Relatively Famous

by Roger Averill

  My memory is that Mum was full of physical affection for me when I was young but that it didn’t survive my adolescence. The story is similar with Sunday and me. Nat was always envious that when Sunday was little she came to me for comfort whenever she injured herself or was upset. Burrowing her head into my chest, she seemed to enjoy being engulfed by my larger frame, feeling it offered more protection from the dangers of the world. After the breakup, it sometimes felt like the roles were reversed, as if we were hugging so that Sunday could protect me, hold me together. Over the past year our cuddles had become self-conscious and awkward, and far less frequent. I understand that it’s a natural thing, a crucial part of the maturation process, but that doesn’t stop it being a loss. Increasingly, my body feels closed to the world, a thing that touches objects but is itself untouched. Armoured in its aloneness.

  Standing with their arms around each other, Sunday now the taller of the two, they turned and stared back at me. Mum said something that made her granddaughter laugh. I stepped from the car. ‘Nice of you to join us,’ Mum said.

  ‘I thought my job was done, having delivered your precious cargo.’

  Casting her hand at the ground, she said, ‘Not at all … You’ve still got the grass to mow.’

  I leaned down and kissed her on the cheek. ‘That’s going to cost you a cup of tea.’

  As I mowed, Sunday helped Marj prepare lunch. She never did anything like that with me. The mowing was meditative and most of the time my mind was pleasantly blank. Glimpsing my mother and daughter through the kitchen window, I thought back to when I was fourteen and how things had shifted, how they became more distant between Marjorie and me. I realise now that Mum must have seen me with her mother, playing cricket and cards, much as I see her and Sunday – all easy intimacy and affection.

  I pushed the mower in a pattern of diminishing squares, a spiral of right angles. The thing was, Grandma was around when Mum was not. I didn’t think much of it then, and understand now that it was because Mum was either at work or was exhausted from having been there. She was teaching by then and often spent her nights marking or preparing for the next day. And while Grandma usually cooked tea and helped out with other chores, she had different ways of doing things. This created its own tensions and dynamics, none of which concerned me directly. I knew, though, from their silences when things were tense between them, and, in subtle ways, no doubt revealed my sympathies to be with Grandma rather than Mum.

  The pattern of squares was disrupted by the apricot tree, forcing me to lunge like a fencer, manoeuvring the mower below its outstretched branches, then retreat, shuffling slightly sideways with each parry.

  I was fifteen when Mum met Helen Macpherson; Ms Mac, we called her at school. Like Mum, she taught history, and I can’t remember if they first met at a parent/teacher interview or at a history teachers’ conference. A union meeting, perhaps. While most of my other female teachers were trying to look like Farrah Fawcett, Ms Mac, who was older, kept her hair short and only ever wore raggedy jeans. She reminded me of Patti Smith, skinny and fragile-looking, but fierce, too. In class, she spoke to us as if we were adults. We discussed Vietnam and the Dismissal and women’s rights. Some of the boys hated her. But not as much as some of the girls. One day when she was late, leaving us waiting for ages outside the classroom, Nadia Bogdan said, ‘Where is the bloody dyke?’ and everyone laughed.

  Of course, I didn’t tell anyone when Mac started appearing at our place for meals, dropping round on weekends. Perhaps because I was too immersed in my own world to take much notice, I never objected to Mac entering our lives. She was younger than Mum and much cooler, and to my mind made Marj more interesting. At the same time, she added miles to the distance between us: Mum being distracted, me no longer feeling that strange inverted responsibility that I’d always carried, knowing Mac now had her back.

  It was denial, I guess, a wilful refusal to join the dots, for despite Nadia’s labelling, I never thought of Marj and Mac as being gay. Just friends. They were discreet around me. Dishonest is another word for it. Perhaps they needed to be. Maybe if they had been physically affectionate with each other in front of me, referred to each other as partners, I would have reacted badly. I would like to think not, but, as Mum often reminds me, they were different times back then and I can understand her not taking the risk.

  It wasn’t until fifteen years later, long after they broke up and Mac had moved to northern New South Wales – actually when Mum was telling me she’d learned Mac had oesophageal cancer – that, in a clumsy attempt to comfort her, I asked if they had been lovers. Mum blotted her tears with a folded handkerchief. Opening it out, she blew her nose. Mopping up, she said, ‘I loved her, Mick. She saved me. I was drowning, and Mac saved me.’

  Later that year I offered to drive her north for the funeral. I wanted to pay my own respects. In the end Mum flew, because she said it was something she needed to do on her own.

  With the last of the grass mown, I switched off the fuel supply and waited for the motor to die its slow, stuttering death. Taking the sudden quiet as their cue, Mum and Sunday brought lunch out onto the patio: salad, bread and a freshly baked quiche. ‘Your daughter’s handiwork,’ Mum said, pointing to the quiche.

  ‘Impressive,’ I said. Holding up the hands of a grass-stained bandit, I made my way to the bathroom. On the way back, stopping in the kitchen for a drink, I stood and watched the two of them through the window. Something about the tilt of Sunday’s head, the drop of her shoulders, reminded me of Gil. With her looking so much like her mother, I had never before noticed this more subtle resemblance to my side of her lineage. I wondered if that in part explained Mum’s connection with her, some vague mimesis of an earlier attraction. I knew they spoke of Gil sometimes, which was interesting, given how little Mum talked to me about him over the years.

  In 2009, when Penguin, fearing Gil would never write another novel, published Afterthoughts: Essays and Opinions, Readings, the bookshop in Carlton, had two publicity posters for it in their window, one of the front cover, the other a black-and-white portrait of the eminent author himself. Sunday was only eight, but was old enough to understand celebrity and her connection with the old man on the poster. This, she believed, entitled her to have it. Nat, who had always criticised my lack of assertiveness, joined the campaign: ‘Tell them who you are – that it’s for your daughter, his granddaughter. They’ll just be throwing it out.’ After weeks of resistance, I finally relented. Gravely embarrassed, blushing as I approached the counter, I asked a man with a beard and Woody Allen glasses if we could have the poster when they were finished with it.

  ‘You’re his son, really? I didn’t know that.’

  Why, I thought, would he expect to be privy to that information? Once I had supplied my phone number and made the arrangements, the bookseller kindly insisted we have the other poster too: a black sixties Buick driving across the front cover, caught midway between a wedge of green sward and a vault of powder-blue sky.

  Ever since receiving the call to collect it, I have been confronted, first at Munro Street, now in the flat, by the constant presence of my absent father, his giant image gazing at me from the outside of my daughter’s bedroom door; his once sharp jawline sagging with the weight of age, his mouth framed by parenthetical wrinkles.

  Brunswick has changed so much since the seventies when I was at school – the Greek and Italian migrants with their concrete lawns and olive trees having died off or moved into nursing homes nearer their children’s mansions in Greenvale or Templestowe; every knitting mill and factory converted into apartments full of downsizing Baby Boomers and young creatives. And yet, for different reasons, Sunday gets as little cachet from telling her friends of her connection to the famous novelist Gilbert Madigan as I did. Now the most common responses are: ‘Who’s he?’ and ‘Yeah, my Mum/Dad’s a writer, too.’ Some of her friends’ parents are impressed, though not always the writerly ones, but hardly anyone under forty has read him. For yea
rs The Falling Part was on Year Twelve reading lists all over the country, then it was The Raven’s I, but since the late eighties Gil’s books have been considered too dense and difficult for young readers, the language too ornate.

  Now when people ask about the poster, Sunday tells them to Google him.

  Sitting on the patio under the wisteria, enjoying the quiche, Mum asked how school was going. I assumed she was talking to Sunday. ‘Year Nine still killing you?’

  Realising she meant me, I swallowed what was in my mouth. ‘They’ve just finished a unit on post-impressionism. I took them to the Fairweather exhibition. By the end of the excursion I wanted to build a raft and escape to a tiny island!’

  ‘Tell Grandma about Azra,’ Sunday said. I was flattered she’d been listening when I told her the story a few days earlier, that she had brought it up now.

  ‘Two of my Year Twelve students are really talented. One of them, Azra, a Hazara girl, is sculpting a series of very detailed, intricate dioramas of scenes from a refugee camp. Very expressive. Explicit, some of them. Poignant. But when she exhibits them, all that nuance is lost because she lights them in such a way that what you’re looking at is a distorted shadow play projected on the wall behind, some aspects looming large, blown out of all proportion, others completely hidden. It’s brilliant.’

  ‘I bet they don’t have that at Wesley,’ Mum said.

  ‘No, just the materials for making it. We’re constantly scrounging, making do.’

  Sunday had made a pot of tea and began pouring it. Mum, lifting the cup to her lips as if to hide that she was speaking, asked if I was doing any art of my own. As usual, and in a way I could not control, I became defensive and quickly changed the subject. Even though by abandoning my artistic ambitions and becoming a teacher I had effectively switched my family identity from Gil to her, I still felt I’d disappointed her in some way, let myself down. Rightly or wrongly, I couldn’t believe that the woman who had once loved Gil, with all his youthful drive and ambition, didn’t secretly regret her son’s failure to find a vocation, to leave a mark.

  On the way home, before I dropped her back at her mother’s, Sunday asked if we could stop by her friend’s place in Albert Street to pick up a book she needed for school. She went in by herself. I didn’t know her friends anymore. Not like when she was in primary school and I negotiated her play dates with the mums and socially eased her way. I wondered about boyfriends, when they would come. Or if she might be like her grandmother and be attracted to girls. Perhaps both. Maybe the kid she was seeing now was more than a friend.

  Waiting in the car, I watched a dog and its young hipster owner playing frisbee in the park across the road. The dog leapt, and for a moment was suspended in midair as it clamped the orange disk between its jaws. Landing with a jolt, shaking its plastic prey from side to side, it galloped back to its owner in the hope of repeating the process. Looming above them were the brickwork chimneys. Gilpin Park was on the site of the old Hoffman’s quarry. By the time Mum and I arrived from England the brickworks had changed hands, the quarry exhausted of its clay. Throughout my teenage years the enormous cavity was slowly filled with the refuse of Melbourne’s northern suburbs. Houses built of bricks made from the quarried clay were repaying Brunswick by replacing its useful dirt with their worthless rubbish.

  When the wind had blown from the north, which it did most summer days, our house was enveloped by the sweet, rank odour of the tip. Black and luminous green-backed flies rode the warm air. If the wind was a southerly, the cyclone fence bordering Albert Street would be plastered with litter – newspapers and plastic bags spread-eagled and frisked by the breeze. The air above would broil with the shriek of seagulls. Hovering, buffeted, they descended and rose in time with some inaudible rhythm, then suddenly collapsed in unison on a morsel, or singly peeled away from the ragged squadron, buoyed on an eddy of humid air.

  Watching the young couples pushing prams, their toddlers on balance bikes, the dog people milling about with their mutts, I imagined most were unaware of the layers of memories on which they walked, the lives of men like my grandfather and the migrants who followed. Lives buried by time; hidden, like the waste below, under the trees and the grass.

  There is a way in which all of Gilbert Madigan’s ruling passions can be thought of as addictions: alcohol the most superficial; the love of women, or at least his seduction of them, the most constant; and writing merely the most productive of the troika. As with all threesomes, their interrelationships are complex – sometimes mutually exclusive, other times complementary. While we do not know the number of liaisons Madigan had during his Oliver Reed period, we can with confidence say that one such encounter acted as the catalyst for its ending, and ultimately returned the author to his desk.

  It is not inconceivable that Madigan attended the opening of Donald Judd’s exhibition at the Tate because he was particularly interested in the sleek, industrial sculptures of the American minimalist. It is, however, more likely that he did so because the opening was the next entry on London’s arts calendar and represented yet another opportunity for him to receive praise from strangers and sycophantic acquaintances, avoid writing, drink someone else’s alcohol, and, with luck, entice a female admirer into bed. The evening proceeded according to script until Madigan and his newfound companion reached the woman’s hotel room. Having once again drunk too much, Madigan slumped on the bed and fell into a fathomless sleep before any flesh was bared.

  Having slept poorly beside her unresponsive, occasionally murmuring companion, Annie Edwards rose early the next morning and propped a note on the pillow, in the hollow left by her head. It explained that she needed to catch the morning train to Newcastle, and, considering the disappointments of the night before, generously suggested that if at any stage Madigan needed a break from the bustle of London, he was welcome to visit her in Wark, ‘a picturesque village on the Tyne, where, outside of fishing, there’s absolutely nothing to do but work, the town’s name being an ancient typo’.

  Edwards was herself a sculptor of considerable repute, whose work in metal and stone, in direct contrast to that of Donald Judd, emphasised the random and irregular. In a brochure for one of her exhibitions she is quoted as saying, ‘I’m fascinated by the territory between intention and mishap, in the art of artful errors.’ This commitment to chance perhaps explains how she came to bring Madigan back to her room that night, why she left without waking him, and yet also left him her details should he care to make the four-hour trek from London to Wark.

  Curiosity and boredom outweighing embarrassment, Madigan rang the next day and arranged to visit Wark the following weekend. Edwards warned that his accommodation would be primitive. For her, the feature of the small eighteenth-century stone cottage was its enormous barn, which, despite its lack of adequate heating, made for an ideal sculptor’s studio.

  Stopping off at the local Battlesteads pub to buy a bottle of wine to complement the dinner he expected was being nervously prepared for him, Madigan downed a double Scotch for courage before completing the short drive up Church Lane, where he found Edwards in her workshop, wearing coveralls, her face a mask of dust. Given the awkwardness of their last encounter and the unpromising beginnings of this one, Madigan – who later confessed he had expected Edwards to greet him in something a little more alluring – was amazed at the ease between them, the way they fell so effortlessly into conversation. The desultory lust that had driven him so far north quickly blossomed into a much deeper desire, one that would see him effectively move in with Edwards by the end of the following week.

  Inspired by her work ethic, and free of any distractions, Madigan commandeered the spare bedroom and, for the first time in three years, ratcheted a page into his typewriter with literary intent. Over the next six months he hammered out a first draft of what became In Darkest Light. Not since In Daniel’s Den had he depicted the inner workings of the world he knew best, the life of the artist. Borrowing heavily from his recent experiences
of stumbling about in a creative wilderness, he substituted a painter for a writer and told the story of Mitchell Greene,* an expatriate Australian who, after enjoying middling success as an artist, is diagnosed at age forty-six with keratoconus, a rare degenerative disease of the cornea, which is rapidly rendering him blind.

  The artist’s initial reaction to his impending loss of sight is blind rage; his more considered one, blind drunkedness: ‘a blindness I can at least enjoy’. Abandoning his wife and children in a way that perhaps provides disheartening insight into Madigan’s own repeated flights from family life, Greene undertakes what he declares to be a final grand tour, one designed to fill his mind with ‘sights fit to take into an everlasting darkness’. Predictably, the travelogue barely makes it beyond Rome before becoming a tour of the circles of self-destructive hell; a regular catalogue of drugs, drink and debauchery.

  Through a chance encounter, Greene is rescued from himself by a cellist, Delia Rombach,º who had lost her ability to play two years earlier when her left arm was crushed in a car accident. Caring for him in a remote cottage in Wales, within sight of Mount Snowdon, she inspires him to paint again. Through the mist of his encroaching blindness, he creates a series of abstract landscapes that, when exhibited, see him celebrated as ‘a twentieth-century Turner’, the new master of light. The irony is not lost on the media, which accords him the celebrity he once craved but can no longer countenance. The book ends with the chill, existential realisation that while Greene’s name might now be up in lights, he must enter the darkness alone.

  In lesser hands, such a story would have tipped quickly into cliché and mawkishness. As it was, Madigan moulded it into a poignant fable about art and ambition and the modern world of celebrity. Ironically, by so doing, he greatly increased his own.