Second Half First

by Drusilla Modjeska

  I could have given up, and there were times in Sydney when I’d wake at night cold with the fear that I’d got myself, yet again, into a situation of raising expectations I wouldn’t be able to meet. There were times when the obligations of exchange became onerous. It’s a complex place, PNG − nothing’s straightforward, I’ve barely skimmed the surface here − and it’s easy to feel snared, overwhelmed. But I’d go back to the villages, hear the news of all that had happened since I last visited, and there’d be no way I was giving up. One time Joseph told me there’d been a village meeting, and guess what, they’d introduced gender equity. You have? How? In PNG, where violence against women is endemic − though it’s not bad along that coast, nothing like in the Highlands and the towns. The women laughed when Joseph said some of the men had cooked one night, before their wives put a stop to it. The men were taking girls out on the canoes to learn to fish − that was still happening − and, Joseph said, it’s been decided that when the book house is built, the girls must all go. He’d read a report on the education of girls; he’d got it from someone in the Education Department. Did I know, he asked, that a woman who is educated puts three times as much back into the community as a man? Yes, I said, I must have read the same report. Very good, the women said, literate and non-literate, young and old. And although I haven’t heard of gender equity since − it’s not a term that’s entered the vocabulary of the village − the participation of girls is rarely questioned now.

  Another time the writer Russell Soaba flew across from Moresby to join Hilary and me. Russell had been at the Martyrs School outside Popondetta, and the boat he’d caught from his village further east along the coast had stopped at Tufion its slow way from Alotau to Popondetta, and on to Lae. Also on that long-ago boat was John Wesley Vaso, then a schoolboy and now an elder from Uiaku on Collingwood Bay, an hour and a half in a dinghy east from the fjords. I’d got to know him when I was trying to understand what had happened there during the dispute with the loggers that had resulted in a victory for the landowners, hard-won in the National Court, only to have the loggers return, or try to return, in another guise.80 John also joined us. He had his guitar with him. Russell had read the manuscript of The Mountain. An exemplary critic, and also a friend, he didn’t protect me and every one of his comments stretched the manuscript in ways that were wholly good. He’d recognised an element of himself in the character Milton: Milton’s writing, that is, not the fiction of the life I’d created for him. There in the fjords, where so much of the novel takes place, we enjoyed the play of fiction and character, moving between them, between the world of the imagination and the world around us.

  With John and Russell in the villages, the idea for a resource centre became clearer. Hilary had recently returned from Jordan where, among many other things, she had visited a foundation working with students in the Palestinian refugee camps. The organisation gave scholarships for university students and in return they would work for the community a certain number of hours for each term they were supported. They’d work in the small library that had been set up, or with the school children; they’d paint rooms and knock windows into the walls of dark houses. It was a way of thinking, an exchange that the village responded to, listening, asking questions, not just about this particular project but about the Middle East. Why such bitter fighting? What was America doing? Why were they there at all? And Australia? Obama? Joseph had read about Iraq online in Popondetta, and he’d read about it in Time, but the more he read, the more questions there were. I knew the feeling. Hilary and Russell had a go at making some kind of sense of it, a conversation continuing the next morning when we stopped on our way up to the gardens for Hilary to draw a map on the ground with a stick.

  On our last night together, the four of us stayed at the small resort overlooking the fjord near the airstrip, ready for the early plane out the next morning. On the terrace over a bottle of wine, maybe a beer too many, Russell reminisced about the student writers he had known and I’d read, a few of whom I remembered from back before Independence. Words had proved powerful then too, as the old colonial ways collapsed around the raised fists of student protestors. Newspaper editors had flown up from Melbourne to feature them; that’s not what happens now, there’s barely a flicker of interest in PNG unless it’s for stories of violence and witchcraft. Was change easier back then, with enough political and economic interests running the way of those young anti-colonial writers? Of course, John said. It’s all about money now, and no matter how you get it. No illusions there, yet despite all that he’d seen while fighting for his land, he is a man of humour. It bubbled up in him as Russell remembered lines from poems, and he strummed his guitar, picking up a theme here, a melody there, the familiar music of the Pacific. At the end of the evening when we were onto ‘the sad crying of the midnight sun’ – a line from John Kasaipwalova’s rolling epic allegory, Sail, the Midnight Sun – John raised his voice over ours with The House of the Rising Sun.81 That great Melanesian song, he joked, and it was, somehow, a fine finale to a fine visit.

  By the time Libi, the anthropologist, was in Sydney at the beginning of 2014, there was still nothing on the ground and not much more than nothing in the bank. The other piece of advice we’d got from everyone was that if we were going to raise money for SEAM, the resource centre would have to be sustainable, affordable and replicable. Would one literacy house for one village, one school, not be another, larger, version of individual sponsorship? Why this village, this school, and not the next one in the fjords, or beyond, elsewhere along the coast? As for affordable – which also meant transportable – how was that to be achieved when getting tin roofs and building materials into remote villages and rugged terrain can cost considerably more than the educational and literacy materials themselves? Think helicopters, barges, cranes. Each step of the way the questions got harder, more complex. Was SEAM to be another fiction in my head, with no more reality than the box in my study marked with its name, sitting there next to the half-written, abandoned Vanity? At least when it’s a book you don’t write, the only person you let down is yourself.

  While Libi was here, we walked and talked as we had in Milan, the fjords as present to us, this time, as the harbour of Sydney. Forest, rock, reef, waterfall: she knew them all. She knew the villages, she knew the currents and the tides; she knew the gossip in the township by the resort and the airstrip; she’d met Joseph and Euphemia. When it came to SEAM, she knew the need, and the dilemma. It was while she was in Sydney, staying with me, that I made a move – though I didn’t realise it at the time – that proved critical. I invited an architect I’d had a short email exchange with, but had never met, to join us for lunch at a café close to my house. He’d written to me after reading The Mountain. He’d been born in Port Moresby in 1966, he told me, which meant he was two when Nick and I arrived at the university, too young to comprehend what was happening around him. He was ten when his family left Moresby after Independence. The Mountain, he said, had triggered ‘clear and compelling memories of deep attraction (what I could describe as troubled love), yearning for what I was too young to see and actively take a part in, and for what I wish I could now be part of but feel (perhaps rightly) excluded from by dint of being white, and for the fact that PNG has remained at the rear margins of my thinking and identity for 30+ years.’ Reading The Mountain, he said, had ‘rekindled a desire’ to know the place again, ‘to know the people who are striving to make it strong’.

  ‘I try to imagine whether I could overcome my own fears by returning there and making a contribution,’ the email ended. ‘Kind regards, Stephen Collier, Stephen Collier Architects.’

  Well, I’d written back, as a matter of fact … And I told him about SEAM, without then realising that an architect was exactly what we needed. I thought of architects as urban and expensive, elevated far above the practical difficulties of getting tin roofs and sheets of fibro, or re fitted containers, into remote communities. I didn’t even realise it at lunch that day,
though I liked Stephen at once, and so did Libi, and we talked as if we’d all known each other for a great deal longer than we had – which is often the way with people who share that ‘troubled love’ for PNG. Afterwards he walked back to my house with us; he looked at the mats and barkcloth Libi had with her from Tufi, at the Ömie barkcloth on my walls, at photos of the first tropical fjords he encountered.

  ‘You should come up some time,’ I said when he left late that afternoon.

  ‘I will,’ he said.

  ‘Is April too soon?’ I asked, telling him I was going up then with Alison Lester, the children’s writer, to do a book-making project at the school. No, he said, and within a week, or maybe two, he’d booked his ticket.

  Serendipity? Luck? An alignment of the stars? Sometimes things come our way and people walk into our lives, and at the time we don’t realise their significance. Which is how it was with Stephen; how could it be otherwise after one short lunch? Besides, as soon as Libi left, I returned to the book – this book – that was insisting its way onto my desk and into my consciousness.

  I have made a lot of SEAM here, catching you up with the years since David died, but during those first months of 2014 I kept it out of mind to the extent that I could. One more visit, and if something didn’t happen then, I told myself, I’d have to face up to those raised expectations and find a way of telling the village how wrong I’d got it, that even in rich Australia I couldn’t find a way to make it work. Not an encouraging prospect. So I put the SEAM box in a cupboard, out of sight, and wrote. A book as diversion? Maybe.

  By May, one of Sydney’s best months, with high skies and chill nights, the water still warm enough to swim, Second Half First was powering along, its shapes squaring up, when Lynne arrived from London. Lynne, the friend with whom there’d been that tangle thirty years earlier when she was here on a fellowship at Ross’s university. You could say that it has something to do with feminism that we came back from that bad moment. Feminism gave us a framework, I suppose, a language for making sense of what had happened. A critique of the roving man was easy to agree on, but when it came to our part in it, the wounds inflicted, the words spoken, the hurts, the angers – that was a good deal harder. It was a long afternoon in the kitchen at Lynne’s house in London, with other people living there coming in, putting on the kettle. For Lynne it wasn’t the wound it was for me; it had taken several years before I could contemplate making that peace, but I did, we did, and I am glad. The daughters of Simone de Beauvoir truth-telling and responsibility-taking? Maybe. Or maybe that is part of the feminist biographical illusion, the truth being not so easily told, or agreed. But still, it was a significant afternoon, and since then we always see each other when we’re in each other’s cities, sharing as we do that movement between north and south, England and Australia.

  Lynne has had a successful career since those distant days, as an academic and a writer. Lynne Segal. She was in Sydney that May for the writers’ festival with Out of Time, her book about ageing. When she’d been here for her previous book, Making Trouble – feminist trouble, trouble as a woman – I had done the onstage interview with her, but this time I didn’t. I’m not a good interviewer, another skill I don’t have; I talk too much, go off on tangents. Sometimes I manage to pull it off, just, and I think I did with Lynne, but sometimes I don’t and it’s a bad experience, for me and – more importantly – for the writer who should be shown to her or his best. One of the worst interviews I have done was with Robert Dessaix; I don’t know what happened, for as an interviewer himself he is a good subject for an interview, and it’s not as if I didn’t know him well, or there weren’t questions to ask about the book, Arabesques, one of his best, about that perverse character André Gide. It was in 2009, that bad year, and I haven’t conducted a public interview since. Lynne’s onstage ‘conversation’ for Out of Time was a success; I was glad to be an observer, not a participant. The question she raised wasn’t so much how to survive ageing with its attendant decrepitudes, as how to live well – on into the last years of our lives, until eventually we must surrender to the challenge of dying. It’s a tough read, and though Lynne and I didn’t agree on sex and ageing, we argued amicably. I consider the easing of the hormonal imperative a relief; she sees it more as a cultural convenience that we’ve learned to accept, which of course it also is, in a culture that doesn’t like the face of the post-fertile woman. Another inequity. At a market one day, looking at clothes, I told her about the book I was writing, and the strange night of remembering Ross, the trigger that had had me writing these last five months. Even with two weeks in PNG, I’d written the best part of half of it, I thought, though with this book it was hard to tell as it seemed less than usually under my command. Our command. We laughed. What’s that? Did we ever have command?

  The weekend before she left there was a farewell brunch for her in a sprawling wooden house in Erskineville. It was a fine day, a little chill in the air, wintry sunshine, Sunday morning papers. Among the guests were people from the long-ago 1960s, when Lynne was at Sydney University and libertarian meant not the economics of a neo-conservative right, but the social and sexual freedoms of a bohemian left. In some kind of weird time warp the women were gathered in the kitchen, while out in the courtyard were a few of those once-powerful men, now with bad backs and painful knees, struggling to lift themselves out of their chairs. I was surprised to find myself talking to them and enjoying it, the allure and the danger stripped away – frail bodies with still-sharp minds, talking with a disarming humour, including about their early sexual antics. Though of course the ability to recognise bad behaviour doesn’t mean they weren’t boasting. Still, I was not in a critical frame of mind. I went into the kitchen to refill their cups and their plates, and we chatted on in the winter sunlight, mostly about books. Ian Bedford, one of the kinder of the men back then, had taken to fiction, and somewhere in the conversation he invited me to the launch of his latest novel, The Last Candles of the Night, in which he thought I’d be interested – and I was. I already knew it was a further investigation into cross-cultural relationships in India, and after talking for a while about writing across cultures, he told me the date in June, and the bookshop where the launch was to be held. Would I like to come? Of course, I said.

  ‘It should be a good evening,’ Ian said. ‘Ross will be here and is going to speak.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I’m not sure that’s the way I want to re-encounter Ross.’

  It was Ian’s turn to say, Oh. Then, Ah, as memory came slowly. ‘You were involved with him once,’ he said – half-statement, half-question.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It ended badly.’

  ‘Ross didn’t transition well.’

  I laughed. ‘You could say that.’

  ‘Do you not want to see him at all?’ This was the man with the bad knees who couldn’t lever himself out of his chair. There was a woman in the kitchen, he said, who still wouldn’t talk to him.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s not like that. I just don’t want to encounter him in public, not for the first time.’

  ‘Would you like his email?’ Ian asked.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  If Ross wanted to get in touch with me, that was one thing. But after what had happened – I used the word graceless – the move would need to come from him. But I did give Ian my email, and I knew Ian would give it to Ross.

  And sure enough, a week or so after the launch I didn’t go to, an email pinged into my inbox from Ross. It was polite, and slightly awkward. If I thought now was a good time to meet, he’d like that, he wrote. Despite being busy and leaving at the end of the month, he thought ‘we could probably work something out’. What we worked out was lunch in the restaurant at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

  He was already at the table when I arrived. He stood up, put out his hand. He looked immediately familiar, and also distant as if he might be a stranger, a man in a darkish jacket at a table with a glass of white wine. The harbour was it
s sparkling winter self, and the old wharf that was once a working wharf and is now luxury accommodation was solidly there, a reproof to the foolish person – me – who said that if the developers did what they ended up doing, she’d leave Sydney. There were moored yachts and expensive cruisers. Ah well. Be careful what you promise.

  I didn’t have a glass of wine; I rarely drink in the middle of the day and it was easy to refuse. I knew I didn’t need fortifying.

  We enquired after each other’s health. He is getting deaf, but otherwise okay. His hearing aid was new and not well adjusted. He told me of the bleakness around this journey back to Sydney. His brother was ill; an old friend and once lover was dying. He told me the title of the book he was working on, which I can’t quite remember but which made me laugh, something to do with the past and its fingers into the present. He liked teaching his one course a term. He could bicycle to the university from the house in Brooklyn where he still lives with Elena. She didn’t get a mention, not by name; but he spoke more of ‘we’ than of ‘I’. As to our shared past, it hovered at the table but it too remained unspoken. I said something general – about the nadir being more about my mother’s death, a deeper grief. Each decade, I said, which is true, has got better; each decade I am stronger and lighter. I’m not sure if he heard all or even most of what I had to say, as he didn’t realise I still went to Papua New Guinea though I’d said it several times. He adjusted his hearing aid and was, I think, quite interested in SEAM, surprised even, as if it were beyond his expectation of me. Or maybe not. I don’t know.