Everywhere I Look

by Helen Garner

  Was there a form of madness called court fatigue? It would have mortified me to tell the girl who sat beside me about the crazy magical thinking that filled my waking mind and, at night, my dreams: if only Farquharson could be found not guilty, then the boys would not be dead. Their mother would drive home from the court and find them playing kick-to-kick in the yard…I could not wait to get home each evening, to haul my grandsons away from their Lego and their light sabres, to squeeze them in my arms until they squirmed. Young boys! How can such wild, vital creatures die? How can this hilarious sweetness be snuffed out, snatched away forever?

  It seemed fitting, and in a bizarre way almost consoling, that it was a woman who finally got deep enough into the dam, that night, to find the sunken car. She was Senior Constable Rebecca Caskey of the Search and Rescue Squad. The vehicle, they had calculated, was wedged nose-down in the mud, twenty-eight metres from the bank, in seven and a half metres of water. Testimony so terrible demands a simple telling:

  Caskey dived again. In the mud at the bottom, working blind, she felt her way to what she guessed was the driver’s side of the vertical car.

  ‘The first thing I noticed on the driver’s side was an open door, just above the level of my head. Its window was closed. I felt around the edge of the door.’

  Again, eyes shut and palms exposed, she mimed her fumbling search.

  ‘And then,’ she said, ‘I felt, slightly protruding from the car, a small person’s head.’

  On the witness stand she cupped both hands before her face, and delicately moved an imaginary object sideways.

  ‘I pushed it back in. And I shut the door.’…

  Soon after midnight Caskey clambered out of the water for the last time. A police 4WD winched the Commodore to the edge of the dam, and a commercial towtruck dragged it, still full of water, up on to the bank. Caskey had been in the dam for several hours. She was cold. She was keen to get changed and go home. Before she left, she took a quick look into the car. She saw three children. Two were in the back. Lying in the front was the one whose head she had touched and, for a moment, held in her hands.

  At this point, in an earlier draft of the book, there was another paragraph and it went like this:

  The diver’s detachment was exemplary; but had she been pressed for more detail, her composure might have cracked, and then we would all have been lost. Her simple gravity was the only thing holding us back from uttering a great communal howl of horror and grief.

  I cut that paragraph. A writer friend of mine made me do it. I remember it hurt me to cut it; my own urge to utter such a howl was almost beyond my control. But in the spirit of the diver, and of those police photographers who disciplined themselves in the face of death and plainly, purely recorded the facts as they saw them, I scribbled out my fancy flourish, and now I’m glad I did.

  I saw what the police went through in the course of these trials, and I wanted to emulate what was calm and shrewd and decent in them. Last month I turned on the TV news and saw that a Sudanese woman in an outer western suburb of Melbourne had driven her four kids under six into a lake; three of them had drowned. I confess that my first thought was for the furious, exhausted cops in the Major Collision Investigation Unit, the ones who barrel out at all hours of the day or night to road smashes where people have died or suffered life-threatening injuries. I longed to get in touch with them, I don’t know why—what on earth could I say to them? All the ones I got to know around the court are gone now, anyway, transferred or promoted or burnt out; and the detective with the silver buzz cut, who sat with me under the plane trees up the top of Bourke Street one day and gossiped quietly and gently—what would I say to him? I admire you? I pity you? I respect you? No—I envy you—because your job is to get into your car and drag yourself out to the scene and try to do something about it—while all I can do is sit here on the couch in front of the TV with stupid tears running off my cheeks, unable to form a coherent thought or even to locate in myself an emotion with a name.

  In Farquharson’s first trial, the Crown screened what they called the submergence videos: the police had fitted up a Commodore like Farquharson’s with internal lights and video cameras. They had lowered the car into a dam with a crane, and filmed what it did and what the water did and whether it was possible for a driver to open the door of a sinking car in the way Farquharson said he had. These videos were shown to the court after the police diver had given her restrained testimony about gently pushing Jai Farquharson’s body back into the car at the bottom of the dam.

  When court rose after that horrible screening the jury looked older, weary and sad. Men’s brows were furrowed, women stowed sodden handkerchiefs. People staggered out into the street white-faced.

  On the long slow escalator down to Flagstaff station, I could not block out of my mind those small bodies, the tender reverse-midwifery of the diver. The only way I could bear it was to picture the boys as water creatures: three silvery, naked little sprites, muscular as fish, who slithered through a crack in the car’s rear window and, with a flip of their sinuous feet, sped away together into their new element.

  There’s no point roaming around looking for comfort, or so I have found. Comfort is like grace. You can’t earn it, or deserve it. You have to thrash on, bearing things as best you can, and hold yourself receptive for the moments when it comes to you of its own accord.

  Towards the end of the second Farquharson trial, during breaks in the proceedings when the court was cleared, I used to walk up and down the great bare Victorian corridors of the old Supreme Court, stretching my legs, trying to get the blood moving.

  One day I heard what sounded like music, very faint and far away. I thought I was hallucinating, and kept walking. But every time I passed the entrance to a certain west-running hallway, the same thing would happen: fragile drifts of notes and slow arpeggios, as if a ghost in a curtain-muffled room were playing a piano. I was too embarrassed to ask if anyone else had heard it; was I starting to crack up? But one day when there was no one else around I went in search of it. I found that an intersection of two corridors had been roofed in glass or perspex. Two benches had been placed against a wall, and from a tiny speaker, fixed high in a corner, came showering these delicious droplets of sound. It was a resting place that some nameless benefactor had created, for people who thought they couldn’t go on.

  One afternoon in a different hallway a lady came out of an unmarked office carrying a flat dish. She saw me sitting waiting in the corridor on my own, and approached, holding the plate out in front of her: ‘Hello. We’ve just had a little party and we’ve got some cakes left over. Would you like a lamington?’

  These random incidents seem so strange to me now, such unexpected moments of blessing, that I wonder if I dreamt them. Dreams do come: the unconscious works in us and for us, unceasing, with its saving complexity and its deep knowingness.

  Sometimes it seems to me that, in the end, the only thing people have got going for them is imagination. At times of great darkness, everything around us becomes symbolic, poetic, archetypal. Perhaps this is what dreaming, and art, are for.

  2015

  PART FIVE

  The Journey of the Stamp Animals

  The Journey of the Stamp Animals

  WHEN I was a small child in the 1940s, in a country town at the bottom of Australia, there existed in my life a book called The Journey of the Stamp Animals. It was the story of four Australian animals who somehow got off the stamps on which they were printed, and set out on a long and difficult pilgrimage—destination forgotten (by me).

  Their travels were complicated by the fact that each animal was able to eat only things that were the same colour as the stylised stamp picture of itself that it had escaped from: the kangaroo could eat only yellow things, the sheep mauve, and so on. The roo could feast on butter, but the poor sheep had to keep searching for obscure things like wisteria, a plant I had not at that stage heard of.

  The book’s illustrations were most
unsettling. I pored many times over a picture of the Foxy Roadhouse, a sort of nightclub where foxes went to dance. The four stamp animals, timid creatures with no experience of the world, had to creep past this wicked establishment, whose open doors let fall across the pavement a strip of smoky light. Inside the building, glamorous vixens in tiaras and plunging-necked cocktail gowns were gliding about in the arms of their tuxedoed, snarling partners; and all the foxes’ clothes must have had special slits at the back, for out of their skirts and trousers gushed great, curved, furry tails. It was an image—sexual, sinister, intensely metropolitan—that thrilled me, as I lay on my bed in my sensible cotton pyjamas, in the humble town of Geelong beside its quiet bay.

  But here’s the really weird part. Except for members of my immediate family, no Australian I’ve mentioned the book to, in subsequent years, has had any knowledge of it whatsoever. I used to ask people about it all the time, but everyone looked blank. I started to think I must have dreamt it, or that it was a figment of my family’s fantasy of itself.

  Then ten years ago I wrote for Vogue magazine a little piece about childhood books, in which I mentioned the mysterious stamp animals and the deep effect they’d had on me. Soon the magazine forwarded to me a letter from an old woman living in a suburb of Sydney. Her daughter had spotted my article and brought her the cutting. Her name was Phyllis Hay. She was excited: she wanted me to know that she was the writer of the book.

  It existed! A real Australian person had written it! We corresponded. I asked if she had a spare copy. She said she had only one left, but would lend it to me if I promised to return it. In due course it arrived. I hardly dared to open it. But when I did, out of its battered pages flowed in streams, uncorrupted, the same alarming joy it had brought me as a child, before everything in my life had happened. The wisteria was as mauve and as hard to reach, the stamp animals as sweet and determined, the foxes’ tails as erotically forceful as I had remembered them. I gloried in the book and in the vindication of my memories. Regretfully, at last, I posted it back.

  I heard from its author only once more. She wrote again to tell me that, on the strength of my recommendation, she had suggested to the publisher that they might reissue the book. She was sad to tell me that they had shown no interest at all.

  Since then I’ve found that the library at Sydney University has a copy. I could take a bus and a train and another bus and go and read it—handle it, smell it, look at it—any time I liked. But I never do. I don’t want The Journey of the Stamp Animals to exist anywhere except in the imaginations of its author and me. I don’t know if she is still alive. I even manage to keep forgetting her name. Her book is one of those treasures of memory that I have to keep in its own little box, in case it leaks away.

  2000

  Worse Things than Writers Can Invent

  Colonel Chabert, directed by Yves Angelo

  February 8, 1807, somewhere in Prussia. Evening is falling over a smoky, littered battlefield. The sky is full of bloody clouds, the ground patchy with thin snow. A burial detail of soldiers in broad-skirted, belted overcoats, caked from waist to heel in mud, laboriously sorts through the casualties of a French cavalry regiment. The soldiers strip the stiffening corpses and haul them to mass graves.

  Among the corpses lies the commander of the regiment, Colonel Chabert. A Russian split his skull with a tremendous sabre blow, and over his fallen body rode fifteen hundred horsemen in the famous charge which, on this day, decided the Battle of Eylau for Napoleon.

  Ten years later, Chabert’s death is a historical fact, described in Victoires et Conquêtes. So who is this bedraggled, dirty old vagabond (Gérard Depardieu) ‘with his hat screwed on to his head’, a figure of fun to clerks and messenger boys, who keeps doggedly presenting himself at the office of the ambitious young Paris lawyer Maître

  Derville with his claim to be Colonel Chabert?

  If he is Chabert, where has he been all these years? And what will his reappearance mean to Madame the erstwhile Comtesse Chabert, who, since she received official notification of his death in battle, has not only put the fortune he left her to such good use that within eighteen months of being widowed she was already worth 40,000 francs a year, but has remarried and had two children with her second husband, Comte Ferraud, a man eaten up with a fierce desire to be elevated to the peerage?

  Comte Ferraud (André Dussollier) lives well on his wife’s fortune, and she loves him—but because her money was amassed under the rule of the now disgraced and exiled Napoleon, she and her cash cut little ice with the new powerbrokers of the Restoration. In fact, Madame la Comtesse (Fanny Ardant) is so seriously tainted that Comte Ferraud is given a none-too-subtle hint, by a man he is trying to impress, that his political career would be sure to accelerate smartly were he to divorce the countess and marry one of the daughters of an ageing peer who might be counted on to pass his rank down to a suitably placed son-in-law.

  While the count is being given this advice, his wife entertains guests in a drawing room to the elegant strains of a string quartet. In an alcove off the room, her husband pays court to a peer of the realm and his offsiders. The count presses on the peer not one fabulous cigar but two, three. ‘He’s bribing me!’ jokes the peer suavely, taking the whole box. Then he offers his advice: ‘You must cut. It should be surgical. An excision.’ The breathless harshness of this scene is screwed tighter by the unfocused blob of white that floats in the background among the guests listening to the music: it’s the countess’s face, turning and turning towards the alcove, where she guesses her fate is being decided. One thing which would seal it to her eternal disadvantage is the return of her first husband.

  This gloriously meaty movie is based on a minor story by Honoré de Balzac, king of nineteenth-century French realists. Its screenplay, by Jean Cosmos and director Yves Angelo, is a rarity in that it assumes adult intelligence in its audience. The dialogue dances and glances, packed tight with irony, menace, innuendo.

  And the four main actors are up to it on every level. Angelo uses intense shots of faces: we see them working to hide, master, simulate emotions. The characters’ movements are slow and deliberate, as if they were straining to force a path against the powerful currents of other people’s desires, which are at least as obsessive as their own. To these people, as it was to Balzac, society is a seething, merciless swamp of competing ambitions.

  Balzac was fascinated by lawyers, and Fabrice Luchini as Derville, the man so clever that he rarely sleeps and can concentrate on a dozen things at once, almost steals the show. His character is exquisitely worked. At times it verges on the comic, but our laughter is tinged with fear. He is small, very bright-eyed, a whisperer, a smiler, a percher on the extreme edge of sofas. There is something reptilian in the sheen of his alertness. ‘Lawyers,’ he remarks to Chabert, ‘see worse things than writers can invent. Our offices are sewers that no one can clean.’

  This is a story about different kinds of death, and about honour. The range of its sympathies is very broad. It is shocking and convincing on matters as various as the way aristocrats and the wealthy speak in front of their servants, and the brilliant, suicidal madness of a cavalry charge. It’s a film that makes us work. It feeds the part of us that ordinary cinema sends home still howling with hunger.

  1995

  How to Marry Your Daughters

  IT’S two centuries this year since Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice was published. You’d need to have spent your life in a cave not to know about Mr Fitzwilliam Darcy, the ill-natured, land-owning über-spunk; Miss Elizabeth Bennet, sharp as a tack with a will of her own; her skewed array of sisters; her disengaged, ironic father; and her insufferable mother, the archetypal nineteenth-century airhead. They’re part of the tissue of every literate person’s mind.

  But I confess that when I opened the novel last week and was greeted by its famous first sentence, which everybody, including me, claims to know by heart, I wasn’t quite sure when, or even whether, I had read the book
before. I sharpened a pencil and sat down at the kitchen table.

  Austen blasts off with a fast-moving passage of dialogue between Mr and Mrs Bennet that lays out their relationship—her garrulous stupidity, his dry, self-protective ‘teazing’—and the central matter of the tale: the business of getting their five daughters married. My God, Mrs Bennet is appalling. Every time her husband opens his mouth he takes revenge on her: today he is punishing her by means of a sadistic reticence about Mr Bingley, a wealthy, single young gentleman who has moved into their neighbourhood and set it abuzz.

  The Bennets throw a dinner party for Bingley, who brings along his best friend, Mr Darcy. Handsome. Ten thousand a year. Large estate in Derbyshire. But wait. Darcy has a forbidding countenance. Elizabeth overhears him make a disobliging comment on her person and on the company. He’s the most disagreeable man in the world, ‘ate up with pride’. Everybody hopes that he will never come there again.

  Nobody in this society (except the soldiers) has to do anything that would nowadays be thought of as work, though some of the less brilliant among them have made their money ‘in trade’, or ‘in the north’. They drive about to parties and dances, or take tea in each other’s pleasant dwellings, or go for long muddy walks.