There was also an announcement: the LRB was proud to let readers know that the first divorce had occurred resulting from a marriage that had begun in its columns: ‘What was once a desert is now but a wasteland. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.’ Along with the bottle of champagne awarded each issue to the best message, the whole personal ads thing was beginning to look like a carefully contrived narrative.
Within the carriage, the signs were generally far less ambiguous.
Stand clear of moving doors
Do not place feet on the seats
At night travel in the guard’s carriage marked with a blue light.
Was that an invitation? Or an instruction?
When I had given up on Ralph, almost forgotten him, a reply came. Rather terse, with no apology or explanation for the lateness.
If you can fix a Corolla with a nailfile you ought to be able to fake a passport with an old ration book and a rubber printing set. By the way, do you think it is true that the novel is a moribund literary form? Someone who reads the LRB should be able to answer a question like that as well as mend cars.
Regards
Ralph
Unexpected though it was, the question was pertinent. What was I even doing reading a publication like the LRB if I couldn’t offer an opinion on current literary matters? I knew enough about these to know that there was some debate as to whether or not the novel was dead. Indeed, only the previous week I’d read a weekend literary supplement in which a journalist claimed to have proved it. And yet I noticed on the trains that the novel was by far the favoured choice of reading matter. After free newspapers, of course. The novel was generally the latest vampire fantasy, or something by John Grisham, but still a novel.
I replied thoughtfully, citing the reading habits of commuters on the Illawarra line as evidence. Then I mentioned that I thought the real reason the debate even existed was not because the novel was moribund (except I used the word ‘dead’), but because other forms – like memoir, biography or even travel – were more lively and popular these days because they were being written more like novels. I wondered if Ralph was a secret novelist. Or a travel writer. Of course, that would be why he was planning a trip to South America: to write his next travel book. His question had been some sort of sly test. Perhaps even his initial ad was a test. But a quick search on the net revealed no information about an author in the UK called Ralph Poole. There was a Ralph Poole in Cumberland who was a car dealer and hire-car agent, with his own modest website. That made sense, though the dealership seemed to be restricted to those very small makes of vehicles that the English favour, none of which were familiar to me. And no Kombis were listed.
Meanwhile I did worry about Ralph’s use of the word ‘moribund’ when ‘dead’ would have been adequate. Would a writer use that word, or just someone with pretensions to writing? I also reminded Ralph that in Australia we’d barely had rationing, besides which, it had been discontinued long before I was born. And that I was more of the Letraset generation, not likely to use a rubber printing set.
Ralph’s next email was a bit disconcerting. It arrived so swiftly, considering the months I had waited for the first reply. And it was long, with photographs attached. He also seemed to have drawn a tight line between my lack of a passport and my interest in the contemporary novel. He asked what novel reading (or writing) crime I had committed to deserve having had my passport taken away. He also advanced very strong views about the impropriety of drawing upon real life – one’s own or others – to construct fictions.
At that moment the prospect of a long trip through a foreign country in a dodgy Kombi with someone holding such ideas seemed unattractive. Imagine crossing the Amazon and having to listen to the righteous indignation of a person incapable of seeing the grey areas between life and art. Someone who used words like ‘moribund’. Suddenly I was glad I had no passport.
The worst crime, I replied to Ralph, was not confusing real life and fiction but bad writing. Boring writing. I could also have said pompous diction but at this stage was not prepared to give up on the relationship, if that’s what it was.
Desert Rose (35) wanting to meet dusky lover for sandstorm romance, poetry reading and wine. In other words, let’s drink too much and have tent sex. Omar Khayyam enthusiasts welcome.
Ralph had also mentioned his wife. Disaffected, he called her. But wife all the same. So why was he advertising for a companion on a trip to South America? And why was he also emailing photographs of his trusty Kombi? One of them was of the engine, which I found almost offensive in its intimacy. Nearly 17,000 kilometres separated us and this was only the second email: I was not ready to peer into the engine of Ralph’s vehicle. Especially not with a wife lurking close by, disaffected or otherwise. And Kombi engines are so compressed. I could not spot the place where he invited me to consider placing a hairpin, should my hairpin/nailfile repair skills ever be called upon. Nor could I see any evidence of duct tape. It was likely that Ralph’s LRB ad was wishful thinking, that he’d never been with the sort of woman who could effect repairs with personal grooming items, or with duct tape, or with anything at all. The photograph was of an unequivocally male vehicle. Right down to the dull interior. He promised to paint it letterbox red before the trip – but wouldn’t that attract guerillas and drug runners? Or would its original mustard colour be worse, suggesting a military vehicle? Maybe he should consider inoffensive banana yellow or safe clinical white. Perhaps I would suggest as much in my next email.
It seemed likely that, despite his philosophical objections, Ralph was quite creatively fictionalising his own life. Certainly he was plotting it. His ad in the LRB personals was nothing short of evidence of that. Surely, like me, he’d also read Desert Rose’s ad? Why didn’t he contact her? He could invite her to travel through the sands of Africa instead.
As I corresponded with Ralph, sedition laws were being passed in this country that would mean writers could be thrown into jail for expressing their opinions. And there were other signs that had recently sprung up. If you see something, say something, the posters on the platforms urged us. But if you said something in writing then the consequences could be grave. Incitement to a terrorist act. Obviously it depended on what you saw, what you said, and to whom you said it.
There are security cameras all along the Devonshire Street tunnel and City Rail officers patrolling each end. Sometimes the officers stand at the turnstiles, tall and intimidating in their dark uniforms, fondling their truncheons. Even the women officers are forbidding, packing muscles and gazing out through dark glasses at the buskers.
Sometimes I wondered about people like the blind woman draped in robes who stood halfway along the tunnel singing ‘Waltzing Matilda’. It is well known that this is one of the most subversive songs ever written, possibly even unpatriotic. I wanted to explain all this to Ralph until the thought struck me that he could be implicated. South America could have been a kind of code. And if it wasn’t, at the very least it was a continent with a significant number of unstable governments and volatile political leaders. My passport wouldn’t matter (since it didn’t exist), but Ralph could well have his confiscated and I should warn him.
But after I emailed Ralph, I almost fainted with the implications of what I had done. Cyberspace was the least private space of all. I may as well have closed my office, burned my belongings, cut and dyed my hair and fled to Tasmania.
Ajax Spurway Fasteners Ltd
Est. 1956
Way Out Buses
Fancy Some Horseplay?
Erskineville
Fresh Seafood. Gourmet Sandwich.
On the Illawarra line the signs eventually vanish, for after Erskineville you enter the tunnel and from there, past Redfern and into Central, the only signs are the ones in your mind, and the ones written within the carriages.
Do not travel between doors.
Please vacate this seat for older or disabled passengers.
Ralph emailed again, so he was obviously
still safe. And yet he did not mention South America, Kombi vans, duct tape or even the contemporary novel. He merely elaborated on the rubber printing set. It was a must for any enterprising child of the postwar era, who could fashion for himself all sorts of documents – from collections of poems to give to unsuspecting relatives at Christmas, to stern if rather wobbly notes directed to a teacher. He provided an example of the former:
My rabbit has a lovely nose
Pink and wet and shiny
But it is never slimy.
by Ralph Poole, aged 7
And the latter:
Ralph is to be ekcused from rugby practise and Arithmatic today due to a bad head cold. Yrs affectionnately, Mrs V. Poole (Mother)
He also explained that he was an electrician by trade but at heart a philosopher. Which was why he was bound to pose provocative ideas, such as isn’t the novel dead? (Or moribund?) But I knew better. It was clear what a man who had been faking letters and writing poetry from the age of seven really was, and I wanted nothing more to do with writers. How the Kombi or South America fitted into this profile, I didn’t care. I had failed to read the signs. And the signs were everywhere, planted in places as unlikely as the LRB personals, which I reserved exclusively for my train reading. I should have heeded them. I would vacate this column for younger or more desirable correspondents.
Semiotician (F, 39) seeks meaning of life. Or of anything.
The Form of Solemnisation of Matrimony
At first Lucille was reluctant to tell her parents. They had never really liked the boy at the time, thinking him fey and shiftless – which he was – and they were not the type to forgive easily or change their hearts. But her mother surprised her.
‘Of course you’re going to get married. Three daughters, and all these years I’ve never got a single wedding out of it. It’s the least you can do for me.’ She even offered to make the cake.
Her older sister would fix the flowers, and her younger sister agreed to play the cello. There was an aisle, but she did not want her father to lead her down it, not now, not after all these years, although she knew he would have done it, had she asked. The wedding would take place in the shop, which was only appropriate. She would open up the back room and there would be ample space. Five years earlier, Lucille had taken an extended lease on the old church. A retrenchment payout. The terms were long enough to take a risk, not so large that the business didn’t have to pay its way, in the end. She had spent the first year removing birds’ nests and stripping floors, the second travelling the world in search of stock.
Early on in the day, it began to rain. She got up when it was still dark and set to work down the long aisle to the former porch and vestibule, to finish clearing away the goods and displays and set out the chairs and tables. She had borrowed folding chairs from the woodcraft factory in the next town. There would not be enough for all the guests to sit down, but the idea was they should mingle. And the service as such would be brief.
She placed the bolts of raw silk and hanks of vegetable dyed wool in boxes, hung the felted coats and embroidered jackets and skirts behind curtains. The scrolls and wall hangings and musical wind chimes, the rice paper kites, the enormous feathers, some dyed, some not, the scarves and woollen hats and berets and plaited belts and bandannas, the purses and pouches and wallets. She packed them all in cardboard boxes and stacked them out of sight behind the curtains. As she worked she thought that the church grew lighter, despite the clouds outside, the increasing rain. And it seemed to her that everything around her was brown. All the natural dyes and native pigments of the things she touched. Muddy, dark, depressing. Tertiary colours, all of them. Brown coats, beige moccasins. The earthenware pottery, the oatmeal raw silks and wools. But brown, brown, brown.
She cleared the shop counter, placing the cash register underneath, and beside it stacking the baskets of small things – beaded balls, quills and pens handcrafted from wood, Guatemalan worry dolls. Lacquered pillboxes. Natural fibre greeting cards, illustrated by a local artist. Vegetable oil soaps, rough cut, resembling dried tofu. Bare, freshly polished with Mr Sheen, the counter gleamed. It was a single slice of red gum. But still brown. How had this happened? She hated the colour for herself, never wore it. Had never worn it since school, in fact, as it was the colour of her uniform, and she hated school. Whichever way you looked at it, whatever shade the fashionistas called it – Chocolate Drop or Raisin or Brown Sugar or Cinnamon; brown was sellable if edible – brown was the colour of mud, of shit, of sludge and scum.
Now, with all the handcrafts and fabrics packed away, the church was clearer. The light inside seemed blue. She looked out the windows to the west, where the hills rose sharply, bony flanks smothered in dark green. So much rain in the last few months. There was no wind, the rain fell straight as a waterfall. A single, vast wet sheet drawn across the landscape. But if it had not been raining, she knew the light in the church would be green, or gold, or both. The church faced the street; opposite was Bean There, the new cafe, the post office and newsagency, and Cowbells, the organic bakery and dairy. Diagonally across was the better of the town’s two pubs. But the arched windows along the sides allowed a clear view. To the east, she could see past the straggle of little shops, a plant nursery, and a row of low cottages, the garage and petrol station, until the town evaporated. It was a good position, though not as good as the Catholic church farther up the hill, on the highest point of the town.
Last time, it was going to be a Catholic church. She tried to remember why. Perhaps his parents? She had been eighteen, a mix of stubbornness and carelessness, and hadn’t given a toss if the wedding took place in an RSL club or a cathedral or a garden shed. It was fortunate that he had come to her, swallowing too hard, looking at the floor, before they had made final arrangements. She had not felt it in her heart, as she might have expected, but lower, in her abdomen, her bowels. It was as if she’d been kicked in the stomach. She felt ill for days. Years. He had had the grace to disappear completely, which meant she was spared that other pain. Hope. Hopeless hope. If she’d ever seen him around, at parties – there were many mutual friends – at university, in bars and clubs, she would have felt worse. By the time she came down here, he rarely brushed past her mind, but if she had thought about him much she would have known that here, hours away from the city where they met, after all these years, thirty of them, she’d never see him.
‘Lucille! Such rain!’ Her mother was at the door, shaking off her umbrella. She placed it in the corner and walked to the counter, producing a white box from out of a shopping bag.
‘Can I have a look?’
Margaret raised the lid. They both leaned over and peered inside.
‘Oh.’ Lucille held her mother around the shoulders. ‘It’s beautiful. Perfect.’ The cake was a simple one, a single round layer, iced in pale pink. The cerise iced roses on the top had silver cachous fixed to resemble raindrops. As they looked, a real drop slid from Margaret’s face onto the surface. They both drew back. Her mother blotted it with a tissue.
‘I’ll find a safe place for it. Where’s Dad?’
‘He dropped me off. He’s gone to fetch Cassie and her cello from the station.’
Lucille took the cake to the kitchen bench and placed it on a raised platter. Not brown. A white ceramic one with lace-like holes around the edge. She had an old silver carving knife which she’d already polished and decorated with a ribbon. Margaret unpacked jars of babaganoush and olives and began prising crackers out of their packets. She had brought six different types of cheese. Lucille’s father had already stacked beer in a bar fridge he had borrowed for the occasion. A box of red wine was waiting beside glasses that Margaret had washed and polished by hand. There were trays of antipasto, covered in clingwrap, bowls of roasted nuts, multihued bread rolls from Cowbells – spelt, rye, sourdough, all brown – an entire ham waiting to be unshrouded and sliced. Her father would doubtless do that too. Lucille wondered if anyone would come.
As h
er mother hummed and sliced salami and fruit, Lucille packed away the last of the felted slippers, the leather belts and the embroidered handtowels. Possibly her guests would think she didn’t trust them. But she preferred the place to be tidy, as unshoplike as possible. Even though the rows of pews had long been removed, the altar now stacked with prints and screens, vases and garden pots, hand-thrown, most of them, unglazed, brown, and there was not a prayer book in sight, the church looked more like a church again. Above the altar hung dozens of dream-catchers, crystal beads, silk-ribboned curtains, artificial butterflies on strings of fishing line. They would all dance in the breeze, but she couldn’t risk opening the window up high behind the altar, for the rain would rush in. She pushed the last box against the wall, drew back the curtain and arranged a nest of chairs, a coffee table, smoothed over a lawn cloth and set out a candle. She lit the candle and blew out the match.
‘Early for that?’ Margaret was wearing one of the Red Centre Women’s Collective aprons, covered in a design of bush tomatoes. They were brown too.
Lucille looked at her watch. ‘Another half-hour,’ she said. ‘Anyway, they’re eight-hour candles. I might light them all.’
As she did, weaving her way through the church, pausing at the few little tables, the shelves, the counter at the front, bending, striking, then blowing the matches out, her sister Julia arrived with the flowers. Together they placed sprays of miniature roses and maidenhair fern on the tables next to the candles. They had placed the last spray on the bench next to the cake when Julia lifted a final bouquet, creamy pink, out of the box.
‘Peonies! But aren’t they out of season?’
‘You have no idea how hard it was to get them.’ But Julia’s twisted smile showed how pleased she was. She held the bunch, tied simply with green raffia, cradling the droopy heads against her chest for a moment, before looking up and handing them over. Lucille instinctively raised them to her face, but remembered peonies had no scent. She cradled their heads too, to show her appreciation, then placed them on the table next to where the celebrant would stand. She tidied away the box of remaining candles and took off her own apron. It was time to get dressed.
Letter to George Clooney Page 3