Relatively Famous

by Roger Averill

At the time I gave the obvious response: ‘Inside them, their imaginations and curiosity, their sense of security.’ All of which I thought, and still believe to be true. That didn’t stop me late that night, lying beside Noah in his narrow bed, having comforted him after a nightmare, questioning what was wrong with me. Why didn’t I resent those wasted hours, all those non-productive days? Why was it that I loved just being with them?

  The next time I saw Mum I asked her about it, about how she had coped.

  ‘I never thought about it, really,’ she said. Her eyes didn’t meet mine but stared out the window behind me, as if into her past. ‘I felt isolated, being in England, but it would’ve been much worse if you hadn’t been there. I guess back then, like most married couples, we had an unstated agreement that your father was the productive one and my job was to ease his way, to keep you out of his hair. He couldn’t write with noise, so you and I spent much of our time out-of-doors. Walking, mainly – to the village, in the woods, catching the bus to Stroud. As I remember it, we spent many an hour walking in the rain. Fortunately, you loved nothing more than wading through puddles in your wellies. I guess it was boring, but I don’t remember ever thinking of it in those terms.’

  ‘I hadn’t either, until Drew made me feel brain dead.’

  ‘It’s funny how no one speaks of being “heart dead”. It’s to your credit, what you’re doing with the kids. You’re not brain dead, just a dreamer. Always have been. Your grandmother used to say that if they had a national team for daydreaming, you’d be its captain. It’s how you cope, how you’ve always coped – your mind off God-knows-where.’

  Even now, when I’m meant to be rushing out the door for work, I often find myself propped on the end of the bed, a sock or shoe dangling, staring blankly out the window at the green metal roof of the house across the road, the branches of the lemon-scented gum swaying beside it. Like an infant mesmerised by a mobile.

  Nothing comes of these reveries now, no songs, no ideas for paintings. But I continue to enjoy their stillness. I sometimes worry that our phones and tablets, our pods and pads, are fidgeting our minds. Endless images and meaningless tasks crowding out our daydreams. How many poems have been lost to Twitter? I know they compose them on there too. But, yes, like all the middle-aged who have gone before me, I am convinced our world is a pale imitation of the one I remember from my youth.

  Even the trams are not what they used to be: the rattle and lurch and the daring of the running board replaced by a smooth, sealed-in silence. The one we were taking to the gallery eased to a stop near the market. An old man on a bike pulled up beside us. His bike was dilapidated, but hanging from the handlebars was a new-looking wicker basket. Perched within it was a small white dog. Alert, its gaze fixed, directed straight ahead, it looked like a hood ornament. ‘That’s what my dog in England looked like,’ I said, nudging Sunday, ‘Boswell.’

  She pulled the bud out of her right ear. I wasn’t sure that she’d heard me. ‘Cute,’ she said.

  The tram glided forward, leaving the man and his dog behind. Sunday reinserted the earpiece and returned to her phone.

  I have always liked Ian Fairweather’s work, so was never going to miss a Fairweather retrospective. As it happened, I had been planning a unit on post-impressionism for my Year Nine class and thought that having begun it with Van Gogh and Gaugin I would end it with Fairweather, topping it off with an excursion to the exhibition. This, then, was reconnaissance work. The romance of Fairweather’s itinerant travels through Asia, his raft trip from Darwin to Timor, his twenty-year self-imposed exile on Bribie Island, living in a hut like a hermit, dedicated solely to his art – surely this was something that still appealed to fourteen-year-olds. I remembered how on first hearing of Fairweather in Fifth Form I had scoured maps of the Victorian coast, looking for an island I could escape to.

  When I had asked Sunday if she wanted to go to an exhibition with me she’d said, ‘Maybe. Who’s the artist?’

  I told her about Fairweather and dragged out a tattered print of one of his early Chinese landscapes, spoke enthusiastically of his monastic commitment to art.

  Handing me back the print, Sunday said, ‘Sure, why not. He sounds like a loser, but the painting looks good.’ She walked away as she said this and I couldn’t tell if she was stirring or not.

  Strolling through the exhibition, we gave each other a wide berth. Not wanting to bore her with my penetrating commentary, I did what I hardly ever do and paid the extra money for an audio tour. I offered Sunday the same, but she preferred her own aural accompaniment. How, I wondered, would Fairweather go with a Katie Perry soundtrack?

  I was still studying one of his early white-on-black gouaches, wondering how I could get my students to do something with such free and simple lines, when I sensed someone standing close behind me. It was Sunday. She rested her head on my shoulder. Touched by this public display of affection, I put my arm around her and gave her a squeeze. ‘Do you like it?’

  ‘I want to show you something.’

  She led me to a much larger canvas, which, like most of Fairweather’s Bribie Island works, turned out to be painted on cardboard. A parade of cubist-style figures jostled each other in a crowd.

  ‘It’s meant to be a street in Manila,’ she said. ‘I feel sorry for this guy.’ She pointed to a figure, a child perhaps. He was kneeling, squashed on the pavement, his head turned sideways to avoid the crush, his left arm twisted awkwardly behind his back. She next directed my gaze to the fluid lines of a mother holding a squirming infant.

  ‘But this is my favourite!’ She was pointing to the upturned, moon-shaped face of an older girl wearing a cape. Seemingly oblivious to the crowd around her, she was sounding a small cymbal. Where all the other faces were mask-like, their features rough and cartoonish, this one was expressive and individual, utterly human – her eyes closed, her broad nose tilted, her full-lipped mouth slightly open, as if in ecstasy.

  ‘I can see why,’ I said. ‘She’s beautiful. I wonder why he gave her such expressive features?’

  ‘I’m not sure, Dad,’ Sunday said. ‘You’re the art teacher!’ She reinserted her earbuds and wandered off into the next room in the exhibition.

  Fearing I would keep her waiting too long, I abandoned the audio tour and stopped studying the paintings so closely. Afterwards, in the gallery cafe, I tried to revisit our conversation, asking if, having seen the rest of the exhibition, the painting with the expressive girl, ‘Anak Byan’, remained her favourite.

  Scrolling her finger up and down the glassy surface of her phone, not bothering to even look up, she said, ‘Yeah, I guess so.’

  Our moment had passed. I tried not to lament this, focusing instead on the wonder of it having happened at all.

  If the evidence was not so overwhelmingly to the contrary, one might think Madigan’s liaison with, and eventual marriage to, Tamara Billings was a matter of pure convenience; a match made in ambition. Certainly many of his detractors, both then and now, have suggested as much.

  The fourth and most wayward child of the legendary New York editor and publisher Amon Billings, Tamara was simultaneously rebelling and conforming when she became involved with Madigan.

  Like many publishers, Amon Billings both loved and despised writers. A man with a formidable work ethic and rigid routines, he saw the hypersensitivity of writers, their often chaotic approach to the production of words, as a lamentable yet unavoidable liability, akin to the relationship of weather to farming.

  No matter how fond he was of some of his literary associates (Cal Lowell and Dick Yates among them), he refused to meet with them at home, but always at the office or, if they needed to feel literary, down in the Village at Chumley’s. The young men Billings invited home and introduced to his elegant and precocious daughters were not writers but the sons of publishers and bankers. Katherine (or Kitty, as she was known in the family) followed the script to the letter and married a Harvard-educated member of the Scribner clan. But despite, or more
likely because of Amon’s attempts to quarantine his daughters, his youngest, Tammy, was enticed by the dim bohemian lights of literary life.

  An effortlessly brilliant student, she disobeyed all parental directives and dropped out of Wellesley halfway through her sophomore year. She was writing poems by then, two of which had already been published in England in John Lehmann’s New Writing. Rather than toll a warning, Sylvia Plath’s tragic death only eighteen months earlier seemed to act as a siren song, strengthening Tamara’s resolve to escape her father’s sphere of literary influence and make her own way – on the other side of the Atlantic. So it was that in August 1965, with neither the financial nor emotional support of her family, she sailed for London.

  Apart from Lehmann, with whom she had corresponded solely about poetry, Tamara’s only real contact in London was Felicity Cameron, a Cambridge graduate who had lived in a tutor’s flat in Cazenove Hall while tutoring on the Romantic poets at Wellesley. It was there that Tamara met her, and some would say, fell under her spell. Cameron left Wellesley in 1964 and returned to England, abandoning the ‘strictures of her academic career to concentrate on her poetry’. Her letters to Tamara celebrating the joys of this ‘newfound freedom’ did nothing to discourage her younger friend from throwing in her studies. Encouraging her discipleship, Felicity offered her a place to stay should she ever wish to move to London.

  So it was that they shared a cramped flat on Gerrard Street, a literal garret with a tiny box bay window that overlooked the bustling street below. By 1965 Soho had become a republic of youth, a borough set apart from the rest of London. Tamara revelled in its energy while avoiding its commercial epicentre in Carnaby Street. Her Soho was that of the self-proclaimed British Beats, who congregated in the coffee houses on Frith and Greek Streets.

  It was in one such establishment, Legrain (which was actually on Gerrard Street, not far from Felicity’s flat), that Tamara found work as a waitress. Late one night in October, after she had finished her shift, Felicity excitedly told her they had been invited to the actress Jessica Guy’s flat for a reading. Guy, it was well known, was the new partner of the Australian author of In Daniel’s Den. Everyone was talking about it and Felicity had only recently declared it ‘utterly brilliant’.

  Tired, Tamara begged off her flatmate’s petitions to accompany her,but then,at the last minute,decided to go.Wearing a tight-fitting sweater, a tartan miniskirt and calf-length boots, her impression on Madigan was immediate. He was reading the already notorious bathroom scene from Chapter Two of his novel when Felicity and Tamara entered the room. His performance faltered as he watched Tamara squeeze into a spot on the sofa opposite him. Once she had settled herself, crossing and uncrossing her legs, he resumed reading with, others duly noted, far greater vigour.

  Sinclair Hughes, Inside the Lion’s Den: The Literary Life of Gilbert Madigan, p. 105-106.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Prior to arriving in Australia as an eight-year-old, I had only the vaguest sense of what it might look like, yet none of those hazy expectations were met by what I saw when Uncle Vernon, my dead grandfather’s brother, drove us from Port Melbourne to my grandmother’s house in Brunswick. Driving through the city centre, Melbourne struck me as a smaller, less crowded version of London. The river was narrow and dirty brown. The cars were bigger, more American-looking. And the streets were straighter. But the people looked much the same. Taller, perhaps, bigger-boned; less pasty. My imagined Australia had largely been formed by Norman Lindsay’s illustrations in my father’s battered boyhood copy of The Magic Pudding. I wasn’t expecting overgrown, suited-up koalas to waddle down a dusty track, but I had, I guess, thought Melbourne would be rawer somehow, more rustic.

  It was a relief, then, to discover something of Bill Barnacle’s rough magic in my Uncle Vernon, whose hands, face and personality were larger than those of anyone I had met in England. He stood back while my grandmother embraced her daughter, wiping tears from her eyes.

  ‘Oh, and you must be Mick,’ she said. ‘I can’t believe it. Look at the size of you. I sometimes wondered if this day would ever come.’ She gave me a furtive hug, as if unsure she was entitled to such intimacy.

  ‘Yeah, and I’m your taxi driver – Uncle Vernon.’ Thrusting a huge hand towards me, he shook mine as if I were a man. ‘Great-Uncle, I suppose. If the cap fits, hey, Marjie?’ He smiled at Mum. ‘I’ve always been a great uncle, haven’t I?’

  ‘Greatest one I ever had.’

  Putting her hand on my shoulder, talking conspiratorially in my ear, Grandma said, ‘The only one she’s ever had!’

  Grandma was thin and wiry, not plump as I had imagined. I had seen photographs of her, of course, but they were old and mostly head shots. There was, however, a full-length snap of Mum as a girl with Grandma huddled beside her, standing in front of the elephant enclosure at the zoo. It must have been cold that day because they were wearing bulky coats and strange, identical-looking knitted hats. In the background, in the right-hand corner of the frame, the beast they were posing before was sheltering beside a wall, its head bowed, its trunk resting on the pale ground. More than this, I think it was the plumpness of her loopy handwriting that had put the pounds on her; that and the warmth of the words her ornate script had carried, the ones Mum read aloud to me whenever one of the powder-blue aerograms appeared through the slot in our cottage door.

  So it came as a shock to discover that, in the flesh, Grandma was not fleshy at all. She had thinned where most women thicken, and if I had known of such things back then, I might have worried she was ill. I did, though, notice the slight stoop to her shoulders. Years later, when it was more pronounced, she would tell me it was caused by a lifetime of crouching over knitting and sewing machines, work to which she had returned after the death of my grandfather.

  Compared to the skinniness of her body, her face was full and soft-looking. Apart from the antler lines branching from the corners of her eyes, the brackets around her smile, her skin was remarkably free of wrinkles. Walking to the car, she kept staring at me, her eyes pale blue like my mother’s, studying my every move. ‘Did you enjoy the voyage, Mick?’

  ‘Yes, thanks,’ I said, without conviction. ‘It was good. Some of the activities were fun.’

  Helping me out, Mum added, ‘Poor boy was seasick half the time. It wasn’t like in the movies. We were in steerage. Not an evening gown or tuxedo to be seen. We made our own fun.’ She rested a hand on my shoulder. ‘We did, didn’t we, Mick? Though I’ve probably played my last game of gin rummy for a while.’

  ‘Beat you, did he?’ ribbed Uncle Vernon, a suitcase in each hand. ‘Ah, Mick, people like us, we’ve just got to ignore them – the world’s full of sore losers.’

  We drove north out of the city along a broad boulevard that Mum said was called Royal Parade.

  ‘Not that we’ve got any royals to parade,’ Uncle Vernon chipped in. ‘I guess you saw the Queen often enough, back in old Blighty. High tea at Buckingham Palace and all that, hey what!’

  A row of elm trees either side of the road formed an arch above us like an arboreal guard of honour, their yellow leaves glowing against the dark trunks, twirling, clapping in silent applause.

  ‘Down there’s where your mum went to teachers’ college,’ Grandma said, twisting around on the bench seat to face us in the back. ‘You should see about going back there, Marj.’

  Mum didn’t say anything. She kept staring out the side window and for the first time in my life I was aware that she too was somebody’s child. Following her lead, I looked out my side window: at the grand three-storey terraces and, through the windscreen, at the parklands beyond.

  Then suddenly the road narrowed and we were trapped behind a green tram and everything became cramped and shrank to a smaller scale. ‘Welcome to Brunswick Town,’ boomed Uncle Vernon, catching my eye in the rear-view mirror.

  ‘Bloody wog!’ he yelled, jamming his foot on the brake, his hand on the horn. ‘You see that? Pulled out right in fron
t of me.’

  Grandma smiled. ‘It’s always the other driver, isn’t it, Vern?’

  ‘I swear they get their licences off the back of Weeties packets.’

  ‘Not sure Italians eat Weeties for breakfast,’ Mum put in.

  ‘Probably not,’ he conceded, shoving the column shift from second to third, crunching the gears. ‘Garlic, I’m guessing.’

  The car came to a halt in front of a white weatherboard cottage. Moments earlier Grandma had pointed to three giant smokestacks and told me that they belonged to the brickworks where my grandfather had worked. As I stepped from the car I could see the tall chimneys looming above the houses on the other side of the street, their smoke drifting, merging with the clouds. Walking through the wire gate to Grandma’s cottage, I surprised myself by saying what I was thinking. ‘I thought it’d be brick.’

  ‘What, not flash enough for you?’ gibed my uncle.

  ‘No – because of the brickworks. I thought …’

  ‘Don’t listen to him, Mick,’ said Grandma. ‘Of course you’d think it’d be brick. The brickworks built it! Hoffman’s owned half the suburb back then – didn’t want anyone else getting their hands on the clay.’

  ‘Yeah, but they still wouldn’t waste bricks on houses for their workers,’ said Mum. ‘That’d be asking too much.’

  ‘So how was Moscow?’ said Vern, plonking the heavy cases on the verandah. ‘Catch-up with your mate Mr Philby?’

  Grandma shushed him as she opened the door and ushered us in. ‘The main thing is, we own the place now. Well, we own the bathroom and half the kitchen – the State Bank owns the rest.’

  The house had a central hallway, with bedrooms branching off either side at the front, a small lounge room that opened onto the kitchen, and a bathroom and a laundry out the back. The place smelt of burnt toast, which would become for me its permanent perfume. My grandmother’s ancient toaster required its user to guess the optimal toasting time and then carefully open its two tiny doors, manually turning the bread from one side to the other. The distractions of pouring and drinking cups of tea invariably resulted in the toast being burnt; the scraping of the charcoal coating into the sink a kind of ritual. Imagining the patterns of charred crumbs as maps of unknown continents, I always felt godlike turning on the tap, watching the deluge destroy these newfound worlds, drowning them in the drain.