by Alex Miller
She reached up and pushed back her hair with her fingers and she looked at the other women, as if she wished to challenge their silence and their private thoughts, some of them surely absent mothers themselves. Then she closed her notebook and placed it carefully on top of my novel and she folded her hands on the table and looked at me, her emotions once again under control. ‘One of your characters says somewhere, I forget where, that a lifetime isn’t long enough for him to ever forget what has happened to him.’ She paused. ‘Do you think I’ll ever forget this thing that has happened to me?’
My first impulse was to reassure her that it would all pass and be forgotten one day. But I knew she would see through that lie at once and despise me for it. ‘I haven’t even forgotten that week I spent in the children’s home, have I? And that was nothing compared to what’s happened to you. How can we ever forget these things?’
‘It’s not nothing that happened to you, Mr Crofts. Because of what happened to you, your books have helped me to understand what I’ve done.’
Jill tapped the table sharply with her biro. ‘Perhaps someone else would like to ask our author a question?’ When no one spoke she looked at me and smiled, her even white teeth twinkling at me. ‘Perhaps I can ask a question. Can you tell us something about the book you’re working on at the moment? Some of the women are writing books.’
‘I’m not working on a new book.’ My life’s work was lying on the table in front of Jill. That was it. I was tempted to tell her, It’s over. I’m done. There it is in front of you. I smiled. I had my own crisis to manage. I turned to the note-taking woman and stood up. I offered her my hand. She stood and took my hand in hers. I said, ‘Good luck.’
She held my gaze. ‘Thank you,’ she whispered.
Walking across to my car from the prison, I heard the eagles scream. I stood and looked up into the sky. But I couldn’t see them against the dazzle of the evening sky. I stood gazing upwards, listening to the melancholy of their cries—it was as if they called for something lost and unattainable, to a companion of the past. I was seeing my stricken friend, the absent mother locked in the prison behind me. I had always taken my liberty for granted and had done so little with it. I looked hard for the eagles but couldn’t find them. Ever since my arrival in Australia on my own as a boy of sixteen, the cry of the eagle had signified my passionate sense of freedom. If I’d ever thought to say what I believed to be the soul of the Australian bush, I would have said, the cry of the eagle. I first heard that strange, lost cry of those great birds when I was working as a stockman on a remote cattle station in the Central Highlands of Queensland. I sat on my horse alone among the wild stone escarpments of that country and watched enthralled as a pair of wedge-tailed eagles soared into the sky above the forest, their pinions locked, circling above me in a slow dance; higher and higher they went, until I could no longer make them out, their screams audible long after they had disappeared from my sight. And then the silence and the distance closing over me, until there was just the creak of my saddle as my horse shifted its weight under me, the two of us more eerily alone in that place than we had been before the eagles’ cries.
When I drove out of the prison car park I was so distracted by what had happened that instead of turning to the right, towards the junction with the main road that would have taken me back to town, I turned left. I’d been driving for some minutes before I realised I was on a road that was unknown to me and I was going the wrong way. I kept going. I was glad to be going the wrong way. The strangeness of it was a relief. Sometimes the wrong way is the right way.
I was driving at a dangerously high speed, the narrow strip of broken and neglected bitumen dancing about in the uncertain evening light. I had no idea where it was leading me, except that it was taking me further away from the town and from my home. I was exhilarated by the speed and the danger and by my anger and the wild scheming in my head of ways I might find to meet the note-taking woman again on her own so that she and I could continue the friendship we had begun. I knew such a meeting was impossible. But still I schemed. Ridiculous and stupid.
The massive trunks of grand old yellow box trees flashed by close to the verges on either side of the car. At this speed I had only to swerve from my line by a fraction and I would collect one of these giants and meet my certain death. I didn’t mind the thought of death. Mine was the indifference to death of the drunk or the despairing lover. I wasn’t in love and I wasn’t drunk, but there was that kind of reeling in my head that we know in both these states. Now, right at this minute, along this unknown road, in the grip of this strange youthful madness, it might be just the right time for me to go. Why not? Death might even be my best option. It wasn’t the first time I’d thought of it. Perhaps there really was no way forward for me from here. Perhaps I really was finished and just had to find the courage to admit it. The observant note-taking woman in the prison had neatly removed my fictional mask and laid it to one side and placed herself close to me. I wanted to see her again. In a strange and contradictory way, she had given me hope. I pushed the accelerator pedal hard to the floor.
As I crested a low rise, the glare of the sun burst into my eyes and I caught a flash of something red ahead of me. A fox was lying curled up in the centre of the road, so still and so perfect it might have fallen asleep there. The fox’s coat had a coppery sheen in the last of the sunlight. It looked to be in the fullness of its vigour; I would not have been surprised to see it jump up and run away. But it was dead. It was all over for the fox. It was lying there alone in the open where it had sought the final companionship of its own warmth at the moment of its solitary death. I slowed to a walking pace and eased the car around the body. It had evidently been struck such a mortal blow that it had been unable to crawl to the side and take cover among the tangle of undergrowth under the box trees. I stopped the car and got out and picked up the body and carried it into the cover at the side of the road and placed it carefully on the ground. And I wept, for the fox, for its beauty, for the woman in prison, and for my own doom. I got back in the car and sat a while till I had recovered and then I drove on at a sedate pace.
I continued along the unfamiliar road well after darkness had enfolded the landscape. I saw no other cars. Eventually I stopped in the middle of the road. It was no good going on forever. Against the blackness of the night the massive scarred trunks of the great trees were thrown into sharp relief by my trembling headlights. I sat there for a long time in the perfect stillness of the night, looking at the trees and thinking about the note-taking woman in her fresh white blouse, her fingernails bitten to the quick, her eyes reddened with emotion as she spoke to me of her terrible fears. I’d almost shared with her my precious three shards of memory of the children’s home. With her I would have broken the silence of that old taboo that had lain on me and on my family all my life. I sat in the car gazing through the windscreen at the ancient trees and I told my memories to the fantasy of her presence. It was a way of keeping alive for myself something of the intimacy between us, becoming for her the voice of one of her abandoned children.
‘I’m riding in a taxi with my father through the streets of London,’ I said, telling my story aloud. ‘I’m gripped by a vivid excitement that’s edged with an uncomprehending anxiety. It’s a fine summer day. My nose is pressed against the shuddering window of the cab, London’s crowded streets and views of parks whizzing past outside, inside the exotic smell of the leather seats and the intimately reassuring aroma of my father’s pipe tobacco. The view of London’s streets that sunny day has remained with me as an ideal of what London should look like. It’s a view I’ve never quite managed to recover, though sometimes in Hyde Park on a summer day I’ve sensed the magic of its presence fleetingly, like a half-remembered dream. Although this first fragment is not an unhappy memory, its atmosphere is nevertheless touched with the foreboding that sometimes enters into even our most innocent dreams. I remember the ride in the taxi with a strange clarity that hasn’t faded with t
he passing of the years. I suppose it is the mystery of the journey’s purpose that accounts for my sense of foreboding—I seem to know in my infant soul that some ill is to befall me at the end of the taxi ride.
‘The second fragment is colourless. A large woman is standing at the top of a short flight of grey stone steps looking down at me. I’m being led up the steps by my father and am holding tightly to his hand. I feel the firm grip of my father’s hand in mine—he will never let me go! The woman at the top of the stairs is wearing a black apron over a long grey dress that reaches to her ankles. She is foreshortened and made even more imposing and heavy than she would have been if we’d been approaching on a level with her. And of course I’m small and my angle is even closer to the ground than that of a grown-up. I’ve no memory of my father letting go of my hand. Just the looming figure of the woman waiting for me at the top of the steps. My mother, in contrast to this massive grey woman, was small and of slight build and often described herself to us as a little mother sparrow. As we go up the steps towards this woman I’m overwhelmed by such a powerful conviction of my guilt that my emotions are brought to a frozen standstill. What terrible crime am I guilty of that has driven my loving father to hand me over to this fearful person? The memory is shrouded in a hopeless feeling of shame and a helpless desire for redemption and forgiveness. Such feelings make no sense to me as an adult, but they persist all the same in their association with this memory.
‘In the third, and final, fragment I’m being punished for the crime against my parents that has made it necessary for them to abandon me. My face is being pushed against the shiny green tiles of a wall in a long corridor that ends in distant blackness. The unnerving sound of my child’s screams fills the air. It is a fragment of terror. I’ve no other memories of the children’s home beyond the shiny green tiles of the wall and my helpless screams. Green tiles have always held a morbid fascination for me. I included a single row of shiny green tiles in my bathroom when I had it renovated some years ago. When I was inspecting his work one morning, the tiler pointed out to me that he’d made a mistake and had set one of the wall tiles crookedly. He said he would correct it. I told him to leave it as it was. “I like to see some little sign of error in things,” I said. Standing naked under the shower in the morning, there is a peculiar satisfaction for me in seeing that crooked green tile. I alone know the meaning of its skew. But I cannot say what that meaning is. It is simply meaning. Seeing the crooked green tile gratifies me.’
I fell silent. I reversed the car and turned around and drove slowly back along the road I’d come by.
I hadn’t been working on a new book since my last book had come out, now more than two years ago. Till then, for more than thirty years, whenever I finished a book, I’d always had another book waiting to be written. I’d been struggling for some time to come to terms with this. The will to write, the need, the desire to do it yet again, they weren’t there anymore—I was the forest of stumps, a dispiriting expanse of emptiness.
2
On the Thursday after my visit to the prison I was in upstate New York to deliver a lecture at Vassar College. The weather was unusually warm for October and I decided to stay on in Manhattan for a couple of weeks. I rented an apartment on the Upper East Side and put my life on hold. I told myself I needed a break. And I did need a break. But it was more than that. I was being a coward. At home I would have to confront the fact that I didn’t possess the will or the desire to go on writing. New York’s parks and museums were the perfect distraction, and for two weeks I looked at pictures and at dogs and children playing in the park, and was careful to read only books that I was confident would not unsettle me.
The day before I was due to fly home, I was sitting in the sun on one of the benches overlooking the East River, my back to Carl Schurz Park, reading John Berger’s collection of essays About Looking. I walked to the park and spent an hour there reading and daydreaming most afternoons—practising being an old man in the final years of his decline. I was getting quite good at convincing myself I’d paid my dues and had no further challenges or responsibilities to meet. Contemplating death a little way ahead of me was quite a pleasant thing to do, and I smiled at the thought of it as I watched a young boy floating by on his skateboard—there goes the future. I have no part to play in it. Smile, old man! Just smile.
The park was only two blocks from my apartment and was filled with children and idlers like myself. I liked to watch the dogs in the small dogs’ playground and the children and their parents in the small children’s playground. The big children’s playground was mostly given over to boys shooting for the basket, and the big dogs’ playground was generally given over to arse-sniffing by the biggest dogs and cowering from the not-so-big dogs. I was only half attending to my reading and was pleasantly aware of the warmth of the sun and the yelling of children and the occasional stately passage up the river of a cargo boat when it registered with me that I’d read something of interest on the previous page.
It was as if a standby light blinked in my sleeping brain, reminding me that death had not yet taken full possession of me. I turned back the page and found the passage. It was in Berger’s essay on the Turkish artist Seker Ahmet Pasa’s painting Woodcutter in the Forest. ‘The novel, as Georg Lukács pointed out in his Theory of the Novel, was born of a yearning for what now lay beyond the horizon.’ Here it was! A yearning for what now lay beyond the horizon. A startling reminder to me that it was the empty horizon in a photograph of the Australian outback that had inspired my first great boyhood dream and resulted in my flight from the dreary post-war streets of South London to the limitless expanses of the great Australian outback. The joy of the openness to all possibilities of the empty horizon, after the enclosed stupor of working-class South London after the war. I was sixteen then and consumed with a need to get to the promised land of the outback. That I did get there, and that it was as I had dreamed it would be, seemed then to be a miracle.
Something of that sense of a miracle touched me now through Lukács’s words: A yearning for what now lay beyond the horizon. Not only a yearning for the outback, then, as I’d always thought it to be, but also that other yearning which had inspired my life as a writer. Were the two of them the same impulse after all and not, as I had always thought them to be, distinct and hostile to one another? Were the bush and the city, two antagonists in me whose differences I’d been unable to reconcile, two parts of one whole life? Lukács had made this precious link for me. It was a gift, and although I’d never read his book, sitting on the bench reading his words over again and savouring their meaning, I knew the warm emotion of being in the presence of an old friend, a friend whom I’d not seen for more than half a century and whom I’d long ago thought dead. So he still lives! That was my thought, my feeling. So I still live! I knew at once that I must ask myself the one great unasked question of my life: what was it that I had found over the horizon line of nothingness? Was it, in the end, grace or damnation? And did I have the courage to confront the truth of it?
I felt grateful to Berger for touching me lightly on the shoulder and waking me from my dream of death; for reminding me I was embraced within a circle of kindred spirits; for rekindling in me a yearning to reach for something.
I closed his book, got up from the bench and headed for my regular diner. I sat in the booth I’d occupied for breakfast and my evening meal every day for the past fortnight and ordered a beer and the meatloaf with mushroom gravy. While waiting for my meal to arrive I took my notebook out of my satchel and began to write. I didn’t hesitate. I knew where to begin. Not at the beginning—I had no hand in my beginnings—but at what I had long understood to have been the bottom. For it did not occur to the young man I was then that he was in possession of his liberty, the greatest thing known to humankind, possessed only by a privileged few. The young Robert Crofts took his liberty as much for granted as he did his youth. Was the woman in the prison right when she said, ‘I thought he was explaining hi
mself to his mother as a way of explaining himself to himself’?
And so, after a long and anguished silence, I began to write again, sitting there in that diner in Manhattan.
3
After three years in the vast hinterland of the Australian north working alongside the legendary black ringers, Robert Crofts quit his job. When the camp broke up at the end of that mustering season he collected his cheque from the manager and headed for the coast and the city of Townsville. It was over. He was twenty-one and his great and beautiful dream had come to an end. He had not expected the dream to lose its hold, and for the first time in his life a great emptiness was in him. In despair, he wrote a line in pencil on a toilet wall in Townsville: The desert took my soul.
From Townsville he drifted south, until he arrived in Melbourne, thousands of miles from the Gulf of Carpentaria, where he’d set out, and another world entirely. He had no money, no friends, no family and no connections in Melbourne. He had stopped drifting because he had run out of money and had also run out of Australia. He was at the bottom. There was no further down to go.
He slept the first night wrapped in his swag on a bench in the Malvern railway station, close to where his last lift had dropped him off. He was woken early in the morning by the rattling and screeching of the first suburban trains coming through. He sat up and looked around. His lift had dropped him in the dark and Robert had no idea where he was. The platform was teeming with city people going to work. There was a newspaper in the bin next to his bench. He reached for it and sat wrapped in his old grey blanket and wearing his sheepskin coat and he read the Rooms to Let columns. He set the paper aside on the bench and got up and took a drink of water at the tap on the platform. He gave his face a going-over and dried himself on the sleeve of his jacket. He went back to the bench and tied his things with the bull strap as he always did and he said good morning to the station attendant and showed him the paper and asked for directions to the nearest of the three rooms he’d circled with his pencil.