by Sue Woolfe
Now, as I think about all of this, the taxi turns onto the Ponte Grazie, to cross the Arno. The waters seem to dawdle there, accumulating a silent strength underneath, before they can tumble over the weir, and return to black silence.
I wind down my window. The driver turns around and shouts that I must shut it. But I need air, space, my country, the smell of rustling gum leaves in the midday sun, the silky steaminess of a damp Australian summer. I hang my head out into the air but it’s the wrong air, the wrong temperature, the wrong smells. Then a full moon slides out from behind a cloud and lights the river, which flashes and winks.
Go home, says the winking river to me. Take your yearning home.
The driver, swerving dangerously, reaches back and winds up my window himself. But the ancient river keeps talking through the finger-smeared pane of glass, talking as it must’ve done over the years to many bewildered pilgrims.
Go back to your restaurant, it repeats. Ask the new regular about his book when he looks up. And give his dog a bowl.
The List-maker
Dear P,1
How do I explain to you, my only friend, my reaction when he touched my breast? – such a tiny incident in the scheme of things, since to most observers I manage my life as well as any other, though constantly fearing that someone will find me out. In the meantime, I’m making the best of it, for as they said all that time ago in the hospital, I must live like anyone else, as if It hadn’t happened. I was living alone – for who would there be to cope with me? – in a pocket-sized apartment in Stanley Street in Darlinghurst, then lined by thin, dark houses, like long and decaying teeth. In its midst there was an apartment block towering high over its neighbours, once a proud hotel built in the 1930s with the graceful and geometric grandeur of Art Deco, now broken and shame-faced like me except my breakage occurred, unlike the hotel’s, in my early years. I must insist I’m here not because of what they said I must do, but because I couldn’t bear ordinariness.
Though Nan’s a woman querulous about life, especially about being saddled with me, she never thinks of her life as ordinary – what with the embroidery still glowing vermilion and emerald and yellow and sea blue on the trousseau serviettes, tablecloths and bed sheets after sixty years of scrubbing; what with the enormous pumpkins she grows, almost big enough for her to be put in, Snakey the neighbour laughs, darting his shiny prehensile head towards her; what with the glossy furniture bought for her wedding to the handsome man who even on that day pulled his hat over his eyes (she still assiduously picks up bits of veneer and saves them in a matchbox for the day he’ll return to mend everything, her broken heart as well); what with the mauve-shadowed milk that cascades under her knobbly hands every morning from the ten softly nuzzling cows that she calls by name; what with the way the dozen hens, nameless because one day they’ll be dinner, produce eggs far bigger than city eggs in cardboard boxes, eggs coloured like their feathers, brown, beige, fawn and chocolate. Nan’s a woman world-famous – she says – for knowing how to draw eggs out of hens, even though Hen Number 9 periodically flies off in a huff and an eddy of glittering feathers, then in mid-air flaps frantically above her own cloud of dust, reels backwards at the sight of the big world beyond, and slumps ruefully in the nearest tree, skulking back to her own perch when no one’s looking. You’ll be like that, Nan laughs at me, more a cackle, really, her thin body creaking over her joke. Oh, how I hated her then.
It so happened that history conspired with my determination. At a particular moment in the century, the politicians and authorities, moved by a sentiment that isn’t relevant here, permitted the deserving poor, the brighter students, including girls, to sit in the great halls of the universities along with the more genetically deserving, the children of the rich. Though, like a person displaced not only by this stroke of destiny but by my previous history, I listened always but spoke seldom to girls and boys astonishing for the glow of their money and their assurance about the future, I had a sense of being found out on that chilly day when I stood in front of the notice board in the university quadrangle and read that I’d come first in the final examinations.
Gotcha! Nan would’ve cackled.
I’d walked home that day to my tiny shared room where my only territory was my bed and, relieved to find my roommate gone shopping, I crawled fully-dressed under my sheets and blankets, and trembled. What should I do now that the protecting university had finished with me? I couldn’t amuse Nan by skulking back to the perch. Teaching was an obvious answer but I was terrified to face children, for children have such knowing eyes. My professor in the struggling department of Asian History had invited me to become his research assistant, but I’d declined because the stipend wouldn’t be enough to keep a roof over my head, not even the peeling ceiling of the tiny flat I aspired to in the once-grand hotel a few streets away. The real estate lady, a girl of my age but with a strawberry birthmark from her forehead to her mouth, as if an autumn leaf, the sort you’d hold to feel its fire, had blown onto her and she couldn’t peel it off—she’d intimated that she’d seriously consider me for the flat if I found immediate employment.
Gotcha! again.
I could no longer put off the dreadful moment. On my bed I frowned over the Saturday newspaper advertisements for work, and made stammering phone calls. So I found myself across a gleaming desk from Maria, a stern but, as I was to find out, furtively kind European who must’ve seen her own displaced self in me, for she hired me in preference to the other young graduates yawning on a line of black chairs outside her office.
It’s the early days of a television channel that shows foreign films needing translation. The translators adept at their own languages write subtitles in English that themselves need translating. It’s shift work. So I travel to my new life on an ashtray-smelling bus that coughs its way through the city traffic carrying dark-suited men who rustle newspapers with such importance that I’d forgive a poke in the eye from the unwieldy pages of print – and women who, dressed in suits with tight skirts and shoulders enough to carry a sheep, clack knitting needles on the stuttering journey just like Nan does in front of the fire, though it’s true that they consult intricate patterns from glossy magazines pushed back into handbags on the neat creases of their laps, whereas Nan’s knitting never varies from one line purl, the next line plain, the next purl, the next plain, the next purl, plain, purl, plain, purl, plain, purl, plain, purl, plain, purl, plain, purl, plain, purl, plain, purl, plain, purl, plain …
It’s my work to sort out the subtitles, partly by silent puzzling, partly by checking with the movie on my monitor, partly by questioning the translators, and – the part I like the best – partly by conferring with my colleagues. That’s because I confer with Simon.
It’s the first day of winter, I wake up to hear heavy rain, a wall of sound. I’m irritated by my own clichés for there must be millions of individual pear-shaped drops pulled by gravity to sparkle and drench the particular metre of earth between my window and the building next door. But no matter how hard I listen, it just sounds like a wall of sound. When Nan woke to such a sound she’d be delighted and, despite the cold, she’d run in and wake me up like a child at Christmas who can’t bear not to share her toys, but I’ve left the farm and her behind and merely grizzle to myself about the stoutness of my shoes in the rain, the only pair I own.
Then I remember I have no shift today. In a break in the rain I rush to take in the washing up on the roof. I like riding in the lift to the top floor. Even though it’s only ten floors up, it feels important, and in case someone gets in, I carefully arrange the straw washing basket on the jut of my hip in the stylish way I saw in a movie, not like Nan who’d hold it in front of her stomach like a wheelbarrow. The roof garden – Nan would cackle at the name – is no garden at all, only a few weeds in pots – no, today there’s a new pot, and I can tell it’s spinach, with thick tempting green leaves. I don’t see Irene waiting in ambush while I glance between other people’s pillowcases and sweats
hirts, already weighed down and sullenly sodden. But I mustn’t take them in; the Manager warned me last time that’s being suspiciously over-friendly. I look over beyond Hyde Park to the city beneath me and beyond, to a rectangle of Harbour lying like a puddle between the buildings. In the foreground there’s the little island where starving convicts screamed in agony but now we pretend that screams from people like that didn’t matter; why the screams held in those stones were probably no different than the screams held in any other. Beyond the buildings, the puddle of harbour will spill and spread like a tipped-over 44-gallon drum all across the roundness of the planet.
Irene emerges from her chair under the little canvas awning where the rain’s been plopping.
You see how well my spinach is doing?
She’s been watching the rain too – and me. I blush. Did she read my thoughts? Often I allow myself to wonder if the thoughts of others might be contagious because they come as a fluorescent green line unbidden into me, ready-made, it seems. Do mine go like that into other people’s minds? You’d know these answers, P.2
Irene launches into instructions on how I should’ve pegged the shirts so the peg marks don’t show – you must place the pegs at the armpits – and she pokes at one of shirts in case I don’t know where an armpit is. She lives in the city, not out in the sticks – and she thinks about this? Then she tells me how I should always shut a door so everyone in the corridor isn’t disturbed – and since I don’t like to walk away, she’s holding the handle of an imaginary door, pushing it open only a gap, slinking her feet, hips, stomach, shoulders, head through it like a fat mouse sneaking through a gap in the floorboards, and voilà she’s on the outside. Her smile even makes the roof garden glow.
I’m not sure if I should clap.
I see, I say.
Before she insists I do it with her, I flee.
I try to write to you in the roof garden when it’s not raining, but my thoughts fan out like striped butterflies over the city. Did you ever see this astonishing city? Over the roof gardens where lonely dogs pace up and down, I flutter over the building tops and land, quivering on thread-like legs on ugly grey air conditioners, then I fly off over the dome of the Queen Victoria Building that was once gleaming copper but now is poignantly aged with streaks of blue and green verdigris, lumpy and crumbly beneath my quivering thread-feet. Now my thoughts ride in straight lines on the long red noisy train crossing the Harbour Bridge, but I’m swallowed in a gulp by the black tunnel.
Day two of rain: I will count the days of rain because, as Nan would gloat, this rain is settling in. It’s a shift day, and I’ll wear my only pair of thick jeans, thick jumper, thick woollen coat. I’m cursed with big motherly breasts, already pendulous, so I’m square shaped, maybe the shape of a bar fridge, especially in this coat. On the bus to work, I’m a bar fridge on legs.
My desk is pushed next to the desk of the handsome Simon. I like to think that we puzzle together. When I haven’t interrupted him for a while, I consult with him, but never with what’s-his-name, an afterthought when the Channel was forced to accept they needed a third editor, and what’s-his-name’s desk was set up apart from mine and Simon’s, and in the way, really, so you have to walk around it just to go for a cup of tea. What’s-his-name is an afterthought man, even his face is a mess no one got around to organising, a wide nose and hair that only kindness could call brown. He’s more the one colour all over, he’s a dirt-coloured blur, I decided when I was in the tea room while he took such a long time to stir sugar into his cup that I considered snoring.
Or at least saying: Did you know sugar is highly soluble?
It’s a good thing I’m shy. I could do damage with my tongue.
Day three of rain: when someone sits near you for every eight-hour shift, you think you know more about him than anyone else would, you know every burp, fart, arm scratch, belly scratch, crotch scratch, every stroking of the chin and whether he’s a sporadic throat clearer or a rhythmic throat clearer. You’d know what he ate from the snack machine (not that he’d use it, he wouldn’t be seen dead with a Wagon Wheel or a Milky Way).
His lips turn up right at the corners and his red hair recedes from his face, already an admission of mortality, though he’s only twenty-five, but there’s a heart-rending copper lock that falls over an eye and he has to flip it back. And my heart flips. There’s a scrubbed quality to his almost transparent skin, as fine as a woman’s, so that I want to stand him against the window light to find out what handsome men are made of. But there’d be nothing sullied inside.
A month ago I came across a photo of him in the Sunday papers, and he’d won a poetry prize. It was a shock to see his face on the table under my plate of toast crumbs, his face all angles but charming in the way it comes together, his patrician nose, his velvet eyebrows, his heavily eyelashed eyes – not that you could make them out in the picture, but as his neighbour I count and slide down his eyelashes – and the perfectly placed lines that guard his mouth. When we talk – and he graciously talks to me from time to time – I study his face for no reason and to guard my heart against him, I rearrange his nose and eyes to make him ugly, more ordinary. But to be honest, I haven’t guarded my heart.
Beside him in the picture posed a sweet-faced woman, named as his wife, a woman with her own jewellery business, and holding a little wrapped-up baby. I wondered that in our conversations, he hadn’t mentioned a word about his wife, the baby, the prize or his poetry. I have to admit that we haven’t talked personally at all. As soon as I had a few shifts off, I went to the library and tracked down anthologies that included his poetry. I’ve been borrowing them from the library ever since. I could see the poetry’s ingenuity but I was relieved that I wasn’t so very impressed – otherwise, I’d have lost my heart entirely. Not that I’m a great one for poetry, but being a poet, that’s far from ordinariness. Imagine going back to Nan with him on my arm and telling her I’d married a poet! But much of the poetry felt like clever contrivance. However, every now and then, a bit snagged at me. It was like walking across a paddock in the dark and being caught by blackberry brambles. Not the whole poem, just a line or two, when he’d leaned on a word so it broke like a twig and shot out of the grass.
Waves scurried like crowds in a subway,
Heads down not daring to stop
I wondered about that.
Last time I found an excuse to consult, I asked him would he use the subjunctive in the film I was watching or did he think it required less formal English? I showed him a couple of scenes on my monitor. He accepted the offer of my headsets, intimate since they’d been on my ears, but he’d have had to go to the trouble of reaching back behind the machines to unplug his own. I liked the way he thanked me by ducking his perfectly rounded red head as if he was bowing. He watched, grunted amicably, pulled off the headsets and announced that the subjunctive would be too formal. Since he’d been interrupted, he unexpectedly asked:
What’s your attitude to the dash?
Caught off-guard, I always take a while to think. My lower lip trembles. It’s annoying, but if I covered my lip with my hand, it’d look worse. He had to repeat his question before I answered.
I talked about em dashes and whether he’d want to emphasise the parenthesis or to keep it subtle.
Depends, he said.
We both laughed.
Everything always depends.
I bent to my work, flattered all over again that he sought my opinion. We both know that when he talks to me he’s only sweeping off what’s at the very top of his mind. There’s a lot more going on, deep down, surely, to write that poetry. He’d reveal his depths to his pretty wife, whisper about it to his baby. He’s always courteous. He probably learned courtesy at his grammar school, and it’s become natural.
I come from generations of people uncomfortable if someone gazes at us. Even in my dreams I still finger the cracks in my hands that could be grubby with dung.
We talk about our fellow editor – Liam – tha
t’s his name! – about Liam’s sideways grin. Simon says it was caused by a childhood muscular paralysis. Liam’s family were very poor, he says. No one ever searched out the right medical attention.
Peasants, he spits out, almost angrily. I’m stabbed with fear that he’d find me out.
Many of the European films we subtitle have sympathetic peasant characters. It’s made me feel safe, but I see now it’s a false security.
I must speak.
I came from peasants too, I say.
Oh of course we were all peasants, generations back, Simon says. I come from the dirt.
But you’re not a peasant?
My father, he says – irritated that I don’t know – is a lawyer.
So I don’t tell him about Nan.
To see the sky, I have to kneel on my office chair, wobbling because of its wheels, and crane up into the space between the buildings, to a sky bloated with rain.
It’ll go on all day, I report to Simon. He grunts deep in thought.
At lunch break, I put down my pen, stand and pick up my handbag in a slow, deliberate way. I want him to know I’ll be out of his way.
Sometimes his eyes fix on mine, unblinking, not seeing me but deep in his poet’s thoughts.
I won’t come with you, he says, charming as always.
When the vast room is empty, or nearly so, he’ll make it bulge with the thoughts that poets think and so he’ll make this space immortal, like John Donne’s bed, like John Keats’ meadow.
On the way out I pick my coat – dry now – from the rack, pick up my umbrella from the drip stand and leave.
In this tiny, unremarkable, unremarked way I want to help him – might I be in love with him? I’ve never been in love. Maybe I just like to have something or someone to look after? At least Simon’s a warm presence in my mind, someone to spoil as I was never allowed to spoil Nan’s hens. I’d like to have a cat but Irene would find out and tell.