Tempting, in these fractiously ambitious times, to view such a measured memorial sadly. Here lies some mute inglorious Milton, died soon and died obscure. If only Archibald McGlashan had shared in our twentieth-century advantages he might have got somewhere, become famous like Sting, had his own series on telly – Sex in the Grave – at the least made it on to Big Brother. Never mind that he’s dead; even alive, Teacher of English is too modest an achievement for us to contemplate without melancholy. The poor bastard, we think, forgetting that it wasn’t all teenage junkies with abusive parents in the 1870s. The poor bastard, forgetting that you were allowed to enthuse your pupils once, that there was an exhilaration in passing on the baton of learning and enquiry, enfranchising young minds with the best of thought and feeling, because ‘best’ wasn’t then an unacceptable and outmoded elitist concept.
For which favour, conscientiously bestowed – and I take this to be the logic of the epitaph – you became ‘A Man Greatly Beloved’. Not honoured, lettered, knighted, prize-laden, best-selling and all the rest of it, just greatly beloved. We don’t even need to be told by whom. By humanity, naturally.
Best gig in Edinburgh – Archibald McGlashan, Dean Cemetery, any time you’re free, dead in the earth.
All at Sea
Today I buried my father-in-law at sea. Buried is probably not the word for it. There was no body. What we did was cast his ashes to the four winds.
I’ve never seen a person’s ashes before. I suppose I’d unthinkingly assumed that ‘ashes’ was only a way of speaking, that what we burn down to is some sort of odoriferous powder, finer and sweeter perfumed than talcum, and somehow still animated by soul. But we don’t. We make the same sort of ash as a bonfire makes. Grey and grainy and unspiritual. Plenty of it, too. A whole plastic flaskful, which can take a fair bit of shaking out. Especially if your hands aren’t steady.
I don’t fancy being burned myself. I’m too worried about the possibility of a mistake. Imagine lying inside that highly flammable wooden lozenge and listening to it crackle while you’re still alive, still able to hear the congregation singing ‘Jerusalem’. Imagine the condition of your mind. Illogical, I know, given that you can be buried alive just as easily. But then I’ve never fancied the soil option either. Earth, water, air, fire – let those who are happy to live in the elements, die in the elements. I’m not. I keep hoping I can hold out long enough for someone to discover some new and more suitable medium for my expiry. Something less natural. Evaporation through abstruse sentence, say. Interment in metaphor.
Scatter me in words, O my beloved.
My father-in-law was lucky in that the elements spoke directly to him. He was a gardener, a garlic grower, a pisser on to the roots of lemon trees, a maker of barbecues and fires, and a waterman – that’s to say he swam, fished, sailed, and therefore understood and loved the capriciousness of the wind. What a bore he could be on each and all of those subjects! When he expatiated on boats to me, I thought I was dead already. He showed me nautical charts. He talked knots to me. Tides. Reefs. Rips. Sandbars. Fathoms. Channels. Fish. Masts. Sails. The lives of Dutch navigators, for Christ’s sake! He clogged my brain with seaweed. He picked my bones clean with maritime minutiae.
But at least he knew how he wanted to be disposed of. Burned to soulless ash and scattered on to the waters of the Indian Ocean off Rottnest, the paradisal people’s isle a half nautical hour from the port of Fremantle. And let the winds and tides and fish and fathoms do as they wished with him.
So that was where we repaired to do his bidding – his widow, his daughter, his old fishing and camping friend Eric the ferryman, Eric’s wife Dot, and me. There is always farce associated with the disposal of ashes: so of course we left him on the boat and had to run back for him, and of course we weren’t able to open the plastic canister that contained him until his daughter found a way of breaking into it with a car key, and of course the wind blew half of him back into our faces. Life is three-quarters farce; it is only fitting that death should be the same.
‘There is a willow grows aslant a brook . . .’ Nothing to do with Rottnest but it’s a great line when you’re thinking about watery graves. There is, though, a wooden jetty which gives out into Thomson Bay and we sat on the end of that like urchins looking for jellyfish and watched the water discolour with our husband and friend and father. We threw flowers after him – camellias from Dot’s garden, and wild flowers, white and green and yellow everlastings, which his daughter had picked illegally from the roadside a thousand miles north of here. And so we made a floating memorial park for him.
Then we sang. Then they sang. No words, just a tune. ‘The Swan’, by Saint-Saëns. They’d been a quartet when they were young. Dot the singer, Joy on the piano, Eric on the violin, and the man who was now a faint discoloration of the Indian Ocean on the cello. ‘The Swan’ had been his favourite. Forever harping on things watery, you see.
So here’s a question. Which came first? Were we putting him back where he belonged? Or had his interest in water been nothing all along but a premonition of his fate?
He was blessed with a perfect day, however one understands it. Simultaneous showers and sunshine, the rain light and warm, and then a rainbow, especially vivid, as they always are in Western Australia, in the lilac section. Why not? As with farce, so with the pathetic fallacy. You get it in life, so there’s no reason why you shouldn’t get it in death.
I thought we were finished, ready to return to the living, when Eric suddenly began to speak in maritime tongues. Not an address, just a quiet, private blessing. He wished his old friend a fair wind. A billowing sail. A good landfall.
I felt shamed. Wasn’t it incumbent on me, the English-literature person, to essay something similar? Surely I had some apposite quotation. But the only nautical line I could think of was ‘’Twas on the good ship Venus’. So much for a solid grounding in the classics.
What had happened to the John Masefield I’d read at school? What about all the Joseph Conrad I’d lectured on? What about Moby-Dick? What about the Ancient Mariner? ‘Alone, alone, all, all alone / Alone on a wide wide sea!’ Wouldn’t that do?
Pathetic. Better with the good ship Venus. He’d liked a touch of rhymed ribaldry in his time, Allan Sadler. He could take a seasoning of profanity. He knew it wasn’t all ‘The Swan’. So I let him have it – man to man, me to him, but silently, for no one else’s ears. ‘By God, you should have seen us . . .’
Corrugation Road
Life is a perpetual margarita. You sip the tequila and the lime, you taste a little salt, you need to sip again, you taste more salt, and so it goes – you grow increasingly thirsty on what you drink. If you’re not a drinker you could say life’s a perpetual Cleopatra. She too made men hungry by what she let them feed on. If you’re not into the flesh either then scrub the whole thing. I only write for the incontinent.
I think it was incontinent of me to have done what I have just done, though I guess to some people it would merit about as much remark as a picnic in a layby. It’s all to do with the way you were brought up. I was taught to count every penny and never to travel further than a quarter of a mile for any pleasure. Had Cleopatra lived more than a shilling’s bus ride away my parents would have suggested I find somebody cheaper. ‘There’s plenty more fish in t’sea, our ’Oward.’ So to me it feels pretty reckless to have flown in from London to Perth (Perth Western Australia, not Perth Scotland – I’m not that much of a cheapskate), and then a day later to have flown out again to Broome, 2,500 kilometres up the coast, just to take in an Aboriginal musical.
I’d said no at first when a particular person suggested it. I was jet-lagged. I was middle-aged. I was skint. And I didn’t like Aboriginal musicals.
‘Name one.’
I couldn’t. I thought perhaps South Pacific, or Porgy and Bess, but I wasn’t prepared to risk ethnic approximateness.
‘Why don’t you let me sleep for a week then I’ll take you to the pictures?’ I said, and where I
come from you can’t say much fairer than that.
‘Are you a man or a mouse?’
‘I’m a man,’ I said, ‘who is just going through a mousy patch.’
Four hours later I am 2,500 kilometres up the coast, sitting in the gardens of the Mangrove Hotel under a scimitared moon, listening to the wind rattling the louvred palm fronds, waiting for the curtain to go up, and trying to make it right with myself. I add up the cost of the plane tickets (no discounts when you don’t book two years in advance), the taxi fares, the accommodation in Broome (height-of-season prices), the stiff thirst-making margaritas, and calculate that Onassis would have shelled out this much in aeroplane fuel every time he jetted out from Santa Barbara to catch Callas doing La Somnambula at La Scala, which he must have had to do on a pretty regular basis. Don’t you hear of people selling their houses to pay for one night of Pavarotti? Isn’t there a woman, on a moderate income, who has been to the first night of Phantom of the Opera in every city in the world barring Kabul where it hasn’t yet opened?
It’s terrible to have been born in the north of England and brought up to be careful. Behind me there are dolphins leaping in Roebuck Bay; above me there are whistling kites and wedge-tailed eagles waiting motionless for the red tide to trickle back out through the mangroves and reveal the whereabouts of mudcrabs; the night is as quivering and velvety as a Balinese maiden’s first embrace; stars are falling out of their appointed places in the heavens with giddiness, and I – I am doing my accounts.
And then the musical begins with a woman wailing for her pidgin lovers – ‘I bin losin’ three mans’ – and her grief is so inordinate that the hairs above my collar prickle and money is suddenly the last thing on my mind. Remarkable, though, that Aborigines in the audience – in so far as one can be certain in a place as richly mixed as Broome who is Aboriginal and who isn’t – find the inordinacy comic. Another way of putting it is that what they find comic is themselves. Remember comic? It used to be a quality of musicals prior to The Phantom. It also used to be a quality of Australian life prior to Pauline Hanson, the one-time fried-fish lady from Queensland who has recently risen from the stale chip oil of far north Australian discontent like some anti-Venus of un-love, and formed a minority-phobia party – One Nation – on the strength of a vocabulary of twelve words and a platform of a dozen ideas fewer.
The fact that the party is called One Nation tells you all you need to know about it. Why would anybody want only one anything?
To say that Corrugation Road was written as a musical rejoinder to One Nation would be unjust to its author, Jimmy Chi, who was making art when Pauline Hanson was battering saveloys. But in its celebration of variousness and plenty, in its magnanimity in the face of cultural schizophrenia even – and you have to see the blackfella in his Father Christmas hat with your own eyes to take the full measure of that magnanimity – it plays like a riposte. That’s how we take it, anyway, sitting mixed and merry in the mongrel night. That’s what makes us laugh and cheer and sing along.
It is, of course, especially pleasurable if you are an Aborigine, to see comedy made out of all those missionised Christmases in the course of which you had to dress up like little white-faced angels and hymn ‘Silent Night’. But the laughter is good for all of us. It multiplies us. It makes the world a bigger place. You never see Pauline Hanson laugh. You only ever see her succumbing to a hot flush when some fellow monoglot pumps her fishy hand.
I, meanwhile, have worked out how to halve the cost of flying 2,500 kilometres to see a musical. By staying another night and seeing it again.
Suddenly I’m Homesick
It’s beginning to get uncomfortable here. The wet’s coming. Season of floods and murderous humidity. Already you walk out in the morning and there is a moat of moisture around your dwelling. Buildings are starting to weep. People who don’t have to be here all year are looking for house-minders and drifting south. And yesterday a crocodile was sighted in the bay.
I don’t know whether there’s some psychological explanation for it, but crocodiles always make me homesick for Manchester. Could be that crocodiles were the only peril my mother never warned me against when I went out to play by the Ship Canal.
For the most part, people in the Kimberley are cool about crocs. Come the wet there’s every chance you’ll find one swimming down the high street, or waiting behind you in the queue for the automatic bank teller, but he’ll be a freshie, and freshies aren’t dangerous unless you surprise them. If a freshie locks his jaws on to you at least you’ll have the consolation of knowing it’s not malice. He’s as unhappy about it as you are. Yesterday’s croc, though, was a saltie – a twelve-foot adult male saltwater crocodile – and a saltie will have you for breakfast, no worries.
Hence my hankering to be home.
But it’s not only a temperate climate and safe streets I’m missing. It’s men. The consideration of men.
There are no men here. That’s a preposterous thing to say, I know, since this is reputed to be man’s country, and I do read of men piloting light planes over the Bungle Bungles, putting out fires, fishing for barramundi, driving camels, pearling. But they’re not where I am. Where I am there are only women – women writers, artists, critics, gallerists, teachers, administrators, fortune-tellers, reflexologists, basket-weavers – and I’m at my wits’ end with them.
On paper it doesn’t look as though I have much to complain about. I am shipwrecked on the Fortunate Isles. The sirens sing, Penelope cooks, and the Hesperidean nymphs dance circles around me: Arethusa, the Ministering One; Erytheia, the Blushing One; Hirsutia, the Bristly One.
I was at a dinner party the other night in honour of Elizabeth Durack, a distinguished artist embroiled in unseemly controversy, late in life, with the gatekeepers of Australian culture, than whom few are more sanctimonious, even in these sanctimonious times. We sat at a table in the red sand behind her daughter Perpetua’s gallery – ‘My little gallery,’ the nymph Perpetua calls it – washing down fiery chilli shepherd’s pie with iced champagne and watching rare Siberian waterfowl leave town in their thousands, wave after wave of them, a translucent silver against the sky, like the guileless souls of angels.
After dinner it was photo time, Elizabeth attaching her camera to a tripod, composing, focusing, setting the delayed-action timer, then running to join us at the table before the flash went off. ‘Us’ being the Hesperides and me. ‘Cluster around the man,’ one of them said. And they did – they clustered around the man!
I know, I know, I should count my blessings. I’m in Lotus Land. But you can have too much of a good thing. Remember Ulysses. The long day wanes, the slow moon climbs. A man’s a sword and it’s not right for him to rust unburnish’d in his scabbard.
Besides, the women can get rough when they have the place almost entirely to themselves. They tumble and scratch. They upbraid and abuse.
It’s the soothing male companionableness of darts and pool and poker I’m feeling the want of. At the risk of sounding metropolitan, I’m missing the understanding a man finds at the Chelsea Arts Club and the Groucho. Those velveteen nights, sitting swapping troubles at the mirrored bar, or falling in from some party somewhere else, man wrapped around man in the old love-and-death embrace, Coriolanus and Aufidius, unable to remember when the clock strikes twelve whether this one’s your friend or your enemy, but what the hell – you’ll take him in your arms anyway and suffer the self-hatred and the beard rash in the morning.
Do you lose the trick of it? Afraid that I would no longer know what to say to a man should I ever again encounter one, I persuaded the only woman I’ve met in Broome who has a husband to lend me hers for half an hour. Just to practise on.
It was all right. Nothing to write home about, but not a disaster. I didn’t put my hand on his knee or blow him kisses. I didn’t call him sweetie-pie or lambkins. I wasn’t completely at my ease, though. His fault, partly. He didn’t know how to behave around a man either. ‘So what do you do when you’re up t
o here with women?’ I asked him.
‘I go into the desert for a couple of months,’ he told me, ‘and prospect for water.’
‘On your own?’
‘Oh, you’re never on your own in the desert. There are snakes, birds, lizards . . .’
Too drastic for me.
And then I heard that a number of famous triathletes were flying in from all over Australia to contest an Iron Man competition on Cable Beach. Men in Broome – at last! I turned up in time to catch the final of the tug of war. Darwin Killers versus Premier Security. A man short, the Darwin Killers turned to me. Would I?
Would I! Ha!
We spat on our hands, dug our heels into the soft sand, and took the strain, all for one and one for all. ‘Heave, men, heave!’ And when we pulled Premier Security over the line, with what innocent selfless manly joy did we fall into one another’s arms! ‘Well pulled, men!’
I’m lying. Premier Security won. And Darwin Killers never asked me to join their team. I merely watched from the sidelines with my sandals in my hand.
But I’m allowed to dream. ‘Heave, men! Heave!’
Australian Hairdressers
The girls at my hairdresser’s in Melbourne call me Heoward. It’s a nose-ring thing. ‘Hi, Heoward! How air you?’
It’s queerly comforting. They are like little talking marsupials. I gaze at them in amazement. They don’t look big enough to have the wherewithal to produce words. The only time I see such creatures is when I come here to have my scalp massaged, my beard trimmed and my hair scrunched.
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