Homesickness

by Murray Bail

  Walking with Borelli, Louisa looked as if any second she would grab his hand. Gaiety (spontaneity) inflected her flying coat-tails. Leaning forward she kept glancing at him, shaking her head with a type of mock sadness: well, at his harebrained theories and the observations he made. And it was as if they were against the world, the two of them: forcing their way through the surge of oncoming words and soldier faces, Borelli was discussing the social implications of toast, Anglo-Saxon toast, when he crouched wombat-shaped to tie a shoelace, and she turned and stood over him, and out of the blue demanded to know about the walking stick, ‘and no monkey business, please.’

  ‘Silly bitch!’ He fell backwards onto his flat palms. ‘What a time to ask.’

  This wasn’t like Louisa.

  Several people stopped or at last turned.

  ‘Never mind,’ he called out, ‘she’s crackers.’

  ‘Tell me! I am not letting go!’ Louisa laughed. Never had she acted so carefree, one foot planted on Borelli’s jacket. A few seconds before he’d been strolling like a drum-major.

  Waving the stick Borelli called out, ‘Help me. I’m a cripple. This woman—’ To her he said, ‘Wait till I tell my Uncle. Help!’ he croaked aloud.

  ‘Stop it!’ she cupped her mouth. They wouldn’t have done it in their own city; certainly Louisa wouldn’t have. It was because they were away and felt anonymous. ‘It’s all your fault.’

  ‘What?’ He took her arm. ‘Seeing you’ve embarrassed me, I’ll have to tell you. And keep it to yourself.’

  They were walking and she looked at the ground.

  ‘It has nothing to do with my leg. I have legs that are in perfect shape. It’s an affectation. A way of getting sympathy, attention. Some people have their arm in a sling. I need the sympathy.’

  He went on, ‘It’s a swordstick as well…’

  ‘You’ve told me all that before, and I never know whether to believe you or not,’ she walked on ahead.

  ‘This uncle told me the way we behave before women reveals our selves. He was right. I’ve been telling lies because—you’ve confused me. I think we’re lost.’

  Borelli pulled out a street directory.

  Back, turn left, right, left again, cross Dean Street. Women pushing wicker prams had them filled with cauliflower heads (nothing more). Street musicians; one a former pug. A balding groovoid leaped out of a cab in tan platforms, silver film cans glittering under his arm.

  Borelli tried to answer Louisa’s questions about his uncle; his age, his women and appearance, physical and geographical history, why he chose to live alone—not only in London, but in Soho. He held Louisa’s hand. A bearded man vomited in the gutter.

  ‘In Soho alone because he sees himself as a specimen in a glass case. He examines himself minutely. He told me last time it accounted for his stooped back; I believe him. He said his room is almost the precise geographical centre of London. It is like a small museum. The angles and lines from elsewhere pressed in on him, as does the entire population. It forces him further into himself. In any case, we are all specimens, he says.’

  ‘Then he’s where you get all your silly ideas from. Hey?’

  Borelli glanced away and frowned.

  ‘I promised I’d see him again. He’s from my mother’s side.’

  ‘I think I’ll like him,’ said Louisa swinging her bag.

  A crane lowered artificial clouds onto the outside of a cinema for a display.

  As usual Borelli couldn’t contain himself. He stopped. ‘Isn’t it interesting how the normality…or the actuality of things goes on without our descriptions? Our time is spent cataloguing the description of objects and animals, and explaining, even though they exist solidly in the first place. I find that increasingly odd. We like to classify and describe. We want to understand; I certainly do. But it only adds to the nature of things, it doesn’t alter.’

  Louisa was shaking her head. ‘No, I didn’t mean it like that! I love being with you!’

  Borelli looked up. ‘After you…’

  They climbed the stairs over the sandwich shop. Bending down on the landing he read the sign opposite:

  FREDDIES * * * THIS IS THE SHOW!

  ‘I didn’t notice that before…’

  He continued, his voice sounding loud.

  ‘You see what I’m saying. Everything continues without descriptions, and yet descriptions are all that we are doing—it seems to me. I find it strange. Museums, for example—.’

  He tapped on the door with his walking stick.

  It was opened by an ageing redhead in a pink dressing-gown. Borelli smiled and glanced past her. She put one arm across the door and the folds of her gown fell open.

  The woman glanced at Louisa.

  ‘Who are you looking for?’

  Borelli looked around the landing.

  ‘This is 7. This is it. I came here some weeks ago.’

  The woman folded her arms.

  ‘No you didn’t. I’d have remembered.’ Again she looked at Louisa.

  ‘No no! My uncle’s place,’ Borelli corrected. ‘He lives here.’

  The woman laughed.

  ‘I’ve been here for four years April. There’s no one else who lives here. No man. I have a name. It’s Flora Burton.’

  ‘I remember,’ Borelli frowned, ‘that banister there is very loose, right?’

  ‘It’s always been like that as long as I remember.’

  She added, tired. ‘I’ve never in my life touched a banister that isn’t loose.’

  ‘Did you say your name is Burton?’

  ‘That’s not who you’re looking for, is it? Well I’m here any time,’ she smiled. Then she began coughing.

  ‘Come along, James,’ Louisa tugged.

  ‘But I was here only a few weeks ago,’ Borelli said loudly. ‘He was in there!’

  ‘He must have moved,’ Louisa whispered.

  Borelli went over and touched the wall and the banister. The entire building seemed unstable.

  ‘Now you listen,’ she called down from her door. ‘I’ve been here for years. I don’t like people imagining. You’re worrying me.’ A high, thinly pitched voice, a worn violin.

  ‘Come on,’ said Louisa, ‘we’ve made a mistake.’

  He looked through the window at FREDDIES and back up again. The first floor landing was empty. There was silence.

  ‘Poor woman,’ said Louisa.

  The flash of chrome and plate glass struck them from all angles. The stairs had been dark, the walls fingermarked and torn, as remembered: a building condemned. The essential interior colour was brown. Even the traffic patiently banked in the street looked like the other day. Brightly lit clarity: always deceptive. Beware.

  Louisa had to take his sleeve. ‘Now come along.’

  Her gentle way implied a mistake.

  ‘But I wrote to my mother about him. He asked me to come back. We had things in common. And this is the street. I remember the stairs; that’s the building.’

  ‘If you walk along, we might see him in the street,’ Louisa suggested.

  She had to lead him away.

  ‘I couldn’t have been imagining…’

  ‘Even if you were,’ Louisa half answered. She was looking left and right for a nice restaurant. She’d steer him away from his mistakes.

  As mechanical as the trumpets, strippers were performing behind the walls, weary in the bones; business as usual. It was a bright morning in London.

  Over the door in wooden serifs (soaked in printer’s ink):

  ZOELLNER & ROY G. BIV

  * Definitions, Maps *

  ‘This is the place,’ said Gerald.

  A tiny brass bell shivering on a spring shaped like a comma sprang into action when they entered, at odds with the sedentary calm of the shop, and remained shaking there long afterwards, like a salmon dying on a line. Undoubtedly it indicated the turbulence beneath the marmoreal calm of both Zoellner, the dying bibliophile, and his junior partner, the repressed Biv (one given t
o daydreaming). Still waters, so it is said, can run very deep: even these scholarly backwaters. Otherwise, wouldn’t the harsh little bugger—the bell—get on their nerves? Perhaps, as North pondered afterwards, it punctured the parchment-yellow steadiness of their day, reminding of the world outside—only a few feet away through mullioned glass—of words spoken and deeds, the real action, so making their lives more tolerable. Much has already been written on Zoellner in technical journals around the world. Roy Biv out the back, handling the maps, glanced up. Not old Zoellner. Behind the desk where books tilted like laminations of slate he kept his head down, annotating a pamphlet on Swahili phonemes. An electric waistcoat (for warmth) restricted his movements to a tight circle: a badly frayed maroon cord fell from the light socket, into his collar. In Clarendon Bold on the wall a small sign announced: NO BAD LANGUAGE. ‘This is the place,’ Gerald rubbed his hands. He was evidently pleased with his find.

  Words had been collected from all corners of the globe and stored in bound volumes, singly or in sets. The air was grey, teeming in effect with phosphenes—an appearance of rings of light produced by pressure on the eyeball, due to irritation of the retina. Zoellner & Biv retailed every dictionary and word binge imaginable; every Harrap’s, Larousses from way back, old Grimms’ and a Littré, and the latest Langenscheidt; the Oxford blues with Supplements alongside Chambers Twentieth Century—preferred by the crossword puzzlers; Webster’s Internationals, American Heritage, and all the other Yankee upstarts, illustrated and non. Zoellner & Biv stocked glossologies, language maps, semantic atlases on Gleek, Anglish, Jappish, East Indian, Ptydepe and Jarman, Double Deutsch, and an indispensable phrasebook on Swiss; all kinds of cocky argot, Strine and Partridges: a low shelf of Dirty Words or ‘rudery’ made browsers bend down or squat. [Wowser. n. (Aust.) Fanatical puritan; spoilsport, killjoy; teetotaller.]

  The varnished steps placed to reach the higher shelves—Astronomical Definitions, Scientific Terms—were opened like the arrow A, the rope stays forming a taut X. There were words and articles lying on the floor. They stumbled over certain words. Zoellner & Biv had one of the finest collections of Collective Nouns to be seen anywhere. A regular scriptorium; polyglot’s trove.

  Dictionaries of Surnames, of ‘Misunderstood, Misused, Mispronounced Words’, long shelves bending under the weight of Historical Principles. ‘Ghost’ words made their occasional appearances. And in a dimly lit corner languished those languages suffering from entropy, gathering dust and mould: Old Norse, Celtic and Wild Boer, Latin, boring Olde English, Volapük, Zend and Tasmanian Aborigine, Navajo and Mandarin. Et cetera.

  The gargantuan cash register, an antique Remington, resembled a Japanese typewriter or a small lino machine: so tall and wide, so black and scratched, so appropriate. On either side stood the virile new tongues in glossy rows. They include Canadianisms, Afro-French, West-Indian and Anglo-Indian, stubborn Esperanto, and the rejuvenating neologisms from America, e.g. jeep, coke, napalm, apartment, typewriter and skunk. Lingua franca! As a sideline Zoellner & Biv sold letterboxes.

  Unable to concentrate on any one shelf, Gerald crouched and darted left and right. In this way—for the first time—he resembled and understood Kaddok’s clutching and tripping with his camera before an exceptionally rare motif.

  ‘What was it we came in for?’ North scratched his head. He remained on the apex of the steps, turning the pages of the Scientist’s Bible (1973).

  ‘We just don’t have this back home,’ Gerald complained. ‘It’s a part of the infrastructure missing. A major lacuna.’

  Zoellner at his desk cleared his throat.

  The storage of words, like the lines on a map, records and fixes the existence of things. Inside the shop, the repository, a feeling of serenity pervaded, as if the four walls contained the entire world and even what lay beyond, each part isolated, identified and filed. It was based upon facts, upon known quantities. Exactitude reigned. It contrasted casually with the chaos of forest impressions suffered by the travellers. It was a haven.

  Ho-hum: on the slippery leather stool Sasha crossed and uncrossed her legs. So very boring. A few minutes before she said airily she had always assumed etymology to be some sort of skin disease, and so produced from North some attention: an indulgent cheek-squeeze. Sasha turned to fidgeting Biv.

  Reversing heavily down the steps North wore a satisfied expression.

  ‘We need a phrasebook and a strong map, if you can tear yourself away for a second.’

  Gerald had his nose in A Dictionary of Architectural Terms (Unabridged). They opened a phrasebook with a red and white cover. Running his finger down North looked up blat: ‘Getting what you want through friends and influence.’

  ‘This’ll do. It seems up-to-date.’

  ‘My friend,’ said Sasha to Roy Biv, ‘loves a good map. If I wasn’t here he’d stay all day. D’you have trouble folding maps? I don’t s’pose you do.’

  Biv squinted past her. She was about his size and age.

  ‘Say, don’t you find it terribly musty in here? I mean all day. Why don’t you open a window? I want to get out.’

  Leaning over his desk Sasha picked up a 45-degree set-square, opaque with scratches, and a new handbook, The Walls of Peking. Unconsciously she pressed her thighs against the desk, beside him. Oh boy! So Biv launched into the old argument for maps, including memory maps, cartography in general; in case she was interested. Maps make visible verifiable truths. Maps don’t change the physical world; the drawing or even the manufacture of maps is one of the few worthwhile professions left. ‘Maps of course are…metaphors. They can do no harm.’ He said it again. ‘They’re designed to help people.’ He also began raving on about the mystery of maps, even of street directories. ‘Oh well that’s better,’ Sasha agreed. ‘Now you’re talking, because I find facts incredibly boring.’ She ran her painted nail along the hypotenuse. ‘My life,’ suddenly dropping the set square, ‘is one big confusion. I think I’m experiencing too much. But funnily enough, nothing much happens.’

  Biv had orange hair and a hairy houndstooth coat. He didn’t know what to say about that. He picked up some French curves; he put them straight back.

  Gerald Whitehead and North, wise old men looking pleased with themselves, joined them and showed a keen interest, the way travellers do.

  Biv became conscious of his blue nose, and to participate let out a laugh for no reason at all.

  ‘What is the nicest word you have here?’ she asked, to help Biv. ‘What’s your favourite, frinstance?’

  Creaking back in his chair Biv didn’t hesitate: ‘Pave-ment... Pavement! I often dwell on that word. It has a smooth sound. And it’s related to maps.’

  Pavement…

  Zoellner in the corner snorted.

  ‘I think I’ve heard that choice before,’ Gerald said.

  ‘I love verandah and boomerang,’ Sasha said.

  Gerald nodded. ‘Boomerang has a pleasant ring. It’s a traveller’s word.’

  The bookworm fished in his side pocket and pulled out a paperback. ‘Listen to this.’

  ‘Here he goes again,’ Sasha complained to Biv.

  North elbowed her gently. ‘No, listen. A Russian finds us mysterious. “Whenever one sees Australia on a map,”’ North read out, ‘“one’s heart leaps with pleasure: Kangaroo, boomerang!” There, page 151.’

  ‘Hip hip,’ said Sasha.

  Gerald angled the book to see its cover: Andrei Sinyavsky, alias Abram Tertz.

  ‘Not bad, what?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Gerald, ‘he wrote that in a labour camp. So he was writing from a zoo.’

  ‘You mustn’t be too harsh on your country,’ a voice called out. And they turned: Zoellner was looking at them between two piles. ‘Other writers have been hypnotised by “kangaroo”. “Boomerang”, to a lesser extent. Those words represent the mystery of Australia—its distance and large shape.’

  ‘You mean in particular D. H. Lawrence?’ Gerald asked respectfully.

&nbs
p; ‘Not only him. It is quite a pronounced, if minor, trend in world literature.’

  Really? Go on?

  Roos along with other marsupials were Dr North’s field. Many of his papers in the zoological journals began with an apt quotation, from the north.

  In particular, French novelists have long been attracted to kangaroos. The beast is biologically and visually surreal. The word itself is histrionic: a series of rhythmic loops. ‘Implacable kangaroos of laughter,’ wrote young Lautréamont—a fine metaphor. Very fine. Young Alfred Jarry had his supermale box with not one but several kangaroos. You find the noun leaping like a verb from the hallowed pages of Louis Aragon, Malraux in China, and Goncourt’s Journal—yes, he reported eating authentic kangaroo meat during the siege of Paris. Another naturalist is Gide. He described in his journal a monument in some little French village square, peopled with ‘familiar kangaroos’. To Proust, an acquaintance ravaged by time looked unexpectedly strange, ‘like a kangaroo’. There is Tiffauges, the ogre, astride his ‘kangaroo-like horse’. (But then Michel Tournier can also throw a boomerang. It is said.) It appears in Boswell’s Life, in The Mill on the Floss and ‘Dear Kangaroo’ is the nickname in Virginia Woolf’s letters—ha ha. And who was that sad Irish clown who spent pages confusing the kangaroo with women and shirt-tails? The frequency of the word increases the farther north the writer is from Australia. Distance = novelty and a desire to conquer. Writing in Zurich, James Joyce recommended the Kangarooschwanzsuppe. ‘Kangaroo-shaped’ is a common metaphor. See Isak Dinesen’s description of hares, or the young philosopher in the Thomas Mann story, ‘At the Prophet’s’. Chekhov in his notebooks used it to describe a pregnant woman with a long neck; and in Ehrenburg’s novel he has a vintage car hopping like one. The great Osip Mandelstam questioned the logic of kangaroos in Armenia. And when discussing the cosmos in his autobiography Vladimir Nabokov writes, ‘a kangaroo’s pouch wouldn’t hold it’. Not bad? Very good. In a thunderstorm Henry Miller stripped naked and ‘hopped around like a kangaroo’, the damn fool.

  ‘Sinyavsky,’ Zoellner put his head down, ‘is part of a northern tradition.’