by William Lane
She shook her head again.
‘That one’s a hard one, I admit,’ said Barnabus, ‘I don’t really understand it myself. You sort of had to be there to get it. It’s the way he says things. Maybe I wrote that one down wrong. Then let me tell you about our handwriting workshops. They are great. We begin by slowly writing the letters of the alphabet in the way they were first taught to us. We do the vowels and then the consonants – we were all taught the vowels first. It brings back flashbacks and traumas for some, but we work through it, to arrive at a new attitude to those sounds. It is amazing. Then Kenric asks, “And what were you thinking on that day? And what passed by the window?” And we can remember! Because that was such a special time, when we first learned to write – that was the opening window, the unlocking door, that’s how he describes it. You step from one world into another. And then he takes us back to the first cursive lessons – no, hang on, we do cursive first, before the first handwriting. We work back through time, that makes sense – because how confident and clever and experienced we all felt learning cursive! Cursive is when you join the letters. And when you learn it, you feel as if you are already fully in control of everything to do with writing – because then you can do it fast, and then you have an optional style – it’s like acquiring an incredible tool. The handwriting workshops take us back to that feeling, and those days. If you want, we can do that together once you start to write – these days now will come flooding back to you. Do you want another sandwich, or shall we go for a walk on the beach?’
‘A walk on the beach.’
He agreed, and did not mention her reading classes. They had decided to put off reading awhile.
‘Don’t worry about that argument you saw,’ repeated Barnabus, ‘Maria and Kenric will look after everything.’
The next day, however, Maria and Kenric departed the Pittwater house, although not before one last little incident occurred. Having taken a farewell walk along the beach in the morning, Kenric was returning to the house via the road when a man approached and asked if he were not Kenric Kendall, once employed by The Firm?
‘At last! I’ve found you,’ said the stranger, who introduced himself as Jonathon Swallow. ‘I’ve been looking for you for such a long time.’ Jonathon had long, thin arms with swollen veins, a large, mobile Adam’s apple, and pallid, almost silver skin. Kenric thought he might have seen him years ago, perhaps around the corridors of The Firm, or in the streets surrounding its offices.
‘You’ve been looking for me?’ asked Kenric, not understanding.
‘Yes, ever since your time at The Firm. I used to ring, but they kept fobbing me off.’
‘They?’
‘Yes – Quick and his lot. I lost the trail, and I’ve only now succeeded in picking it up again, after I tracked down Quick at The Message. His personal assistant had just received this address – but I had to do him a favour to get it. I’m a curator of a contemporary art space, and I’ve long wished to hold an exhibition of your work.’
‘Work?’
‘Your products,’ said Jonathon. ‘The ones you name. You’ve heard nothing of this? I used to leave messages in the days when you were still at The Firm. And I wrote several times to an address in western Sydney.’
‘No, I know nothing of this.’
‘Shall we talk a little?’ suggested Jonathon, and they began to walk back down the hill towards the water. ‘I discussed my ideas with Quick years ago, which was a mistake, as he seemed to think I was some crackpot. Or perhaps it suited him not to take me seriously. You don’t remember him ever mentioning me to you?’
‘Never.’
‘Well, I’ve long wanted to put together a collection of your work – the wrappers with your words,’ Jonathon explained.
‘The wrappers?’
‘Yes, work associated with your naming – exhibit the wrappers, the boxes, the signs as works of art.’
‘But my work was anonymous –’
‘Yet instantly recognisable –’ Jonathon smiled – ‘which is the wonderful, the outstanding, the remarkable thing. So many of the products you named have become cultural icons, Kenric, so many have become words and messages indelibly printed upon the consumer’s consciousness. Some of your product names have even entered the Macquarie Dictionary – changing the language, changing the nature of society. Raising standards of advertising to a new pitch, raising it into an art form – making it stick. I think you’re a very, very talented man … oh, here’s the sea, I thought I could smell something. Let me buy you a coffee at this charming little shanty,’ continued Jonathon, rattling on, ‘and we don’t mind squatting on these horrid plastic chairs here a moment, do we? Mind the bird poo.’
After buying the coffees, Jonathon detailed his plan to exhibit Kenric’s works, and provided a list of those to be exhibited. Kenric named more products the curator had overlooked, to Jonathon’s delight. ‘Oh, you did those! I should have known, of course – my partner and I always buy those.’
‘Please don’t expect me to get involved,’ said Kenric, ‘it’s another life to me. Arrange it as you will.’
‘You are going to be a pleasure to work with,’ said Jonathon. ‘Some of the artists I deal with are just so temperamental. And you are an artist, a word artist – a poet. Everyone says it, and everyone will be saying it after the exhibition. A new kind of poet – the kind of poet we can hang by the roadside and flash across screens. The ones in the know just love your work, Ken – I do hope you’re not really retired.’
Jonathon talked on, but Kenric only looked at the sea. He was not listening – it seemed he could not hear – until the man said ‘Ciao’, and pressed a card into his hand.
Epilogue
Krystal soon left The New Word to join Teddy. Teddy had departed Pittwater to enter The Happening, a community of like-minded souls on the North Coast, where several of his old friends and ex-lovers now based themselves. The Happening focused on action and condemned thought. Krystal wrote to The New Word once, but then they heard no more of her.
Meanwhile, Judith conducted her Spanish lessons, and the community’s field of interest diversified to include yoga and spontaneous dance classes. Mama Cass was only referred to as Cass Elliott, the name she preferred. Tess always led them back to words one way or another. The women liked to play word games – they might spend a morning laughing about what words were included in the Macquarie Dictionary, for example (‘Moomba Festival’, ‘Petrov affair’, ‘dagwood sandwich’), whole weekends disappeared playing Scrabble, and the competition was fierce to solve crosswords of the most cryptic kind.
It was true some tensions existed within the group, but Tess was confident these could be managed – after all, she had so many examples from recent memory of what not to do. Certainly tension remained between Connie and Tess herself, Tess having never quite forgiven Connie for divulging Tess’s supposedly private phone conversations. A lingering coldness persisted there.
Nevertheless, Connie thrived at The New Word. She had quite transformed. Once round-shouldered, her splendid carriage was now wedded to a fresh alertness and quickness of movement and action and freed wit. Her catering business was growing as fast as she could manage it, and she was also happily engaged in writing a cookbook. If she did have any regrets about The Word, it was that Heidi could not be enticed to move to Whale Beach. ‘Something about that girl’s cooking was magical,’ Connie would wistfully recollect, ‘I have never tasted food quite that scrumptious. I just can’t describe it.’
During her short stay at the beach house, Krystal had begun to compile a book of sayings and remembrances of her time at The Word, but with her departure the book was left unfinished. Other works were taking shape there, however: Judith was writing, with Tess’s help, an account titled My Life with a Man on the Run, and Tess found it paid to write articles on the interior decoration of coastal residences. Most excitingly, her play about the man who ate a writer, Degustation (‘degust: L. to taste, to relish’) won a playwright�
��s award. A time of great hilarity and thespian activity ensued at The New Word, the women taking turns at reading the different parts, each member more or less learning the play by heart.
A friend of Tess’s who came to visit gushed over the location and the possibilities of extending the beach house by building a second storey, suggesting she could grow the membership of The New Word. Tess dismissed the idea. She resisted recruiting new members – too big was too hard to handle, she insisted. While most decisions at The New Word were made jointly, this one she made alone.
Tess was most insistent they not indulge in too much idle talk at The New Word – no gossip, no backbiting, no ‘Justin-speak’, as they called it – but then again, no ‘Bruno-no-speak’, as they termed any passive-aggressive silences. Tess maintained Maria’s custom of occasional silent days. She taught that the great sadness, the tediousness, of our world is that so many words used so unthinkingly, or so mischievously, are poured forth every day. This misrepresents the inner and outer worlds of the speakers and nullifies their connection with listeners, and misunderstanding and suffering ensue. Yet – while every word is eroded by everyday use, and grows thin and perhaps close to perishing – throughout each word’s bedrock there remain runs of opal, veins of gold, and with the emergence of heightened language, and awareness of the authority still latent in language, all other sources of authority can be overwhelmed. We recreate our world by naming it, she taught, so be careful what you say.
Meanwhile, at Pittwater, Heidi had taken on the role of housekeeper, and Barnabus that of handyman. Barnabus had begun to succeed in teaching Heidi to read. They enjoyed children’s stories together. Robert liked to watch the couple walk along the beach or sit on the jetty, hand in hand, while he got sloshed, pissed, tanked on the verandah (he was making a list of the number of English words or phrases expressing drunkenness, and was closing in on fifty).
One day, Janis appeared at the door of the Pittwater house. It took Robert a while to comprehend her relationship to Kenric. Then, not having much else to do, he asked her in for a drink.
‘But this is such a big house, and not at all a small block!’ exclaimed Janis, walking about the place, having a good look around, ‘and in such a perfect location, close to the water. It took me a long time to track you down. So this is where Kenric was living …’
‘Yes, I’m not sure of his current address,’ Robert told her, ‘he and Maria sort of drove off into the sunset –’
‘Oh, I’m not trying to find him, not as such,’ said Janis, surprising Robert. ‘I was just curious.’
Robert, rather befuddled, offered her a glass of wine and a seat on the verandah.
‘I won’t say no,’ said Janis, still looking about in a sharp sort of way, which began to make Robert uneasy.
‘I’m told Kenric became a very strange man after we broke up … and wasn’t it some kind of cult he had here?’ asked Janis. ‘Some kind of rogue advertising venture, was it?’
Robert found himself trying to explain The Word. ‘No, it was never a financial concern,’ he heard himself repeating. ‘I’ve been in two Words –’
‘Two worlds?’
‘Words. The second The Word, Kenric’s initiative, more or less fell apart once we moved here –’
‘But how could it, in such ideal surrounds?’ wondered Janis.
‘We had personal problems in the group, and a lack of clarity from the top – I suppose that was Kenric’s fault, I’m afraid,’ said Robert. ‘He wasn’t able to assert himself, or … manage … others.’
‘Oh?’
‘The first The Word was the real deal …’ and so on. Robert found he wanted to explain to this woman that anyone who tried to live in The Word, anyone who began to love it, even if only for a month, a season, never regretted it … yes, of course they had known it was a naive enterprise – everyone was always so keen to tell them so … nevertheless … but he soon gave up explaining to Janis, sensing she was rather a cold and narrow woman. She had no inner ear, as Kenric would have said. Robert could not find the words anyway, and ended up looking at the water, wishing the woman would leave.
‘I don’t think I ever really knew Kenric that well, you know,’ Janis confided. ‘Didn’t you find him rather … shut down?’
‘Yes, you’re right there,’ said Robert, ‘that’s the word, the phrase: shut down. He had no real communication or personal skills. Perhaps he should have stuck to advertising.’
‘You mean he didn’t?’ she asked.
‘No, no – he gave that up long before he started living here.’
Janis then asked Robert a series of somewhat related questions: Had Kenric had a job? What vehicles had he driven? Had he ever talked of owning investment property? Had he acquired shares? Had he frequently gone on overseas holidays?
‘No, no,’ said Robert, ‘Maria and he were the least materialistic people in the world.’
‘So she had no money either?’
‘No, no – they were only interested in The Word, see. You know, The Word – revelation, the Holy Spirit, to put it in theological terms – although we were more interested in the philosophical than the theological … you know, the Logos …’
‘But it’s such a waste, isn’t it,’ said Janis, ‘when you think of a man like Kenric.’
– in three sizes with or without sleeves –
‘He was on a relatively good wage at The Firm, after all,’ continued Janis, ‘and had job security. I thought he had a reputation for being rather good at what he did. And he threw it all away. Who’ll ever understand it? He threw it all away – for what? An idea?’
‘Yes, exactly, for an idea,’ confirmed Robert helpfully. ‘You’ve said it very well.’
William Lane lives in the Hunter Valley, NSW, where he is raising three children. After completing an Honours degree in Australian literature, he travelled and worked in a number of different jobs. In addition to reading and writing, his interests include music and education. He has completed a doctorate on the Australian writer Christina Stead, and has had several critical articles on Stead published in literary journals. He is the author of three other novels: Over the Water (2014), The Horses (2015) and The Salamanders (2016).