A told me about his father and his brother. ‘I felt that if they couldn’t get themselves together they should die.’ He said it harshly, with a sharp pushing-aside gesture of one hand. Then, of course, they did, and the girl killed herself. ‘I just went to bed. I was completely undone. And I prayed. I didn’t believe, but I prayed.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I said, “If there’s anybody who can take away this load of guilt, please will you.”’
——
‘You seem happy lately, sweetheart. Singing round the house, always in a good mood.’
‘Yes, I am. It’s so much nicer around here. You used to fight all the time.’
——
In the cathedral, fifteen minutes before the communion service was to start, a bloke got up and said, ‘As we feared, someone has rung a TV station and said there’s a bomb in the building.’ A boy of five or so was sitting beside me with his mother. At the word ‘bomb’ he looked up at me with an expression of intense and comical puzzlement, and said, as if trying to nut out a problem, ‘Well, it can’t be the Americans, because—’
‘It’s not a bomb from a plane,’ I said. ‘It’s only a stupid joke—somebody’s told the police that there’s a bomb under a seat.’
He sprang up like a scalded cat, would not be reassured that it was a hoax, and dragged his mother off down the aisle at a fast clip.
——
Another day in court. Fascination seized me. An unflappable pathologist read out her description of the injuries and wounds on the girl’s body. The shock of detail.
——
They rang and told me I’d won the festival award. Ten grand. I began to tremble at the knees.
——
I woke and heard the north-westerly rushing the dead leaves past our house: thousands and thousands, an unending supply, a people going into exile. Now the sky over the low mountains is dusty orange.
——
While we were in the Twins it began to thunder and lighten and pour with rain. The dog, chained to the post outside the shop, barked and whined. She did not have the nous to stand under the veranda.
——
P called in at dinner time and ate with us. She spoke about Halley’s Comet and suddenly the wonder of its colossal journey struck me. Surely God exists? Can such a phenomenon have no meaning?
——
Dreamt I went to church and sat in a pew. I felt calm, and waited for enlightenment which I knew would come: I didn’t have to do anything in order to be enlightened, just sit quietly and be ready. A feeling of quietly simmering expectation. Something good and right coming, if I could be patient.
——
The woman accused of the murder must have learned her evidence by heart. Would a girl who says ‘somethink’ and ‘anythink’ also say, ‘And I think on the odd occasion another female’ or ‘prior to reaching the service station’ or ‘the matter that I’d been taken into custody for’? She said she was ‘re-luke-tant’ to do something and her barrister had to correct her. The frightful pathos of this. I would say they were done like a dinner.
——
The man was found guilty. And the judge directed the jury to acquit the woman because the charge against her could not be proved. We all stood up, incredulous. But then came to me a sharp flash of illumination: what we were bowing to was not this thin, tough-faced man in a red robe, but to the power that he exercised, that passed through him, that our society gives him. I felt the spirit of the law—something tremendous restraining itself by reason. They really do have to prove it.
——
The class reunion, in a suburban backyard. People had brought their husbands. Nobody told me we could, and just as well, for I no longer have one. The men must have been very bored. They barbecued a creature on a spit and stood about drinking. A woman whose quiet, intelligent manner and thick fair hair I vividly remembered told me she was a hypnotherapist: ‘I like depressives. Suicides. People in extreme fear states. Schizophrenics.’ The woman who was head prefect the year before me, a powerful hockey player, seized my arm: ‘I read your book. Saw it on TV. Bloody awful. Sorry. Hated it. Not trying to be rude, but it was bloody awful. You won’t get any false praise from me.’ I shrugged, and folded my arms. She immediately folded hers. It was cold in the garden. Someone passed round an exercise book and we wrote our names. When I saw the way one woman wrote—left-handed, a thin brown claw—I felt a small rushof emotion: ‘Oh—the way you hold a pen—I remember it!’ People burst into shrieks and cries. I suppose we spent all our school lives together with pens in our hands.
——
Marcos flees the Philippines. Photos of him, mouth agape, orating into a microphone on the palace balcony, and behind him, plump and coiffed and upholstered, the repellent Imelda, her face casting a slanted glance past him as if towards a mob.
——
Pulling on his steel-toed boots, A sings to himself softly, tunefully and correctly, ‘Blame It on the Boogie’.
——
The husband talks as if the wife were not present. He considers himself the main act and will cut across her quite ruthlessly, not even noticing he’s doing it, in the middle of her sentence. She neither objects nor submits, but lowers her voice slightly and goes on speaking as a subtext to his discourse, even though each of them might be talking about something quite different.
——
J’s put on a lot of weight and looks brown, smooth and solid. I was so happy to see him, I wanted to curl up under his arm and stay there all day. We lay on the grass listening to the speakers. When I got up I had green duck shit on my linen jacket, and I did not care.
——
They gave me the prize. I had to make a speech. My new black shoes were giving me terrible blisters. Thea Astley gave me some bandaids. She hugged me and said, ‘You can write about all those tiny household things, like scraping the food off the cupboard fronts, and validate them.’ Quite a few people told me that The Children’s Bach is ‘so small that it’s hardly even a novel at all’. One bloke remarked in a classic backhander that he liked me and Frank Moorhouse because neither of us was any good at writing novels.
——
A hard-faced, blue-eyed poet in a singlet and jeans gave me tips on how to teach writing in Pentridge: ‘Take a packet of Camel. Camel plain. Chuck ’em on the table and say, “Help yourselves.”’
——
I was the only woman writer at the dinner. As the evening progressed I felt the foreign writers’ egos balloon and take up even more air than did the pall of cigar smoke that issued thickly from their lips. Everybody deferred to the French nouveau romancier. He was actually rather pleasant. The Cuban big-shot avoided meeting my eye at all. I sneaked away into the garden after dessert. His glamorous wife, also Cuban, came out and sat beside me in the dark. I asked her, ‘What is your work?’ She looked at me with a blank surprise. ‘I don’ work. I maarried to berry fah-mous wriiiter.’
——
The ravaged beauty takes me to her newly renovated pied-à-terre close to the city. We drink tea and coffee. She is charming in the way that women (especially beauties) of her age and class can be: ‘How dreadful! That must have been absolutely devastating!’ etc—those phrases of the consummate listener, women’s expressions that mean simply, ‘I am paying attention to your tale’, but which probably serve, as well, to conceal boredom and the fact that she is thinking of something else, something private, paying attention to her own silent story.
——
I was taken to visit a high school. Some students read out their stories. I loved this and was able to show it. Afterwards their teacher and I laughed happily together about the frequent theme of shit. One girl’s story was even entitled The Droppings.
At 4 am someone opened my door and walked in. Waking in the dark, I thought, ‘Oh no—I must have gone to sleep in somebody else’s room by accident.’
‘W-who’s there?’
‘Security. I can smell smoke. Is everything all right?’
‘It must be my mosquito coil.’
‘Sorry! Goodnight.’
When my heart stopped thumping I thought, ‘Well, at least somebody’s looking after me, even if I don’t know who he is and will never see him again.’
——
In the long-term carpark at Tullamarine, waiting for the bus, sitting on an old hunk of timber against a cyclone-wire fence through which the morning sun is carefully warming my back. Birds. A phone ringing in the Budget office. Cars close and distant. Men’s voices shouting, a hose squirting air. A small, cool breeze. A smell of grass.
——
My little niece gives me, Christmas-wrapped, a beautiful seaside stone, exactly the size to fit the palm.
——
After a warm night: rosy sky; remaining darkness clustering inside trees; pale objects drawing the new light towards them.
——
A party for Laurie Anderson in a beautiful gallery in the Domain. Arty people: some whose gender was not immediately apparent, others wearing exaggerated outfits—one bloke in a kind of helmet with shiny metal objects attached to it.
——
The biographer is going to AA. She told me she realised she had spent a lot of her life feeling envious and jealous, but censoring these emotions and denying to herself that she felt them. And I remembered—but did not speak about it, for she seemed to need to be the one doing the talking, though I could see that it was tiring her—a day when she came to my house, sat down opposite me at the table, and said, in her determined, dangerously smiling way that used to make me shiver at what she was about to hit me with, ‘I’ve noticed that you use the word “envious” a great deal more than anyone I know.’
——
I wonder if I will ever meet a man I can love. Love, let alone live with. At my age is this such a tall order? Yes, it is. In a shop window I saw a poster of a naked man in profile holding a naked baby. The photo was cropped at the point of the man’s torso where his cock began to be visible: I saw with a shock the stiff little bush of pubic hair. I had forgotten that such intimate sights existed. If I’m not careful I will forget my own body, too. Well—I may be lonely, but at least I’m not bored, and neither am I being hated by someone who is supposed to be loving me.
——
The movie I wrote is going to Cannes. Fear of the pincer action: on one side, public attention, on the other, the rage of people who see themselves portrayed.
——
In the Botanic Gardens A and I lie on two blankets that he’s spread on the Oak Lawn and read The Europeans aloud. The bliss of being read to. The speckled shade, small children shouting and running across the grass. We take it in turns, chapter by chapter. The long sentences tax our powers of forward-seeing, but our skills develop as we warm to it. My crabby temper evaporates in the beautiful autumn day. The leaves are hardly brown, let alone on the ground.
——
The ex-junkie borrowed $68 off me ten days ago and has not been seen since. I thought I’d wait another week before I made inquiries. Then he called.
‘Sorry I haven’t paid back the money you lent me.’
Silence.
‘But I—umm—well, I need to borrow some more. I need $80.’
Pause.
‘No. I don’t want to lend it to you.’
Pause.
‘I’m crook and I need to go to work.’
‘No. I don’t want to lend you any money.’
‘Oh. All right.’
‘OK?’
‘Yeah. Bye.’
So the gossip is true. I didn’t hesitate, or feel guilty, or even give a reason. I must be making progress.
——
Cool, cloudy day at Anglesea. They took us for a swim. Everyone was leaving the beach for lunch and it started to rain lightly. The water was green and the sky was grey. Big, cold, slow swells that didn’t break. P turned blue: ‘My teeth are what you call chattering!’ After five minutes it was no longer cold. We were all laughing and shouting—blasts of intense joy. On the way back to the house I looked around me at the low scrub and the greyish air and the massed tea-tree in a sort of bliss.
——
A movie about war crimes in Poland. A small crowd had gathered to watch the exhumation of bodies from a mass grave. Two men at the very edge of the trench slipped on the crumbling soil and fell in among the blackened, rotting remains. Their frantic scrambling to get out was frightful.
——
I thought my ladder had been stolen, but it turns out F had come over and taken it. What is the actual process by which one separates oneself from another person?
——
I bought a cassette of Maria Callas and played it in the car. When she sang Io son’ l’umile ancella I amazed myself by bursting out sobbing. Not just a few tears but real weeping. All kinds of good and comforting thoughts rushed through my head. I want to be ‘the humble servant-maid’.
——
I dreamt that someone threw blood on my long skirt. I took it off and wrapped myself in a towel while I washed out the blood. A young Eastern European man was anxious that someone would come in and suspect indiscretion. He stood in a corner with his finger across his lips. I couldn’t convey to him that there was nothing to suspect. Someone was playing a piano for children to dance to.
——
The surgeon’s wife actually considered buying a watch that cost $700. The courteous young man serving her kept his face blank while she loudly bashed my ear about Australia’s descent into the maelstrom of unionism, high taxation and welfare. ‘Workers are bludgers,’ she said with scorn. ‘Rostered days off, one a fortnight.’ ‘What’s wrong with that?’ I said, really wanting to know. She didn’t have an answer.
——
The law student came downstairs to tell me something he’d read in a judgment he’s studying. ‘This judge reckons the law says that as much responsibility is to be expected of a twelve-year-old as of a twenty-one-year-old.’ I noticed how white his face was, mauve shadows under his eyes. I said, ‘Do you feel sick? You’ve gone very pale.’ ‘No—it’s just the shock of the judgment.’ His emotions often show in the colour of his face. When his girlfriend was coming back from overseas his skin was green.
——
The prisoners in the Pentridge writing group liked gasbagging about families, about touching people while you’re talking, and whether this habit came from your parents. One bloke said, ‘My family’s very close, always huggin’ and that. When my mum comes in here she throws her arms round me and starts bawlin’. I could’ve started meself—but you know—you have to—’ He mimes himself darting embarrassed, tiny glances to left and right. Imagine if everybody in Pentridge started bawling at once, screws and all. The tears would rise up and spill over the curved top of the bluestone walls.
——
We walked out to Princes Park to look for the comet. A found it and I saw it, very blurred, six times as big as a star, like a headlight in a very thick fog.
——
Walked to the shop. Picked a twig of bottlebrush with three flowers on it. Looked at it with extreme pleasure. At home I noticed a shifting and saw that a praying mantis was hiding among its spiky leaves. ‘Poor thing. Poor thing.’ I took it out the front and held the twig against the wisteria: it stepped across and, adjusting its camouflage, disappeared.
——
M read me some Banjo Paterson poems. ‘Where the breezes shake the grass.’
——
Peggy Glanville-Hicks was interviewed on TV.
‘You love it, don’t you—music?’ said the interviewer, in a shy, humble voice.
‘Well,’ said the old woman, holding a whining black poodle in her arms, ‘it’s international. It can go anywhere. It doesn’t need translation. And its manifestation is the displacement of air.’
——
Once I accepted F’s analysis, in his letter—that we’d never really committed ourselves to each other as married people do—all my victim feelings and anger fell away. All that was left was a terrible sadness. Days of crying at the slightest stimulus.
——
‘Afterwards she repented it bitterly, but she was hopeless at apologising: instead of retracting her feelings, what she always did was to say that she was sorry for expressing them, a kind of amends that costs nothing and carries the built-in rebuke that the other person is unable to bear the truth.’ —Penelope Gilliatt, ‘The Redhead’, in The Transatlantic Review
——
Sick in bed. My sister came round and told me the latest family gossip. We laughed and laughed. I thought of a little movie about how information passes round a family—very sternly structured, solely in the form of two-way conversations—all in dialogue, clothes and body language. ‘And I said, “Look, Mum, there are dead letters in dead letter offices all over the world.”’ When I get better from this I’m gonna WORK. I’m going to make fur and feathers fly, I’m gonna ATTACK IDEAS and let the chips fall where they may.
——
If I had a little boy I’d call him Angelo.
——
‘What I missed,’ said the law student about the time his girlfriend was away, ‘wasn’t so much getting love as giving it. I just wanted to—I wanted to cover her with love.’
——
A said that anger ruled my life. Which of course made me furious but I tried not to be. Once again his humility and ability to accept criticism took away my weapons. He was washing up while we talked. When he got to the saucepan he turned aside and left it lying in the water. All the while, as the talk went to and fro, I was looking at the saucepan in the water, congealing with fat, bobbing in the sink, and I was thinking, ‘Can’t you finish a job? That’s what makes me angry with you. You’re sloppy.’
——
Dreamt I was doing an English exam and making a mess of it. I had missed one of the essay questions. I panicked, and began to give up. I looked out the window. A bird flew away. I felt sad and hopeless, as if all were lost. A woman supervisor looked at me through a grille. Suddenly I laughed and said, ‘I’m a famous novelist! I don’t need this exam!’ She laughed too but still I felt ashamed, as if a necessary step were missing in my self-preparation for life.
——
A horrible nuclear disaster, a meltdown, at Chernobyl in the Ukraine. Nobody knows how many people have died.
——
Dinner with the famous ones. Among men, as usual, I became aware that I have no subject on which I can deliver quantities of information, facts etc. Savage gossip. I wondered how many knives would be quivering in my back after the door had closed.
——
All day at the Royal Women’s birthing centre. I longed to watch a birth but of course this was out of the question, though I did glimpse, through opening doors, several cunts—one bloody, with a doctor sitting at it sewing it up. A huge placenta in a metal dish, the young nurses examining it bloody to the wrists. The matter-of-fact calm of midwives. The premature babies, their shuddering and gasping, their appalling tininess, I wanted to sob out loud. As if a nose were not made for anything but to have a tube shoved up it.
——
The nurse’s husband, in a letter: ‘Geez you women cry a lot but yer as tough as nails. I walk around feeling limp and inferior in the face of that iron-hearted sex you belong to.’
——
I drove her to school at 7 am for camp. We laughed all the way at I have forgotten what. She’s had a dramatic, rather sixties haircut. ‘It makes you look older,’ I said. ‘At least eighteen.’ Her face burst into a joyful smile. I love her as one is afraid to love, through superstition. Even having written that…
——
A letter from the American. ‘I swim beside you in spirit.’
——
Dreamt I was to be ordained and to give the sacrament. Anxious because I hadn’t studied the liturgy. I woke thinking that if I were ordained I would be qualified to bury the dead. And the part I want to lay to rest is the girl I was in the 1960s. Who thought she was free but who was in fact chained. Who had two abortions and was not loved or respected by the men she slept with, although she believed she was, through inability to see the facts and insufficient imagination about what went on in men’s minds and hearts. Cruel to herself without realising it.
——
Two people told me they’d seen me on TV. The man said, ‘You looked sad.’ The woman said, ‘Your eyes were twinkling, as if you were about to laugh.’
I suppose being sad and laughing are not mutually exclusive.
——
The psychotherapist talks about ‘men in suits’ who come to him. ‘They think they can hand me their problem and get me to fix it for them. They’re so blocked. It’s sad.’
‘They must be terribly lonely?’
‘And frightened. At some stage they always cry.’
——
Up at Primrose Gully with Y. We’re both scared of snakes. And we’re ignorant of electricity, and how to use the car battery for power in the house. The neighbour from down the road: plain, with a mouth that’s drawn in, watery eyes, filthy farmer’s clothes, a loud, rather harsh voice—but a lively mind, witty turn of phrase, a tough and cheerful friendliness. He called each of us by name once or twice, as if to fix us in his mind. He offered to help with buying a chainsaw. I liked him very much, and felt lucky to have met him. He mentioned in passing that one of their children had died.
——
Dreamt I was to sleep in a borrowed room. I asked the woman, ‘What’s in that drawer?’ ‘Maps,’ she said. I looked at her with happy respect, knowing that she was a traveller, someone who’d been to strange, distant and perhaps dangerous places and who had returned. She seemed a calm person, the kind who makes plans and fulfils them with steady application.
——
A hawk on a tree. We saw its shoulders.
——
I dread having to become a Christian.
——
A beautiful letter came from J. He said he loved my work, and that though I may not define goodness as he does, I was ‘searching for a language of grace’. I went stumbling out on to the footpath still reading, and when I glanced down, the pebbles sprang into such bright relief that I had to look again. I had the dog with me and we walked slowly round the big block. It was a windy, sparkling afternoon.
——
‘People who can’t accept a gift,’ said the Jungian, ‘often feel a need to wound the giver.’
——
The biographer does that maddening thing of asking, ‘Am I boring you?’ at the exact moment when I am most deeply attentive to what she is saying: thus she breaks my concentration. It’s as if she’s jealous of her own discourse: when I’m paying total attention to it, she needs to force on me the distinction between what she is saying and her.
——
A Giuseppe Bertolucci movie, Segreti Segreti. I was struck dumb by its sophisticated structure and the deep sense of the society it emerges from. The final scene, where the terrorist sits opposite the woman judge and begins to reel off the names of her comrades, made me want to get down on my knees and grovel. Why can’t Australian films achieve that density? It must be because our society is so porous.
——
At Primrose Gully the grass is stiff with frost. Feet aching with cold. The clear patch on the window where I wiped it to see out has refrozen in prettier patterns.
——
I saw a big fat koala fall out of a tree. It sloped off towards the road with a sulky look over its shoulder. I laughed out loud and clapped my hands but it paid me no attention. Its victorious rival, clinging to a tall slender trunk, had what looked like a bloody wound on its chest. Life is carnage up here.
——
Census night. The law student and I were filling out the form. He had to say what he was in relation to the head of the household. I expected him to write ‘tenant’ but he put ‘friend’. I think of this on and off all day and it comforts me.
——
Hannah and Her Sisters. Too close to the bone. Oh, it hurts so much to look back. I rode over him roughshod. Impatient, vain, self-important, and then abject. No wonder he can’t stand me. I can hardly stand myself.
——
House full of music. The law student and his huge friend roaring away upstairs on amplified bass and guitar. The girls downstairs singing Schubert at the piano.
——
The I Ching says that flight means saving oneself under any circumstances, whereas retreat is a sign of strength. Voluntary retreat. Friendly retreat. Cheerful retreat. That’s what I’m after.
——
As the afternoon was ending my friends took me for a walk along the Glebe waterfront. The sky was quite black in parts, then streaked, swirled and plumed like a Turner painting. A strong, warm wind blew. The evening star shone steadily between rents in the cloth. ‘Australians are hopeless with land use,’ said the Cretan. ‘In Europe there’d be a couple of little restaurants along here.’ He showed me some photos he’d taken of me last year and I was shocked by my ugliness: spotted skin, lined face, ugly haircut, dark expressions. I mean I was shocked. I quailed at the possibility that I will be alone now for the rest of my life. That I will never turn back into a womanly being but will find myself stuck here in between, plain and dry in my manly or boyish little clothes. I was afraid of my ugliness. I thought, I will go on getting older. This is not a temporary phase. I am moving slowly and surely on towards decrepitude. But walking with them I became happy. I picked wattle, bottlebrush, Geraldton wax. The Cretan poured out so much botanical information that we teased him and called him Professor. They asked me if I would ever consider moving to Sydney. ‘I feel,’ said the Cretan, ‘that you’re on the verge of plunging into a pool of clear water.’
Up here, among kind friends, I forget my troubles.
——
How the nun says goodbye: ‘Go in peace.’ ‘You too,’ I say, without having to think. Afterwards I felt her little blessing and was grateful.
——
F says I ought to get a regular job, so as to be less ‘frantic’.
‘What could I be?’
‘A teacher. A publisher’s reader.’
——
The historian who came to my reading at Monash. She told a little anecdote, with gestures, about using the expression ‘phallische Symbolen’ to some visiting German friends of her age: to her astonishment they had never heard the term. She was speaking about a row of carrots standing on a shelf in a juice shop.
——
I like it when my sister talks about nursing. She told me about nasogastric tubes and how to insert them. And about colonic irrigations.
——
Les Murray’s wonderful poem ‘When Bounty Is Down to Persimmons and Lemons’. The infuriating accuracy and simplicity of his images—birds that ‘trickle down through’ foliage. Of course, I think, that is what they do—why didn’t I know how to say it? ‘Women’s Weekly summer fashions in the compost turn blue.’
——
Evil Angels—its marvellous combination of tenderness for the characters with an awesome ability to handle masses of factual material. And the delicacy of its emotional texture. The whole thing is buzzing with life.
——
At the school concert a girl’s proud father says, ‘I love you!’ and squeezes her in his arms. She shrieks, ‘Ewww, YUCK!’ and fights to break free. He grips tighter with a demonic grin.
——
To the dentist for a crown preparation. He stuck the needle twice into my lip, babbling rapidly, ‘Oooh, yes you’re a good girl a brave girl a very very good girl a brave girl.’ Almost two hours of grinding, drilling, injections, string, blood, impression taken twice, post screwed in. As the time went on I became weakened by attrition. His waggish, chatty spiel, his way of addressing me as if I were a child and stroking my face while the impression set, caused a regression which reached its peak when I told him, after he’d cemented the temporary crown on, that it felt big in my mouth. He snapped at me: ‘I asked you before! And you said it wasn’t touching!’ To my horror I burst into tears. ‘I’m sorry! I’m so tired! I didn’t understand exactly what you were asking—oh, boo hoo!’ He was astonished, and embarrassed: ‘WHY are you so tired?’ ‘I’ve had my mouth wide open for TWO HOURS!’ He put me back in the chair and drilled off a bit more. I tried hard to control myself, for fear that if I jerked he would puncture my already bloody gum, but I couldn’t stop my quivering sobs, like a child’s, and tears ran off my face. He and the nurse acted soberly. The nurse didn’t look at me again. It was awful. His falsely cheery goodbye. I stumbled off down the hallway. Before I reached the street I had recognised it: Dad territory. His baby talk had lulled me, and then the shock of his anger—a sudden withdrawal of approval. At the traffic lights I met Mum’s brother. He didn’t even notice I was crying, so I quickly stopped.
——
I lie in bed thinking voluptuously of the stories I’m going to write.
——
‘I think,’ says R, ‘that people who “long to have children” are just being romantic.’
——
The bloke next door shows me the room with bunks that he says his children will sleep in, if he ever finds anyone to have them with. I forbear to point out that any child who sat up in the top bunk would be beheaded by the ceiling fan.
——
The plane lurched in the air and was lit by lightning, but in Melbourne the land was sunlit and the air was crisp.
——
I entered the living room and found Mum sitting alone on the couch, looking elegant. During our short conversation I had one of those moments of disconnection from myself: looking at her face I felt strongly that I both knew and did not know this person.
——
The high-school drama night. M’s house did Molière, Le Médecin malgré lui, which she had directed. It ripped along, seductive, hilarious. Her fleeting bit-part as the passing stranger who tries to stop Sganarelle from beating his wife—she was a flash of lightning, her face white with righteous anger and then with alarm and apology—people shouted with laughter. This skinny little trouper of mine. Not mine much longer.
——
Raymond Carver called collect when I wasn’t home, and the law student, confused, caused him to hang up.
——
Out near the rubbish bins I ask my neighbour if she knows anything about Melanie Klein. ‘I absolutely detest psychoanalysis,’ she snaps. I bet you do. Look at your life.
——
A woman reviews my postcards book in Meanjin. Covers it with praise. ‘Artful.’ ‘This brilliant story.’ ‘Consistently good.’ ‘Outstanding.’ I’m glowing, defences down. Then on her way out she flicks me with her tail: ‘She is at her best, so far, when dealing with…middle-class, contemporary living and relationships. This is her great talent. It remains to be seen whether this is also her limitation.’ What do they WANT from me?
——
Visconti’s wonderful movie Bellissima. We writhed with laughter in our seats: the comedy of the child’s suffering. How there’s often a secondary activity in the background of the main action: a line of tiny distant dancers rehearsing on an outdoor stage: ‘Uno! Due! Tre! Quattro!’ A man on a high scaffold banging in a nail with tremendous arm movements. Layer after layer of life.
——
Afterwards at the Rialto A ordered another beer when everyone else was ready to go home. Three quarters of the way down it he went off to the lavatory. T seized his glass and swigged a large mouthful, to speed up his painful slowness. ‘Here he comes,’ she hissed. ‘Is there foam on my lips?’
——
I want to write a story called ‘The Punishment for Not Being Beautiful’.
——
I shot off a whole roll of colour film in our house while everyone was out. First I took one of each bed as it had been left; then I crammed myself into corners, set things up, crouched, stood on chairs, screwing up my face, framing things—to take photos you must have to relearn to look. Filled with respect for people who do this difficult thing beautifully. I loved trying. Thought of writing a story with no characters in it, called ‘Four Beds’, and even began it, but put it aside, out of fear I suppose.
——
At their house we ate barbecued chicken out of a paper bag and listened to Nat King Cole.
——
Dreamt I was a teacher and there was one uncontrollable boy in my class. I sent him to the principal. I said, ‘I’m not stupid, you know, no matter how much you dislike me. What do you think of me?’ He replied frankly, ‘I think you’re awful.’ At that moment I saw a close-up, near my face, of a bush covered in pretty little flowers, in the front garden of our old house at Ocean Grove.
——
Outside the post office the dog shat out a tapeworm. It trailed behind her and I had to put my foot on it to snap it off.
——
In Readings I picked up a novel about a sadomasochistic affair. I read it in furtive bursts, in case someone looked over my shoulder. It was frightening. I realised I am very much a moralist: afraid of the tremendous power of sex when it’s let loose from love and social restraints.
——
‘There are people,’ a reader writes to me reproachfully, ‘who have their babies at home, get married with flair, and get buried in triumph.’
——
After the funding meeting comes a surprising letter from the old poet who worked with us, a small, gentle, mildly spoken, slightly trembling woman with long white hair in a French roll: ‘You will never be in need of friends. I mean of all sorts and degrees—and whatever your own personal uncertainties may be.’ The extraordinary kindness of this. She mothered me. I’m not used to it.
——
Spring comes. People fall in love—or they will, when the sunny breezes blow and exams are soon and cafe tables are put out on the pavements. Will I? I can’t imagine who with.
——
On a sparkling morning, windows wide open, Crowded House on the stereo, the law student and I wrestle with a lamb shank. He twists and wrenches with the rubber gloves on, I hack with a big blunt knife, so he can make stock and cook us some soup. Carnage over the trough. Blood splatters his front. ‘Take your shirt off and soak it.’ ‘I wouldn’t have known about doing that.’ ‘Women know a lot about blood.’ He’s the closest I’ll ever get to having a son.
——
Primrose Gully with T. There’s a star beside the moon that neither of us has ever noticed before. Star and moon are both reflected in the dam so vividly that it’s unnerving—as if we were suddenly seeing everything upside down.
——
A big dry wind roars all night. Stars brilliant. Several are yellow. ‘Look at them,’ says T. ‘Aren’t they queer. They make the others look really blue. They look like electric bulbs.’ She messed around with some grass and rags and came up what she called a ‘pagan bride’, a little straw doll in a dirty cloth dress and hood. She called me to look at it and I got a funny feeling, seeing it leaning against a small bush. It looked primitive, mysterious and powerful. Maybe I could write about A’s panic when I said I was going to get my palm read. His refusal to tell me his astrological sign. Can I use the Cathedral Tearooms? The women’s ordination? Ayers Rock? It could be a novel. Oh, calm down.
——
I sat at the table working away with the Faber Castells while the law student played his Jazz Originals book on the piano. Drawing beats colouring-in hands down.
——
In a magazine a sketch of three women sitting at a table, and on it, in the foreground, a crudely drawn pistol and a very high-heeled shoe. The artist does people with hardly any lines: women with funny little bobbed haircuts and sober faces.
——
‘I saw how beautiful she was,’ said the bridegroom in his speech, ‘and I saw that a man’d be a fool not to want to share his life with her.’
——
The things men say to me sometimes at public gatherings. In a strange, jesting, almost pugnacious tone they say that they like my work, and then they tell me what bugs them about it. This one couldn’t stand the way I ‘talk about Bach and popular music in the same breath. That’s an abomination to me.’
——
They must have seven kids by now, the youngest only a few months old. Felt a longing to visit them, to see them all thronging, hear their family language and songs, jokes at the table, the noise of it.
——
The academic was wearing a little pale satin shift to mid-calf, like a pretty nightie. Watched her in the line for food, saw how large her head looked, pale and tired, well-set on her slimmed-down body.
——
Should the law student write his new almost-girlfriend a letter? If so, what sort? My tactician’s idea: a postcard. What’ll he write on it, though? Something short. What about ‘Dear X, Come back quick. Love—’ and sign? Perfect! But should he put some kisses? Just put one. OK—he doesn’t want to be heavy.
——
Dream of a court case. A report typed on a typewriter that made small plants grow out of the page. I had to push the little stalks and leaves gently aside so I could read the print at their roots.
——
A visitor from Circus Oz. Her grey hair, flamboyant comfortable clothes. In the kitchen we talked with urgency and uttered screams of laughter.
——
My mind is full of stories but I lack the nerve to catch one and try to pin it down.
——
After the concert of mediaeval music the academic said she had seen the counter-tenor walking down the street with his little drum over his shoulder on a leather strap. We thought that he probably slept under a hedge.
——
We quarrelled. M spoke sharply to me. I suppose I was being silly and middle-aged. I was embarrassed that her rebuke had hurt me. She gave me a perfunctory hug which I accepted. I drove off to review a play, alone in my car and my clip-on earrings. Walking in the dark down Queensberry Street I felt quite desperate. I thought, ‘This far down is when you ought to pray.’ I didn’t know how, but the thought presented itself like a reminder of a practical technique.
——
A thunderbolt struck me—a character. Ideas and plans flooded in and out of my mind all day. Such a richness of material that I hardly dare to look straight at it: I have to keep looking in the other direction. Surges of excitement and confidence, which suddenly ebb away and leave me panicking: can I do this? Can I find out what I need to know? By this I mean that a creature is beginning to exist which will lead me into a story. All I had to do was wait for my guide. I stepped out the back gate, my head bursting with this, and remembered that state where one lives night and day in the world of the novel and one is NOT AVAILABLE. No wonder men don’t stick around.
——
A Russian cruise liner crashes into a tanker and sinks in ‘the warm waters of the Baltic Sea’. Three hundred die. ‘Those who had retired for the night would have had little chance of escape.’
——
Dreamt I cooked a meal and put those green anti-slug pellets in it. We all ate it before the terrible truth was revealed; and yet we agreed that its flavour had been delicious, with a hindsight tinge of horror.
——
A spiteful review of a friend’s novel. I ask the magazine editor what the critic looks like. ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘she’s one of those Australian women with thin faces and black hair who remind you of Heckle and Jeckle.’
——
Primrose Gully. My sister comes down the track from the car, all in black, sunglasses, white-faced, like a refugee. Very upset and weeping. The married man she’s having an affair with, his coldness in public, his failure to turn up, she lay awake all night waiting. Disgusting memories of my own. I talked at length about humiliation, low self-esteem, self-punishment etc. I must learn to shut up. Talking loosely and inefficiently is an indulgence. We went for a walk to look at the river, and back across the gully under the big pine tree. We picked up firewood. In the morning she said, ‘I woke up once in the night and looked out the window. The sky was full of stars. I thought I must be in heaven.’
——
Against Z’s back door jamb, after the Rigoletto rehearsal, leaned a small, white-faced, long-headed, warped figure. Weird, like something that had crept out of a dark hole where it had been lying for a long time in a tense and twisted position. ‘This is V,’ said Z. When the others went out of the room I felt nervous, like a schoolgirl having to entertain a grown-up. As we walked away from the house R said, ‘Just as well neither of us is married to him!’
——
Later, a dream: some kind of dark, dumb attraction between V and me.
——
My sister breaks it off with the guy. ‘I felt really happy for two days, and I still feel good. But sometimes I get very sad.’
‘Sadness is better than wretchedness though, isn’t it. It’s more dignified.’
I felt very proud of her. As if she’d dragged herself out of a swamp in front of my very eyes.
——
We walked the dog round Princes Park and kept noticing a strong smell of animal shit. We inspected our boot soles—nothing. ‘It must be a circus,’ said A, meaning it as a joke, but then I remembered that there is a circus on the other side of the footy ground—I saw the two camels, tall and lonely away from their desert.
——
A doco about Berlin after the war. Footage of a boy of eight or so picking his way across a huge pile of building rubble, cap on head, pack on back, bare knees, boots—answering the questions of a disembodied voice: ‘Where are you going?’ ‘I’ve lost my family. I’m looking for them.’ ‘How long since you saw them?’ ‘Six weeks. Goodbye!’ He smiles, turns and walks away, a man with a mission—then a few yards further on turns again, waves, calls out ‘Goodbye!’ and goes on his way. I stood at the sink dumbly washing and stacking, despairing of ever having anything worth saying. I know nothing of what is savage and cruel in life. My work is as ignorant as I am. I don’t know anything. But maybe it’s the devil talking when we get the idea that someone who knows no savagery knows nothing—as if only evil were real and the rest weightless.
——
Near us, after midnight in the piano bar, sat an old man with a carnation in his buttonhole. He clapped his square hands in time to the music in such a way as to let it be known that he was with the band. Behind us a woman knocked over a stemmed glass. It smashed. She moved off to the dance floor without a backward look. A Japanese tourist at a third table bent down, picked up the glass, stem and base from the carpet, and placed them reverently on the glass-smasher’s table. The only person who observed the Japanese woman’s act, and her low bow, was a half-drunken young man, the gooseberry left at the dropper’s table: he stared at her, loafing back in his chair, and made no sign.
——
The worst moment at the funding meeting was rejecting the application of a man who wanted to write a novel about the Kampuchean bloodbath. I looked at his file and thought, This guy’s seen people suffocated in plastic bags and I’m sitting here telling him he can’t have money to tell his story. I tried to make a coherent statement but felt heavy and desperate. I wanted to say that our procedures were inadequate and frustrating, but all that came out was, in a dull voice, ‘He used to be a journalist and now he’s a labourer.’ ‘It’s a tough world,’ said the chair, and on we went.
——
‘He became a Roman Catholic after his son died of a drug overdose,’ said the journalist. ‘Course, being a Catholic in the right wing of the Labor Party isn’t exactly a disadvantage…’
——
L, an unfairly handsome guy who was at the festival. I like him more than I’d expected to. Rather soft, talkative, an enthusiast, the sort of person who gives your forearm a little push as he approaches the punch-line of his story. I suspect a series of terrific emotional crashes in his past. Why does a man like this attract me? Don’t be silly. Because he’s gorgeous.
——
The student asked me if I thought love could connect people across boundaries of class. ‘Of course.’ He said he’d been convinced by Communism, then felt its rigidity: ‘It dropped off me like a shell.’
——
At lunchtime I sat in the gallery beside a large, flat, shallow body of water in a pebble-bottomed bed. It quivered like the water in my best dream: trembled with inner life. A girl beside me on the couch, wearing modern clothes, was deep in a serious paperback novel. I sat there and thought, I am happy. —
Fay Zwicky on the effect of Les Murray’s work: ‘Why then, after wrestling long and hard with many poems in this book, have I come away feeling excluded, mystified and defeated?’ Excluded is the word I had been using.
——
My sister got some freebies to Mondo Rock. In the hour of waiting she took us to a new place called the Hyatt on Collins. A noisy palace in pink marble. A very amateurish singer and pianist, both boys, murdered certain innocent classics. ‘Tsk,’ she said, tossing back a glass of terrible Australian champagne. ‘That’s a very pedestrian
L shows me a list he’s typed up, of adjectives and epithets used by reviewers about his novel. An A4 page and a half. He read it out to me and we laughed and laughed. The whole range, from ‘meaningless and pretentious’ to ‘brilliant’, was covered.
——
Woken pleasantly from a nap by Bach on the piano downstairs, those powerful patterns flexing their muscles through the afternoon when no one’s home but me and my daughter.
——
‘I always thought that when we accepted things they overpowered us…This turns out not to be true at all, and it is only by accepting them that one can assume an attitude towards them.’ From a letter by one of Jung’s patients. —Peter O’Connor in Understanding Jung
——
Girls pass in the street, clapping a fast rhythm and singing a vigorous song.
——
In the pub after Carlton lost the Grand Final, the table of roaring, bellowing brothers. ‘This is going to be one of those nights,’ I muttered to one of their young wives, ‘and I’m fucked if I’m going to put up with it.’ She laughed in a comradely way and said, ‘Aren’t they terrible!’ How come these yobs all end up with fabulous women?
——
V wrote, ‘I wanted to see you again straight away.’ So I was not imagining it. A gong of terror sounded in the bottom of my stomach. Something chilling in him. His intellect.
——
While I was asleep the Japanese girl got stranded in North Melbourne at 2.30 am and called our place for help. The Sydney visitor answered, told her he couldn’t do anything for her and she should call a taxi—leaves her to her fate in the dark. She gives up and sleeps at the Youth Hostel. I know nothing of this till eight in the morning when she calls me. Furious and ashamed I drive over and collect her. When the law student hears that she had thought the rude visitor was him, he is strangled with distress: ‘If it’d been me I’d’ve run to North Melbourne. I’d’ve piggybacked her.’ ‘I know you would, you darling,’ I say fondly. ‘Oh yuck,’ says M with a grimace.
——
I walk down the street in bright lipstick and light-coloured clothes. People look into my face and smile. I’ve got seven-league boots on. I’m alive again.
——
Bulletin review of our movie. So splenetic it’s embarrassing: apparently all my characters, in everything I ever write, are ‘renowned for their unlikeableness’, and the director has taken cinema back to a primitive stage before cameras could move. ‘If Ms Campion is to be hailed as the new empress of Australian film…’ Wonder what made him so crabby.
——
‘Your daughter’s terrifically striking-looking, isn’t she,’ says L. ‘Boys must be swarming round her, I suppose.’
‘Well, not really. She knocks around with a rather blue-stocking crowd. They repel boys with contemptuous stares.’
——
At the party a clean and bright young man in a striped shirt and little round tortoiseshell spectacles, with a flamboyantly Hungarian name, told me he’d read only one of my books and thought I ought to ‘broaden my range’ and ‘write about the proletariat’. I was a bit drunk and said, ‘What bullshit. Why?’
‘Because the middle class is boring. It’s narrow, small, confined, a minority.’
His wife or girlfriend, a striking dark woman, said, ‘I’m from “the proletariat”. He’s got a thing about it.’ She looked at me in a friendly way and laughed. I wandered off, shaken by his challenge.
——
Rain is falling softly and steadily. This is comforting. What do I need comfort for? Being a member of the middle class. Not writing. Being forty-three and three-quarters. Being a solitary woman. Only no. 2 is a painful thing. All the rest often give me extreme pleasure.
——
Constant struggle between money and time: will I waste an hour going into town to Bell’s Discounts to get the skin cream cheap, or will I waste a couple of extra dollars at the corner chemist and save the hour?
——
L hasn’t answered my letter. The sense of having lost something, that his silence provokes. Remember that always, when a horror balloons in my memory around something I’ve written, a calm re-examination of the thing itself reveals a lightness of tone that saves it from being the crusher I have let myself imagine. Do my duties, try to get more sleep, drink less, try to keep this feeling of worth alive.
——
The American poet at the festival dinner meets my eye from the opposite corner of the long table and holds it, almost aggressively, with a small smile on his very wide, very smooth face. He holds my gaze for such a long time, smiling like a little brown Buddha, that I laugh out loud in a spasm of embarrassment. Later, I move to his end of the table, where a woman is declaring that feminism has caused an increase in male homosexuality. The poet says he thinks most people are sexually ‘much more timid’ than our society allows them to be. A bunch of us talk for a long time about sex and love. The young editor says he has never slept with anyone he hasn’t ‘got to know really well first’. The poet says he’s always felt he was ‘just as eager for love as women are supposed to be’; that he has ‘never been interested in sex without love’. I opine that people organise their emotions to accord with their sexual interests, ‘so that what you get is emotional rather than sexual promiscuity’. ‘Love,’ says the young editor, ‘just comes.’ ‘Does that mean,’ I ask, ‘that you can’t seek it, then?’
——
I am the only person in the world who carries round an inventory of my crimes. Everyone else is busy with their own.
——
The poet comes up to me in the lobby and says, ‘I get consolation from seeing your face.’
——
Today I’ll get up, have a shower, see how my period’s going; make my bed; wear something clean and comfortable; go to the last day of the festival; maybe walk across the river and look at the water; and come home.
——
Mum comes to stay a night. I’m so tired. I ask her if she’ll ‘look after me’.
‘Is there anything in the kitchen?’ she asks. ‘Any…eggs?’
‘The trouble is, Mum, I haven’t been here for days. There’s no food.’
‘I’ll go to the shop.’
‘Do you know what I’d really like? Chicken noodle soup out of a packet, and a boiled egg, and some fingers of toast.’
She laughs and looks pleased. The law student is playing ‘My Funny Valentine’ on the piano. My sister calls to tell me she’s met Cyndi Lauper at a party: ‘She’s just a regular woman. She’s great.’ I go upstairs and lie down.
Mum returns. She brings my meal upstairs, sits on my bed and chats to me. I lie here bathing in her wandering tales. Sometimes my eyes close, but I don’t have any trouble staying awake. I feel loving and thankful towards her. She kisses me goodnight at nine o’clock and goes downstairs with my tray. On my way to the bathroom I glance into the mirror. My face is young and smooth, exactly as it was after my crack-up two years ago when I dropped my bundle and slept for twenty-four hours.
——
One of these days I’ll meet a man to whom I’ll be circumstantially free to say, ‘Do you want to get in the car with me and drive to Darwin?’ and he’ll say, ‘Yes,’ and we’ll do it.
——
The poet Rosa Cappiello. Her terrifying sadness. Her clumsy questions: ‘Helen, are you happy?’ and statements: ‘I want someone who is clean inside.’ She asks me to read out her paper, for the panel ‘Why I Write’. It’s full of her awkward passion. Her poems terrify me too—I read the translations for her, trying to be only a vessel or a conduit for the rage and disgust that’s in them: ‘Lie down, man’—wanting to ravish, to ‘breathe into his lap’ a sexual fury that would set the world of gender right—but I felt very Presbyterian—restrained, small, neat, quiet. One of the poems was simply too much for me and I didn’t even attempt it. But the American poet took her aside and spoke to her urgently in a low voice. I heard him as I passed: ‘You are really, really good. You must practise and practise.’ She seems to have no friends, or very few, and to spend her time alone, waiting for her dole cheque. When she received her pay for the festival session she was staggered. I said, ‘You must apply for a fellowship—$25,000.’ She gave a strange laugh: ‘I can’t ask for so much money.’ She is lost between Italy and here, stuck in her terrible English. She seemed a member of another species, wild, in pain, knowing things I could barely dream of—humiliations, violence, disgust, loneliness, fear. She’s got a wild animal’s face—although she’s my age she has smooth skin, her eyes narrow and lying on high cheekbones, mouth that is generous like all Italian mouths, with a pretty top lip that doesn’t move much when she speaks. Her legs are slim. Beautiful hands, small, narrow and slender; very small feet in distorting, ugly, very high-heeled sandals—her toes pinched lumps, curved in and under as if trying to hold themselves back off the pavement—squirming back to stay on the inadequate leather. ‘I’ve suffered too much,’ she said to me. ‘I can’t change now.’ Her weak, reedy voice. When she read her poems in Italian it was barely audible. I could see her skirt quivering as she stood whispering and gabbling at the lectern.
——
On my way out of the Athenaeum, so tired I could hardly speak, I was approached by a young woman.
‘I heard you read that story about the friend. The painter. It made me very angry. I thought it was a cruel story,’ she said, clenching her hands. ‘You took all the little illusions that people use to make life bearable, and you stripped and stripped and stripped them away. I’m trying to be a painter, and I—’
Exhausted, looking at her smooth pale skin, her items of silver jewellery here and there, I thought, Come back in twenty years, sweetheart, and tell me about your little illusions then.
I walk away, get into my car, drive home, and go straight to bed, at five in the afternoon. What I could have said to her was, ‘Listen. There is no comfort. And if you think there is, then maybe you’re not really an artist.’
——
Walking with C in the Botanic Gardens. Rain. Our shoulders were damp. We talked about our lives, our loneliness; how we are tempted to invite unwanted men back into our lives just in order to feel less alone.
——
The reason, says T, why house-hunting is so tiring: because you have to move, in fantasy, in and out of every house you look at—shift all your furniture and arrange it, and cook and eat several meals; and carry out the rubbish. Yes, and you have to part from your daughter, and leave your piano behind. Half of me will be with her always, longing to care for her and make a life for her.
——
Dinner at Toki with T’s son. At sixteen, the pure lines of his face, those marvellous bones, the strain of youth in a face. His lively company, tales of bashings, school wars, ‘rumbles’ etc. On the way home we stop for a coffee at Notturno. A hulk with a five o’clock shadow enters, runs him through the soul handshake, and engages him in urgent conversation about someone called Eddy who is going to bash him. ‘Eddy? Oh, man.’ The hulk wears a jumper with the sleeves rolled right up past his biceps. He leaves, upon being summoned by his scrawny mate outside.
‘Who was that?’
‘Hassan. He’s so cool.’
‘He sure is. How do you know him?’
‘From school.’
‘But he must be twenty-five!’
‘He’s the same age as me.’
‘Sixteen? Him?’
‘I bet he only shaved an hour ago. Once, he decided to grow a moustache. Next day, he had one.’
——
Spring. The curtain moves all night on fitful streams of air.
——
The house auction. My father bid for me, late, twice, and with contemptuous authority. His astonishing exhibition of cool. A merchant in his element. A life of buying and selling. ‘Gawd. What a lotta mucken around. We’da bought a million dollars wortha wool by now.’ My sister stood beside me uttering a stream of hard-nosed opinion and theory. I sank down on to the asphalt with my knees up and my back against the fence and stared at the ground. The agent, a blue-eyed Greek called Koletsos, jogged back and forth between us and the vendors who remained inside the house: ‘He’d sell. It’s his wife.’ Dad refused to raise, shrugged and turned away. So we lost. My sister drove away to Kew. I trailed him back to the car. ‘Don’t worry, Miss,’ he said. ‘They’ll be in touch. My bids were the only two genuine ones they had.’ How could he tell? ‘What’ll I say if they ring?’ ‘Push the faults forward at ’em. The rotten roof on that loose-box. The kitchen. The bathroom.’
——
I cook dinner for M and serve it. ‘To think that this time last year I had a broken heart. Do you remember how we used to eat together and play Aretha Franklin records?’
She looks blank, and slightly embarrassed. ‘No. I don’t remember.’
——
Randolph Stow, To the Islands. He wrote it when he was twenty-three. It’s a man’s book, a young man’s book—about the Big Things—death, trying to die, murder, wanting to murder—the land; myth—actually it’s brilliant, but there’s something grim about it, and deathly serious; he’s got no lightness in his personality. There’s almost a kind of grinding quality. It’s an Important Book. Maybe he’s been mad, or something terrible happened to him that crushed all lightness, airiness, wit. Maybe people are born without these.
——
Ran, Kurosawa, with the born-again. As usual in these manly dramas I feel distant and excluded. But a fabulous spectacle.
——
‘If you do meet someone you like,’ says the tough Polish GP, ‘for goodness’ sake use condoms.’
——
I’m supposed to send a story to an anthology. I haven’t written a word. I was in that intolerable state of having cleared the decks and finding how far inside me all the real obstacles are. But this morning an hour’s work. Two typed pages and the tremulous sense of having hit a vein—that sensation of recognition—as if it were all formal, I mean as if all one were seeking was form, and the rest came after.
——
School concert. M played with plenty of attack, rhythm and feel the prelude from Bach’s Unaccompanied Cello Suite No. 3 in C major. So difficult—she made a lot of mistakes and was white, but there was guts in her playing and I was proud of her.
——
Another ratbag from the seventies comes to visit. ‘Remember when—remember how—’ His memories of me seem skewed and even invented, though this of course is the Rashomon principle. ‘Remember when I told you I went to bed with X and Y, the three of us? And you acted not jealous, but for tea you gave me two burnt chops?’
——
When I have begun to carve out the little country of a story in which I will make my home for the next few days (or months, if it should be a novel) I feel a secret power. I don’t need to chatter.
——
There’s no romance going on with L, just a kind of racketing friendliness. Or maybe it’s a smokescreen of shyness.
Darryl Emmerson’s The Pathfinder—John Shaw Neilson’s poems set to music. His sweet tenor, so lovely. Most of the audience was old. I found the story of the poet’s life, his lonely struggles, terribly moving. A woman near me pushed up her glasses and wiped her eyes with a shuddering sigh. Her husband saw she was crying and put his arm round her shoulders. Thinking of Neilson’s solitariness I wondered if I would be solitary for much of my life from now on, and whether I would find the comfort he did ‘in song’.
——
I dreamt that a man whose beauty was gone—his face had been burnt—brought me a present. I opened it and found first one pigskin glove, then two, as if it had doubled in my hands. They were brown, flexible, seemingly worn in but with the price tag still on them. I slipped my hands into them. They were a perfect fit. The man walked me across a deep meadow, French, high green grass, bordered by a line of poplars.
——
‘I had a dream last night,’ said T, ‘about cocks. There were three. And I was testing them, to compare and contrast. And the one I chose was the one that went best with its own body.’
——
At Primrose Gully, a night visitor: a bloke from up the road. Unblinking eyes, ocker manner. Glad not to have been alone when I saw his tall figure stooping to come under the creepers. Q and I tried to hide our boredom, tried to be sociable, while a splendid silver moon rose over the gully and moved steadily up into a cobalt sky through cloudbanks and then wraiths of gossamer. We kept exclaiming; he showed no interest.
——
A letter from V. Charming, I suppose. He says my handwriting is ‘nicely childlike, and yet not’.
——
I read his first novel again. Before I’d heard his voice I never got it, or saw what the fuss was about. It never made me laugh. But now I can hear its tone, and it’s so funny that waiting in the foyer of the Con while M does her cello exam I keep giving grunts of laughter and having to sink my mouth into my jumper neck. My response to this is a kind of panic. Why would anyone so brilliant (and giving the appearance of casual brilliance) want to have anything to do with me?
——
She comes out of the exam all flushed. ‘Guess what happened! I had to sight-read a Bach sarabande! The teacher told me the prelude was all I had to do—but they pointed to the syllabus! And it said “TWO pieces”!’ In the evening the teacher rang to apologise. His voice was trembling. I was astonished by his distress. I said, ‘Look—she came through it all right. If she’d come home in dark despair maybe I’d feel differently—but she handled it well—and it’s the quality of the teaching she’s had over the past four years that enabled her to handle it.’ He seemed relieved, and calmed down. Later she told me about the ambitious mothers of many of the music students: ‘They live through their daughters. I hate them.’
——
Stomach cramps, attributable only to the fact that L is speeding down the Hume in my direction. I’m jumpy, I can’t hide it. I’m a free woman. He’s a free man. I like him. He likes me. What am I complaining about?
——
I wake up early to get M off to school. When I return L is sleeping soundly—‘sweetly’, I think, looking at his head of brown curls half buried in the yellow sheet. I stand by the door and watch him with that respect one feels for completely silent, still slumber.
——
‘God,’ says the law student, ‘he’s a hunk, that guy. I saw him coming out of the bathroom’—he makes a two-handed gesture from shoulder to waist—‘and I wanted to say, “You can be in my video clip! You can mime my part!”’
——
I manoeuvre the complicated intersections that lead off the Westgate Bridge and listen with a burning curiosity to L’s tale of heartbreak. ‘I can’t even use her name! I’ve had a terrible year. Probably the worst year of my life. Thousands of dollars worth of phone calls. Always rushing from one country to another. The strain of everything. The language problem. The only happiness I’ve had this year’s been with you.’
I look up sharply. Me? Have I got the dates wrong?
He’s addicted to drama, glamour, pain. He’s almost totally un-self-examined, at least in the sense in which I mean it.
——
I sneaked a look in his address book when he was out of the room. There she was. I had expected beauty but was shocked by what I saw in her face: a delicacy of emotional tone that was almost frightening. Wide face, wide-set eyes, an enormous mouth that still looked childlike—it was the mouth that was terrifying—it looked as if it was quivering, the shape of its top lip was irregular in a way that was too sensitive for life. I felt a stab of fear—I mean for her—and for him too because he’s put what happened in a little shrine, with a candle burning in front of it, and he worships it.
——
He wakes panting from a dream. He’s had a phone call. It’s her; but her voice fades away and is disconnected—it’s a nightmare, I feel the shock of it, how it hurts him.
I see that I’ve actually lived a quiet life.
In the restaurant he asks me how my marriage ended. He shudders with horror, picks up a knife and mimes operatically stabbing himself in the heart.
‘If something like that happened to me I’d—I’d—I’d never have seen them again—I’d have wiped them out of my life! I’d have—’
‘You’d have to kill something in yourself, to achieve that. That’s revenge. That’s useless.’
‘But you can’t be an emotional wimp about it. You’ve got the right to feel things.’
‘Are you kidding? Do you think I didn’t feel anything? I was wounded. I was bleeding.’
With him one can use that sort of language.
He leaves me a Gilberto tape. I play it over and over, in the car. What on earth can come of this? Nothing but the pleasure of what it is. Let it be what it is, then. And be grateful.
——
Deeply embedded in V’s novel are turns of phrase of an Australianness I’ve never before seen on paper. Someone describes a collection of railway stations, of which one was ‘completely rusty. The platform, benches, even the ticket office…were all made from old railway track. Passengers would always come away with orange hands.’ ‘Come away with.’ This could be my mother speaking. I laugh again and again, and at times shudder at what awfulness he sees in people.
——
Having a beer in the kitchen with the law student while I cook dinner. We talk about falling in love.
‘Do you learn how not to,’ he asks, ‘as you get older?’
‘You learn what the process is, and you recognise its stages.’
‘Do you mean you can stop yourself?’
‘You can discipline yourself. You can feel the moment at which it would be possible to let go another string of yourself, and you can choose whether to or not.’
‘I’ve said “I love you” about a thousand times.’
‘So have I.’
‘Have you?’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘A million times.’
‘And I always mean it.’
‘Me too. Or—hang on—I’ve probably had to force it out two or three times.’
‘Force it out?’
‘I mean I said it when it was no longer true. Just to make someone feel all right.’
‘I know exactly what you mean. When Donna used to come round here, remember? All I had to do was say “I love you” and she’d stop crying. It was the only thing that’d make her stop.’
——
Three teenage suicides in the news: a boy hangs himself after an argument about eating too many biscuits; a boy shoots himself because he wasn’t allowed to have a motorbike; a sixteen-year-old girl shoots herself with a shotgun and they don’t know why. ‘Don’t anyone out there even think of doing it,’ said the mother of one of the boys on TV. ‘You don’t know what you leave behind.’
——
A sunny day. I am wearing a floppy skirt with hyacinth and white stripes. The psychological effect of wearing stripes. They move, and cross each other, with an audible whirr.
——
Dreamt I was wheeling my bike towards the uni through an unfinished two-storey building. I was wearing a thin white nightie but also a black jacket that meant I was reasonably modest. Workmen whistled at me but in imitation because I was singing as I went along. In a garden I asked a man, ‘How deep is that compost heap?’ The compost heap was beautiful. It had a coating of green moss and did not look ugly or messy: it contained a substance, it seemed, already smooth and broken down.
——
I thought of volunteering at the Children’s Hospital. But there are huge nurses’ strikes on.
——
Watching ‘experimental’ movies is terribly cheering—makes one feel more daring.
——
Lying in despair on the couch in my work room I noticed in the wire shelf a forgotten notebook. Pulled it out. It was a sort of diary I had kept back at the beginning of writing The Children’s Bach. At first I thought, I’ll be able to sell this one day. Then I read it and saw with astonishment and relief the HOPELESS MESS my mind was, back then. I thought of the shapely thing The Children’s Bach is, and remembered that writing a novel is a process of refinement. Out of chaos comes the fine thing; out of chaos comes form.
——
In an essay Fay Zwicky quotes Germaine Greer about Henry Handel Richardson’s ‘provincialism’ in being unable to see that The Getting of Wisdom is superior to Maurice Guest: ‘…for in a country which is utterly philistine, people who are genuinely excited by the arts tend to distrust any art form which seems close to ordinary life and to adopt paranoid, overblown concepts of the artistic personality’.
——
Worked on the bandaid story, wept over it a bit—it’s still lumpy and clumsy, but I am working on it.
——
The house vendors have accepted my offer. I signed a contract.
——
I used the expression ‘a beachhead’ about the steadiness I’ve worked out for myself over this year. The Jungian sat up. He quoted Freud—‘Where id is, there ego shall be’—and said he thought ‘beachhead’ was a better image than the strict idea of the ego descending right over the id (he made a covering, seizing movement from above with one claw-like hand). ‘The ocean’s still there. Nothing’s permanently reclaimed. It can all be washed right back in.’ He said, ‘Now you’re back in contact with that part of yourself you’d lost, you must feel reluctant to lose it again in a big projection—which is what falling in love is—letting your whole peace of mind be dependent on someone else.’
——
My forty-fourth birthday (and La Stupenda’s sixtieth, I heard on the radio on my way to the pool). M won’t come out with me for breakfast. The law student, embarrassed perhaps, offers himself as company.
——
I told L my husband gave me a lemon tree for my birthday.
‘A lemon? Sour fruit. Couldn’t he have chosen a peach?’
——
Dreamt I was standing on a bridge over a canal, looking down into the water. A black, hairy, slimy creature surfaced and swam away down the canal. I screamed, ‘A rat!’ but it was too big to be a rat. I watched with revulsion as it swam away from me, its shoulders working, and then dragged itself up on to the bank. I saw it wasn’t a rat, it was as big as a cat and had a thickness at the root of its tail that made it unidentifiable.
Trigger for this: a dead thing near the tram stop the other day when the law student and I were driving.
LS: ‘I don’t think it is a rat. Go back, let’s have another look.’
U-turn.
HG: ‘You’re right, it’s a baby possum.’
We both made sentimental noises. Whereas when it was a rat we thought, Good riddance.
——
Clowning with M on the couch, actually having her in my arms and making her laugh by teasing her about the trumpet player in the band, who is six foot three, pale-skinned, handsome, with a WWI face and brow, hair pulled back in a ponytail.
——
V’s piece about Borneo in the National Times. An efficient piece of writing without any sign that his emotions had been engaged. And why should they? It’s only journalism.
——
Dreamt my sister and two other women gave me, in a huge cinema, baskets of flowers and herbs to plant in the garden of my new house. In exchange I wrote out for them the words of ‘Praise My Soul the King of Heaven’.
——
Went to work and wrote a short story about a ‘luminous boy’. It poured out in a rush and then I spent a timeless couple of hours fiddling with it, changing this and that, cutting, shaping etc—utterly enjoyable. Now I must discipline myself not to spoil it with my cumbersome afterthoughts.
——
R rang and offered me their house in Sydney for three weeks while they’re down the coast.
——
M came home from her HSC English exam in excellent spirits. Her father called her at dinnertime from America and after this she was radiant with happiness.
——
A cheque arrived from the lady in Queensland. Stunned, I accepted. I gave half of it to my sister so she could see a shrink.
——
L sends me an account of his latest struggles to extract himself from emotional entanglements (‘you must think I’m a walking basket case’), plus a drawing of his just-planted garden. I wrote back, taking a breezy tone: ‘You are much too charming and good-looking for a tranquil life, and in this respect we belong to different species.’ Told him I’d be in Sydney in summer. ‘But you’re overloaded. The last thing you need is more female attention. You sound like a man who’s going down for the third time in a sea of consequences.’
——
Mass-murderers of girls arrested and charged in Perth. A married couple in their thirties. Shallow bush graves. Stranglings, suffocations, sexual assaults. What does this mean? The devil, A would say. The rottenness in people.
——
While M slaves in her room for tomorrow’s exam the law student and I drink beer downstairs and listen to Miles Davis and Mink De Ville. I’m fascinated by the power that beauty has over him. ‘On the beach, Helen, I’d look at this creation—the colour of her, and the skin of her arms—and I’d be nearly passing out—thinking, How can God have made something this perfect?’
——
At Brunswick Baths I was alone for an hour against a brick wall in the sun reading J’s new stories in proofs. His terrifying prolificness. I read until I felt trembly, hypoglycaemic, and had to go home.
——
L grumbles on the phone: ‘I watched that show on Brazil—God, why do I live in this country? It’s so self-satisfied here. In Brazil there’s so much energy—’ etc etc, ho hum, but underneath is fear: the first draft of his novel is 900 pages long, ‘a mess’. He says, ‘I was reading Postcards from Surfers again the other day and I could see how it’s made up of notebook things—it’s terrific, how you do that?’ I bet he really thinks, She hasn’t got an imagination as big and creative as mine. Heh heh. Polished up my little story and sent it to the Adelaide Review.
——
At the baths I lay on a wonderful foam rubber object I bought en route at K-Mart, fount of all goodness. Creamed my skin, put on my sunglasses, and just as I was about to lie down I glanced towards the northern end of the pool and saw four people, a group, of different sizes and ages, sitting on the rim. Something in their postures, their groupness, the angles of their spines filled me with a rush of bliss so intense that my eyes ran with tears. How could I have forgotten this simple joy? Available to any moron with the money to get past the turnstile. The sky was pure blue, and in it sailed great galleons of cloud, white with blue-grey floors. I felt my skin begin to burn. I swam a length in the cold water, shuddering, in my goggles. Two rough girls near me kept giving me friendly looks and smiles. God, I was happy, I was content!
——
I’m shortlisted for the Age book of the year, which I have never won or even, I think, been shortlisted for. I look at the list of judges and think, I haven’t won. I feel nothing. I determine not to go to the presentation. Never again, that shameful public torment.
——
Dancing in Lygon Street to Venetta Fields and her band —the wonderful power of gospel, its shouts of joy. Five minutes of that music does more to convert a person than six months of solemnity from a born-again in your house. Just before the last song she said, ‘That lady in the blue dress who’s been clappin’ and singin’—maybe you’ll know this song—“Steal Away to Jesus!”’ People looked around. She meant me. I blushed. Two men dancing—Aussie crim types—one a stumpy pale little fellow with very muscly legs bared by rude torn-off denim shorts, the other tall and limp-backed in a Hawthorn beanie and cheap fawn trousers. They seemed to know each other and danced in a way that was distressing—tensely, with clenched arms and bent knees and no fluidity of spine, all aggression. A black American danced right in front of me, a great hunk of a man with massive hips, bum, thighs—his relaxed authority—nothing flashy or even skilful, just easy in his body and glad to be moving. Everything he did originated in his hips, completely centred there and at ease.
——
Roland Barthes, in ALover’s Discourse, on dedicating a book: ‘Writing is dry, obtuse; a kind of steamroller, writing advances, indifferent, indelicate, and would kill “father, mother, lover” rather than deviate from its fatality (enigmatic though that fatality may be). When I write, I must acknowledge this fact…: there is no benevolence within writing, rather a terror: it smothers the other, who, far from perceiving the gift in it, reads there instead an assertion of mastery, of power, of pleasure, of solitude. Whence the cruel paradox of the dedication: I seek at all costs to give you what smothers you.’
Hmmm. I see it’s a proper noting and working out of the tiniest flickers of consciousness, a teasing out of their meanings i.e. (like Handke) he is using the same raw material that I use, and his field of operation is home to me, but we perform different acts/actions upon it.
——
I wonder if I will become one of those women in their forties who have affairs with married men. No! I will not. Full of curiosity about this one, though—V. I read an interview with him and see his alarming statements and concerns—how he is ‘horrified’ by the idea of the ‘erosion of his standards’. This is real, stern, rigid animus talking. But I can’t say he hasn’t warned me—describing his own hand-writing as ‘cramped, tight, stilted and jerky, and this nib can’t be blamed’.
——
The Adelaide Review paid me $200 for my story. Now I’m working on the opera one. Something improves in it every day, and I get more control over it. Today I fiddled with the river and water imagery.
——
Meeting at the Windsor about some film festival I’m invited to. Two cups of tea and a glass of orange juice cost $11. We nearly fainted.
——
A critic, writing about Elizabeth Jolley: ‘Compared to Garner, who was once presented to us as the enfant terrible of Australian fiction—’
——
Reading Elizabeth Bowen, very good of course in an infuriating English way. Full of depths, if not widths.
——
Three mothers of teenagers laughing together at the dinner table. Two of us talk about how sexy the son of the third one is. I jokingly offer to take him to live at my place. ‘Take him,’ she says. ‘I bet he’d be the perfect gentleman at your place. To me he says “Fuck up and die.”’
——
I spent an hour standing on a high stool at the cupboard reading old diaries. My bare feet were blue with cold. Pain of those years, when I read them without the filter of previous ignorance. Why didn’t I see that the marriage was already done for? The soul was not itself.
——
A woman’s tinkling showers of laughter.
——
Dad came to Primrose Gully, taught me to use the motor mower. A wheel came off, twice, and he showed me how to fix it with a piece of wire. I was impressed with his competence, patience and ability to improvise. He went home. I cut the grass on my own. Now I understand why he used to be so single-minded about it. It’s positive destruction. You’re obsessed, walled in by the tremendous noise, faced with a design problem—the pattern of the strokes. You can’t hear voices speaking to you, the phone has no hope of being heard, you have the luxury of being incommunicado. You see an immediate result. After mowing, I raked.
——
The native tree outside our back gate is thickly covered in creamcoloured flowers. The street is lined with these trees, but none of the others has more than half a dozen blossoms. Ours is the only one that is riotously flourishing. The law student and I noticed this on our way back from the shop. I said, ‘It must be because we have such a happy household.’
——
The law student has found a room in a student house and will leave in ten days.
——
‘I’ve got many things,’ says L. He wants to show me his life. His sweet-smelling skin, his thick curls. The bedroom is in the very centre of his house. The streetlight is blocked by curtains. We make love in pitch blackness. He is generous with the bed: leaves plenty of room for me. We sleep, or rather he sleeps, and I drift all night just below the surface, with occasional brief dives deeper.
——
‘They arrested a bloke in Brisbane who had a bomb to blow up the Pope. He was from a lunatic asylum.’
‘Was he making purposeful strides towards the Pope?’
We fall about at this but she was not trying to amuse.
——
‘I love talking to girls,’ says the law student. ‘I need to. I feel as if I need to release something in me.’
——
At the lunch table I can’t help staring at V, the married man. I want to let my eyes wander freely. A plain man. A very white neck. Old, soft, faded Levi shirt, jeans, horrible old seventies boots with heels, black corduroy jacket. He’s the flipside of L, the curly-headed, laughing one. He is very male. Something very definite and uncompromising about him. Do I mean ‘rigid and inflexible’? I don’t know, yet.
——
At Toki I tell the law student about the two men. He listens with bated breath, groans and shouts. When I start to compare them he twists in his chair and cries out as if in pain.
——
The law student stumbles in after a night at a party and the Users’ Club. ‘This guy called Daniel says to me, “Hey! Come upstairs! There’s this fabulous guitar!” So I go up to a bedroom and we play this steel-string guitar, and he plays some blues and I play some blues, and I show off; and whenever I do anything on the guitar that I—see, he’s not very musical—he’s a really nice guy but he—so if I do something that I just feel, he says, “Oh! How’d you do that? Show me! I wanna learn! I wanna learn!” And I feel like saying, “Go and listen to this record. I can’t teach you.”’
——
L took me to his friends’ house for lunch. We sat at the table in the sun, drinking and talking as people do. We all got on merrily. I sat beside him, liking him and liking everything. I saw his lovely sociability, his readiness. When people spoke he listened, and when it was his turn he spoke. One of the women was very pregnant. The pure skin of pregnancy. Her dainty ankles and sparkling eyes. I felt very drawn to her, wanted to stroke and pat her and admire her radiance, and I did.
——
After dinner the waiter brought L the wrong coffee, was corrected, went away. Time passed. He realised he’d been forgotten and from that moment the evening was lost. He went dark and stiff with rage. Anger spread into the air around him. A grille clanged down between him and the world. I panicked. All the air went out of me. I felt my face drop on its bones. He noticed and said, ‘What’s up?’ I said, in a small voice, ‘I feel sad. And scared.’ ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘I just hate it when things like that happen, when people treat you like—’ I wanted to say, ‘He doesn’t scorn you, or hate you—he just made a mistake.’ But his whole ego was bound up in it. My own iron grille came down. I missed the chance to level with him. From then on we were both deep in reticence but keeping the superficial intimacy going. In the morning, a shyness. I like him. I envy his beauty and I hate the way it distorts his life. He is all split and troubled; and his loneliness is as bad as mine. We would wear each other out.
——
‘You can feel Patrick White in your own writing, can’t you,’ says the man. ‘Sometimes you look at a sentence and you can see where it comes from—completely unconsciously. That’s his power.’
‘Yes,’ says the woman gaily, ‘even in someone like me who’s hardly even read him.’
——
Two actors walk into Pellegrini’s, the wife more famous and highly regarded than the husband. He walks very close behind her, shepherding her through the crowd, chin high and wearing the look that says, ‘I am famous and I am only looking at you for two reasons: (1) to check briefly whether I shall greet you if by chance you too are famous and (2) to repel your eager glance if you are not.’ Her skin is white white white: the whiteness (1) of the redhead and (2) that says ‘I work indoors’, bounces back light and makes her photogenic.
——
Outside the university college, in the dark garden, a huge magnolia tree held out its opening buds, and in the street some night birds were singing, one in one tree, one in another. I remembered a French essay I wrote in 1961 about those birds, which I heard near the Union sandwich bar on an early summer night just before my first uni exams.
——
I dreamt that my nutty old boyfriend from the other side of the river was near me, singing sweetly.
——
I stood.
‘Why do you have to go now?’ said V.
‘Because I have to do something in Melbourne at six o’clock.’
We were looking each other right in the eyes. Not a romantic or soft look, but a direct, hard challenge, straight out of the hard self.
——
P walked with me at Primrose Gully. We took sticks against snakes. Grass very long, with beautiful russet tips.
——
I dreamt of a yellow object. I forget what it was. Was it thickly coated in perfect duco? About the size of—what? Even that’s gone. It gleamed, it was bright, smooth, it made the heart glad.
——
At the launch the writer kissed me on the cheek and gave me a cassette of her work. Her bright make-up, narrow fox-like face, her straw-dyed and square-chopped hair, and a little black fez.
——
Damn it. There’s an opening in me towards where V is. If we lived in the same town I would write and say, ‘Tonight, grave sir, both my poore house, and I, / Do equally desire your companie…’ —Ben Jonson, Inviting a Friend to Supper
——
After I’d signed a paper agreeing to pay the house loan back ‘on demand’ should anything ‘go wrong’, Dad became expansive and made orotund pronouncements on matters of family finance, saying each thing several times in several different ways. We had steak, perfect boiled potatoes, peas they’d picked at Portarlington, and strawberries ditto, with King Island cream. A fabulous, classic lunch in our mother’s tradition. He put a spoonful of tomato sugo on my steak, reaching over my shoulder with a flourish deft enough to get him a job at the Italian Society. Driving home with my brother: warm wind, the huge, low horizon of that plain, streaks of grey cloud and a hot-looking sunset.
——
On the phone Y and I went through my story line by line and raked all the lumps out of it, cut off the last sentence, fixed misleading punctuation etc. Of course I’m anxious about it. Is she really telling the truth when she says it’s ‘lovely’ and ‘fine’ and that she ‘loves’ it? —
Speech Night. Hundreds of brown-legged girls in those ugly, bag-like uniforms. Nothing can make a young girl less than lovely. The steadiest, quietest, most faithful, least ambitious, least flamboyant thing in the world is the alto voice in a girls’ madrigal group. The law student and I whisper across each other, ‘It’s so quiet.’ ‘It’s so calm.’ When the choir sings an Elgar song, ‘The Snow’, with two violins, a father on my other side cries openly, tears collecting in the creases under his eyes; then, between items, he opens a business magazine and reads on. ‘C’était un peu sucré,’ says F. The law student and I, both tear-stained, are pained by his refusal ‘d’être ému’. A professor of economics gives a rousing feminist speech: ‘It’s all out there waiting for you—you can have a wonderful life.’ On the way home I mention this admiringly. M is less impressed: ‘We get told that kind of stuff every week at assembly.’
——
The man’s clothes are very expensive, and look it—suits obviously Italian, shoes of the fashionable clod-hopper kind. His ex-wife’s are well-chosen, stylish, fashionable, but when seen close up are of cheap cut and material. She puts her money elsewhere, I guess. She is potentially beautiful. What stops her is unhappiness, anger, resentment.
——
Dreamt I was a police cadet. I was lonely and a bit scared in the building where we were being trained. I made friends with a young bloke, not my type at all, curly-haired and beefy, not all that bright. We were issued with a kind of yearbook, containing a page about each of us. My page said that he was my friend and I was embarrassed.
——
L wants worldly esteem. I know that feeling. I hope he’ll get it because it means so much to him that if he doesn’t it will deflate him and make him sad and bitter.
——
What am I setting up for myself, here? Some happiness, perhaps. I’m calm, and in good spirits, quietly, as if something important and good were about to happen. I’m not scared or nervous. I can’t even imagine it, how it will be, what it will look like, what felicities or clumsinesses either of us will commit. Bucket of cold water: he’s married. He is an intellectual and I am not. ‘He lives,’ said Z, who introduced us, ‘almost entirely in the world of books and ideas. I imagine that’s why he didn’t want to have children.’ Maybe he’s in the habit of having quick, harsh, demanding affairs. Or maybe this will be an important relationship, for both of us.
——
At the peace vigil a pastor gets up and says, ‘The most important thing I’ve written in the last year is some remarks I made at a meeting about trying to re-unite North and South Korea. You’ll hear the emotion and the politics in it.’ He then proceeds to read, in a wooden voice, an interminable sermon. He stood with his heels together and his feet in a broad V. At the end he said, ‘Amen.’
——
Went to Borsari’s and bought a new bike, a Puch 5-speed, big and female and reliable as a pram. With girl’s handlebars and a skirt guard. Flew home up Lygon Street, sitting up with straight back, not angled forward as on the too-racy Hillman which I now pass on to M.
——
At Heide I liked the paintings very much. Arthur Boyd bridegroom pictures. Bouquets sprouting from people’s ears. In a frame, several pages torn from the artist’s notebook, from the early fifties, pencil scribbles on yellowing paper. He can’t spell at all—very endearing. ‘Cresent moon always looks like this…dingoe’s sniffing bone’s.’
——
The enclosed garden, full of flowers, very beautiful. V is botanically even more ignorant than I am. At the bottom of it an extraordinary vegetable—is it a turnip? A betterave like on the French kitchen poster? It’s mauve and green, as big as a canteloupe, touches the earth on a lower point, and is held vertical by flying buttresses of long, muscular-looking leaves. It is split, and looks dry and woody inside.
——
V doesn’t like his name. ‘Why don’t you change it?’ ‘If you change your name you have to change your surname as well, don’t you? ’Cause that’s what you are.’ ‘Most women change their surnames at least once in their lives.’ He’s surprised—never thought of this before.
——
In the warm and windy night streets, kids stumble about in gangs or alone. A chubby girl carrying her shoes and smoking stops me and asks me the time.
‘Five to eleven.’
‘Oh! I thought it was later.’
Her face is smeared, somehow—she is drunk and unhappy, perhaps has been humiliated. She tries to smile at me. Her features aren’t anchored in place, they slide on her face. I feel a pang for her. She stumbles away up Russell Street.
V says, ‘Why’s she got her shoes off and her shirt hanging out?’
‘’Cause she’s unhappy, and her feet hurt ’cause she’s a fat girl. And some man’s probably just been cruel to her.’
‘For sure. At the bottom of every bit of trouble there’s always a man.’
‘Yes. You only have to look, and there is.’
This banter, which to me is flippant, is perhaps less so to him.
He presses: ‘Do you think that’s true?’
‘Oh, I don’t know.’
‘See, I think what women don’t realise is that men like to be with other men.’
‘That shouldn’t cause problems necessarily, should it?’
All evening I am dodging and feinting, to avoid being pinned down.
——
‘What did you do in the fifties?’
‘Lay on my bed and read. Listened to Little Richard records and danced. Mucked around with my family. What did you?’
‘Cars,’ says V. ‘I was crazy about speed. I drove an MG, stripped down, no floor.’
‘Where’d you put your feet?’
‘Well, there was a bit of floor, on the driving side. But in the rest you could see the ground going past.’
——
Me: ‘What’s your house like?’
V: ‘You should come there one day.’
Me: (thinks) ‘What? Don’t be ridiculous.’
——
‘You know how marvellous it is,’ says the woman in Notturno, ‘to be with another writer. They don’t get bored or think you’re mad.’ But this stuff I’m writing in here will embarrass me later when V ceases to be a MYSTERIOUS STRANGER and reveals all his meanness and weakness (and I mine).
——
Thelonious Monk playing ‘Ruby My Dear’. Over and over. On the cover: ‘He had evolved an unorthodox approach to the piano, involving crushed notes and clusters, and left-hand chords made up of seconds and sixths instead of conventional triadic jazz harmonies.’ They’re only technical terms but I wish I’d made up ‘crushed notes and clusters’.
——
V turned away from me, while we were looking in a shop window, and I caught a whiff of him—only faint—but it was a plain smell, unadorned and unperfumed (not like that of L, who’s all fresh and herbal)—a smell of wool, of ordinary skin—not young—a smell that reminded me of my father and my grandfather—I was jolted by the connection—and I thought, If I do know you when you are old, it will have been a plain life indeed.
——
Gloomily coming into my bedroom I stump towards the bed and see the mess of New York Reviews beside it, and a copy of Joan London’s stories that are so beautiful, and I think, Whatever happens, I’ve got this one little power—I’m a writer. I can use everything that happens, I can use it and shape it and in that way I can get control of it.
——
It has been discovered that humans emit certain smells or substances which cause health in the opposite sex. Men can only pass on their health-giving substances by sex. Women’s, however, can be conveyed over distance and even tend to permeate the atmosphere—and women’s, also, work on other women. Really?
——
I see that what I am doing, in this diary, is conducting an argument with myself, about these two men, and myself, and men in general.
——
Family lunch at the Latin. Just as my sister is getting red-faced and shrill about the nurses’ strike, two men rush through the room, one cringing under the blows of the other who is covered in a white mess of food and roaring in a fury: ‘How dare you! You’re only a waiter!’ They roll on to the street and disappear. ‘You can tell it’s a joke,’ says my sister, ‘because he said, “How dare you?” No Australian would say that. He’d say, “You bastard!” and punch him in the face.’ ‘Aww, I dunno,’ says our father. ‘I reckon if one of ’em had had a knife there’da been real trouble.’
——
In the shack I get up to take the kettle off the fire and see through the narrow window a pretty sight: a blue wren flirting with his own reflection in the outside mirror of my car. He flips up, whirring his wings like mad, performs a caracole and a pirouette in mid-air before the glass, then perches on the mirror’s rim and looks around in confusion—then back he goes and does it all again.
——
‘Most people are not aware of such a call’ (to the numinous) ‘yet they may feel the strongest attraction to make some sense of the “God-feeling” within them, and be overwhelmed by feelings of sickness, sadness, depression and despair if they suppress it because they disagree with conventional kinds of religious belief, or are afraid that others will think them mad or odd…They will find it painful to begin with to admit to being driven by such an improper longing, but if they can get past this stage they will discover that most people have a very good idea what they are talking about and are repressing similar longings and experiences of their own…We are all contemplatives to a greater or lesser degree, and we all need, to the limit of our capacity, to admit the experience which we may, or may not, call God.’ —Monica Furlong, Contemplating Now
All this is true, and it is what my novel should be about. The spirit comes to an unhappy woman. She denies it. It departs. I’m frightened of all this, I think.
——
Fear—of being drawn to another man whose phlegmatic nature will limit and distort mine—or for whose sake I will limit and distort myself. And yet I am so much stronger, now.
— The only way I can have anything to do with him is by (a) lies and (b) hurting someone. Am I prepared to do this?
——
Annie Gottlieb’s dream that when she began to enjoy her ‘powers as a writer’, her mother had her sterilised. The terrific jolt of this: I didn’t simply dream being sterilised. In the year between the writing of Monkey Grip and its publication, I had it done to myself.
——
The university year ends. Our law student is moving out.
Me: ‘How will I live without you?’
Him: ‘Who’ll I talk to?’
——
‘There are virtually,’ says V, ‘only two things that go wrong with a car engine. Petrol, or—far more likely—spark.’
——
The window is open, the curtains lift and drop on a warm breeze that smells strongly of dry grass.
——
Went and had a little haircut. I think the hairdresser’s freaking out. He cut it dry, a thing he’s never done before. He was late. He looked pale, distracted; is going to France on Thursday. Has moved out of his house and is sleeping in the salon.
——
The biographer talks about her progress. ‘I didn’t want to write another book about a put-upon woman. At first I was full of admiration for her. I thought she was a heroine. Then I saw what really happened, and I was angry. And then I sulked.’ She gives her tuneful laugh. ‘Yes—I sulked. And now I know that if it has to be a book about an oppressed woman, that’s what it’ll be.’
——
Because I know that someone finds ‘almost everything about’ me ‘interesting’, I am walking round in a cloud of power.
——
In an old diary I find this exchange between me and Y:
Me: ‘I’d like to have a man in another city. I’d like him to be crazy about me, and for him to write me wonderful letters, once or twice a week, and to come to me every now and then, and me to him—a real passion—but for him not to want to make me his wife.’
Y: ‘Now you’re talking.’
I forgot to mention that I would like also to be crazy about him.
——
Invited to eat with two high-powered academics, philosophers. I’m happily surprised by their worldliness. While she works in the kitchen she has the radio on low and I hear her singing along to the Bangles: ‘Walk like an Egyp-she-an.’ She tells a tale of drunkenness, of ‘calling for a bucket’. Feel no longer shy of asking them what, for example, Heidegger was on about. Rain fell, quiet and vertical, at dinner.
——
A letter I can’t quite bring myself to write to L:
‘I’m no good at these reticent, half-hearted affairs. I thought for a while it was what I needed, in my awkward, bruised convalescence; and because you seemed to be in a similar state I felt it all to be appropriate. But I feel your wariness and it’s brought out all my own: it made me grow a thicker skin. And now you’re on the outside of it and voilà.’
If I told the whole truth I would have to say: ‘I think I’ve fallen in love with someone else.’
——
A woman has reviewed Postcards from Surfers and The Children’s Bach in the New York Times Book Review: ‘…lit by a kind of eerie, slanted light, reminiscent at times of Jane Bowles’s work, as are Ms Garner’s sharp, strange images and the dense, rich texture their layering creates.’
I know it’s dangerous to dwell on praise but allow me a little moment of delight at being mentioned in the same sentence as Jane Bowles.
——
I am mean to our dog. I ignore her when she casts herself at my feet. I must be in love.
——
Dreamt I sat on a couch beside another person, a cheerful man I knew to be a semi-reformed crim. From the floor a dog, hairy and importunate, wormed its way between us. We went to a strange house, where in a derelict room with no furniture a fire was only just alight in a big, empty fireplace. While I waited for him to come into this room (were we going to make love?) I took the poker and moved the fire around, grouped its fallen parts and tried to make it burn properly. There was no wood, the room was quite empty and dark, and the fire was almost ashes, but still gave out a little bit of warmth if not a clear flame.
——
Sun came out of the clouds while I was in the pool. Water suddenly full of little yellow feathers.
——
The Polish philosopher said she had found Stendhal’s On Love attractive and relevant ‘as an adolescent’, but that now she considers love to be ‘a cancer of the mind—you pick a man out of the crowd, and you demand that he should play a part, that he should be this, and that—it’s grotesque! It’s ridiculous!’ I came away rather sobered. Fortunately I was en vélo and this always cheers me up in doubtful moments.
——
An Italian photographer from a magazine. He reminded me of the one who said to me meanly in the seventies, ‘Your profile, it is not the best.’ But this one ended up charming me into smiling and laughing. He even laid his palm against my cheek.
——
‘All the kids in maximum security,’ says the poet, ‘have read your book. And they love it.’ Am I supposed to believe this? His alarming gaze. He can fix you for up to five minutes without blinking. Is that a jail thing? His hard, forceful presence, his hard talk and anecdotes, his need to keep talking, his discourse of violence—what he said to men who crossed him, what he said he’d do to them, what he in fact did do to them. ‘I jumped up and down on his arm, I was yellin’, “Ya cunt, if you break her arm I’m gunna break yours.”’ I kept thinking, must I take account of this? Is it middle class not to want to? ‘I was bored with m’ wife,’ he says. ‘I kept saying, “Here, go and buy yourself a nice dress or something.” But she wouldn’t. She’d wear a tracksuit, ’n’ ugg boots.’
——
Out all day with the jaws of my purse straining wide. Horror of Christmas. But I exchanged friendly looks with many strangers…I like people when they are in a great mass, thousands of lonely or rather solitary blobs, each one with ‘le front barré de souci’.
——
The barrier of shyness that attacks us both (and especially V) when we’re together. I mean sexual shyness. As if we were learning each other by some more decorous means. An inversion of the modern order.
——
One day I’ll have to burn this book. I use as buckets of cold water thoughts of his wife’s preparations for Christmas.
——
The landlord comes to examine the cracked wall and the powerful wisteria on the house-front. F is visiting. I set up the ironing board and say to the girls, ‘Sing to us.’ One plays the piano, the other sings: An die Musik. While I work, F sits quite still with his forearms on the table. I don’t dare look at him; it’s a song that brings such painful memories of the music we discovered together. ‘Du holde Kunst, in wieviel grauen Stunden…’ They sing other less poignant songs, and shift into carols. We join in. Meanwhile the landlord wanders up and down the stairs. I pass him in the hall. He’s standing still, listening to the girls’ voices: ‘Isn’t it lovely!’ Later, in the kitchen, he tells me a story: ‘When I was a kid I had a really good voice. I sang all the time, in choirs. I was good, and I loved it. My father—he was a wonderful man—used to get me to sing for him when we were going along together in the car. Then one day I overheard him talking to another bloke, someone he knew, a neighbour or someone he worked with. He was saying, “Some blokes have sons who are footballers. Some have sons who are runners. But I’ve got a son who’s a singer.” I thought he was ashamed of me. So I stopped. Gave it up. Never sang again. And years later he said to me, “I’ve never understood, John—why’d you stop singing?”’
On the doorstep he pauses. It will be fine with him, he says, if the four girls live here when I move out.
——
Maybe he’s the kind of man who conducts flirtations with women in such a way as to allow his wife to find out; she then puts a stop to the developing affair and, though he grumbles etc, this is what he wants, and needs. No idea why I thought of this. Just running through the painful possibilities.
——
On TV a dramatised life of Freud. Very enjoyable. Did he really have a black lower lip, like a dog’s? The madwomen in the hospital: raving, twitching, and nothing that could be done.
——
‘You look well. You look happy. Are you?’
‘Yes, I am happy.’ Feeling my flesh light on my bones.
——
The visiting German editor wants me to write a big piece about Melbourne. Though his monthly circulation is 250,000 he offers me only $1200. I make a series of small sounds meant to indicate slight interest in the piece but lack of excitement about the money. We agree to write to each other. Before my foot hits the pavement outside I have lost interest.
——
‘I’m a woman now,’ says M, pirouetting at the kitchen door.
‘How do you mean?’
‘I got my learner’s permit. I’m allowed to drive a car. I can drive a car.’
We laugh so madly we have to lean on the walls. Fact: I love her more than anyone in the world.
——
Whenever I start worrying about not being beautiful and young, I try to imagine a man of my age, someone whose age shows, who is not glamorous, who’s got wrinkles, but who’s got a sexual presence and an authority of personality. I imagine him in a group of people, sitting there quietly, not making a fuss. And I think, if he can be attractive, so can I.
——
In the car with F and M, last night, tired and crabby, I began to see my secret new fantasies as silly and pointless. How long does it take two people to slide into being a couple? But then F gave me a garden spade for Christmas. In my fatigue I had forgotten all the nice and lovely things about him, how funny he is, how on the drive home (he drove) we sang together, with M, for miles.
——
A two-year-old girl has been stolen from her bed (the person cut through a flywire screen) and ‘sexually assaulted’. She was found ‘crying and wandering’ in a street ten kilometres away at 1 am. Doctors have had to operate on her to repair ‘internal injuries’.
——
Cried and bawled by myself in front of the Mediaeval Mystery Plays on TV. Abraham and Isaac, what a terrible story, it made me hate God, the jealous God who demands appalling tributes, but then at the end when he tells Abraham he may spare his son, and says, ‘I am going to sacrifice my son, later on,’ I was pulled up short.
——
Mum brought to Christmas dinner some very old photos of us four girls as kids, outside the house at Ocean Grove. I saw myself at nine or ten looking so tragically plain that I lost heart for twenty minutes. Dad picked out the one who in the photos looked the most ‘cute’ and ‘timid’, then showered her with affection for the entire day. The rest of us craned sideways from a couch in the next room to watch him hold her, with his arm around her waist, while she stood beside his chair. Later she came up to us and said, ‘I think Dad loves me.’ We went into convulsions of embarrassed laughter.
——
T mended my pink trousers and then we lay on her bed and sofa and shrieked about fucking young or boring men. She fancies a bloke in a pub where she goes to play music. I said, ‘Is he a murderer?’ ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘He’s boring and has no sense of humour. But every time I see him I feel all stirred up on the way home.’
——
Dreamt that somebody had a baby but it died. A great deal of sobbing. The father was terribly distressed. I was trying to be of use but did not know how. In a paved courtyard I lit a fire in a metal container with a lid. Smoke poured out of it and I went back into the house and forgot about it.
——
Looking around this room I realise I’ll only be sleeping in it two or three more times.