I own this house because of the Sydney property boom of the late twentieth century, which magically turned the ordinary house where I grew up into a goldmine, transforming my father and mother into well-off people. When they died my sister and I inherited enough money to buy, respectively, a studio flat at Bondi Beach for my sister to use during her infrequent visits to Australia and a ramshackle house in France for me, for which I feel both grateful and obscurely guilty.
The money I have left over supplements my modest editing income, as well as my son’s desire to study at Saint Martins in London. My husband’s father is still alive, ninety-two and still painting and drawing, and our son lives with his grandfather in a beautiful house in St John’s Wood. A sensitive boy, my son learnt long ago not to talk to me about his father, and never to mention my sister’s name. Of course I am ashamed of this, but I was born preferring death to surrender. Like my parents before me, I am the possessor of violent emotions.
Where I have chosen to live is close enough to London for my son to visit. I pick him up in my old banger from Carcassonne airport, now on the airline budget route from Stansted. I wait for him in the flimsy terminal as pale English tourists are disgorged, together with befuddled locals, and then the face of my adored, newly adult son, that face more dear to me than any face I know.
I keep a room for him. He is a young man of grace and charm, half-English, half-Australian, a French speaker, his heritage to be forever torn between north and south, a lover of northern-hemisphere seasons and southern-hemisphere skies, with roots reaching out in all directions. Like me, he loves freezing Christmases and sweltering Christmases, his exiled heart schooled to pursue what is beyond.
NINETY-SIX
The deathly lover
SHE DOES NOT LIKE TO think of her brother. She hates to think of him, in fact, breathless, stopped, that boy who once dragged a reluctant dog across a polished floor.
Steph told her that her brother was no less real even though she could no longer see him, just as Russia was no less real even though she couldn’t see it.
Steph advised her to adopt the Gestalt technique of speaking out loud, saying carefully and clearly: ‘I choose to have a brother who is dead.’
She tried it, but only once.
The words in the air sounded so bleak, so bare, so awful, that she rushed from the room, leaving them behind, running and running.
She does not like to think of all the things she did not do: go to him, hold his hand, drag him screaming to some faraway place to stop him drinking himself to death. She does not like to think of her own culpability.
What happened to those years between him rising from the bed and getting into that car? How did she come to not know her own brother?
The guilty truth is that the woman did not see her brother Paul often. One time she did not see him for three years straight, when he was in the Northern Territory working and she was in Paris, grieving. He lost his driver’s licence in Gove, where he was working at the mines, for drink driving. He was jailed in Darwin for driving a mate’s car while drunk. It was these years that turned out to be crucial, the years when it might still have been possible to reach out and save him. But as he was going down she was looking the other way, and she did not know what was approaching.
She has a bag which contains all his worldly possessions: a jumper with holes, smelling of cigarettes and of him; a fraying wallet; a couple of old vinyl records (Harvest, which they used to play over and over); and an old torn photograph of all of them at the beach in Queensland, her brother, her sister and herself, still children, their parents standing behind them, much taller than their children, more beautiful and more glamorous than they could possibly hope to be.
Paul, Ro, Super Nan, her mother and father, citizens of that vast republic of the dead. Nana Elsie, stilled.
Where have they gone, the pictures inside Nana Elsie’s head of dancing around a room with a handsome captain? What of the pictures inside Paul’s head, and Ro’s, and that picture in her mother’s head of holding a knife against a daughter’s soft throat?
Where will her own pictures go? Who but she apprehends the world with her particular eyes, grasping it with her ten particular fingers and ten particular toes? What body but hers bears these unique scars, the story of a life made manifest? No self without a body, no body without a remembering self to animate it.
The woman who now lives alone in a cottage in southern France is careful to catalogue her body’s memories. In the urge to tidy up, to sort through her body’s archaeology, she makes sure that pictures pass from head to head, a collective remembering. Her son remembers a sixteen-year-old blind girl growing watercress on a flannel during a long sea crossing in order to have something fresh to eat. He carries a picture of Mademoiselle Joubert, too, adrift in the Australian bush, the daughter of a baker from Angers. As well as inheriting his grandfather’s small, girlish hands, her son has also inherited the sound of Aggie thwacking her stick, together with the sound of six sisters, giggling, the youngest one frightened of bushrangers.
But he will never remember his mother longing to kiss the lips of Justine Gervais. He will never recall how her stomach lurched whenever she saw that dissolute lover, as if she were travelling too fast in a car over an unexpected hill.
These memories will vanish along with her body, lost to the far place that holds the memories of that vast republic.
But while she still breathes, nothing is lost, forgotten or forgiven. While she still breathes the past is permanent, unredeemed, and the present dissolving, slipping away. Oh, to be capable of smelling ripe cheeses and roses! What it is to be breathing!
NINETY-SEVEN
Rain
ON THE FACE, THE EYES closed, head back, upturned. Water trickling into the coiled ear, round the back of the hair, down the neck. Standing naked in the garden, before anyone is up, not even an animal. The rain against your shoulders, your breasts, your belly, your grateful face, making the soil dance around your feet.
NINETY-EIGHT
Scheherazade
EVERYBODY KNEW BUT ME. PAOLA knew, and Celestine knew and, unforgivably, Horatia, because Celestine told her. Why didn’t anyone tell me? I never spoke to any of them again.
I spoke to my sister only once after I found out. Rather, I screamed at my sister only once. I can still hear the sound of that scream, as if it hangs permanently somewhere in the air.
In despair, I slapped my small hand across my sister’s beautiful face.
‘Don’t you dare give me that bullshit,’ I said. ‘You sound like you’re in a B-grade movie.’
‘He doesn’t love you anymore,’ she said.
I laughed. ‘He doesn’t mind sleeping with me.’ I clenched and unclenched my fists.
‘Look at you,’ she said, in a sneering voice that sounded like our mother’s. ‘You always think you’ll get exactly what you want, don’t you?’
‘Get out,’ I said loudly. ‘Get off this boat now.’
‘Gladly,’ she said. ‘He hasn’t loved you for a long time, you know. He said he didn’t realise what love was until he met me.’
I rushed at her; she raised her hands in self-protection. ‘Tell me while you have the chance, Jane,’ I said, breathing hard into her face and holding her by the hair. ‘Do you really want him or do you only want to win him from me?’
She giggled and I slapped her again.
‘Mama,’ said my son, walking in, ‘are you wrestling?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Mama is wrestling with Aunty Jane. Now go back to your room, sweetheart.’
Jane lunged for the door, bolting up the stairs to the deck. Scheherazade rocked on the water.
I sometimes wonder what would have happened if my son had not come in, how far my violent emotions might have taken me.
Not long after this we left Scheherazade forever. I was sadder to be leaving her than to be leaving my husband, whom I had not loved, not deeply and not properly, for some time. If I still loved him at all, I l
oved the memory of him, of what he and I had been and what we might have become. I loved his most pure self, which I believed I glimpsed when we were first in love. It was him I grieved for, that man who once wanted only good things for me and for our coming child.
I thought I grieved most keenly for the loss of Scheherazade, for the community of permanent boat-owners: Russian heiresses and adventurers, shifty men from Margate, former shopkeepers from Turin. I could not stand the loss of the river in the morning in mid-winter, a white mist coming off the rippled surface of the water. I grieved for our summer life, sipping wine in chairs on the deck, the smell of potted lavender and thyme and basil baking in the sun. Most of all I mourned the loss of the rock and sway of life on the water, for the passing of my sea legs, for the taking away of that joyous sensation of being warm and dry, loved, afloat, which I believed I would never feel again.
NINETY-NINE
The second-last lover
A SUSPICIOUS WANDERER WHO HAS spent her life wandering, flitting from here to there, from house to house, from flat to boat, looking for love in cities and villages, in endless places and faces, might count herself surprised to find that love came when she wasn’t looking. Surely she had learnt that history begins and ends unnoticed and that when an inconsequential action tilts everything in an unheard-of direction men and women are most often looking elsewhere.
Love arrived smaller and more humble than advertised. Love turned out to be plain, quotidian. Love was many encompassing things, painful, conflicted. It was more terrible than publicised.
Love was in the room when her son was in his hospital bed in London, his body rigged up to machines. She would have cut it out then, exorcised it from her breathing heart, but she could not. Her son did not die but came home to recuperate and she was still suspicious of love.
She saw her lost husband once, from behind. He looked stooped, sad, walking along the hospital corridor, and she was more surprised than she could say to feel her heart swell with a tender feeling that resembled forgiveness.
Love was in the ground, in the old stones of the house, in the scarlet geraniums around her door and in the pillow placed against her lower back by her old friend Steph, who came to stay when she slipped on the ice and broke her ribs.
Love did not really stretch to forgiveness. Not for Jane or Horatia or Paola. It probably did not stretch to her husband either, now that she thought about it.
Love was a nuisance. It meant considering other people besides oneself, a difficult adjustment for a temperamental, deeply solitary person to make. In truth she did not enjoy having to consider other people.
Love was Phillip, that unprepossessing English handyman who lived two houses up. Bald, too fat, with bad English teeth and a riotous laugh, he loved red wine, the French, driving all over France and Italy even though he could barely read a map. He loved life, really loved it, the gift of eyes, of ears, of a flowering tongue with which to taste everything it offered. He dug in the earth’s soil and knew the name of every bird and tree, and thought nothing of fixing for free the broken window of old Madame Morel so that she could remove the black plastic she had taped across it and once again look out over the valley. Love was the two deep lines running down each side of his face, where happiness had carved itself.
The Suspicious Wanderer had grown fat too. Her belly flopped over the waistband of her skirts and if she had once, long ago, possessed graceful ballerina legs, she did not now. She had grey in her hair and yellowing teeth and a couple of scars that she might tell you about if she had knocked back a few too many happy glasses of vin de pays.
Sex with Phillip was a bit of a laugh. They prodded each other’s fat bellies with their fingers.
‘Watch it,’ he said once. ‘Thirty years ago I was out of your league. Thirty years ago I was a god.’
She laughed. ‘Thirty years ago I wouldn’t have looked twice at you either,’ she replied.
And she wouldn’t have. She preferred herself now, less succulent and more loving, humbled, loved.
THE HUNDREDTH LOVER
TICK-TOCK. TICK-TOCK, the body remembers. A human lifespan is less than a thousand months long, really, just a single gleaming day.
My body, mine at last.
I am wearing a red shirt.
I was here, an ordinary citizen of the sated world and nothing exceptional ever happened to me, save the commonplace and extraordinary fact that, like you, I was born, I was born, I was born.
C’est la vie, so thrilling, so terrible, that I stand before it, hopelessly ardent, saluting before I forget. Every day unique in its details, already passing, vanishing, like breath.
Acknowledgements
THIS BOOK HAS HAD A long gestation. I would firstly like to thank the fantastic team at Allen & Unwin for their patience and understanding, most especially Annette Barlow. Patrick Gallagher was always supportive and the editorial team of Christa Munns and the brilliant editor Ali Lavau saved me from my worst excesses. My long-time former agent, Margaret Connolly, encouraged me through thick and thin, and I’d like to thank her and her husband Jamie Grant for many years of unflinching support. My friends Sandra Hogan and Emma Felton continue to be the anchors of my life, as do their husbands Danny Troy and Kevin Hayes, who have become my dear friends too. My mother Barbara Johnson, and my brothers Steven and Ian, and their wives Janet and Michelle, continue to be rock solid, and I thank them. My sons, Caspar and Elliot Webb, provided much-needed distraction. I’d also like to thank everyone in BrisVegas who helped our coming home during a difficult time; in particular, the brilliant author and editor Matthew Condon, who changed my life in giving me my lovely job at Qweekend at The Courier-Mail. Thanks, too, to David Fagan and Michael Crutcher and to my fab colleagues Sandra Killen, Leisa Scott, Frances Whiting, Anne-Marie Lyons, Phil Stafford, Alison Walsh, Amanda Watt, Matthew Fynes-Clinton, Trent Dalton, Mike Colman, Russell Shakespeare, David Kelly, Genevieve Faulkner and everyone else on that mighty team. BrisVegas locals are some of the friendliest and most generous people on the planet: big thanks to Rob Hugall and Issy Hugall and Meg Hinchcliffe; Chris Strew; Kristina Olsson; Janet and Bob England; Cathy Jenkins; Rosa Hogan and Annette Hogan; Chris Whitelaw and John Hook; Paul Reynolds, Ross Booker and the fine team at Education Queensland, including the unstoppable Lyn McKenzie; Cameron Belcher and Jennifer Brasher; Donna Wright; Joan Wilson-Jones; Maria Comninos; Susan Oakenfull and Ian Oakenfull; Judy McLennan; Robyn Flynn; Billy and Nikki Webb and everybody in Sydney and Melbourne who were there too, including Anna, Maddy-Rose and Tom MacClulich, Tracey Callander, Leigh Hobbs, Dmetri Kakmi, Jim Pavlidis, Megan Backhouse, Ross Tanner and Elizabeth Minter, all of whom helped make the transition from London to Brisbane easier for me and the boys. Merci Marion Cabanes for helping with my French. Special thanks to JH, who knows what for.
Susan Johnson, My Hundred Lovers
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