Five Bells (13 page)

By the time he arrived at the restaurant James was nervous and moist with sweat; it was a relief, having arrived early, to sit alone in the Antarctic air-conditioning. Faux alfresco. But he had to endure a supercilious waiter, overtly insolent, and the extra brightness of spotlighting, which would surely induce a new headache.

James looked out of the window at the view of Circular Quay. From his table he could see across the water the Opera House entire. He began vaguely to wonder how the Surrealists would paint it. Magritte would place it in a forest or let it float in the sky; Dali would melt it like ice-cream, like one of his dissolving clocks; Max Ernst would use it as ruffles on the cloak around a pompous figure. No: Magritte would set it adrift in the ocean, like a rare, efflorescent species of underwater life; Dali would refigure it as the chambers of a woman's body; Ernst would have children fleeing it on a sparse, bleak plain, as if it had arrived from nowhere, from outer space, as a menacing apparition. And then there was the Australian, James Gleeson. For him the smooth arcs of the Opera House would be covered with excrescences; grim faces would appear, limbs sprout out, indefinable and disgusting matter would festoon the surface.

James was surprised to have relinquished his initial aversion; it was an art-object after all, it contained multitudes, suggested metaphors.

A woman at a party had once told him that surrealism was an adolescent taste, something for lonely teenage boys wanting to do violence to the order of things – and he found himself agreeing. He had discovered the instability of images when he discovered his own body; somehow these were linked, though he could not bring himself to consider why. He had slept with the woman from the party, whose name he could not now recall, and woke in the middle of the night, his heart pounding,
his forehead aflame, his thoughts in a boring and groggy loop –
surrealism is an adolescent taste
– feeling he had been criticised for his judgement, and found pathetically wanting.

 

James entered the slack reverie of the over-tired. He was thinking randomly of the patina of light on the faces of pedestrians, of the ferries, the buskers, the wake on the water; he was wondering if the seagulls ever flew sideways and smashed into the glass. He tried imagining what it must be like to live here, not simply to visit. Do Sydney-siders regularly converge on this place, as if coming to a shrine? Do they esteem this monument, that from here, receding in the ultraviolet assault of the midday sun, appeared to be constructed of ancient bone? Or was it all rugby and beaches and the Good Life with a beer? Conspicuous consumption. Unreal real estate. The aspiration to a many-roomed immoderate house, shaped like a wedding cake, with a sweeping Harbour view.

But there it was: ancient bone.
Imperishable
, that was the word.

 

And then Ellie was before him, appearing without announcement. The Opera House disappeared; the com motion of the restaurant subsided. He lurched upwards, bumping the table, causing a little spill. He paused, and then cautiously leant forward to kiss her on the cheek.

‘You haven't changed,' James said, his voice rusty from pills.

‘Nor have you,' she lied.

He was grateful for the small mercy she displayed in not confirming the wreck he felt himself to be. She had not recoiled, or thought him repellent.

Yet he spoke honestly; she seemed essentially unchanged. In her face he saw the girl he had doted on at school. She was still slim, though more womanly, and held her head just so, slightly inclined to the left, just as she did twenty years ago.
And he remembered this: that she was tender, but not meek, that she had a street-tough element and a resilient streak, that she was bold and assertive in ways that had made him seem the weaker one. She wore a white blouse and a blue skirt of some filmy synthetic material. Lipstick. Pink.

‘So, here we are.'

‘Yes,' Ellie said.

She was stretching one arm then the other from the straps of her small backpack. James saw a glimpse of the skin on her chest as her blouse briefly gaped. A glimmer of sexual memory recurred, the moment of winsome recline, the arm cast back, the curve of an exposed breast, the unconcealed invitation. He suppressed the image almost immediately and looked away. On the path before the restaurant an overweight couple ambled past, their arms affectionately draped around each other's backs. Both wore identical baseball caps and matching loose clothes, as if belonging to an exclusive club of two. James was moved; he was sentimental. He felt the same way watching old couples walk hand in hand, or bending solicitously towards each other over cups of tea. A gentleness of bodies long proximate and wordlessly comfortable.

It may have been the sedative effect of gazing out the window; James realised that he was no longer anxious. But he was dumbstruck and feeling foolish at the paucity of his words. What to say?

‘Here we are,' she repeated, and with this forgiving chime, they began.

 

Ellie took a sip of water and seemed slightly abashed. There was food to order; the waiter was hovering and insistent. They busied themselves with gigantic menus bound with gold cord, like something one might see in a church, opened slowly by a priest. Both decisively ordered the grilled barramundi. Salad,
not vegetables. And a New Zealand white. So it was quickly settled. Their instinctive unanimity made the first moments together easier.

‘No entreé?' the waiter asked, in a tone that said ‘cheapskate'. He was perhaps seventeen and subtly fierce in his persecuting disrespect.

James moved a small basket of bread rolls to disguise his embarrassment.

‘We have enough,' Ellie said firmly. And the waiter turned away.

 

So they were, at last, left alone to talk. James realised that he had chosen the wrong place for a rendezvous, too noisy, too Saturday, too public, too bright, too susceptible to his sardonic turn of mind and his disdain of relaxation. A dusky bar, late at night – that would have worked. A quiet corner with a banquette and the kind of sensual confinement that permits bodies to lean seductively towards each other, to find a whispery tone and a cunning route for confidences. Perhaps a trumpet, low-playing a plangent jazz solo. Perhaps a furtive tab of pharmaceutical stimulation.

But he was here,
here-now
, and had much to say, and to confess. He must tell Ellie how he had carried her, all these years, how through everything there persisted the residue of her affinity and understanding. She was a voice in his head; she was a passenger he transported. Her shape, her face. Her grace a still incredible immanence that had tempered his fucked-up life.

Her hair was short now, James saw, and seemed a lighter brown. She was looking down at her lap.

And he must tell her of the child who died, and for whom he felt responsible. Only Ellie would understand. He must tell her of his mother, and of his long-time regret. It was a time of apology. He must also apologise. He must say sorry. He must
drag sincere words from his heart to his mouth. He must say something, so that he might be cured of the ordeal of his own history, of his failings, of his loss, of his disabling culpability.

 

Of these things, at this time, James said nothing. In the raucous restaurant, no place for a confession, Ellie and James spoke together in a casual way, ascertaining that each was still single, no kids, that Ellie had moved to Sydney to take up a postgraduate scholarship, returning to university after all these years, and worked part-time in a hole-in-the-wall coffee shop on King Street; that he was a med-school dropout but a committed schoolteacher, that he had declined the scholarship that had been proclaimed in the small-town paper, that he had bummed around Europe with a backpack and settled for a couple of years in London, that he was now visiting, just for a few days, with no declared purpose. There was a dark patch he skipped over, something he could not yet tell her. Yes, he still played the guitar, was still a crazy Bob Dylan fan; and no, he had never, never ever, returned to the old town.

The meals arrived and both were relieved to have something neutral to claim their attention. James tore at the bread, using it to mop, as his mother had taught him. Italian,
Mama.
Today she was more than usually present.

‘Do you remember,' Ellie said suddenly, ‘our teacher, Miss Morrison?'

‘Of course.'

‘The way she wrote arcane words on the board, and underlined them?'

‘Clepsydra,' said James. He saw Ellie blush. ‘I was cruel, wasn't I? Boys are such bastards.'

‘She liked you. Both of us. Teachers always like the clever ones …'

James shrugged.

‘Well, she liked you best, teacher's pet,' said Ellie. ‘And she taught us all those fancy Greek and Latin words.'

James thought of clepsydra. Across the table this young woman was recalling their first time: he knew it. In a confused second between mouthfuls he wanted nothing more than to slip his hand beneath her skirt and remove her panties, to find himself back in the foundry, to enjoy
adolescent
lust. Their love-making had been simple, blundering, making up in lewd vigour what it lacked in sure knowledge. James had no idea then how to treat a woman's body; he entered, collapsed, found a momentary logic for his meagre boy's life, pulled into hers. Still, it had astounded him, to be alive in that way at fourteen. To enter another body.

James poured more wine for himself and knew he was drinking too fast. Ellie had barely touched her glass. James's thirst was crude and demanding. He thought of slipping away for a moment to swallow another pill, but the compulsion of Ellie's presence was too difficult to break.

Fluids, essential for homeostasis.
Polydipsia
: excessive thirst, one of the indications of diabetes.
Dipsomania:
drunkenness.

 

Not long after the death James considered returning to their town. His mother had died in the hospital in the city, where she inhabited her sad lonely skull full of snow, and a letter from a lawyer arrived, requesting a ‘consultation'. James turned up at an office in a tower block, one of those buildings that looks like a huge filing cabinet, and found there a gloomy looking man, Mr English, with marble eyes and a touch of brilliantine in his starkly black hair. He sat behind a wide desk, his hands shaped into a cathedral. After the antiseptic formality of condolences, none of which could assuage the guilt that had subsumed James's grief, Mr English informed him that the house he had shared with his mother might now
be worth something. The strip of land along the beach, once the space of outcast migrants, of
dagoes and chinks
, he might have said, was being redeveloped to construct a group of chalets for a beach resort. He pronounced the word ‘chalet' as if he were eating a plum. And then there were the ‘goods and chattels', he added (James wondered if lawyers lived, as doctors did, in a world of parallel vocabulary), since the house had been closed up when his mother was committed to the ‘institution'. Might there be something of worth locked away? He was acting, he said more formally, on behalf of the ‘institution', which often had cases like this, of deceased estates ‘going begging'.

James sat before Mr English, noted his large brow and his clean fingernails and the hairs curling on the backs of his hands, noted the framed documents on the wall, and the imposing beige surrounds, and felt too disqualified as a son to know what to say. He resented this horrible man, with designs on their house. It had been such a poor, despised place, symbolic of all he wished to leave; now this man who inspired such distaste was urging a conspiracy of profit. James had risen from the chair and without a word, left the lawyer's office.

 

‘I once thought of returning to the old town,' James said, out of the blue. ‘After Mum died I considered visiting to deal with her things. To sell the house. Tidy up. And I wanted to see you,' he added shyly.

‘When was that?'

‘Almost ten years ago. You had left, I heard. So I never returned.'

It was as close as he would come to saying that she was his only reason for returning; or more forcefully, that she was the only past he could admit.

‘Couldn't do it,' he went on, remembering the dreadful
emptiness of that time, the funeral, oh God, that no one attended, the woman he was with, who found his prolonged weeping rather touching at first, but then disgraceful and unmanly. She told him so. After that they could only draw painfully apart. After his mother, the scale of his feelings shifted. After mother, the deluge.

‘I didn't cope very well. The death, I mean.'

Why was he telling her this?

‘I'm sorry,' Ellie said. ‘I remember your mother. I remember her voice, calling.'

It was the wrong thing to say. James looked at the mess of fish scraps on his plate. Jesus,
she
was sorry.

As if telepathically called the waiter appeared to take away their plates. Coffee, yes. The waiter smirked at his small victory.

 

The vast white silence of his mother's death overhung their conversation. He had seen her on the very last day, summoned by a nurse at the hospital who believed in the spiritual solace of goodbye, and who, reading her details, had already called a Catholic priest. His mother was almost entirely vacant. She did not acknowledge her son. She could not speak or respond. Beneath the covers of the standard issue hospital linen, pale blue blankets with a honeycomb texture, her body had never looked so reduced and so small. The outline might have been of a child, or a victim of starvation. Her spotted hands clutched at the covers and her face was closed and unfamiliar. James thought her eyes enormous, sunk as they were into their sockets, and was afraid she might open them, afraid of what they might see. Afraid for himself, perhaps, because while she lived, even in a snowstorm, he was still a little boy. While she lived, even evacuated, he need not be the grown-up and sensible one.