First Person

by Richard Flanagan

  But you must put it in. My birth, you have to.

  Not any more, I don’t. Gene Paley just told me to get the book done.

  I was born—

  You know what?

  Born, he said, pressing on regardless, in a South Australian mining town in the desert. Jaggamyurra.

  I’m not actually that interested in you, I said, hoping insult might excite some response. I find you boring, if truth be told.

  No one lives there now. Ghost town.

  He had told me this story before and I had checked it out.

  The last recorded birth in Jaggamyurra, I said, was in 1909.

  Heidl said nothing. Perhaps he hadn’t heard.

  You’ve aged well, I said.

  It wasn’t recorded, Heidl said, looking up from the newspaper to finally look at me, a slight sad smile on his face. How could it be? Hundreds of miles from anywhere. It was awful for my poor parents.

  I said nothing as he went on with what I felt to be inspired improvising.

  He said, How can you not believe me? He raised both his hands in an outstretched and upward manner, as though he were a priest bestowing a blessing. How can you not?

  Jaggamyurra?

  Amazing place, Heidl said.

  You ever been there? I asked.

  1978, Heidl said.

  Realising his error, he hastily added, I’d gone back to show my family.

  So you want Jaggamyurra in?

  Heidl looked at me incredulously. Well…I was born there.

  Of course, I said. What was it like?

  Dusty.

  Dusty?

  Yes.

  Anything else? Friends? Stories? Family life?

  Just dust.

  It was all to no good end. He would tell me nothing I could use. And out of his dust I was expected to somehow conjure up a childhood and a book. With a growing horror I realised I had no idea how I was to write Heidl’s memoir and collect my fee; no idea how to begin far less finish the book if I wanted a new pair of runners and to return home to Suzy and our growing family with something to tide us over while I finished my unfinishable novel; even less idea who my subject was and no idea what to do next. There was a long silence in which I felt a paralysis of the soul and mind so complete that for a time I was unable to speak. But I had to try one last time with Heidl.

  What sort of child were you? I asked.

  Child? replied Heidl, leafing through the latest Woman’s Day. And without looking up he said, Child, yes. Child? I have no idea. I have been missing since I was born.

  He went back to reading.

  I typed: I have been missing since I was born.

  I stared at that line. And then I cut it from the end of my document, scrolled upwards, and pasted it at the top, immediately below the words Chapter 1. And sitting there at the beginning of what I still dared hope might yet be a book, I read it again.

  It read like something, but what that something was wasn’t clear. It felt like a voice in the desert. Lacking anything else, I resolved to follow it. I felt it move something within me, or, more precisely, I heard the line and that line, that sentence, led me to start hearing other sentences, at first one or two, then more, and finally so many that my head began to crowd with them.

  I erased everything I had previously written. Realising I had both the opening line and possibly the key I needed to the entire book, I began typing the sentences as I heard them. While some were amalgams of things I had previously made up but now told afresh and aslant, as if they had always happened, much was of necessity fresh invention. And in this way I began writing the true story of Siegfried Heidl, Australia’s most notorious con man.

  6

  The following day, on Friday afternoon, a little after 4 p.m., I walked down the corridor and into Gene Paley’s office. I handed his secretary a laser-printed manuscript of the first chapter. What he would make of it I had no idea. But I already knew. I would meet myself writing Heidl. There was no other way to write the book. I and I. Me and me. Did I know, at the very beginning, the crimes I would commit? If I did, it’s not that I didn’t tell others, it’s that I didn’t even admit them to myself. But I think even then Heidl knew. Being the first person, perhaps that’s what I hated in him most.

  3

  1

  I WAS THIRTY-ONE when the magic vanished and the phone rang, though, as you will come to see, not in that order. I heard Ray at the other end, asking how things were.

  You know, I said. Good.

  Maybe I said I was getting by. It doesn’t really matter what I said. Maybe I asked him how he was going, and he told me how he had only just got off the work he’d been doing in the remote tropical country of Cape York. It doesn’t matter what Ray said either, but it reads better if he is given some words too. The point of the story is what Ray was going to say, but first he said, You still want to be a writer, right?

  Ray felt being a writer was like doing the dive masters course he had taken some years before to work as a scuba diving guide on the Great Barrier Reef: a short explanation of theoretical issues, some technical matters to be learnt and practised before you took to fucking English backpackers ten metres down amidst schools of gropers and fairy fish.

  I remember that it was night, and a winter’s night, when Ray asked me his real question. But memories are like cancers, they spread until they are impossibly entwined with everything else, the bad and the good, the true and the false. Do I remember listening to Ray in the closeness of the small lounge room into which we had retreated for those long dark nights, with its cheap Taiwanese cast-iron wood heater I’d installed myself and which kept that much of our home warm, or do I just imagine it was so? The point is that I was trying to write a novel on no money, and I was failing. And I didn’t know it, or if I did know it, I ignored it.

  But something—a feeling like the grim world outside that night—was taking hold of me. I stood with my ear to the phone receiver, back to the wood heater. Its cast iron groaned as it expanded with the heat of the log fire inside and burnt into the back of my legs. It was unclear where I was going and where we—by which I mean me, Suzy, and Bo, our three-year-old daughter whose real name was Brigid—would end up.

  If I am to be honest, things weren’t going great. I wasn’t panicked, but it’s fair to say I could feel a shadow lengthening and I was doing all I could to stay away from it. It’s also fair to say that we were, after our fashion, happy within the aspirations of our place and time, determined to have a family, to make a life on our island home which we persuaded ourselves we loved. Ray was more sanguine.

  Loving Tassie is like loving a beautiful junkie, Ray would say, and Ray would know. It’s always going to let you down with bad habits.

  Though we didn’t know it they were the good years. So much that was unknown to us lay in the future, so much unbelievable and bad, and we didn’t worry about any of it. We were broke, without prospects and with no possessions of worth, and yet we were right to think life was sweet. We had so little we didn’t even know how little we had. We didn’t care. All that we didn’t have was uninteresting and irrelevant. The future was an infinite horizon over which the sun still glimmered its early-morning promise. Everything had a smell and every smell was fresh—the morning air, the sun on the bitumen, the evening rain. There was just today and that felt more than enough.

  The idea of bad, of all the bad that waits just out there, all the bad that will one day, sooner than you think, be inside here, inside you—well, that was just the stuff of the fairytales I read each night to Bo. German fairytales of wolves in disguise bearing gifts.

  Will we turn the page and see what happens next? I’d ask Bo. BOO! I’d say, and Bo would close her eyes and instinctively grab me. And look! The wolf is disguised as the woodcutter! Look! The woodcutter is pretending to help the little boy! Look! The wolf is eating him all up! And Bo would squeal and laugh and I’d turn over to the next page.

  Later in the night, spooned into Suzy’s back, I would c
lose my eyes and see us as a couple floating, bending, flying, entwining around each other, holding each other while there swirled below us a wild world, as if in a Chagall painting, wolves and beasts and flames. But as long as we held together we were free of gravity; we were safe from all that waited outside. Chagall’s early genius slimed over time into a cheerful high kitsch. Perhaps, given half a chance, we might have also.

  In any case, we weren’t in a Chagall painting, we were in Hobart, Tasmania, and flying and wrapping around each other like ribbons in the wind was no longer a straightforward matter because Suzy was pregnant with twins. We were astonished to know that we might soon be the parents of something so extraordinary, so miraculous as twins. And having had one child and seen all that it meant with work and money and living, we were also a little terrified. Suzy was heavily pregnant, and, to be frank, hugely pregnant.

  We had looked at the books—it was still a time when you might, as we did, visit a library and borrow books on a subject that pressed on you as the impending birth of twins now pressed on us—and we had gasped and laughed at the illustrations and the badly printed photographs of women pregnant with twins, women who looked, to be honest, like whales, so distended were their poor bellies. That might be them, we told each other, but that won’t be us. You see, we still talked that way then, still thought of us as, well, us. And we were never going to be that big, but Suzy soon enough was, and improbably, amazingly, kept on growing even bigger.

  We.

  That glorious, sweet first-person plural.

  Of a night when Suzy woke and tried to turn over I had to get both my arms beneath her and bulldozer-blade-like lift and roll her belly of twins as she followed. So big was Suzy that of a day we put the front bench seat of the EH Holden wagon back as far as it would go, and still her stomach jammed up against the steering wheel. So big, she had had to give up her work as a typist in her seventh month of pregnancy, and now had three weeks left to term.

  We were making do on what I earnt labouring a few days a week and being a doorman for the council on some others. It wasn’t much and it was becoming clear that it wasn’t enough. On days when work fell through, on nights when I wasn’t too tired, and early in the morning when I could force myself, I wrote, trying to turn a confusion of notes, ideas, and stories into something coherent that might be a novel. It wasn’t that I wanted to be a writer. It was that I knew I was a writer. It wasn’t the least of my vanities, but it was the most breathtaking.

  I had so many opinions, certainties and verities about writing, that, in another age and in another country, I may well have been a star product of an MFA creative writing course, or several MFA courses, or, for that matter, a professor teaching MFAs. I could have been anything.

  But I would not have been a writer.

  For I faced the inconvenient dilemma of not knowing how to write a novel, and the growing unspoken terror that perhaps I couldn’t. Written I had words. Written I had anecdotes, theories, lyrical passages of prose that seemed, in moments of delusion, good. But only when deluded. The rest of the time I knew they were rubbish. Written I had nothing. Yet unwritten I had a life, feelings, memories, dreams—a universe! How had I made of this universe of everything a nothing of words? I had imagined that there might be some getting of wisdom in the struggle, but it felt only a quickening of idiocy. My writing was only words. There was no story. There was no soul. And whatever gave a novel its soul was a mystery to me.

  If by some miracle I ever were to find that soul, I didn’t know how I might get the book published. And if, by a second miracle, I somehow were to get it published, I had even less idea how I might subsequently make a living from writing that would lift us out of poverty. It wasn’t that I didn’t have a Plan B. It was that I didn’t even have a Plan A.

  2

  Still, they were the good years. A great global party had started, the Wall fell, History ended, and everything was beginning. Including, it seemed, me. And if the nation was, for a moment, temporarily thrown from its trajectory of growth by a short, sharp recession in the early ’90s, things were still soon going to be good again. The recession’s consequence was spiralling interest rates that left a nation in a mood of vindictive rage. As it turned out, the party of prosperity would have another two decades to run. The recession was but a blip, a blown fuse in the amp; the party was going to go on for far longer, but nothing is as unwelcome to a party than feeling it is being shut down just as it’s starting.

  Australia was particularly bitter about the ’80s entrepreneurs who only a few short years before had been national heroes, winning global yacht races and buying up Hollywood studios. But by 1992 the moguls were on the skids, their once much-admired commercial chutzpah revealed as a criminal web of deceit, fraud and theft. Banks were collapsing over the exorbitant loans they had given, and every Australian with a mortgage—and for a short time every Australian seemed to have a mortgage—viewed it as a personal affront that interest rates kept rising. It was as if the entrepreneurs had personally robbed them of their property-owning rights as Australians and willed the recession. That everyone was buying into the same Ponzi scheme at higher rates of absurdity was not a point anyone much wanted to hear.

  We were no different. We had bought our home—a run-down terrace—with a deposit cobbled out of credit card debt and money borrowed from friends. Every month another letter came from the solicitors—who ran the sort of mortgage rackets that later got the U.S. into such trouble, lending to the lowest at the highest rates—to say our repayments had to go up again. Yet each month we somehow found the growing sum we needed to stay in our home. Each month I would walk across town to the solicitors’ chambers—as their dowdy, oppressive office was grandiosely called. Each month I would wait for the receptionist to flick through a sticky-taped shoebox of grimy index cards searching for our particular pink cardboard rectangle, and each month I would pass the necessary notes and coins across the counter.

  But that night the phone rang, the latest letter on the kitchen table was saying interest rates were now up to 19.5 percent and our repayment had increased to a sum that was beyond us. Suzy wasn’t earning anything, I wasn’t earning enough for the three of us, and with every passing day I was finding it harder to ignore my failure to finish my novel.

  And if I did finish it, what then? I had read some books. But Borges and Kafka and Cortázar had none of the answers I needed. None of them had mortgage payments they feared every month they would not make. They played games with time and infinity, made myths of dreams and nightmares. They didn’t even know the questions I tried not to ask, so unliterary did my questions seem.

  Such as how to afford ten litres of paint? How to pay off the nappies that were on lay-by? How to finish a novel between hanging out unspun wet washing and taking the washing machine apart to fix a clutch assembly? How to find enough dollar notes to stuff in my wallet and walk across town, feeling them pressing on my buttock, before handing them over to the young woman in the solicitor’s office to once more count out, with me watching?

  Ashamed.

  Humiliated.

  Fearful I had the amount wrong. To make sure, I would count it out before I left home. There was a world and my writing and nothing joined the two. How to make money? How to make a story work? How to afford a double pram? How to get a character out of a room? Sometimes I’d run my hand down the back of our old couch for the coins I needed to make up the total owed. I spent evenings and weekends fixing up old furniture found on the tip face, repainting a chest of drawers, working out how we might fit three kids in a single, cramped bedroom. I counted and I counted, but writing was ever the second person and life always the first, and there was sometimes nothing left to buy food and we would live on lentils or pea soup until the next bit of cash turned up.

  I wrote in a room so small it only just fitted my desk, a chair jammed beneath it, its back against the far wall, while facing me on the opposite side was the room’s sole decoration: a postcard of Caravaggio�
��s painting of David brandishing Goliath’s severed head, the face of which, in a gruesome joke, is Caravaggio’s self-portrait. To get in or out I had to climb up onto the table. Everything was pressing in, and Caravaggio’s sad, unseeing eyes stared down as I counted our mortgage money and my novel’s words and either way, no matter how I figured it, there was never enough of either.

  And then that night the phone rang.

  Kif, Ray continued. You do, right? Don’t you?

  I was slow in replying.

  That’s what I said to him. That you want to be a writer, right?

  Sure, I said.

  I got someone who wants to talk to you, Ray said.

  And a German-accented voice came on the line.

  Hello, Kif, it said.

  3

  Ray was given to violence and drugs and women, and violence and drugs and women were given to him. Maybe I liked all that. Maybe I liked the violence. I certainly liked the women, the frisson of excitement. There were fights, police, car chases. Parties. Petty crime. Stealing cars and joy-riding with the one cassette we always carried with us and played as we sped away: The Saints’ “Stranded.” Sometimes Ray would bring his welding mask along—he was a boilermaker–welder by trade—and we’d take it in turns wearing it after spotting hash off the cigarette lighter, dreamily staring out through its Ned Kelly visor of smoked glass at the world dissolving into streaks of car and streetlights—that’s one image of our youth.

  Another is of us in a Valiant station wagon we had stolen. It was an older car that had been hotted up, replete with an Impala floor shift, a brutal piece of chromed iron bar that was installed by home mechanics to replace the domestic column shift. Befitting its jerry-rigged purpose, the Impala floor shift had an unusual placement for each gear, meaning first was where reverse was meant to be and so on. But we were blind to such shortcomings, seeing only a cool four on the floor with a furry roo scrotum stretched tight over the eight ball to replace the Australian suburban verity of the three on the column shift—so suburban, so safe, so middle-aged. Ray had a particular loathing of the office workers who would catch the bus in front of his home when he was a kid, their slack suits, their tufted cardigans, their slumping flesh, which he was convinced came from eating endless stews of grey meat.