Five Bells (3 page)

And that was when she thought of it:
beauty like a kiss
.

On a day such as this, a bright January day with light pouring from the heavens, when the blown quality was not disintegration but a token of completion, when other lives seemed everywhere to open and effloresce, it was easy to believe there was an eroticism in the address of something beautiful. This was it, arousal, the pause of a new pleasure, the comfort of a sudden connection, intimate and unanticipated. In a kind of instinct of humility she bent her head, then raised it again, and saw the petals anew.

 

Catherine found herself thinking of the lover she had left. She thought of Luc's mouth, its fleshy appeal, and the ragged scar
on his upper lip, the mark left by playing with a corkscrew as a child. It was a sign by which she knew him, the groove that was his wound. When they made love her tongue sought it, with a pre-emptive kiss. She thought now of her lips swooping his chest, tasting his skin. She thought of her hands clasping his cool buttocks on a warm humid night; how lovely, in general, men's buttocks were, always unspoiled when other parts began to sag and discolour. She liked to watch him sleeping, face down, the way he hooked an arm under his body, the sweet and somnolent compression of his face. Even his snore had appealed, resonating in the depth of his sleep, making the sheets quiver, making him serious, somehow, older and more vulnerable. Catherine felt lusty here in public, standing at a distance from the monument. Beneath her sightseeing was this mayhem of remembered touch.

And there was something else. As Catherine paused, she saw, to the left, the Bridge across the water, and the harbour, and a small ferry, chugging away to the north. Bridge, water, harbour, ferry: all were ablaze, all illuminate. This part of the world collected light as if funnelled double-strength from the sun. Perhaps some refractive quality of the water, or those shining petals, perhaps the geography of sheltered spaces or the winking skyscrapers on the far shore, perhaps these together contributed to an increased incandescence.

Catherine fumbled in her bag for her sunglasses, thinking of Luc's pale shoulder, glimpsed from behind. She felt the brush, ghostlike, of an unshaven kiss. Elvis Costello's ‘I Want You' trailed mournfully through her head.

How did Australians cope with all this light?

 

As Catherine sought a patch of shade and put on her sunglasses, she felt a fleeting nostalgia for dull sky and objects fogged over. Her mother's sad face flickered into
remembrance, framed by a cheap nylon scarf and squinting in sea-spray. It must have been Sandymount, and the sea like liquid ash. It must have been just after. A week, no more. Midwinter. Mourning winter. Chrysanthemums, not roses.

It was like a still from a fifties' black and white movie – the woman's face turned just so, panning to the light-sliced ocean, the tone Irish, miserable, and a strained soundtrack, a Bach cello. This scene may have been fiction, but it was already ineradicable.

And now she looked across the wide, encircling stretch of the harbour, the enormous glaze of sun-fire and surface-dazzle stretching into the distance, and wondered what she was doing here, in Sydney, in Australia. Restlessness had caused her to move across the planet.. The job offer was a year-long placement, but it was enough; she had felt the need to flee London. She could not have stayed there, with Luc, becoming heartless in the mire of her grief. She hoped he would forgive her, and join her, and understand why she had fled.. The calm of their lives had been destroyed by her obdurate mourning. It had deformed their conversations, interrupted their contentment, filled to the brim all the spaces between them. It was eleven months now, and still she could not free herself.

 

Catherine noticed the tiny human shapes of climbers moving in a line upon the Bridge. They were cartoon-like in their simplicity and vaguely nonsensical in their endeavour.

How small we might appear. Going nowhere, just up and down again.

Flags waved at the summit of the bow, like a mountain conquered. There was not a single cloud. The sky was a high dome.

I beheld the Bridge.

Beheld.
Where did that come from? Since the death there had been incursions of stray vocabularies, as though current language was worn and deficient.
Hearken.
That was another.
Hearken.
It suggested gold-leafed manuscripts, lovely decrepitude, and paper so brittle it must be held behind glass.

Catherine turned away, almost tearful, from a jumble of associations she could neither disentangle nor inspect. How confused this place had made her, this Circular Quay, turning on the curve of lost time and unbidden recurrences.

Catherine glimpsed the Scottish lovers retreating along the wharf. They were almost skipping. His arm rested around her shoulder and hers slid along his waist. The utter fit of their bodies was a beautiful thing to behold.

It was a kind of tropical summer, cool in the dawning, steaming up as the sun rose, raining in late afternoon or at night. Ellie had not expected Sydney to carry such moistness, such skin scent and sensuality.

That morning she pushed open the sash window, lifting against the resistance of weathered wood and time, feeling grateful to have found an old apartment so close to the city centre. It had the semi-dark, compartmentalised feel of Deco buildings – all deep red brick and shadowed nooks, cosy, European, reproducing a foreign shade remembered slant-wise from elsewhere. But the apartment suited well; it fitted the austerity and quiet inwardness of her bookish life. It was not a slab of a high rise, glassy and tough, such as bordered the freeways that curved down to the city and the harbour. Instead there were Moreton Bay figs, jacaranda and eucalypts with shedding bark; there was birdsong – currawongs and honey-eaters – sounding above the buildings, and a scale of life beyond traffic-roar and the pitch of distraction wrought by cities. From here, in the bathroom, from the small window above the basin, Ellie could see the rooftops of her suburb, the TV dishes and antennas. She could see the renovated additions, the solar accessories and the rusted corrugation on the poorer houses. The whole vista of mortgages, families, graffiti in laneways, the
desire for a second car, a bigger life, and the meaning of it all. Just visible was the spire of an abandoned church. It pointed to the sky like the aerial to a lost wireless code.

Ellie would discover today that she will never escape James. He was pressed into her life as they pressed together as fourteen-year-old lovers. Into her memory. Now and for evermore.

Ellie would recall, with sharp clarity, as if she had prised a fading photograph from a powdery album, dear Miss Morrison, her seventh grade teacher. Although she had not thought of her for years, she will carry her all day, close as a new baby.

Ellie will be troubled by the newspapers – the war going on in Iraq, the cruel atrocities, the violence that had persisted beyond any war-monger or peacenik reckoning. For all this, her anticipation of James, her childhood recall, the disturbing continuity of tales about war, Ellie was predisposed, this Saturday morning, to joy. She woke each day to the world, not expecting catastrophe. She woke in blue light, to a damp clear morning, and before the sun was a lit fuse in the gap between the curtains she had already found five objects of interest to consider and contemplate.

 

After rain during the night everything was bright and cleansed. There were still isolated pools of water, holding the sky in a sharp shine, and a fresh beaded gloss to the trees and the creepers. From next door a frangipani tree, an old twisted monster, sent fragrance into her rooms as a local blessing.

Ellie had gone out early to buy the newspapers and found herself skipping over puddles and hurrying beneath dripping leaves. At each step she scuffed a fallen blossom. Frangipani stars lay everywhere, and sprinklings of jasmine; the browning petals of crepe myrtle had washed across the road and filled up the gutters. It was the world in a benign organic dissolution. Ellie collected a few of the frangipani blooms to place in
a bowl on her table, holding them gently against her chest as she walked, her papers tucked in an awkward roll beneath her arm. Such a simple garnering. Such a fine clear sky. She was empty-headed and happy. She felt the frisky vague euphoria of a new day in a new city.

In the bathroom Ellie applied kohl to her eyes and pink to her lips. She would be meeting James later on, after all these years, and was self-conscious in anticipation of the severity of his judgement. Her enhanced lips looked tarty and over-emphatic, but suitable for a harbourside lunch and the exhibitionism of Sydney cafés. She would go to Circular Quay early, since she'd not yet seen it, and wander about,
lollygagging
, as her father would say, so that she could look out when James came, and watch him unobserved. She would
lollygag, people-watch,
wander the city, finding the pleasure of eddying crowds and the wayward motions of human traffic, their tidal sweeps at traffic lights, their rhythmic currents of locomotion, doing nothing-in-particular until it was time for their meeting. Six weeks. She had been living in Sydney for six weeks and had not yet seen the Quay. The business of finding her apartment, the settling in; now James's email had given her permission to take a day to sightsee.

Ellie made herself coffee and spread the Saturday papers on the table. There were the usual horrors. The war in Iraq, bombings in Afghanistan, the rapacity of large powers and the subordination of the small. There was a photograph on the front page of a distraught woman in a headscarf, bending in torn, rigorous grief over the body of her son. It was generic and familiar. She was a no-name mother who had lost a no-name son, the convenient portrait of another attack, and selected because the contortion of her face, and her anguish, and the plea of her uplifting hands, told in dumbshow what exceeded the journalist's skill.

Death's enormous sickle.

History would record this time as one of relentless repetition. How many images of grief might the reader of any newspaper see? How many scenes of blasted terrain, or medics rushing headlong with a stretcher on which lay a figure beneath a sheet, too small, too anonymous, and too deathly still? How long would they
mean?
Ellie thought of the Japanese photographer, Hiroshi Sugimoto, who photographed movies inside the cinema. He left the shutter of the camera open in the dark auditorium and the film exposed for the entire length of the screening. The result was not a wildly complicated superimposition of images, but simple white-out, pure light, a flare of nothing. Too many images, layered together, left only a blank. She imagined Hiroshi Sugimoto gazing at his photographs in a gallery, marvelling at the mystery of what excess might delete.

 

From somewhere in the streets beyond a siren sounded. Then another, following, in a high panicked drone. Ellie wished to protect herself from what might overwhelm her mood. She read only the first two paragraphs on Iraq, then sought the national news. The stories were still of the change of government and the ‘honeymoon period' of inauguration (how strange, she thought, this sexual connotation). But there was optimism about, and the sense of a new beginning. The youngish Prime Minister, his moon-face beaming, looked pleased with himself, like a school prefect dressed in his blazer, receiving a prize. Ellie was always struck by how many male politicians retained a little-boy visage. Or managed to look poignantly dazzled at their own
ex cathedra
announcements, insisting to the TV spotlights on the innocence of a feckless decision. The microphones looked like listening insects, leaning to suck up the nectar of scandal. Now the government had changed. One might yet be permitted to expect reform; and one might yet be disappointed.

Ellie extracted the book review supplement of the news
papers. These she would save for later, for a casual perusal of the wordy dimensions of the world, the unremitting, mock-heroic, making-of-sense. She had no money these days to buy new books, but for now there were libraries, which she cherished, and these compact descriptions of other worlds.

 

One of the workers in her local library looked like Miss Morrison. Why had she not made the connection before? And both, in weird likeness, resembled the Queen of England, that abnormally stiff face, that taut string of a mealy mouth. Miss Morrison would draw on the blackboard and write fancy words, underlining them with an oversized oak ruler that clacked as it struck. When Ellie recalled her now it was often in a static rearview, the woman of indeterminate age communing with her own messages, turned away, serious-minded, her back to the class. In their small country-town school, with James sitting beside her, the children were tempted by an impulse to mock, but somehow constrained and respectful. Away from school, however, James could be cruel. He was the child – there is always one – able to parody others. For the guilty enjoyment of his classmates he mimicked Miss Morrison's hunched-over posture, he copied her rather high-pitched voice, he pretended to underline words on an invisible blackboard, turning back to face his classmates with a grimacing smirk.

 

Ellie folded the newspapers and drank the last of her coffee. Frangipani scent hung lightly in the room. Another sun-drenched day, the kind that might sell a city. The kind that might signify package-holiday amusements, with volley-ball on a beach, frolicsome children and the shadows of palms quivering over impossibly bright water. Still, Sydney surprised her. Would it always visit her in this way? Would Circular Quay match up to its own publicity? Ellie touched her coloured lips,
wondered about her hair, then was annoyed at these traces of vanity she had tried to eliminate.

 

As she rose with her cup to the sink Ellie recalled James and Miss Morrison figured intimately together. James had developed a nosebleed in class and Miss Morrison was tilting his head back, her left hand placed on his forehead, her right holding a cloth, soaked red, clenched securely beneath his nose. It was a sort of tableau: the teacher solicitous, commanding, taking control of the child's body; the boy morosely compliant, embarrassed by his bloody nose and the spectacle of his submission. Miss Morrison had clamped him down, held him there, and his classmates looked on with malicious fascination. Ellie had wanted to say something, or be a nurse, or put her own hands to his face, clammy and loving, but instead she sat in her place watching with the others, silently commiserating.

James often developed nosebleeds. It was one of those afflictions that undermine the gifted, seeming to make them like everyone else, vulnerable and common. James took to carrying a wad of handkerchiefs and would disappear from class at the very first spot of blood. Ellie had felt a kind of frightened pity; the boy otherwise a class star, an intellectual champion, streaming with blood in some dank, hidden corner of the school, his head upturned, his throat draining with fluid, his mouth tasting the trace of something sour and internal like death. Each time James returned to the classroom he would not meet anyone's gaze, but resumed his smart-arsed, cocky manner, showing off his learning and wittily denouncing his peers. Miss Morrison found him irritating – Ellie could tell – but retained the distant affection clever children inspire. Once there was a vulgar fleck of blood-spatter across James's chequered shirt; no amount of bravado erased it, or reinstated his power.

And now here was Miss Morrison, cradling him, holding
his head like a mother. James had the drowsy, abandoned look of a child feeling faint or swooning, without will, falling inward, becoming limp and yielding like a plant. It was a vision that bound them like a fresco, varnished and cracked with age, shining its meaning through time as from beneath the archway of an Italian church. Ellie resisted the word
pietà
, but it hung around nevertheless, dignifying what was, after all, a very ordinary distress.

Miss Morrison looked beautiful then, in the way tenderness is beautiful, a kind of indication of the soft collapse into which one might be held. Ellie was surprised to consider her teacher in this way, but found that her childhood was full, in retrospect, of exactly this tenderness, which she missed, and wanted to recall, and had found in the sleepy roll into someone's arms that precedes a slumberous, post-coital confidence. Her former lover was a gentle man and she dreamt of him still, wanted him still. There was no conclusion in the matter. There was no cessation of desire. True feeling does not conclude; this much she knew.

 

James had tracked Ellie down through a mutual friend, who wrote a small lifestyle column for the daily newspaper. Ellie had not seen him since they were fifteen or so and was curious as to why, out of the blue, James now wanted to meet.

He had been a handsome boy, and tall – another high-school predictor of success – but she had also known the James who had lived half a block away, the single child of an abandoned mother. He was the boy who rode his bicycle alone and seemed to have few friends. She remembers him pedalling up and down the street in the grainy lavender dusk, doing wheelies, raising dirt, disappearing as nightfall grew. The shape of a boy. A lonely figure. Even then she saw a muted torment in his repetitious route, and in the meaningless display of skids over gravel.

Sometimes she would hear his mother's voice calling for James; she was bidding him to his dinner, wanting his company, calling in Italian for her son to return to her side. There were times when the calling went on and on. Ellie knew where James hid when he wished not to be discovered, but would never have told; it was part of their pact. In the small space between schoolday's end and dinner, in which children might recover themselves, might find somewhere beyond the confinement of a desk and mean regulation, James would have returned to their hideout,
our hideout,
so that when he was not riding the street he was private and self-possessed.

Adults underestimate the degree of solitude required to counter school-life. Whole populations of schoolchildren crave to be left alone. Everywhere. Millions of them. Just to be left alone. So that they can find in sulky noise or quiet the refuge they have lost.

 

Between mockery and mastery, James made his way, and when at the end of tenth grade he won a scholarship to a boys' school in the city, no one was surprised to see him leave. His mother was proud and heartbroken. Ellie saw her living a contracted life, lingering near the letterbox in her dressing gown at the end of the day. She'd not bothered to dress, nor to separate daytime from nighttime. Her face looked worn to a frazzle and her manner was infirm; her matted hair flew up around her sad, rather doll-like face. She developed a gesture of tying and untying the cord of her dressing gown so that her hands were a flurry of agitation and could not stay still. She spoke to herself in Italian, further marking her foreign state, announcing to everyone that she had returned to the country of her birth and was immured there, alone, tethered elsewhere by words. People gossiped, or despised her, or took pity in mostly blunt and unhelpful ways, taking her hands so that she burst into tears from a human
touch, leaving food on the verandah that she refused to eat. The Country Women's Association tried to organise her into shopping excursions and social activities. Eventually Welfare had to be told: the woman, Ellie heard, was
a danger to herself
.