by Alex Miller
He looked around the barren bedroom, their dirty clothes on the floor, a wet towel in the bathroom doorway. It must have looked squalid to the doctor. Robert realised he’d never really taken any notice of it.
They looked at each other. ‘You’re a crazy girl, you know. But I do love you. Why is that?’
She smiled and wiped at her tears with the sheet and took hold of his hand again. ‘I need you,’ she said. He thought she was going to start crying again. ‘Promise you’ll never leave me.’
He wanted to remind her that it was she who had left him and that if she hadn’t left him they wouldn’t now be in this position but would be living comfortably in the house at Red Bluff. ‘I’ll never leave you,’ he said. It was true. ‘I promise.’ She held tightly onto his hand.
‘You left me when you started writing your book,’ she said. ‘I’ve been lying here for months being tortured by that incessant tapping out there on your typewriter. You’ve hardly glanced at me. I thought I was going mad. If I tried to talk to you, you just weren’t there. You didn’t listen.’ She lay there looking at him. ‘You’re back! It’s so good to have you back.’
‘Has it really been that bad?’ It was true, he supposed. He hadn’t given her a thought. He might as well have been on the moon. It couldn’t all be his fault, though, could it? It occurred to him that it was only after her asthma attacks ceased and her mother had died that she’d begun worrying about her face getting fat and had started fasting. Wasn’t that the problem? Her fasting? Her physical weakness? He felt suddenly exhausted and couldn’t think about it anymore. He stood up. ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’
‘Yes, please. And it’s not your fault. I’m responsible for me. I’ve always been responsible for me.’
‘Okay. Of course you are.’ But it was too large a claim for her to be making at that moment. ‘Are any of us really wholly responsible for ourselves?’
‘It’s no one’s fault,’ she said. ‘That’s all I meant.’
He slept soundly for the rest of the night and woke late. The early jets going over hadn’t bothered him. He asked Lena how she was feeling. She said, ‘Much better, thanks. What are you going to do?’ She looked anxious when she asked him this. He said, ‘I’ll go and see the people at the university appointments board.’
‘You don’t have to do this.’
He looked at her. ‘Yes I do. We can’t go on like this.’ He waited a moment, but she didn’t say anything, just patted his hand, as if to imply there was nothing to be done.
He got up and went out into the living room and put the kettle on. He glanced guiltily at the pile of manuscript sitting on the table beside his typewriter, a half-filled page still in the roller. The thought of it made him feel he wasn’t yet properly facing up to his responsibilities. But he wanted to go to it all the same. Thinking of his writing now, at this moment, wasn’t it like thinking about making love to another woman when your wife was ill in bed? He didn’t care what it was like. He wanted to be with his writing.
He took in her tea and picked up the dirty clothes and the towel and had a shower and a shave and put on a clean shirt and his suit and tie and he went in to the university appointments board offices and asked their advice. They suggested he apply for a graduate research position with the Commonwealth Public Service in Canberra. ‘They’re looking for graduates at this time of year.’ Like orchardists, he thought, looking for seasonal fruit pickers in the autumn. Well, okay, I’ll go and pick fruit in Canberra if that will save Lena. He filled in the forms and went home to the flat and told Lena what he’d done. She got up and sat at the table in the living room. She said, ‘And I’ll try to eat properly. We must do this together, you and I. We must find a proper way to live.’
36
Robert received his letter of appointment a week later and the following morning they walked out of the flat. They took with them a couple of suitcases and abandoned the rest of their things: the bits and pieces of second-hand furniture, the cutlery and plates and cups, their joyless bed. When Lena was already out on the landing, he took a final look around. They were putting behind them the failure they had made of Sydney. Abandoning a poor, half-hearted attempt at a life. And perhaps that was why he didn’t take the manuscript of Frankie. He saw it sitting there beside the typewriter, and he wanted to go over and pick it up. But he didn’t. His legs didn’t take him across the room. Instead, he slammed the door behind him and joined Lena on the landing and took her arm. Going down the stairs, an image of the half-filled page sitting in the Olivetti’s roller was a vivid icon in his eye, a silent scream in his skull. The manuscript of Frankie, paused in mid-stride. Was he abandoning writing forever? He didn’t ask. He didn’t want to know. He was doing what he was doing.
On the street he hailed a cab and asked the cabbie to take them to Central Station. At the ticket office the woman laughed at his request. ‘There’s no such thing as a Canberra train, love,’ she said. ‘The train doesn’t go to Canberra. You can get a coach or you can get the train to Goulburn then catch the bus to Canberra. Most people fly.’ He didn’t believe her—surely there had to be a train to the capital of Australia—but the man in the queue behind him said, ‘She’s right, mate. There’s no train to Canberra.’
He bought tickets for the coach. He picked up a packet of sandwiches, two Granny Smith apples and two takeaway teas at the kiosk. An hour later they were in the coach threading its way through the labyrinth of inner-city streets towards the highway. The man across the aisle from them said, ‘We’re a band of pilgrims going to a new frontier.’ They all laughed and his girlfriend hit him on the arm and told him not to be silly. But Robert thought he had something. Lena and he weren’t the only travellers who knew nothing about their destination. Whatever else, and despite the bliss and the pain of Frankie, the way they had done things in Sydney had not been right. There had to be a better way.
He insisted Lena have the window seat. She soon dropped off to sleep in the warmth, her head against his shoulder. He could smell her hair, the shampoo she’d used that morning. He ate the sandwiches and one of the Granny Smiths and smoked a cigarette. Lena slept till they pulled in for a refreshment break. She sat up and rubbed her eyes as children do. He said, ‘How are you feeling?’ She looked out the window, then turned to him, an expression of joy in her eyes. ‘God, I’m just so glad to be out of that flat! That place was killing me. Let’s get off with the others and have a cup of tea and stand in the sun for a minute. I want to feel the sun on my face.’
They got out and stood in the sun. He wanted to tell her the Leichhardt flat hadn’t been killing him but was where he became a writer. He wanted her to know he had not been dying there, but coming alive. But he didn’t tell her. It would have had the feel of boasting about another lover.
She astonished him in the cafe by eating a coffee scroll with her cup of tea. When they were back in their seats on the bus and humming along the highway again, she turned and looked at him, her gaze thoughtful. She tucked her arm firmly in his and said, ‘I think part of our trouble is that I need other people more than you do.’ She set his hand in her lap. ‘You don’t seem to need other people at all.’ She smiled. ‘It’s okay. I don’t mind. I love you the way you are.’
He said, ‘I don’t need people. It’s true.’ He was silent then, thinking. ‘Everything you do affects me,’ he said.
She kept hold of his hand in her lap and they looked into each other’s eyes and neither spoke. She leaned and kissed him on the lips then turned away and looked out the window at the landscape rushing by—golden paddocks, a scatter of pale sheep, empty clouds standing in the sky, low wooded hills in the distance. The paddocks daubed with the shadows of the clouds. Time made visible. He could have stayed on the bus forever, postponing his future.
Robert took up his appointment as a research officer in the education section of the Department of External Territories. The department was in a ten-storey building opposite a large open space covered in mowed grass and a
dispersal of trees. Behind the building there was a car park. Each floor of the building was crowded with hundreds of people sitting at desks in open-plan offices. He was determined to fit in and make the best of things.
He was on the seventh floor and his desk was beside a window through which he had a view over the open grassland with its orderly trees. In the distance there was a hill with a radio tower on top of it. A red light on the very tip of the radio tower was flashing on and off at regular intervals. It was hard not to keep checking on that red light. It might have been warning him, and the rest of the inhabitants of the capital, that something was going to happen soon—perhaps the pressure inside the hill was reaching a dangerous level and they should all clear out before it exploded. Every time he looked out at the red light blinking he half expected to hear a siren. But no sounds came from the outside. No traffic noise, no bird calls. No sound of the wind.
The people at the desks around him made him welcome and wanted to know where he’d come from. Everyone in the office, it seemed, except for the young woman who carried the files up from the basement and placed them on their desks and had been born in Canberra, was from somewhere else. Being from somewhere else, Robert found himself in the majority.
His boss was a Frenchman, Claude Debussy, an easygoing man with a gentle sense of humour. Robert thought he was joking when he introduced himself, but Claude Debussy was his real name. He set Robert the pleasant and interesting task of reading the history of educational reform and institutional design in the liberated African ex-colonies. Why not the history of Papua New Guinea? Robert asked him, since that was where the college they were planning was going to be built. But no, first it seemed they were to make themselves thoroughly familiar with the institutional failures, and the one or two meagre successes, of the newly independent African states. Robert soon learned that the same humiliating conditions that Frankie’s mob endured had been suffered by all the indigenous peoples of the colonised world. The challenge was not only to overcome the problems of liberation itself, but to deal with the intractable evil of their old conditions under their white overlords, the stains of which, both moral and economic, had become too deeply etched into the shattered native cultures to be easily removed. Frankie and his mob weren’t even halfway there yet.
There was virtually no public transport, so Lena bought a car. Everyone had to have a car in Canberra; it was a city designed for cars. She also found a house to rent, and rang Dr Eady and asked him to have some things sent up from Red Bluff, including furniture, her Rönisch and a selection of their books. She took a part-time job as a social worker at the Canberra hospital. They were glad to see her.
Robert watched her regaining her strength. Even putting on a little weight. And he saw that she was piecing together a commonplace life for them, ‘I think it’s time we had a dog,’ she said one evening when he got home from work. ‘We can go walking with it in the bushland round here.’ She’d had a dog when she was a little girl. She wrote to Birte and posted the letter without showing it to him. This puzzled him but he didn’t question her about it. He decided she was putting on a very good act, but he said nothing in case she saw through the act he was himself putting on. He feared they were tying knots too complicated to ever unravel again. The game was deep. He saw no alternative and stuck with it.
In his more optimistic moments he accepted cheerfully that he and Lena were just like everyone else, except that they didn’t have any children. They were average middle-class people, in other words. He had joined them, as she had once accused him of attempting to do. He was being encouraged by his boss to believe he might rise to a senior position in the bureaucracy.
They were sitting in their living room watching the effect of the sunset over the forested hills. The full-length windows looked out on the surrounding bush, with a distant view of the Brindabella Range. He was drinking beer and Lena had a cup of her weak black tea. Earlier she had been practising her scales. Neither of them had spoken for some time, mesmerised by the beauty of the evening, when she said, in a voice that was quiet and cautious, a tone in which provocation may have had a place, ‘So why did you leave your manuscript of Frankie behind?’
He couldn’t believe what he was hearing and must have looked startled, because she at once said, ‘I’m sorry. I just thought, that’s all…’ She let it trail off.
He looked at her with shock, hurt and disbelief. He couldn’t answer her. He was choked with sudden rage. ‘You’re asking me why?’ It was his father’s rage. It boiled up in him. She had fucked another man and that had scarcely touched him. This struck him like a hot knife in his chest. He stared at her. He could settle the question then and there. The voice in his head urged him, Get it done! Get it over with once and for all! Put an end to the pointless tyranny of this tortured marriage to this mad manipulative woman.
He stood up. He was trembling. He had to get out of the house before he killed her.
She said, ‘Where are you going?’ There was a touch of fear and excitement in her voice, as if she thought she might have pushed him too far this time, just to see what he would do, to test him, to find the limit of his forbearance.
He went out the door and slammed it behind him.
He walked into the darkness of the forest. He was breathing hard, his brain boiling with wild impossible thoughts. He hated her. He stood in the rustling night, the elaborate silence of the scrub, his heart pounding. He felt cheated. Betrayed. He’d believed they had made an unspoken pact of silence about abandoning everything in Sydney, including his dream of becoming a writer. The doctor had said she might not survive. Now she was thriving. With a pang of regret he realised he’d left his cigarettes on the coffee table. He could see the light of the house from where he was standing among the trees. He leaned against a tree and looked up at the clouds swimming past the early stars, a thin remnant of pink still visible in the sky. What was he going to do? He’d accepted his defeat as a writer. His sacrifice had been sincere. He had meant it. And he had meant to stick to it. He had believed they were doing it together. Hadn’t she also given up her search for some special meaning to her life? She’d had the piano tuned and was talking about taking lessons again. She had settled, it seemed to him, for being the person she’d been brought up to be. Her distress in Sydney had frightened her. She just wanted to be normal again, the piano-playing social worker. A product of her mother’s world. Or what were they doing here in Canberra if that wasn’t the case? He was bewildered and angry. Hadn’t she understood anything? Hadn’t he given up his writing in mid-stride for her? Hadn’t he talked himself into this heroic renunciation for her sake? He said aloud, ‘Fuck her! I’ll write Frankie again. It will be better this time. It will be stronger. I promise you!’
He stayed there among the trees for some time, leaning against the rough bark, listening to the night, the faint hiss of traffic along the wide Canberra boulevards at the bottom of the hill. He said, ‘I’ll be a bureaucrat and a writer. You’ll see. I’ll do both.’
He walked back to the house. He didn’t have a key and had to ring the bell.
Lena opened the door at once. She looked worried.
He said, ‘I’m going to write Frankie again.’
She said, ‘I’m glad. I hoped you were going to say that.’
They made love again that night. Neither of them was unkind but both understood it wasn’t going to work for them anymore. The lust was gone. Out the door and gone. A dry paddock between them and their private dreams of sex.
On the weekend they went together and bought an expensive new portable typewriter and a new desk and office chair and a pale pinewood bookcase and they set them up in the spare bedroom. And that afternoon he unpacked his books from the boxes Dr Eady had sent and set them in the shelves of the bookcase. Lena came and stood in the doorway and told him dinner was ready.
‘It looks wonderful,’ she said, and she went up to him and kissed him on the lips.
‘Yes,’ he said, looking around. ‘It’
s not too bad, is it?’
‘It’s wonderful. Come and have your dinner.’
After dinner he went back into the spare room, which they were to call the study now, and he closed the door and sat at the desk and he smoked a cigarette and gazed through the uncurtained floor-to-ceiling windows into the dark mass of the trees over beyond the bare earth of the garden where the bulldozer had scraped off the vegetation so the house could be built.
He rolled a sheet of paper into the typewriter—it was a Helvetia, not an Olivetti. Lena was playing the piano. Scales. Her fingers running up and down the keys like a rabbit at a wire fence looking for a way out. He tapped out the title, Frankie. Why call it Frankie? It was himself too, wasn’t it? He couldn’t remember how he had begun. He thought hard but no image came into his mind. He stared at the paper in the roller with the title in the middle of it and said aloud, ‘Frankie and me.’ It sounded silly and made him feel embarrassed.
He smoked another of the tailor-made cigarettes that he had changed to. The tobacco was hot and dry in his throat and he got up and went out into the kitchen and fetched a beer from the fridge.
Lena was sitting on the little round stool at the Rönisch in the front room. She paused in her playing and smiled at him. ‘How’s it going?’
‘It’s going well.’ He flourished the bottle of beer and went down the passage and into the study. He shut the door and sat in the office chair and drank the beer and smoked another cigarette and looked out the window into the dark.
How to start? Where to start? Where had he begun in Sydney? He hadn’t thought about it then but had just started. It had started itself. He sat staring out into the night, drinking the beer and smoking the cigarette. He decided to write a summary, just setting out the various stages of the story with no detail. This happens and that happens, that kind of thing.