Relatively Famous

by Roger Averill

  That’s what Gil was like with everyone: taxi drivers, air hostesses, the concierge at the Hilton, waiters, ticket sellers – he made them all feel taller. His fame was not the sort that meant people recognised him; no one treated him strangely or expected something from him. Rather, it operated subliminally, giving him a confidence and ease with people that made them feel good about themselves – their jobs, the weather, their lives. At its worst his charm was self-conscious and manipulative. But it was also a habit, a way of negotiating the world. Even as a boy, it was obvious to me that he liked leaving people smiling from some witty remark, glowing in the warmth of a compliment. Fearing shallowness, intellectuals were suspicious of his charms even as they succumbed to them. In an interview he did in the early eighties with Andrea Stretton (who due to her own obvious charms was his favourite arts journalist), he said Australians found it hard to love their writers. They preferred them to be misanthropic; that way the mistrust could be mutual.

  Although I could never admit it to Mum, those three days in Sydney were a highlight of my childhood. Even then I knew it was unfair, him breezing in to show me a good time, Mum doing all the hard, boring work of parenting.

  We stayed opposite Hyde Park and from there walked to the gallery (where the director, Peter Laverty, an old acquaintance, gave Gil a personalised tour), the botanical gardens and Mrs Macquarie’s Chair. We watched workers wearing yellow helmets attach white tiles to the frame of the Opera House. Gil loved it, saying it looked like a nest of keening cocky beaks.

  In the past I had always felt that my father charmed me as a way of showing off to others, usually women. This time it was the other way round: everything he did seemed dedicated to impressing me. Even the meeting with the publisher. I didn’t know it then, but it was with a rival outfit that was trying to lure him from Penguin. Gil was going along for the ride – an allexpenses-paid trip for the both of us.

  The building was in Market Street, not far from our hotel. Gil checked his hair in a window before we went in. He was wearing it longer than he used to, and threaded a loose strand behind his ear. ‘Not too scruffy?’ he asked. ‘They like bohemian but get scared off by down-and-out.’

  There was no chance of him being mistaken for a hobo. He was wearing jeans to a business meeting, but only because that was the fashion. And because he was proud that at thirty-seven he still looked good in them. That morning I had seen him ironing them as I came out of the hotel bathroom.

  A young secretary in a miniskirt showed us into the boardroom. Gil adjusted the buckle of his belt, squared his shoulders. The walls were lined with books, all bearing the publisher’s mark. The room was dominated by an oval wooden table, behind which was a wall of windows looking out onto the street below, the buildings opposite.

  ‘Mr Hargraves will be with you in a minute,’ said the secretary. ‘He’s on a call to London. Can I get you anything while you wait?’ Gil stared at her, hesitating before telling her we were fine. Self-conscious now, she turned and left the room.

  I peered out the window at the pigeons huddled on the ledge. Then studied the tops of people’s heads as they walked on the footpath below. I wondered how often I had been watched without my knowing it.

  ‘Gil!’ a voice boomed behind me. I turned to see a bald man in his fifties, wearing a chocolate brown suit, his face flushed, his hand thrust out to my father. ‘Sorry about that … London … Now, has Suzie fixed you with a drink?’ Noticing me, ‘And who’ve we got here?’

  ‘I know we agreed no agent, but I thought it’d be okay to bring along my legal advisor. My son, Mick.’

  ‘So, are you going to be a writer like the old man?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘More interested in playing cricket for Australia, aren’t you, Mick?’ Gil said, rescuing me.

  ‘Batsman or bowler?’ asked Hargraves.

  ‘Both,’ I said, staring at his yellow teeth, the fixed smile.

  ‘Good to be ambitious, keep your options open. That’s what I’m telling your father.’

  Hargraves instructed Suzie to bring in the morning tea. Everyone encouraged me to take as much as I wanted from the platter. Polishing off a vanilla slice, the custard oozing from between the pastry, I licked the icing from my fingers.

  Excusing herself, Suzie squeezed past me and waddled on her heels to the section of the bookcase nearest the door. I looked to Gil, whose gaze directed me back to the secretary as she bent down to reach the bottom shelf, her skirt pulled tight across her bum.

  His mouth full of lamington, Hargraves motioned for me to go to her. ‘They’re the kids’ books. Choose any you want,’ he said, crumbs and specks of coconut escaping his mouth. ‘Yours for the taking.’

  ‘Why don’t we take these ones next door?’ Suzie said, struggling with a stack of books. ‘Bring your plate and I’ll set you up there.’

  Dad glided past Hargraves and made a show of opening the heavy glass door, bowing a little as Suzie passed. ‘Madam. Squire.’

  Two low lounge chairs and a circular coffee table made for a waiting area opposite the boardroom. Depositing the books on the table, Suzie put a hand on my shoulder, as if to steady herself. ‘I have some letters to type. If you need me, I’m just through there.’ She pointed to a door down the corridor. The warm, gentle pressure of her hand on my shoulder, the blossomy smell of her perfume, made my head swim. I sat down. My eyes were now level with the hem of her skirt, the brown curve of her thigh. Blushing, I flicked through one of the books. ‘Hopefully you’ll find something you like.’ Listening to her heels click down the hallway, I stole a guilty glance.

  The glass in the doors of the boardroom were frosted, so I could only see Gil and Mr Hargraves in silhouette, their arm gestures, the tilt of their heads, Mr Hargraves standing, pacing back and forth. None of the books took my interest. I looked at their covers, read the blurbs, the first paragraphs of a few. I liked the idea of books more than reading them.

  After a while Suzie returned to see that I was all right. ‘Found something you like?’

  I shrugged my shoulders.

  ‘I’m not surprised, they’re not exactly bestsellers.’ Holding a finger to her puckered lips, angling her head towards the boardroom, she said, ‘Don’t tell him I said that.’ She asked if I wanted more to eat, something to drink. Not wanting to put her to any more trouble, I declined.

  ‘I know!’ she said, raising a finger as if pointing to her inspiration. ‘Would you like to do a job for me?’

  In my eagerness, words momentarily left me, then returned with a rush. ‘Sure, yes. I’d like that. Yes.’ I began piling up the books.

  ‘Leave them,’ she said, touching her hand to mine.

  I followed her down the corridor, swooning in the wake of her scent. Pausing at the doorway, she stretched an arm across the threshold, barring entry. ‘You’ll have to excuse the mess. I didn’t know I’d be having a visitor. Not many get invited in here. You’re special.’

  My heart was a prisoner’s cup clattering the bars of its cage. Blood in my ears muffled her words.

  Showing me to a seat at the end of her desk, Suzie placed a pile of invitation cards in front of me. ‘I’ll type the address on the envelope. When I’ve finished, you slip an invitation inside, lick the back and put a stamp on the front.’ She demonstrated the process, her pink tongue licking the sticky seal, her painted nails manoeuvring the stamp as if with a pair of tongs. ‘Can you manage that?’

  We worked in silence. Then Suzie asked what it was like having a famous author for a father. ‘Good,’ I said unconvincingly. ‘I don’t see him much. He lives overseas.’

  She fed another envelope into the typewriter. ‘That must be hard.’

  Mr Hargraves’s voice suddenly became louder. ‘Looks like your lad’s run off with my secretary. That might complicate things.’ Gil was laughing when they entered the room. ‘Ah, no … not love so much as labour,’ the publisher said. ‘Child labour at that.’

  ‘Looks like a labour of love
to me,’ Gil said, winking at Suzie.

  Mr Hargraves took all three of us out to lunch, in a taxi to an Italian restaurant in Paddington. The owner made a fuss of Mr Hargraves and pretended to remember Gil from a visit years earlier. ‘Sì, sì, mi ricordo. L’autore, il celebre autore.’

  We sat at a table beside a mural, a painted vista viewed from a balcony overlooking red-roofed houses and pencil pines, down to a cerulean sea.

  Halfway through their second bottle of wine, Gil and Mr Hargraves argued over the source of the artist’s inspiration. ‘Cinque Terre, maybe, but definitely not the Amalfi. I was there only last year. It’s seared into my memory, the beauty of the place. The slopes there are steeper.’

  Remembering he was trying to win Gil’s favour, Mr Hargraves conceded. ‘It must be ten years since I was there. No doubt you’re right. A composite, perhaps – Tuscany by the sea.’

  Not long after, Gil announced that we had to leave. ‘I’ve promised this boy a ferry ride to Manly.’

  Mr Hargraves’s face looked sunburnt: red, swollen. ‘He’s manly enough already.’

  Suzie rolled her eyes.

  Making to leave, Gil leant over and kissed her cheek.

  ‘Thanks for your help, Mick,’ she said, turning to me. ‘We made a crack team.’

  Mr Hargraves levered himself from his chair. ‘Don’t forget, Gil, no second billing with us. Numero uno. Here, and in the Old Dart. Think about it. You deserve better.’

  Travelling back on the ferry late that night, after we had walked along the beach and eaten fish and chips under the pines, Gil spoke to me like I was his equal. ‘So what do you think, Mick? Should I stay with Penguin or jump ship?’

  I watched the colours of the city lights shimmer and then run as they touched the ocean’s darker ink. ‘Suzie was nice,’ I said.

  ‘A good judge of women – at least I’ve passed something on. And so young!’

  Emboldened by his compliment, I added, ‘I didn’t like Mr Hargraves much.’

  ‘Me neither.’

  ‘You know the little penguins on the side of your books? I like them,’ I said. ‘They’re friendly.’ I scanned the water as if I might see a real one. ‘I’d miss them.’

  ‘That seals it then,’ he said, clapping his hand on my leg. ‘Seals eat penguins, though, don’t they?’

  In 1971 Madigan’s professional life had never been stronger, his personal one more strained. By then he had sons by different ex-wives living on separate continents, neither of which he was calling home. His decision to leave New York to return to Britain seemed perverse on both professional and personal grounds. Having become the first Australian novelist to garner such widespread critical and commercial acclaim in the US, his flight from this success (not to mention his infant son) back to the Mother Country can only be understood in psychological terms, those of someone suffering from a Peter Pan complex. This reading of his behaviour is only strengthened by the fact that upon returning to England he spent the first four months living with his recently relocated parents, something he had not done since he was seventeen.

  The pattern of regression suggests it was no coincidence that this period also saw the kinetic clatter of Madigan’s typewriter cease. Whether paralysed by the success of Freedom Falling or traumatised by the breakup of his second marriage, for three years, from 1970 to 1973, Madigan failed to write anything beyond correspondence. Having himself abandoned so much, he feared that his one abiding love had finally abandoned him.

  For the first time in his adult life, Gilbert Madigan was lost for words.

  Sinclair Hughes, Inside the Lion’s Den: The Literary Life of Gilbert Madigan, p. 141.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Whether they are present or not, it seems we are destined to live out our lives in response to our parents. Cast either in their image or its negative, we never really escape the light and shadow of our childhoods, the chemicals and memories that make us adhere. Which is why even some of us who should know better are still happy to blame our parents for our own shortcomings.

  Surely, though, if the antecedents of all our failings can be laid at the feet of our parents, then they too should be thanked for having given us the capacity to live with the damage, to shape it in creative ways, to form relationships and raise kids, to hold down jobs. At what point can those of us who feel neglected be expected to jump our own shadows and face the reality that inherent to inheritance is the begetting of frailty and failure? For me, the answer is now, writing this. The arc it describes, my shadow leap.

  Years ago, at one of Nat’s legal parties, a colleague of hers asked me what I did for a career. I was caring for the kids full-time back then and I had drunk a bit to cope with the small talk. He had spent the past fifteen minutes droning on about how he was contemplating a move to a prosecuting chambers to increase his chances of taking silk.

  ‘Career?’ I queried. ‘Isn’t that what a vehicle does when it’s out of control?’

  He tried to laugh. ‘I think you mean “careen”.’

  ‘“Careen”, “career”, they mean the same,’ I said, ignoring the condescension, his professional tic. ‘I’m aiming for a tootle, a meander, maybe. You career, I’ll meander.’

  The irony, of course, is that I have been careering my whole adult life. Trying to find direction, to steer out of the spin caused by Gil’s abandonment, every move an overcorrection.

  Now I’m more concerned about the roads I’m propelling my own kids down. What blind alleys will I bequeath to them? Gil’s absence made me an overly attentive father; I hope not a meddling one. One day last week Noah and I had arranged to have a kick of the footy, something we used to do regularly when he was a boy but manage less often now that his interests have turned to the internet, my knees to stone. Having changed into a pair of tracky daks and some worn-out runners, I stretched my hamstrings while I waited for him to stop texting in his room. Trying to be patient, I failed. ‘Isn’t the kid meant to hassle the father for a kick?’

  A grunt sounded from beyond the darkened doorway. A few minutes later Noah emerged, wearing a pair of baggy shorts over black skins that showed off his muscled legs, a loose T-shirt hiding his premature flab. He was almost as tall as me, and far more solid; his Italian blood gave him the shadow of a beard, hair sprouting from the neck of his tee.

  ‘Where’s the kid?’ he asked, wresting the ball from my grip.

  As we shuffle-trotted to the park, handballing the footy between us, I told him how when I was boy I used to drive his grandmother mad pestering her to play with me. After the voyage from England, with its endless games of gin rummy, she had sworn off cards but occasionally subjected herself to Scrabble and Monopoly. Ball sports, though, were a bridge too far. She had no ball skills whatsoever, so it was left to her mother, my grandmother, to take pity on me, underarming me tennis balls in the backyard. Even she drew the line at football though.

  When he had no better offers, Russell Neale, from two doors up, used to have a kick with me in the street. Having come to the game late, I was still mastering the art of kicking the oval ball. My timing was better than Russell’s, so when I got it right my kicks went further than his, but he had the better technique and was more reliable, less likely to land the ball on Mrs Redburn’s cherished rosebushes or bomb it onto the roof of Mr Georgopoulos’s Kingswood, drawing him out of his shuttered house, threatening to call the cops. Russell insisted we use my cheaper Lyrebird ball so as to protect his prized Sherrin. The asphalt scuffed and nicked the leather of my ball, so after each session in the street I brushed it with boot polish and rubbed it smooth again with a cloth until it gleamed a deep jarrah brown.

  Nowadays Noah’s drop punts travelled ten metres further than mine. But because he resisted my repeated attempts at initiation when he was younger, he never practised the arcane arts of the drop kick and the torpedo. After a couple of failed launches, the ball slewing off the side of my boot, I successfully unleashed a torp from thirty out, enjoying, as I always have, the t
hrilling physics of its spinning arc.

  Standing in the goal square, his neck craning, arms outstretched, he watched the ball spiral above him as it cleared the fence. Retrieving it, he honoured my hobbled lead and yelled, ‘You’ve still got it, old-timer!’

  A charge of pride rose through me. Not for the first time, I realised how much I wanted to impress him, craved his approval.

  Years before things went sour between us, Nat had said something that I’d automatically dismissed. That it’s stayed with me suggests it hit a target. Noah was stuck up a tree. Guiding him down, I showed him where to place his feet, which branches to grab onto, and then encouraged him to try again. Leaving him to it, I returned to Nat and a baby Sunday, sprawled out on a picnic rug. Staring up at the sky through her sunnies, Nat said, ‘Your problem is you’re trying to father yourself as well as him.’

  Borrowing from Joyce, Gil called all would-be writers of his life story ‘biografiends’. From his sixtieth birthday onwards, he was plagued by a steady stream of requests from PhD candidates and more senior academics for permission to become his authorised biographer. The answer was always an emphatic no. ‘How can they write my life while I’m still living it?’ he protested in a now celebrated piece published in The New Yorker, ‘Biografiends and Other Leeches’. ‘For over fifty years I have worked tirelessly to turn my life into art, to give it a meaningful shape, some beauty, and now that I am nearing its end these woodworms want to reverse all that and turn my art back into a life; an inverted alchemy, gold back into base metal, fiction into chronicle, paper into dust.’

  Gil was seventy-five when he wrote that, ranting at the creeping shadow of his own good night. He had the feeling that the literary world thought his time had passed, that he had only one scene left to write: his death. And that the only impediment to him gaining literary immortality was the minor matter of him still being alive. He joked that when people asked after his health they were disappointed when his response was positive. It was as if they were extending him their condolences for this unfortunate thwarting of his career. In the article, he called the writing of literary biographies ‘a process through which music is turned into dictation taken down by the tone-deaf’. Mocking the monumental size of such books, he memorably dubbed them ‘tomestones’. ‘Pretending to direct or redirect readers to the author’s work, they are in fact a vast slab of wastepaper laid across the writer’s legacy, debarring literary resurrection; an accessible altar encouraging worship of an unread god.’