by Alex Miller
The book was old and well used. The cover had fallen off long ago but the title page was still legible. Billy Bunter Omnibus, it said above a line drawing of a fat boy with a scarf. I began to read.
Time passed.
The boy waited.
A small shuffling movement from him woke me from my thrall and I looked up from the book.
‘I’ll swap you,’ I said.
He gaped at me for several seconds.
Finally I kneeled down and, placing the book on the pavement by my hand so that he could not snatch it up and run away, I took off my skates and handed them to him. Without a word, he turned and fled.
I should say at this point, I suppose, that my parents had managed to buy the roller skates only because my sisters and brother had all agreed to forgo a present themselves that Christmas. It was an astonishing sacrifice on their part. But I had not thanked them or wondered how it had been done. Destiny had been in the air for me with the skates. I had been sent on a journey. It was not of my own doing.
By the time I got home it was dark. My family gathered around me and my father asked, ‘Where are your skates?’
‘I swapped them for this book,’ I said.
My father took the book in his hands and opened it. We were silent, watching him. After a minute of reading to himself he began to read aloud. My sisters and brother and my mother and I stood at his shoulders to see the illustration of the fat boy. My father read to us until he reached the end of the first chapter, then he closed the book and handed it back to me. ‘It’s a good book,’ he said. There were murmurs of approval all round.
Such was the generous spirit of my family that not one of them—not even my older sister, who liked to bully me—ever reprimanded me for swapping the skates for the old book. They seemed to understand that the skates had been a worthy sacrifice in the service of a higher cause for each of us. And that’s my story of how at an early age the book was received into my family as a mysterious and powerful sign.
2002
Living at Araluen
In 1967 I was deeply demoralised after working in the public service in Canberra for two years and needed to get out of the place. With the help of my first wife, Anne, I managed to get hold of twelve thousand dollars and bought a rundown, fifteen-hundred-acre farm in Lower Araluen. My reason for buying the farm was to have a place where I could write without the distraction of a nine-to-five job. Araluen saved my life. Another year in the public service would have killed me.
Lower Araluen is beautiful; wild forest, very steep, hilly, with nice little creek flats. The Araluen Creek ran all the way through my property and the southern border was the Deua River. This is marginal country. It’s not country for people to make a lot of money on. Fortunately, I got the contract for the mail run, which gave me a modest monthly cash payment. I grew my own vegies and began buying a few head of breeding cattle at the Braidwood market. I knew how to deal with cattle in the bush. Horses had come with the property; I had once made my living as a horse breaker and a stockman. Over the next few years I built up a modest herd of Hereford cows and I grew tomatoes and pumpkins for the Canberra market. Together with the money from the mail run I had enough to live on.
Alex at his desk at Araluen, c. 1972
At Araluen I wrote three pre-novels. In other words, I did my apprenticeship there. The first pieces of mine that were published in mainstream journals like Meanjin and Quadrant were written there.
Alex at Araluen with his dog, Blue, c. 1972
I drew on my time in Araluen for my fourth novel, The Sitters, and returned to this landscape in my ninth novel, Lovesong, as the home of John Patterner. For me, John Patterner is a good Aussie bloke of the kind I knew in Araluen; a modest Australian with enough intelligence and curiosity to go to the university and make the journey to England. Like me, John Patterner also went to Melbourne University. He’s got a lot of my biography in him. I know and love the places he knew and loved. I know the smell of his country and the feel of it. Like him, I loved Araluen and the time I spent there. I’m always pleased if I can get some reference to Araluen into my work.
2009
EXCERPT FROM
The Sitters
In her childhood bedroom in her mother’s house at Lower Araluen there’s a little blue china dish on the chest of drawers. The room is so small that Jessica doesn’t need to get up from the bed in order to reach the dish. The little dish fits snugly into the palm of her hand. She taps the ash from her cigarette into the little blue dish, which she remembers from when she was a child, and she weeps. It’s the first moment of her return. As the tears run down her cheeks she lifts her face to the ceiling and blows out the smoke of her cigarette. It is a confusion that is both sadness and joy that makes her weep. Then she stubs out her cigarette and she dries her eyes and blows her nose. And she replaces the blue china dish on the chest of drawers and she laughs and tells herself that she is an idiot. She runs her hand along the top of the chest of drawers. A piece, like a small bit taken from a pie, is broken from the bevelled edge of the chest of drawers. She inserts the ball of her thumb into the hollow of the ‘bite’ and rubs it back and forth. This is one of those idle gestures that are ventured upon involuntarily. There is something intensely familiar, something unexpectedly private and deeply personal, in the pleasure she gets from the feeling of rolling the ball of her thumb in the hollow of the wood. She is taken by surprise and she repeats the action. She rolls the ball of her thumb in the little hollow and searches in her memory for something. But it is like trying to remember a dream after waking. The harder she tries to remember, the more recessed the image becomes, until it is lost altogether.
1995
In the End it was Teaching Writing
The day after I received the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 1993 I had a call from Richard Friedman, who at that time was the Professor of English at La Trobe University. Professor Friedman, or Dick as he asked me to call him, offered me a job teaching writing. For many years I had been struggling, as most novelists must do, to balance a need to spend time earning a living with a need for clear periods of time in which to compose the novels I felt I needed to write. The conditions attached to the teaching job that Dick offered me were far more favourable to my writing than the conditions of any position I had previously held. So I accepted his offer at once—and Dick Friedman and I became friends and have remained friends ever since.
When they heard what I was going to do, my friends all asked me, as if the question had been poised on their tongues for years, waiting for an opportunity to be asked, ‘But can you teach writing?’ I didn’t know the answer to this question, of course, and I think I responded with something like, ‘Probably not, but perhaps I can offer students encouragement and give them a real sense of what it is like to take on the business of writing novels as the principal occupation of one’s life.’ The question of whether or not I could teach writing was one that greatly occupied my thoughts for the next few months while I prepared myself to begin working at La Trobe. I was anxious to know the answer.
Meanwhile, for a reason associated with the literary award and with publishers, I visited England. While I was in England I took the opportunity to stay with my mother in Dorset for a week. My mother was eighty-six and this, though we did not know it at the time, was to be the last occasion on which we were ever to see each other. My mother was in vigorous good health and we walked in the New Forest almost every day during my visit. On the last day our walk ended at a pub on the edge of the forest, and she suggested we have lunch there. We ate, and between us finished a bottle of a Spanish wine called Bull’s Blood, then walked home arm in arm to her house in the village of Burton.
I had left my childhood home in London to come to Australia alone when I was sixteen, and although I had frequently visited England since those days and had often seen my parents, my mother and I had never before spent a week alone in each other’s company. It was towards the end of the week that my mother pointed
this out to me, as if she and I had at last stolen a week together. When I left her the following day to drive back to London in my hired car, we both pretended not to be deeply moved at our parting and sought to reassure each other, repeatedly, that we would be seeing one another again quite soon, when the two of us would spend another wonderful week together.
Alex’s mum, Winnie, on their last walk together
I had been teaching my two classes at La Trobe for three weeks when my mother telephoned me late one evening. ‘I’ve had an offer of death,’ she said. We both laughed and agreed it was probably the best offer she was going to get at her age. After her Irish beginnings my mother was brought up in a convent in Chantilly. A strict Catholic when she was young, she loved the nuns and had been treated by them with great respect, even with a degree of favouritism, and had always spoken of them as her family. Her memory of her time growing up in the convent at Chantilly was of a happy childhood. She was eighteen when she returned to England and met my father. From that day she had never revisited her faith and rarely spoke about it.
‘It was a visitation,’ she said to me over the telephone. And the moment she said this, I knew that she would not have told anyone else about the offer of death in quite this way. ‘Two figures dressed in white came for me,’ she said. ‘They told me to fall back into their arms and they would take care of me through the darkness.’ We were both silent for a long while. ‘And you turned them down?’ I said at last. ‘Yes, darling.’ She sounded a little sheepish at this admission. ‘Do you think I should have accepted their offer?’
Two or three weeks later, when I was preparing work for my students’ crucial seventh week of term, my sister telephoned me from Windsor and told me our mother was very ill and was in hospital. ‘The doctor says she has heart failure and will not last more than a week or so,’ my sister said. In fact, it took my mother six weeks to die. According to my sister’s account it was a slow, painful and, in the end, terrifying experience for my mother, as her various systems shut down one by one, her poor heart retreating to conserve its failing strength, until at last she was blind and bloated beyond recognition.
I didn’t go to England to see my mother during her final illness. I felt I had to stay with my students, who I felt were relying on me. The response of my students to the work we were doing together had been far more compelling than I had ever imagined it might be. There were not many of them and we had quickly become a passionately committed group of writers, knowing ourselves privileged to read the vulnerable early drafts of each other’s work—a unique privilege, I believe, at that time, for most of us. We were all learning a great deal about the business of bringing a piece of writing out of its clumsy early stages and making of it a confident work. I didn’t feel I could leave my students without betraying the trust and the hopes they had placed in me and in the process I had initiated with them.
Some years after my mother’s death, I visited my sister in the small town in Provence where she was then living. I had always regretted not going to England to farewell my mother and had never resolved the feelings of guilt I associated with her death. I was eager to talk to my sister about my mother’s final days and asked her to tell me everything she could remember. When my sister had finished her account she said, after a brief silence, ‘Mum’s last words were, It will be all right when Alex gets here.’ She looked at me. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘But Mum was waiting for you. That’s why it took her so long to die.’ My sister was not being cruel in telling me this, she was being honest, and I am grateful that she had the decency and the courage, and the faith in our love for each other, to tell me the whole truth.
When my sister had driven me to the railway station at Montelimar, and we were standing together in the forecourt about to say goodbye, she said, ‘It’s all right, you know. Mum understood that writing meant everything to you.’
‘It wasn’t my writing that prevented me from coming,’ I said. ‘It was the teaching writing.’
2008
The Last Sister of Charity
For Robert
Our family GP, Andrew McDonald, God bless him, picked up the big telltale pulse in my abdomen during a routine check. It was last March and I was leaving in three weeks for Paris and Provence for a two-month holiday with my family. Andrew sent me to John Gurry, who diagnosed a 4.7-centimetre aneurysm of the abdominal aorta. ‘They don’t usually burst before five centimetres,’ John said. ‘Enjoy your holiday. Call me when you get back.’
It was John Gurry’s use of the imprecise ‘usually’ that nagged at me, as well as the scant three millimetres of leeway. But it didn’t spoil the holiday. For the most part I forgot to think about it. Wandering around the Musee d’Orsay or going to the ballet in the crazily overdesigned Palais Garnier, or practising my French and enjoying the wines and cheeses of Nyons in the golden sunlight of Provence, I had become the old invulnerable me once again. It was only when I woke in the early hours in our apartment near the Madeleine and lay in the eerie glow of the Paris night, feeling around with my fingers for the thing thumping away below my ribs, that I sensed an edge of panic. If it bursts I’m dead! My wife lay sleeping beside me, but I was alone in the dark. She had assured me, ‘If it bursts, darling, I’ll rip you open with a kitchen knife and grab it.’
I’m sixty-three, I’m lean and fit and I’ve never been ill. My body had always been utterly reliable—I had secretly exulted in its perfection! I’d stood in hospital wards at the bedsides of less-fortunate relatives and friends, young and old, who had undergone what used to be called heroic surgery but which nowadays, with the high-tech and drugs, rates only the prosaic adjective ‘major’, and had felt impotent to offer either comfort or reassurance through the pall of chemicals and pain that lay between us. I’d watched them weep with gusts of emotion that caught at them helplessly, and I’d been glad to get out of the hospital and away from them. I am ashamed to say they seemed to have lost something of their reality for me, these people hovering at the edge of death. There was just a hint of superiority, of the hubris that it could never happen to me, in my attitude. Not overt cruelty, not a lack of feeling, but a desire to protect myself from their pain and their excessive emotion; a decision that there was no way of responding to these terribly ill people that would mask my own inadequacy. I waited for them to get well again, to get real again, as if communication between us was not possible until they did so. There was a secret guilt in my relations with them. I knew I could have done better.
I did not understand people who could counsel patients suffering this kind of distress. I did not understand how anyone could be counselled in such circumstances. I couldn’t imagine ever responding to such counselling myself. I was certain of my emotional strength. It was one of the few certainties on which my sense of myself was based. I had always seen my own way through crises unaided. I believed I always would. I thought there was a hero inside me.
This certainty about the autonomous durability of my emotional life was as chimerical as my exultant belief in my perfect body had been. But I didn’t know that yet.
I took three books and plenty of writing materials into the hospital with me. I’d decided to make my hospital stay a reading and letter-writing holiday. As I settled into my private room that first evening—a view over the city, the late-winter sun gilding the cupolas of the Exhibition Building, a view not utterly unlike the view we’d enjoyed from our apartment in Paris—I had only one pressing question for the nurse: Did the hospital serve wine with dinner? Of course, the nurse reassured me, I would be served wine if I wished. She withdrew the first needle from my abdomen. I was alone in the small pleasant room. Books, wine, peace and quiet away from the email and the phone and the PC. No visitors. I’d told my friends, I’ll see you when it’s over. I settled down in the armchair by the window and began reading James Bradley’s Wrack. It had been on my list for some time.
I went into theatre at three the next afternoon and returned to the ward at eight, after spending a period
in recovery. I’d had an epidural but couldn’t remember much: a green sheet in front of my eyes, figures moving, voices, lights. Did my wife visit me that first evening? I can’t remember. John Gurry, the surgeon? I imagine so. I remember the nurses coming and going, attending to the drips and catheters, giving me injections and taking samples of blood. But more than anything I remember the blinding headache and the nausea.
For the next three days the headaches didn’t go away and the nausea became worse. I didn’t know it then, no one did, but I’d always had a tendency to migraine and the epidural had triggered a major series of these terrible headaches. I couldn’t eat or sleep and the painkillers they were giving me for the wounds had no effect on the headaches. I took anti-nausea pills half an hour before mealtimes. But the smell of food, even of orange juice, made me retch. Even plain water had a revolting metallic taste to it. The operation, however, had been a success and I was doing fine. I had nothing to complain about. I didn’t complain.
The afternoon of the third day, I think it was; one of those rare moments when I was alone and undisturbed, lying in my misery staring at the ceiling, Wrack and the wretched old man at the centre of its action long forgotten, scarcely able to believe that the headaches and the nausea and the pain in my body would ever go away, suffering my own wrack. A young man came into my room. I prepared myself to give blood or to be given an injection. The young man leaned down and touched my arm. ‘It’s all right,’ he reassured me. ‘I’m Robert. I’m a counsellor.’ I made to speak to him, to tell him he was welcome, but an irresistible tide of emotion flooded my chest and I burst into tears. I clutched Robert’s hand, laughing and weeping with inexplicable joy. I’d had no idea that this enormous reservoir of emotion had been gathering in me. I was taken by surprise. Robert stayed. We talked about literature and philosophy and people, our lives and beliefs. He was training for the priesthood. He had decided against a study of the scriptures in favour of becoming a counsellor. A study of people. I said to him, ‘You counselled me. You have a gift.’ We were both delighted. I was sad when he left. I had never wept before with a stranger. With another man. I was astonished to realise that my life, my spirit and my existence, had acquired a new dimension. Counsellors seemed the most wonderful and necessary people.