Looking for the sound of bells

When I was 24 I went to Europe for the first time with a friend that I lived and worked with up North.  Mazz and I landed in Amsterdam; he was keen to catch up with a girl he’d met in Bali the year before. This was just before Christmas and we left the Australian summer to arrive in a city that was white with snow and 18 degrees below zero.  We’d never seen snow before and we sat in the cab from Schiphol airport hardly able to blink or take the smiles from our faces.

 

We stayed at this little place called the Schmidt Hotel but before an hour was up we were in the streets of Amsterdam bracing against a freezing breeze down streets like we’d never known before.  We picked up the snow and threw it at each other, sent postcards home saying, “There is snow everywhere.”  We were like kids.

 

That night, in our small room, we lay on our beds and drank Heineken beer.  Even now, that taste takes me straight back to that night.  A church bell rang and we leapt up looking out the window as if we could see the sound of it.  Mazz explained how the cold air made the peeling so crystal clear.  I didn’t listen; I only knew that it was beautiful. “You’ll be telling me how Rembrandt made his paint next,” I said but only gently.

 

I read the words on my green Heineken can.  “It says this beer won the Grand Prix of 1886,” I say.  “Bullshit,” Mazz says, “Where the fuck would they put the wheels?” and we laughed, not because we were drunk on beer but because we were drunk on Europe already.

 

In the morning, while Mazz still slept, I crept out into the dark streets and watched the shopkeepers setting up.  I heard the unfamiliar sound of footsteps in snow.  There was a smell of coffee and cigarettes in the air.  I pushed my white breath before me and I realised that I had never seen my breath before. I was alive and for the first time I knew it.  There were chocolates in the windows and people smiled at me politely.  They had red cheeks and tufts of blond hair that escaped from under their woollen caps.  I am alive, I thought, and I will never forget it.

 

Years later I was in Amsterdam again but by now I had seen a lot of the world. Mazz was married; I hadn’t seen him since the wedding two years before. It was summer. I found myself in a non-descript part of the city in a non-descript street and there in front of me was the Schmidt Hotel.  I was tired from walking and stopped in the street as a picture of me and Mazz flooded back.  I looked up to the window where we had stood looking for the sound of bells.  Nothing was the same as I remembered. The hotel and the street had become mundane, its shops plain, its people now solemnly bent on lives of which I was not a part.  I walked quickly away.

 

This was all a long time ago. My life is different now.  I no longer search for the joy of the exotic or stand breathless in unfamiliar weather or long for views unseen. I search for pieces of the everyday - my daughter’s hand in mine as I cross a road, my son sleeping, and the old smell of a new book. I look for the minute signs of life now, for the big spaces between events, or maybe just for signs of me. Now I no longer need to go over there to find that I am here.  You know, once not far from where I live, I saw an orange train passing silently through a yellow field of canola.

The feet of dead people

About five years ago I was staying at this bad hotel on the edge of Denver.  It was a cheap hotel so I should have expected it to be bad.  Like my father says, “You always get what you pay for” which is true except, when it comes to hotels, I think the benchmark should be different.  All hotels should be good and after that, if you pay more, it should just get better.  But this was a bad hotel. I booked a smoking room and they gave me a non-smoking room.  “Nothing else available,” they said.  “Just smoke in there, man.  And leave the window open.”  So I did and I got cold and kept waiting for the smoke alarm to go off or someone to come in and bust me.

 

There was one good thing though; you could see the Rockies from my window. I rang home all the way to Australia and I told my wife and kids that I can see the Rockies from my window but the kids were too young to get it and my wife sounded like she wasn’t really that interested.  Like she did about everything these days.   I wished I hadn’t wasted that picture of the Rockies on her; it spoiled it somehow.

 

Anyway, soon after that I went to the bar in the hotel.  I ordered a Millers Draught because it was American beer and I was having my first night in America.  There was one other guy at the bar and no one else even in the lounge seats.  After a couple of Millers I felt like talking to him.  I had an American beer and I wanted to talk to an American.  But I couldn’t think of anything to say and he didn’t even look my way like he was not interested in knowing who I was or what I was doing there.

 

Then I heard this laughing and talking and when I looked to the foyer I could see a group of Indians in full traditional dress walking out of the hotel. “Shit,” I thought, “I really am in America.”  One of the Indians wore a full feather headdress so I figured he was the chief. Then I remembered seeing a poster about a Pow Wow going on in town.  I wanted to know what that was all about.

 

I turned to the silent man at the bar.  “Do you know what that’s all about?” I asked.  He didn’t even look at the foyer or me.  “Just some Indian shit,” he said.  It wasn’t much of a start but it got the ball rolling.  Soon we were talking pretty easily.  When he found I was from Australia, he said with some animation, “Did you know that Australia has more marsupials than any other country on Earth?” The fact seemed to cheer him up for some reason. “We’ve only got one,” he laughs. “A fucking possum!”

 

He is 48 years old; he’s been a railway inspector for a quarter of a century.  “It’s all I know, Man,” he tells me. Lost the sight in one eye in ’84 and had to give up painting. The inspector’s son was the best pitcher in Trenton, Nebraska, won a scholarship to Dodge City, Kansas but gave it up for love and came home to his dad while his girlfriend studied to be a mortician. And his daughter, who was Miss Hometown Queen, got in a car crash that left her with scars and a bad neck.  Now she works as a dental assistant. “I didn’t know Australia fought in Vietnam,” he says later.

 

There was television on the wall and the news was on.  It showed a bomb blast somewhere and there were bodies strewn over this road near a market.  The American said to me, “What do you look at when you see a dead body on TV or in the newspaper or somewhere?” I really tried to think about that but I was getting drunk and I told him I didn’t know where I looked.  “You gotta look somewhere,” he said and I said I guessed so but somehow I couldn’t remember where I looked, at the blood, I suppose.  “I always look at their socks,” he said.

 

He went silent for a while.  Then he looked at me over his beer and he laughed a bit.  “Now why the fuck would I look at their socks?” He seemed genuinely interested in this.  I went to say something but he interrupted and said, “You know, it just seems such a dumb thing to do on the day you’re gonna die.  Put on your socks.  Why the fuck would you even care!”

 

“They don’t know they are going to die,” I offered.  He looked at me with a faint air of contempt.  “I fuckin’ know that,” he said. “But we’re are all fuckin’ dying. It’s the socks I don’t get. It’s all the fuckin’ little things like socks.” Later he said he had to make a phone call. I waited for about half an hour but he didn’t come back so I went up to my room.

 

I was drunk and hungry now but I was tired too; the flight was catching up on me.  I threw my clothes on the floor and climbed into bed in my underpants. The sheets were cool.  There was a fight going on in the car park and I thought how wonderful it was that beyond my curtain lay the snow-capped Rockies and the great big country of America.  Then I missed my family and wished my wife would cheer up a bit.  I wondered why she was always sad lately and I felt this little knot of fear in my stomach. Then I realised I still had my socks on; I took them off and soon I was asleep.

And all the voices lost

In the middle of the morning I make my way alone to a place called Chinaman’s Pool, not far from where I am staying for the holiday.  About a hundred years ago, this permanent pool was the mainstay of the town’s water supply and Aboriginal people made money by carrying it in heavy buckets to a tank in the main street.  The small stretch of water got its name from the large shoulder yokes, like those of the Chinese, which straddled the dark backs of the carriers.

 

I did not grow up in this area of the river but a couple of kilometres further east.  There is no doubt that the shady white gums, the paperbark trees and the green, peaceful water are beautiful.  But I feel I am in a strange place; that this is not my river but the river of the town kids.  My part of the river was wider and scattered with small islands.  We named each part and knew a story about every bank and stream.

 

It strikes me that this was always the way for the first people of this land.  The river stretches more than 500 kilometres inland and each tribe called just a small part of it home.  To the Ingaada people, here near the mouth of the river, it was Kow Win Wardo but just 70 kilometres away the wilder circumcised and scarred tribes had their own names.

 

Now they are all gone and the river is become one river but empty of their ancient songs and laughter.

 

Later, I take my kids to my part of the river.  It is still flowing but shallow.  Soon it will return to sand until the next cyclonic rain arrives.  They wrestle and run after each other in the clear stream.  “Are you watching, Dad?” they yell.  I am watching.  I watch the trees stretched like a familiar garland along the grassy banks unchanged in all this time.  And there’s the crossing where we boys stripped off one night and swam with strange exhilaration and a kind of moonlight madness.  That’s the island which we lit up with matches and watched disappear in a tall conflagration like a Viking funeral.  And over there, a girl called Susan and I kissed and tried to make love but both of us too young and clumsy.  Later she sent me a letter, “I miss you.” About a kilometre downstream we boys camped most weekends and carved our names on pieces of driftwood and whispered naïve dreams from our sleeping bags. We heard our words float up into the night sky with embers from the dying fire.

 

As I watch, three boys appear on the banks.  They are riding bikes and they look at us as if we have spoiled something.  I wish they would come down and talk to us, tell me what they are doing.  I know they will tell me they are bored and that there is nothing to do in this town and one day we are all going to leave for the city. As I did before them and muttering the same old small town mantra. One of them says something and points east.  They disappear. So many have disappeared now.

 

Suddenly my daughter is beside me and looking up at me intently.  Maybe she can see something in my face that wasn’t there before.  Anyway, it’s as if she has guessed what I am thinking. “Is it still the same as when you were a kid, Dad?” she asks. I wonder then if she will come back to this place one day and remember her brother and me in the gentle autumn sun, how the river stones glistened in the light and small birds whistled in hiding. And even as I wonder this I am struck by the certainty of it. She will remember me. And the river will remember me too and the Ingaada people and Susan and some naked boys laughing and all the voices lost to the sky.

 

“Well,” I say but smiling now, “the water changes but the river is always the same.”

He watches the rain

 

He watches the rain.  It is running down the window.  He is thinking of a woman who is far away.  He cannot remember ever thinking about anyone for as long as he thinks about this girl. Even so, his thoughts are like a silent movie; images without feeling or soundtrack.  He is practicing being neutral.  The phone rings.  It is his ex-wife.  She wants to change a night with the kids.  “It’s fine,” he says. 

 

She is apologising. “I’ll make it up to you.” He tells her again that it is OK; he had no plans for the night she wants to change.  “I’ll take them an extra night next week,” she says.  Then she is gone again and he returns to the window.

 

He wonders if his wife has a lover yet.  Once the thought would have made him apprehensive, reignited the smouldering ash of his emotions after the affair.  Something inside him has changed though.  For the first time he imagines his wife happy with another man and there is a tiny feeling somewhere inside that he wants this.  That he wants her to be happy again.  “Weird,” he mutters to the emptiness but finds himself smiling.  Part of that smile is for her, a bigger part for the fact of not feeling anything else; no fear, no anger, no hurt.  It has been a long time since he felt so removed from her; felt that she cannot touch him anymore.

 

He reaches for his coffee, holds the mug in his palm feeling the warmth in his fingers.  It strikes him dully that he did love his wife for a long time and that the feeling has gone; not even replaced with something close to love.  It has just gone. 

 

But where does love go?  Not the love for ourselves but the love we feel for others.  It fills our hearts then quickly or slowly it goes away.  He had once read somewhere that the love we feel defines us more than the love we receive. He thinks about this for a while.  Where love goes seems an unanswerable question and a little dangerous.   He finds it strange that he has never thought of it before. 

 

The woman occupying his thoughts spoke of love once or twice.  It is a big word, she said.  They were lying together on a Friday afternoon in Melbourne.  Too big for this strange thing between the two of them, she meant.  And he knew this was right in a way, in the normal way of the world.  But something about love is small too, he thought, easily given, easily lost.  His wife said to him once, “I love you but I’m not in love with you.”  The thought of this makes him turn from the window.

 

He mentally shifts away from this time; this time he tells no one about.  Increasingly he will not even tell himself that story.    But now he remembers that at the time of the affair, he never once hated his wife; not even her lover.  He thought he understood love then; that it can be a cruel, spoiling thing and yet almost impossible to resist. He had, early in their relationship, loved his wife so much that it had made him crazy at times.  And then it made him calm and good.  But in a long, dangerous, despairing drive South on the day he found out about the affair it was the knowledge of the unassailable nature of love that almost destroyed him. 

 

He is a lot of things but he is rarely dishonest with himself.  He knows that somewhere in the morass of their feelings for each other, he had stopped being someone his wife needed.  He knew it then and he spent four wasted years trying to discover the key again. He avoids thinking about that time now because he did not like what he remained long after her love for another man had gone.  And he does not want to be that person again, lost to himself.

 

He switches his mind to the sad-eyed lady thousands of miles away.  He thinks about her hands.  He remembers her crooked smile and the way she looks up at him sometimes with a look he can’t fathom for meaning.  She is beautiful and she does not believe she is beautiful.  Lying in bed in the late afternoon he had stroked her bare breast and shoulder and listened to her talking.  He was filled with the wonder of another human being, so mysterious, like a planet.  It made him believe in the beauty of the world again.

 

“Shit,” he murmurs and turns up the music.  “You are a sentimental fool.”  But he knows that he has never been sentimental.  Inside him there is a faint stirring.  His heart is making room for someone else.  He is not altogether happy about this; sometimes feels nervous, sometimes sick.  But he knows it is happening. 

 

The rain keeps pouring.  He feels uneasy, has felt uneasy for weeks.  Part of him knows they will meet again, part of him believes this will never happen.  There is a rumble in the distance.  He holds his palm against the cool glass of the window.  Somewhere a car swishes along the flooded highway and he wonders where it is going.

 

 

 

Class Management 101

A teacher I knew told how he always had trouble with a particular class of 14 year olds when he came to explain the joys of human reproduction.  Inevitably, the boys, in particular, would snigger and whisper during his lesson and no admonishment or threat on his part seemed to affect the mature reflection he desired.  Then, one day, he found the solution without really trying.  Turning suddenly from the blackboard, he bore down on a hapless boy caught giggling to the student next to him.  At the top of his voice the teacher commanded, “You, son!  What’s a penis?” Apparently the remainder of the lesson assumed an unusual gravitas both profound and undisturbed.

Holidays

I swear I didn’t raise my kids differently; they just turned out nothing like each other.  Maybe it’s a gender thing. 

Anyway, I’ve decided to take them to Bali this year, their first overseas holiday.  We are looking through the brochures together.  There are photographs of our hotel, jungle adventures and palm trees.  The mood of excitement is palpable and my eleven year old daughter exclaims, “Wow, Dad - elephants!”

Barely have the words passed her lips than my 13 year old son, in tones equally ecstatic, cries, “Wow, Dad - cable TV!”

Shark

There is a shark in our river

 

Below the surface of things

He swims where people feign

No memory of him.

 

Yachts capsize and sailors

Strike towards the shore

Legs kicking into the darkness

And the chill.

 

At Point Walter

Children swim

And laugh at dolphins

 

A man watches from the tree line.

He walks towards them humming.

Past the old people doing Tai Chi

Pushing gently

At the helpless sunshine.

 

 

 

Deep Thought

 

I have just jumped out of the shower where I was contemplating oral sex.  Well, sex and art or something like that.  Let me explain before you start thinking I have just made the world’s most inauspicious start to a blog entry!  I was thinking about a film I saw once, which was called “Inside Deep Throat,” a documentary of that somewhat famous porn movie (which, as it happens - but nothing to do with virtue - I have never seen).  It was funny, interesting, and sad and provoking e.g. Gore Vidal saying, “People always lie about sex because they are taught since they are children to lie about everything.”  Anyway, I wasn’t thinking about the film per se but about the strange dynamic that occurred amongst the audience when, all of a sudden – and only for about ten seconds – the big screen was filled with Linda Lovelace performing her most famous act.  And suddenly I was embarrassed and awkward and wishing I was anywhere else!  And I sensed that other people were also.  And I thought this was very strange because we were watching a sex act in the dark and we were all grown up and know that’s how grown ups act and that it is not shameful or dishonest or bad; that we would not feel the slightest embarrassment to see our fellow humans shooting each other – for longer and in slow motion and even with great cruelty.

Now, where exactly am I heading with this?  You see, the protagonists in the film could mainly be drawn into two main camps – those that see even bad performance as a form of art and those that see pornography as non-art and offensive and demeaning.  As usual, I kept thinking that neither was quite the whole story – even if you accept Oscar Wilde’s dictum that there is no such thing as a bad book or a good book; only a badly written or well written book.  Anyway that is another story because I wasn’t even thinking about the pros and cons of pornography as art (if it isn’t, then what else is not art  - war like Guernica by Picasso, martyrdom like all those religious pictures of St Sebastian with arrows in him, Jesus on the cross?)  Or does art stopping being art when it is based on exploitation?  Is that why pornography makes us feel a little morally bereft?  And if a film about oral sex is not art then what is a documentary about a film of oral sex? Buggered if I know – it’s not what I was thinking about!

I was trying to get my head around how when we look at something we change its nature.  This is not making much sense, I know, but I find it puzzling and interesting.

A few years ago in New York, I went to the Guggenheim Museum.  There was this photo, very large, a colour print of a naked woman with a very newborn baby in her arms.  She is standing, facing the photographer in front of a white (hospital?) wall on which only a light switch is evident.  A thin trickle of blood runs from between her legs and down to her ankle.  Her expression is difficult to judge, ambiguous – though not unhappy.  The nakedness and starkness, the blood and the tiny baby create such a sense of vulnerability yet, at the same time, of a greater, simpler truth about us all that it strikes deeply, an effective amalgam of the profound and the everyday.  Mostly though, it is the framing and viewing of the scene that changes it, transforms it into art.  After all, it portrays an event, a moment of the ordinary and common.  Most of the adults in the museum have experienced variations of this event, have known women and babies and hospital walls – why do we pause now and so troubled? 

Another picture, smaller and black and white, was also confronting but for different, though related, reasons.   A naked couple are about to kiss, she slightly on top of his prostrate body.  She is also holding him erect in her hand.  They both look at each other’s eyes.  This picture is avoided by most people, even their conversations pause then move on – not out of offended dignity but out of social discretion (like me in the movies!).  Out of good manners!

Do you see what I mean about the act of viewing, the public presentation of this private moment that leads to the transcendence of the act itself?  This last picture could have as easily been a single shot from an X rated movie, there is little abut the photograph that is “artistic.”  But its enlargement, its framing, its placement on a museum wall for viewing has created the effect of art.  Now this moment is held up for public view, placed in a context where social conventions are different and somehow inadequate.  We are challenged by a variety of emotions – embarrassment, voyeurism, titillation, confusion.  And all in public!  It’s as if the act of stripping away the walls from these intimate scenes has somehow stripped the walls from us.  The formal expression of intimate acts somehow confounds us and changes the meaning of the acts themselves.

And yet, if the man and woman in the photograph or the woman with the baby were actually in front of us, this would not be art, would it?

Or would it…?

Last laugh

There was a time when my grandmother was a vivacious and romantic young schoolteacher who loved the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and quoted the poetry of Tennyson. She was funny and mischievous well into old age.  One day, says my father, he was courting my mother on the front veranda of my grandmother’s house.  His fiancée’s younger sister, Janet, hovered around them and did her purposeful best to ensure that the young couple were not left alone.  Finally, in a fit of frustrated amour, my father reached out and smacked the teenager’s leg.  She raced tearfully and angrily into the house.  A pause ensured and my grandmother’s voice came from inside, “Bobby, did you just hit Janet?”

My father, still annoyed but also a little embarrassed answered curtly, “Yes, I did!”

There was another pause and then my grandmother’s voice, calmly and emphatically, returned with, “Good.”

When my mother was a teenager, my grandmother would take great delight in foraging through rubbish bins while they waited for the bus, much to the mortification of her daughter.  Then she would giggle about it all the way home.

Once, when I was just a small boy, she found me laughing at something on the television, something suspiciously like sexual innuendo.  “And what are you laughing about, young man?” asked my Grandmother.  I explained in my confused, uncertain way.  She looked at me sternly and then said with mock disdain, “I believe, sir, that you have a polluted mind!” But I heard her loudly guffaw seconds later.

By the time she was sixty, however, she had become completely and painfully crippled by rheumatoid arthritis. Letters to my mother were written over many days as it became increasingly difficult to hold her pen and her mind began to wander.  One day she wrote, “Now that the years have past, there is something that I need to tell you, something I should have told you many years ago. Now that you are a woman you will understand and there is no need for this secret to exist between us anymore.”  My mother turned the page with a sense of dread and expectation.  What she found was a new date and a new set of agonisingly etched lines that began, “I can’t remember what I was writing about before.  The weather here has been delightful lately although not good for the garden…” 

Despite my mother’s elaborate and extended entreaties, no further information was ever forthcoming and the secret, whatever it was, has long ago gone with my grandmother to the grave.  I don’t know about the afterlife, what it looks like or where it is, but I suspect that there is someone there reciting poetry and chuckling.

Once under the Southern Cross

I sure did all the dumb things for Colette. From this distance it seems such a beautiful name for first love but I didn’t love her then for posterity. Thirteen was I and sitting on a summers evening verandah seeing her image ranged across the Southern Cross and recalling every soft word, the faint English lilt of it, the pale fingers around a pencil. Colette.  Whose fingers were never to touch mine or voice to say my name.  Me; too desperate in my dumbness and struggling to find the secret of the older boys, their easy leering smiles and knowing winks.  Me; too young for this secret but old enough to know that I did not know.  Sometimes when Colette looked at me I felt she was willing me to grow up, to grow me into this knowledge that I could not learn. But how did she know it, I wondered, she who was no older than me.  How many nights looking at that bruised sky and searching for the secret that would not come? Too many. So I learned to make people laugh instead and I grew it into a little web and a little shell too. And sometimes I would see her smile, from a distance, but definitely smiling at the jokes that grew for her at night from my helpless heart.  Colette smiled. Did I grow slightly older at those moments or did she grow slightly younger? It doesn’t matter; you can’t make people laugh forever.  She found an older boy and then her family left town. The last time I saw her she was 17.  She gave me this quizzical look as if to say, “So you’ve finally grown up.” But I hadn’t grown up; I’d just grown taller.  In my confusion I dug into my pocket for a joke and I poured it from my mouth into her open ears, so gently like a gift. I like to think she is out there somewhere in the big world and that she keeps it still.