Barley Patch

by Gerald Murnane

  The chief character always tried to prolong a certain moment during this sequence of images: a moment when his image-self and his image-wife had lain on their image-bed to rest and when his image-self had closed his image-eyes. When he observed other sequences of images in which his image-self took part, he seemed never more than an observer and his image-self an entity to be observed. Only when his image-self seemed to rest in the dim image-room in the image-cottage surrounded by images of mostly level grassy countryside and lines of image-trees—only then did he seem likely, for however short a time, to be no longer an observer of images of himself but instead himself living an image-life. He tried to prolong the moment by staring, as it were, at the images in his mind of the few items of furniture in the room or of one or another window-blind with a crack in its fabric that let through a sliver of the dazzling light from outside, but what followed was as though his future self had fallen briefly asleep in the bedroom of the cottage and had dreamed one of the vivid and disturbing dreams that occurred to the chief character himself whenever he fell asleep in daylight. The cottage would seem a mere cabin with a single bed and a chair and a cupboard and with a window facing the sunlight of early afternoon. The cabin was one of a row of such cabins. The men who occupied the cabins were employed as grooms and track-riders on a large property where the mostly level grassy countryside was partitioned by white-railed fences as well as by lines of trees. The man who awoke in his cabin in the early afternoon may have begun work on that morning several hours before daylight. If he had raised the blind and had looked out through the window of his cabin, the man might have seen, beyond several lines of trees, the upper windows and the roof of a house of two storeys. The man understood this in the way that the narrator of his experiences seemed to understand certain matters in dreams. The man understood further that he had no wife or girlfriend and that he was far from being a young man, but that he might admire from a distance a certain young woman who came out each morning from the house of two storeys and who supervised the training of a stable of racehorses in a mostly level grassy place among stands of trees. Or, he would seem to be looking at the cottage from the outside, with the difference that the window-frames and other trimmings were painted orange-gold, and with the further differences that the cottage stood among a row of cottages in a street with gravel footpaths in a city in northern Victoria and that he was a child of four or five years standing on the footpath in front of the cottage and in the company of his mother and another woman. The women seemed to have stopped for no other reason than to speak derisively about the young married woman who lived in the cottage. The two women spoke as though the young woman was at that moment inside the cottage and was reading magazines or books when she might have been doing housework. The child understood further that the surname of the young woman had as its first syllable the word Bells. He learned some years later that the surname was of Italian origin and began with the letters B-a-l-s- . . . , but for as long as he seemed to be standing in front of the cottage he supposed that the surname of the young woman behind the drawn blinds was one of the superior sort of surname that denoted things seen or heard readily in the mind. He supposed that the colour of the window-frames and of other trimmings was the rich metallic colour of the bells denoted by the surname of the young woman or of the bells mentioned in a certain book that the young woman remembered having read behind her drawn blinds or of the bells depicted in one or another picture in one or another of her dim rooms.

  When the chief character had first bought his binoculars, he had supposed that he would use them mostly for looking at fields of racehorses on the far sides of racecourses and occasionally for looking at birds in grassy countryside, but he had not hesitated to take his binoculars to the upstairs flat. During the year in the early 1960s when he was a regular visitor to the upstairs flat, the chief character was no longer a clerk in a building of many storeys but a teacher in a primary school in an outer suburb of Melbourne. He had earlier undergone a year-long course of teacher-training but not in order to live with a young wife in a cottage painted cream with dark-green trimmings; he had become a teacher so that he could apply to be transferred to a school far from Melbourne if ever he felt drawn in future to live among mostly grassy countryside. During the years while he had owned the binoculars, he had gone out on one occasion only with each of two young women, but he mostly saw himself as a bachelor who admired girls or women from a distance. He arrived with his binoculars at the upstairs flat hopeful that some or another magnified image from the opposite building might embolden him in his future dealings with young women but more inclined to suppose that whatever he might see through the binoculars would only show him more clearly what he was deprived of as a bachelor.

  The chief character had moved out of his parents’ house during his twenty-first year. He took with him two cardboard grocery cartons full of books, several manila folders of drafts of poems waiting to be revised, his binoculars, and his clothes. During the four years between his moving out and his arrival with his binoculars at the upstairs flat, the chief character had lived in six different rented rooms in various suburbs of Melbourne but had kept safe his cartons of books and his folders of poems and his binoculars, which were still in their original case of imitation leather. In the case also was a parcel of white cloth, about half the size of the chief character’s thumb. The parcel was stuffed with some or another sort of crystal or granule, the purpose of which, so the chief character had heard from someone, was to draw off the moisture in the air inside the case of imitation leather.

  Whenever he opened the case in order to take out the binoculars or to put them away, the chief character would touch the parcel several times with a fingertip. Afterwards, he would roll the parcel between several fingertips, pressing and squeezing the cloth until he could feel some of the many crystals that were packed into the parcel. Whenever he merely touched the parcel, he seemed to be plumping a pillow that belonged on a bed in a bedroom on the upper storey of a doll’s house. After he had plumped the pillow, it would have been ready for placing on the single bed in the upper room in his mind so that the young female personage whose room it was could have lain to rest in the bed whenever it had pleased her to leave off looking out from her upper-storey window and to step across the room to her bed. If it had occurred to him that the usual occupants of a doll’s house were lifeless figurines, then he would have seen the female personage in his mind either as a character in a comic-strip in his mind or as the handiwork of a craftsman of genius who had equipped the personage and, perhaps, each of the other personages in the same house, with tiny clockwork or electric motors that enabled the personages to walk and to perform certain rudimentary movements. Whenever he fingered the granules inside the parcel, he seemed to be fingering beads of a substance that he knew as Irish horn.

  Like many another earnest Catholic schoolboy during the 1940s, the chief character had carried in his pocket a set of rosary beads. Sometimes he passed the beads between his fingers while he murmured the collection of prayers known as the rosary. He understood that the beads themselves were no more than counters or markers and had no intrinsic spiritual value. However, he had once received as a present from his father’s youngest sister a set of beads somewhat different from any that he had previously owned or seen. A small cloth label attached to the beads stated that they were made from genuine Irish horn. The chief character did not know at the time, and never afterwards learned, what were the origins of Irish horn, whether genuine or imitation. But his not knowing as a boy what the beads were made from only added to their value in his estimation. He would have prized them for their appearance alone. Every bead differed, however slightly, from the next, if not in shape then in colour. If a bead was not distinguished by some bulge or concavity, then it was more richly tinted or less so than its neighbours. The fifty and more beads, when viewed from a distance, seemed predominantly blue-green, but hardly any bead, when he looked closely at it, could have been called either blu
e or green. In many a bead was a tint that he could not name, but this only pleased him the more. He would sometimes hold bead after bead between an eye and the light, hoping to see what he saw whenever he peered into certain of his glass marbles or into certain panels of coloured glass in the front doors of houses: a luminous other-world waiting to be populated by personages of his own devising; or, perhaps, a limpid medium, much less dangerous than water, through which he might have found his way towards places beneath rivers and lakes where characters from comic-strips or from poems watched over their female captives who might have been, after all, not dead but merely fast asleep.

  The chief character took his binoculars to the upstairs flat on a few Friday evenings and Saturday evenings but got no benefit from them. He and his companions soon tired of keeping watch in the dark bathroom until the light might have been turned on in the young woman’s bedroom. Sometimes, when one or another young man had seemed to stay overlong in the bathroom, the others would suspect him of having sighted the young woman and kept her for himself alone, as it were. Once, when the chief character had stepped into the bathroom in order to urinate, the light had just then appeared in the young woman’s room. The chief character had picked up the binoculars from where they lay in readiness on the bathroom floor, but before he had brought them into focus the light had been turned off again.

  On a certain Friday or Saturday evening, the chief character’s binoculars were lying in readiness on the floor of the bathroom of the upstairs flat but all of the young men gathered in the flat were drinking beer in the lounge-room and watching some or another television program. At a certain point in the evening, according to the narrator of the abandoned work of fiction, the young men found themselves watching images of bishops or cardinals or high-ranking personages of the Catholic Church while some or another religious ceremony was taking place. Several times, while the young men watched, the image of one or another personage was seen to close its eyes and to bow its head for a few moments. After the second or third occasion when an image had appeared thus, the young man who lived in the upstairs flat began to jeer at the images of the personages.

  The young man who jeered was one of two persons in the room who had attended a Catholic secondary school but had later ceased to call themselves Catholics. The other such person was the chief character. The young man who jeered looked while he jeered in the direction of the chief character. The young man then left off jeering and asked a question of the chief character as though he might have been the only person in the room who could answer the question. The young man asked what it was that Catholic bishops and priests and members of religious orders saw or affected to see whenever they closed their eyes during religious ceremonies.

  The chief character of the work of fiction that would never be completed gave some or another flippant answer to the young man who had jeered at the images, but he, the chief character, was not comfortable. This was not because he was in any way sympathetic to the personages whose images had appeared just then on the television screen but because he himself, a few years before, had often closed his eyes and bowed his head during religious ceremonies. The chief character and the young man who jeered had sat in the same classroom during their final year of secondary education. The jeerer had failed his matriculation examination and had then gone to work in an office in a building of many storeys where he had spent much of his time planning to find a young woman who would live with him without first having married him. The chief character had passed his matriculation examination and had then gone to live in a building of two storeys among mostly grassy countryside, which building was the novitiate of a religious order of priests. The chief character had lived for only twelve weeks in the building of two storeys and had then returned to his parents’ home in a suburb of Melbourne. Soon afterwards, he had gone to work in an office in a building of many storeys where he had spent much of his time planning to write poetry or prose fiction. On the evening when his former classmate had jeered at the images on the television screen, the chief character had suspected that his former classmate was jeering at him—not as though the chief character still prayed or still attended religious ceremonies but as though his staying alone in his room during most evenings and his trying to write poetry or prose fiction was his way of closing his eyes against the real world for the sake of something illusory. The chief character could not have defended himself if he had been thus jeered at. Moreover, he suspected already that he was far from being the sort of writer who could include, years later, in one of his works a scene, so to call it, in which a fictional writer avenged himself against a fictional jeerer.

  Twenty and more years after the young men had gathered of a Friday or a Saturday evening as reported above, the chief character began to notice in newspapers one after another report of one or another person’s having been paid a sum of money by one or another diocese or religious order of the Catholic Church for the reason that the person had been sexually assaulted by some or another Catholic pastor or teacher. On one or another of the evenings mentioned above, the young man who was reported above as having jeered at images of Catholic clergymen announced to the other persons gathered in the young man’s upstairs flat that he intended to take legal action against the Catholic Archdiocese of Melbourne and against the orders of religious brothers and nuns that had taught him. The grounds for his legal action were going to be that his various parish priests and teachers had set back his intellectual development by ten years and more; they had filled his mind with legends and superstitions instead of useful knowledge. (Even if the persons in the upstairs flat had not been drinking beer for several hours, none of them would have supposed the young man to be talking seriously. Any sort of legal action against the Catholic Church would have seemed preposterous folly in the early 1960s, even though certain priests and religious teachers were perpetrating during those years some of the sexual assaults that gave rise to criminal charges and out-of-court settlements in later years.)

  The sum of money that the young man was going to demand from the Catholic Church was the equivalent in today’s currency of about twenty million dollars. When his listeners asked how he would spend such a sum, the young man answered them in detail.

  Twenty and more years after the young men had gathered of a Friday or a Saturday evening as reported above, the chief character began to notice in newspapers one after another advertisement offering for sale one or another building of two or even three storeys that had formerly been a convent for an order of nuns or a monastery for an order of Catholic priests in some or another town in the countryside of Victoria. At the time when the young man in the upstairs flat began to explain how he would spend the equivalent of twenty million dollars, it would have seemed preposterous to suppose that any convent or monastery in any town in the countryside of Victoria would ever be offered for sale, and yet the young man predicted that the Catholic Church, which was then a flourishing organisation, would soon begin to be less than flourishing and that convents and monasteries would soon be offered for sale. The young man explained to the other persons in the upstairs flat that he would use part of the proceeds of his legal action as the purchase-price of a building of two or even three storeys in the countryside of Victoria, which building had been formerly a monastery or a convent.

  When the young man who lived in the upstairs flat first mentioned a monastery or a convent, and whenever he afterwards talked about such a building, the chief character saw in his mind one or another detail of an image of a two-storey building of bluestone that he had seen twice only, on a certain Saturday when he had attended a race-meeting for the first time. The chief character had been taken to and from the race-meeting by a paternal uncle who lived in a coastal city in the south-west of Victoria. The race-meeting had been held some twenty miles inland from the coastal city, at a racecourse that was surrounded by mostly level grassy countryside with trees in the distance. Between some of the trees were the roofs of buildings in a small town. The tallest of th
ese buildings was a convent belonging to an order of teaching nuns. The chief character had only twice glimpsed the convent through the windows of his uncle’s motor-car but he, the chief character, had noted several dormer windows above the level of the upper-storey windows. He had asked his uncle whether the windows were mere ornaments or whether each window had behind it a cell-like room where one or another nun read or prayed or slept of an evening. The uncle first told the chief character that any male person who went beyond the hallway and the front parlour of the convent earned the penalty of immediate excommunication. The uncle then said that the nuns in the convent in the small town took in as boarders a few older girls from districts further inland. Perhaps each of these older girls, so the uncle said, was allotted a comfortable attic room with a window overlooking grassy countryside and part of a distant racecourse.

  One of the conditions of his buying the convent or monastery, so the young man told his listeners in the upstairs flat, was that all the furnishings and fittings should be sold to him. He would be especially concerned to have the chapel handed over to him with its altar and tabernacle intact and the sacristy with its cupboards full of vestments and so-called sacred vessels. If possible, he would buy also the robes or the habits worn by the priests or the nuns who had formerly lived in the building. After having acquired the building, he would arrange for part of the first floor to be turned into a luxuriously appointed apartment for himself and the woman who lived with him. The rest of the first floor would be turned into many smaller apartments, each of which would be occupied, so the young man said, by a high-class call-girl. The upper floors would be converted into spacious apartments to be occupied permanently, or at weekends, by each of the young men who had visited him on the many Friday and Saturday evenings when he had been no more than a clerk who worked in a building of many storeys and who lived in an upstairs flat. One of these young men, of course, would have been the chief character.