JULY THE FIRSTS

RYAN O’NEILL

It is July the first.

And Ernest Hemingway is cleaning his favourite shotgun, the one with the silver-edged barrel, which he will next day place in his mouth, and Charles Laughton is born and Thomas Moore is on trial for his life and I (1970 to present) am lying awake in Newcastle. On this day Vespasian was given the purple by the Egyptian legions and Napoleon captured Alexandria. The first television advertisement, for watches, was broadcast in New York City, costing the company nine dollars. It is 12.50 a.m. In 1971, in a Brisbane hospital, my wife Sarah has just been born. Four years ago at this time I lay in bed awake, listening to her stir beside me. She had wanted to make love, but I had said I was too tired. In truth I was bored of her. By then I already knew the history of her body, the provenance of every scar and blemish. I pretended I was asleep.

This year (2004) I have taken to sleeping in old piles of the Newcastle Herald which I bought from a pensioner in Charlestown. The past week I have been napping in the 1988 earthquake, but tonight I cover myself in a more recent pub brawl and the football results. For some reason, I find I enjoy most rest in December 1979. Yet just now I cannot sleep and so continue the introduction to my History of Newcastle (Newcastle University Press, 200?). One hundred and twenty notebooks filled with my handwriting are stacked on the floor around my desk, along with the dozens of history books and journals that are referenced in the ninety pages of footnotes. And still I have not arrived at the First World War. I once wrote a history of Africa that took less time and research than this history of a small Australian city. And yet still I believe I was born to be an historian, exiting from my mother backside first, in order that I might better understand where I came from. I take a new page in the introduction (p.104) and write: Abraham Lincoln once said, ‘We cannot escape history.’

Then the Beatles start singing ‘Paperback Writer’ on the radio, number one today in 1966. There are more songs and I stop writing for a time and listen to them, ‘My Foolish Heart,’ ‘Why Don’t You Love Me.’ Then I hear ‘Guess Things Happen that Way’ and I run barefoot to turn the music off, trailing a Lambton murder from December 14, 1983 on my heel. My feet are dirty. The floor is filthy with my dead skin and hair. Historians should not sit in ivory towers after all.

Now it is 4 a.m. on July the first and in 1993 I have just proposed to Sarah. We lay in bed together in an Edinburgh hotel. I had bought the engagement ring earlier that day at an antique shop – I wanted it to have history. She told me it was the best birthday present she had ever had. She told me of each of the men she had loved. She asked me about the women I had been with. ‘I don’t want our pasts to ever come between us,’ she said. I had a cold that night, I remember.

My medical history: measles (1975), appendicitis (1984), a fractured left arm (1992), malaria (1990, 1991), and of course, clinical depression (2001 to present). Outside the house, a red and green and yellow bird is whooping in the dawn, but I don’t know its name. It is a cool morning. I decide to go for a walk and dress in my second-hand clothes. I leave the house, cross the street, walk past the undertakers where an Australian flag is displayed against black curtains, as if the country itself is to be buried today. My house is near the harbour. The roof was destroyed by a Japanese sub-marine that fired thirty-four rounds at the city on June 8, 1942. Three drunken young men shout at me and I hurry past them and think of the first day of the Battle of the Somme. I could never fight. I have no history of violence.

I walk down to the foreshore and look out at the ocean where in the pale light I can see five identical coal ships spaced equidistant along the horizon, like a time-lapse photograph. Long ago today the French frigate Medusa sank and the survivors escaped in a raft which became stuck in the sea of the famous painting. There is a strong smell of seaweed. It is Estée Lauder’s birthday. In 1998 at this time I was still asleep in bed, but not with my wife.

I walk back and forth along the sand for a while, and then return to the road. At this early hour I am surprised to see an old man reading on his front doorstep, with a faintly astonished look on his face, as if he had just seen his own name in the book. I pass him, then charge back up San Juan Hill with Roosevelt and take my street without casualties.

It is eight o’clock in the morning on July the first and I still cannot sleep. I return to bed and sit and watch old black and white films for some hours, looking for Olivia de Haviland to wish her happy birthday. Then it is midday and the postman rings the doorbell once and I wait until he rings again, in honour of James M. Cain, also born this day.

The postman is a Barbarossa of a man. Ink has come off on his large hands as if he has been making words with them. He has a package for me from Melbourne which I must sign for, and as I do so I entertain him with the history of my surname. He does not seem very interested. I take the package inside. Some history books, including one that I once wrote about the Mau-Mau rebellion. Years ago I lent them to Sarah’s sister, but I need them now for my history of Newcastle. Sometimes I think I will need every history book, from the time of Thucydides to those yet unwritten, for my history of Newcastle.

When I open the book a photograph falls out. I stare at it for some time, for it has been so long since I have seen a photograph that was not stapled, captioned and dated. A man and a woman are standing outside a dark stone cathedral, smiling in a sunshower. The picture was taken on the July the first of 1989 in Glasgow, when I met Sarah for the first time. I could hear her in the next chamber in the cathedral before I saw her. She was leading a group of Polish students. Her Australian accent I noticed at once, but then certain other words that she pronounced differently, some rising unexpectedly, some falling. I imagined numbers over these words, leading to footnotes which explained that she had once lived in China, India, England. I watched her, fascinated. For when she spoke of the past, she threw her hand back over her shoulder, when she spoke of the present, she pointed in front of her, and the future was a sweeping gesture of both her hands. She had begun these motions to give her students visual clues for their tenses, but eventually they had become habit. She had sent her students away to look at a tapestry and she was finishing a book on a bench outside.

‘What are you reading?’ I asked her, and she looked up at me.

‘A biography. Jane Austen,’ she said.

‘Oh. How does it end?’

‘Well, she dies,’ she said, and we laughed.

I remember how her hands moved when we arranged to meet the next evening. Later, I watched her students sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to her. The next year, we were alone when I sang it to her.

In 2004, now, I return to the 104th page of my introduction. Outside, above the houses, there is a picture of the sun in the sky that is already some minutes old. I wonder how it compares to the sun the Americans made in the Bikini Atoll, the fourth time of splitting the atom. It was on this day of course, years and years ago. After some time writing, I fall asleep and when I awaken I look at the clock. It is 5 p.m.

In 2001 the conference I was attending at Sydney University to discuss trends in African historiography had just ended. It was Sarah’s birthday, and I was going to call her from the lobby, to tell her that I would be home soon. There was a black woman at the hotel bar. I recognised her accent as Burundian from the speech she gave about French colonialism. Her name was Clio Mbabazi. She was quite pretty and invited me to join her for a drink. ‘It is July the first,’ she said, ‘and Burundi is celebrating its independence.’ She looked at my wedding ring and my whisky. ‘And so it seems are you.’ I called Sarah at nine o’clock to wish her happy birthday and tell her that I would not be home that night, as we had planned. There was too much work to do.

And then I am hungry and I eat using November 23, 1997 as both tablecloth and napkin. The bread is four days old, the cheese is six days old, and I am 12,875 days old. It is evening and I go to shower off the history of the day. The ink, the sweat, the dirt. It is still July the first, still, and Marlon Brando has just died on television, though he is there in the screen screaming, ‘Stella! Stella!’ I sit on the floor. Something cuts into my leg. One of Sarah’s diaries. She kept them from when she was fifteen years old. I have read them several times. In their pages I appear as an historical figure, like a Garibaldi or a Caesar. Herein, all my lies and my infidelities are recorded. ‘For an historian,’ Sarah wrote on July the first 1997, ‘my husband is no good at fabricating the past.’

Suddenly, it seems, it is 9.02 p.m. In 2001 at this time I was in a Sydney hotel room. On the radio, Johnny Cash was singing. I kissed Clio Mbabazi and we took off our clothes. Afterward I could not sleep and I idly read the Gideon’s Bible. Much later I learnt that the society had been formed on a July the first by some Wisconsin travelling salesmen.

It is 11.41 p.m. and in 2001 Sarah is dying on her thirtieth birthday, alone in our bed in Newcastle. A sudden heart attack. The doctors could not explain it. There was no history of heart disease in her family. If only someone had been with her, they said, she might have been saved. In Germany, Chekhov was dying too. They would take his body back to Russia in a crate marked ‘fresh oysters.’ Like Shakespeare, whom Chekhov greatly admired, Sarah was born and died on the same day.

Abraham Lincoln once said, ‘We cannot escape history.’ It is July the first.