INSTEAD OF learning the fine art of wool-classing, Wesley had thought he might try something entirely different, such as science or languages at one of the universities. His father had other ideas. A push, which is eventually necessary between father and son, turned into a full-blown shove, and Wesley watched as his father, still reading the riot act, tripped and fell on his knees, kicking up a puff of dust. A scuffle near the veranda steps, Lindsey in a short skirt looking on. This was at the beginning of 1978.
By ten o’clock, not-so-young Wesley was on the train to Sydney, where he camped in his mother’s apartment at the Astor. He soon realised he couldn’t stay there. It was the powdered humidity, mirrors wherever you turned, the bathroom with its array of milky jars, bottles in the shape of hearts, tweezers and pencils, the miniature soaps from the south of France, little things, potpourri, the embroidered foot-stools – and his mother, the docile tea-drinker, long-fingered, a woman of taste, interested and yet not really – enough to have him step out after less than a week and find somewhere else.
The first apartment he saw was good enough. Typical of the buildings around Kings Cross it had a chrome-plated bolt of lightning decorating the glass doors, and a maroon carpet of floral pattern which darkened the foyer and continued into the lift. It was strange living in a tall building where so many other people lived – all those nearby lives, attended by the water and gas pipes and the electrical wires. Wesley’s apartment on the fourth floor faced Macleay Street. A thin man with out-of-control black eyebrows, which gave him an untidy bachelor look, claimed to be the oldest resident, and made it his job to latch onto any new tenant, to help them ‘acclimatise’, as he put it. He was known as Joseph. No abbreviation was possible. With Wesley he went around and pointed out the fuse boxes and the location of the rubbish bins; along the way he kept noticing things which reminded him of certain tenants and their exasperating behaviour, and he went on complaining, shaking his head and so on, as he led Wesley onto the roof to show him the clothes line, raising his voice as he stepped over a young woman in a bikini lying on a towel.
People in the building came and went at all hours, and looking down from his window Wesley could see figures moving along Macleay Street, stopping now and then to talk. Where he came from, in the country, there was no movement after dark – nothing. By eight fifteen, everybody was asleep and loudly snoring. In the city, people couldn’t sleep; and they talked more. Always someone, somewhere. Much of the talk was in the realm of small courtesies, although a man could often be seen arguing on the footpath to convince another to his line of thinking.
As for his own talkability, the endless paddocks and the creaking tin roofs had passed through him and left behind a teeth-sucking way of speaking/smiling. It suggested some sort of face-in-shadow reserve; but soon enough he joined in giving the standard nod and ‘Good Morning!’ to people in the building. Straw blonde about fifty-plus applied lipstick in the lift. She was the one who always asked him the time, yet didn’t appear interested in the answer. Most mornings he had bacon and eggs at a café next to the Sicilian barber’s. It was one of the side streets that form the misshapen asterisk, Kings Cross. He bought his cigarettes at a place that sold complicated mechanical ashtrays, the genuine Havana corona. He was twenty-two. Of course he liked the idea of smoking and looking thoughtful. Along the streets were spaces into which were fitted cramped enterprises, where figures bent over needle and thread, while others nearby did their best to resurrect wrinkled tan shoes, sandals and ankle boots, so reproducing the craftsman’s atmosphere, not much different from the Middle Ages – one bloke still held tacks between his lips, as he cut leather and hammered. Others there on Darlinghurst Road had tired expressions as they cut pizzas into bleeding triangles which drooped over plates, day and night, like Dali watches. Bottle shops, money-changers, the fluorescent optimism of the all-night newsagent. Strip joints – ‘nite spots’, they’re advertised as – had a door opening onto stairs going up to nowhere, to darkness and pounding repetitious music, a spruiker or two on the footpath pointing up the stairs. To kill time or just being polite they listened half-heartedly to tarts bitching about the other girls. A stripper in a short coat looking cold and hungry running across the street to her next venue. Opposite the fountain, a butcher sold basic cuts and Australian sausages, unaware of the shifting demographics; Wesley noticed the way this gangling slack-lipped countryman sat down to his lunch at the back of the shop, tucking into two freshly fried lamb chops with liver, no vegetables. Pawnshops are drawn to the intersections, variety in all its messiness, no more surprising than the banks in there too, adopting a patient, resigned air, at least architecturally.
Street people spotted Wesley as a yokel, not only for his red ears and premature crow’s feet, and the tan boots – only missing item being the hat – but also his wide-open gaze of one who had never before seen at close quarters eye-sliding men and women, jittery, and yet matter-of-fact types, flaunting themselves to make a quid – and the wear and tear it takes out on the eye, mouth, skin and sympathies in general. In the first week his wallet had gone. But this was a man earlier on Bayswater Road who saw a twenty-dollar note on the footpath and kept walking. Even back then he could hardly be bothered bending down – or seen to be stooping for anything.
At night he was a large slow fish with bulging eyes passing through the channels, changing mind, turning back, taking in and digesting the many different movements between people, and the people themselves, their expressions, temptations. In fact, the world had turned its details in his direction; every little thing seemed to wait in bright, clear light for his inspection. Edge of building, one eye bigger than the other, pigeons unafraid of that fat woman. He felt like squatting down to examine the very small and ordinary. Early in the morning, streets were watered and along the gutters flowed bus tickets, dry leaves, dead matches and toothpicks, cigarette butts, torn notes, trimmings from fingernails, hair – all manner of leftovers, discarded things. And as he kept seeing each day something fresh on the street, he felt he was gaining experience, or at least complexity, even though it was only observation.
To have her boy within reach his mother had a telephone installed in his apartment. And it became more or less established Thursday nights were set aside for her, his mother. If other people were invited she’d phone and suggest he wear a necktie; otherwise, it would be pasta or Thai takeaway from trays, not saying much. A daughter might have been better, but Mrs Antill and Lindsey didn’t get on.
Early on she enquired, ‘What did you do last night?’
‘I went to a brothel, on Darlinghurst Road.’
‘Oh, that’s nice. What was she like?’
‘Blonde.’
‘I suppose she would have a nice figure.’
‘I think all she wanted was for me to make her laugh.’
As for what his mother did all day in the city in amongst its verticals and congesting horizontals he could only wonder. To hear her women friends, she was incredibly, determinedly active, and – news to him – a bridge player at state championship level.
Whenever his father turned up he stayed at the Australia Club. It was a few minutes from the Astor – same street. After finishing his business or attending the races Cliff Antill went back to the property without looking in on his wife. And when after almost a year Wesley and his father eventually spoke again it was in the dining room of the club, where the oil paintings were benign and the lunch specialty was the steak-and-kidney pie.
Because there was no point going over their argument, and Wesley showed no interest in the horses, his father looked into the distance as if he was back on one of his paddocks, and talked about his stamp collection. There were collectors and there were philatelists, explained his father who had plump, weather-beaten fingers. And there is a difference. He was a philatelist. Look at the near-completion of his collection: among its treasures, the blue first kangaroo, 1912. All a man needs is a preoccupation, preferably involving classification. Later, as Wesley walked home by the water at Woolloomooloo, he saw how philately was a solitary pleasure which centred, unusually, not on the specimens secured in rows, but in the contemplation of those that were missing. Now there’s a strange pleasure. And he could see his father sitting in his office at the homestead – could go for weeks without a word – identifying from his swivel chair the gap in the pattern of his life. His wife as a rare postage stamp! A figure of theatrical design who had to be handled with tweezers; for the moment unattainable, out of reach.
‘Have you found your feet?’ his father managed to ask as he bent into a taxi, not turning around. ‘More or less,’ he would have said at that early stage.
At one of the Thursday dinners Wesley found himself seated next to Virginia Kentridge, a friend of his mother’s. Instead of talking he fiddled with his knife and fork, and considered the farm shed with its hard dirt floor, and on the bench the grey metal cabinet, which held in drawers, at different levels, screws and nails of various sizes; always interesting pulling them out and having a look, even if you didn’t want anything. Under the bench old bottles, sheets of tin, lengths of wood.
‘What are you smiling at?’ woman, in black, cut in from the left. ‘You’re thinking about some poor girl?’
A small tanned woman, Virginia Kentridge had a thin neck with prominent sinews sweeping up from her shoulders like a Moreton Bay Fig, enough to stretch her credibility, for when activated, which was often, they gave a neurotic force to any ideas she may have had. And this neck – those sinews – also suggested emotional adventure, just below the surface.
Wesley’s mother had told him about her.
To commiserate he said, ‘Your husband couldn’t have been so old.’
What actually happened? (Why think, let alone ask? Why was he talking?)
‘He was with his poxy girlfriend,’ Mrs Kentridge smiled. ‘A clear day, a perfectly straight road, and he was driving. The rest I leave up to you.’
‘Was she killed too?’
The widow shrugged. In broad daylight at any given moment there was always somewhere a head-on collision taking place, especially on the road to Cooma. There were so many solid trees in Australia. Far better to lean forward, which she did, allowing him to glimpse the softness of her neglected breasts.
The following night he spent at her house. Photos of the husband in silver frames were still on the shelves – a man entirely frank with the camera, nothing to hide. Stacks of hair, the strong wiry stuff, and in silver eruption above his teeth like a burst water main. By looking straight at the camera he was looking straight at her.
Until Virginia Kentridge, Wesley had fumbled around with the willing experimenters from the nearby towns – on the slippery seats of locally made cars, he was the awkward skater on pale green ice. But this energetic woman who exercised a tennis player’s sinews in many parts of her body was only a few years younger than his own mother. No sooner had he begun that night to linger in her bed than she placed an extreme, restless importance on his feelings for her, and became different, making herself singular to him. So specific was the change, he wondered whether it could be true. He didn’t know that her anxiety was close to momentary happiness.
Mrs Kentridge reached out to him. Oddly she complained he wasn’t talking to her, yet when he did she looked away and fidgeted, sometimes getting up and putting something in a slightly different position, as if she wasn’t interested.
Taking him shopping gave her pleasure. Shirts in boxes, woollen tie, diamond socks, a rust-brown herringbone jacket, gave form to the idea she had of him. He appeared more sure of himself than he actually was.
By now he no longer looked like a hick, which therefore you would think an improvement, but it caught the eye of his cosmopolitan mother – narrowed her glance, well-practised at isolating a situation. And when the happy and bold Mrs Virginia Kentridge insisted they go to hear a Russian pianist giving one and only one recital at the Opera House, which happened to be a Thursday evening, Wesley casually went along and didn’t go to his mother’s or get around to telling her.
The following morning she phoned early.
‘What have you been doing? I sat here and I added two and two together. The poor thing, that’s all I can say. We don’t know what’s the matter with Virginia. Why does she have to carry on the way she does? The fresh widow. She’s trouble. Listen to your mother. Are you listening? I know women like her. You have to be careful.’ The bridge club at Double Bay and the tennis group were full of them – and not only widows and divorcees – tanned, gaunt, large-eyed, fierce women. ‘Find someone younger. They’re around. I saw some lovely young things on the street yesterday.’
The way she spoke rapidly as if to herself, his mother didn’t sound like a mother at all; to his surprise he saw the younger, single part was still there.
Now she said, ‘I’ve got to go now. I’m going out.’
He took ferries too, cream and green ones looking like nineteen fifties kitchen cabinets, and bus and train journeys – to Parramatta, more than once – stopping at the regular intervals – across to the North Shore – as far as Palm Beach. He preferred the buses where he could gaze at the haphazard mess of streets and the people on them, and glance at the passengers as they made their way to seats near him. Old ladies wearing coats on hot days and women clumsy with children he helped on or off. He began to wonder what he was doing with himself.
On a noisy night the students next door invited him in, where he entered the source of the music, steady, blurry, blood-pumping, and the rising and falling laughter and shouting. He was dragged in. Men and women his age stood in the one spot and made pronouncements from what they had learnt that very day in the lecture hall. It was not possible to remain silent; Wesley was expected to agree or not.
A woman he had seen once before brushed past him and went into the kitchen.
She put her hands over her ears. ‘I don’t know where all these people have come from. And I have this terrible headache.’
He filled a glass of water, and sat across the table.
‘Where do you fit in?’ she looked up. ‘What’s your story?’
‘Last time I saw you,’ he decided, ‘was up on the roof. I think I saw you there.’
‘He only thinks it was me…’
Sturdy thighs, Wesley remembered. Lying face down, reading a book.
She said, ‘Up there, I’m all by myself. All I can hear is the traffic – and the pigeons. I hate pigeons. There’s nothing attractive about them. They’re both disgusting and boring.’
This was Rosie Steig, close up – a broad forehead, narrow chin, severe eyes, messy black hair to her shoulders. She was studying Old Norse and psychology, among other things. Wesley explained where he came from. Because she had asked, he described his sister. Even with a headache she listened carefully. His mother and father he mentioned with a shrug. Describing his interest in impressions and movement, he realised he didn’t make sense, and sounded almost mournful when he said he didn’t know what to make of anything much.
And the kitchen became crowded. Although they were in her place, she asked over the noise if they could go next door to his place. There, still talking on his second-hand sofa of muddy roses, he allowed his left arm with its restless fingers and a Swiss watch strapped on, to lengthen towards the first port of call, her shoulder. At the very moment his fingertips touched, he stopped. She seemed to be waiting – but you never can tell.
Later, lying next to her, conscious of the welcome of a woman’s body, again Wesley Antill decided to pause, decided to remain separate. He concentrated on the smallest gaps between them – not to remain faithful to the memory of Mrs Kentridge, who he was still seeing, but to experience the difficulty, the austerity of resistance. Was it celibacy? It was close, but not really.
From then an apparent naturalness flowed between them; a pleasant ordinariness, none of the complications.
A few weeks after the party she suggested one afternoon they go up on the roof. It was too ‘stuffy’ inside. Chatting away at the bedroom door, she bent forward to let her breasts fall into the floral bikini he had last seen on the roof.
To his sister he wrote, ‘My neighbour next door is like you. I’m trying to work out why exactly. (When I know I’ll let you know.) Is about your size. Don’t screw your nose up! Name is Rosie. She tells me there’s no problem attending lectures at the university. All I do is tag along as if I’m a student too, which of course I am.’
Rosie Steig took him to other parties, where he looked on as she and her friends discussed politics, and names and ideas Wesley had never heard of. He left early, and didn’t mind when he heard Rosie arrive next door with another man. It was Rosie who first led him through the gates of Sydney University and into the lecture hall. With Wesley in tow, she liked to arrive late, and take a seat in the front, where she would begin brushing her black hair. To Wesley the descending tiers of seats gave the impression he was stepping down into a volcano, or some sort of excavation where, instead of eruptions, a small vertical figure stood at the microphone and spoke with quiet reasonableness, trying to make sense of it all. It was here that Wesley first heard the main theories of psychology and psychoanalysis, which had been transported in book parcels all the way from Vienna, Zurich, London.
Whenever he looked up one of Rosie’s friends waved at him using her little finger.
Nothing before had produced in him such keen anticipation. The process itself of arriving and choosing the best position for learning, then to sit down and wait for the lecturer to arrive, watching and waiting as the papers were shifted, sometimes just a page of notes, before the mouth opened and pronounced the first words. It hardly mattered what the subject was. Theory and information unfolded as one. In this it resembled the way Mrs Kentridge undressed in stages, proud to reveal her nakedness to him – who flew into a rage when he happened to tell her this.
He attended as many lectures as possible. And so he acquired broad knowledge of the histories of the significant parts of the world – really, a history of congestions. Even a bit of Australia was touched upon; he traversed the Spanish lake; listened in on linguistics, the Romance languages; Greeks, the myths; political theory; the Russian novels; utopias; various anthropological subjects. It required study. He filled almost to overflowing the emptiness of his childhood and youth with density – with grey matter. Even at breakfast he had his nose in a book. For eight months every Thursday morning an analysis of a Shakespeare play was given by one man. Beginning with the first, each play was examined in detail, until every play was done. A one-man show. Among the talents of this popular lecturer was the ability to read parts, switching from a la-di-da voice of a king to a high, clearly enunciated woman’s whether mother, queen, witch, loyal daughter.
After the first year, Wesley concentrated on subjects he was interested in – discarding, for example, colonial and post-colonial fiction, yes, and the slide-shows that represented the history of European painting and architecture – and law, and Old Norse – until, after some hesitation, he turned to philosophy, a subject he had avoided, where he immediately caught the attention of one lecturer.