Second Half First

by Drusilla Modjeska

  It might have ended there. He asked for the bill and when I reached for my bag he said, No, Let me – which I did. We said it was good to see each other, and how odd it is growing older, and the way we see the person who was in the person who is, so that age doesn’t seem as it does for those we don’t, or didn’t, know. The vanity of age, I said. The curious thing was that the Ross sitting there at the table didn’t look anything like as old as he had in that photo on the internet. The possibility of plastic surgery crossed my mind; that could explain why he looked like a stranger as well as familiar. Or maybe the change was in me and there’s no need for surgery as an explanation; whatever that face had once done to me, or summoned up in me, it no longer did. I looked at my watch. Ten minutes until the next bus home. It was then that I said what had been waiting to be said for the hour or more we’d sat there. I made it a story, about Martha being here, and the slough I’d dropped into when she left, and the night I looked him up, the unexpected night when this unexpected book started. Not that it’s about you, I said. You’re the trigger, not the subject; the ‘conceit’ – in literary terms – that started it. It’s about a whole lot of other things, my mother, psychoanalysis, reading, writing, New Guinea, living away from where I was born. At this point I felt a sweep of feeling. Was I dancing a dangerous dance? Would I regret it in the morning? Or would I regret it more if I didn’t say what needed saying? It wasn’t that I feared being shamed for myself; if I feared, it was for the sake of a book, which at that moment in that restaurant sprang into its own life, no longer a private musing that might as well live beneath my bed. No! It was a book, insistent and real, for all that it was, in fact, only half-finished on my desk. Was I jeopardising it by telling Ross of its origin? But if I didn’t would I be jeopardising it further when the day came that I’d have to tell him, or he’d hear about it, or read it and know the deceit? I put my bag back on the floor.

  ‘Maybe I’ll have a glass of wine after all,’ I said.

  It was then that we talked, carefully, tentatively, another half-hour at the table before we went to look at paintings before I caught another bus home. He walked to the front of the gallery with me, put out his hand, then an embrace, quick and cautious, a tear in his eye as well as mine, just possibly, a very small one. Or maybe not.

  ‘It’s been good,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s been good.’

  ‘As to the book,’ he said, ‘do with me as you will.’

  Of the talk that half-hour, only a little remains. I remember a few of the things he said. He used the word extremis of the state I’d been in, which was indeed the case. He said there was ‘something powerful’ about me and that he’d had to turn his back to survive. That surprised me, though I’m not sure he meant it as a compliment; powerful in my anger and grief, I suppose he meant. He said – and this also surprised me – that he hadn’t known how to be honest with me, or what being honest with me would mean, what it would look like. And all these years I had thought it was his honesty that brought me undone; the confession of the penis, not the confession of the heart. When I said I was left with a sense of him as a chimera, he said he was left with a sense of himself as a man, in that regard, he didn’t much like. No blame. No acrimony. That long-ago injury somersaulted into another shape at a table with a man in a dark jacket whom, in that present, I found I quite liked.

  When I told Martha – who arrived from Singapore soon after for her term break – that Ross had said he hoped my seeing him wouldn’t be destabilising, her hackles shot up. It was one of those moments when you realise that something has shifted and it’s now the young, who are no longer so young, protecting us. The little girl who could once be picked up when she fell over in the sandpit, her face washed, an apple found, or a piece of chocolate, now rose in defence of me. On this occasion I didn’t need it. He hadn’t meant it with the vanity she ascribed to it, and all I needed to do was shake my head. The ground I stood on back then had been unstable, I said, and the air pressed down on me; but, as I’d told Ross, now and for a long time, though I couldn’t quantify it, the ground beneath my feet was firm and the air around me light.

  So there it was, the end of June, half a year gone, half a book written.

  14

  July. The salvia in the front garden cut back, neighbourhood cats taking advantage of the clear space to shit and scratch. Vicks VapoRub, Helen read somewhere, keeps them away. It doesn’t, not entirely, but it helps. Other than cats, there were no irritations, no interruptions. Jeremy was in London. His elder sister had died – she’d been ill for a long time and was ready to go – and as the last surviving sibling, Jeremy went to sort out her house. We had dinner before he left. He was sombre, and asked if I’d try again when he returned. We can remain friends, I said, but more than that, no, not if it meant returning to the revolving door of dependence and resentment, habit and reproach; it did neither of us any good. I could be part of his support team, if there was a team to be a part of, but that was all. Something needed to change, I said, but change was not in Jeremy’s repertoire. So he was in London, ringing once a week, sounding morose but otherwise not too bad, while here in Sydney my house was quiet. I wrote each morning and walked each afternoon, a drink or a meal with Helen up the road; that was the tenor of my days. It might sound boring, and maybe it’s a symptom of age when I say that it wasn’t. Sinking into a book, finding its shape, letting it build, chapter by chapter, is, for me, one of life’s great satisfactions. Mostly. There are times, I admit, when I still wish I was an artist, and could lay it all out on the floor, an object in three dimensions that I could walk around and see from every angle. Gertrude Stein said the reason artists were mad and writers were not – a dubious proposition, but still – is that artists wake up every day to see it there in all its imperfection, hanging on the wall, balanced on studio tables, impossible to avoid. Janet Malcolm is closer to the mark when she writes:

  To the writer, the painter is a fortunate alter ego, an embodiment of the sensuality and exteriority that he has abjured to pursue his invisible, odourless calling. The writer comes to the places where traces of making can actually be seen and smelled and touched expecting to be inspired and enabled, possibly even cured.82

  I don’t expect to be cured, or even want to be, but it’s true I invariably experience a hit of envy when in the studio of an artist friend – the physical nature of it all, their strong arms, their dirty aprons. All the way through the writing of this book, I’ve been able to see Helen’s work as it’s come into being in her studio. I saw the first of the vessels that were inspired by the blunt-backed boats in the bays at Skopelos – an ancient shape, which, once rendered to its essence and etched onto metal plates, is part vessel, part boat. While I’ve been writing the last chapters of a book she knows about only in broad outline, Helen has made a series of three-dimensional bowls. Each began with a sheet of intaglio printed paper from plates ‘etched’ in salt water at a beach near the print workshop on Skopelos. Once printed, she moulds the paper, wet with a casting agent, into a vessel, a bowl which, when dry, changes shape from round to oval and back again according to the level of moisture in the air: a breathing, living container – a bowl, or a tiny boat. She has made eighty of them, and as she makes each next print the ‘etched’ surface of the plate wears down, resulting in lighter and lighter tones, so that when the bowls are assembled their colour fades from almost black to almost white, gradation within repetition. While I write on, they have been exhibited twice under the title ‘earthen wear’. In her artist statement, Helen writes of the parallel she sees ‘between the wearing down of the plates’ in her use of them to make prints, ‘and the wearing down of our earth in our use of it to sustain an ever demanding human habitation’.83 I see that too, of course, but from the perspective of this book, for me they are also little boats of friendship floating together, a flotilla of possibility. Oh, to be able to do that − to accumulate those small living, breathing vessels, to see them there in front
of me. Of course I’m envious! I can, and do, talk to her about this book, but I can’t show her it – well, I can, and will, when it’s finished. But while it is still on my desk I can’t ask her what she thinks of this paragraph or that; would it be better here? I can’t say, What about this semicolon, this comma, although it is a real question as my punctuation has changed with the writing of this book.

  But even with Helen, even with the vision of those vessels sailing alongside each other, when I walk back down the hill to my house with its pens and paper – no smells, no heavy presses, no bottles of acid – there’s a countervailing sense of relief. Imagine having to step around or over all those little objects; imagine if all my paragraphs, all those semicolons were actually there, tangible beings filling the house. Gertrude Stein is right; I’d go quite mad.

  What I would like, though, is for a book when it is finished to transform itself into an object, a three-dimensional object that represents it, that I could put on the table or lay out on the floor and walk around. You can do that with a book, of course, once it’s bound into an object, but you can’t see its essence, its being, without reading the words, line by line. I don’t want to make the object. I am well reconciled to my invisible, odourless calling. Artists make good friends and excellent companions, but when it comes to the way they create and work, they are another order of being.

  And so are architects – fortunately.

  It was in July that Stephen rang to say he thought he’d come up with a solution to SEAM’s problem of how to get resources into those remote locations. Before the visit we’d made in April with Alison Lester, having only imagined the fjords from photos, Stephen had been attracted to the idea of a floating literacy centre that could move between the fjords, from one village to another; he’d seen photos of a barge on a lake in Africa, with a market on the deck and a school built above it. A neat concept, but impractical: expensive to build and maintain, and what would happen when the next cyclone – or even strong winds and high tides – pounded that usually peaceful coast?

  Stephen had not been impressed by the school building where Alison Lester worked with the children. With an uninsulated roof, slatted sides preventing cross-ventilation, it was hot, hot, hot. I’ve been in those schools often enough not to notice, and anyway didn’t have time to contemplate the absence of a ceiling beneath the tin. It was the first time Alison had been to PNG, and although she has run her book-making project many times in Australia, she didn’t know what to expect, and I wanted everything to go as smoothly as it could for her. She was donating her time, and the materials we’d brought with us: wax crayons, paper, watercolours, stencils, scissors. Before we left, she’d said that fifty children was about all that was manageable, so I sent through a message to the school, to the teachers, and to the village. Fifty, I said, suggesting that this time we work with children from the middle grades. But when we arrived at the school and were drummed up the steps into the classroom, there were at least a hundred children singing in welcome. Who was going to send half of those expectant faces out of the room? Not us. So we arranged the school’s two classrooms with the desks pushed together to make working tables, each for six to ten children of similar age. We then divided the materials among the tables, crayons piled in the middle, watercolours, brushes and pencils. Fortunately we’d brought extra paper, and Alison’s provisions were generous. In the heat of that crowded school, she didn’t miss a beat, no sign of dismay, leading us all, showing the kids what could be done with materials they hadn’t encountered before – and within minutes, it seemed, they were all drawing and writing their stories. In the first moment of pause, not long in, I was standing beside Alison when we glanced down and saw rows of little eyes looking up at us though gaps between the floorboards. These were the children from the elementary class that was not part of the school, along with some too young even for that, and others who were not enrolled. So they all came in too: another thirty children, or more, cross-legged on the floor. ‘The tiny school building at Tainabuna,’ Alison wrote afterwards, ‘was almost bursting with kids painting, drawing and telling their stories. I’m sure if you’d looked down from a cloud you’d have seen it glowing with creativity. It was a hectic, wonderful, magical day.’84 By the time we’d finished, we had a painting or a drawing from each of them: houses on stilts, fish, mountains, pigs, birds, trees, canoes, pathways.

  The next round of work was the following day with the teachers back at the resort by the airstrip where there was power. We transferred the images to Alison’s computer and printed them out into twenty-eight-page books; she had even brought a laminator to do the covers. When we returned to the village late that afternoon, the children came running to see the books. Parents came from their houses to shake our hands. On the table for the meal we shared there was crayfish from the reef, sweet potato and pumpkin from the gardens, the best bananas you’re ever likely to taste. The children were crowded round, turning the pages of the books. They knew exactly who had drawn which drawing, and they told us again the story of the picture, the story of the child. Look, they said to each other, to the adults and to us, we have made a book! What would you write, Alison asked, if you wrote another story for another book? One child would take a canoe out past the rocks, along the pathways of the ocean, until she knew every bird, every fish. Another would walk with his friends through the forest to the highest peak where the ancestors came from. And then he’d build a house. What will your house look like? That was Stephen. What will you keep in it? Books! Yes, he’d build a house just for the books, all the books together, all our stories.

  That night we fell asleep under our mosquito nets to the sound of the children still talking, still looking at the books. They would not go to sleep, the teacher said the next morning. They were excited.

  While we’d been at the school, Stephen had been looking at the village, talking to the men about their architecture, the materials they use, their methods of building. The school and the church were the only buildings not made by the men themselves from materials that came from the forest. Two buildings with tin roofs and neither had guttering for a tank, and neither had power. Near the school was a large community building with a sago-thatch roof, open sides and raised bamboo-slatted floors. Cool and beautiful. Why bring in tin when this was the way of the village?

  In Moresby we’d visited children’s libraries in the settlements, a project that started small and in less than a decade had grown to have twenty libraries catering to the least advantaged of urban children.85 Most of the libraries are in refitted containers, which gives them power and water. But while the classes that take place inside are impressive indeed – there are kids lined up each morning waiting for the library to open – it was hot in there; again no cross-ventilation. While Alison and I were inside reading with the children, Stephen was outside with the caretaker having a good long look. Those building were cheap, serviceable, and they could be secured. They were also unimaginative, without charm, making no use of the breezes, no gesture towards a tradition of building that had been developed to combat the heat. Could a container be realigned somehow so that an entire side opened out, perhaps? Could it be combined with sago thatch to cool it down? These were the questions Stephen pondered back in the hotel with its security guards and businessmen. It seems parodic, but in the bar one night we were there, Thomas Piketty was on the television being interviewed about Capital, his book on rising inequality. Next to us another man talked to New York about immense sums of money, while Stephen and I contemplated the cost of refitted container.

  And that’s where I was up to with his thinking when he rang me that afternoon in July to say he thought he might have cracked it. What do you think of this? he asked, opening his laptop at my table and spreading out his drawings and diagrams. He showed me images and specifications of flexible roofing materials that can be combined with solar panels – enough to run a couple of computers and a printer – and with a water bladder to collect drinkable water. Why lug in he
avy roofing material when this folds up like a tent and can be erected in a day? Rather than a refitted container, why not combine this roof with traditional building methods and practices: the best of the modern, the best of the traditional? Yes! But what about security? With those open sides where would the books go? The computers? Wouldn’t we still need a building of some sort to put them in? And wouldn’t that have to be made of those heavy materials if everything wasn’t to vanish on the first night?

  No, Stephen said, way ahead of me, and before he showed me the next part of the design, he reminded me of the giant open clam shell at the end of the peninsula where the canoes turn in to one of the villages. He had a photo of it, perched there on the rocks; it’d become, for Stephen, a talisman. He’d found an off-the-shelf box used by the military, 1.4 metres square. My heart sank. Don’t think military, he said. Think of that giant clam. Strong on the outside; beautiful inside. The box can be carried by a team of strong men; it can be secured into position; it is vandal-proof, and waterproof. Inside, there would be individual cabinets made of bamboo ply, that could be lifted out, each designed to be used from all four sides – with panels folding out as working surfaces for the computers, or lifting up as display boards, along with shelving, storage, a place for the printer, curriculum materials, art supplies. A modern version of the cabinet of curiosities. Stephen’s cabinets are designed on Le Corbusier’s system of form and proportion – the Modulor – a system itself based on the Golden Mean and the proportions of the human body. From whichever side you approached the cabinet, he explained, it would meet the scale of the human body. Clever. Although, as we looked at it that first day, I’m not sure I realised just how clever it was.