Births Deaths Marriages

by Georgia Blain

  ‘Sure,’ he replied.

  The lift doors opened in front of us. I was still clutching a tissue, white shreds scrunched up in the palm of my hand.

  ‘So why didn’t you make another appointment,’ I asked, ‘for after the end of the job?’

  He shrugged. ‘We can do it then,’ he said.

  ‘If we need it,’ I added.

  We looked at each other, neither saying what we knew the other thought. We had eased the pressure, just a little. The job would help too. But we both knew there had been no resolution, no eradication of underlying difficulties, no radical changes in our relationship. At best there had been small moments of awareness. And as I thought about my report, and how much it had made me cringe, I dropped the tissue, knowing I should have found a bin, but letting it litter the car park instead.

  CLOSE TO THE BONE

  ON AN UNSEASONABLY HOT SPRING AFTERNOON I SAT outside Andrew’s father’s flat, while inside Andrew took photographs. The terrace faced north, the full glare of the sun bouncing off the white walls behind me as I looked across a mass of pot plants, all of different shapes and sizes, a profusion of brightly coloured flowers wilting in the heat. The sharpness of the light, the whiteness of the walls and brilliance of the blooms made the glare unbearable. It seemed there was no shade in which I could shelter.

  From inside I could hear Louis Armstrong singing ‘It’s a Wonderful World’, his rich voice cracked and throaty as it rose through the stillness of the afternoon. Andrew was playing the song on a cassette player and, despite the poor quality of the equipment, I remember the melody as still plaintive, heartbreaking in its beauty. It had been Andrew’s father’s favourite song, and Andrew had bought the tape that morning because he wanted to play it at the funeral, to be held the next day. Now, as I waited for him, he listened to it over and over again, rewinding the cassette each time it came to an end.

  His father had died only two days earlier, and Andrew was photographing everything: the small kitchen, the numerous paintings on the wall, the bedroom, his father’s books, even his clothes hanging in the wardrobe. At first I had stayed inside with him. He had wanted me to see where his father had lived and I had followed him from room to room as he pointed out objects, pictures of the family, drawings that his father had done in art classes, the chair that he had sat in when he wrote letters. Andrew explained the significance of everything to me.

  As he talked, he began to photograph. Sometimes he did no more than point the camera, documenting whatever lay in front of him just as it was. At other times he took more care, arranging books across the floor, or adjusting a curtain to let in the requisite light. There was no apparent order to his process; he would spend a moment in one room, move onto the next and then perhaps return to the first.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I asked him as I began to realise he wasn’t just taking one or two pictures.

  He didn’t answer me and, aware that I had no place in what was occurring, I went outside to wait for him. Standing alone on that terrace in the still heat of the afternoon, I called out to him occasionally – would he be much longer? Knowing that my question would probably remain unanswered, I was, I suppose, just letting him know I was there, trying to reassure myself that if he heard me often enough he wouldn’t disappear into a place that was beyond my reach.

  Eventually he emerged. Shading his eyes against the intensity of the glare, he held up his camera to take my picture.

  ‘Don’t,’ I said, backing away.

  Surprisingly, he didn’t argue.

  ‘Will you photograph me?’ He gave the camera to me and I took it from him reluctantly.

  Had I adjusted the aperture? I had. Was it in focus? It was.

  Standing directly in front of me, he looked straight into the lens. I clicked the shutter. And then he cried.

  Andrew often takes photographs. Driving north on holiday, he points the camera out the window, documenting the blur of road, the rush of sky, the rocks, the arch of the trees. Walking the dog along the winding length of the river, he stops every few moments to take another picture. At Odessa’s birthday parties, he is crouching low as he takes snaps, children jostling over games, eating too much, giggling and crying.

  ‘Can’t you just enjoy it?’ I sometimes ask him, usually when I have been made to wait while he gets an exposure right, or when he’s failed to answer me because he’s been too engrossed in capturing the image he wants.

  That afternoon, at Andrew’s father’s flat, I found Andrew’s need to photograph distressing. I thought it demonstrated an inability to let himself truly experience what had happened. He’d chosen to document, I thought, seeing this choice as excluding any possibility of actually being in the moment, there in his father’s flat only a couple of days after his death.

  That evening I wrote about the afternoon in my diary, failing to appreciate the irony of the fact that I, too, was engaging in a process of recording a time that was sharply painful. He’s not dealing with this, I wrote, as though there were a textbook way of coping with the death of a parent, a standard he had failed to meet. And for a long time, I could only see his behaviour as a way of distancing himself from the experience.

  But later, when I described the afternoon to a friend, I began to see it differently. Most of the time when Andrew takes pictures there is a sense of purpose or direction to the way in which he chooses the images he will record and how he will do this. In his father’s flat, it was as though he wanted to switch that off, to let randomness take over, to simply photograph without thought. When I realised this, so many years after the event, I saw that perhaps I had misinterpreted his actions on the day. There was more immediacy to his response than I realised. It was a complex and intuitive process. He was there, wanting to see it all, to find some way of ensuring that he’d remember the details of his father’s life, and he simply let himself go, camera in hand, not pausing to think as he captured everything.

  I have since tried to find those pictures, searching through the boxes of photographs he keeps, images of our life together and the life he led before he met me. Each time I ask him where they are, he gives me evasive answers – not because he does not want me to find them – but because he’s not entirely sure where he put them and doesn’t really want to engage in a search for something he is not looking for at this time.

  Eventually I gave up. My desire to see them again was curiosity. I remember the afternoon well enough not to need them as a memory aid.

  Just as Andrew photographs, I write, taking notes of moments I want to be able to recall, recording small details from conversations, or putting an idea into words so that I can tease it out later. Andrew’s photographs are, however, usually for the family record. My unpublished writing has generally been more secretive. It’s also become a habit that I no longer engage in as frequently as I used to.

  Throughout my teens and my early twenties, I kept diaries. Writing helped me understand so much of what was difficult for me then; my brother’s illness, my friendships and my relationships. I was unhappy a lot of the time. This was the place where I could speak. But it was also the place in which I practised. I wanted to be a writer, and because of this the entries that I made alternated between an immediate outpouring of emotion and more self-conscious attempts at refining a craft.

  Some years ago, I had a call from someone I once lived with. We didn’t speak often so his ringing was a surprise. He sounded uncomfortable, and moments into our conversation I found out why. He was ringing to confess. In the two years we lived together he’d regularly read my diary, taking it out whenever I wasn’t around to look over my latest entries. He was sorry, he said. He’d felt bad about it for years.

  I didn’t know what had prompted his sudden desire to let me know of his transgression.

  It was therapy, he explained.

  He apologised again and then, backtracking, he told me what his therapist had told him. ‘It’s not that bad,’ he said. ‘Everyone who keeps a diary expects it to
be read. You wrote it all knowing I would probably look at it.’

  I put the telephone down and stood for a moment, uncertain as to how to take this news.

  I had to go and find the notebook. It was as I had dreaded. My writing from the period in which I had lived with this person showed me at my unhappiest. With a sickening sense of embarrassment, I read the outpourings he, too, had read, including many in which I talked about how little I loved him. I closed the book. I put it away.

  That night I told my then boyfriend about the call.

  ‘That’s awful,’ he sympathised.

  ‘You would never do that, would you?’ I asked.

  Of course he wouldn’t.

  But some years later, I discovered my foolishness in believing him. As we broke up we fought, and there were times when I wondered at the strange familiarity of the words he used to describe what he disliked about my behaviour. It wasn’t long before I realised that they were my own, quoted back at me. And in using my words, it was as though he was trying to tell me that he had me pinned. He knew me; this was the truth. I had nowhere to hide.

  I no longer keep a diary. I haven’t for many years. But I still have the old ones, notebooks that are hidden in different locations around the house. I am not sure if I know where all of them are, nor am I sure why I continue to keep them. I used to reread entries regularly, but this changed as I changed. It’s now been a long time since I looked at these books and I know that the last time I read my diaries I contemplated destroying all of them. This is not me, I thought, and I tried to remember the person who had written those words. I didn’t know who she was. I couldn’t believe she and I were one.

  The desire to get rid of those notebooks is still there, and it springs from a fear of misinterpretation. Diaries are seen as authentic documents, a glimpse of the true self. I am concerned that anyone who reads them will believe that they represent who I am, overriding any contradictory memory of the person they have known.

  Both boyfriends who read my notebooks would have believed that they had finally found out what I was thinking. I can only hope that they later came to understand they were seeing only a part of me. I wrote when I was unhappy, and this was what they found in those pages: my unhappiness rendered stark and hurtful.

  When I first decided that I was going to try to be a writer, I went away on my own. I travelled north, to an island off Brisbane, and I spent five days staying in a small fibro shack. It was the first time I’d been alone for more than a day, and at first I wasn’t quite sure why I’d felt this brief period of solitude was necessary.

  It was hot, and I woke early, swimming in the warmth of the ocean before walking back up the cliff along a path that was lined with breadfruit trees and clusters of frangipanis. I made my bed and ate my breakfast. It was only eight a.m. and the whole day was still in front of me. I didn’t know what to do with myself. Sitting under the shade of the small porch at the front of my shack, the blue expanse of ocean stretching out to the horizon, I tried to make notes for the supposed novel I had decided to write. I had been practising for years, but now that the time had come I felt I had nothing to say.

  This is of course fear, a lack of confidence in the worthiness of your own voice. It speaks in various guises, telling you that you are not good enough, that the world doesn’t need another book, and when you continue on regardless it asks you one simple question in a slightly belligerent tone: who cares what you have to say?

  It is not a voice that goes away, but in those early days I didn’t know it for what it was, and I had no tricks to turn it off. Alone in my single-roomed house, I had to battle it. I had to take myself seriously. And ultimately I managed to do this. Without books to read or people to talk to, without television or radio, I eventually turned to what was left: myself. Sitting up in bed, with the mosquitoes whining outside my window, I began to write, not only a plan, but the first few pages of what would later become my first novel. And despite the doubts continuing, sheer stubbornness and determination made me go on. I had given up a lot to write, including secure work and stability. I hadn’t, at that stage, met Andrew, I had not had a child, and although I had faith that my decision to attempt a novel wouldn’t necessarily mean these choices were gone from me forever, I felt I had this small window, this brief time to myself to make this first attempt.

  Many years later, I went away once again, this time to Western Australia. And, although I didn’t realise it at the time, I also made this trip to find the courage to write. I was staying out the back of a friend’s house in Margaret River. It was the beginning of autumn. The days were clear and warm and the mornings cool. Andrew and Odessa were going to join me in a week’s time, but in the intervening days I was on my own.

  Each morning I walked, taking a bush track on the other side of the river that branched off in numerous directions, each path eventually seeming to wind back on itself. The scrub was thick, hiding the suburban stretch of new houses from view. In any event, I barely looked where I was going; with my head down I just walked, wanting to wear myself out, to make my body so exhausted that I would simply stop thinking.

  At night, I woke. Sometime between the hours of two a.m. and three, the air cold, the silence heavy, I would sit up, and I would know that I had been woken by fear.

  I was about to start something new, and I was scared.

  For years I had been writing novels, taking life experiences, tales that had resonated with me, memories, and cloaking these in a story. Writing fiction brings with it freedom and constraints. With a story you can be anyone, you can go anywhere. At first, the possibilities appear limitless. But it is not entirely so. Plot and character bring with them their own demands. They imply an understandable universe in which the people are believable. Life is not always like this. Straining against these demands, I began to consider the idea of simply speaking. But could I just write about myself? It was a question I hardly dared ask. The thought terrified me. My courage failed me. But then my curiosity returned.

  On the day before Odessa and Andrew were due to arrive, I went further afield. I drove out to Augusta, to the point where the Indian and Southern oceans meet. There is a lighthouse that you can climb, and next to it are three old asbestos shacks, each with a fenced-in garden that is no more than a stretch of dry grass flattened by the constant wind moaning low across the cliffs.

  The staircase to the top of the lighthouse was narrow and worn. Pressed against the cold curve of the chalk white walls, each step echoing, I made my way upwards, not wanting to look down. Out on the ledge, the full force of the wind ached in my ears.

  Dark rocks tumbled down to a deep blue sea flecked with white. This was where the two oceans met and although I had not expected any marker of their merging point, I was aware that a small part of me would have liked something, perhaps a slight difference in hue to indicate their difference and their meeting. But it was just a single wild ocean, deep and dark.

  That night, when I woke again, I decided there was only one thing to do. I would list my anxieties. Sitting up in the chill, I wrote:

  Who am I to write about myself? I am no one. I have done nothing. Who cares what I think or feel?

  I am a private person; how can I bear exposing myself to public view?

  How can I write about the people I know? What gives me the right to expose them?

  This was my set of fears, and I looked at them under the harshness of the bedside light. There, written down in front of me, I could see that they weren’t as new as I’d thought they were. I had encountered them before.

  The first was my doubt about the validity of my own voice. Each time I wrote I had to deal with this, I had to overcome my lack of faith in myself. The second fear was closely aligned to the first, and I had also come face-to-face with this one, although in a slightly different form. Because each time I wrote for publication, I inevitably exposed myself to some level of scrutiny. The third fear was more removed but still not entirely unknown. I drew on other people’s liv
es in my novels, but so far I had managed to avoid exposing them. Fiction gave me a disguise that I could use, a way of ensuring I didn’t hold them out there to be seen.

  Unfortunately the familiarity of these fears did little to allay them. I may have faced them before but never like this. Using story had given them a certain remove. Having a common language, a fund of tales, an expected structure, helped me find an authority that I felt my voice otherwise lacked. Fiction also helped me to hide. This is not me, I could say. It is made up. Don’t think you are really looking at who I am. You are not.

  Without the fictional narrative, these fears were closer. The battle was more immediate. I could feel their hot breath, and I was scared. I had come to a place that was close to the bone.

  Shortly after my first novel was published, I was asked to do interviews. I hated them. Naively I believed there was one truthful answer to every question, and I had to pin it down, articulating it clearly. When the questions were personal, I floundered. I could see the infinite array of answers spreading out before me, and I felt honour bound to try to pick out the one that was most buried, most raw, as though this were the elusive truth that I had to deliver.

  Now, as I grappled with writing about myself, I felt a similar urge, and this was what made me uncomfortable. There is a private space and a public space, and within each there are many layers. I wanted to hold the private up to the light, to look at it and to put it out there on the table for public viewing, but I needed to think carefully about how I wanted to do this.

  When my mother was a commissioner on the Whitlam government’s Royal Commission into Human Relationships, she had travelled the country hearing private stories from people brave enough to talk about what was really happening in their lives. Everyone who stepped forward went on the public record with the most intimate details: they didn’t all live in nuclear families, they weren’t all heterosexual, they had terminated pregnancies, they had family members with disabilities, they had sex before they were eighteen. It was unprecedented. Old people, young people, married, unmarried; they all spoke of a life that was messy, complicated, painful, joyous, rich and infinitely varied.