Relatively Famous

by Roger Averill

  * Suggestions that Greene was modelled on Sidney Nolan appear based on nothing more than the fact that they were both Australian modernist landscape painters living in England in the 1970s. Nolan was older than Greene and, at least prior to the Blinded series, far more successful than Madigan’s fictional artist. It is true that Madigan knew Nolan, but not well. In fact, during his Oliver Reed period, he caused Cynthia some offence when he became abusively drunk at a dinner party at the Nolans’ house in Putney. Madigan has dismissed suggestions of a parallel between the real and the imagined artist as ‘nothing more than exercises in sad biographical reductionism’.

  º An obvious candidate for a ‘saint’ in Lee Wagner’s typology, see ‘Saints or Sinners: Women and Other Fictions in the Works of Gilbert Madigan’, The Southern Review, Spring 1986, pp.195-204.

  Sinclair Hughes, Inside the Lion’s Den: The Literary Life of Gilbert Madigan, pp. 185-186.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I’m not sure about Tolstoy’s claim for the uniqueness of unhappy families, as if misery were the mother of originality. I always felt that Natalie’s and my unhappiness was cut from a familiar template and was no more novel than our initial rush of romantic bliss. Where is the uniqueness in the story of the things that attracted us to each other slowly becoming the things that repelled us? In the beginning I loved Nat’s confidence and clarity, and she was drawn to my dreaminess; a drowsiness she mistook for artistic temperament. These points of difference created a misplaced hope that when combined – certainty with reflection, confidence with doubt, ambition with sensitivity – they would produce a better ‘we’. Instead, our once alluring differences became a source of unrelieved irritation.

  Things that come together grow apart. It sounds like a law of nature, which of course it’s not, but as a rule for human relationships it is a formula that holds too often to allow much room for original unhappiness. To be fair, I guess Tolstoy meant that the differences keep company with the devil – in the details.

  Part of my unconscious attraction to Nat was, I now realise, that her success in the law allowed me to defer my own entry into the dull adult world of careers. Freeing me from the sense of responsibility I had felt growing up, she indulged my desire to create, to delude myself that, like my father, I would fulfil my vocation and find the satisfaction and approval that I craved.

  As a teenager, I had attended a reading of Gil’s and afterwards listened in on an exchange between him and a clutch of his admirers. A short man with a red face asked him what he considered to be his greatest achievement, expecting, I imagine, the nomination of one book over all the others.

  ‘That question should be hard, like choosing between your children.’ He said this without irony, probably forgetting I was there; that he had chosen neither of us, abandoned both. ‘But for me it’s easy. By far my greatest achievement has been making a life from my imagination. I’ve made the whole thing up! While others have been slugging it out from nine to five making other people rich, I’ve been left to play, to make up stories. I’ve never had to report to a board, be answerable to a boss. I’ve avoided the adult world entirely, or at least all its dull bits.’ He flashed a boyish smile at the women in the group. ‘Of course, there are some adult things I like! No. I’ve no truck with these writers who bemoan their fate, going on about suffering for their art. Let them carry bricks, I say. See if that suits them better.’

  Nat liked it that I was emulating my father in this regard. She wanted me to be successful like him, too, and couldn’t understand my lack of drive and focus. Ultimately, though, she was happy to negotiate the adult world if it meant I could paddle in the creative pool; to do it for the both of us. After Noah was born, when I told her of my plan to do a Dip. Ed. and become a teacher, I thought she would be relieved that I was finally abandoning my dreams and growing up. I had no idea the degree to which those dreams were shared. I suspect she didn’t either.

  At no time did she actively discourage me from teaching; it was more subtle than that. A shift beneath the skin of things. It wasn’t until I became heavy in that adult way with the burdens of study and work that at some deep and unspoken level I registered her disappointment. No longer a special case, an exception, I was now just another rival. A less successful version of herself.

  After a day of relief teaching, having collected the kids from aftercare and made a meal, I would try to amuse her with stories from my day. ‘In second period I walked into a Year Eight class that was meant to be working on a unit on modernism. When I asked what they’d been learning, an olive-skinned, curly-headed boy put his hand up and, in a heavy Spanish accent, said, “We’ve been learning about Pubism, sir.” I wasn’t sure if I’d heard him correctly. A couple of kids sitting beside him sniggered. His face was unmoved. “Pubism and Pablo Pigsarso, sir.” Now the whole class was laughing. Except the boy. He was still staring at me, holding my gaze like a dog trying to please. I didn’t know if his classmates were laughing with him or at him. I couldn’t risk humiliating him, so I had to play it straight. “That’s very interesting,” I said, suppressing my own laughter. “Thank you.” “No worries, sir,” he said with no trace of the accent, suddenly smiling, high-fiving the kids around him.’

  Nat cut up the meat on Sunday’s plate and slid it back in front of her. ‘You took one for the team,’ she said, not really encouraging me to continue.

  ‘I guess so,’ I said. I went on and told her that the remainder of the period was a write-off and how at the end of it I had the boy stay behind. Letting him think it was to tell him off, I paused for a bit and then congratulated him on the gag, for maintaining a straight face. Unlike earlier, now he couldn’t return my gaze. He kept looking over his shoulder towards the corridor where his mates were waiting for him.

  I had a similar sense talking to Nat. I pushed on, telling her what I’d told him: how I thought he had real talent, that humour was a type of intelligence, and that if he wanted to he could probably become a good student, or a comedian. Maybe both.

  ‘A real teacher talk, then?’ Nat said, forking up the last of her peas, mashing them into the potato.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, disappointed that she had missed the point, the humour and the sadness of it.

  ‘First it’s their teachers, then it’s us, giving them the lawyer talk.’

  Of course Nat didn’t actually do criminal law. By then she had a reputation as a formidable advocate in WorkCover cases and was something of a hero in the trade union movement. So much so that she was contemplating accepting an offer for preselection in a marginal Labor seat to contest the next federal election.

  I had started voting for the Greens a decade earlier, and since then politics had become a topic Nat and I avoided unless one or both of us was sniffing for a fight. The only labour movements that really interested me were the ones that didn’t exist in Bangladesh and China. To my mind, ever since Whitlam, the ALP had been a stalking horse for neoliberalism, always doing down social democracy to prove its economic cred to the big end of town. I wanted a different vision, something that didn’t microwave the planet and wasn’t based on obesity economics, on us consuming ourselves to immobility, a sad, blubbery death.

  To Nat, these were the utopian hallucinations of an inveterate, self-confessed dreamer, someone who had never fought, let alone won, a political battle in his life. ‘What’s the point,’ she’d taunt, ‘of being in politics if you’re never going to have power?’

  ‘What’s the point of having power if you’re so afraid of losing it you never use it to further the causes you believe in?’

  Beating each other about, neither ever saying anything to alter the other’s opinion, these fights would momentarily cease but never really end.

  Naturally enough, I always felt my position was one of principle and conviction, while hers was a matter of dumb loyalty, a brand of barracking not dissimilar to the passion I felt for the North Melbourne Football Club: a tribal, unthinking sentimentality that, in the context of sport is
appropriate and by and large harmless. I cannot tell you what Nat’s retort to this would be. Not because I haven’t heard it, but because I have heard it too often. Like the repetition of certain geological movements, over time the repeated recital of our conflicting positions had resulted in erosion rather than any sedimentary build up of meaning.

  I didn’t hear about the offer of preselection from Nat. I was picking Noah up from Claire’s place, where he had been playing with her boy, Arlo. Claire was one of Nat’s old ALP student politics friends. She had left the law years ago and was working in HR for a telco, which is where she’d met her husband, Martin. Martin was someone with whom I’d never clicked; a category of people that expands the older I get.

  The boys were in Arlo’s room playing Warcraft, and Claire had dashed down to the shops for some basil to put in the napoli sauce she was making. This left me with Martin, who had just walked in from work. Still in his suit, he kept glancing at his phone. My mistake was to accept his offer of a beer – locally brewed, of course. Noah had shrugged off my five-minute departure warning, so I knew that five would really be twenty. In modern-day parenting, Orwell’s O’Brien was right: two plus two does equal five. Or fifty. It had seemed smart to lubricate my encounter with Martin, to soften the edges. Really, though, I should have been an adult and announced to Noah that we were leaving.

  ‘I need to take this,’ Martin said, picking the phone up off the bench. I nodded, and stepped off the bar stool where I had positioned myself on the other side of the kitchen island, a grey marble slab. With its vase of red gerberas at one end, it reminded me of a grave. I tried to look casual, otherwise engaged, to encourage him to take his time.

  From the street, Claire and Martin’s house looked humble enough: double-fronted but nothing grand. Yet, like so many houses in Brunswick now, the front facade was a Tardis that once entered played havoc with your personal time-space continuum. As soon as you passed the threshold, all sense of the house’s former residents, of people who had struggled to make do, disappeared. The occasional period feature evoked TV lifestyle shows rather than anything about their histories. As you progressed down the hallway’s Persian runner you saw that the parameters of the original dwelling were merely an antechamber to an open-plan prairie of modular furniture, tasteful prints and cinema-quality entertainment equipment.

  Staring out the floor-to-ceiling windows at what was now a tiny, neat-freak back garden, most of it given over to a circular trampoline, I leant against the adjoining wall and accidently depressed a button with my shoulder, activating the automatic unfurling of outdoor awnings. Panicked, I pressed it again. After a moment’s delay, the quiet hum of the motor fell silent, the blinds halted in their descent. ‘Just do it again,’ Martin said, his finger covering the phone’s mouthpiece, his other hand making a prodding gesture. Pressing the button a third time, I watched the blinds retract into their slimline casings, the sunlight return to its full brightness.

  A few days earlier, Noah had caught me pulling up the bamboo blind outside our kitchen window. The blind was cheap when I’d bought it three years earlier, and its clasping mechanism had broken the previous summer, meaning I now had to tie it to keep it scrolled. Each time before I did this I stretched the cord out sideways in the hope that the clasp might have magically mended itself. Watching me do this, Noah, in a tone part childish innocence, part early-adolescent disdain, asked, ‘Why don’t you just buy a new one?’ Smiling, wishing I had something more practical to impart to him, I instead told him what I think is mostly true, namely, that there’s nothing wrong with making do.

  Hours later, still turning his question over in my mind, I came up with my own contribution to the internet fad for inane dichotomous thinking. Half-smart lines like, ‘There are two types of people in the world: those that leave a mark, and those that leave a stain’. To this store of human wisdom, I added, ‘There are two types of people in the world: those who can do, and those who make do.’ When I later told it to Noah he looked at me blankly and said, ‘You should get on Twitter’.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ Martin said, breaking my reverie. Collapsing on the leather couch, he swilled the beer in his mouth like he was judging it. ‘Another crisis at work. I tried to leave early because Claire and I are going to a play. Can’t ever escape the place.’

  I nodded in sympathy and placed my stubby on a low, glass-topped coffee table. Martin leant forward and flicked a coaster across the glass. Seeing him up close, I noticed his dusty blonde hair was getting dustier with grey, that he had age spots near his temples, one on each side like a matching pair.

  ‘That’s a good thing about teaching,’ I said, repositioning the bottle, covering the wet ring it had made with the woven rattan coaster. ‘The kids haven’t got my number. A few of them email me, but only when the SACs are due. Nat’s up until all hours every night, sitting in bed sending texts, answering emails.’

  Martin pretended to study something out in the garden. Like a rushing tide, the silence between us quickly deepened. I read the label on my beer: a hop-heavy pale ale with aromas of passionfruit and cantaloupe.

  ‘Great news,’ Martin blurted, ‘about Nat and Bruce.’

  I had no idea what he was talking about. ‘Yeah’, I said, my mind flicking through a mental teledex of all the people I knew, searching for a Bruce. Someone at Nat’s work? A new partner in the firm? A big case? Bruce. Bruce? Contrary to Monty Python’s suggestion that all Australian men are called Bruce, I had only ever known one: Bruce Muir. And that was in primary school.

  ‘Federal preselection,’ Martin said, ‘that’s the big dance. She deserves it. It’s winnable, too. Canberra, here you come! Exciting times.’

  These staccato proclamations were one of the things I found annoying about Martin. Now, though, I was grateful for them because they provided the pieces to the puzzle that I needed, and his releasing of them like a verbal ticker tape allowed me time to solve it. Nat, I gathered, had been offered Labor preselection in the federal seat of Bruce.

  ‘Brilliant,’ I said. ‘You’re right, she does deserve it. Wonderful opportunity.’ I drained the stubby of its dregs and stood up. I needed to leave before Claire returned. She would either know that Nat hadn’t told me, or quickly spot the brittle reality behind my B-grade performance. ‘I’d better be off,’ I said, carrying my bottle to the bench. ‘Let you guys get ready for your play. What are you seeing?’

  Now it was Martin’s turn to go blank. ‘I can’t remember. Claire books them. Bell Shakespeare. Julius Caesar, maybe?

  ‘Sounds good. Perhaps Nat should go.’ Martin smiled. ‘Or me,’ I muttered to myself.

  Nat didn’t get home in time for tea. I was hustling Sunday through her toilet-and-teeth routine when she walked in. The fried rice I had made was on the stove waiting to be reheated. Nat changed out of her work gear and ate the rice, talking with Noah about his day. I got Sunday into bed and read her the next chapter of Pippi Longstocking. Without really talking to each other, we swapped children and Nat had a hushed conversation with Sunday, while I listened to Noah read the nineteenth chapter of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. He had struggled with reading early on and Nat and I had helped increase his motivation and confidence by reading the first couple of Harry Potter books to him. Before long he was devouring them on his own. Recently, having read them all at least once, he had asked us to re-read the third one with him. Eager to accept his invitation back into this part of his world, we happily agreed. In truth, though, Nat usually had work to do and, over time, it had become something he did exclusively with me, both of us taking turns at poorly imitating Stephen Fry. Although it ate deep into my evenings and I sometimes struggled to stay awake while he read – him forever explaining things, having to stop himself from telling me what came next – I enjoyed being with him and realised it was an important bond between us, the sort of connection I wished I’d had with Gil.

  By the time we had finished, Sunday was asleep and Nat was propped up on the couch wit
h her laptop, completing whatever it was that had kept her at the office. I sat in the lounge chair beside her and switched on the tellie. Flicking through the channels, past the talent shows and ab-buster machines, I settled on an SBS documentary about Welsh slate mines. During the 1890s the Welsh slate industry produced a third of all the world’s slate. My mind drifted back to the thing churning inside of me.

  I was both keen to confront Nat and yet apprehensive about it. Keen, because I was hurt by her lack of honesty and wanted to air my grievance. I also knew this momentarily gave me the higher ground in our emotional cold war. But apprehensive, too, because I had never been good at conflict and especially not at winning arguments with Nat, who was, after all, a professional. I usually got in a good line or two, a couple of glancing blows, but she was the one with the combinations, the knock-out logic.

  I had always thought slate was quarried, not mined; apparently it was both. Two men worked their whole (albeit short) lives chiselling slate from a single massive chamber, and in the process created an underground cathedral. The clean angled edges of its dark vaulted ceiling glistened in the glow of the compere’s lamp.

  ‘I spoke with Martin today.’ I hadn’t planned to lure her into it this way; it just happened.

  Nat didn’t take her eyes from the computer. ‘How’s he?’

  ‘He’s going grey,’ I said. ‘I hadn’t noticed that before.’ Nat kept tapping on the keyboard. ‘He told me about Bruce.’ The tapping continued for a moment, then stopped. ‘When were you going to tell me?’

  Nat folded down the screen and turned to face me.

  I stayed on the front foot. ‘I mean, it’s not some small thing, is it, moving the whole family to be in the electorate? Or will it be Canberra? You didn’t think I might like a say in all that?’

  To split slate, you always score it in the middle. Never to the side or you’ll just chip away at it.