, walking backwards, and backwards, walking forwards backwards …
Ellie is thinking of rainfall over the Opera House, thinking of the Harbour swept shining and mystical by rain light, thinking of the time-lapse of all that she has known and read, and of James, and with James, ever and ever and abiding. The night has gained an enormity with the coming of the storm and in the drench she imagines it out there, Circular Quay, the vast dark water, the rain-glazed tide, the Harbour buoys with their red flares tossing messages across the water, seabirds rising up and rain coming down and the falling, falling, upon the living and the dead, ever and ever and abiding. There is the musical sound of rain on her roof and Ellie is thinking, so she will remember, must ring James, must ring James, must ring, ring …
Also by Gail Jones
Black Mirror
Sixty Lights
Dreams of Speaking
Sorry
Acknowledgements
The first debt of this project is to Kenneth Slessor’s elegiac poem, Five Bells (1939), which returned to me, like a remembered song, one midnight on a ferry in the centre of Circular Quay.
I wish to thank my colleagues at The University of Western Sydney, especially members of the Writing and Society Research Group led by Professor Ivor Indyk. The solidarity of members of this group is deeply appreciated. Thanks to the Shanghai Writers’ Association (SWA) for sponsoring my residency in Shanghai in 2008; Madeleine Thien and Yukiko Chino had coterminous residencies and were both congenial and supportive companions. Particular thanks to Claire Roberts and Nicholas Jose, for their patient kindness and circumspect advice on Chinese cultural matters. Hu Peihua, Rowan Callick, Wang Anyi, Ye Xin, Antonia Finnane, Guo Wu, Julia Lovell and Jiang Liping have all offered Chinese advice of one sort or another. Thanks to Jia Zongpei (my Chinese publisher), Zhao Lihong and the SWA for arranging my visit to Chongming Island. Jang Luping (Lucy) was a wonderful translator; Hu Peihua (SWA) was tirelessly wise and helpful; Francine Martin offered hospitality in Shanghai; thanks too to Michelle Garnaut, for her friendship and advice. Thanks to Paddy and Clare Callanan for hospitality and good-humour in Dublin, Fiona Wright for the clepsydra image, Fiona Stanley for medical knowledge, Kathleen Olive and Melinda Jewell and Suzanne Gapps for collegiate generosity and support.
Special thanks to Geoff Mulligan for editorial advice and to Meredith Curnow and Catherine Hill, two extraordinarily gifted and sensitive readers. Rebecca Carter and Laurence Laluyaux have been especially kind. I have the good fortune to work with Zoë Waldie, my wonderful agent. Victoria Burrows, Susan Midalia, Prue Kerr and Michelle de Kretser have each offered utterly essential moral support, as have Robyn Davidson and Drusilla Modjeska. My daughter Kyra has made this book possible.
Among textual resources, the works of Gelin Yan, Qui Xiaolong, Yu Hua, Ha Jin, Xinran and Yiyun Li have been helpful. Nien Cheng’s Life and Death in Shanghai (Penguin Books 1988) and Anhua Gao’s To the Edge of the Sky: A Story of Love, Betrayal, Suffering and the Strength of Human Courage (The Overlook Press 2000) are two fine memoirs of women’s cultural revolution experience. Wang Zhousheng’s story ‘The Beautiful Mushrooms’ is the source of some of my knowledge of labour conditions at Chongming Island. It is in Selected Short Stories by Contemporary Writers from Shanghai (II) (Better Link Press NY 2008). I also consulted Feng Jicai’s Ten Years of Madness: Oral Histories of China’s Cultural Revolution (China Books and Periodicals Inc. San Francisco 1996), the website Morning Sun http://www.morningsun.org/ and Li Zhensheng’s Red-Colour News Soldier: A Chinese Photographer’s Odyssey Though the Cultural Revolution (London: Phaidon, 2003). Simon Leys’ work, most recently a return to articles in The Angel and the Octopus (Duffy and Snellgrove 1999), was also inspiring.
The opening stanza of ‘On Raglan Road’ by Patrick Kavanagh is reprinted from Collected Poems, edited by Antoinette Quinn (Alan Lane, 2004), by kind permission of the Trustees of the Estate of the late Katherine B. Kavanagh, through the Jonathan Williams Literary Agency. The stanza of ‘Five Bells’ by Kenneth Slessor is reprinted from Five Bells: XX Poems (F.C. Johnson 1939), by kind permission of Paul Slessor. I thank Paul for his warm-hearted and affirming response to this project. The quotes from Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak (Harvill Collins Edition 1988) are reprinted by kind permission of the Random House Group Ltd.
FIVE BELLS. Copyright © 2011 by
Gail Jones.
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Originally published in Australia by Vintage
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jones, Gail, 1955 –
Five bells : a novel / Gail Jones.—1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-250-00373-7
1. Sydney (N.S.W.)—Fiction. 2. Psychological fiction. I. Title.