When I got home from Castlemaine, after I had cooked dinner, I searched through my files of Gil’s correspondence. The letter wasn’t there. I might have thought I had imagined it – that in fact it was something he’d said to me in person, during his visit to the house in Preston, or at the dinner in town the night before he left – but I so clearly recalled re-reading it and hadn’t forgotten the effect it’d had on me. Double- and triple-checking, thinking it may have been miscatalogued, I rifled through the other correspondence files.
It wasn’t there.
Thinking I had solved the mystery, I went to the bookcase and pulled out the book of David Hockney prints Gil had presented to me as a parting gift in ‘84. Paging carefully through the images of shimmering swimming pools, the only thing I found was that the letter wasn’t there. Defeated, I poured a whisky and sat in front of the heater, staring at the gas’s predictable flames. The letter, I concluded, must have been lost in the move. Or was now buried in what, in the manner of my father, I had dubbed the Mausoleum of Munro Street (MOMS, for short).
I drank the whisky fast. Poured another, and as I sat down my gaze landed on the box of letters. Forgoing my earlier hesitations, I tore the tape from around the lid, taking the smooth surface layer of cardboard with it, leaving a furry strip around the opening. I wasn’t expecting a miracle, to find a carbon copy of Gil’s missing letter among my missives, but thought I might have responded to what he had written, and that finding this would confirm my memory of it.
The rubber band around the first bunch of letters crumbled at my touch. The letters had been shoved back into their envelopes and, along with the aerograms, were bundled together in a rough chronology, registered by the evolution of my handwriting as much as their postmarks: from neat and boxy, through the slanted, wind-blown look of early adolescence, to the insect crawl of adulthood. Surprised by how little I had written to him in the eighties, I quickly located a letter from late ’84 in which I’d written: I don’t envisage an excess of praise being a problem of mine, however, I take your warning about it seriously. Even from the little I’ve had, I can see its corroding potential. It’s like a batsman who scores a ton yet still gets annoyed when he’s dismissed. We can never have enough.
With this curiosity satisfied, I turned my attention to the more fanciful hope that the box contained a letter from Gil, a posthumous epistle. Of course, there wasn’t one. I had been teasing myself thinking there might be, betting hope against experience.
I swilled the second whisky. Shuffling the letters together, nestling them back in the box, I read the back of a postcard I’d sent him from Lorne, where Mum and Grandma and I had holidayed when I was ten. On it, I described where we were staying, the giant waves, and how Mum had taught me to bodysurf, arms stretched out like a torpedo. Signing off, I thanked him for the phone call on my birthday.
All week leading up to that day I had repeatedly checked the letterbox, hoping for a parcel. The year before, when I’d turned nine, he had sent me a royal blue Hornby locomotive. It didn’t matter that I had no track to run it on; it sat like a sculpture in the middle of the shelf on my bedhead.
This year, the letterbox was empty – not even a card.
Mum and Grandma made me my favourite dinner for my tenth, and gave me cricket pads and gloves to go with the bat I’d got for Christmas. I kept the pads on all day, and before it got dark, Grandma underarmed me a battered cricket ball in the backyard so I could practise my forward defence.
Readying for bed, grabbing my pyjamas from under the pillow, I saw the model train on the ledge. A great weight, like a train itself, came over me. Over me and in me; heavy yet hollow.
I did what I always did when this happened and took my copy of The Raven’s I from the bookcase. From where I was lying on my bed, the spines of Gil’s books on the other side of the room resembled the silhouette of the skyscrapers of a distant city.
The Raven’s I was the book he had given me in Stroud the day I met Tamara Billings and he announced he was moving to America. The back cover of the dust jacket was a black-and-white close-up of his face. At times like this I would stare at it, searching for myself in the confident sweep of his hair, the satisfied smile, his glittering eyes. Sometimes, if the light was right, I saw myself reflected, not in him, in his features, but in the gloss of the image itself.
‘It’s your father.’
Mum was shaking my shoulder, trying to wake me. I thought I was in a dream. The book still lay on the bedspread. ‘He’s on the phone. Quick.’
His voice was distant, slurred. I suspect now, though didn’t think it then, that he was drunk. ‘Happy birthday, my Mick.’
‘Thanks, Gil.’
Thanks, Gil.
There was an echo on the line. I hated hearing my words bounced back at me.
‘Sorry it’s so late. It’s the different zones – I’m not good with time.’
I told him it didn’t matter; that it made my birthday longer.
‘Anyway,’ he said, his voice suddenly loud, ‘it’s appropriate – you were born in the wee small hours. I remember that night.’ There was a pause. ‘Your mother nearly died having you. Has she told you that?’
‘Not really.’
Not really.
‘That’d be right. Well, she did. I cried like a baby myself when the nurse told me you’d both pulled through. I’d been out celebrating, in anticipation – she might’ve told you that – then I got the news she’d had a bleed.’
There was another pause. I would have said something if I’d known what to say.
Softer again, he continued, ‘I made promises that night I’ve failed to keep.’
The silence was longer this time. I heard a rustling, snuffling sound.
‘I didn’t mean to go all sad on you, Mick. I rang to wish you well, not to dump us down one! Gone and felt sorry for myself. I miss you, Mick. That’s the nub of it. If it’s possible to miss what you’ve never really had?’
‘It is,’ I said, knowing it to be true.
It is.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I wish to thank the following friends who were generous enough to offer – or at least not to refuse when asked – to read early drafts of the manuscript: Paul Ashton, Elva Averill, Leanne Averill, Steven Butcher, Paul Croucher, Richard Freadman, Stephen Hutton, Olga Pavlinova, Peter Pelz, Catherine de Saint Phalle and Tony Thompson. Their feedback and support were invaluable and contributed to making this a better book. I am especially indebted to Chris Eipper and Owen Wood for their edits of various drafts.
The dedication and support of Tess Rice and Barry Scott at Transit Lounge is a gift that keeps giving, and one for which I will be forever grateful. I also want to thank Penelope Goodes for her expert edit of the final draft. Any remaining errors of grammar or judgement are entirely my own.
The love and support of Shelley Mallett and our daughters, Grace and Lily, undergirds everything I do, and this book is no exception. However on this occasion I must single out Grace for special thanks. When she was in Year Eleven we would often find ourselves still working late at night: her on homework and me on the manuscript. Curious as to what I was writing, she asked me to read her the first chapter when it was still in its rawest form. I reluctantly agreed, and from then on the serial-like reading of each chapter as it was written became our late-night ritual. Grace’s enthusiasm, encouragement and suggestions were integral to my writing of this book – a gift for which I am deeply grateful.
Reading Group Notes for Relatively Famous are available from
www.transitlounge.com.au
Praise for Roger Averill
Boy He Cry: A Island Odyssey
Roger Averill has woven a beautiful, touching tale about his year on a remote Papua New Guinea island with anthropologist partner Shelley. The two young Melburnians arrive unannounced on Nuakata, where they’re the only Dimdims in the close-knit community. The islanders generously build them a no-frills house and the couple gradually become accustomed to a
world without electricity, phone or two-way radio. They cope admirably until health concerns force an early departure. Lasting friendships are forged and the intrepid couple’s affection for the islanders, and vice versa, rises above everything in a heart-warming story, simply told.
Barry Oliver The Australian
An engrossing and touching account of an unforgettable experience.
Kate Lockett, Readings Monthly
This is the record of a year when two urbanised Australians discarded the creature comforts of electricity, hot and cold running water, washing machines and regular visits to the supermarket and replaced them with a simple palm leaf and timber hut, and life at its most basic. The appeal of the book lies in its simple descriptive honesty. Rarely does Averill pass judgment.
Bruce Elder Sydney Morning Herald
While Averill admires the villagers, the reader is left admiring both him and his wife for their innate humility, bravery and grace.
Dianne Dempsey The Age
Keeping Faith
A gripping debut novel which explores faith: how it can function against all odds in one person, and falter irrevocably in another.
Gemma Collett M/C Reviews
A quiet and resonant piece of work. Befitting a novel set partly in a labour ward and beginning with a description of a still born baby it proceeds with the knowledge that finding the right words can be difficult. It speaks carefully and tactfully, in a spare language of great focus. Keeping Faith is a fine novel. What is most engaging is the book’s directness and unapologetic treatment of faith and loss. There is little room for irony or intellectualized disclaimers here. Averill honours the simple speech and pained questions of the grieving without reverting to rhetoric and knowing winks, trusting his nuanced prose to carry the necessary weight. His diligence and literary intelligence are a reader’s reward.
Adam Rivett, Australian Book Review
This tender, beautifully written story set in suburban Melbourne is told through the lives of Josh and Gracie Templeton. The siblings’ father fixes radios at an electrical store but is also a lay preacher with absolute trust in God. Their mother is a believer but when her elderly agnostic friend Mrs. Potter dies, she experiences doubts. At the memorial service for Gracie, the father and son’s level of faith collides when Josh questions him as to why his sister was taken from them. To this his father replies “You are the lost one, Josh; you’re the one I weep for”.
Although this is a story about the fortitude of faith, and the loss of it, the religious thread fails to detract from the story’s gentleness and ability to move. It also is a well-crafted story about family, childhood recollections, love and loss.
Robyn Doreian, Courier Mail.
Exile: The lives and hopes of Werner Pelz
At the end, we know this man who lived trying to wrest meaning from every moment, who pursued a truth unbound by orthodoxy, who slipped and fell innumerable times. We can also marvel at the friendship and love between author and subject.
Mary Phillip, The Courier Mail
Averill digs deep, scours wide. We trust him – trust his integrity in chronicling Pelz’s life, trust he's not playing haywire with the facts and with us. I think Pelz would have liked the book. And he would have thought the right man got to write it.
Maria Tumarkin, The Australian
Averill is a constant but discreet presence throughout the book, as he meets and gets to know Pelz’s friends and family, visits his old home in Berlin, and tries to work out what his discoveries are telling him if anything, about Werner, and where the boundaries of biographical decency lie. The prose is as clear as Orwell’s pane of glass, though he knows how to use a good anecdote, and the book flows evenly, deeply through Werner’s life. … Averill’s quest for the truth about Werner Pelz begins with questions: Can you really understand someone without knowing much of their past? What happens when you do know more? ‘Might I know more, yet understand less?’ He asks and in the spirit of his beloved teacher and friend he has no answer, except perhaps the one that Werner gave in a radio interview not long before he died: the most important thing is simply to go on thinking.
Peter Kenneally, Australian Book Review
Averill truly loved Pelz, but he is nonetheless a skilled biographer not blind to the man’s flaw’s … Averill writes about Pelz’s last days with great feeling and compassion. I was reminded about my teacher and about all those who survived the monstrosity of the mid-twentieth century. The book’s poignancy stayed with me for long after I put it down.
Grazyna Zajdow, Arena Magazine
Roger Averill’s Exile is an intelligent and deeply felt memoir of a friend and a friendship with his teacher, Werner Pelz. This book seems the perfect vessel for carrying a remarkable, if not famous, modern life out of its crowded privacy and gently into history; it is a kind of travel memoir in search of the life Pelz kept hidden inside the life of the mind he shared so courageously and freely with his readers, students, friends and loved ones.
This book deserves notice — not to mention a wide readership — as much for the beauty, elegance and tenderness of its writing, as for the lives (Pelz’s and Averill’s chief among them) and ideas it explores with such discernment and love. It is a new kind of nonfiction: personable, but never merely personal; scholarly, but never merely academic.
Judges, NSW Premier’s Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-fiction
Roger Averill is the author of Exile: the lives and hopes of Werner Pelz, the novel Keeping Faith, and a travel memoir, Boy He Cry: an island odyssey. Exile won the Western Australian Premier’s Prize for Non-fiction in 2012. He lives in Melbourne, Australia.
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