3

Their connection began when they were both nine, and together watched her father with the axe. Under the pepper tree he raised it high, and brought it down on a scraggly white chicken, which he had tied, just one loop, with a rope to the chopping block. Father was unsure of his aim, perhaps, or worried that the bird would flap away. But in the act itself there was no trace of uncertainty or worry, just irreproachable gravity and the blade fast-falling, just the whoosh of an intention sharper and heavier than most.

Only seconds before, the doomed chicken was making a throaty, moaning sound, inert but for its roving and nervous eye. Ellie saw it blink, and blink again, and wondered if chooks had thoughts or memories, or heard songs in their heads, as she often did. She held James’s hand tightly and pulled him close. In the olive-green light of the backyard he looked nervous and afraid. His face was pinched, his mouth was firm, his brown eyes were moist and suddenly huge. Clouds flew above them, wind, a single bird.

Then the axe-blade fell. The chicken’s head popped off – no big deal – but when her father untied the body a ghastly thing happened. The body writhed a little, uprighted itself, then lurched away in a swoony, directionless run. James laughed, but looked terrified. As the headless chicken ran past he bent down and swooped it into his arms. He clutched hard, trying to still it, trying to make the lively body die. His eyes entreated – who knows what? – and filled with tears. Ellie could hear her own rapid breathing and knew that time was rocking into shape as water does, pooling around this boy’s face and his blazing desperation.

When her father prised the chicken from James’s grip his shirt was bloody and bespattered. The boy shook and began to cry, and Ellie opened her arms and took him gently into her child’s embrace. She knew then, even with her own heart galloping and her senses all alive, that she was the calm one, that in the circle of killing she could watch and somehow know not to recoil. She knew too that there was a gap between death and life, a remnant vigour, a kind of puzzled searching.

Do humans search like this, looking stupidly for what is missing? Would a human body run? Crazy-like, with no head?

Ellie was possessed by this idea, its exhilarating horror. As an adult it will occur to her that this was her first moment of philosophy, when she found in the world a seductively bamboozling question. Yet in the vast stillness of the moment she saw the answer in James’s face: yes, crazy-like-with-no-head, a human would still search.

 

Ellie decided to walk to Central Station, take the train to the quay, and then return on the bus. She wanted this walk downhill through the Saturday crowds, already trailing out of coffee shops and cycling past with the newspapers, already responding with like heart to the glorious weather. Faces evanesced before her, rose up and fell away, and she thought of the negligent flicker of perception that negotiates any crowd, of how in the champagne morning light they were all caught in flux and lustre, igniting, appearing, lit with energetic purpose. In the grounds of the local primary school a market was being established; Ellie could see stallholders setting up trestle tables and unpacking their wares. They were holding cardboard cups of coffee and lightly chatting. It would be a good day. Even from across the road you could hear optimism ringing in their voices. But Ellie was still thinking of James at nine years old, and of herself, self-centred. She hadn’t really cared for his suffering. She had wanted high drama.

 

Her mother was suddenly there, surveying the mess. ‘Bloody hell,’ she said, ‘what were you thinking, Charlie?’ Ellie noticed her father become submissive at his wife’s reproach. He was still holding the chicken, its feathers mucky with gore, the event a crude wreckage, and the head forgotten, ridiculous, in the sawdust beside the block. Ellie saw him pass the upside-down carcass from one hand to the other, then wipe his left hand on his trousers, leaving a faint greasy smear. They exchanged words, her parents, and then her mother seized James by the wrist and dragged him away. Ellie saw in her mother’s glance that she was also stained; holding James she had printed chicken blood onto her clothes. So there was the blood-print, the sky, her father dangling the chicken. Images lined up for her memory, for the future, for wild or idle surmise, this little collection that made up the blunder of the moment, and of James’s pure fear, and of her own shameless sense of triumph.

In this pause lay the inkling of a net of relationships. Ellie registered with sure judgement the range of her affections: she loved them all – loved – her mother, her father, her schoolfriend James, all of them caught in this drama with the headless chicken that would not do the right thing and straightaway, as it should, just lie down and die.

 

Ellie was in the kitchen, dressed in a clean cotton blouse. She had tucked her hair behind her ears, and sat silent, watching, fiddling with the hem of her skirt. James had been on his knees, vomiting into a plastic bucket, but was now perched on their high stool, not yet settled, with a glass of water in his hands and her mother leaning towards him. She was soothing, whispering words that Ellie could not quite hear. They would be the right words; her mother was good at that. They would be words gathered from the air, or so it had always seemed, and fitted into just the right sentences, in just the right order, and spoken just right, like a special trick, like the way a dog knows when to nuzzle you and when to stay far away. She recognised the low tone of voice and the lovely comfort residing there. James was hectic with crying and barely consolable. He had the glazed look of a child too small for the enormity of all he’d seen. His shoulders hunched, he trembled a little. Ellie’s mother plucked at a box of tissues and handed him fat, floral bunches.

Like James, Ellie was a single child. She learnt only as an adult of the brother who preceded her, dying of infant leukaemia at the age of four. William, his name was. Her parents had never spoken of William, but their devotion to her was his ghostly bequest. They loved her double and found her existence adorable. Ellie watched her mother’s attention as she calmed James and offered him an arrowroot biscuit, as he nibbled around its edges, like a storybook rabbit, as he brushed the crumbs away, like a girl, she thought meanly, like a scaredy-cat girl, and began gradually to see where he was and what a bother he had made.

In her watching Ellie glimpsed her mother’s power, this remaking of damaged things and events within words, this placing of sentences, carefully, as a balm over a wound. At last her mother straightened. She lifted James under the armpits, hoisted him upwards and straightened him too.

‘Time to go home,’ she said. She untied her apron, folded it swiftly, and held an arm out to show that Ellie was allowed to accompany them. The kitchen light was pale yellow; it was always yellow in the kitchen. Every kitchen in the world, thought Ellie, is always yellow. James and her mother both had round yellow faces.

 

They had walked the gravel road of their seaside town, passing Mr Anderson-with-the-large-belly who was outside watering his garden, flailing the plastic hose, this way and that, like a private game or an emblem of his own distraction; past the Covichs’ (who were divorced) and the Hallidays’ (who were Catholics), and the Maloufs’ (who were from Lebanon, wherever that was), past the empty block in which Patterson’s Curse flourished its purple blossoms (Dad said it could kill horses, so Ellie thought it magnificently dangerous), to the end of the street, where there was only James’s house, an unrepaired weatherboard, half-falling down, with holes in the roof that let the rain in (James had told her) and beyond that, the sand dunes, the coast, and the true-blue Indian Ocean. The house had a wretched, decomposing look, as though it was caught in a process of unmaking that affected no other house on the street. The verandah had planks of wood missing and a broken rail, and an iron roof, rusted orange, that was peeling away. One of the side-walls was crudely patched with a warped sheet of three-ply. It looked like a blister, just hanging there. A surprisingly vigorous rosemary bush grew by the letterbox. Ellie watched her mother tear a woody stem in an absentminded gesture, rub the little leaves together and sniff at her fingers as she passed.

When Mrs DeMello opened her door she saw only a blazon of red. She let out a cry and fell to her knees before her son, then reached and pulled his thin body towards her face.

‘He’s not hurt,’ mother said quickly. ‘It’s not his blood.’

But Mrs DeMello sang: ‘oh Dio, Dio, Dio.’

‘Chicken,’ mother added, in what must have been an incomprehensible explanation. But still Mrs DeMello did not acknowledge the visitors. She buried her face in her small son’s belly. Ellie was excited to see a grown-up so disarrayed. It was a kind of guilty pleasure; the sight of Mrs DeMello weeping, even before she knew what had happened, and the way her face reshaped, and James staring dizzily ahead, mystified, unfocused, embarrassed by his mother’s possessive display.

‘Italians are different,’ mother said later. ‘They have passions,’ she added. Ellie would wonder over this statement for the next few years.

But then she saw that burst of feeling as something she might desire. To be clutched at like that. To be seized by an adult as if you might be the one to save them. Ellie glimpsed behind Mrs DeMello her orderly house. Although ramshackle outside it was impeccably tidy inside. There were doilies on every surface and plaster ornaments of lap-dogs and prancing horses and figures in puffy historical dress, rimmed in stiff lace. There was a Jesus on the wall, showing off his lolly-pink heart, and an old velour armchair with a crocheted cream cover. In so ruined a space lay foreign oddity and decorative excess.

‘Oh Dio, Dio, Dio.’ Still chanting, still distraught.

Then at once Mrs DeMello rose up, uttered a hasty thank-you, smothered in tears, and pulled James inside. She banged shut the door.

‘Well I never,’ said Ellie’s mother. ‘You can’t tell with some people.’

As they left Ellie grabbed at the rosemary bush, twisting free a twig. She crushed it as her mother had done, and breathed in its scent.

‘Rosemary,’ her mother said casually. ‘Rosemary for remembrance. ’

 

Afterwards James did not talk to Ellie for three years. Mostly he was alone, but for a time, when he was eleven, he hung out with the tough kids, the bully, Col Harper, and Kev Andrews and Blue. Ellie saw how James used his wit to entertain them and didn’t squirm when they gave him Chinese burns or knuckle-punched him in the upper arm. They liked to whack other kids behind the knees, so that you buckled and fell forward and were scared they might kick you when you were down. For a while she seemed to see them everywhere, skinny boys with mean streaks, in their striped T-shirts like their hearts, Ellie thought, remembering those comic books in which prisoners wear stripy pyjamas. They were rowdy and rude, a collection of trouble-makers. They invented war games and shot at each other and died rolling in the dirt, clutching their bellies, scowling with enjoyable, make-believe agony. They chucked stones on old Mrs Taylor’s roof and ran away laughing when she came outside. They spat on the ground and looked at their gobs of spittle, proud. They were cheeky in shops and morose in the classroom, swearing under their breath, glowering, planning insurrections.

‘Dickhead!’ they shouted at the old metho drinker, Merv, who lay half insensible in the park that was only weeds and pussy tails and a tall lonely monument to the First World War. ‘Shitface dickhead!’

Ellie felt sorry for Merv. And since in her home no bad language was allowed, she was transfixed by the swearwords, flung spinning into the sky, and by the cruelty of the boys and their bold bad behaviour.

But she also missed James. Until the chicken and the botched slaughter he had been her best friend. She missed what had precariously existed between them, secrets, mostly; secret talks and words and sly imaginings. She knew James wanted to be a pilot when he grew up, so that he could see the world from the sky, he said, and go out across oceans, far, far away, where people were more interesting. He might even visit Italy, where his parents were from, and where he could speak the lingo and see the Coliseum in Rome. ‘Two thousand years old, Ellie,’ he had whispered, ‘just imagine that. Two thousand years.’ James wanted to go back in time, to find another history. Ellie would go forward and be a movie star, she dreamily confided, kissed by handsome men wearing hats and speaking American. Their ambitions were like stories they might some day live by. Ellie thought of a flashlight, its ray erratic in foggy darkness, seeking a pathway. And her own footfall, a child-searcher, sounding as she went.

James had peered into Ellie’s face. She knew he saw her freckles and her sunburn and her stringy brown hair, but he did not mock or denigrate or suggest that her dream was impossible. ‘I’ll speak American too,’ he said, leaning close, ‘and I’ll fly to California, whatever, or to China or Czechoslovakia, and look down from the sky, from way up high. And you can wave, and I’ll see you, and I’ll wave back; and it will be a kind of spy-code we have, with no one else knowing …’

 

Extraordinary to surrender like this, to so cogent a memory. To have her young self returned to her, and the particulars of one day.

It was a trance Ellie walked in, with all the welter of details – the spluttering fear of Mrs DeMello that for years, absurdly, would denote ‘Italian passion’, the marriage drama of her parents, one submissive, one strong, the vision of James’s face, all alarm and pure shock; and more than that the improbable density of moments she’d not thought of for years – it was an oval-shaped arrowroot biscuit he nibbled, it was a chicken’s death, horribly messed, that had shattered their friendship, and all the blood it sent flying, all the irrevocable filth, and James’s over-reacting misery and sense of contamination. It was – could this be so? – the mustard-coloured walls of their kitchen that cast everything of that era in yellow light, and the listed names of their neighbours that tinted the yellow memories with affection. And it was the ‘Dio, Dio, Dio’, a terrible song, that broke through to this white morning and into the hurrying present.

 

Ellie turned left at the Salvation Army charity shop on the corner. The university was to her right, beyond the ill-planned park, and the city, abustle, lay straight ahead. She headed downhill. Traffic, far too speedy, hurtled past. As Ellie strode she was aware of the preoccupying visions in her head, and made a conscious decision to notice more carefully where and when she was. She realised too that she was trying not to think about sex, not to be defined by her body, not to let it signify too completely.

The pavements were busy. This was the summer every young woman displayed a cleavage, and every young guy a T-shirt logo. They were amassed on the footpath and moving in packs. No mortality here, no hesitation. Vital bodies passed by like rolling surf. Ellie walked quickly. Although she had all the time in the world, something enthused her limbs and her sense of expectation, something larger than she was commanded her movements.

 

 

In the madding crowd James paused and looked around. He was at Central Station and would find the line to the Quay. He had entered under the sandstone arches at Eddy Avenue, taken an escalator, wandered around, but was already lost.

It was a confusing place. There seemed to be tunnels in all directions, tiled passages with dingy post-atomic connotations and the possibility of hunched bodies, or beggars, or buskers with mournful demands, such as he had seen years ago in the London Underground. There were narrow chutes, all interconnected, which emerged at platforms outside in the glaring light, and people all-ahurry, knowing exactly where to go.

He read the signs: Eastern Suburbs and Illawarra, Blacktown, North Shore. Olympic Park, Northern Line, Intercity lines … Inner West … that was it: that would take him to Circular Quay.

James thought suddenly of dendrites and ganglia, all those diagrams he had seen in his one year as a medical student, all those cortical systems and webs that are our mysterious plumbing and electricity. Choroid plexus: why did he think of this term? Aqueducts of the brain, canals and cavities. He had forgotten most of it now.

First-year medical students cram not only images and new imaginings, but a vast vocabulary that is exquisitely arcane: from the Greek chorion, meaning ‘membrane’ and the Latin plexus, meaning ‘knot’. Their anatomy instructor, Professor Heller, insisted on teaching them the Latin or Greek roots; that way, he said, you will learn the poetry of the body. So it was not just capillaries, but a membranous knot. And the linguistic body was part of the surprising loveliness of medicine.

‘Anatomy of the Brain: Introduction’: it was his favourite part of the year. Professor Heller, with his bifocals and thick mammalian moustache, was his favourite professor. When they were given a slice of cerise-dyed brain to peer at through the microscope, it was a sublime and singular moment in James’s life. The channels and mounds, the trailing intricacies, they rose into focus as an entire new world. No other organ in the body looked like this. Nothing else was quite so tightly elaborated. James considered how few people had seen a slice of brain, how privileged doctors were to glance at this dark-side-of-the-moon self. He examined it fraction by fraction, forgetting that he was meant to be clarifying this or that, the purpose of the amygdala perhaps – though that was easy – or some more baroque, difficult-to-remember utility or facility. Euphonious and rhyming terms flooded his mind: endorphin, seratonin, acetylcholine. Transmitter, receptor, mediator. Any number of neurobiological arrangements or derangements existed in this flap of special flesh.

James tried not to think of his mother in hospital, her mind confiscated, her senses blown, dealing with the blizzard in her mind that she liked to call her ‘snow’.

 

In his novice enthusiasm, James knocked over a pile of glass slides. He saw the glass and brain matter mash together as someone stepped backwards in surprise and crushed them underfoot. As he knelt in his white medical robe, and tried to scrape up the mess, he was overtaken with the offence of it and an intimation of vulnerability. Just as he had worked during the year, not wholly successfully, to overcome his aversion to blood, this also became an abruptly threatening substance – mashed brain spiked with glass. He withdrew instinctively, his hands visibly trembling. The others were all watching. Professor Heller was watching. James was afraid he would cut himself and add blood to the mix.

‘Leave it,’ Professor Heller called. ‘Sally will get it.’

Sally was the laboratory assistant who cleaned up after them. She appeared from nowhere and matter-of-factly set about the cleaning. Sally was the girl who dealt with the violet-pink open cadavers and mopped the floor of its rheumy spillages after the students had left. She dealt with all the unhallowed matter of the place: waste tissue, muscle, bone, leftover humans. She was a quiet girl with auburn hair and blotchy skin, teased by the male students and ignored by the women. James felt, though he could barely concede it, a furtive affinity with Sally. He thought of asking her to coffee, or whispering to her as she passed, or pushing her against the wall and running his hands under her shirt.

Sally bent over the mess, scrabbling and wiping. James moved away. Something in the moment shamed him. He felt his throat flush and said something meaningless before he fled from the room.

What upset him was not so much the crushed brain sample, the flagrant clumsiness and ineptitude, as the evidence of his precarious grip on things. Within seconds he had moved from poetical pleasure to unpoetical bungle; he had fallen from the prodigious terminology of medical life to mute departure and a pathetic, stammered excuse. He had failed before Professor Heller, whom he most wanted to impress. He had failed before Sally, to whom he had never spoken a word.

 

James dropped out of university in the last few weeks of the year, just before his final exams. He had wanted once to be an artist, perhaps a figure like Magritte, who might paint with Surrealist extravagance all the anomalies of life, who might depict the illogical as though it were everyday. It would be like a holiday, being an artist. He would have a mistress and a casual, supercilious demeanour. He would wear a beret and drink toxic mixtures to excess. The clichés didn’t bother him. Coming from a small country town in Western Australia, European clichés of another life carried the prospect of seduction.

Then he had wanted to be a doctor, because he was clever – everyone said so – and because this was a conventional aspiration for clever young men. He had won a university scholarship and medicine would earn him respect. James never really considered what this work might involve. He was initially shocked by encounters with gross, ruby innards and the sense that the body is perpetually prey to disorder. Against the magnificence of its system was the jeopardy of any organism. His mother and her snow dome. The list of communicable diseases. All those patients he had seen, randomly damaged and cruelly assailed. He was haunted by a young man, barely forty, with Fahr’s Syndrome, a degenerative neurological disease which caused him to writhe and jerk. Edward, his name was. Edward something. On one of his first visits to the hospital he had seen this unfortunate fellow, whose basal ganglia were crusting over, whose cells were popping away. From his wheelchair, bent over, Edward smiled up at him, feigning equilibrium beneath his acute distress. James could not bear it. He averted his eyes. Edward something-or-other.

It was rather like discovering that the boy Magritte by the riverbank was also fourteen years old, an odd sense of having one’s boundary blurred, as if history or other people could carry premonition, or warning, or an obscure shared meaning. Behind his panic was the spectre of an overwhelming loneliness, but also the knowledge, then and there, that he would never be a doctor. Edward something-or-other.

 

 

For all this, the study of medicine had surprised him. The intellectual appeal was something he had not anticipated. The body was more improbable and fantastical than he had imagined, and also more plausible and lavishly coherent. The chemistry alone was astounding, not to mention the mechanics. Diagnostic and treatment enigmas were everywhere to be found. Something as simple as laughing was physiologically complex. Professor Heller told them that the ancient Greeks had a word, agelasti, for those who never laughed. Once or twice, when the first-year medical students were bent in mirthless contemplation over their specimens or books, he would call out: ‘Ah, my Agelasti!’ and elicit a startled chuckle. ‘The baby cries,’ Professor Heller said, ‘approximately 4,000 times in the first two years of its life. Enough with the crying already!’ At which the class laughed again, a shudder of reply rippling through their backs.

James wondered how comedy worked, calling up a collective response. Or words, just words, joining each of them in the same moment. But the puzzle of being-in-the-world, first and foremost, was this: the weirdness of one living body, and the precipitate touch.

 

Ellie. How he had loved Ellie. She had gathered him in. James had been cautious at first – they both had – discovering the difference of another body still fully dressed and in outline. A tentative hand on the breast, her exploration inside his trousers. But the first time he pulled her thighs towards him and rocked into her, slowly, and then began fast-breathing and labouring for pleasure, the first time he dropped his face to her neck to whisper her name, and to gulp at her skin, and to convulse somewhere inside her, he felt astonished that no one had needed to teach them at all, but that this experience had arrived, and would arrive again, complete and intact. Ellie was kissing his damp forehead; he was saying Ellie, Ellie, and he did not want to extract himself or leave her embrace. He felt sodden, emptied, crazed by joy. He could smell the lavender scent of the powder she dabbed under her arms, and his own fluids, and hers, pungently intermingling. He could feel her breathing as though it were lodged in his own chest: the union had not broken but was there in the warm pounding of their hearts, almost pressed into each other, like a new organ shared.

When they rolled apart in their quiet, shadowy space, he felt like singing. He remembered he said it out loud, ‘I feel like singing.’ He had turned to her reddened face and seen Ellie smile back at him.

‘Sing then,’ she said.

And he had started something, probably Dylan, and ended humming deep inside, as if new knowledge rested there and a new understanding. He had heard guys talk about fucking, about the slags and the tarts, the bikes and the molls. There was a huge world out there of sticky yearning and illicit images, of schoolboys telling each other of mythical conquests, or of some girl with lank hair and bad skin who would do it with anybody. But this tenderness was not what they had described. And this correspondence was quiet, even unspeakable. He had no wish to tell anyone. His greatest fear was that, having found her, he might scare her away.

Our secret, they agreed. Like the secrecy of their hideout. It was the secrecy of singing to a girl, of tucking his mother in bed at night after she had finished her hot milk, of sitting under the standing lamp, reading a book about artists, then dreaming he wandered through the ruins of a lost city and found something unbroken.

 

James thought afterwards that the shyness of social situations – the school-room, the shops, even the road outside their houses – was a kind of fake distance under which this real life of connections happened. Perhaps all life was like this: affinities known but hardly ever expressed, pulsing and moving beneath an everyday encounter or conversation. A man might meet a woman in a corridor, exchange a few words as they held cups of coffee, enact a punctilious and austere restraint, and know afterwards that some code had passed between them. Some sympathetic quiver of recognition that finds its completed expression like this, only like this, with two faces touching.

 

After the first time together they were hyper-sensitively aware. For him the brush of her skirt, the threads of hair at her nape, the way she turned away when she found his gaze too compelling, were almost unendurable. He was distracted, always waiting, for a thrilling handful of breast, for the next time she guided him into her, her hand gentle around his penis.

They sat beside each other in the class. He watched her reading and writing; he noticed that she chewed her fingernails, and hid her hands so as not to reveal it. He saw how she yawned and sneezed and kept pushing her hair behind her ears. Everyone was still treating them the same, like kids, but between them was this hidden maturity, this adult awareness. There were twenty-eight students in their classroom, twenty-eight bodies and twenty-eight inner worlds, but James could imagine only Ellie as alike, or as unlike in ways he almost understood.

 

At Central Station a loudspeaker somewhere was booming. The message was unintelligible. James saw signs: Eddy Avenue Exit, Elizabeth Street Exit, and felt disorientated. Discreetly he shifted his genitals in his pants, and tried to put Ellie from his mind. After all these years she still returned to him in this private way. Just as he held his father in a phantom dip and rise, escaping the gravity of the present, so Ellie also persisted in an earlier body and unrelinquished longings.

James stood before the ticket machine, fed it coins and pressed the buttons. When he located his platform it was bathed in full sunshine. He could not have denied there was a cheerful spirit afloat in the weather, but he still felt out of sorts and enormously thirsty. The side effects of Temazepam, taken for too long. Dehydration, memory loss, depressive withdrawal. All those benzodiazepines zapping the gamma-aminobutyric acid in his brain. He bought a bottle of water from the little stall on the platform, suddenly wondering how he might appear to Ellie. He didn’t want rings under his eyes or a hung-over daze.

The doors parted before him. When he boarded the train James found he was silently chanting fragments of anatomy revision: right coronary artery, left coronary artery, anteriorventricular artery, aortic valve, mitral valve … it must have been one of the early lessons. He used to chant the terms as he walked the paths by the university around the river, timing his steps rhythmically, watching light from the sunrise glance in streaks on the calm water. It was a kind of happiness. Repetition, sky, light on water. Once he had seen a pod of dolphins in the river, lazily arching, turning their sleek bodies, and all momentarily was right with the world. God-in-his-heaven. Etcetera, etcetera.

The man in front of James was wearing a black T-shirt stamped with a logo that read teen spirit. As James found his seat he recalled the Nirvana video-clip, ‘Heart-Shaped-Box’: cut-price Surrealism. There was Kurt Cobain looking crazed, shouting at the camera. There was a crucifixion, ravens, babies hanging from a tree, there was a sad little girl in white robes and a white conical cap. There was a large woman in some kind of suit that showed her inner organs on the outside.

Although James was what? – nineteen – when this video version had appeared, it left a terrifying impression. He cannot now remember when first he saw it on television, but the images gave him a nightmare. And here now, on a train in Sydney, it was still invading and upsetting him, acting like airy turbulence when he wanted to cruise.

 

 

James stared out of the window and watched inner-city Sydney slide by. He took another gulp of water, finishing the bottle. So much was playing in his head, ringing in this paltry, mortal cupola of the skull. He wanted to see Ellie. He wanted peace and quiet. He wanted not this thirst, this wider hunger, this sense of failure and shame, but whatever he had felt when twenty years ago he first fell into her body. Wholeheartedly. As a kid. Finding a true home.

It was freakish good luck, to be welcomed to the chamber she offered him. Women didn’t realise this: that the noise a man made when he came was of gratitude, simply to have been admitted.

 

 

Central Station. She was almost there. The train slid to a creaking halt and a line of passengers disembarked, then came a tide of others to replace it, in a lovely long stream. It was reassuring to see so many people in the world. So many legs moving, stepping upwards, to the modern command of sliding doors.

Central Station. Pei Xing thought wryly that she would never be at the centre of anything, that her life would always be this circling around an irrepressible past. As the train accelerated away, so did her recollection. The world in a train-ride was conducive to her own speedy summonings.

 

Pei Xing was thinking of her family, long ago, making them reanimate. With her mother and brother Lao, four years older, they had gone together to the First Department Store on Nanjing Road to buy her a new winter coat. She was seven years old. It was 1958, the beginning of the Great Leap Forward. Every morning at school the students praised Mao, the Great Helmsman, and sang ‘The East is Red’ in a hearty, energetic spirit of agreement. They stood stiffly to attention, and even then, so young, Pei Xing knew of Grand Economic Plans and carried nationalist phrases on her tongue. Her teacher was pleased to remind his class that Mao Tse Tung once worked as a primary-school headmaster in Hunan – anyone could be a Communist leader! – and each week they learnt about a new hero of the Great March of 1935, some modest fellow who had sacrificed all, melodramatically, for the People’s Republic, or who had starved, or martyred himself, or believed in Mao beyond all others. In storybooks these figures always appeared in the same poses, three-quarter view, one arm raised, peering towards the future, and the illustrations of valiant deaths made Pei Xing cry. She knew she belonged to an incomparable nation with an inviolate leader, a leader, fortuitously, who shared her birth-date.

Mao’s balloon face would become better known to her than her own father’s, that mole on the chin, that spaced-out stare, the way the single button in head-and-shoulder portraits always looked so exact and rhymed so perfectly, so centrally placed, with his mid-chin mole. His head would float like a dirigible throughout her life, beyond gravity, weightless, in the corner of her vision, always sweeping into history with the bright awful glamour of a God.

 

The weather was already cold, though it was only early autumn, and the visit to the First Department Store was an outing she remembered because her mother had made a fuss. Her daughter needed a new woollen coat because, she predicted, it would snow in the coming winter. Pei Xing could not remember having ever seen snow before, but believed – in a kind of magical thinking – that the purchase of the coat would be answered by a wide white heaven. Lao also wanted a coat, and mother said she would see how much money was left. He was carrying a kite. It was a time in her brother’s life in which he always carried his kite, as other boys carried books, pocket-knives and fighting crickets. The kite was homemade with a painted phoenix outstretched on the brown-paper diamond. It crackled as he held it, a fragile precious thing.

 

 

The women behind the counters chanted a greeting: Huanying guanglin! Huanying guanglin!: Welcome, brightness draws near!

Pei Xing looked into their broad friendly faces and felt that all was right with the world; it was an auspicious day, and she would choose scarlet.

She had never known before how various and how many were the products of the world. She had been to markets, of course, and to smaller local shops, those near Hua Shan Lu and further up Nanjing Xi Lu, near the Jiang’an Temple, but her first visit to a department store was a revelation. When they selected a coat from a rack of hundreds it was exactly as she had wished – of scarlet wool, with four buttons, two by two, and a neat symmetrical collar of two black triangles. There were side pockets for warming her hands and a black trim around the sleeves. Pei Xing remembers her mother standing behind her as they looked together into the long tilted mirror. She was smoothing the coat across her back and tugging at the sleeves to check that it was not too small.

There was not enough money that day for Lao to have a coat too. But he was placated by a trip across the road to the People’s Park, where mother bought them onion-salted pancakes wrapped in rice paper. Lao flew his kite with other boys on a large oval of grass while Pei Xing sat with her mother on a bench beneath the shedding trees. An old man nearby was playing an erhu and singing in a thin reedy voice. He plucked at the two strings intently, as if every emotion was caught there and must be released.

‘From the provinces,’ mother whispered, with a hint of approval.

Pei Xing was wearing the new coat, taking care not to stain it with her snack. When she finished eating her mother leant over and wiped her fingers with a cloth. It was a moment Pei Xing would return to again and again, first when she was in prison, and later at the Cadre Camp. For some reason there was a purity in this simple touch. Pei Xing held her hands out obediently, finger by finger, as though it were a game. It reminded her of how her mother stretched and pulled her fingers before she played the piano, seeing the gift of her own hands, preparing to skim them across the keys.

She wondered if the recollection was so complete because she had been so happy. Sadness blurs and erases; it cannot bear too many details. But the sight of Lao’s kite aloft, the way he turned to them and called out, wanting to show his skill, the fluttering phoenix visible as a golden mark swooping and rising in the sky, all this was preserved for Pei Xing in a kind of shining delineation.

 

When they rode the tram home, along Nanjing Road, it was full to bursting with Saturday shoppers and all three had to stand, packed in the crammed aisle. The vehicle rocked and shuddered. Pei Xing was wedged between the bodies of larger people, hemmed in by adult legs and arms. Lao held his kite above his head, afraid it would be torn. Mother steadied Pei Xing as they rode. One hand rested gently behind her daughter’s head, the other clasped at a leather strap, so that she held the motion for both of them. All around was chatter and communality and the smell of someone’s fried meat. Pei Xing loved this sense of other bodies containing and encompassing her, the muffled, animal warmth of the moving tram. She loved her new coat. She loved her family. She leant against the cushion of her mother’s belly and felt like singing.

 

At home Pei Xing’s first thought was to show the new coat to her father. She rushed into the house and found him where he should be, at his desk, translating. His face was fixed in concentration. He was somewhere between languages, in a studious and placid world. Pei Xing stood in the doorway until at last he noticed he had company. Father peered at her over his rimless glasses, slowly put down his pen, then smiled and opened his arms so that Pei Xing stepped forward into his embrace.

‘Ah, a new overcoat! Pretty! Let me tell you about Gogol!’

And as if the day had not enough intimate moments to fill it, he pulled Pei Xing onto his lap and told her the story of The Overcoat.

In St Petersburg there was once, long ago, an unhappy young clerk, called Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin, who wanted nothing more than to own a new overcoat. He scrimped and saved – he was very poor – and at last the day arrived when he could afford a new coat, a fine-tailored garment with a collar made of cat fur. When he wore this coat he was suddenly popular and successful. But one night, after a party, two thieves set upon him, beat him up and stole the coat, leaving him alone and barely conscious in the falling snow. Poor Akaky Akakievich died, bereft. He took revenge on the people of St Petersburg as a scary ghost, roaming the snow-white city at night, spooking and attacking the people for their winter coats.

Pei Xing must have looked alarmed.

But in the end, her father said gently, he attacked one important man who had been tormenting him and then no more: justice was done. Other ghosts roamed around, playing havoc and disturbing citizens. But not Akaky Akakievich. He was not a bad man, Akaky Akakievich, and not a bad ghost, but he cared too much about his coat, and too little about the words he wrote in the office. Words, not coats, are where meaning lies.

Pei Xing told her father of her mother’s prediction, that the coat would bring snow. He responded that she was a wise woman, her mother, and if she claimed it was so, she was no doubt correct. It would certainly snow.

At first Pei Xing thought that her father had ruined everything, moralising like that, wanting her to think about ghosts. He had a Russian story handy for every occasion, a literary homily for all events. But his tale added beautifully to the memory of the day. It was there, years later, like breath on a pane of glass, a human trace to see through. It added to the subtle, persisting ways in which she would remember her father, long after he disappeared.

 

 

Russia was in those days the ‘Big Brother’ of China, and Russian was the number one foreign language. Young sailors and soldiers were taught to sing Russian songs. Russian folk tales were taught in schoolrooms and universities. For Pei Xing, her father’s knowledge confirmed his importance; he knew both English and Russian; he was internationally skilled. But with the Cultural Revolution everything changed; Khrushchev was a revisionist and capitalist roader; Russian was traitorous, English decadent. Pei Xing, loyal to Mao, was deeply confused. They had been mistaken, it seemed, in seeking other tongues. Languages were not a special capacity, as she had once imagined, but incautious assent to the wrong kinds of meanings.

 

A few weeks after the shopping excursion the three returned to the First Department Store to buy Lao’s coat. By then the air was chill and sharp and everyday Pei Xing looked out the window, like a character in a book, waiting for the advent of snow.

The second visit to the Store was largely unmemorable, except that she wore her scarlet coat, clasped her mother’s gloved hand, and felt proud that their family was so well dressed. Her coat by then held a scent of the camphor trunk in which it was stored; she walked in a little circle of fragrance, a small charmed embrace.

And when snow at last came, fitful at first, in the faintest disappointing sprinkle and then – oh yes – in a dense overnight fall, she believed that in some way she was personally responsible. She had woken and there it was, layering the roofs and the trees, lining the handlebars of bicycles and piling the edges of the laneways, caught on stall awnings and in the yard of the Elementary School. Whiter than rice powder, with a bluish-mauve lustre. Softer than leaf-fall and more wind-dispersed. You could taste it. You could drink it. You could swallow the sky. Flakes settled in her mouth and on her open dazzled eyes.

Pei Xing gazed with moist delight at the world anew. Her big brother grabbed snow and moulded shapes and flung it around him, or tipped the branches of trees so that he created his own snowfall. But Pei Xing wanted the snow to remain forever as it first was, a damp hush and a pale shadow, just fallen, undisturbed.

Within hours it became slippery mush, dismally dissolving. But the early morning vision was enough to confirm the bright promise of the scarlet coat.

 

At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, Pei Xing’s teacher who so loved the tales of the Great March was one of the first to be attacked and then disappear. By chance she had seen him in the winter of 1967, assembled with other schoolteachers on a basketball court. He had been badly beaten, and one of his eyes had been crushed. Eye matter and blood ran down his face. He wore a dunce’s hat, a high white cone, and a board around his neck that announced his crime as being a ‘running dog imperialist’. By then Pei Xing was no longer surprised. Her parents had been taken, the schools had been closed, everyone for whom she had felt affection was experiencing persecution. But this teacher – Comrade Lu – who had conducted their singing with such enthusiasm, who had been moved to tears telling of the 170,000 souls who died on the Great March, seemed somehow more unlikely as a generalised target.

Comrade Teacher Lu was made to kneel with the others, his eyes downcast, and a crowd of Red Guards surrounded them and shouted slogans of hate. Pei Xing had retreated. She did not want to witness another denunciation of ‘black counter-revolutionaries’. Nor did she want some quiver of complicity to arise between her and Comrade Lu. Sympathy was dangerous in those dark and volatile times. Afterwards she was haunted by what her fellow students had done – so many had participated in beatings and murders. And afterwards it was not only what she had witnessed but what she had heard, that she could not forget. Her literature teacher was found dead, covered with bruises, her mouth was stuffed with torn pages from an English language book. Her arms were tied backwards in the excruciating ‘flying a plane’ position. With scant details, this was still unbearable knowledge.

 

Afraid to attract attention, Pei Xing walked quickly past the large character posters flapping in the wind, and when she was out of sight of the Red Guards broke into a panicked run. She felt she was running into shadows and from all she held dear, but she was only one of many, very many, who were told to repudiate past histories. The campaign of the Four Olds – destroying Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits, Old Ideas – was already well under way; the slogans of the Four Olds were daubed all over the city.

On the door of her home had appeared the sign: ‘Breaking down the Four Olds; setting up the Four News!’ after which the Red Guards had entered, tearing photographs, smashing vinyl records, crushing underfoot her parents’ small collection of porcelain figurines. She heard a man call out the slogan on their door, as if reciting Tang Dynasty poetry or a line of sutras from a holy book.

Lao was not at home that day and Pei Xing had worried about his absence. Her mother was crying. Her father was brave. But she saw him tremble with distress when they pulled the books from the shelves and hurled them through the window to be consumed in a bonfire. He had always believed in ideas, not things, words, not new overcoats, but the violent destruction of his possessions must have been more painful than he could show. And they all had yet to learn that possessions would be the least of the destruction.

 

 

The visit to the First Department Store in 1958, the purchase of the coat and the advent of snow, was the last period, for many years, of unalloyed happiness. Years of famine followed. The snack sellers disappeared from the streets, even the markets of Shanghai became places of scarcity. Black-market trading depleted the little money her parents had saved. Pei Xing’s father, always a thin man, became even thinner, living, it seemed, only on cigarettes, so that when the Cultural Revolution began and the Red Guards came to take him away, he was already half gone. As someone educated abroad and used to negotiating meanings in English and Russian, he was bound to be considered a class traitor and a running dog of imperialists. The weighty terms written in large characters on banners outside their house, the line on the door about the Four Olds, all seemed to bear no relation to her harried parents, but more especially to her father, whose skin was like parchment and who was already translating himself into another world when the Revolution began. He was already thinning in Chinese style, like lines of brushstrokes, a narrow falling vertical, and right to left.

 

 

On the train from Kings Cross they were sweeping around a bay. There were so many bays, peninsulas and headlands in central Sydney. The city geography was fashioned by the irregular shape of the Harbour. It was vaster than Catherine had anticipated, and an improbable cornflower blue. She glimpsed the scintillating water, and the old houses of Woolloomooloo. She saw the pearly backs of the Finger Wharves and a scarf of green grass, rising gently, that was called The Domain.

Woolloomooloo; she must look it up somewhere. What could it possibly mean? It had to be Aboriginal, she supposed. Would she Google Woolloomooloo? Brendan would have liked that: to Google Woolloomooloo. Brendan would have made a joke of it, or written a neat lyric poem. Or a song, perhaps:

I met my love, down Woolloomooloo,
I Googled her, down Woolloomooloo,
Her googly eyes, her googly hair,
I Googled my love, down Woolloomooloo …

By the time Catherine arrived at Central Station she realised she should have walked; it was a sunny day, downhill, and with much to explore. But she found the Inner West line and set off for the Quay. This was her London habit, to assume that the Tube was the Way, to dive underground, then up again, when one might just as well have walked. Central Station was abuzz with the Saturday morning crowd. Calls rang out, loud voices, random vowels and consonants. In what must have been, she later realised, a synesthesic moment, the voices seemed orange, bright orange, and gleaming like graphite.

 

Patrick Kavanagh, that was one of his favourites. Brendan loved Kavanagh’s poem ‘On Raglan Road’ and the way it was sung in pubs and by motley, all-and-sundry Irish bands.

On Raglan Road on an autumn day I met her first and knew
That her dark hair would weave a snare that I might one day rue;
I saw the danger, yet I walked along the enchanted way;
And I said, let grief be a fallen leaf at the dawning of the day …

All those Dublin poets. A’moanin’ and a’groanin’ and thinking forever about love, letting grief be a fallen leaf and crying into their beer.

Brendan had taught her the words of ‘On Raglan Road’; it was one of hundreds of poems he had committed to memory. A ‘deathless ditty,’ he called it.

‘When I die,’ he said, ‘my brain will be riddled with poetry. You should get some surgeon to cut it into lacey slices and find the poetry there.’

They talked about death a lot, when they were young. It was easy then, so daft and distant, and so unimaginable.

‘It’s Irish,’ he said. ‘We’re a sad-hearted lot, it’s why we sing; it’s why we rhyme.’

‘And you’re a walkin’-talkin’ all-Irish cliché,’ she responded.

Brendan laughed, pleased his little sister was so cheeky and bolshie.

As a university student Catherine moved into a shared house not far from Raglan Road, just to be located where the song had arisen. Brendan said it was fucking brilliant, fucking brilliant, it was! to walk each day up Raglan Road, Patrick Kavanagh’s road.

Raglan Road, Ballsbridge, Dublin, Ireland, the planet Earth, the Milky Way, the radiant mess of blinking stars, the deep black, the filigree night, the whole endless Universe.

She would walk up the road humming the song, turn left at Pembroke, into Upper Baggot and Lower Baggot and on to St Stephen’s Green; she would waste time there when she should be studying, meet her friends at Tonehenge or at the bandstand behind the bust of James Joyce. She wandered the tidy pathways, fancy-free, gallivanting, smooching, mucking about and canoodling. With her friend Dymphna Doyle she met boys at the pub, at Hartigan’s, and drank too much. Her mother, had she known, would have said she had a ‘reputation’. And with her brother she sat in shady corners with a packet of digestives and a thermos of tea and listened to him talk about politics and poetry.

 

Once – she must have been twelve or thirteen – they had caught the bus together to Phoenix Park and visited the Dublin Zoo to see the Giant Pandas that had arrived as a gift from China. The Pandas were called (how she enjoyed this!) Ming Ming and Ping Ping. There were images on the telly and photographs in the newspaper. Brendan bought the tickets and borrowed somebody’s camera, so there exist mad snaps of them larking about in front of the imported bears.

Ming Ming and Ping Ping were melancholy in the curious way of the obese, plonked there, ungainly, stuck God-only-knows-why on the Emerald Isle. Their gigantic heads turned slowly, as though impossibly heavy, and their movements were blunt and affectionate, like those of infants. Their black eyes were Gothic, and weirdly unnatural. They sat and ate, ate and sat. But all Dublin was charmed. The crowds at the bear enclosure were well behaved and unprecedented. Everyone said so. It was in the Irish Times. Even Brendan, with a cynical streak as wide as the Irish Sea, loved the surreal element of displacement and the sense of exotic intervention.

‘We’ll go to China,’ he announced. ‘Just you and me. We’ll become foreigners, reverse Pandas, and be ridiculously bold!’

How we cherish those who give us our dreams. In the struggle against dispersion, how we value the casual, cohering suggestion.

In a single sentence Brendan produced this wild ambition for both of them and presented his sister with wanderlust associations: the Great Wall, cups of tea, bamboo brushes, twirly noodles. China was a machine of formula images and folkloric associations. Pagodas with curled roofs, willow pattern plates. Firecrackers. Red banners. Portraits of Chairman Mao. Catherine loved the idea of becoming a foreigner in the faraway East. Better than a secretary or a schoolteacher, better than a shop-girl in Bewley’s, serving currant buns to old farts and complaining ladies with arthritis and lipstick on their teeth, wedded to their god-awful ailments and imperfections.

Brendan asked a fellow gawker to take a photograph, there and then. To this day it was the only image Catherine possessed that contained just the two of them. There were family snaps of course, blurry birthdays and weddings and out-of-focus holy communions, but only this one, this special occasion which caught them together, vigorously happy and kooky, mugging with large smiles under a bunting of bright leaves. A piece of panda was just visible: there was one black eye, hanging like a Goth decoration in the bottom left-hand corner.

It was about that time they all realised that Da was ill. He had always been a smoker, sucking so many that the tips of his fingers looked scorched and he seemed always wreathed, like an idol, in a dim nimbus of smoke. He hacked up muck and had brass-coloured teeth. There was tobacco on his shirtfront and burn holes in his cardigans. But that was Da: they loved him just the same.

It must have been a sinister alchemy that turned the outer signs inwards, all that grubby stain and brown discoloration, because one day, after breakfast, he simply keeled over, coming to rest on the kitchen floor, clutching at his chest. Mam looked down upon the man she had shared her life with, and slowly turned him over on his back to face her. He was alive, but gasping, his face magenta and mottled like streaky bacon. Brendan had already left home, but the girls crowded round and exclaimed, shocked to see their mother so calm and Da so unmanned, shaken by the appeal of his fear and the intimation of his mortality. Ruthy cried. Ruthy always cried. Mam called for the ambulance, knowing they came slowly to the Ballymun Estate, but without much choice; and the five sisters were posted in turns at the window to watch for its saviour arrival.

 

For almost two weeks Da lingered on, in the ghastly hospital. They all visited together, the mob of them, the whole Healy clan, and one of the nurses whispered ‘thick as thieves’ when she saw them standing together. They decided to ignore her and later mocked her moustache. They were proud and loyal and always looked out for each other.

One evening, in his extremity, Mam slipped Da a sip of whiskey from a flask, holding his head as if she were holding Jesus. Catherine could not get the image out of her mind, her father dying in a soft and helpless way, her mother cradling him, being Mary, loving him to the end. Though he was sunken and disfigured by his cruel condition, though he dribbled and could not speak and stank of disinfectant and sour breath, Mam loved him to the end just as Mary loved Jesus, full of drowsy sorrow and miraculous belief, aware of the compassionate eye of God and blesséd, as the blesséd Virgin Mary was, First Among Women, Mother of God, Cause of Our Joy and Mystical Rose, so special and so separate in her prayerful weeping.

When they arrived home it was as if all the hospital smells had followed them: Mam sprayed Lily of the Valley from a can, and placed new mothballs among their winter clothes. These were the confusing smells of her father’s death. These were the smells of grief unlike a fallen leaf.

Philomena had called out ‘Who’s for tea?’ and they had gathered then, stony-faced, in a circle at the table. Brendan was crying as much as his sisters. He was nineteen, a handsome lad and a hit with the girls, but on that day, at the table, he was returned to boyhood. Red rimmed his eyes and tears ran on his cheeks. Grief had swollen him. He carried it flaring like disease beneath his skin. Catherine loved him all the more when she knew that his grief was like hers. They shared this too, the community of sinners, the peculiar piety of atheists and of sinners unredeemed.

‘Those of us that don’t believe in Heaven must stick together,’ he once said, ‘and believe more strongly in this world – here-now – in this gorgeous mad fuck-up.’

Mam believed: she led a little prayer. They all crossed themselves – even Brendan – and consoled her in this way. Pretending. Performing. In this gorgeous mad fuck-up. Around the table their heads were as beads on a rosary, caught in one beseeching purpose, seeming all the same.

 

The time of mourning knitted Brendan and Catherine more closely. She remembers that at the Estate there was never any privacy or quiet. Brendan had moved close to University College, using his scholarship to rent a bleak room in a grimy boarding house, the kind full of shuffling old men muttering nonsense into their shirtfronts as they fumbled for begged cigarettes and tripped on the stairs. He was studying literature by then – something Da never understood – and dressing in second-hand clothes from charity bins which he wore with a rakish and heedless flair. Women adored him. He was in love twice a week, and writing volumes of poems to girls with blue eyes and black hair, listening to dramatically unhappy songs and learning the constellations.

‘Our stars come from Ireland,’ he told her more than once.

For years Catherine had found this saying enigmatic and only after Brendan died did she discover that there was an American poem of this title, by Wallace Stevens. Somewhere in America some poor bastard was thinking of Ireland, thinking of distance, and the turning planet, and of the sky sliding its twinkling diagrams through the dark, lonesome night. Some Irish foreigner, gone-in-the-head, in a new far land. Some Son of Erin staring homesick at the starlit heaven.

Celestial glissade, Brendan called it, in one of his own poems. East and West confounded.

They spoke of the stars. They looked at and considered them. As you do. They spoke of Da and death and the absence of the hereafter. They helped each other. And although Brendan had love-affairs non-stop he seemed without intimate friends, and Catherine knew that somehow she provided this too, a kind of comfort of understanding and the forgiveness of all sins. He seemed wholly unmindful of the difference in their age; it was from Brendan she first learned of the abstract and extraordinary operations of sex, from him she heard of Marx, and mixed drinks and the relativity of time, of Wolfe Tone, and the Easter Rebellion and the whole heartbreaking, maddening, fitful-fangled quality of Irish history. Books and music became the trade between them. Band Aid happened (how they both hated Elton John) and yet another Eurovision (‘and who could forget,’ Brendan said, in a high-pitched TV voice, ‘the glorious achievement of Johnny Logan singin’ “Hold Me Now”, bejesus and bemary, ah hold me now, in all his star-spangly, big-eejit Eurovision glory. Go hold yourself, said the tart to the bishop …’)

So many sentences of Brendan’s speech wafted in Catherine’s memory. They trailed through at chance moments, like a delayed echo. Sometimes she would be altogether elsewhere, minding her own business, getting on with her life, and Brendan’s voice would softly sound; and not only the content of his funny sayings and haphazard rude wisdom, but also his timbre and tone, his particular intonation, his pauses, his sighs, his put-on accents, arriving like a breath on the back of the neck, catching her shivery and unaware.

For a long time she believed herself a derivative creature, taking all she knew from her older brother. It was a place he gave her, on the rim of his life. So much of what she knew, Brendan had taught her. But her interest in journalism and rock music – these were truly her own. These she cultivated with an exclusive, almost irrational, devotion.

 

After the death of their father Catherine felt free to worship U2. There was nothing more beautiful in the world than Bono bursting his lungs out, singing ‘With or Without You’. In the black and white video-clip on the telly he wore a leather waistcoat and no shirt; his naked forearms glistened and he eyed the camera as if he was shagging it. His face advanced and retreated in a system of dark shadows, oh the plea of miserable love, oh the dank seedy magnetism. No tinted glasses; the Edge wore no cap. They were unadorned and not yet so preposterously famous, not yet kings of all Dublin and Champions of the World.

Catherine found Bono’s voice deeply sexual and romantic; she played him in her head like a dirty secret. At the end of the footage of ‘With or Without You’ Bono emerged in half-light to swing his guitar like a madman.

Pure genius, that’s what it was. Pure fecking genius, as Brendan would say.

Bono was so televisually distraught every young woman in Ireland wanted to comfort him, to drag him from the punishing contrasts of Orson Welles cinematography to the quiet soothing twilight of an unmade bed.

Catherine was fourteen years old. The passions conceived then, felt in the quiver of the heart and the unmentionable spaces of the body, experienced in dear obsessions and constant cravings, these were as significant as any adult formulation of desire, and more direct, more alive, more radically imperative.

 

The train swung in a wide arc to emerge alongside sturdy buildings and suddenly pulled into Circular Quay. She’d not noticed the journey, it had been so swift. In this new city she was still moving in guessed distances and miscalculations.

Where was her ticket? She needed it to exit.

With or without you. Jesus, she thought, still this fucking eighties’ song, still a younger, sexy Bono hollering in her head.

Passengers all around her were rising to leave. There was the etiquette of standing just apart, and waiting, and a polite crowding before the doors. Catherine hitched her shoulder-bag and rose up, out of her childhood.

And she reflected then that for all her adoration of U2, for all her wish both to follow and not to follow Brendan, when she walked on Raglan, or any road, she still sang the songs that her brother loved, she still heard his voice, and thought of every damn thing that he had taught her, and all the visions he had inspired, and their sweet sibling complicity. And when she closed her eyes at night she still dreamed of going faraway, to Australia, here-now, and eventually to China.