Barley Patch

by Gerald Murnane

  When the young man had fitted out to his satisfaction the former convent or former monastery, so he told his visitors not only on the evening when he first talked of taking legal action against the Catholic Church but on many an evening afterwards, and when each of the smaller apartments on the first floor had been occupied by a high-class call-girl, then would begin the series of events for the sake of which the building had been bought and fitted out. On every Friday and every Saturday evening, the owner of the building of several storeys would arrange for the celebration in the chapel of the building of a Black Mass, that is to say, an obscene travesty of the Catholic Mass. Whenever he discussed this matter, the young man who lived in the upstairs flat would state that the chief character was the best qualified of all the young men in the flat to be the celebrant of the Black Mass. As the celebrant, he would wear only a chasuble of the style known as Roman, which would scarcely hide his nakedness. The young man from the upstairs flat would be the altar-server or acolyte and would wear only a lace-edged surplice reaching to his waist. The congregation would consist of all the other residents of the building of several storeys, each of them naked beneath the habit of a nun or of a priest. At a certain point during the Black Mass, the celebrant would reach into the tabernacle and would take out a croissant and a bottle of expensive wine. The so-called priest’s communion would consist of the celebrant’s buttering and eating the croissant and swigging often from the bottle. Soon afterwards, the congregation would be invited into the sanctuary not to receive communion but to take part in a banquet. (Food and drink would have been waiting on tables near by.) Towards the end of the banquet, a plentiful supply of comfortable cushions would be spread around the sanctuary, on the steps of the altar, and on the altar itself, in front of the tabernacle. Then would follow what the young man from the upstairs flat called a sex-orgy.

  After the young man of the upstairs flat had first disclosed his plans for the Black Mass in the building of several storeys, it became the custom on every Friday and Saturday evening for all of the young persons gathered in the upstairs flat, including the young woman who lived there, to spend some or another part of each evening in discussing how they might spend one or another Friday or Saturday evening in the building of several storeys after the young man of the upstairs flat had bought the building and had fitted it out to his liking. The discussions at first were simple. The young man of the upstairs flat owned a copy each of several issues of the American magazine Playboy, which had recently been allowed into Australia after having been previously a prohibited import. All of the persons gathered in the upstairs flat would look at one after another illustration of a bare-breasted young woman from the magazines and would cast votes in order to decide whether or not the young woman should spend some time as a guest in the building of several storeys. The young woman of the upstairs flat was interested in dance and music and would describe some of the items that she would later choreograph, as she put it, for performance by herself and other naked young women during banquets. The chief character tried to amuse the others by reading to them parodies he had composed of prayers from the Mass. In each parody words such as God, angels, and sacrifice were replaced by words such as Lucifer, devils, and farce. However, few of the persons in the flat knew anything about Catholic doctrine and liturgy, and the parodies aroused little interest. The only means that the chief character found for amusing the others in the upstairs flat was his performing a brief mime in which he took the role of a priest first turning from the altar towards his congregation with his head bowed and his eyes closed, then seeming to notice that something was amiss, and finally looking aghast. (The chief character never held back from discussing with the other persons in the upstairs flat the details of the banquets and the orgies in the building of several storeys, but he was never able to imagine himself as taking part in an orgy. Whenever the chapel of the building of several storeys appeared as an image in his mind, it was always fitted with a so-called side-chapel, a sort of alcove with a few pews to one side of the altar. If an orgy seemed about to begin, he would slip unnoticed into the front pew of the side-chapel and would there masturbate quietly while he watched the goings-on in the sanctuary.)

  In time, discussions about the building of several storeys became more detailed. Someone proposed that banquets and orgies should be filmed. This proposal led to plans for a library of films to be set up in the building together with a cinema where the residents could gather on quiet evenings to watch memorable scenes from past orgies. Someone then suggested the setting up of a film-unit which would not only record notable events in the building of several storeys but would produce short feature-films with contents grossly obscene: what would be called, twenty and more years later, porn movies. Mention of a library led also to discussion of books—obscene books, of course—and a plan for sending one of the residents of the building of several storeys by ship to Europe for the purpose of buying and smuggling back into Australia some of the most outrageous of the books reputed to be available in France or Sweden. Failing that, the chief character could be allotted a quiet suite in a remote part of an upper storey, could be provided with a baize-topped desk, a shaded lamp, and the latest electric typewriter, and could be urged to write short stories or novels with contents so foul that the works could never be published but would be circulated as bound typescripts among the persons who lived in or visited the house of several storeys.

  After a few weeks of the sort of discussion mentioned in the previous paragraph, the persons in the upstairs flat began to talk less about sexual gratification and more about the indulgence of some of their less urgent passions. Perhaps they had begun to ask themselves how they might spend the uneventful mornings and afternoons between the riotous evenings in the chapel. Perhaps the young men, knowing that they would never again want for sexual relief, were pleased to discover in themselves yearnings for more subtle and lasting pleasures. For whatever reason, the young men in the upstairs flat came around to discussing such projects as the setting up of a large room given over to the display of football memorabilia. After the young man of the upstairs flat had reassured the other young men that money would be no object in the fitting-out of the building of several storeys, he who cherished old football-cards and autographed pictures of premiership teams had taken to setting out in an imagined upstairs hall row after row of glass display-cases, each containing part of a valuable collection inherited from his grandfather. One young man loved to play poker. He was to be provided with a luxuriously appointed gaming room where he could spend whole days with like-minded persons, betting on the fall of costly, hand-painted cards. It was expected that many of the high-class call-girls would find their way to the gaming-room and that their presence, fashionably dressed, would give a stimulating piquancy to the atmosphere among the card-tables. A young man with simpler interests wanted to be provided with numerous large glass tanks, properly heated and aerated, so that he could stock them with rare tropical fish. This man assured the others in the upstairs flat that nothing would be more likely to rest them and restore them after a strenuous night of banqueting and sensuality than to wander through an indoor aquarium, admiring the changeable colours of gliding or darting fish or the swaying of green water-plants in limpid water behind sturdy glass.

  Of the various young men in the upstairs flat, the chief character was the last to report to the others how he hoped to amuse himself on uneventful mornings and afternoons in the building of several storeys. He supposed that the other young men were expecting to hear that he would furnish an upper-storey room with bookshelves and a writing-desk, that he would fill the shelves with classic works of literature, and that he would spend most of each day in his room, reading in a comfortable armchair or writing prose fiction or poetry at his desk, and when he was finally asked about his plans he tried to fulfil these supposed expectations. He would keep mostly to his room, he said, and the walls of the room would be covered with books and the desk in the room with pages of typing and h
andwriting. He knew from experience that the others would not be curious about the subject-matter of the pages on the table. However, for the sake of the few young men who seemed to be occasional readers of books he offered the information that his library would be missing many of the so-called classics of literature, given that he often struggled to read more than a few pages of one or another so-called classic. His library, he said, would contain many of the sort of book called by literary historians or critics a minor classic or a neglected masterpiece or a work that defied classification.

  The chief character hoped that his brief account of his way of life in his upstairs quarters would dissuade the other young men from seeking him out if ever they became bored with the goings-on in the more frequented parts of the building of several storeys. Perhaps after he and the other young men had been together in the building for a year and more, so the chief character supposed, and after they had been present together at many a Black Mass and after he had watched them taking part in many a sex-orgy and after they had looked up many a time from their cushions in the sanctuary and had seen him masturbating quietly in the side-chapel—perhaps then he would be more comfortable with them and would not object to their opening the doors of the further rooms of his remote upstairs suite and learning how he spent most of the time while he was assumed to be reading or writing. Perhaps then also, so the chief character supposed, he would not shrink from having one or another of the more friendly high-class call-girls look into his further rooms. During his first months in the building, however, the chief character would prefer to be taken for a reclusive reader of books and a writer of poetry and prose fiction.

  During those first months, the chief character would hope that the craftsmen climbing the stairs each day towards his suite would be supposed by the other residents to be building bookshelves and that the boxes delivered to his suite would be supposed to contain books. The craftsmen, however, would be skilled model-makers, and the boxes would contain the many thousands of components of the models to be installed in one or more of the chief character’s rooms in the building of several storeys.

  Once having got from the owner of the building a sum of money equal to the cost of several thousand books, including many rare first editions, the chief character would have employed a team of highly skilled model-makers to work under his direction in an upper room with a dormer window. The team would have begun by covering most of the floor with a taut, green-coloured fabric. The team would then have driven through this fabric and into the floor hundreds, if not thousands, of tiny white pegs. These pegs would then have served as supports for hundreds, if not thousands, of tiny white railings. The whole structure would have formed the inside running-rail, so called, of a miniature racecourse with long straights and gradual turnings. Beside the racecourse would have been numerous miniature buildings and car-parks set among miniature trees and flower-beds. In the area enclosed by the course proper, so called, would have been at least one miniature lake.

  Sometimes, when the chief character had got thus far in his plans and when he had foreseen himself lying for the first time on the floor beside the newly completed racecourse and looking along an expanse of green fabric bordered with tiny white pegs, he would be tempted to abandon his project. At such times, he would seem to have made only a toy-landscape, a place more suitable for recalling certain days in his childhood than for enabling him to see further across his mind than he had yet seen. But then he would foresee himself fitting a brownish Holland blind to the dormer window and then drawing the blind against the sunlight and then, perhaps, stepping back into a corner of the room and looking at the lines of pegs through half-closed eyes and even through a pair of binoculars held back-to-front to his eyes; and then some or another glimpse in his mind of something not previously seen in his mind would persuade him to go on.

  The other persons in the upstairs flat, if ever they cared to imagine the chief character in his suite of rooms in the building of several storeys, could have seen him only as writing at a desk with shelves of books around him. Soon after he had talked to the others about his way of life in the non-existent building, they had begun to lose interest in the orgy-house, as it came to be called. The poker games and the other diversions and even the Black Masses were seldom mentioned again, although sometimes an image on the television screen of some or another young woman would prompt one or more of the young men to reminisce as it were, about the good looks of the high-class call girls. It began to seem to the chief character as though he had been left in charge of the house; the less the others talked about it, the more clearly and substantially it began to appear in his own mind. Sometimes, when the house had first been talked about, he had given much thought to protecting his privacy; and he had seen himself often in his mind as being alone in his rooms in the late afternoon or the early evening and trying not to be distracted by some or another drunken shout or playful squeal from far below. As the others in the upstairs flat talked less about the building of several storeys, it seemed in his mind sometimes so quiet that he might have felt urged to go downstairs and to stroll around the deserted chapel until he had recalled a few hectic moments from some or another orgy that he had watched long before.

  The chief character had often sustained himself with daydreams about his future, but his wandering around a disused convent in his mind seemed unconnected with any life that he had previously wanted for himself. The empty upstairs rooms seemed more solid than any scenery from daydreams; the rooms seemed to be on the same level of existence as things that he would have called his faculties or his qualities; the rooms even caused him to feel a more ample person and a more worthy.

  He was no mere observer of mental scenery. He was not long in learning that he could alter certain details and have them stay as he preferred them to be. He had wanted for some time to extend the part of the building that he thought of as his own. His particular wish was for more dormer windows, each with an attic-like room behind it. Then, after no effort that he could recall, he seemed to be strolling past doorway after doorway in a corridor that he did not recognise. When next he looked upwards towards his quarters from the grounds around the building, an entire wing seemed to have been added. His desk and his bookshelves, not to mention his rooms filled with models, were now even further away from the main living area. Even if the other young men and the high-class call-girls were to settle in the building after all, he would hear scarcely a sound from them.

  He was in no hurry to call in the model-makers. He was now of a mind to have a number of attic-rooms filled each with a racecourse but he supposed that this would disturb the quietness of his suite for many weeks or even for months. For the time being, he was content to experience the subtle differences between room and room: in one room a red-gold hair still lay in the crack between two floorboards from the last days before the last girl-boarder there had gone home to her parents’ property far inland; in another room the hair, if he could have lighted on it, would have been black; the window of yet another room was the only window in all the building from which a person looking out might have seen on a day of sunshine the occasional distant flash of light from the windscreen of a motor-car and might have understood how far away was the nearest main road. (Seemingly, the chief character had shifted the building by the power of his imagination or by a supreme effort of his will; the reader will recall that the original of the building of several storeys was in one or another street of a small town.) Some rooms were distinguished one from another only by the mood that came over the chief character after he had stepped inside and had closed the door behind him. Perhaps the glimpse of the distant countryside that came to him through the sides of his eyes put him in mind of Tasmania or New Zealand, although he had never been to either of those places. Perhaps he felt weak and foolish to be an adult and yet to be devising elaborate games with painted toys. Perhaps, on the other hand, he felt that his life was all of a piece: the imagery that had sustained him as a child could yield still more meaning
in his later life. This last-mentioned feeling came to him sometimes accompanied by an image of an old man staring at the shore of a lake or a swamp where a gentle wave was breaking against a clump of rushes. The original of the image was a photograph of the psychiatrist C. G. Jung that had once appeared on the cover of the news-magazine Time. The chief character had read the long article that accompanied the photograph. He had not been able to understand the theories of the famous psychiatrist but he, the chief character, never afterwards forgot his having read that the psychiatrist as an old man had set out to play again his favourite childhood games in the hope of learning about himself something of much value.

  The chief character was most likely to bring to mind the building of several storeys during the many weekday evenings when he was alone in his rented room and was trying to write poetry or prose fiction. Instead of writing what he had intended to write, he would draw a plan of the upper floor of his wing of the building and would try to decide which of the rooms there would be the room where he would sit at his desk deciding such matters as the shape of each of the model racecourses, the sort of landscape that ought to be painted as a mural behind each racecourse, and whether or not each dormer window ought to be of stained glass and, if so, what should be the colours and the design of the glass.