Letter to George Clooney

by Debra Adelaide

  She dragged this mute creature back into being, and it was a physical effort, as hard as pulling oneself awake when one knows one is not yet there at the crack of wakefulness. It was like dragging her out of the ground itself, the soil clinging to her, damp and cold. She sat her there, in a ditch, and watched the rise and fall of her chest, and knew she would live. It was half light, barely dawn. Why had she been beside the road? Had she fallen, or been pushed from a vehicle? There was nothing else about, no cars, no people, no buildings. There was not even a sound, or any trees. The road emerged from a scrubby background and curved to the same drab vanishing point. Ellis was clad in ordinary clothes, pedal pushers and a boat-neck knit sweater, striped orange and cream. Her hair was half across her face, tangled and dirty, but recognisable as a pageboy style. It was reddish brown. But her body was half coated in black soil and her legs were oddly straight from being dragged into the light, her bare feet – her shoes were lost – pointing back towards the ditch, and rolling beyond that, the landscape disappearing in a black-green cloud.

  But even as Dove dragged her from the oblivion of unconsciousness, as she heaved and struggled and swore for those last crucial metres in order to get the limp form away from where the cold earth and the dark scrub conspired to hold Ellis back, she was also seeing Ellis, in the story in her mind, in another place altogether. In the suburbs, in fact, in Ashfield, juggling her baby and stroller on that bus. It was re-running in her mind but it was not the same scene replayed, rather the same scene viewed from a different angle, and she noted new things: Ellis holding out a coin, the driver jerking the bus away from the stop, Ellis careful not to fall, sliding into the red seat halfway along, on the left, the baby on her lap. He was called Charlie. The women three seats in front, having discussed the absence of his sunhat with muted disapproval, were now holding their heads up high, gazing this way and that in the anxious manner of old people, looking out for their stop at the corner store.

  Then Ellis was walking down that street in Ashfield. It was wide, lined with cabbage tree palms. She was walking along the warm concrete footpath, smelling again the scent of grass, and of dust, of boiled onion and meat dinners, from the houses she passed. Brick homes, most of them, neat, silent and unwelcoming, their front gardens fenced, with hydrangeas, lasiandra and plumbago – why were the flowers all blue and purple? – her father’s place no exception.

  She had reached the front gate, she was through it, and had then turned to push it shut, listening for the latch’s oiled snick on the green wire gate, before walking up the path, when Dove realised Ellis had forgotten to replace Charlie’s sunhat, as she had meant to before she met her father, and there was nothing she could do about it.

  The images in her head refused to emerge from the pages. Cathy racing barefoot across the moors. Heathcliff beside her, both yelling with delight. Wuthering Heights was not about wild free childhood at all. It was barely even Cathy’s story. Instead it was the story of a servant, the housekeeper, the only one of her generation to survive. It was orderly, controlled, quiet. The novel had been swept and folded and locked. All the interesting, passionate characters were dead and buried before their time.

  How had this happened? How had its author, Emily Jane Brontë – Ellis Bell – so independent and stubborn, let this maddening, self-righteous housekeeper, this character who pretended to be much older than she was, steal the narrative like that? Dove recalled wisps of stories about the author of Wuthering Heights. Her potent imaginary world. How she refused social obligations. The visions she saw on the moors behind the parsonage at Haworth. How she once took a poker from the fire and scorched the bite of a rabid dog on her forearm. Her refusal to accept medical attention, until the hour before her death. You can send for a doctor if you like. How she then turned her face to the wall and closed her eyes forever.

  As Dove read the final chapter, where a woman sat in the kitchen sewing while her young charges played with words in books, she marvelled at its author. Emily Brontë had been brave as well as stubborn. She had permitted her story to be rewritten. She had abandoned it to the control of its readers. Although she conceived it, wrote it, published it – with a dodgy publisher, against the advice of her sister Charlotte – she had then let it go, entirely. It was no longer her story. She had created a magnificent illusion. Dove thought about why she had never realised this before, and why her reading of the novel was now so different.

  ‘“. . . and wondered,”’ Dove read, ‘“how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers, for the sleepers in that quiet earth.”’

  She closed the book and stared at her mother, whose eyes were shut. It was so simple, but it did not occur to her until she was placing the book in her bag to take home. It was not just that she had read the novel at the bedside of her dying mother. She had, for the first time, read the words aloud.

  When she abandoned the purple notebook and began to steal a half-hour in the morning before work, or ate instant noodles at the computer in the evening, she wrote with a sense of compulsion, almost peril. She dreaded interruption. The phone would ring. Someone might knock on the door. She feared the story would slither off and disappear like a snake into the bush. Or that she might just grab it by its tail and pick it up, only to see it transform into something quite unlike the story that had brought her awake those weeks back, awake with such clarity and urgency that she had reached for the notebook and scribbled pages of draft scenes before getting out of bed.

  As her mother began to be less agitated, more compliant, the phone calls, the meetings, the arrangements, began to dwindle. Dove rang the Grange for the last time.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ and even as she said it she wondered why she was apologising. ‘But my mother won’t be leaving the neurological ward.’

  The residential services officer cancelled the booking with cool efficiency. ‘We can refund your interim deposit,’ he said, making it seem like a very special favour when Dove knew the waiting list was long. ‘But you’ll need to invoice us.’

  Back in the hospital, the staff began answering her questions with increasing vagueness. The evening nurse smiled and said, ‘Your mother isn’t suffering. Don’t worry, we’re monitoring her every day.’

  Dove asked the resident outright, ‘Will she die soon?’

  The resident cocked her head and shifted her folder to another arm.

  ‘The important thing is that she’s remaining stable. And we’re doing all we can to keep her comfortable.’

  And Dove had to concur. Her mother was at peace, lying back on clean linen, her white hair, her white skin, smoothed and thin, exposing the bones of her face. Sometimes she would accept a few mouthfuls of soup or ice cream, a cup of tea. Other times she wanted nothing, waved her daughter away, her hand stiff like a dry leaf.

  Dove had by then written enough of her story to begin revising it, and so she sat beside her mother’s bed with her laptop. A structure emerged. As she worked she learned to block out the noises of the hospital. And she began to understand how to suspend work, quickly if necessary, hitting the save key and closing the computer if her mother called out, or if one of the nurses came by. She began to trust that the story would stay with her, and that her character, if she were strong enough, would remain in her imagination. And it was true that just as Ellis had lain on the earth choking for air, her breathing becoming less ragged, more regular, and as she had survived the ordeal of the nightmare operation, she would survive being tucked into a corner of Dove’s life as she waited at the bedside of her dying mother.

  Now that Ellis continued to live in the story that was still being written, Dove wondered at her fluidity, how she could be there in the ditch in the growing dawn, gasping and leaning on her elbows, struggling to sit up, crushed and exhausted yet clearly, undeniably, alive, and yet at the same time be walking to her father’s house. Her mother coughed softly beside her.

  As she saw Ellis at that gate, Dove wondered why she was even making this visit at all, but having watched
her place Charlie on the path where he would take his first unassisted baby steps and then hold her hand out and take him further up to the front door which was now being opened by her father – who was saying ‘Hi-dee-hi’ as he had for as long as Ellis could remember – she knew why Ellis was here, on the same day each week that she always visited. She knew that knowing this could be painful, and that she would have to be brave with her story just as Emily Brontë had been brave, and follow it where it had to go and then let it run ahead of her, alone. Ellis was here because her own mother was not and had not been for a long time, not since she was a baby. Dove finally understood this, and she typed this in between paragraphs, just a note in case she forgot, as her mother began to cough slightly again, a noise more like a groan. And now that Ellis was a parent, she came to prepare meals and clean the house for her father, with his only grandson. Charlie was beaming, arms out, tightrope walking, wobbling as he stepped forward, once, twice, three times, as Ellis laughed, reached out and grabbed him just in time before he fell, and swung him up to her delighted father on the front step. Dove’s mother coughed once more. She wished she had brought the cat in after all.

  If You See Something, Say Something

  There were two ads in the London Review of Books personals that attracted me that morning. Felix Green at a hotmail address wanted a clever mistress for very light duties, mostly conversation and drinking coffee. It was the name that intrigued me most, as I believed I could handle much heavier duties than that. But the idea of an amusing, interested, attractive and wealthy-enough man called Felix Green, aged 56, was promising. Only problem was, he lived in London and I was here, in carriage two on the 8.50 to Sydney’s Central Station.

  Rail Clearways – untangling our complex railways.

  Did you know that a sick passenger on a train at Berowra can affect trains to Penrith?

  Or that delays at Sydenham affect trains at Parramatta?

  Ralph, no surname, however, was seeking a companion for an overland journey through South America the following September, and was after someone with wit and resourcefulness, including the ability to mend a Kombi van with a hairpin and duct tape. The companion was not stipulated as female, but the hairpin made it clear.

  I always liked the name Ralph. It was the name of the first boy I was in love with, back when I was twelve years old and in my last year of primary school. Ralph had caramel hair, brown eyes, tanned skin and the most dazzling smile in the entire western suburbs. I believe I am still in love with him. He lived in a white fibro house down the hill, screened by pampas grass, which we would drive past on our weekly trips to the shops. There and back, I would slyly twist my neck and slide my eyeballs as far as they would go, to stare at Ralph’s house without letting my mother know I was staring. I am sure she always knew. I would wonder which of the flyscreened windows represented his room. Speculate on how, in the thick of the night, I would sneak from my house, at the top of the hill, and come to his window. I dreamed of fighting my way through the pampas grass and standing there until he opened the screens and leaned out, either to gather me up into his bedroom, or to leap out and join me in the steamy summer night. There we would exchange our first kisses, gently sliding our tongues together to taste each other’s passion – just as the magazine stories said. I for one would lick his glorious shiny teeth. He would almost burst at the tender warmth of my full lips.

  This was all sheer fantasy, as Ralph barely knew I existed, let alone cared about me. Had I appeared under his bedroom window late at night, he would have told me to piss off. Nevertheless, for years I secretly yearned for Ralph and his brilliant white smile, mourning the final day of term when he went off to a private boys’ school and I entered the local State high school. I would be tormented forever by the thought of him bestowing those splendid teeth upon other girls.

  Shop Here: Ladies Children Babies

  Sleepwear Outerwear All Sizes

  Fines Apply

  Skateboards Prohibited

  Over a year of travelling on the Illawarra line and I had come to take more notice of the signs. For a chronic reader, signs are vital. When I forgot my reading matter, which was rare, I could only read what was spelled out on the walls and hoardings and carriages surrounding me. It is no great leap from merely reading the signs to interpreting them, and then only a small step to start seeing in them something of profound significance.

  Sometimes the signs speak directly to you. Sometimes it is as if the signs were made for you alone. Hundreds of thousands of commuters every day go up and down the line, but a sign will be there for only one purpose: to speak to you. As I began to see and understand more in the signs surrounding me, I realised that the ads I was reading in the London Review of Books were becoming more fragmented. The personals were dissolving. People’s lives were disintegrating by the month. The ads were more desperate, fanciful, audacious, unlikely.

  Man, 45, seeks female, preferably under 40, for companionship. Dinners, movies, concerts, drives in the country. Okay, I want sex as well.

  Amid the plaintive and comically anguished offers or requests for vague relationships, Ralph’s ad struck me with its note of purpose, its promise of tangible adventures.

  I had never driven a Kombi van, let alone attempted makeshift repairs on one. But I had operated my old Corolla with a metal nailfile, and I felt that counted. In fact it was something I was proud of, as it involved ingenuity, persistence, a tricky manipulation of locks and contacts every time I wanted to open the door or switch on the ignition. With my nailfile skills, I felt I more than met Ralph’s requirements, even without the duct tape. But with duct tape I was a virtuoso. It was duct tape that was still holding my downlight together over my reading chair. Duct tape that kept my vacuum cleaner going; duct tape that ensured the noise from my muffler was kept to a minimum, and duct tape that meant the radiator continued to function. Friends and acquaintances (all male) had explained that duct tape was not designed to withstand heat. So the downlight would break apart again, the muffler would let fly with a growl sooner or later and the radiator hose would sizzle and explode. But in all instances they were wrong. Yes, I qualified for Ralph.

  Dear Ralph

  I read your advertisement in the LRB personals. I kept my old Toyota Corolla going with a nailfile (on reflection, a hairpin would have done the job nicely). However you are in the UK and I am in Australia. And next September I am not free. Plus I don’t have a passport. So why have I replied to your advertisement? I just thought you should know that there is at least one woman in the world who is resourceful with vehicle repairs.

  While waiting for a response, I received the next issue of the LRB. The neuroses seemed to have cranked up a notch. A professional M, 38, of Basingstoke at Box 19/12 wanted a girlfriend who could make his mother cry – a heartless common slut who would eject his mother from her two-year complacency. A female meteorologist, age not given, announced herself devoid of all pleasure since 12 June 2008. She did not specify what she wanted, merely what she was. Some of the correspondents were assertively punctilious about their requirements. For instance, a man, 37, sought a psychoanalyst/tailor/stevedore. Another man wanted a woman no older than 50 who was familiar with failure and beards, and whose taste in music was restricted to Belgian jazz. Ralph’s request for a resourceful driving companion was looking quite tame by comparison. Though he was yet to email me back, I did not regret contacting him.

  Sometimes the signs contain useful information. People stick up those photocopied messages, advertising bargain computer packages for sale, or rooms to rent in houses nearby, Chippendale or Redfern. Messages sticky-taped to poles and pillars with optimistic little tear-off flags at the bottom, telephone numbers that remain fluttering in the wind.

  Units to Let 8994 3001

  Sunny room in house with private courtyard. No animals.

  Meanwhile a physicist (M, 45) with a big dirt bike and swim fins was after a female pillionist to explore molecular gastronomy in Auckland, New Zeal
and. A workmate of mine was planning to set off to New Zealand. She was the adventurous type so I emailed her the details in case she fancied the idea.

  Ralph seemed disinclined to reply. As the months passed, the LRB personals became increasingly lengthy and narrative-driven, much of them desperate. It was still the forum for obscure neuroses and wittily inflated egos, but concision was becoming sacrificed in favour of something more complex. Ralph’s little message regarding hairpin repairs and South America was a mere prologue, barely an opening chapter, amid a score of ads that became less like ads and more like stories. Entire novels. Ones that spoke passionately of lives lost, careers forsaken, relationships curdled. Rancour was the dominant emotion. Pseudo-comic relief was tempered with self-deprecation and revenge fantasies. The columns seemed full of pathetic, impotent men and cold, bored but occasionally glam women in their fifties.

  One ad ran for more than twenty lines, detailing the progress of the proposed affair once it was met with a reply, and concluding with the request that respondents just cut to the chase and send a post-relationship Christmas card, preferably along with a gift. This was in the issue that ran an ad for the LRB Personals Singles Night, which of course I would never attend, headed with one of its more famous ads:

  I’ve been taller than this. And left handed. And once had all my body parts. So you won’t be the biggest compromise I have had to make. Sensitive F, 43.