I always used to think of myself that any eloquence I might muster was almost certainly a false wind.
What I used to like, and admire, about Beckett was his austerity. What I saw was a life pared back to its essentials. The evidence was locked in his face, in that spiky hair of his, as sturdy as a cleaning brush. I assumed he led a monastic life and existed on a diet of bread and water. In portrait after portrait his face settles into a firm jaw, the hair rears away from the scalp, and the eyes are as keen as a hawk’s swooping low over a paddock. That is how I saw him, and how Beckett encouraged us to. In real life I never saw anyone quite like him. But in the imaginary landscape, he loomed—in the hacked hills and their gorse patches, and on a mad dog of a road as it twisted around corners and charged into successive stages of ugliness. I imagined Beckett’s grey cosmic attention drawing up miles of tarseal on its way to some hard scrabble beach, the top button done up on his jacket, his nose flinching at the faint smell of raw sewage.
One day, idle and nosing about in a secondhand bookshop, I happened to flick through a large book of photographs taken in the south of France. Tanned 1970s women in big hair and sunglasses. Maseratis. Umbrellas, beach balls. I turned a page to find Beckett striding up a path from the beach, a towel draped over his arm, in shorts, sunglasses, sandals. It was a shock to find him in this sunny environment. I had never thought of him as a sunbather or a wearer of sandals—and of a kind similar to the brand put out by the shoe factory back in its day. But there he was, in Cap Ferrat, as I recall, the ripe smell of summer bursting from his shadow. His long tanned legs striding out. His legs were another thing to square away. His legs were beside the point. Not part of the biography.
The problem with my past was that all the tapes, if any ever existed, had been destroyed.
One of the few stories with an unmistakably allegorical line handed on to me had to do with hard times.
Long before you came along. Mum could always be relied on to remind me just how lucky I was to have popped up behind that cabbage leaf when I did.
Long before I came along, Bob arrived home from school to ask Mum if he could buy his school lunch like the other kids. Apparently, buying your lunch at school was a new thing, and my brother wanted to try it. But of course there was no money for such an extravagance. Bob must have kept up his campaign because eventually Mum found a few pennies behind the couch for him. He chose a pie, a meat pie (on such details memories thrive) or was it a potato pie? But come the lunch hour he couldn’t eat it, and saved it instead to bring home to share.
After telling that story, Mum would nod into empty space, while I remained suitably in awe.
I might have missed it all, but I absorbed the anecdotes—the pie story and the one about Bob shooting himself—and laughed eagerly, as if I had been there, and developed a knowing smile when once more we were reminded that one sister could not be trusted to dish herself up a fair share of Spanish cream, Mum’s signature dish. Strangely, this fact has endured like some oddity stuck in the sand.
Continuing with my good fortune, I didn’t have to leave school at fifteen, as my sisters did, and unlike them I had a new tennis racquet and clothes bought from shops. By the age of twelve I had flown on a plane—to Sydney, then on to Surfers Paradise, where I had my first Hawaiian steak and sat speechless with joy in the holy grail of a beer garden nursing a fruit cocktail with a floating paper umbrella.
My mother dreamt of a life for herself different from the one she had landed in. She liked Englishness, good china, manners, and would often say so if someone was well spoken, but such types rarely visited 20 Stellin Street. When they did, we sat around in a circle like newly minted disciples. The one who could talk—and very persuasively—was my brother.
He did not so much smash as talk his way out of our working-class stocks, which was to make the way a great deal easier for me. I was lucky enough to attend university—not that I intended to, but he insisted. And because of Bob’s success in commercial property, Dad was able to retire from welding. Mum, who had cleaned houses to supplement the household income and sewn underpants for her kids, would fly first-class for the rest of her life, and once, memorably, in a chartered jet all around Australia. And because she could now afford to she shook the lines of depression and disappointment out of her face. For the last thirty years of her life, she took an anti-depressant pill every day. The effect was extraordinary. It seemed to strip away the protective layers to allow a different person to emerge—a far more cheerful person. It was not a mask she put on before our startled eyes but a part of her that had lain buried for so long without the means to emerge and express itself. She turned into a lovely old lady whose welcoming hug at the door and demand for a peck on her cheek suddenly felt weirdly inappropriate, even unsettling. I wasn’t used to this person, and if I could I would step around her and brush aside her protests. To be met at the door by all that charm and lipstick—it was too much. It was as if someone else who was only vaguely familiar had taken up residence inside her. Whenever I indulged her it felt like we were playing at something, like grappling with a foreign language, or acting out roles in a play for which we had only some of the lines.
Just as annoying, some old habits remained. She would yell at me as I reached for a piece of fruit in the bowl. She had just bought those bananas. What on earth made me think I could eat one? A week later, the bananas would still be there, soft, untouched, and covered in black spots.
Such moments might have been an act of solidarity with the single mums she taught to budget, something she knew quite a bit about, even though these days she drove a late-model Jaguar to the Citizens Advice Bureau in the Hutt to give advice to desperate young women arriving on the bus.
I am made aware of how the world is built from what lies near to hand. A musical instrument can be made by stringing sheep gut between two goat horns. And fate can intervene in surprising ways. Whoever would have thought of giving a flying ram to a nymph in order for her to rescue her children from a murderous father? Or to cast a spell over guard dogs and to steal their bark? And I know how theft can be a kind of comic correction to the world order, such as when stolen cattle are made to walk backwards to throw off their pursuers. Although, in the account of the myth I prefer, brushes are tied to the tails of the cattle bringing up the rear to erase all trace of their passing. I also understand that vengeance knows no restraint. Rulers are turned into ravens, their children into twittering birds, and betrayers into stone.
I know all about Hermes because ‘for the sake of my education’ Mum has taken out a subscription to Knowledge magazine, which now regularly turns up in the letterbox at 20 Stellin Street.
I’ve also read that Hermes, the interpreter of dreams and messenger of the gods, bestowed on the witness Aesop the gift of fable.
As it happens, I have a real-life magician in my life capable of spinning gold out of air.
Each Sunday, Bob comes home for the roast.
He parks his fabulously expensive sports car in the drive by the rubbish bins, which attracts the neighbourhood kids and dogs. He is often too excited to eat. Instead he paces up and down the small kitchen recounting adventures to do with his salesmen who sell advertising space to tradesmen in something called The Bride Book.
My brother brings into that tiny kitchen a life brimming with wild and outrageous stories. He is often at the heart of them. For diversion there is the map of the world pinned to the wall. My father keeps his head down and tucks solitarily into his meat and potatoes. It’s almost as if he can’t hear. On the other hand, he will sometimes remember me and before his mouth closes down on a forkful of meat call out across the table, ‘Capital of China?’
Bob’s stories have a touch of Robin Hood about them. Mum might smile, or catch herself to turn the smile into a look of official disapproval. Perhaps it is because the world that my brother brings to our attention has such different rules. As far as I can tell, there aren’t any. It’s a world in which Henry Fielding’s foundling
bastard Tom Jones would flourish. In many ways, Tom Jones belongs in our family tree, along with Hermes. And here, too, a lesson was to be absorbed as completely as I had absorbed the pie story and less honourably Mum’s anti-Catholicism. You could be anyone and achieve anything. Secondly, ‘work’ was a loose and imaginative word. Our father had flogged himself half to death for nothing. From now on things would be different. My brother had found a way.
It was the 1960s, and huge tracts of the planet we are familiar with today—South America, to choose but one continent—did not register in any other way than on the map. In the world beyond the rubbish bins a young couple fell in love, got engaged, bought a section, and got cracking with building a house. Ideally the last nail was banged in as she dropped her first kid.
As corny as it sounds now, The Bride Book spoke of happier times ahead. Not so much for the couples. The business model behind The Bride Book didn’t really give a toss about them. No—happier times for the tradesmen, and the enormous business opportunities associated with a couple’s decision to get hitched, usually after the first fumbling in the back seat of a car parked down by the river.
A plumber or an electrician or a marriage celebrant, tilers and specialists in linoleum and lights and fittings—none of them could afford to miss out. Hermes could not have done better to come up with The Bride Book to exploit the standard fairy tale so irresistible from the beginning of time. The wonderful irony is that its creator came from a family riven with illegitimacy and abandonment.
The world beyond the rubbish bins, I understand, is a pantomime. Someone is always pretending to be someone they’re not. The men who work for Bob have nicknames like ‘Twelve Foot’. Like all extremely tall men, Twelve Foot came through the door with a bowed head and stayed like that after he sat down at the dinner table to tuck into Mum’s roast. Mr Moses was another pseudonym I heard, entirely appropriate for someone offering the Promised Land to a dazzled builder caught halfway up a ladder. And Rick, of course, who my mother objected to because, she said, he was good-looking. She also objected to his teeth, which, as far as I could see, were perfect. The smile and its flashing white teeth went into overdrive whenever he entered the kitchen. Mum would look away grimly. And Rick was canny enough to know to address Mum as Mrs Jones, never Joyce.
In the late 1960s Bob handed on The Bride Book to Lorraine’s husband Michael, who continued to run it from its Hutt offices on the street behind the riverbank.
After school I would pop in there to stuff calendars covered in trade ads into tubes.
Through the open office door I listened to Michael rehearse a new salesman. And it was like catching up with a story first heard around the Sunday roast years earlier. ‘Now, I will be Mr Brown. You be Mr Green.’
The trainee salesman would leave the office to compose himself as Mr Green. He barely noticed the kid in the corner stuffing tubes. But I noticed him, and a whole swag of other Mr Greens in their badly ironed white shirts and skinny black ties, each one with a face like a Mormon’s, young, spotty, lips mumbling the lines that would take him out to the world as Mr Green. He took a deep breath and disappeared around the office door. ‘Hello Mr Brown. I’m Mr Green…’ followed a few moments later by howls of laughter.
‘From Rags to Riches.’ I was nine or ten when I saw that headline. I remember the thrill of seeing Lorraine, then just a few years out of living in a caravan in the Hutt Park campground, photographed by the newspaper—there she was, in the paper, holding a model of a commercial building in Andrews Avenue, which on completion would become the tallest building in the Hutt, and owned by my brother.
Bob had become a millionaire, once upon a time a thing unimaginable to the inhabitants at 20 Stellin Street. But, at a deeper level, nothing much else was to change. The history that went untold was still manifestly present—in Dad’s struggle to make himself understood, in Mum’s neurosis.
In my own case, it was in an outsider’s feel for the margins, and a contempt for anyone who might think themselves part of the establishment, while, paradoxically, not necessarily condemning the idea of the establishment. One can still admire the crystal without feeling a need to own it. Pretension was the offending character trait.
It never occurred to me that my heritage also included a rich lineage of jesters and fools and risk-takers who could be depended upon to say aloud what everyone else thought but could not bring themselves to say.
But it also came with a recklessness. Words could lead you anywhere. It was just a matter of trusting them completely.
There was a time when I pursued my wife’s family lore all the way to the Ukraine. It didn’t seem such a crazy idea to seek out the source of a physical similarity between my eldest son and his great-grandfather. I did sometimes wonder if Jo’s grandfather really had been a violinist to the Czar, but there was his portrait in such proximity to our own lives, overseeing the scamper and hijinks of kids running up and down the hall, returning my own gaze with equanimity, as though he guessed my doubts and wished to reassure me that, yes, everything I’d heard was true.
This was big history, desirable history—and it happened in places that I wanted to visit. One year I travelled to Moldova, well outside the ‘family map’, and, being short of leads, I found myself inventing one. I said whatever needed to be said to persuade the Moldovan Embassy in Moscow to give me a visa, which is how I came to find myself sitting in a hotel room in Kishinev with a map open on my knees and a cross marked on Zura, a tiny village on the banks of the Dniester which tumbles down from the top of Russia to the Black Sea.
I liked the sound of Zura. It was so out of the way and unreachable that the only legitimate excuse to visit was to invent a family history that included Zura. I’d told the consul that my wife’s ancestor had floated down the Dniester until he reached Zura. And when did this happen? I could offer only approximate dates.
It seems preposterous now, but I remember calmly describing this piece of family history with the sangfroid of a salesman for The Bride Book or, for that matter, Arthur Leonard Jones inventing his drowned-at-sea story.
Otherwise Zura was a world that I would never have found. And, with some justification, grandfather Arthur Leonard Jones might claim that with the drowned-at-sea story he would never have found his third wife and, for all I know, happiness.
My interpreter was an out-of-work schoolteacher in Kishinev. Her boyfriend, an agricultural inspector, happened to know Zura; he drove there a few times a month. His tiny car was a familiar sight to the soldiers at the roadblocks at each bridge, and so we were waved through. There was a war on. Or one had just finished. A few weeks earlier we’d have been in Moldova. Now the border had moved and we were driving through Western Dniester. Eventually we came to Zura, a small village of unsealed roads. Across the river was Romania.
Without the thread of make-believe, I would never have met the old Jewish man. A crowd gathered around the cherry tree where I sat with the mayor and the interpreter and the agricultural inspector while we waited for the old man to turn up to shed light on my wife’s ancestors.
He duly arrived with a small briefcase much like the one Dad used to carry his sandwiches and tobacco in to the factory where he made fire engines.
Short, thin, weak-kneed, dressed for the occasion in a threadbare suit and a frayed shirt collar. Bits of newspaper flopped out the sides of his cracked shoes. His eyes were large and still, and never once blinked. His face was sparsely covered in grey stubble.
A chair was found for him. He was treated with much respect, which he took in his stride, or, as it later occurred to me, dismissed as too little and too late. He shook his head at the offer of a drink from a jug of cold red wine. His eyes tended to weep, and he kept dabbing at them with an old rag.
The air was cool out of the sun and where we sat under the tree was in partial shadow. I picked at the cherries and spat the stones onto the ground as I had seen the mayor do.
The old man set his briefcase on the table. Inside it were
news clippings from the war. As they were written in Russian I handed them to the interpreter. A small crowd stood behind us. The interpreter put on her glasses. I could hear the river tinkling between the small houses. A car slowed down for a look, then drove on.
As the interpreter began to read the old man came to life. Every now and then he nodded at something she said, and when she ended he announced grandly that after he was drafted into the Soviet Army he had fought on every front. I remembered the evenings in front of the telly, the carts piled with bodies and the landscapes stitched with barbed wire, and, heard again Mum’s lament about man’s inhumanity to man.
His voice was surprisingly emphatic, like Mum’s at the end of her life when she seemed briefly to recover her voice, but not her control, so that her words came out in different registers, surprising too like an unexpected burp, and I remember thinking at the time that it was as though she was emptying the bilges of all the lives she had lived, one moment sounding like a little girl, harsh and guttural in the next, and then a scolding sound that was emphatic, such as her reprimand when I had reached for a banana; the old man in Zura sounded the same way as he stabbed the air with his finger and listed all the fronts he had fought on.
The crowd listened and nodded silently like a cast of extras, but now he was repeating himself and they waited patiently for something new. I endeavoured to look like I was listening hard before becoming distracted by the old man’s whiskers, noting again how distinct and sparse they were.
In the Soviet Army the old man had had countless brushes with death—his body was covered with shrapnel wounds—but being drafted undoubtedly saved his life. At the end of the war he made his way back to Zura to discover he had fought in a losing war after all. The Romanians had thrown every last Jew into the river, including all the members of his family.