About The Beginning of Everything and the End of Everything Else
Her name is Persia: a girl of the 1970s, cherishing a nature sure in its curiosity and uncluttered values.
His name is Adrian Parkes-Bourne: a man magnificent in his firm grasp on life and and his belief in modern affluence.
The beginning is their meeting, and that is also an end, for Persia’s life becomes singed by the relationship then bleached to suburban conformity.
This is a simple story of a marriage between self-certainty and self-probity; a marriage where freedom of spirit is fettered and disciplined and life is seen as a continuing sequence of beginnings and ends.
A curious and sensitive book from a new and talented Australian writer.
To
Miles and Cama
Contents
Cover
About this Book
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
About the Author
Copyright
Chapter 1
The conception was accidental and in a graveyard. The soldier went to war and the woman swelled.
The child was difficult from the start. Moving in fluid, feeling already the will stirred against it, it kicked as often as possible. Intruding in this strange red body of some other person, growing to form parasitically, it sensed at once that it had been claimed, and its life was to be ordered by the flesh which had nurtured the seed to flesh. To survive it was necessary to presume on this bone and matter which was about, and which beat, and burbled, and throbbed.
When it was time for the child to be born the mother wept over letters at night and sent locks of her hair to the husband-soldier and he went to his commanding officer, and was granted a week’s leave. But the baby did not choose to come in the week that the father and mother demanded, and held on to the corded, spongy, slime-coated womb so that the woman and the man had to part again, still not knowing what lay within the woman’s body.
And when the child was ready to declare itself, it came, full-formed, round, crushed, bloody and wet. It came, and cried, and was born. And it was a girl, and immediately was marked with a band round its wrist and a surname written in purple indelible ink.
It was only the feeling of growing which kept the child growing, the feeling of ants which ran over fingers without thinking. The child enlarged, knowing it had been beaten at times, knowing it had not always been liked, and yet never remembering. The child grew, and began to understand there were adults who manipulated the world, and who could not remember how they had been. It grew, without labour or effort, according to its kind, and formed smooth limbs about itself, and found it was in a world which was not ordered, apart from superficial structures, and began to reach for other people, because that was said to be safe, to speak with others in the same predicament.
There had been a bus going past, and stopping at the yellow marker. People from town had alighted and scurried to ordained abodes. Persia, who had come down to look for mail, had seen the man come from the bright interior of the single decker, last through the door which hissed, unravelled, and almost slammed on the end of his coat, like garden shears at pruning time.
‘What are you thinking about?’ the man asked.
‘Nothing,’ Persia answered, because it could not be tackled.
She looked at him and saw he was an intelligent and graceful being with a proud body and a sure way of moving and a belief in himself; a being so cut and bound that he could only be reached distantly. He was strong and solid, a body putting itself through its life from beginning to end when it had not even discovered what it was, had never looked and did not want to know, beyond ordinary routine.
He looked in his letter-box, removing a handful of letters, which were thick with importance, and of manila and red stamping. He stood in the dusk, against the traffic of exhaust and home-coming cars, the great high-rise block of flats above him, a small portion of which might have been his, the scent of severed stalks all about. He opened his letters with total disregard for all that was about to happen.
Then, when he had grown so strong and over-powering because beams came out of him like light-house glare on promontaries, and when Persia thought she would have to escape in some direction before she was faded out, the man smiled. It was not an easy smile, and came from effort, and although it tried to be as ordinary as possible it could not help being main when it came from him.
‘Do you have a plot?’ Persia asked him.
‘Plot?’
‘Yes. In this garden.’
The man snorted. He was quite total. He did not require any more additions. He was ticked, and approved, and signed.
‘I don’t go in for gardens,’ he said. ‘I’m an accountant.’
There was the lawn between them, and other people who walked along the path that lay between the ridiculous front gate which did not even restrict dachshunds, and the lighted foyer which did not restrict moths. So they continued standing with the lawn between, with no reason for standing except something which made them do so, as reeds which have no alternative but to be where they are.
The man shuffled and re-assorted himself, and coughed. Then he said, ‘Well, I think I’ll go in,’ and looked at the letters in his hand.
After they had stood some more, he began to move towards the building, because it would have been difficult to remain any longer groping across the lawn. Then Persia followed in his wake, and all the outside which was around became irrelevant. Only the man was real, because he insisted on being where he was, and put his feet so that they held him onto the earth, and he was pinned and alive.
There was a lift which came and opened, and then they were in the lift, and the lift locked behind them, and they were close in the air and the bright neon, in motion with the motion of the ascending machinery, seeing each other in made light, which was more widespread than moons which were limited. To stand beside him and to be in the radiations of his skin and bone, and to smell his smell of business and flesh, and to see his shoes, which were city shoes, and the cuffs of his trousers, and where his tie bolted his neck, that was enough. His eyes were strong like torches dropped in the sea that still burn until dawn on beaches. He made you be not graceful because you knew of yourself, and how you were just ungainly swipes at existence.
The lift reached the nineteenth floor and it was necessary to alight. The door thudded behind them. They looked at each other and did not look at each other. In the lift they had used up all their watching, and they had none left, and did not know how to remove themselves from each other’s company, both wanting and not wanting to be removed.
The man went to his door and Persia went to her door. They both knew of each other’s opposing backs, and the shoulder blades which were stiff because there were no words to ply them. The man opened his door and Persia fumbled in her bag for a key.
The man won, and vanished. Persia went inside and sat down on the settee which being a centre of life was the only stability to carry through the changed past. It had been inhabited to varying degrees in staggered hours, stained with cups of coffee and urine, semen, and dog’s hair, having harboured loving and hating, and been warmed and cooled alternatively by people rising and then falling again to position, among the sags and lumps.
Because she did not believe in weighed and measured plans, nor holding lists of reasons, it was neither necessary to consider his c
ompatibility nor his station, for she had been told in handfuls of intuitive baskets, without reference to experience or forethought, that the man should become her man. For although he had made no promise, and been spare with his words, which had been remote, and unfamiliar in detached fields, he had made everything which had been before end. He had come out of accidents of walking and routes of buses to land in the right place at the right time, and put her life differently forever. It was like matching pieces of bread for sandwiches. So that although to any watching person the meeting had been irrelevant, Persia knew quite completely that it was the beginning of everything, and the end of everything else, like renovated houses with closed walls.
*
‘You’re very young to be living on your own,’ the man said.
‘I have a flatmate,’ Persia replied. ‘And anyhow, I am twenty years old.’ It was hard to make the words and answers match and follow and fit. They went in starts and stops and did not link or join, or pull each other along.
‘Oh,’ the man said, but continued to disapprove. He was too old and too solid. Persia would have liked to have pushed him into the water which was blue, and stunk of chlorine. He sat there contemplating and considering, like old hillsides in England. But even pushing would not have provoked a scream. He would simply have turned the situation into a consideration of motives.
Persia stood up. She had been waiting all morning for him to come down to the communal pool, but now was upturned by his arrival. Unfolded and straight and above him, she knew of her own smooth tight skin, packed on its thin bones, and gracefully bound.
‘I think I might go up for lunch now,’ she said, and poked at an artificial crack in the cement, which pretended to be separate blocks, but was in fact all poured from one machine.
‘Perhaps you’d like to come up and have a drink with me some time,’ the man said. ‘My name is Adrian Parker-Bourne.’
‘Oh.’
‘And yours is?’
‘Persia.’
It was quite natural to him that all people should be investigated before they were approached. He stood up so that he was tall and put a hand on her shoulder, so that it was a plan to cast a magic spell, and describe with compass circles and triangles. The touch had been implanted and made a hole, and the open gape was a mark, so that she was marked for all time. Because Adrian had come first and noticed her first, and set her up because of his choosing.
Chapter 2
Sometimes at night the sun was full and heavy like waiting rooms in maternity clinics, with bits threatening to break everywhere. Sometimes there was also the feeling of knowing there was more to life than merely keeping the peace. But for the time being there was still too much to find out, and you could not act in the way that was right until it was ready.
One night coming home the sun was gone and stars turned on strings, and sometimes went out completely when flying saucers blocked them momentarily.
‘Hello,’ Adrian said. ‘What a lovely night.’
‘I’m just going home from work,’ Persia said, and could not think of one sensible remark, because she was stupid and gangled.
‘Yes, I am too,’ Adrian said.
They walked on in silence. It was possible he might swerve away and be gone at any moment.
‘The people on buses stare out as they drive past,’ Persia shouted. ‘Caged light.’
‘Caged light?’ He coughed. ‘Oh I see.’ He was willing to put himself out, to try and reach across, and be plebian.
He was himself, and under the stars, with a wall on one side which was in fact no more than a couple of layers of bricks. It was like pushing off from rushes and mud into the clear central stream which raced past because there was no stopping. Adrian, whoever he was, had, because of positioning and the arrangement of paths and patterns, appeared, through no planning or fault of his own, and now had to be negotiated.
The process of being born was continuous, and not yet ended. It did not ever end, being born, and it was growing up to know that what you thought was an end was just a beginning. Perhaps you only stopped being born when you died, and even then it was doubtful whether death itself was complete, being merely a passage towards some more complicated existence.
‘Those buses are always so crowded,’ Adrian said.
‘They bounce,’ Persia said.
So they walked down the path which was concrete and quite ordinary, and Adrian opened the silly little gate which was as high as a knee and not as fluid, and they passed through, as if it might have hindered them had they not grappled with it, and he shut it again, with deference, as if in fact it really did divide, and Persia said it would have been easier to climb over, and Adrian said, yes, it would have been easier. The words then were marked, like white signs among straw grass because they said that tonight was there for later reference.
In the foyer there was the white light from too much neon and the plants which might have been plastic, their leaves shining from spray-on polish, and the lift, and Cecil.
‘There was a woman asking for you,’ he said to Persia. He had a rubber mouth which rolled in waves and dips.
‘My mother?’
‘Could have been. She was magnificent, and wafted, and shrieked.’
‘Must have been my mother.’
‘She’s outside somewhere, or gone.’
Cecil’s eyes were clear and backwards like madmen.
‘I suppose she found out my address from work,’ Persia said. ‘I ought to have known she was far too determined to ever believe in disappearance.’
Persia pushed open the foyer door and went outside again. There among the star strings she could see the cars parked along the curb, and her mother’s jammed sideways in an illegal curve. She was unlocking the driver’s door. She was still a mother, Persia was surprised to see. Neither the insult, nor the fact that the mother might not even like the daughter were significant now. It was only important that she was familiar and safe, and could be returned to, and was there, bracing bitumen and wrestling with keys, and in a way, defeated.
‘Have you lost your keys again?’ Persia asked. Her mother swung around, quivered her face, and began searching for suitable expressions. She did not intend to let the moment pass without drama. She was determined to exploit it to its full potential. The headlines were already written in her own private theatrical.
‘Persia! How could you! I’ve been worried sick. It really was extremely selfish. I have twenty-one letters for you, and I never knew where to redirect all your phone calls.’
‘I don’t like arguments.’
‘And neither do I. But one must clear the air at times.’
The mother trembled, her cue having been stolen. Perhaps daughters, even though unliked, did in some way hold some special recommendations. It was necessary to embrace, and smell powder.
‘Did you speak to Cecil?’
‘Oh that strange boy in the hall? He insisted on congratulating me.’
‘Why?’
‘He thought you were quite nice. I can’t imagine why.’
‘He believes in reincarnation. Also, there is another man. I’m staying with Smithey. She’s playing in a tournament tomorrow. Would you like to come up and have a drink? I have learnt to cook quite well.’
A mother could come back and at once you had to tell her everything, as if it would not exist without her knowledge. There was nothing you could hide from her, because confrontation produced compulsive confessions.
But she said, ‘I must be getting back to your father. The roast will be burning.’
Persia tried to remind herself that she had, after all, come here to escape.
‘Please come some other time,’ she said to her mother.
‘We’re going away next week-end, but perhaps the next one . . .?’
Persia opened the door for her mother.
‘Here are your letters dear,’ she said.
‘Thank you,’ Persia answered, and took them.
The mother drove awa
y again. She drove down the street in the big car which rocked and swayed and threatened to hit gutters or collect chromium trims. Having possessed, she was now pleased to relinquish. Persia felt herself to be small and young. She went inside.
*
Cecil, being an inhabitant of the unit block, and a remote acquaintance of Adrian, asked Persia down one night. His flat had thick red carpet like wading through tomato soup, and was even sticky. But mostly it was the mirrors which were coated on all sides of the walls like paper, sometimes in tiles, sometimes in sheets, some black like deep waxed marble, others clear, some red or yellow, some sand-blasted with yachts or mermaids. There were mirrors like fans with dimpled brass frames, there were heavy cedar bound mirrors propped against open doors, there were even mirrors framed like cameos and hung in groups, on strings which turned in the breeze from the open verandah door. Whenever you turned the real world forgot to be confined, and was unlimited, and retreated eternally.
‘Come into my mobile experience,’ Cecil said, and held open his arms, which were then everywhere in all angles, in all colours, stamped and shadowed. He seiged the room, quite by chance, for he had no intention of doing so, backing away inside himself, and laughing at everything and nothing so that he would be noticed as little as possible by drawing attention to everything else.
His face was round and his nose was big and his eyes were big and he had long black lashes, like ingenious clowns whose eyebrows vanish into their hairlines, and whose eyes are so wide they split and divide in two.
He took bows like wooden men, and gangled his limbs which were as youth’s limbs ought to have been. He laughed apologetically and looked at the floor, and turned his shoes upside down almost. He seized Persia’s hand, after having trouble catching it because of the independent wishes of his own limbs. He kissed it lavishly just above the wrist, dropping it again before he could be accused of anything. The wet mark remained and Persia was too polite to wipe it off.
‘It’s like tremendous crowds,’ Persia said, and stepped in among the images which shifted, and danced and mocked. She tried not to watch herself, even though it would have been interesting to do so.
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