Everywhere I Look (19 page)

I keep noticing in the shelf beside my bed the copy of Marcus Aurelius's
Meditations
, a reminder of the wakeful nights I had while I was working on my book. The emperor's thoughts were not much use to me. The Book of Job was more comforting, or Thomas Wyatt: ‘I scarce may write, my paper is so wet.'

On the train a dark-haired young man in a dirty navy-blue boiler suit and work boots sat beside me. He was holding up a tiny book at eye level, chanting and singing in a very soft voice. It sounded like Arabic, though he didn't seem to be turning the little pages backwards. He was entirely absorbed in his prayers, if that's what they were. I wished I could murmur a psalm with that sort of oblivious devotion.

My friend and I came out of
South Pacific
and strode down into Parliament Station in the foolishly lighthearted mood that a musical can induce. A man came stumbling towards us along the tiled concourse, yelling and wailing—barefoot, barelegged, swollen-faced, holding up his pants with both hands, like Poor Tom in
King Lear
. Four tall young policemen were clustering inside the ticket barriers through which he must have been ejected. We swiped our cards and passed through, close to the cops. They were standing in a group, facing each other, half-smiling with a strange awkwardness. One of them, dark and thin and very young, looked shaken by the man's helpless craziness, or perhaps by something he and his fellow officers had done before we got there.

To the NGV on St Kilda Road to see a show called ‘The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse'. Dürers, manically detailed and phantasmagorical—tall spires thrusting towards a calm sky through foliage that crouched against a cliff; young lovers surprised by a Grim Reaper behind a tree; a knight clanking past a grave out of which clambered a skeleton. In the dim gallery the woodcuts were exquisite, but fanatical. When I emerged on to the street the world looked frightening and brutal. On the tram a deadbeat with a loud, grating voice praised a little girl's beauty. ‘You're gorgeous, you are! Children!' he croaked to her shrinking mother. ‘They're a joy, aren't they!' He barged off, cursing the driver, shoving through the crowd. I walked into the house and found the two boys bowed over the computer. I came up behind them on velvet feet, prepared to cut short some monstrous orgy of mayhem. They were intricately manipulating the long red tongue of a frog to catch flies on a lilypad.

The boys came to stay the night with me. After dinner I sat on the toilet lid and watched them in the bath: up to their armpits in pale greenish water, talking softly and playing with face washers, wrapping them round their legs in complex bandage shapes. Amby crouched on knees and elbows and I poured bucket after bucket of warm water over his back. Ted, the lofty philosopher, declined my offer, then crept closer and closer until his back and Amby's were touching: ‘What about mine?' Soon they were in bed and the house was orderly. The dog lay curled on his pallet outside the back door. A quarter moon blazed very high in an endless warm sky.

Werner Herzog's documentary about American prisoners on death row—men found guilty of randomly gruesome crimes which, under the filmmaker's unflinching scrutiny, are suddenly the least interesting things about them. Herzog's Bavarian accent, his almost perfect colloquial American English. To interview his subjects he shoots them from crown of head to hips. After they finish talking he lets long silences fall, but keeps the camera on them, keeps and keeps it on them. Some can tolerate it. Others endure it. Others again lower their eyes, or turn aside. Some go to pieces and start to weep.

In Newcastle we had breakfast in a café right on the foreshore at Merewether beach. There was a mild offshore breeze. Great swells bulged and toppled; tiny figures cut across their faces and disappeared in boiling foam. One tousle-haired little teenage surfer called to his friend as they ran down the steps to the sand, ‘Hey, Zephyr!' We laughed, thinking he must have hippie parents, but it was more likely short for Zephaniah. What the hell is this fashion for Old Testament boys' names? Regret will come later, as with grandiloquent verbal tattoos.

At dinner we play a game of inventing movie ratings. PGF: Parental Guidance Forbidden. TMK: Too Much Kissing. POE: Plenty of Explosions. TSFK: Too Sad For Kids. Ted asks a riddle he says he's just made up: ‘What do you call a graveyard that's been cut exactly in half? A symmetry.'

Hand-lettered sign in public toilets, Ararat: ‘If you're about to use these toilet facilities, we apologise in advance, we know they're not the best.'

We drive down to Queenscliff to inspect my parents' graves, which other family members have recently discovered to be looking neglected and unloved, their black lettering faded almost to vanishing point. We enter the bush cemetery expecting a desolate scene, but in fact, among the larger, squarer, darker graves, our parents' pale, curved little vertical headstones, side by side, look modest and rather elegant. From behind they resemble the shoulders of a couple sitting in a theatre waiting for the show to start.