Relatively Famous

by Roger Averill

  It was Craig who had told Russell about the Playboys, a whole stack of them, good as new, near the Pearson Street corner of the tip. Russell was more physically advanced than me and was always on about sex. He was allowed to watch Number 96; or at least said he was. The plan was that we would steal the magazines before Craig and his mates got to them, stash them under the old washhouse at Russ’s place, and then sell them to other boys in the neighbourhood, keeping the best for ourselves.

  Mum didn’t like Russ, but she knew I didn’t have many friends, so I was allowed to sleep the night at his house. Once his folks had gone to bed, we waited another thirty minutes before climbing through his bedroom window and over the back fence into the lane. It was late on a weeknight, so despite the heat, the streets were deserted. Russ had pinched some of his mum’s Winfield Reds. We smoked a couple, trying to look casual and in control as we walked the two blocks to Pearson. Inside the dump, the sickly, overripe smell wasn’t as bad as usual, as if the earth had inhaled for the night, absorbing the suburb’s gases.

  Russell took a Dolphin torch out of his haversack and picked a path through the piles of rubbish. A large brown rat stared red-eyed into the beam. Deciding we were harmless, it continued gnawing at the rotten corn cob it clutched and turned in its twitching paws. Approaching the spot Craig had described, Russell trained the torch on a large carton tipped on its side, magazines spilling out.

  ‘There they are,’ he said in a whispered yell, running towards it, leaving me tripping behind him in the dark. Crouching in the muck, he thrust the torch towards me and started rifling through the magazines.

  ‘The bastard!’ he screamed, forgetting to whisper. ‘I’m going to kill him.’

  I shone the beam on the scattered mags and saw an image of Princess Margaret in a red frockcoat. Craig had set us up – they were Women’s Day, not Playboy. ‘I wondered why he’d told me, why he hadn’t just grabbed them himself. Bastard!’

  Like a madman, Russ started tearing at the magazines, tossing shreds of them in the air like confetti. I joined in, and soon we were surrounded by mounds of torn paper. Squatting in the stink of it, he asked if I had the matches. I pulled them from my pocket.

  At first the flame wouldn’t take because the paper was damp and filmy. I found a pile of newspapers under a box of old pamphlets and scrunched some up and struck another match. They didn’t burst into flame either. But then, with some well-directed blowing, the scallop of fire blackening the paper’s edge gradually spread like a spill of ink, until, all of a sudden, it billowed into a yellow rag cavorting on the wind.

  Almost immediately, we switched from trying to light the fire to desperately trying to put it out. As the flames took hold of the glossier magazines with their coloured photographs, they intensified and gave off a spiralling plume of black, toxic smoke. Stamping the fire out with our feet, I thought we had it under control, but we’d managed only to spread it to what was left of the stack of newspapers. From there it found an aerosol can that popped and flared and pushed us backwards. Flames were pouring in lava-like runnels into other parts of the pit. Russ looked at me. Without speaking, we ran for the fence.

  By the time we were back in Pearson Street the fire was leaping skyward, a column of acrid smoke sounding its own alarm. We ran as fast as we could, racing to get away. Back in the lane, chests heaving, we collapsed on the cobbles. Russell began laughing. ‘How good was that? You’re a legend, Madigan! Craig and his mates wouldn’t’ve had the balls to do that.’

  Our clothes smelt of smoke. We took them off in the backyard and shook them before clambering back through the bedroom window.

  Lying on a sagging canvas stretcher, I listened to the distant wail of sirens swell closer until the night was thick with them. I imagined I could see the flashing of the fire trucks’ lights, the yellow of the flames, and wondered why I wasn’t excited like Russ. I closed my eyes and hoped it would go away; that no one would be hurt, that no houses would burn down.

  Entering Munro Street in the heat, memories and alcohol sloshing inside me, I stared at the brickworks’ chimneys silhouetted against the evening sky, standing sentinel over the suburb as they had for one hundred and fifty years. Their vigil now silent, smoke-free.

  Curious to see what had happened to the house, I wished as soon as it came into view that I hadn’t looked; wished I hadn’t given in to the booze and the melancholy, the desire for lamentation that had dragged me there. A reversing truck, I guessed, had collected the front fence, fanning the bricks onto the remains of Grandma’s rose garden. Marj, I thought, would have approved of the fence’s destruction, resenting as she did the way it pointed up Hoffman’s stinginess in building the rest of the house from weatherboard.

  From what could be gleaned in the moonlight, the demolition team had lost no time in getting started. Most of the rear of the house was already gone. A giant skip mounded up with rubble was parked at the kerb. An excavator was in the sideway. It looked like a mechanical swan, its articulated neck bent in an arch, the lip of its bucket resting delicately in the dirt.

  Leaning on what remained of the front fence, I absentmindedly picked up half a Hoffie from the pile of scattered bricks. Weighing it in my hand, still staring at the bomb site, I blindly traced a finger over the embossed letters in the frog: man. The broken off Hoff half must have been lying in the dirt. The drone of evaporative coolers clamoured the air. All around me the humble houses of my youth, places where families of five or six had happily dwelt, had grown to twice their original size yet housed half as many people. When, like the quarry, would our expectations bottom-out, reach an end, a bedrock beyond which even greed could not go?

  The half-brick left my hand before I realised what I was doing. As if in slow-motion, it tumbled through the air towards the house of my forebears, the facade of my ex-wife’s future dreams. Resentment, defiance, rage, resignation – all these threw the brick, but drunkenness too, thoughtlessness. It was an act, to be sure, but an act of casual madness, and in the time-warped moment it took for that lump of fired clay to leave my hand and hit its target, I futilely tried to recall it, my hands clawing the air at the irretrievability of time.

  The window didn’t shatter, or the glass pause then fall dramatically in a jagged sheet. Instead, the brick just punched a hole through it. The noise was no louder than a neighbour smashing a bottle in their recycling bin. No one came to investigate. Suddenly sober, I felt relieved. Guilty, but relieved; confessing would only make matters worse. Let them think it was kids.

  Stepping away, brushing brick dust from my hand, I saw a torch beam jerk about beneath the drapes that covered the broken window. Seizing the opportunity to instantly redeem myself by nabbing these burglars, I scrambled over the scree of bricks and ran towards the house. Nearing the front door, I saw the curtain fly back from the window. I stopped. Now the torch was trained on me. Confused, blinded, I heard the window open.

  ‘Mick? Is that you? Did you do this?’

  It was Nat.

  ‘Dad?’ – Sunday.

  I bowed my head to avoid the torch’s glare – in shame. The light disappeared.

  The door opened and Nat rushed at me, yelling, ‘What do you think you’re doing? You could have hit us! Sun’s looking for a book she needs for school. Are you insane?’

  Sunday said nothing. She couldn’t look at me.

  Was I no better than all those male crazies who terrorise their families out of jealousy? My eyes blurred with tears. ‘I don’t know …’ I said, unable to mount a defence. ‘I was just …’

  ‘You’re drunk, aren’t you?’

  Brandishing my phone, I offered to call the police. I wanted to be punished.

  ‘You’re pathetic, Mick.’

  Nat put a protective arm around Sunday’s shoulder and the two of them walked away. Nat’s car was parked on the other side of the road, under a streetlamp. How had I not seen it?

  Opening the passenger door, Sunday flashed a look at me as she stepped into the car.


  Tears were streaming from me. ‘Sorry,’ I said, raising a hand in appeasement as the car pulled away. ‘I’m sorry.’

  No one was there to hear my apology. The street was empty.

  Stunned, distressed, I stumbled back to the flat. Unable to face going inside, I sat on the steps to the first-floor landing and imagined Nat telling Sinclair; Sunday posting about it to her mates. Or worse, her being so ashamed of me that she couldn’t. As I sat there, the wind went round to the south. A wave of cool air hit the captured heat of the concrete. The suburb exhaled.

  My head bowed, I heard a car pull up at the kerb. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. Footsteps approached and, refusing to look up, I fantasised that it was the cops, or that Sinclair was a different kind of man and had come to teach me a lesson.

  ‘Another big night, Michael?’

  It was Aziz. He sat beside me on the step and lit a cigarette. ‘Your liver needs to convert to Islam?’

  I sniggered. ‘Like your lungs.’

  ‘Yes.’

  He told me he had just dropped off a couple a few blocks from here. He’d picked them up from a city nightclub and they had started having sex on the back seat of his cab. ‘I wanted to tell them to stop, to kick them out, but I thought the man would kill me. I nearly had an accident, looking in the mirror.’

  Stimulating another infidel organ, I thought. I didn’t say it, though. Instead, I told him about the brick, the crazy thing I had done.

  ‘You threw it at the house, Michael. At greed. Not at your daughter. Not your wife.’ Placing a hand on my shoulder, Aziz stood up. ‘You didn’t know they were there.’

  After a long denouement, the last scene in the final act of Gilbert Madigan’s life occurred offstage, while no one was watching. Frustrating Rosalia’s bedside vigil, Madigan did the dying part alone, somewhere between 2.40 and 2.55 p.m. on 7 April 2015, in the fifteen minutes it took for her to buy a cup of coffee.

  Two days earlier, the medical staff had told Rosalia her husband’s death was imminent. This news inspired a parade of old friends, including a frail Peter Kessler and, despite her failing eyesight, a remarkably well-preserved Annie Edwards, to bid him a final farewell. His son and agent, Reuben Madigan, flew in from New York and spent the night by his father’s side, reading aloud extracts from the recently released Modern Library edition of Freedom Falling. Madigan had no way of responding to his own majestic sentences being read in the mellifluous voice of his loyal American son. If, however, he was on some incommunicable level cognisant of this performance, it is hard to believe he would not have concluded, with at least a small measure of satisfaction, that his work here was done.

  Despite its foretelling, Madigan’s passing sent shock waves through the literary world. Overlooking Patrick White, The New York Times declared him Australia’s most important novelist, ‘one occupying the uppermost rank of literary significance in the second half of the twentieth century’. The Times of London lamented the passing ‘not only of an individual writer of exceptional talent, but the final demise of the typewriter-and-whisky generation of iconic authors, men who lived the myth even as they made it’.

  In the country of his birth, equal attention was given to his status as an expat as to the calibre of his oeuvre. Trying to fix his place at the pinnacle of the hierarchy of Australian letters, an obituary in the Sydney Morning Herald suggested that ‘Madigan refused to retreat to the comfort and plaudits of home, forcing himself to compete continually on the global stage.And while he may not have received the ultimate accolade of a Nobel Prize, his work was both critically acclaimed and widely read throughout the Anglophone world and beyond, having been translated into 42 languages.’º

  Indeed, the abiding affection of millions of readers around the world for The Falling Part, In Darkest Light and Freedom Falling ensures that the work of Gilbert Madigan will have a long literary afterlife. The fact that these and others of his texts are exemplars of the late-twentieth-century novel and accurately capture the texture and temper of their times suggests that this, his second life, will be long-lived, if not eternal.

  º Interestingly, the obituary in his hometown newspaper, the Melbourne Age, still carried the tone of a jilted lover, marking him down for having turned his back permanently on the place of his birth. It did, however, note that this city remained home to one of his sons and his two eldest grandchildren.

  Sinclair Hughes, Inside the Lion’s Den: The Literary Life of Gilbert Madigan, p. 531.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  After the brick-throwing incident, I didn’t hear from Nat until the day before the next scheduled handover. I had sent her and Sunday an email later that night, after Aziz left me to resume his shift. I’d tried as best I could to explain what had happened: the heat, the beer, the flashback to the fire at the tip. I’d told them how mortified I was at the thought of having frightened them; that they might think I had intended them harm. Again, I offered my apologies and insisted on paying for the window.

  In response, fourteen hours later, Sunday sent a one-word text: Thnx. Nat didn’t respond at all. Then the night before the handover she texted that Sunday didn’t feel comfortable being with me at the moment.

  Texting is technology’s greatest gift to the separated and divorced, saving us from the awkwardness of conversing directly with our past loves, allowing the robotic logic of emoticons and predictive algorithms to mediate our interactions. If Nat had told me this face to face, or even over the phone, I would likely have blown up at her, or laughed at the absurdity of Sunday being scared of me, which would only have confirmed her newly formed prejudice and made things worse. As it was, I swore and raged into the smooth-faced silence of our digital interlocutor, then tossed it on the couch.

  Noah stayed with me as usual, making his own way from Sinclair’s place, saving Natalie and me from seeing each other and saying things we might later regret. He acted like nothing had changed, which for him may have been true, but for me it was a fiction I could not sustain.

  ‘You heard about the other night? The brick?’

  He was working his way through a packet of rice crackers, coating each one with hummus. He nodded. ‘Way to go!’ He licked some hummus from the finger he was using as a knife. ‘I thought it was hilarious. Mum says you were pissed.’

  ‘Both ways,’ I said, ‘angry and drunk.’

  ‘What was that punk band you were in?’

  ‘Very funny. Unfortunately, there’s nothing funny about me frightening your sister. Or your mother.’

  He popped another cracker in his mouth and slid the almost empty tray back into the packet. ‘They’ll get over it. You’re becoming a colourful character. Like your dad. Keep it up and Sinclair might write a book about you.’

  I had received an email from Rosalia a couple of days earlier, so I was expecting the call. I hadn’t expected it to come from Reuben. He and I had talked a couple of times after Gil’s strokes. Still, I had no sense of him being my brother. The accent didn’t help, sounding out the differences between us. But it was more than that. Even before he became Gil’s agent, it always felt like he and I were doing business. When he tried to be personal, to make a joke or laugh at one of mine, he was like a politician playing at being normal – a suit wearing a polo shirt.

  ‘It’s happened, Michael – our father’s dead. He passed on half an hour ago.’ There was a pause. ‘The world has lost Gilbert Madigan.’

  I asked after Rosalia. He said she was distressed that Gil was on his own when he took his final breath.

  ‘We all are, aren’t we? In the end. On our own.’

  I hadn’t meant to vocalise this and Reuben ignored it anyway. As he told me the details of Gil’s final days and hours, I uncharitably thought of how our father’s dying would be good for business – one last chance for the life, albeit in its ending, to ignite interest in the work, sell books, move units.

  ‘As you can imagine, I’ve hundreds of calls to make.’

  ‘Yes, sorry,’ I
said. ‘Thanks for ringing. Give my love and condolences to Rosalia.’

  There was a long pause at the other end, and for a moment I thought he had already hung up and moved on to the next name on his list. Then, as if in summary, as part of a broader campaign, he said, ‘I think we can agree that Gil’s approach to fatherhood was, let us say, unconventional. But he was a great man, Michael – his books will be read for centuries. We should be proud to be his sons.’

  I waited until morning to ring Natalie and the kids. Nat picked up.

  ‘I was just about to ring you,’ she said. ‘You’ve heard, then? Reuben rang Sinclair in the middle of the night. Sin’s flying out tonight.’ She sounded sad but excited, and seemed to have forgotten all about the incident with the brick. ‘Sounds like the funeral won’t be until next week – I think Rosalia’s got family coming from El Salvador. We’ll go Thursday, though Noah’s not sure he should because of school. He’s got a SAC next week. I’ve told him his grandfather’s funeral’s far more important.’

  ‘He should do what he wants,’ I said. Pausing longer than I should have, I added, ‘You know I’m not going. I made that decision when I visited Gil last year.’

  ‘But you must, Mick. You really must. Despite everything, he’s your father.’ There was a tenderness in her voice I hadn’t heard for years, and for the first time since hearing the news of his death a tremor of grief rumbled through me. ‘If it’s a matter of money, Mick, I’d be happy to pay.’

  The emotion went thick in me. I couldn’t speak. The loss of Gil was mixed in with my loss of this woman I had loved and had children with. Through the tears, I thanked her for the offer and tried to explain. ‘Maybe it’s a kind of payback. I doubt it. I hope not. But maybe.’

  Later that morning I was rung by ABC Radio for a comment. Then by The Age. I said it was a great loss, and left it at that. When they fished for details about our relationship, asking what sort of father he had been, I declined to elaborate and suggested they contact Reuben. Or Sinclair. As I was eating my lunch, some professor from Melbourne University called, sounding me out about a memorial service they intended to host. As if offering me some great opportunity, he asked if I would care to give a speech. Gil’s old university friend Emeritus Professor Ronald Kemp was going to give the main address, but I could speak either before or after that. I declined the invitation to speak, though, as a way of getting rid of him, promised to attend and lend the occasion my imprimatur.