Relatively Famous

by Roger Averill

  His praise pulsed through me like a drug. I had been determined to disregard his opinion whatever it was, but the depth of his engagement undid my defences and I absorbed his words of appreciation as if through the surface of my skin. My suspicion of his motives dissolved in the slow-release fizz of his measured enthusiasm. His response was not uncritical, which, of course, only increased its value. He said that one painting, of an old man crouched in front of a graffitied train, was too derivative of Jeffrey Smart; that it didn’t deserve a place in the portfolio. I defended it, pointing out its departures from Smart, the most obvious being my more impressionistic technique, the textured surface. Gil’s judgement, though, only confirmed my own long-held doubts about the canvas.

  Because I had to admit to myself he was right about that one (though not to him), I also had to acknowledge that his positive assessment of the others might also carry weight.

  He spent ten minutes contemplating the large canvas I’d been working on when he arrived. It was an interior that drew the eye through a doorway into a sparse room where a man, seemingly exhausted, sat in shorts and a blue singlet at an empty kitchen table. The foreground was grainy and barely lit, so as to tunnel the viewer’s attention to the kitchen’s yellow light. Gil examined the canvas up close, then with as much distance as the room’s cramped dimensions allowed.

  ‘There’s real gravity at work on his body, the muscles loosened. That’s where we feel it, the weight of his world.’ He nodded and said that he liked it and asked if I had thought about changing the kitchen’s yellow light to a fluorescent white. When I said I hadn’t, he ruminated about it aloud, as if the problem were his own. Finally, he concluded there was probably no need to increase the sense of bleakness.

  Breaking the spell, the back door slammed as Mal came in from the garage. Playing up his Scottish brogue, he complained about the lack of food: ‘Whit’s a laddie gotta do to find a tattie in tis hame?’

  After we had eaten, Gil insisted on a tour of Mal’s studio as well. He showed the same interest in the sculptures as he had in my work, and asked Mal if he knew the work of his ex, Annie Edwards. Sitting on the back steps, surrounded by weeds, the three of us drank cask wine as Gil told us stories of famous exhibitions he’d seen and, at our prompting, gave the gossip on artists he had met: Hockney, Freud, Bacon, Nolan, Boyd and Tucker.

  It was after midnight when he left. As the taxi waited, we embraced, and for the first time I registered how much taller I was than him. ‘See you soon,’ I said, now enjoying the idea that he was residing close by.

  ‘Definitely,’ he said, one leg in the footwell, the other on the kerb. ‘Dinner on me. Bring Mal.’

  What he didn’t say then, but announced when I called a few days later to arrange the dinner, was that he was flying back to London the following Friday. A few weeks earlier he had offered to take me with him when he went back, to introduce me to his contacts in the British art scene. I appreciated the gesture, but I knew how Gil’s promises panned out. Full of youthful pride and naivety, I told him I wanted to be sure it was my art that people were interested in, not my parentage. But now, hearing he was leaving so soon, I felt a clenching in my gut and a part of me wished I had said yes.

  After marrying Michael Madigan in 1991, the industrial relations lawyer Natalie Farella began a long and intimate correspondence with her father-in-law, who, it seemed, enjoyed her forthright opinions and equally strong affections. Writing on the eve of his sixtieth birthday, responding to Natalie’s well wishes and solicitations, Madigan confided:

  I know it’s not original, but time is a torrent propelling my little tributary to the sea. I can’t help feeling, though, that all the rush and bubble is behind me, that I’m now meandering in my own reflection. The future feels like a delta of meaningless decisions, all leading to the same ocean.

  So now, tell me, does that answer your question? Does that constitute a crisis?

  Of course, I’m overstating it, yet at my most churlish I do lament my early success and wish my river had run deeper before it took on boats. That way I would have been entering my seventh decade with more momentum and the shush and draw of the ocean might have sounded softer, more distant. (With metaphors so hopelessly distended, it’s perhaps a miracle I had any success at all!) In truth, as you know, my life has been, and continues to be, one of unearned good fortune. Tomorrow, twenty of my closest friends are taking me out to celebrate – the destination a secret as well kept as the Cambridge Five – and I’ve had many kind thoughts expressed to me by post, though none warmer or more appreciated than yours.

  Beyond the creep of time, Madigan had reason to feel disheartened. After failing to produce a follow-up to The Sons of Others, by his sixtieth birthday he had not published anything of substance for over six years. Unlike his Oliver Reed period in the early 1970s, a writing dry spell caused, ironically, by his imbibing of liquids, this publishing drought resulted from a flood of words rather than their absence. During his stay in Melbourne in 1984, Madigan had conducted research into the Victorian gold rush and made multiple trips to Clunes, a small town near Ballarat, where his maternal ancestors had settled in 1852. The fruits of this investigation, when mingled with the stories of his mother’s parents and his own ripe imagination, were bountiful to the point of overabundance. For the first time in nearly forty years, Madigan had a story he could not tame. Five years into the writing of it he declared to his diary that the manuscript ‘is like a bloody tropical creeper.’

  No sooner do I lop off its greedy tendrils than they sprout again. Minor characters push through the lines on the page as if through cracks in my resistance and insist on playing larger parts. Subplots swell into narrative trunks, shooting out branches of their own. Longing to be a topiarist, to shape all this into something artful, instead I remain languishing, lost in the jungle, flailing about with a machete. Two hundred pages in and I’ve barely got the bastard out of Cornwall!

  The bastard in question was the intended central character, Manfred Cline, a disgruntled Cornish tin miner who, having sailed to the other side of the world in search of gold, discovers instead that neither his distaste for mines nor his brooding disposition have changed with the hemispheres. Good fortune, though, comes in an unexpected form. After a year of fruitless mining, he turns his attention, and then his trade, to feeding his fellow miners with the rabbits whose smaller burrows they constantly disrupt with their deeper diggings. Once lit, Cline’s entrepreneurial spirit quickly takes. At first he pays Eliza Barkle, soon to be his wife, to sew the rabbits’ pelts into blankets. Then, observing the miners’ hats disintegrating from sweat and salt and the perishing sun, he has her try her hand at millinery and thereby creates what soon becomes Cline Hats – ‘“an empire”, he liked to say, leaving the meaning ambiguous, “built by a pest”.’

  It took another two years of frustration, of abandoned drafts and renewed false starts, for Madigan to complete his much anticipated tenth novel, Felt. It wasn’t until he switched to a first-person narration, telling the story from the jaundiced perspective of Cline’s eldest, artistically inclined son, Arthur, that he found a device capable of reigning in what threatened to become a sprawling family saga. With remarkable candour, in a later letter to Natalie he confided: ‘Having made such a mess of family life myself, it is perhaps no surprise I’m making a mess of Manfred’s, even though my intention all along was to depict his own species of domestic disaster.’

  As if the book were cursed, its advertised publication date of 20 June 1994 had to be delayed when its author fell seriously ill with a urinary tract infection caused by an enlarged prostate. While rumours that Madigan had prostate cancer were unfounded, he did undergo surgery, which, although minor, had a major impact on his future sexual relations.

  Still recovering from the operation, Madigan nonetheless embarked on a gruelling promotional tour after Felt was eventually released on 9 August. In an interview for the The Independent, he said, only partly in jest, ‘That book nearly kil
led me. It might well be my last’.°

  ° ‘Deeply Felt’, The Independent, 13 August 1994.

  Sinclair Hughes, Inside the Lion’s Den: The Literary Life of Gilbert Madigan, p. 324-325.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Ever since meeting Nat I had been trying to create and nurture connection, to sandbag myself against the threat of future abandonment. Bizarrely, after the breakup I found myself carried along by a flow of events I’d helped initiate and yet felt I had no control over. How does it happen that those of us fortunate enough to exercise considerable choice in our lives still experience them as narrated in the third person rather than the first? I can now see that I have spent most of my adulthood trying to wrest back authorship of my life from the distant, omniscient narration of my father’s story.

  Nights were the hardest. It’s funny how the dark reveals things. In the flat, I found it difficult to sit with my own company once the sun went down. I continued the habits I had formed at Drew’s: walking, drinking, watching late-night tellie. Most nights, after I got home from work, I walked to the shops in Grantham Street or further still to Sydney Road. I always bought just what I needed so I would have to do it again the next night. The taste for whisky I’d developed at Drew’s became a thirst I quenched too regularly. Finally I had found some footsteps of my father’s that I could successfully follow. And yes, that was the sort of self-pitying crap I wallowed in at midnight, slumped, half-scuppered, in front of re-runs of Magnum P.I.

  On a good night I would sketch, with music playing in the background, and just have a nightcap. Or I’d make some music of my own and muck around on an old Ibanez that had spent the past seventeen years in its case on top of a wardrobe. Playing guitar returned something to me, a memory of the person I’d been before Nat and I were together. Some nights that reunion was welcome, the old passions passing off as consolations; on others it felt like regression. I relearned songs I used to know, wasting hours studying YouTube clips, trying to imitate moves my fingers could not master. No amount of replays helped, and I remembered why I’d always played bass, had taken up painting.

  One night, snooping round the internet, its free associations taking me where they would, I jumped from an old clip of Mark Gillespie to a string of things about The Go-Betweens, to a snippet about The Solo Project on a blog written by a bloke who claimed to have seen all our Melbourne gigs. Then – succumbing to a temptation I had to that point resisted, for fear of becoming one of those people who try to reassemble their past from the rubble of their present – I searched the names of the Project’s other band members. Barnaby had died years ago of an overdose in Sydney. I was a pallbearer at his funeral, despite not having seen him for over a year before his death. Occasionally I would beat myself up about that and wonder why I hadn’t reached out to him, tried to halt his descent. Why had I given up on him so easily?

  I knew the drummer, Brett, had married a Dutch woman and moved to the Netherlands in the early nineties. Google informed me that Ross, the saxophonist and the only regular member of the brass section, was a music teacher in the NSW Southern Highlands. And Rob, the keyboardist, was living in the Gold Coast hinterland, playing in a weddings cover band specialising in surf music called The Tidal Waltz.

  I hesitated before typing ‘Marcus Reading’ into the search bar. Marcus, the guitarist and driving force behind the Project, was the only one I’d really kept in contact with after we went our separate ways, when I had reversed the cliché and left a band to join an art school. Before I moved in with Malcolm and his sculptures, I had lived in a run-down mansion in Blyth Street, between Sydney Road and Lygon Street. The place was owned by Marcus’s Uncle Morrie, who had made his money in plastic mouldings and was by then living in the States. The rooms in the house were enormous, the rent negligible. It was always hard to know how many people were living there at any one time, though it was never less than seven. The place was a circus; Marcus, its ringmaster. For a time, one resident actually was a working clown, replete with a slack wire that he would string up along the hallway. Other members of the Project lived there off and on, and most people who drifted through were artists or performers of some kind. Except for Spud, a pothead, who by day worked in a warehouse and at night assembled and disassembled his beloved black Norton Atlas 750, surgically placing each polished part in a grid on sheets on his bedroom floor. Every few weeks, the house would suddenly roar and shudder as he kicked over the engine and unwound the throttle. I’m not sure I ever saw him ride it on the road, but occasionally he would ease it down the hallway into the lounge, where everyone who was in the house at the time would gather to admire it, nodding and smiling amid the rumble and the fumes. Having throbbed it back to his room, he would diagnostically rev the engine a few more times, then kill the noise. Once it had cooled, he would begin to strip and clean it all over again.

  It wasn’t until I was in art school that I wondered if Spud hadn’t in fact been the most serious artist of us all, his whole obsessive routine an elaborate long-play performance piece.

  There was only one television in the house, an early Pye colour set. Crate-like, it nevertheless seemed tiny in the vastness of the lounge room, its spindly wooden legs standing firm against a sea of swirling, paisley-patterned carpet. After months of rolling disputes about seating rights on the couch and clapped-out chairs gathered round its bulbous screen, Marcus and new resident Phil, who owned an arc welder, built a four-tiered bleacher in time for the broadcast of the 1982 VFL grand final. The day was going well – Phil had rigged up a makeshift barbecue in the backyard, and we all had a good view of the game. But then in the last quarter, Marcus, who barracked for Richmond, shoved Rob, our Carlton supporting keyboardist, off the edge of the third tier. Rob laughed about it at the time, but I could see he was hurt, and I think it was then that he determined to leave the band, which, it turned out, was the beginning of its end.

  Another feature of the house was the enormous wardrobe covering the doorway of Marcus’ bedroom. Completely obscuring the entrance, it had a large section of its backboard cut away. Opening the oak-panelled door, he would ask select female visitors if they wanted to visit Narnia, daring them to step between the dangling clothes into the fantasy world beyond.

  His greatest innovation, though, was his cannonball competition, challenging all-comers to hitchhiking races from Melbourne to the other capitals. Long before smart phones, competitors had to keep a photographic log of their lifts and have someone take a shot of them in front of a predetermined public clock and date display. The winner was not officially declared until all rolls of film had been developed.

  I only competed once, in the inaugural contest, a return trip to Sydney. Having managed to get there and back in a little over two days, with half a night spent walking from Benalla to Violet Town, I thought I had won. Collapsing on the couch back at Blyth Street, I told Spud, who had stayed home to work on his bike, how on the outward journey an old guy wanting company had picked me up in a Morris Minor that couldn’t go over 80 k’s an hour. As I explained my dilemma – take the slow ride I had, or chance dumping it for a faster one – Marcus walked in drying his hair with a towel, another cinched round his waist.

  ‘What’s happening?’

  Before I could answer, a long-legged woman wearing a plumcoloured dressing gown slid into the room. Standing behind Marcus, she draped her tanned arms over his shoulders and twirled his chest hair through her fingers. It was like watching a movie. Twisting to whisper something in her ear, Marcus turned back to me and said, ‘This is Soph. We met in Gundagai. We got back last night.’

  Later he showed me the Polaroids to prove it.

  Back then I thought there was no limit to what Marcus might do. Whenever a band hit it big, I always expected him to be in it. He had an energy, an aura, that marked him out for greatness. Fame, at least. At the time, I thought my father must have been like that when he was young.

  Typing ‘Marcus Reading’, hitting Enter, I expected to learn he had bec
ome a successful adman, a documentary filmmaker, a tourism tycoon, an underground poet. Depressingly, the first three results were for The Solo Project. Also on that page were a LinkedIn profile for a realty agent in New Hampshire, and an online speed reading system called GLANCE, developed by Arnold Marcus, Mt Hope, San Diego. After a little more trawling, I found a three-line review of a 2012 gig by a band called the Bureaucrats. The last line read: ‘Slicing through the murk, and providing the evening’s only highlights, were the crystal-clear picking-style solos of Marcus Reading.’ Searching the band name, I learned of its short career and that ‘after its final gig, Reading and Paxton will be forming a bluegrass outfit called The Panhandlers.’ In one of those moments of happenstance that feel like fate, I followed the Panhandlers’ thread and discovered they were playing at the Union Hotel, a few blocks away, the following weekend.

  The pub was full of young parents clinging to their inner-city dreams, working them in around the babies and toddlers dandling on their knees, competing for their attention. I had found a photo of the band online, so I knew that Marcus hadn’t ballooned out in middle age. Even so, I wondered if I would recognise him, or him, me.

  The stage in the Union was tiny and the four Panhandlers and their instruments – double bass, guitar, banjo, fiddle – barely squeezed onto it. Even with his back to me, crouching, tuning his guitar, Marcus was unmistakably himself. Only his movements were slower, as if the restlessness in him had finally found a home and he’d settled into himself. His hair, receding and shot through with grey, was long and swept back. When he turned towards the gathering crowd, I thought it looked better than it had when it was full and brown and cut into a mullet. He also sported a neatly trimmed goatee, which I took to be part of the whole Kentucky Colonel Sanders–bluegrass scene.