Relatively Famous

by Roger Averill

  A young Lionel and a fellow soldier, Reggie O’Donnell, are creeping through the New Guinean jungle. Separated from their section – disoriented, terrified – they suspect they’re being watched, toyed with by the enemy. Reggie pushes a branch from his path and is felled by a spear that skewers his thigh. Screaming, writhing on the pulpy forest floor, he cries for Lionel’s help. Ten metres behind him, Lionel collapses into the undergrowth. Reggie’s screams tear at his conscience, but he is literally paralysed by fear: fear that the slightest movement will trigger another booby trap. His limbs liquefied, he eventually forces himself to belly-crawl towards his mate. Reggie’s implorations cease to be addressed to Lionel and turn to his mother, then to God. Then cease altogether. By the time Lionel reaches him, Reggie is unconscious, possibly dead. Having recovered his courage, Lionel does what he can to stem the flow of blood and hoists his comrade onto his shoulders and staggers deeper into the jungle.

  As Lionel wakes, an Asian boy is standing beside his bed. ‘Wake up, Grandpa. Wake up.’ The boy taps his hand on the old man’s chest. The river of time, we realise, has resumed its usual course: Lionel is now elderly, and his adopted Vietnamese grandson is five years old. Still half-asleep, Lionel is alarmed by the Asian face looming over him. ‘Don’t shoot!’ he screams. Then, recognising Tam, he pulls him into a hug. They embrace for a long, theatrical minute, each comforting the other. ‘I was so frightened, Tam,’ the old man whispers. ‘I’ve always been so frightened.’

  The Sons of Others was a critical and commercial success. Critically, it was celebrated for its dramatic and technical inventiveness, the reversal of time and the use of film, as well as for its themes of intergenerational and cross-cultural reconciliation. For someone residing on the other side of the globe, Madigan had shown remarkable prescience in addressing the issue of Asian immigration, which, only months earlier, had become a hot topic in Australia after the prominent historian Geoffrey Blainey criticised the Hawke government’s high intake of Asian migrants. In one of the early skirmishes in what became known as the culture wars, Madigan’s play was tactically deployed by the liberal left.

  Equally significant, The Sons of Others was seen as a bridge across the generation gap between baby boomers and their parents, helping explain each to the other. In this vein, and without irony, veteran theatre critic Norman Kendell, in his review for The Australian, declared the play, and by inference its author, ‘a father for our times’.*

  ° Neil Jillett, ‘Gilbert Madigan’s novel approach to theatre’, The Age, 27 October 1984.

  * Norman Kendell, ‘When sons become fathers’, The Australian, 28 October 1984.

  Sinclair Hughes, Inside the Lion’s Den: The Literary Life of Gilbert Madigan, p. 305-306.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  We didn’t tell the kids until we were back home. Noah didn’t react at all. Nearly all of his friends’ parents were divorced, he said, so he had been kind of expecting it. At first Sunday wasn’t upset either. She treated it like a puzzle needing to be solved. She wanted to know where the missing pieces were, why we weren’t searching for them. She wanted someone to blame, and in the days that followed she first blamed me, then Nat, then, predictably, herself.

  ‘It just happens,’ Nat said, cuddling her on the couch. ‘People fall in love and sometimes their love doesn’t last, doesn’t go the distance. It runs out, like petrol in a car. Gets burnt up on the journey. By life. It’s nobody’s fault.’

  She was right – we’d no fuel left to burn.

  Perhaps it was an unconscious response to Nat’s taunt about my passivity, or maybe it came from some absurd, vestigial sense of chivalry, but whatever its motivation, and no matter how I now turned it over in my mind, the fact remains that I volunteered to move out of our house. Lately, as I have tried to rework my resentment and regret into something less destructive, I’ve been forced to admit that the decision to make the offer was entirely my own. Can I really blame Nat for accepting it? The best I can do is remind myself that I thought it was the right thing to do at the time.

  Needless to say, that time has passed.

  Awake at night, punishing myself, I pick over the facts: Nat pulled the plug on the relationship, the house had been my mother’s, and her parents’ before that, and I was the one who had spent most of the past sixteen years raising our kids in it. Naturally, it was me who needed to leave!

  As my levels of bitterness threatened to swamp me, a small voice somewhere deep inside reluctantly acknowledged that, while Nat might have been the one to pull the plug, I had flicked off the switch years ago. That if she hadn’t left, I might have. And while it was Marj who sold us the house for a bargain price, it was Nino and Maria who gave us the interest-free loan with which to buy it, Nat’s job that paid it off. Bereft now even of the consolation of self-righteousness, I quietly conceded, if only to myself, that even if Nat had insisted I stay in Munro Street, I could never have done what she had and bought out the other party. So she would have ended up with the house anyway. Or worse, we would have had to sell.

  Despite all of this, my grievances remained a rock not easily moved or even eroded by the force of reason or time.

  After all those years of reading to the kids at night, cuddling away their nightmares, waking them for school, making their lunches, then tea, I couldn’t believe I wouldn’t be there for them at the beginning and end of each day. It didn’t matter that they barely needed me now. I realised I no longer knew who I was outside of my relationships with them. Sure, I was an art teacher, but not an especially good one, and I knew that if I never taught again I wouldn’t miss it. Teaching was a job, not my vocation. Unlike Nat and my father, I’d never confused my working life for life itself.

  I took the day off work and waited until the house was empty before I packed my bags. Nat and I had gone through the books and CDs the night before. She said she would give me most of the kitchen stuff once I’d found a place because she had been wanting to replace it for years. With me gone, she wouldn’t have to feel guilty about buying new stuff, making the house nice.

  I held it together as I shoved my clothes into a suitcase and the old backpack I’d lugged around Europe when I was twenty. Stupidly, I did a final lap of the house to check I hadn’t forgotten anything. Like a river in spate, memories rushed through the rooms, bumping the furniture, buoying the past: Uncle Vernon unveiling the sleep-out; Grandma scraping burnt toast into the sink; Mum stretched out in front of the fire doing her prep; the three of us watching tellie (Bellbird, The Avengers); Nat nervously bathing a newborn Noah; Noah and Sunday taking sheets and blankets and turning the lounge into a fortress, bombarding me with cushions.

  I hadn’t shed a tear since Nat declared our innings closed. But as I walked down the hall and glanced into Sunday’s room, there, amid the jumble of clothes and schoolbooks, I saw Chim, the toy monkey, who until a few years ago had been her constant bedtime companion. How many times had I searched for Chim, discovering him under the couch, beside the bed, out in the yard. Flattened by a discarded maths book, one arm twisted backwards; his face, once so lovingly kissed, being ground into the carpet. My sense of loss overwhelmed me. Tears flowed with the welter of memories. I hurried to the front door, carrying my baggage with me.

  Drew Barnard, my old school friend, said I could stay with him until I found my feet. He and Deb had broken up a few years earlier and he’d moved into an apartment in North Brunswick, in what used to be a rope factory. More a two-storey townhouse than an apartment, it was open plan, with floor-to-ceiling windows that filled it with light. New and white, it looked unlived in, like something in a magazine.

  Deb had left him, too, but only after discovering he was having an affair with a young PhD candidate. That relationship hadn’t lasted and Drew was now throwing himself into his work. He had his kids every second week, though Marlowe was nearly eighteen and did his own thing, and Drew often had to renegotiate terms over the younger two because he was on the conference circuit and regularly o
ut of town. Three days after I arrived, he left for Seattle. We drank too much those first nights, feeling sorry for ourselves, trying and failing to find our old ease. Drew now hated Deb and seemed disappointed I didn’t feel the same about Nat. Six beers deep, he declared, ‘I guarantee she’s screwing you more now than she was when you were together.’

  Once he’d left for the States, I felt like a burglar in his apartment; a patient in a sanatorium. I found it hard to stay there. Of an evening, I watched crap tellie and drank his whisky. At around ten every night my phone would ping: Nite dad. Hate not seeing u. Not fair. Love & hugs & xxx Sun.

  The first of these came the night I left, while I was sitting talking and drinking with Drew. I had to leave the room, the apartment. I composed myself long enough to reply. Pretending to be strong, I reassured her it would be okay, that it wasn’t a matter of fairness. But like the sight of Chim, Sunday’s coded words found the cloud in me and this time, when it burst, it seemed the tears would never stop; that all I had left had gone to water.

  I walked the streets, howling, sobbing, not noticing or caring where I was. I wanted to be lost, for the feeling to be literal. A few hours later I found myself walking through the Edinburgh Gardens. I sat in the old grandstand of the Brunswick Street Oval, staring at the yellow glow of the sky above the city. The tears had finally ebbed. I felt wrung out. Hollow. Dry. I thought about curling up and sleeping on the splintered slats of the seat. I fantasised about letting go, about letting the breakup unravel me completely. I thought, as I often did, about where in the city I would camp if forced to sleep rough. I decided on a spot in Royal Park that I had scouted one day when taking the kids to the zoo – sheltered enough to go unnoticed, open enough to expose potential threats and allow for escape. All my life, even as a kid, I have entertained the possibility of being homeless. Thinking about it now, I wondered if it was not in counterpoint to the expectations of success instilled in me by my father’s absent life. Or was it created by the absence itself? His rootlessness taking root in me as a subterranean yearning for some version of his freedom?

  As it was – as it always is for me – my romance with destruction remained a fantasy. Realising Drew would worry if I wasn’t at his place in the morning, imagining him contacting Nat, the police, Sunday’s distress, I mentally mapped the quickest route back to Brunswick and began the long trudge north.

  It wasn’t until the following morning that I realised my seemingly random wanderings had in fact delivered me to the gardens where Nat and I were married. I could not tell if my unconscious was trying to retrace or erase the vows of that day.

  Sunday’s bedtime texts became a thing between us. It was strange, because our long goodnights of reading and talking had ceased when she started high school, two years earlier. Now that I wasn’t with her, that such encounters were no longer even a possibility, they had become the thing she most missed about me. Can’t sleep, she wrote. Every nite something missing … U! I made my responses chatty and tried to draw out of her how things were going at school, with her friends. Yeah, I’m much more popular now my parents have split!

  One night, past midnight, taking my mind off my own woes by watching those of the world on News 24, I got a fright when my phone pinged. Sunday: Can’t zzzz. Need hug.

  The clouds in me gathered again. I hid my pain in an attempt at humour. Try your brother!!

  She texted back, He’s in Iraq!

  In the ten days that Drew had been away I found myself a flat. Having something practical to do was good, and giving myself a deadline narrowed the options, which for someone who freezes in the face of too much choice was helpful. While I was grateful to Drew for putting me up, the only thing harder than staying alone in his stark, sterile apartment would have been staying in it when his kids were there. I couldn’t have coped with the company of teenage kids not my own.

  Mum gave me a sofa she no longer wanted, and I bought the rest of the furniture from the Brotherhood shop on Brunswick Road. Collecting the books and kitchen stuff from Munro Street wasn’t as distressing as I had anticipated. Noah and Sunday helped. Bizarrely, it was almost fun.

  Carrying a large box of books, Noah said, ‘Shouldn’t this be going straight to Savers? Why lug dead wood around? When was the last time you re-read one of these?’

  He had a point. I didn’t know why I held on to books I knew I would never read again, except, perhaps, because they acted as talismans to my past. All books now, even new ones, seem from another time.

  ‘When I move,’ he said, ‘all I’ll need is my computer.’

  At the flat, they both helped shift the furniture, Sunday taking control of interior decoration. They went home after we’d eaten pizzas – on the floor because I still hadn’t found a table and chairs. I was shelving the books, arranging my collection of Gil’s first editions, when I remembered the day he moved his stuff from our cottage in Edge, he and Peter Kessler scurrying about like robbers clearing out his den. Despite my determination not to repeat my father’s patterns, here I was, in my early fifties, single and separated from my own children, my daughter nightly expressing anguish over her abandonment. I knew it was different, but the differences didn’t seem as significant as the similarities. While I had come to grips with my failure to find a vocation to rival Gil’s, I’d always consoled myself that, unlike him, I had good, lasting relationships with the people I loved. That thought now offered me less solace.

  When I’d told Gil that Nat and I were breaking up he seemed genuinely shocked, as if he too had hoped I could succeed where he had failed. The line went quiet at the other end. He cleared his throat. ‘I don’t know what to say, Mick. I didn’t see that coming. You always seemed well suited.’

  ‘We’re opposites, really,’ I said. ‘But that seemed to work for us. Until it didn’t.’

  He asked about the kids and I told him I would have them at my place every second week. ‘Brilliant. That’s good. Glad to hear it. That’s what …’

  ‘My flat’s close by,’ I said, cutting him off before he said something I couldn’t believe. ‘Walking distance, which’ll make things easier.’

  After Gil left Mum and me, the only time the two of us lived in the same city at the same time was for a few months in 1984, when I was finishing my fine arts degree and he was living in a mansion in Kew, not far from where he’d grown up. The rumour was that he was romantically involved with one of the cast members of The Sons of Others, which would explain his decision to stay in Melbourne. He never admitted it, though, and he returned to London before the season ended. By his own account, John Sumner had asked him to help shepherd the production through the rehearsal stage, encouraging him to embrace the full collaborative experience. Having initially said no, he then agreed to it, he claimed, when he realised it would provide a pretext for spending time with me.

  Although I had craved his company and attention, when he finally offered me both, I found I didn’t want either. It was too late. I was already making my own art, making my own way in the world. Having become an adult, I didn’t want to belatedly become his child, defined by a relationship I’d only ever had in absentia.

  I did, however, have dinner with him a couple of times in posh restaurants, accepting his insistence to pay. But I knocked back his invitations to plays and performances and dinner parties, citing, not untruthfully, my need to finish the drawings and paintings that were to comprise my final portfolio. He desperately wanted to see what I was working on, to attend the opening of my cohort’s end-of-year exhibition. Knowing that the presence of the author of In Darkest Light – widely considered the great novel about a visual artist – would suck the focus from the room and render my work a curio, a mere footnote to his own, I instead invited him to my studio.

  The studio was actually a house in Preston, which I was sharing with the sculptor Malcolm Macleod. Ex-Housing Commission, it had everything we needed: five rooms and a garage. Mal and I didn’t own a mower, so the grass in the front was knee-high, sagging under
its own weight. Inside, the place stank of paint and turps, and every surface was covered with brushes, paints or models of the cyborg nightmares Mal welded together out in the shed.

  At the beginning of each week we cooked up a large pot of bolognese sauce and another of dhal, alternating night-about between pasta and rice. The night Gil came it was rice.

  Hearing the taxi scrape its front fender on the driveway, I deliberately kept painting. When Gil knocked, there was a delay before I opened the door while I put down the brush and found a rag for my hand.

  ‘You found it all right, then?’ I said, ushering him in.

  It felt awkward showing him round, letting him into my life. His clothes looked new and out of place in our mess.

  ‘Well, the taxi driver did,’ Gil said, handing me a bottle of red. ‘From Serbia – the driver; the wine’s from the Barossa. Hardly a word of English. Seemed to know his way around, though. Don’t think I’d ever been past Northcote before, so I wasn’t much help.’

  I cleared the clutter from the kitchen table and went to put on the rice. Jumping up from the seat he’d just sat in, Gil yelled, ‘No, no, we can eat later. I want to see the paintings first. I’ve come to a gallery, not a restaurant!’ Grabbing the wine, searching for a corkscrew, he added, ‘We can start on this though, can’t we?’ As he opened and closed the dodgy drawers beside the sink and rummaged through the dishes in the rack, his expensive clothes suddenly didn’t seem so jarring.

  Wine in hand, I nervously showed him the drawings. He studied them closely, forensically, asking questions about their subjects, about composition and technique. He nominated two he was particularly taken with and talked of buying them once they had been assessed; of using something of mine on the cover of his next book. ‘I’m not saying they’re illustrations – obviously they’re not, they’re much more than that.’ He was talking distractedly, still poring over the pictures. ‘Like the way Stow used Nolan’s images on some of his books. That sort of thing. But only if you thought it might help.’