by Gail Jones
The telephone rings and Dora ignores it. She has the irrational thought that it is Noah, calling her from his death. Still, she ignores it.
Ah, but his voice. How she’d loved his voice.
IN BED, BESIDE Benjamin, Evie hears the word ‘abide’. Before she opens her eyes, the old hymn is playing in her head, and when the lines fade, there it is. Abide: it summons him. She half-expects to see Noah, resurrected in light. An ‘a’ word, abide. A and B together. If she were inclined to religious feeling, she would think it existed here, kept alive with gentle purpose in an ancient word.
Inside the ampoule of the long window, there is the rosy glow of a new dawn. Benjamin looks older in the early morning light. Still asleep, his features are sunken and relaxed, his blindness now a true state, and not a deficiency or loss. His face says he is dreaming: his eyelids flicker, his brow is furrowed, he is engrossed in a world of images that is private and elsewhere. There is a weak sound, like a child’s moan, that he offers up to those images. It is a plea, or a complaint. It is a sound without alphabet, she thinks, that arrives only with images. She does not yet know Benjamin well, but they are learning to be together. They are learning together to contest the decay of time.
His skin has a dark tone she finds arousing. She’s still surprised how easy it was, after their confiding pleasure, after the sharing of movies and grief had eroded their reticence, to meet him as her lover. In Palermo she’d thought it more a casual affair, but since her return realised that she was coming not to Sydney, but to him. He was there at the airport, his chin raised, listening for her call. When they embraced, he held her tight, and she smelled the musk of his body as a home. Martin stood beside her, waiting to be introduced. With his good hand her brother shook and blurted a clumsy greeting. They are still awkward with each other and remain mutually suspicious.
Now Evie rises from the bed in the modest flat she has rented. She’s not sure of her future, but this intermission will help her decide. She does not want to live with Benjamin; she wants independently to know him. Her few possessions here are enough to sustain her: clothes, books, objects that belonged to her father. She pads on bare feet, half-awake, moving to the kitchen to brew coffee. But some instinct directs her instead to the St Jerome icon, leaning on the windowsill.
She lifts and examines it. The face is Noah’s. She had noticed the likeness before but now it strikes her with especial force. She almost cries out in surprise. She sheds a tear, then smiles. There is a new delicacy to her observance, that pays a tribute to the dead. Evie turns over the icon. There, tucked between the wooden image and its cardboard backing, is a triangle of paper she’d not seen before. Evie pries Noah’s message from its hiding place. She reads the code carefully. She knows its meaning almost at once. There is incredulity and solace—and there is his belief that she would understand.
MARTIN IS STRUGGLING. He finds unendurable his father’s mystery, and his own abject failure to discover answers. He does not know why he was bashed, or who commissioned the deed. He does not know if his father stole a sculpture, or if it was Tommaso who betrayed him, or Antonio, or perhaps Maria. He wasted his time, and now he is wasted. He feels unmanned, and hopeless. There might be a recovery in the future, but he thinks the damage is permanent, and more than just a hand. Nightly, in hideous dreams, he falls through a hole in the water.
The telephone rings. It is Nina, caught in her own lonely struggle. Part of her therapy is an obligation to ring her father each day, to practise words without the clue of a visible face. He can hear her valiantly trying.
‘Daddy.’
She sounds alien, her mouth misshapen around the word.
‘Nina. Sweetie.’
There is a long pause at the other end.
‘The boy. I saw him.’
A complete sentence.
‘The boy?’
She tries the word ‘bicycle’, but cannot quite manage. Still, he understands.
‘Bicycle,’ he helps her.
Their breathing hangs in the telephonic darkness between them. She tries again, with no improvement. He hears her snorts of impatience and frustration.
‘Bi’cle,’ she says, still missing a syllable.
‘Well done!’
But she has hung up, or thrown the phone, or walked away from her own disappointment.
Martin holds the handset for a minute, then realises that Nina will not resume their conversation. In the hush, he understands that she now knows her own imperfection, that spoken words have driven her to awe and fury, that her suffering is something he cannot hope to alleviate.
Evie, darling Evie; he might tell her his secret. That when they packed their father’s apartment he found a letter Noah had written to Dora. That he destroyed it, without reading it. In a glare of pain and annoyance, urged by despair, he had acted in spite. He regrets his foolishness. He burned the letter in the kitchen sink, pleased to see it flare and disintegrate. The smoke alarm had sounded a screeching witness.
Martin is already thinking about his father in artful terms: The Death of Noah Glass. This is how he will cope. He will convert his father to art and place him in the world of images. He will forget Piero and Barbie and his wavelength fantasies, and start again, tomorrow, with something new. Something new for Nina.
‘I DON’T KNOW,’ says Evie, in response to his question. ‘Non lo so.’
She is examining her brother’s hand, newly unbandaged. The scars are raised in silver threads across the skin; there are pink indentations where tiny screws have been removed. It is a heavy hand; they are all heavier now. Martin allows his hand to be lifted and turned. He watches his sister stretch the fingers, as the physiotherapist advised, and examine how the tendons extend in a slow uncurling. There is a slight twang of pain, but he doesn’t mention it.
Winter has arrived in Sydney yet it is a bright, clear day, the sky high, full of yellow light, and with no sign of rain. They sit together beneath a grapevine that has recently borne purple fruit. Now it is bare, leafless, but the shape and twist of the vine wood is beautiful to behold.
‘I don’t know,’ she repeats.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The leprosarium in this book is based on Bungarun, which existed near Derby, Western Australia, from 1936 to 1986, established by the Sisters of St John of God for Indigenous patients. I’ve taken many liberties here, but wish to honour this sad history. I thank Dr Charmaine Robson for her scholarship, and pay my respects to those communities and families affected by Hansen’s disease.
Simonetta Agnello Hornby piqued my interest in Sicily, and Dr Valentina Castagna offered a small symbolic tale and the gift of conversation and encouragement. Valentina’s students at the University of Palermo reminded me of the youthful vitality of the city. Professor Giuseppa Tamburello and Dr Brigid Maher both read this book with generous attention. Special thanks to Meredith Curnow and Catherine Hill, whose early support means more to me than I can express here.
Students and colleagues at the Writing and Society Research Centre (Western Sydney University) have provided intellectual community. I’m deeply grateful to the Australia Council for the Arts for the use of a working space in Rome, and to Jane Novak for her wise service. Close friends have offered consistent support, for which I am indebted in ways only they can know. Above all, my daughter, Kyra Giorgi, has been an extraordinary inspiration.
Michael Heyward was a feisty, intelligent and patient editor. Thanks to Chong Weng Ho for his sympathetic artistry, and to everyone in the hardworking team at Text.
The recalled line of poetry on page 72 is from Francis Webb’s ‘Five Days Old’, in his Collected Poems (UWAP 2011).
This novel is dedicated to the memory of my father, Arthur Jones.
Gail Jones is one of Australia’s most critically acclaimed writers, the author of two short story collections and seven novels. She is the recipient of numerous national literary awards, including the Age Book of the Year, the SA Premier’s Award, the ALS Gold Medal and the
Kibble Award, and has been shortlisted for international awards including the Dublin IMPAC and the Prix Femina Étranger. Her work has been translated into twelve languages. Originally from Western Australia, she now lives in Sydney.
A GUIDE TO BERLIN
‘Beautiful and brilliant.’ Sydney Morning Herald
‘What Jones has done in this cool and intricate novel is to expand the stylistic possibilities and exploit the metaphysical implications of Nabokov’s extraordinary story…Hers is an unashamedly cerebral work that will only gain by rereading; but it is also, like its Nabokovian parent, a narrative that pulses with feeling. Its pages finally summon not one ghost but millions of them.’ Australian
‘A remarkable investigation of reading and speaking, and of the interaction between high literature and immediate human experience…The novel is a demonstration of both the power of storytelling and its limitations…a full and moving exploration of the experience of knowing others through literature and life.’ Monthly
‘A Guide to Berlin, like memory itself—how it forms, what we remember, and in particular how childhood memories can shape the person we become—is complex and layered with meaning. An extraordinarily rich and enriching reading experience.’ Newtown Review of Books
FIVE BELLS
‘Gail Jones’s magnificent new novel propels her to the forefront of Australian literature…Her prose is poetic and infinitely pleasurable, imbued with a rare capacity to awaken. She reconciles what is richly human with mundane and alienating aspects of our sophisticated world…The novel is a profound meditation on memory and emotion, as well as a rhapsodic evocation of place. Neither Jones nor Sydney need putting on the map, but the combination is a winner…a brilliant work, both explicitly Australian and insistently cosmopolitan.’ Australian
‘Thoughtful, intelligent and intensely lyrical… Jones’s skilful negotiations with the past—with individual and collective memory, as well as with the literary canon—have provided her with a framework for a novel of unmistakable contemporary relevance.’ Guardian
‘Five Bells is many things: a love letter to Sydney and its physical beauty; a deeply moving exploration of the effects of grief and loss; and, perhaps most importantly, a luminous and shimmering reflection on time, memory and mortality. Yet like all of Jones’ novels, Five Bells is also a remarkably intricate creation: a highly sophisticated, thrillingly allusive web of implication in which a wide range of literary and cultural references are woven together, reinforcing and counterpointing each other in fascinating and often surprising ways.’ Griffith Review
SORRY
‘The great beauty and depth of Jones’ writing, in this novel as elsewhere, has simultaneous appeal for lovers of intricate, elegant thought, and lovers of verbal style. There’s also a great deal of her signature literary “sampling”, with quotations, allusions and echoes from fiction and poetry vying for space inside her own sentences: Emerson, Dickinson, George Eliot and of course Shakespeare, who haunts these pages like a colossal, chanting ghost.’ Age
‘[Jones is] one of the most interesting and talented novelists at work in Australia today…daring enough to express a complex, original and passionate vision; she writes with a belief in the power of fiction to express meanings unavailable to other forms of art or inquiry.’ Sydney Morning Herald
DREAMS OF SPEAKING
‘A captivating, analytical inventory of consciousness-altering technical developments of modernity, from the telephone to the atomic bomb.’ Australian
‘Jones is an extraordinary writer no matter what genre she is working in.’ Australian Book Review
‘Shards of poetry stud Jones’s writing like diamonds.’ Independent
SIXTY LIGHTS
‘There is no doubting Jones’s flair for luminous and accurate prose…In her hands, words feel chosen and juxtaposed in new ways.’ Guardian
‘Jones writes scenes of such simple love, fear and beauty that they will break your heart…[She] consolidates her place in the category of our truly great writers with Sixty Lights.’ Telegraph
BLACK MIRROR
‘Black Mirror shows the beauty of things in dislocation, the wonder of the ordinary.’ Bookseller + Publisher
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Copyright © Gail Jones, 2018
The moral right of Gail Jones to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
Published by The Text Publishing Company, 2018
Cover art by W. H. Chong; figures derived from Piero della Francesca’s The Dream of Constantine
Page design by Jessica Horrocks
Typeset by J&M Typesetting
ISBN: 9781925603408 (paperback)
ISBN: 9781925626445 (ebook)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia