Relatively Famous

by Roger Averill

  Mountain music had never been my thing, but I was impressed by the Panhandlers’ playing. Marcus’ guitar work was clean and restrained. Accomplished. Finishing a call-and-response routine with the fiddle player, he looked up to where I was standing at the bar, and recognised me. His eyes widened and for a second, a beat or two, he left the song and had to scramble to rejoin it.

  At the end of the bracket, he placed his guitar on a stand and slouched towards me, dodging the kids and the punters carrying pots. ‘It is you! Micky Madigan ... Bugger me. I thought you’d left the country.’

  Parting from his embrace, I told him I hadn’t even left the suburb. ‘What about you?’ I asked, ‘I thought you’d be famous by now.’

  Scanning the space behind me, he tried to attract the bartender. ‘Huh,’ he said, still looking past me, distracted. ‘I stopped chasing that rainbow years ago. Plenty of pot at the end of it, just no gold.’ Gesturing back to the tiny stage, he added, ‘Not exactly stadium rock!’

  Once the gig was over, we got a table out the back and ordered an early dinner. Swapping snippets of news about people we used to know, we started to fill in the gaps about each other. I learned that soon after Barnaby’s funeral Marcus had moved to London, where, in his own well-rehearsed words, he ‘spent ten years succeeding only in failure’. He seemed disappointed to hear that my painting career had gone the way of my musical one. We both laughed at finding out the other was paying the bills by teaching.

  ‘Last refuge of the moderately talented,’ he declared, raising his glass of red in salute to our limitations. ‘Your father’s the real deal, though. He was huge over there. I went and saw that play of his in the West End …’

  ‘The Sons of Others.’

  ‘Yeah. Told the girl I was with … I was like a little kid … I was going, “I used to be in a band with the son of the guy who wrote this!” I don’t think she believed it.’

  ‘I’m not sure I do!’ I said.

  Changing the topic, I asked where he was living. ‘I came back from the UK and crossed the Rubicon,’ he said. ‘Uncle Morrie died a few years back and left me enough for a dogbox in St Kilda. Now I spend my time teaching Nirvana riffs to twelve-year-olds. More to satisfy their faux-boh parents than the kids, most of whom couldn’t give a shit.’ Gesturing towards the front bar and the stage, he said, ‘Still, I’ve got this. I’m making music. That’s what matters. That’s all that’s ever mattered.’

  We reminisced about the Project and Blyth Street, and after we had laughed about Spud and the motorbike, Marcus confessed to having cheated in that first hitchhiking competition. Soph was an old friend of his from Sydney. After he had hitched there, he called her up and conned her into driving him back to Melbourne. The snaps of the two of them in front of trucks, the one of her with an arm around Max ‘The Man with the Monaro’, were all staged, complete fakes.

  ‘You bastard!’ I shaped to punch him, made him cower. ‘I won. I beat you, you cheating prick. You owe me … a slab, as I recall.’ I drained my beer. Taking the hint, Marcus jumped up to buy a replacement. By the time he returned he had worked out his defence.

  ‘It was a competition,’ he said, his brown eyes peering at me from above the rim of his glass. ‘It’s just you thought it was about hitchhiking and I thought it was about storytelling. You won your competition, I won mine. Win-win.’

  Stuffing a forkful of steak in my mouth, I chewed it slowly, keeping up the pantomime offence.

  ‘Watching you play before,’ I told him, chomping on some rocket, ‘I envied the way that, unlike me, you’ve stuck at one thing and mastered it. There’s real integrity in that, having a vocation.’ Marcus raked his fingers through his hair. He seemed embarrassed. Some rocket was lodged in my teeth. I sucked at it with my tongue, washed it away with the beer. ‘Now I realise you’ve actually missed your calling. You shouldn’t be playing guitar, you should be selling used cars. Junk bonds. Hustling horseshit.’

  ‘You’re right,’ he said, smiling. ‘I should’ve made millions. Where’d we go wrong, Mickey Man? How’d we end up with all this integrity?’

  By nine, the beer and wine had become whisky, and our conversation had slowed and begun bending back in on itself. We talked of getting together for a jam, of forming a new band, of keeping in touch. Both of us knew none of it would happen. Catching up had been great, but we were ghosts from each other’s pasts, haunting the present only as conduits for memories. To meet again would be to make a future, and that would risk ruining what we had. By your fifties, memories are like savings in a bank, securities of self to be husbanded, not squandered on long-odds speculations. Already I could envisage a time when my only future would be to look back on my past. I didn’t want that sullied by a misplaced attempt to recapture my youth in late middle age.

  I walked with Marcus to the tram stop and waited there with him. The cold air colliding with the clouds of alcohol in my head threatened some sort of internal storm. I suddenly felt very tired. A tram kinked its way round the bend into Grantham Street. Easing himself up from the shop wall he had been leaning against, Marcus held his hand out for a biker shake, dragging me in for a hug. ‘It’s been a blast, Mickey Man. Really has. Maybe we should make a trip. Hitchhike up to Darwin.’

  The tram clattered to a stop.

  ‘Still got Soph’s number?’ I asked, handing him his guitar like I was his roadie.

  ‘The past’s never lost, Mickey, just forgotten.’ He stepped up into the bright light of the carriage. ‘I’ll find her,’ he said. In silhouette now, he raised his hand in a parting salute.

  He didn’t look back.

  Returning to the flat, I bumped into my neighbour Aziz, stealing a smoke on the ground-floor landing. Aziz was Muslim and wasn’t meant to smoke, but he drove taxis all day and had developed the habit out of boredom, hanging round the ranks waiting for fares. We often saw each other late at night. For whatever reason, maybe because of the darkness or because everyone else was inside asleep, we had quickly progressed beyond nods and hellos and, like the keepers of a secret, had established a certain intimacy.

  Aziz was hiding the cigarette under the curl of his downturned fingers when I approached. Seeing it was me, his white teeth flashed in the gloom. He took another puff. ‘You look like the people I pick up from the nightclubs. You going to vomit?’

  I gave him a queasy smile. ‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘So why aren’t you out there, helping infidels like me? What are we meant to do if our designated drivers are skiving off smoking cigarettes?’

  ‘It’s my night off,’ he explained. ‘I can’t sleep.’

  I told him about Marcus, going into too much drunken detail, boring him with stories about our long-ago jaunts. Lamenting that I hadn’t achieved much since those days, I confessed to having never really escaped my past.

  Flicking the butt into the car park, watching its ember tumble through the dark, Aziz said, ‘It’s hard to leave it behind. I can’t think about the past or I panic about the future – feel I’ve made a terrible mistake. I had a good job in Pakistan.’

  He had told me before that he used to be a social worker in a major hospital, but that in Australia he was having trouble getting his qualifications recognised.

  ‘You took action, Aziz –’ the alcohol in me placing a hand on his shoulder. ‘You and Neelofa broke free. Most of us don’t manage that – our past defines us. What you did was brave.’

  ‘Or foolish. We left our pasts on the other side of the world and still they came with us. What hope have you got of leaving yours?’

  After Madigan’s second wife, Tamara Billings, died of breast cancer in 2005, their son, Reuben, by then a prominent New York literary agent, wrote to his father with a proposition. Handwritten on MTM (More Than Managing) letterhead and sent by regular post, the letter is quoted here in full to convey the subtleties of Reuben’s elaborate overture.

  Dear Gil,

  Thank you for the letter. Aside from Grace,° you are the only person who still
sends me real letters. Like presents under a Christmas tree, they are opened with anticipation – a treat. All the other envelopes that cross my desk feature windows onto financial vistas I don’t usually want to see.

  Life since the funeral has been sad and sadly hectic. I keep expecting Mom to call. The other day I rang her number by mistake, from habit, and heard her voice on the recorded message. It utterly threw me. I was a mess for the rest of the day. Connor’sa still in the apartment, of course. Apparently he’s taken to bed with depression.

  My own tried and true method of coping has been to drown myself in work – repression rather than its melancholic cousin. Apart from its distracting qualities, the attraction to work has been propelled by a renewed sense of urgency. I’ll be thirty-five in two months. What might Mom have done differently if at my age she’d known she only had another thirty years left?

  It is in this spirit that I write you. For years now I’ve been frustrated at seeing authors far less talented than you land far better deals. And I’m not just talking about new releases. If I were, though, I would remind you that Felt barely raised a ripple this side of the pond. In truth, with your reputation and back catalog, it should’ve been like a whale breaching, all the literary minnows left rocking in its wake. I know Peter Weir still holds the rights to In Daniel’s Den and Spielberg’s crew showed interest in Freedom Falling, but what you need is to see one of these on the screen. I’m not simply talking about money here; I know that doesn’t especially interest you. I’m talking about profile. Films bring people to books. We might wish it were otherwise, but that’s just how it is. That’s the fact. You need to curate your reputation. These things don’t happen by chance.

  What I’m trying to say is that I want to be your agent. I’m confident that with my contacts on the West Coast I can get those films made; can get you the readership you deserve.

  I also know how loyal you are to Harold Beason, and I respect that. Believe me, as an agent, I respect client loyalty! And it’s been out of that respect that I haven’t approached you earlier. It’s only that a few weeks before Mom died I told her of my frustration about your fading reputation here in the States and she encouraged me to talk to you about it. When I raised the issue of Harold, she closed her eyes as if to recall his face. She remained silent for a moment and I wondered if the drugs hadn’t dragged her back toward sleep. Then, opening her eyes, staring straight at me, she said, ‘Poor old Harold must be eighty by now – he’s probably been wanting to retire for years and hasn’t known how to free himself of your father.’

  I didn’t argue with her because she was so weak, and was, besides, trying to encourage me. However, I feel sure Harold would have retired if he’d wanted and that he would experience your departure from his stable less like liberation than betrayal. That said, agents age and their energies wane. Even more crucially, their contacts retire or die. Beason remains a respected industry figure, but it’s true he’s of Grandpa Billings’s generation, most of whom clocked out years ago or are happily sunning themselves in Florida.

  I wanted to make this proposal to you in person, but it wasn’t appropriate at the funeral. I was in no state to talk that day, let alone talk business. It took everything I had to deliver the eulogy, then exchange pleasantries and receive condolences from people I didn’t know, or should’ve known but didn’t recognise.

  If you’re willing to even consider this idea I will hop on a plane tomorrow. I hope it goes without saying that it would be both an honor and a thrill for me to represent your work, the former because of its exceptional quality, the latter for reasons of blood, which, as we know, transcends all reason.

  Affectionately yours,

  Reuben

  Madigan was in Sweden when Reuben’s letter arrived, which meant his response was delayed even before it had been formulated. Upon reading it, his immediate reaction was outrage. He knew Harold Beason was well past his prime and that, as a result, his own reputation was sliding, especially in the States. In recent years, though, his ambition had lost its ruthless edge, and what had come to matter more was the sense of loyalty he felt for the circle of friends and associates who had stuck by him – or, in a couple of instances, to him – since his earliest days in London. Recently, the circle had contracted with the deaths of Alice Farley and Jack Birchall, and the slide into dementia of Mervyn Drake, whose 1971 travel memoir, Madigan, Majorca and Me, had detailed their ‘stumble’, as opposed to ‘ramble’, around the Spanish island.* The smaller the circle became, the more in Madigan’s mind it resembled a ring of trust. It was, he realised, the only family he had that he hadn’t destroyed.

  So it was that, early in his eighth decade, Madigan’s focus turned increasingly to honouring the past rather than forging a future. In a journal entry written only two months before Tamara’s death, he confessed:

  It’s not that I feel I’ve arrived. On the contrary, I’m still trying to discern a destination by which to set my course. It’s more that I feel my best travelling days are behind me. If I’m honest (which I’m not to those who ask, especially not my publisher), I think I’ve little left to say. All that remains for me are finger exercises, which, of course, I hope to perform with appropriate aplomb.

  The troubling aspect of Reuben’s proposal was that it, too, was about honouring the past. If it had come from anyone else, the answer would have been a perfunctory no. Reuben, though, like his antipodean half-brother, Michael,was an abandoned son, someone Madigan had guiltily left behind in pursuit of literary achievement and acclaim. In effect, Reuben’s request was asking him to choose between a loyal friend and a neglected son. Paradoxically, Madigan was being offered an opportunity to redress past disloyalties by committing a new one, abandoning a man who had stood steadfast with him for over fifty years. Feeling he had done nothing for either of his boys beyond lending them his name, he now felt he could not refuse the youngest his request. But, then, how could he hurt his oldest ally?

  Beyond and beneath these genuine concerns about righting past wrongs, there was another aspect to Madigan’s dilemma: his nagging suspicion that Reuben was right, that his profile and his readership should have been greater than they were. Confiding his pragmatism to his other son’s wife, Natalie Ferella, he wrote, ‘The truth is, I too want those films made. Harold has always adopted a softly, softly approach in such matters, and with age his light touch has, I fear, become imperceptible to the harder heads that now prevail in the publishing and film worlds. Really, who doesn’t want a larger slice of the American apple pie?’

  In the end, a coincidence befitting a Hardy novel saved Madigan the trauma of professionally parting ways with Beason. Nothing, though, could save him from his guilt, strangely amplified by the reprieve. He had arranged to meet Beason at their customary spot upstairs in the Garrick Club.º Harold was already there when Madigan arrived, which wasn’t unusual. That he was keeping company with a cup of tea rather than a G & T definitely was.

  Soon after Madigan settled into his seat, Beason said he had something to tell him. According to Madigan’s journal, the agent looked his oldest remaining client in the eye and said, ‘Now, I don’t want any fuss and nonsense, but the fact is I have cancer of the pancreas and I’ve been told to wind up my affairs.’ To his lasting shame, Madigan’s first response was sheer relief. Now his friend need never know of his betrayal.

  The guilt of his immediate elation made his secondary response more strongly felt. In a voice that turned the room, he exclaimed that it wasn’t right, that the doctors must have misdiagnosed him. Maintaining his composure, responding in his usual, measured tone, Beason raised an eyebrow as he sipped his tea and said he hadn’t known of Madigan’s medical degree. ‘You do know I’m turning seventy-nine next month? That I should’ve been playing bridge and lawn bowls all these years, not lining up deals for the likes of you? I’m surprised you’re surprised. Did you think we were immortals?’ Placing the cup back on its saucer, returning things to right, he added, ‘I hate to break it
to you, Gilbert – it’s the books that live on. Not us.’

  ° Presumably this refers to Grace Paley, who was, through her friendship with Reuben’s mother, one of his earliest clients.

  a Connor McQuaid, the Irish poet, was Tamara Billings’s third husband.

  * The anonymous reviewer in The Times described it as ‘little more than the chronicle of a glorified pub crawl, which, I guess, in this age of hyperbole qualifies it as a “truly staggering achievement”.’

  º John Mortimer, the creator of Rumpole, sponsored Madigan’s application for membership, made when he was living with Annie Edwards in Wark. Having leased his Hampstead home, Madigan had often found himself in need of accommodation in London and had long held a secret yearning to join the literary roll call of the Garrick.

  Sinclair Hughes, Inside the Lion’s Den: The Literary Life of Gilbert Madigan, p. 366-369.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  A few weeks after the kids began dividing their time between Nat’s place and mine, I suggested we take Mum on a picnic to celebrate her birthday. Sunday was keen but Noah begged off on the grounds of having too much homework. Since the breakup, I had given in to everything. I felt guilty about the hurt Nat and I had caused and didn’t want to make matters worse. Plus, I couldn’t face the fights.

  This, though, was different. Noah rarely did homework, and when he did it was usually torn off late on a Sunday, after spending the weekend strapped to his screen answering the Call of Duty. I had told him about the trip to Castlemaine a week earlier, so he’d had plenty of time to rearrange his homework schedule.