The Biographer's Lover

by Ruby J Murray

  Sometimes men in the stands would cry, and as a kid I would cry too, watching them.

  Mum never came to the football with us. She hated it back then. She called it ‘cuddle ball’, and complained that it took Dad away from her, that he spent too much time watching it on telly, driving back and forth to Melbourne for away games. After he got sick, she hated it even more. She wanted his undivided attention every day that he was still alive. But then, when he died, Mum changed. She started going to matches, and I was the one who refused to go with her.

  One memory led to another, and if I followed each branching path I knew I’d get lost.

  The cold was creeping into my fingers as I stood at the rail and waited for the training session to end. Another whistle, and the men stopped. Some of them dropped to the ground, panting. Others bent, hands on knees. Percy peeled away from his team, jogging over the lurid grass. The muscles in his thighs bounced and strained. He was slick with sweat, staring up at me with blue eyes.

  ‘You missed most of the training,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sorry, traffic out of Melbourne.’

  He shrugged. ‘I’m gonna change, stay here.’

  Waiting for him, I lay back on a wooden bleacher, watched the gulls wheeling in the black sky. The rest of the team drifted from the field, down into the tunnels that led to the changing rooms. The trainers ran around the field, cleaning up after the players, picking up orange cones and skin red balls, white flags and neon bottles.

  When Percy emerged, fully clothed again, the floodlights turned off suddenly. My eyes strained to adjust.

  ‘You ready for chicken?’ he asked from somewhere in the dusk below me.

  Sitting in the steamy window of the Ripper Chicks Chicken Shop on Latrobe Terrace, Percy and I looked out over the peak-hour traffic. It began to rain, making jewels of the brakelights lining the hill. The shop smelled of salt and the deep fryer. On the window’s decal a grinning cartoon bird offered me her fluffy rump.

  ‘So,’ said Percy. ‘I meant to ask: you’re not related to Di who runs the fan club, are you?’

  ‘She’s my mother.’

  Hours sewing banners for ‘the boys’ to run through before the match began. Tiny flecks of blue and white stuck in the carpet. Sketches of the Ford logo – the team’s sponsor – turning up under the couch, behind the toaster.

  ‘Of course,’ said Percy. ‘I thought you looked familiar. Geelong. Everyone’s a couple of degrees away, right?’

  ‘Let’s talk about the monograph,’ I said. ‘What can I tell you? I feel like I need to reassure you. I know it’s unnerving.’

  He snorted. ‘People write about me all the time.’

  ‘This isn’t you, though – it’s your mum. I imagine that’s harder, in a way.’

  ‘And it’s not as if anyone will buy it,’ he said. ‘Look. I have a better idea.’ He was too big for his stool. He turned to me, resting his hands palm up on his knees, as if surrendering.

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Write mine.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘My autobiography. We’re going to make it to the Grand Final in September, and then we’re going to win. It’ll be huge. This town will explode. Daicos put out his book about Collingwood after the 1990 final, did all right. You can ghostwrite it, it will pay. Or put your name on it – I don’t care.’

  I stared at Percy, imagining my mother’s reaction. What it would mean to her if I was the official biographer of a Geelong football player. Mum would be a local celebrity too. Anna-Marie’s reaction – I was doing what she wanted without even trying. Famous, reclusive football star.

  The woman behind the counter brought Percy his paper-wrapped bundle of chicken as if we were sitting in an actual restaurant.

  ‘Thanks, Arlene,’ he said. ‘What do I owe you?’

  ‘A premiership cup, Cranno.’

  ‘Don’t you know it.’ He grinned at her.

  She sashayed back to the deep fryer.

  ‘That’s an incredible offer, Percy,’ I said. ‘Yes. Let’s do it. And it’ll be fast, too – a lot of the research will be the same as your mum’s.’

  ‘I mean instead. You write mine instead of Mum’s. That’s the deal.’

  I was slapped by the cold air of his mother’s studio on the far peninsula.

  ‘But I’ve already committed to Victoria.’

  ‘Yeah, and I can pay you more, plus whatever you write will actually sell. Nothing against Vicky. But you think people are going to want to read about some suburban housewife with a painting hobby?’

  The paintings in their shrouds, waiting for me. The silent explosions of colour, the woman in the photograph, hand on hip, cigarette clenched between her teeth.

  ‘Can I think about it?’

  ‘Don’t wait too long,’ he said. ‘Offer has a time limit. And look: don’t tell Vicky about this either, okay? If you wanna do it, we tell her once you’ve decided. No point in making her shitty with me if you’re not even going to take it on.’

  Percy stuck the bundle of steaming food in his gear bag. Waving to Arlene, he left the shop and disappeared into the night.

  I sat on the hard plastic stool and watched the traffic. A group of girls from Sacred Heart College came in, long school uniforms sodden with rain, socks falling off slick legs. Their school crest stood out on their transparent shirts. Virtus Vera Nobilitas. Virtue is true nobility.

  ‘Anna’s a scrag,’ the tallest girl was saying, sticking a chip in her mouth. ‘She knew. She totally knew.’ They went out again, into the dusk, clutching the greasy chips to their breasts.

  Staring out over the dark street, I imagined what it would be like to have real money coming in. I had never, not for one day, felt that sort of ease. It must be like moving through life on a lightly oiled surface. To have time off from the endless churn of projects and turning out copy, words without meaning. I saw myself getting on a plane, flying to Paris, standing in the Centre Pompidou, in front of the wall of Dada’s found objects.

  ‘How do you know him?’

  I turned. Arlene was leaning against the counter, waving to get my attention now the shop was empty.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I said: you two together, you and Cranno?’

  ‘No,’ I told her. ‘He’s just a friend.’

  She stared at me mistrustfully.

  I left Ripper Chicks, returned to the Falcon on the laneway off Latrobe Terrace.

  The idea of money had thrown me. It wasn’t until I turned onto the flat of the Princes Highway that I realised something was off. That the aloof, private Cranno was offering me his life to write. I thought of the reporter standing in the rain outside the basilica, of Max Cranmer guarding his children with his sticks.

  Not long ago, nearly two decades after Percy had retired, the AFL decided to give him a medal. An ‘Anzac medal’. They give them out every year now.

  ‘I don’t want it,’ he said when he called to tell me. ‘This is a nightmare. It just doesn’t stop.’

  ‘Retired footballer dreams anxiously about unwanted accolades. Now there’s a headline. It’ll be something for your biography. Don’t I have a contract for that or something?’

  ‘Very funny. What do I say?’

  Percy accepted the medal.

  Immy and I both went to the match on the day of the ceremony. We sat in the seats set aside for us, behind Victoria and her two grown daughters, and Max. Max had shrunk even further into himself, frail and collapsed. I hadn’t seen Victoria in years. She hardly speaks to me at all anymore.

  Victoria put her arm around Max as the Royal Australian Navy Band played and cars full of veterans circled the field: the Siege of Tobruk, the Korean War, Vietnam. The final car in cavalcade held the girls and boys, men and women still serving in Afghanistan.

  The stadium fell silent as the retired football players walked out onto the grass. Percy was first – an ageing faux Anzac darling. The older men lined up in front of the young team. Percy’s face flashed u
p on the huge scoreboard screens. His broken nose lurching to the side, his eyes blank. A woman in the bleachers outside our box began crying.

  The men stood to attention. A bugler played the Last Post and 89,626 people breathed in. The only sound as the final notes died was the screaming of the seagulls wheeling under the lights, waiting to descend on the discarded chip packets and squashed meat pies.

  EDNA: A LIFE

  The Corio Oval loomed large in Edna’s childhood: for the constant streams of parades and events, but for the football too. Despite the fact that women and girls were not welcome at matches, Imelda was a rabid football fan and, as with everything else in Edna’s childhood, if Imelda did it or loved it, Edna did too. The girls let Margaret’s prim propriety rule every part of their lives … except when it came to football.

  Family legend has it that on game weekends, the tribe of Whitedale cousins would swarm onto the trams and rattle down Pakington Street, riding to where the wooden bleachers rose up from the white grass. Imelda could pass without notice among the men, with her long face and flat chest. But even as a toddler, Edna burst with femininity, all wild blonde hair and plump peachy skin. In 1937, Graham Greene wrote of Shirley Temple that, ‘Infancy is her disguise, her appeal is more secret and more adult.’ Photographs of Edna as a child show the same tight curls, the same deep dimples.

  Imelda couldn’t take Edna inside the games. To stop her from wandering away, she tied her to a post out the front of the football grounds. Tethered on the knotted piece of string, Edna would have been able to hear the tidal ebb and roar of the spectators.

  It might have been there, outside Corio Oval, that Edna first became aware of the role of the crowd. In the football sketches she completed later in life, there were rarely single players – instead, Edna often sketched her son and his friends with half-obscured observers on the sidelines, open-mouthed, urging the players on. From her vast triptychs to her portraits, where her subjects were never really alone, Edna always painted with connection and the crowd in mind.

  The Biographer

  I drove the long haul from Melbourne to Edna’s studio in Sorrento to meet Victoria early the next morning, trying to work out what to do.

  The Falcon’s radio commentary was full of football news. It was May. Geelong had just thumped Essendon at the MCG in front of a crowd of 40,000 people. Percy ‘Cranno’ had kicked five goals. Every radio host had something to say about him. I knew it made sense to take Percy’s project.

  I thought of the sort of person I would be if I said yes to him. Replacing my self-help guides and gardening advice books with rich footballers’ lives. Get enough sleep; make sure to forgive; know your aphids. Cranno kicked a ball and made a team, heroes, brave, courageous. It made sense, it did. But he wasn’t simply paying me to write about him. He was paying me not to write. Not to write about his mother. Was it because it was too early, because he really was still grieving? Or was it out of spite? Was it to punish his sister somehow?

  I parked outside the high fence that surrounded the studio Max had built for Edna. Inside the gate, Victoria was waiting for me on the front step. She was dressed in a pair of paint-splattered overalls, her hair pulled into a bun on top of her head. On her feet were the work boots I’d seen on my first visit to the studio, their toes covered in fuchsia smears.

  ‘These were Mum’s,’ she said as she came down the uneven path to greet me, running her hands over the stiff denim and coloured messes. She sounded almost embarrassed. ‘Silly, right?’

  ‘They look great,’ I told her. ‘Like wearing a work in progress.’

  Victoria seemed fragile that morning, vulnerable without the armour of her sharp business suits. A girl in her mother’s shoes.

  As we stepped into the studio again the smell washed over me, the sharp, heady turpentine.

  Victoria had moved a lot around in the two weeks since I’d first visited. The smaller paintings were now all stacked near the roller doors, opening up a pathway to the towering works at the back. Those were still shrouded in their protective cloths.

  ‘You didn’t get to see the big panel paintings last time?’ Victoria asked, walking towards them. ‘These are really special. They’re the reason Dad built the studio so tall. She’d get up on her ladder to do them. It always looked precarious, the way she reached around on top of that ladder.’

  ‘How many of them are there?’

  ‘Four series. Three to five in each series. They’re meant to … engulf you, I guess.’ She was standing at the edge, pulling on the cloths. ‘I don’t know which one is … oh yes. These are the Papua New Guinea paintings. Bomana.’

  The cloths came down.

  A vast field reared above me, backing up against a heavy jungle, broken across the three huge panels. A track wound across the bottom of the field, connecting the panels. I could look up and see the sky.

  The colours were vibrant; I almost felt as if they were calling to me. The whole room fell into the paintings as I stepped closer to them, let them take up my entire sight.

  In the first panel the field was torn open in great rows. A huddle of low canvas tents and huts were clumped along its edge – a medical unit. The white flares of the nurse’s hats hovered over the scored grass of the field; in the distance, smoke and mist rose from the mountains. The sky was clear and blue.

  In the foreground, a truck raced along a dirt track. The driver was young, his uniform loose; the windshield of the truck was cracked. Its open tray at the back held a dozen injured men, limbs and lumps under blankets. A local fighter stood over them – not a ‘fuzzy wuzzy angel’ but a man powerfully in command, urging the young driver on.

  In the second panel, the field was swarming with men digging graves. The track was paved, a road. The jungle had shifted, becoming darker. Sharper, not quite impasto, certain graves picked out with light, the faces of the gravediggers tight and precise.

  And then in the last panel the field was empty, white grave markers like teeth in perfect alignment, the war over. The rolling cemetery flattened out, a cupola like a nipple rising out of its centre. In the distance, a group of women worked in an adjacent field. I could see the delicate hatchwork on their clothing, the vegetables in their gathering baskets.

  I shivered.

  Sometimes, even now when I see Bomana in a new home – under lights in the National Gallery of Australia, engulfing crowds staring up and expelling silent, collective breaths, the darkness of gallery beyond – I think of that moment in the studio. I can sense the people around me feeling what I felt: the painting’s weight and height, and the bodies buried under the turf, time marching relentlessly on. But that first morning it was just me and Victoria, alone with the paintings in the studio. And now Bomana is only alone at night, when the museums are empty except for the cameras, and the blinking red lights, and the motion sensors, waiting for morning.

  ‘I wanted you to see them before we got to business,’ Victoria said behind me.

  Bomana made the decision for me. I would not take Percy Cranmer’s offer.

  We sat down and worked out the timeline. Twelve weeks. I would go through and catalogue the entire collection. There were dates and names on the backs of most of the paintings, but we would have to chase up a few by fitting them into the sketchbooks. Victoria and I would then both do interviews with family members and friends, and we’d pay someone else to transcribe them. Then I’d write the short monograph.

  Victoria had to leave before lunch, but she gave me my own set of keys so I could close up the studio.

  In the silence after she was gone, I went through the smaller paintings, as many as I could. I grouped them by date, but I could see themes and patterns emerging even on that first day. The cemetery and memorial paintings. The nurse/Imelda paintings. The desert paintings. The portraits, in which her subjects were never really alone. The maritime paintings – so many of Swan Bay. And I could see the change in her work later in life, the release into imagination and narrative.

  A
s I worked, sorting like with like, I came across another painting of the house that I had found that first day. Then another. Every one different: a changed season, a new light. But the house always stayed the same, crouched in the centre of the page, sometimes beautifully rendered, sometimes deliberately ugly, the same number 27 painted on its gate. Menacing, closed. I began to stack them in a corner by the door. Three of them, then four, then six, then ten.

  Time passed without me noticing it – the winter sun tracking quietly across the bright concrete floor.

  At the end of the day, I shifted the Number 27 paintings into the storage racks, out of the way. They were dated, but untitled. None of them were any good.

  I wanted to focus on the paintings I thought would end up in the monograph, of the nurses, of the wars, of the rugged peninsulas and sweeping bays. I pulled some of those paintings to the front of the stacks and sat, watching them glow in the fading light.

  In Nurses #10, from 1978, a figure in a white cap like a sail floats through a long hallway awash with murky hospital cots, each one jangling with need. The cots have built up in shoals around the nurse, like waves rising around her as she walks away from the viewer. Only her presence keeps the waves at bay, parting the bodies. The hall looks as if it could be a sporting court, or a ballroom. Its ceiling is high and shadowy.

  Even from a distance, you could see the nurse’s clenched fists, the red splash of her bib the only real colour in the great sea of grey and green. Edna had painted it decades after the war, decades after her sister’s death. After her own retreat from the art world.

  I thought of my mother on her shifts in the Geelong Hospital. The long nights all through my life, the things she brought home with her – sickness, endless boxes of rubber gloves, and the bright pink soap the nurses used to clean their hands, which was the only soap we ever had in the house.