by Black Inc.
Thus Tom O’Reilly with spreading tumour and with shrinking lands crossed the boundaries of that last and fragile island freehold and tracked out at night into the coarse tracts of scrub and seas of box and buloke and mallee and Murray pine, taking within him his lode of secret messages, now hiding his voice in hollow trees and wash-holes and soaks and under fallen logs and in rabbit burrows and in parrots’ nests, seeding the landscape with his messages but always in secret and in hidden places, with just enough to be discovered for all to know there must be many others across that landscape. With his own life and holding now buckled to restriction Tom still raged against that dying and that shrinking, forging at last these new and lasting forms of possession, new ways of living with a landscape that would run far beyond I own towards I know, I love, I understand, bred from an intuition fed perhaps by the secret marks of those previous travellers who had moved across that landscape, their presence never quite eroded, their fragile but rich possession still marked for those with eyes skilled to see it in the middens, soaks and canoe trees, and in other hidden places.
What did the notes say? That if you walked two hundred metres directly to the east you would come across a mallee fowl’s nest. That if you crossed the sand ridge three hundred metres to the left, you would find the last of a trapper’s hut. That if you made for the tall pine that capped the huge drift to the east you would in less than one hundred metres find a hidden soak. No more than fragments. Not maps, but only parts of maps. Fragments not touching other fragments. As though Tom O’Reilly knew that it was in full order and design that his own destruction lay, that it was in incompleteness and broken tracks and hidden vignettes only that there was life and hope of continuing possession. The tumour in his brain telling him at last the deepest truths of our nomadic condition, against which no kind of fencing, no kind of signposting might give reassurance, he knew, though perhaps in deep unconsciousness, that this smallest shift from frame to frame, the living that one did within the short space that ran from abandoned well to mallee fowl nest, from hollow tree to trapper’s hut, from hidden soak to canoe tree, was the best form of mapping that there could be. That the best way to tell the story was not to wrap up the story but to replace it with a lasting conversation. That the best way to possess was not in deed or map or charter but in the adding of one’s voice to all the voices that had passed, to be part of the disorder and not the regulation, part of the fount and not the boundary, part of the mystery but not the explanation
How many further maps, how many further secrets? If you asked his widow, years afterwards, what Tom O’Reilly thought he was doing, the answer was quite clear and simple, that he liked to find old bottles in the bush and even once high in a hollow tree; that once or twice in all that time he had found things with old writing in them, and thought it would be good for those after him to find these things as well. The richness of his artistry perhaps being as well spelt-out in her few words as ever surly Tom would have attempted, he never telling anyone or trying to explain those silent night-time journeys, linking his messages with the flints of rock and the marks in the trees, the nests and new growths of mallee; innumerable, boundless and not subject to resumption. His family, as though knowing, even before that first note was discovered, decided at his death to build the box themselves and bury him on the last of the freehold. His casket was rough-hewn from that same strain of Murray pine in which he left his messages, the coarse adzed planks sawn and nailed and screwed together, the boards scarce meeting at the seams so that he might quickly meet the earth and be possessed in turn, his body running out to join his words. The nine children, each risking a splinter, carried him to his grave, set on a high ridge beyond the house and towards the sand drifts, to overlook the margins of the freehold fragment, the boundary fence, and beyond, out over the wild and ever renewed and now illimitable tracts of Tom O’Reilly’s mysterious repossession.
The Boy’s Name Was David
Gerald Murnane
The man’s name was whatever it was. He was more than sixty years of age and he spent much of his time alone. He was never idle, but he was no longer in paid employment, and on the most recent census form he had described himself as a retired person.
He had never thought of himself as having any profession or following any career. From about his twentieth to about his sixtieth year he had written some poetry and much prose fiction, and some of the fiction had been afterwards published. During those same years, he had earned a living by several means. In his forty-first year, he had found a position as a part-time tutor in fiction-writing in an insignificant so-called college of advanced eduction in an inner suburb of Melbourne. His first students were all adults, some older than himself. So far as he could tell, they were not impressed by his credentials or his teaching methods, and he responded by being wary with them and giving away little of himself.
He had been given to understand that he was only a stop-gap; that he would keep his tutor’s position only until the college was able to appoint permanently as a lecturer one or another writer of note: someone whose reputation would lend prestige to the writing course. In the event he, whatever his name was, stayed on for sixteen years. By then, the place where he was employed had become a university and most of his students were not long out of school. How these things came about is no part of this piece of fiction.
This piece of fiction begins a few years after its chief character had ceased to be a teacher of fiction-writing, and at a time when he sometimes lived through several days without remembering that he had formerly been such a teacher.
The man of this fiction had no interest in mathematics, but throughout his life he had loved arithmetic. He was fond of calculating such numbers as the approximate total of the breaths that he had drawn since the moment of his birth or of the bottles of beer that he had drunk since the well-remembered day when he had drunk the first of them. He had once arrived at a close estimate of the total length of time during which he had experienced the extremes of sexual pleasure. He daydreamed of quantifying things that had never before been measured. Whenever he was in a railway carriage or a theatre, he wished he could have been free to discover which person from among those present had the keenest sense of smell; which one had been most often frightened of another person; which one had the strongest belief in an afterlife …
Most of the man’s arithmetical enterprises resulted in estimates only, but in some matters he was able to arrive at exact totals, for he was a diligent keeper of records. Calendars, bank statements, receipts and such things he stored in his filing cabinets at the end of every year. And in keeping with his love of recording and measuring, he kept precise and detailed accounts of his work as a teacher of fiction-writing.
He was obliged to keep certain records, of course, so that he could award grades to his students at the end of each semester, but he went far beyond this. Not only for his own satisfaction, but also to avoid disputes with students over their grades, he devised and perfected during his first years as a teacher what he supposed must have been a unique means of arriving at a mark (on a scale from 1 to 100) for each piece of fiction that he assessed. His method was to record in the margins of every page of every piece of fiction every instance of his having had to pause in his reading. Whenever he was stopped by a spelling mistake or a fault of grammar; whenever he was confused by a badly shaped sentence; whenever he lost the thread of the narrative; whenever he became bored by what he was reading; at every such time, he put in the margin what he called a negative mark and, if time allowed, he wrote a note to explain why he had stopped and had made the mark. At the foot of each page he put a running tally of the number of lines of fiction that he had so far read and of the number of negative marks that he had made in the margin. At the foot of the last page he set out in full his calculation of the percentage of the fiction that had been free of fault. This percentage figure became the numerical mark for the piece of fiction.
Of course, it was not only faults in the fiction that mi
ght have caused him to stop reading. He paused often from sheer enjoyment of a shapely sentence or from admiration of a thoughtful passage or from a wish to postpone the pleasure of reading further into a passage that promised much. Whenever he paused for reasons such as these he wrote a warm message to the author of the piece, but his method of assessment would have become too complicated even for him if he had tried somehow to have the outstanding passages cancel out some of the negative marks.
He was always ready and waiting to defend his method of assessment if some querulous student had challenged him over it but no student ever did so, although not a few disputed his comments on particular passages that he had assessed as faulty. For year after year, he went on assigning to hundreds of pieces of fiction percentage marks that claimed to rank the pieces precisely.
He was not required to keep any details of his assessment after he had sent the final results for all students to the administrative officers of the place where he worked. But being the person he was, he could never think of throwing away even a single page that recorded some of the workings of his mind. At the end of each year, he put into one of his filing cabinets the folders of ruled pages on which were recorded, among other details, the title of every piece of fiction submitted to him during the year, the number of words in each piece, and the percentage mark that he had allotted to the piece. The total of the pieces of fiction was never fewer than two hundred and fifty, and the total of words in all the pieces was never less than half a million. Before he put his records away he would turn the pages, letting his eyes take in the columns of figures showing the percentage mark for piece after piece of fiction.
As a boy, he had kept pages filled with batting and bowling averages for cricketers; he had pasted into scrapbooks pictures showing the finishing-order of field after field of horses in famous races. Always during these months-long tasks, his hope had been that some surprising discovery would be his final reward; that the first columns of figures might prove to have been misleading, or that the horse that seemed likely to be beaten in a close finish had won after all. Fifty years afterwards, he was much more adept at devising games to satisfy his lifelong love of protracted contests and delayed but decisive results. He would have taken care throughout the year not to compare any of the several hundred marks that he had awarded. He knew, of course, which were the dozen or so most memorable pieces that he had read, but he had been at pains never to think of one as better than another. Now, at the end of the year, and six weeks and more after the last student had been seen on campus, he placed a crisp sheet of white paper over each page of his folder of results while he looked at the page. The paper was so placed that he saw only the first of the two numerals of the percentage mark for each piece of fiction. When he looked down any page, he knew only which pieces of fiction had earned ninety per cent or more but not which piece had earned the highest mark.
Of the half-formed images that came into the man’s mind while he scanned the titles of the pieces of fiction with ninety or more marks apiece, he was taken most by a glimpse of the highest-scoring pieces of fiction as the leading horses in an impossible race. On some vast prairie or pampa, hundreds of horses were approaching a crowded grandstand and a winning-post. He was fond of dwelling on this image, with its promise of something about to be decided after having been for long in doubt.
There was more to the exercise described just above than the comparatively simple experience of awaiting the out come of a decisive event; more even than the more subtle pleasure of admiring the strong claims of each contender and marvelling or regretting that even such claims might be surpassed by the even stronger claims of another and yet another contender. There was also the question – simple for him to pose to himself but perplexing, if not impossible, to answer – what exactly was he thinking of whenever he claimed to remember each of these pieces of fiction? He saw on the page of his folder of pages a title, and sometimes he saw beyond this no more than an image that the title had given rise to. (He had always encouraged his students to choose as the title for a story a word or words connected with a central image or a recurring theme in the fiction. He discouraged them from choosing abstract nouns or phrases that related only in a general way to the fiction. Among the titles of the leading pieces, therefore, he was much more likely to see such as ‘Killing Ants’, ‘A Long Line of Trees’ or ‘Six Blind Mice’ rather than ‘The Request’, ‘Secrets’ or ‘The Tourist’.) Sometimes, other images would appear in his mind following on from the image connected with the title. Sometimes the succession of images was long enough for him to be able to say that he recalled the plot of the piece of fiction or the story. Sometimes he saw, in what he thought of as the background of his mind, an image of the author of the piece of fiction while one or another of the previously mentioned images remained in the foreground. Sometimes, whether or not he had seen in his mind any of the previously mentioned sorts of images, he saw an image of the classroom where he and a group of students had read the piece of fiction and had afterwards discussed it on one or another morning or afternoon of the past year. At such times, he sometimes heard in his mind particular comments from one or another reader or even the distinctive hush that always settled over a class soon after they had begun to read a piece of fiction that was far beyond the ordinary.
The sort of image that hardly ever occurred in his mind while he read the title of a piece of fiction was the very image that he most wanted to occur. This was the image in his mind of parts of the actual text of the fiction: of a sentence or a phrase, or even of disjointed words.
As a teacher, he had been fanatical in urging his students to think of their fiction, of all fiction, as consisting of sentences. A sentence was, of course, a number of words or even a number of phrases or clauses, but he preached to his students that the sentence was the unit that yielded the most amount of meaning in proportion to its extent. If a student in class claimed to admire a piece of fiction or even a short passage of fiction, he would ask that student to find the sentence that most caused the admiration to arise. Anyone claiming to be puzzled or annoyed by a passage of fiction was urged by him to find the sentence that had first brought on the puzzlement or the annoyance. Much of his own commentary during classes consisted of his pointing out sentences that he admired or sentences that he found faulty. At least once each year, he told each class an anecdote that he had remembered from a memoir of James Joyce. Someone had praised to Joyce a recent novel. Joyce had asked why the novel was so impressive. The answer came back that the style was splendid, the subject powerful … Joyce would not listen to such talk. If a book of prose fiction was impressive, the actual prose should have impressed itself on the reader’s mind so that he could afterwards quote sentence after sentence.
The teacher who set such store by sentences, whenever he visualised as the last fifty metres of a mighty horse-race his looking for the piece of fiction that had most impressed him, regretted that he heard so little in his mind. If the images mentioned in a recent paragraph were few enough, the memories of sentences or phrases were fewer by far. He would have rejoiced if he could have witnessed a contest of sentences alone: if he could have repeated aloud to himself even a short sentence from each of the leading pieces of fiction so as to have had in his mind as the race came to an end only such visual images as arose from the remembered sentences. But he seldom recalled a sentence. The blurred and overlapping visual images took over his mind.
During the first few years after the man, whatever his name was, had ceased to be a teacher of fiction-writing, he remembered some of the images mentioned in the previous few paragraphs of this piece of fiction: the images that had arisen in his mind whenever he had watched the details of an impossible horse-race in his mind. In later years, the man found himself remembering many fewer images than he might have expected to remember. In one of those years, the man began to understand that his failing more and more to remember details connected with more than three thousand pieces of fiction might itself be im
agined as the finish of a horse-race.
The race just mentioned would be the last of all such races to be decided in the mind of the man, whatever his name was. The finish of the race would be very different from the finishes of the races that had been run in his mind at the end of most of his sixteen years as a teacher of fiction-writing. In those earlier races, a closely bunched field had approached the winning-post with first one and then another likely winner appearing. The last part of this last race would more resemble the last part of a long-distance steeplechase, when all but two or three entrants had dropped far behind. The entrants in the race would be every one of the more than three thousand pieces of fiction that the man had read and assessed while he was a teacher of fiction-writing. No, the entrants would be every detail that the man might conceivably have remembered in connection with any of the more than three thousand pieces of fiction that he had read during sixteen years of his life. And the finish of this last race might itself last for a year at least, which would be in keeping with the duration of the whole race, which had already been in progress for more than five years before it came to the attention of the man in whose mind it was being run.
The man could take his time over this race; could even forget about the existence of the race for days or weeks on end. The less he thought about the race, the fewer contestants might appear in his mind when he next looked out for them.