Five Bells (25 page)

Si parla Italiano.

James thought of lingering longer near the happy family, but was afraid he would look suspicious, a guy just hanging around, a guy seedy-looking and ill. They would think he was a druggie, or someone who liked to look at small children. James gave Matteo a little wave as he walked past the family, and to his great surprise, Matteo waved back.
Ciao!
the child called. He waved in the Italian child's manner, closing his hand and opening it, closing and opening. In that second James lost his miserable nonentity. He became the man heralded by a child, caught in the egalitarian affirmation a small child might bestow. James smiled. Spent as he was, alone, the small wave moved and pleased him.

Auguri
, he thought.

It was the wine, James decided, that made his mind swim in this way, and caused him to feel sleepy at only four in the afternoon. He considered visiting the Museum of Contemporary Art, but decided instead to take a short nap in the sunshine. He found a spot on the grass, on a slope, and laid himself down. He closed his tired eyes. He could hear a didgeridoo playing, a muffled soothing sound, and the distant busy din of traffic and people; he could hear the whole world jangly and abuzz on a Saturday afternoon. But he slipped away within seconds into a dreamless sleep, his body finally yielding to bone-aching tiredness. It was peace, it was retreat. The oblivion was sweet.

 

When James awoke it was just after six o'clock. Surprised to have slept for so long, he glanced at his watch a second time, for confirmation. It was as if someone had scissored out a slice of the day, destroying time. So he rose and sat for a while, calculating the shift of scene. The light had altered to what painters used to call Naples Yellow and the air had turned unusually humid and heavy. A change in the weather had begun to travel in from the sea. The crowds had thinned a little. The didgeridoo hum was gone. The non-stop faces and noises were less invasive and compelling. No sign, anywhere, of the Italian family, or the boy who had offered such an innocent and easy salutation. It was good to have slept, after so much wakefulness. James's mind felt clearer; he did not have a headache; he was relocated in the present tense, here and now.

James stood, shook off his doze, and set off in a semblance of true volition to visit the nearby Botanic Gardens. Inattentive to the crowds, conspicuously alone, he walked once more around the circumference of Circular Quay, crossed in front of the Opera House and headed up a hill, finding himself in a
space of leafy parklands and wide expanses of grass. A strong wind flew in off the ruffled waters of the Harbour, and James, with no reason to be there but to wander and look, simply drifted between the trees, followed the winding paths, read the Latin tags affixed to little signs below exhibitions of plants and bushes. In dwindling light he saw there was a native garden, marked with a placard that acknowledged that the land was first possessed by the Cadigal people; there was a begonia garden, a rose garden, an oriental garden and a succulent garden.

 

At length James arrived at something called Mrs Macquarie's Chair, a bench carved by convicts out of sandstone in 1810. Mrs Macquarie, wife of a colonial Governor, liked to sit here, the sign said, to watch tall ships enter the Harbour. He imagined a woman in Regency dress, like someone in a television drama, decorous, prudish, moving with stiff reticence. She would speak in posh tones and gaze into the far distance, her tendril hair blowing.

There was no one else present, so James sat down on the chair, displacing Mrs Macquarie's ghost and acting colonial. He stared at the water. It was bucking under the wind and iron-toned with the coming night. Almost at once a kind of aggravated disquiet assailed him. James could not release himself from the pressure of absent others, Amy Brown in particular, and the tragedy of her death, Ellie and all that she urgently signified, his mother, vivid still and intolerably memorable. So long in inertia, so long sealed away, he was now made restless by his understanding that there would be no conclusion to all this, and that Amy's death had punctured or ripped something, had opened him both to devastation and to revisitings from the past. He was oppressed, all at once, with a sense of her plea from beyond the grave, as if she were a vision, transparent, with the world shining through her. Ghosts disobeyed
time. Their flimsy bodies were interminable. They were at once long-lasting and bizarrely sudden. Afflicted by what he could not name or speak, James needed once again to move his body.

 

With dusk the light had become purple; yellow was draining to the west. Bats rose in flocks from the Botanic Gardens and were streaming across the sky; though distant and high above, they were a loathsome presence. With no plan, with no purpose, James began the walk back towards Circular Quay. In the twenty minutes it took, night had fallen; out here, in the open, it was like parts of the world silently ceasing to be, a downward bending to nothing. The sensation of disappearance was contiguous and threatening. James quickened his pace, almost afraid.

 

But as he approached the Quay he saw that everything was transformed. The Opera House was illuminated against the dark sky and looked still and shiny, like something made for a church. It seemed to bulge in his direction, as if it had grown in his absence and possessed an organic life he'd not noticed before. Beads of light picked out the shape of the Quay, most of them ornamental and over-powered; so too the Bridge was visible as a pattern of dots following its shape, the faint outlines of girders and struts, the honey-coloured pylons, a single crimson light blinking at the high point of its arch. Beneath the Bridge, far to the north, James could see the shimmering icon of the amusement park: a face hideously smiling, its lit hair in afrighted spikes. Along the near side of the Quay the white umbrellas were still up, massing like wings over the heads of customers now beginning to gather for dinner outside. High palms were moving slightly in a rising breeze. Most impressive of all was the Harbour itself, which was black now, pure metaphysical black, and covered in a net of broken light.
The ferries were still heading out and returning, their beacons shining, their little windows lit. And there were red buoy lights on the water, showing the way.

 

All this came towards James in a lustrous rush. He couldn't help thinking of the adjective ‘cinematic', the way everything with perceptual force, everything city-scale and spaced out, was nowadays described. There was flicker and montage; there was the strangely versatile and celluloid shine of the darkness. It was so:
cinematic.
Faces manifested before him, veering in and out of focus, and a continuous ribbon of activity seemed to catch at his vision. The crowds had grown once again, and included the smart set heading for dinner and those anticipating a night at the theatre or the Opera. The elevated train rumbled and raised voices sounded. Everything was converging, everything was ample and ablaze. This was one of those parts of a city that passes for a myth.

 

James walked along the Opera House side of the Quay and took a seat under one of the umbrellas for something to do. A waiter appeared instantly, bending like an actor taking a bow. There was generosity in his manner, a calm assertion of connection. James was not hungry but he ordered a meal and a bottle of wine because he wanted to prolong whatever abnormal feeling this was, waking to a new time, into this
cinematic
illusion, waking into the visionary present after so much smothering past. His steak came, dribbled with sauces, and he looked at it without interest, but he began drinking almost immediately, feeling the Cabernet Sauvignon suffuse his body, falling into him, warmly, like a familiar drug. His metabolism recognised the stimulant whizz in the bloodstream, the cheap revival of chemical life.

Oh Ellie.
The ledge in time that was their bed had forever gone. He realised he was leaning on the table, drinking alone,
looking to all the world like some miserable bastard whose girlfriend had just left him. An
Agelasti
, that's what he was. James could not remember the last time he had laughed.

 

After the unfinished dinner he rose wide-awake, and walked, wishing to lose himself, into the streaming crowd. James made his way to the steps of the Opera House and sat looking at the sky. Then, as the numbers swelled, arriving for concerts and plays, he walked back again. He might have been floating, the loose crowd parting before him, voices circumambient, a sense of idiosyncrasy to his sensations and being in the world. Faceted faces drifted past, the crowds moved gently around him, he saw figments, apparitions, as an artist might have seen. Magritte. He was Magritte, who had lost his mother.

 

At a small liquor store facing the city James bought two large bottles of whisky. These were of thick glass, expensive, and reminded him somehow of a fist. The young man who served him thoughtfully put each bottle into an eco-friendly bag. Drug of choice for the evening, James thought, for a silhouette of a man, false-hearted, misnamed, thinly sketched in graphite by a schoolchild in another time and place. He was not worthy of Ellie. He was too wounded, too lost, too finally disconsolate.

He thought of his cock in a woman's hand – any woman – as she guided him in. A woman's mouth half-open, and the carnal, comforting sigh as he fell into her body. This was the imprecision that desire might become, the unbearable paraphrase and substitution.

A drum of voices hung around, creating the resounding white noise of a busy Saturday night. James wanted silence. He sat on the ground in a dark corner behind the ice-cream
stand and took a few gulps of whisky. Then he retrieved pills from his jeans' pocket, and complicated his tox result. Slurred his sick-drinking self, destroyed his sexual imaginings, wanting the peaceful ruination of not having to remember. And though he'd given them up long ago, he was desperate for a cigarette.

 

On impulse James bought a ticket and boarded a ferry, any ferry. Randomly chosen. He was not sure where the ferry was headed as it surged into the night. It was like entering a small, unstable and generalised world: the rocking seemed exaggerated and the passenger compartment confining. He couldn't bear the overhead lights and the neat little seats, the young people talking in puerile witticisms, the mobile phones and the texting and the Saturday night excitation, so he moved to the back, outside, into the moist gusting wind. It was like being alone, being wholly alone. His nerves settled, he felt himself return, he began again to look. There was the wake, lush white and sucking under the black water; there was the Opera House sliding its great and singular form, and the reflection of the Opera House, which looked thin and unabiding and made of snow. And there was the city, retreating, all those towers of lights, all those engineering wonders, high-rising and firm.

 

It was not a decision, but an act. James slipped over the edge and the whisky pulled him down. At first it was a bounteous wash of dark and light, the water colder than he had expected and covering him quickly. The Harbour seemed to throb around him as the ferry pulled away, and then slacken and gently take him and require his surrender. There were verticals of filmy light and fish-shapes breaking open. There was a winding embrace so that he opened his arms like a lover. There
was pressure. There was night, the tide of night, flowing in. He was thinking of his true name, Gennaro DeMello, which came to him as a song,
Gennaro bello
. He imagined singing from the Opera House penetrating the water –
Gennaro bello, Gennaro bello –
an extended melisma, a round pure moment.

He felt the water of the Harbour enter his body. His chest was filling. The black wet pushed its thumb-balls in. He felt the sad sinking of giving up and letting go.

He was washed and washed into the mothering darkness, a release, a release, as sound releases; into the wake, Gennaro's wake, and into waves, in waves.

The market was a joy. Ellie had caught the bus up Glebe Point Road and disembarked before her stop when she saw the market. It was near closing time, so stallholders were looking rather hot and bored, but pleased too to see browsers still wandering about and relaxed into friendly chit-chat and casual light banter. The market was a mixture of craft, new goods and second-hand junk – clothes, knick-knacks, books and collectibles. Ellie walked past the vendor roasting caramelised nuts in a big open pan at the entrance, and headed straight for the second-hand stalls and the trays of old books.