First Person

by Richard Flanagan

  I needed to know: had it suffered? Why must we—pigs, people—suffer? Why do we do this to each other? But, of course, I said nothing.

  I’ll give you one word for the coming century, Jez Dempster said, face shiny and ebullient, knife and pink flesh still held out before me. Charcuterie.

  4

  Lying in bed with Suzy that first night home, the memoir done, half my ten thousand dollars paid, the other half only three months away, my immediate future assured and a finished novel now within my grasp, smelling Suzy’s warmth, I wondered what was this feeling that then came upon me, that filled me? Her soft breathing as she slept, the smell of her back…what was it? It seemed everything yet I felt a wanting, but what I wanted I had no idea. It was everything yet there was a life beyond our experience, and whatever that was, I wanted it. Already I was drifting outside of our unity, staring down at us.

  And even now that I have a life outside of Tasmania, far from that wretched island that ate us all, I think of us two, held back by bonds neither of us ever really understood—loves that were also resentments, families that punished as well as loved, freedom that also jailed, beauties that deformed and tormented. There was a power to the island, or perhaps a weakness in us, such that we thought we could never make the break from it, or shouldn’t, that to leave was somehow to betray. And perhaps it was, and perhaps it is.

  Maybe it was jealousy or envy, greed or hunger, ambition or dissatisfaction on my part; maybe it was my ignorance of all things that were not books. An insufficient lack of attention to what is real, you might say, to what matters—to all those things that people like Suzy carried within them, within their hearts every day, all the things at best only alluded to and described, but never named.

  It was hard for me to reply when earlier that evening she told me she loved me; there was such a look of suffering on her face, and at that moment love didn’t mean that much to me and I wasn’t sure if it ever really had. I was both of her world and already becoming of another world, Heidl’s world, and perhaps she sensed that I was leaving her even then for that other world, and that other world was a wedge, an axe, a blockbuster that forced things apart, that broke things and broke people like us.

  Still, she thought it was books at first and at first I thought the same—that world of books, Fuck it! I said. I don’t care, I said. As though it were some choice. As though we were through it, as though it were over. But it wasn’t books. It was Heidl’s death. That was the other world.

  I will do anything for you, she said. Until I die. I know that.

  And I couldn’t doubt it, and I knew I would never be offered so much again, and that it was also not enough for me, that nothing was enough for me now. I went to say something, but stopped. We all say too much. Things we don’t feel, things we don’t think, looking for reasons and signs where there are none. We build worlds of causes and effect, thinking that will explain and we will understand, terrified of a world where chance and chaos rule. Trying to persuade others and convince ourselves. It should be otherwise, we think. We think and we think but there is no wisdom in thinking. We know and we know but there is no peace in knowing. And when we can find neither wisdom nor peace we are told to accept and be serene in acceptance. But what if there is no knowledge, no acceptance, no serenity? That’s what haunted me.

  A few days later she said what I realised I had never wanted her to say.

  Go, she said. Life’s too short.

  There was no comfort in it. Though it would take other things, we were undone from that moment. But we were breaking from the beginning.

  5

  When the book finally arrived I hated it. I had not expected to hate it so much. On receiving my carton of twelve finished copies, I set it down on our kitchen table. I paced around the table for a good hour or more, occasionally going outside, then coming back, and staring at it with an emotion that I finally recognised as fear. This seemed shameful. I cut the packing tape and opened the box. Packed in shredded newspaper were the books. I lifted one out. It made me slightly queasy to look at it and hold it. Perhaps it was a nausea of unavoidable familiarity—the inescapable taste of the off-chicken that remains in your mouth as revolt grows in the gut—that I had much of the time I was with Heidl and led me to take those long showers every evening at Sully’s home, seeking to wash him away, to steady my stomach.

  I hated the book’s cover, with a newspaper photo of Heidl’s face torn in half, a face that even in death was there and not there; I hated its uncertain design, half-thriller, half-memoir; I hated the whole look of it as uncertain, as nebulous as he himself had been. The one thing—the only thing—I liked was that which I had fought against most strongly—the relegation of my name as author from the cover to the spine where it existed only in near illegible type—SIEGFRIED HEIDL with Kif Kehlmann.

  My relief quickly gave way to panic when I felt that my name, no matter how small, would still however be associated with the book—a book I had only a short time before wanted to own in every possible way. I worried I would be inescapably shamed by such a cheap and mediocre work about which everything was of the cheapest and most mediocre quality—the soft cover, gloss treated, with its faux thriller design; cheap paper stock as coarse as kitchen paper; the large amounts of white space in the margins and breaks to bulk out a thin implausible tale to make it look a large convincing drama. It looked exactly the sort of book it would immediately become—worthless, ephemeral, disposable. Forgotten. The only notable publicity it received was to come from an organisation called Don’t Buy Books by Crooks, which in other circumstances I might have found offensive. They could have saved their breath: no one would buy the book anyway.

  Telling wasn’t selling, or perhaps it wasn’t even really telling at all. Flicking through the pages that had cost me so much effort, I now saw only a mish-mash of his lies and my inventions never once convincingly turned by me into a plausible story. My writing—I was vain enough to still worry about such things—was by turns dreary and evasive, here a dulled recording, there a failed affectation, my aim of making Heidl compelling enough to carry the reader through to the end revealed as a delusion. The book, in short, was a failure.

  I put the book back in the box. Bo was watching cartoons. The twins were crying. Suzy, who had just fed them, was exhausted. I changed both twins’ nappies, strapped them in their baby capsules, put them and the box of finished copies in the EH Holden, drove to the McRobies Gully tip and threw the box of books on the tip face. Seagulls rose and fell like startled ash from a dead fire.

  When I arrived back home, the twins were asleep. I carried them inside in their capsules and put them in front of the wood heater, though the fire was out. Suzy had taken Bo to the park. Spring was coming. I didn’t know that I never would be a writer. For that too was over, and what had begun, I couldn’t know.

  In an hour at the most, the twins would be awake. I fetched some kindling to start a fire, but it was damp and wouldn’t take. I cleaned the kitchen, returned to the lounge room where I sat down, watching over the twins in front of the cold firebox. Watching and watching, terrified of the hurt waiting for us all.

  6

  With the money from the Heidl memoir we managed, by living carefully, to buy me six months’ free time to write. I told myself that now I, and not Heidl, would be the author of my own life. But I was mistaken. It was as though from the grave he was still writing my story, my fate a tale foretold that people could read in a book, flicking past this moment to the end, and then throw away.

  While the junkies next door went on another bender, I put the ear plugs back in and practised the discipline I had learnt writing Heidl’s memoir in six weeks. Words and pages began adding up, and soon enough the novel was starting to take its final form. But these words of my novel were nothing: they said nothing, meant nothing, were nothing. I finished my book in a defeated mood. All that I had wished for was done. And none of it gave the slightest satisfaction.

  I printed out six manuscri
pt copies and tied each one with a green cord that was lying around the house, finishing each off not with a bow but with a barrel knot—an obscure, complex knot known to very few, taught to me by my father, a crayfisherman. I entered one manuscript in a national prize for unpublished novels and sent the other manuscripts off to publishers. Top of my list was Gene Paley.

  Three months later the shortlist and winner of the unpublished novel prize were named. There was no mention of my novel. Still I believed, though in exactly what was less and less clear. After several more months, with no replies from any other publisher, and three unanswered phone calls made by me to Gene Paley, I received a short note from a TransPac editorial assistant thanking me for sharing my manuscript with them. While my novel was not one suited to their publication needs, she wished me the very best with it.

  I wrote a letter to Gene Paley. To my surprise, he replied. In addition to a slightly arch variation of the normal publisher’s formula of the time (“much as we admire your writing, we cannot see how we might find a way to publish it in a manner that might be commercially remunerative to you as writer and us as publisher”), he added the more revealing sentence: “This novel does not fit into any recognisable school of Australian literature.” It was written in a kind tone that somehow only left me more despondent.

  Some weeks later a parcel addressed to me in my own hand arrived. Not until I opened it and saw my manuscript did I realise what it was—my failed entry in the national unpublished novel contest returned, as manuscripts were in those days if you enclosed a self-addressed and stamped envelope. I put that sorry pile of paper on the table. Only then did I notice that the manuscript was tied up with the same green cord I had used.

  As if it were an unexploded bomb, I carefully picked up the manuscript, turned it upside down and returned it to right-side up, stared at it suspiciously from a dozen different angles, and put it back down. It was impossible to believe what I was seeing.

  I ran a finger along the cord until it reached the barrel knot—the same barrel knot with which I had bound the manuscript when I sent it away. I squeezed the knot between forefinger and thumb.

  It took me some moments to process the full implication.

  And then the bomb went off, turning my world to swirling dust. No one had ever untied the knot. No one had read my novel. No one would read my novel.

  A writer is someone with readers.

  I was not a writer.

  I still have the typescript somewhere, though I am not exactly sure where. Still tied up in the same cord and knot, the cord and knot that have far outlived my dreams. Perhaps one of my children will find it going through my effects when I am gone and read a page or two before giving up. Or not. I can see now that its story—a drowning man having visions of his life—was not something of any originality or appeal. It was a young man’s book. And death—Heidl’s, or a character in an unpublished book—well, death is just death. Not a novel. Just a full stop with an empty page waiting to be filled by a stranger.

  I went out to a local bar. I tried to drink myself through it, under it, over it, around it. It did no good no matter how many beers I had. I was finished and I knew it.

  7

  Ray called. Or maybe he didn’t call. When I think about it I don’t remember Ray being in touch again for maybe the best part of a year. No one knew where Ray was, until one day he just turned up. It was early in the evening, he was standing there at my front door with a flagon of Penfolds port and a pack of chocolate biscuits. Bo was bouncing on the tramp, Ray and I were once more drinking, once more watching her. We were like an old married couple who didn’t remember their spouse’s name; we were like strangers who had nodded to each other for a lifetime and knew nothing whatsoever about the other person.

  He had fled north and spent six months working in the Gulf on a prawn trawler with a couple and their pet corella called Sandy, whom he had befriended. Its wings were clipped and when the seas blew up it would seek to fly from shoulders and railings, and inevitably, he said, go skidding on its arse along the steel decking, leading to an often-ruptured anus that he treated with Vaseline. Beyond this anecdote, he said nothing much apart from prawns had happened. He hadn’t wanted to talk, and kept to himself. His dreams were terrible. Heidl was there, but it wasn’t Heidl. It was a green slime that covered all his body and which—no matter how hard he tried—he could not clean off. He met a girl in Margaret River, and she was sweet; she was kind. One night he dreamt he was flying through mountain passes and landed in a beautiful green paddock. But in the end she had wanted him to talk too, she had kept asking questions, so, he continued, he had cut out of that. Why do people want to talk so much? Ray asked.

  She sounds okay, I said.

  She was okay, Ray said, if she just didn’t talk so much.

  It’s not the worst, I said.

  What’s to tell? Ray said. There I was, finally starting to feel a fuckn sea eagle but every time she made me talk I was back being a corella with clipped wings and a busted arse.

  She sounds a good woman, though.

  She might have been a good woman, he went on, only she talked too much and so I cut out of it.

  Why don’t you just stick to one woman for a while? I asked near the bottom of the port flagon.

  She wouldn’t shut up with her questions. I used to say to her your problem is that you think there are answers.

  And he told me about how his father would get drunk and beat his mother, how he used to tie them up at the table and beat Ray too. And when he was sixteen his father came home drunk and started once more hitting his mother and Ray took him on.

  I creamed the cunt. I thought I was going to kill him. I wanted to kill him. He never touched her again.

  And now? I asked.

  I don’t want to end up my old man. That’s all. When I get in too deep, I move on before I become him. Before I do what he did.

  You never told me, I said.

  Maybe it’s wrong. Maybe that’s all life is, isn’t it?

  I never knew, I said.

  He looked at me as if I was the biggest fool on earth.

  What’s to know?

  His eyes were manic, the live electrode inside his brain once more sizzling.

  What’s to fuckn tell?

  And I could smell it.

  19

  1

  ONE WAY of telling the story of what ensued would begin with a dog running into our yard, grabbing Suzy’s pet parrot, and killing it. Suzy loved that parrot as much as I loathed it, an Indian ringneck cock, a luminous green bird that every time I went near would bite me so hard I would bleed. With Suzy it was as peaceful as a puppet. She would fold its long tail feathers into circles and it would give her nibbling kisses. It would roll a ping-pong ball across a table for her when she asked. It would run its beak up and down her hair, gently grooming her while it sat on her shoulder as she watched TV.

  After I wrested the dead bird’s strangely passive body from the dog’s wet jaws Suzy began to cry and could not stop. I held her in bed that night, but she was inconsolable, cracked open by a grief that seemed to me disproportionate. She had clipped the bird’s wings so that it could wander the garden and not fly away. She kept thinking of the flightless parrot seeking to escape the dog with its pigeon-toed hopping, then finding itself in the dog’s mouth, and she blamed herself. Trying to sleep, I felt her slow, violent shuddering through my back. The death of the bird seemed to have summoned up all the sadness of the world in her, and there was nothing I could do to calm her.

  We’ll get another bird, I said into the darkness.

  It’s just—I don’t know.

  We can tame it up, I said.

  Us, she said.

  Her body jolted with more sobs.

  For God’s sake, Kif! Us!

  Maybe it was then that a wild disorder of my inside began, a turmoil, an aching of the guts, a heaviness in the bowels, which would not leave me alone. At times it affected me so severely I found it hard to br
eathe. Where it came from I have no idea. I would have to stop and concentrate so that I might not fall to the floor. And some force, some weight would push in on my chest on all sides, crushing me, as if the world had grown too heavy and too powerful to keep out a moment longer. And it would no longer be me looking down into the eyes of the dying, but my eyes staring out of my collapsed body, my defeated flesh, looking out at the living. I would just have to hold on as thoughts, dreams, hopes would rise within me like stones I’d have to vomit out or they’d choke me. And I would rooster some sour slime into a sink or toilet and stagger back to whatever chair or sofa I could find.

  What’s wrong? Suzy asked a few nights later as she took me by the arm, the body, and wanted to lay me down. My God! Kif, what haven’t you told me?

  What’s wrong? I thought. What hadn’t I told her? What was it that was untellable? And my tongue would shudder in my mouth trying to find words that would explain a collapsing question mark, grey gruel, ants, rustling bark, trembling lips—

  You must tell me, Kif, she’d say.

  But just trying to find words for that circling black jay was beyond me, because the more I saw it the more I was caught in its spiral.

  Or it will kill you, I can see it, Kif! It will kill you!

  And I would try to hold on, for her, for me, for us, but all the time my grip was growing weaker and Heidl’s stronger. I would look through her. I would see Heidl looking at me. And I would tell her nothing.

  Later that night I woke in an empty bed. On searching I found her in the backyard where she had fallen asleep in a sleeping bag on the lawn. She suddenly awoke and seeing me there smiled.

  Look, she said, and pointed above. I can’t believe the stars tonight.

  Because she did believe in them. Suzy believed, it’s fair to say, in what she called the loveliness of things. It was her defence against a world that in so many other ways had offered people like her little—little education, few prospects, declining hope. It was a reconciliation I was possibly incapable of. There is a sweetness in things that can be intolerable to the less well disposed, that can irritate the more ignorant, who dismiss it as lacking some gravity or weight. And among their number I perhaps count myself. Suzy’s soul was transcendent. Maybe that’s what I couldn’t bear. I was full of wanting what she had, but it wasn’t possible.