Reunion (13 page)

Impossible to predict this boy of hers. Mostly he had the sensitivity of a slab of concrete, then there were times when he knew exactly where to lay the hand. Helen texted a thankyou to him before adding this latest note to her cache of his notes. She rarely threw out anything of Luke's. Poor boy would be mortified if he knew.

Not just her son, but all her old friends were adept at reading people and situations. Helen returned to the study and picked up the telephone. Her desire to speak to Ava was, she realised, more powerful than her antipathy towards Harry. She lit a cigarette, she dialled, she prepared herself for Harry, and such disappointment to hear the answering machine. Helen left a message for Ava suggesting they meet over the weekend.

‘I need to talk to you,' she said.

4.

I have found my lifelong friend
, Helen had written in her notebook on the day she met Ava. For other people and other friends, lifelong might require the perspective from the end of life, but Helen knew at the beginning, she truly knew. Long before she started at university she had been aware of the creases in her life – everyone has them, those dark spaces you
would prefer not to exist. For Helen, as long as she had Ava, her creases mattered less.

Ava was proof that if one is too much in thrall to everyday demands the imagination, for want of quiet and unfettered energy, becomes dormant. Her clothes were unpressed, her room was a shambles, her desk was a mess. Almost daily she would riffle the layers for a lost page, a lost pen, a phone number, and with mounting impatience would pledge to keep a tidy desk, a tidier life, but she never did.

‘If I found myself in the same situation, the same state of knowledge this year as last, then I might as well be dead,' she said to Helen over their very first cup of coffee in the university cafeteria.

Ava insisted on being a non-believer but at the same time she acted as if there were purpose to life, the main tenet being not to waste it. She was already writing fiction when she started university and her presentations to the Laconics were often drawn from her stories. Far from the usual autobiographically infused fictions of most new writers, Ava's stories roved far and wide. Why confine yourself to the tiny arena of your own life? she would say. Why shun all those marvellous excursions of the imagination? Young men, old women, dogs, gods, monsters, castles, caves, starvation, snow, all found a place in her fiction.

It did not take long for Helen to realise that Ava Bryant was unlike anyone she had ever met, and what struck her as so remarkable was that Ava had chosen her.

‘Ours is a romantic friendship,' Helen said when she moved out of college to join Ava in her communal house. ‘Like Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West.'

‘You don't think they slept together then?' Ava asked.

‘No, I can't imagine Virginia would be in it.'

There was a long silence before Ava spoke. ‘I think people can sleep with practically anyone if there's a good enough reason.'

They had known each other a year at this time. They were best friends and best friends shared their deepest secrets. Now Helen wondered if this really had been the case, particularly given Ava's embargo on her family.

‘Some actions and events have their own place and their own reason,' Ava continued in a rush. ‘Nothing would be served by making them public.'

And despite her curiosity Helen left it at that.

There are snapshots in memory that never fade. Ava playing both Romeo and Juliet using the sculpture of a severe-faced university benefactor as a prop; Ava giving a spontaneous recitation of
Howl
at Tiamo café in Lygon Street; Ava with a loudhailer outside the Swanston Street sex shop during a Reclaim the Night march; the two of them sitting by Sydney Harbour eating mango for the first time.

The invitation had arrived in the mail, even though Ava's bedroom was the next one down the hall.

 

A
VA
B
RYANT INVITES
H
ELEN
R
ANKIN

TO AN ALL-EXPENSES PAID TRIP TO
S
YDNEY

TO LEAVE THE DAY AFTER HER LAST EXAM

 

Helen had never travelled outside Victoria and she assumed Ava's experience was the same. The Opera House, the harbour, the bridge, Sydney! She and Ava could not wait a moment longer. Or at least that was how Helen understood it. But just as she did not press Ava on how she managed to fund
two return train tickets and pay for everything during the trip, neither did she question her obvious familiarity with Sydney. Ava was always so generous that to question, to ask for more, seemed ungrateful.

Such an adventure, Helen knew nothing to compare. The train was not crowded and the two of them had a second-class compartment all to themselves. They placed their bags in the overhead rack and spread themselves, their books, a cache of sweets and cigarettes, and coats for warmth across the two long seats. The compartment was an assortment of browns, from the cracked leather of the seats to the wood panelling from which all polish had disappeared, to the ooze of cigarettes and other journeys that hit them as soon as they entered. But it might have been the
Orient Express
as far as Helen was concerned.

It was still light when the train pulled out of Spencer Street Station. They passed quickly through central Melbourne into the inner industrial suburbs, rendered strange from the raised perspective of the train. Within an hour they were in the country. It was dusk and the sky was radiant with pink and maroon strokes between long grey ribbons of cloud. When it was completely dark they pulled down the blind, and in the mustardy light, their feet propped on the opposite seat and their bodies rocking with the train's rhythm, they talked through the night.

The train pulled into Sydney at eight o'clock the next morning. They washed in the station bathroom and bought bacon-and-egg sandwiches at a kiosk. Everything ordinary was extraordinary. The station at peak hour was dizzy with people and that particular fuel-and-grime smell of large train stations. Ava dragged Helen out of the main bustle to a space near a wall.

‘Close your eyes,' she said. ‘Close your eyes.'

And the two of them stood at Central Station in a swarm of noise and smells, their eyes closed and arms linked as the foreign crowd of Sydney streamed past.

‘Where are you?' Ava asked, raising her voice above the din.

‘London. No, Cambridge,' Helen said. ‘And you?'

‘St Petersburg,' Ava said, ‘in the summer before the revolution. And in Cambridge with you. And London, and Paris, and –' she raised her arms and opened her eyes, ‘Sydney. I'm in Sydney now!'

They spent the day around the harbour. They tramped all through the Opera House, the steps and paths that were open to the public and a good many corridors and performance rooms which were not. They ate their lunch perched on a low wall, the harbour on one side and the marvellous sails of the Opera House shimmering above them.

‘Imagine being up there,' Ava said, nodding at the sails. ‘Your body spread-eagled on those gorgeous curves.'

For dessert, Ava bought a large, exorbitantly priced mango and the two of them sat on a parapet overlooking the water while Ava sliced off pulpy cheeks and cubed them with her pocket knife, introducing Helen to the wonder of mangoes. The taste was paradisaical, the taste of Eden, Helen said. And she would never change her mind, not even when mangoes became common fare and she could eat them every day. But her first mango, like so many firsts, she experienced with Ava. They asked a tourist to take a photo of them. And when the tourist moved on they took turns in capturing the other on black and white film in every stage of eating mango.

‘Black and white is more artistic than colour,' Ava said.

They made a frieze of the photos above the fireplace in the house they shared. The same photos, now limp and faded,
stretched in a vertical line down the side of Helen's study window. Wherever she had lived she had put up the mango pictures. It was a way of establishing home.

Before Thursday's reunion she had not seen Ava for nearly three years. But three years or three days would make no difference. The best connections do not require support material from time. She would fix the NOGA fellowship, but she was not in a hurry to return to America. To be living in the same city with Ava, to see her as often as she liked, was exactly what she needed to sort through her work problems. As for Harry, her friendship with Ava had survived twenty-plus years of him, and it would now survive his new-found power.

5.

At seven-thirty on Monday morning Helen punched in the security code and entered the laboratory. She left her coat and laptop in the office and headed out to the bench. She had passed the weekend battling her career dilemmas and struggling to hold Harry's threats at bay. Ava had not returned her call.

Well-functioning laboratories are bigger or smaller, better or lesser equipped, older or newer, but fundamentally the same the world over – like churches have a sameness whether an open-sided thatched structure in New Guinea or a cathedral in Bruges. There's the familiar prickling of chemicals, the particular coolness of the air, the crisp green-white of the lights, the hum of the refrigerators. Helen had arrived at the lab early in order to see if the gene had taken. She set up the gel bath, checked everything was in order, the sample properly in place,
the electrolyte level, and turned on the current. Such a lovely process – the electric current separating and arranging the genetic components so they can be seen in vertical arrangements of bands. Life's mysteries made visible.

While the current sorted out the DNA, she returned to the office to deal with her email. There were the usual queries from Maryland, invitations to meetings, greetings from friends, all routine until the email with the subject line
FLYER FOR YOUR FORTHCOMING LECTURE
, at which point the calm of the morning, the pleasure in her work, her sense that she could do her science and let everything else be damned, crashed.

This lecture had been arranged months ago while she was still in the US. It was to focus on new frontiers in molecular biology, but according to the flyer she was to speak on ‘Bacteria and the New Bioterrorism'. She was described as ‘the renowned expert on bioterrorism'. How typically Australian to call a spade a bloody shovel; in America the lecture would be couched in optimistic euphemism, something along the lines of ‘Securing our World: Safe Food, Safer Future'. But that was beside the point: her area was not bioterrorism, a bioterrorism expert was not who she was.

She knew who was to blame. She printed off the flyer, grabbed her things, locked the lab and set off for the NOGA offices. Bloody Harry whose ‘Be sensible', ‘You know the right thing to do', ‘Many people have invested in you', whose unsmiling face in fish-eye lens close-up was hounding her through the days and nights. Harry was as lethal as any bacteria, but there was something spoiling in him, something not playing by the rules.

 

His door was open, he was seated at his desk, his polished head bent close to a newspaper. He started as she entered.

Helen slapped the flyer on top of his paper. ‘What's this?'

Harry read it slowly. He seemed to be considering every word. He picked the page up, he took it in at a distance, he drew it in close. ‘It reads well,' he said at last, looking up at her. ‘I'm pleased with it. Yes,' he said, nodding his big head, ‘very pleased.'

‘So you are behind this?'

Harry's features settled into ostentatious concern. ‘I wanted to spare you,' he said. ‘You've far more important things to do than write an advertisement for a public lecture.'

He was being deliberately evasive. She grabbed the flyer and waved it in his face. ‘This is not my research.'

‘But it is,' Harry said quietly, settling back in his chair. ‘And a good deal more interesting than diarrhoea in Somalia or contaminated oysters in Japan.'

‘This is not my research,' she said again. She spoke slowly, emphasising each word. ‘I do not work in bioterrorism.'

He smiled, how she hated that smarmy smile. ‘But you do,' he said. ‘A glance at the last half-dozen international meetings you've attended testifies to that.'

She was standing over him, glaring down. ‘It's an off-shoot of my work, not its main thrust. And it's certainly not my primary interest.'

‘Are you equipped to address this topic –' he twisted his head so as to read the title from the flyer, as if he didn't know it already, ‘Bacteria and the New Bioterrorism?'

‘You know I am.'

‘And would you like a good-sized crowd?'

‘Of course I would.'

Again he smiled. ‘You have to admit it's a catchy title.'

‘It's terrible and I want it changed. And that appalling bioline as well.'

He gazed up at her from his big shiny desk. ‘Too late I'm afraid. Notice of the lecture has already been emailed out.' He cocked his head to one side, he frowned with concern. ‘I'm sorry to have upset you. But don't you think you might be over-reacting to what is essentially just a difference in emphasis?'

She took in the frown, the fake concern, his aggressive courtesy. She took in Harry Guerin.

‘You really are a bastard, Harry.'

1.

‘You'll be stars for a day,' Connie said.

‘At last,' Jack said with a laugh, ‘our fifteen minutes of fame.'

But Connie wasn't in the mood for jokes. He cuffed a hand at the back of Jack's neck and pulled him close. ‘Just agree,' he said. ‘Please.'

Almost three months had passed since the NOGA cocktail party and contrary to reputation, the massive machinery that was TV programming and production had been working flat out. Gathered now in the round reading room of the State Library were Jack, Helen and Ava, together with Luke for the youth appeal, recruited as extras for the pilot of Connie's TV series,
Travels in Cyberspace
.

It was only the third time since the reunion the friends had met as a group. Jack had tried on numerous occasions to get them together but with Ava and Connie living north of the city and he and Helen in the south, plus Helen's inability to apply temperance to her work and Connie's lack of temperance when it came to Sara, to settle on a time and place that suited them all had been well-nigh impossible. With Helen just a short walk away Jack saw her often, and he managed to catch
up with Connie about once a week; Ava he could see every day she had so much time to spare but he preferred not to be alone with her. What he longed for was their old Laconics nights, all of them in that heated togetherness uniquely theirs, and being involved in the pilot, he believed, was a move in the right direction. The fact that Connie had called on his old friends rather than Sara's crowd, and that the friends had so readily responded, gave Jack confidence they would find their rhythm again.

The director, a woman much their own age, was calling for silence, and Connie, so anxious in the lead-up to filming, now seemed entirely at ease. He was standing under the lights at the head of a bank of computers – Connie, the computers and the shelves of old books captured together in the one frame. He looked prophet-like, Jack thought, not simply the thick halo of white hair and loose pale jumper, but his appearing simultaneously flamboyant and ascetic in this Olympian space. Andy Warhol's dictum aside, Connie's fame required a measure far more solid than minutes. Mountains would be ideal. Four or five prominent piles large enough to bend the horizons of culture. And if Connie's fame could be measured in mountains then Jack's own was a matter of teaspoons. A teaspoon of talent, a teaspoon of fame.

Jack found the notion surprisingly irksome. Fame in any quantity should not matter to him for he never had the same ambition as the others. Perhaps what was different now was his desire to work, a new book, just simmering at the moment, but his first inclination for years. Being asked his opinion on matters Muslim from the Koran to the alienation of Islamic youth, Jack felt the pleasures of an active brain again. And the proximity of his friends helped too; through the get-togethers
with Helen and Connie, along with regular email and telephone contact with all three, he was connected to the dailiness of their work, which seemed to provide fuel for his own.

A phalanx of black-clad people conveyed Connie from one end of the bank of computers to the other while lights were adjusted and sound was tested. So much care was taken with him, everyone so deferential, and Jack found himself wondering at the connection between people treating you as brilliant, your belief in your own brilliance, and most important of all, your ability to come up with the goods. What person who believed himself to be ordinary ever produced remarkable and original work? And while there were legions of people who over-estimated their talent, might it be possible, Jack wondered, to miss your own talent, actually fail to see it?

He gazed around the great domed space, at the shelves of books lining the walls and the spokes of desks radiating out from the keeper's desk at the centre. The State Library had recently been spruced up and the thick sepia cloud he remembered from his high school years had disappeared in fresh paint and polish. But the old-book smell had seeped back, and the original desks had been retained, and still the green lamps, although greener and brighter than they used to be, and still the familiar safety and solitude common to all libraries. Some people count their travels in churches, others in galleries and museums, Jack could count his travels in libraries. Wherever he was in the world, a library was home.

How many of the authors lodged in this place had been convinced of their own gifts, Jack now wondered. His major obstacle was that the more he learned, the more ignorant he knew himself to be. And while this was typical of most writers, rather than energise him as it did Connie, Ava and Helen and
probably most of the authors represented here, he could never be satisfied with anything he produced. Always falling short of his own desires, he hadn't finished anything for years. And yet if he was to be asked if his friends' work was always perfect, he would not hesitate to say that of course it wasn't, although with Helen's he was probably not competent to judge. But he would also add it was different for them: their solid reputations could buoy them through an occasional lapse, but with no reputation to speak of, the smallest fault would sink him.

One of the black-clad film crew shifted him and Helen to one side (Ava had been given a more prominent position by the wall of books), there was a volley of last-minute orders, a stretch of silence, then filming began. Connie strolled along the bank of computers, pausing a moment in front of each screen to press a key and change the display – such a variety, and Connie speaking with ease and eloquence about each. At the end of the line of computers he stops at the wall of books, takes from a shelf Russell's
A History of Western Philosophy
– Jack recognises Connie's own copy with the distinctive woven-cloth cover – and retires to an armchair to read. He looks so pale and graceful against the dark red leather. Ethereal, Jack finds himself thinking, and entirely in keeping with his prophet-like status.

Slowly Connie lifts his gaze. His tight intelligent face stares into the eye of the camera. ‘Come back in an hour or two,' he says, and returns to his book.

The camera waits and watches, the people wait and watch. A couple of seconds more and Connie looks up from his book, his angular features softening to a smile.

‘Watching someone read lacks something in the way of entertainment,' he says, and closes his book. ‘So stay a while
and let's try to understand what's happening here, between this world of knowledge,' he waves at the computers, ‘and this other world of knowledge,' he holds up his book.

The filming stops and the director takes him through his paces again. Connie resumes his position at the line of computers, he pulls down menus, he alters screens, his hands wave in emphasis, he laughs, he frowns, he cocks his head in enquiry, he's feverish with excitement. Jack watches enthralled. Connie looks like a man in love.

They begin rehearsing a new scene. Connie is indicating the array of computers, there's a smorgasbord of information here, he is saying. ‘On this computer there's the world news, on the next the program schedule at the local cinema complex. And here's the Glenn Gould website including,' Connie presses a key, ‘a sample of his playing,' – the first couple of bars of Bach's 15th Goldberg are heard – ‘and how we would like to stay and listen, but with so much on offer there's no time to stop.' He moves to the next screen, a blog from a sixteen-year-old Japanese snow-boarder, the next computer is downloading music, the one after that is playing a DVD of Fritz Lang's
Metropolis
, the last displays a page from Connie's current work in progress. ‘Actually a whole chapter,' Connie says. He scrolls to the end of the document and laughs. ‘A regrettably short chapter.'

‘All this,' and he waves his hand at the computers, ‘all this for my edification, entertainment and livelihood. And I want to take it in. And I want to do it now.'

He sits at one computer then the next then a third. He swivels around to face the camera. ‘Imagine that I spend an entire day at the computer. How quickly will time pass, how filled – saturated – I'll feel when finally I rise from my chair.
But when I peruse the contents of the day, how much do I retain? I pour myself a glass of red,' – ‘The booze will have to go,' Jack hears one of the crew whisper – ‘and I settle in my armchair and try to recall. Not only do I fail to retrieve all but a handful of sites I've enjoyed these past eight hours, but I find I can't sit and think. The chair is comfortable, the room is nicely heated, the wine is excellent, but something has punctured my ability to be still and reflect.'

Connie now leaps to his feet. ‘We are at an extraordinary moment in human evolution. The very nature of thought and memory is changing. This has a profound effect on who we are, but even more importantly it will affect who we can be.' He flits from one computer to the next. ‘We can condemn the new technology for making us lazy and superficial, or we can exploit it in order to make us newly and brilliantly smart.'

Connie leans into the camera. ‘How,' he asks, ‘can we preserve memory in all its tangled richness, memory whose very existence requires prolonged reflection, when the conditions for prolonged reflection have radically altered?'

His voice is raised, he is speaking quickly, too quickly, and he is twitching with his Connie twitches, those odd shrugs of the shoulders and the prickling at the left side of his mouth, peculiarities that originally Jack thought might indicate neuromuscular dysfunction but turned out to be nothing other than Connie gripped by excitement.

‘There's not one but two generation gaps opening up in the technologically advanced world,' Connie continues. ‘Two generation gaps creating three distinct populations. Each of these populations is defined by the means it employs to acquire knowledge. The first group consists of mainly older people who turn to books, newspapers, radio and mainstream
TV to learn about the world. They read, they listen, they reflect, they discuss. Their knowledge acquisition tends to be focused – no multi-tasking when this group wants to learn; it's also language-based and, to the modern sensibility, quaintly leisurely. Then there's the baby-boomer population. The members of this group have a choice of how they learn. They grew up in a world of books and libraries, they listened to the radio and watched TV. As children, their play tended to be improvised and imaginative with no group leader to guide the proceedings. While still young they learned how to think and developed the patience to think things through. But as well they're familiar with the online world of immediate information. They log on to the web for instant knowledge – the date East Timor gained its nationhood, the name of the current president of France, the Nobel Prize winner for physics in 1934, the four-day weather forecast for New York, and wider searches as well: the signs, symptoms and prognosis of a rare blood disorder, the life and recordings of Bob Dylan. When they want knowledge they can choose between printed material or the web, or use a combination of both. Often they'll start with the convenience of the web but soon realise that Wikipedia alone will not satisfy. This group understands,' Connie's excited twitches have shifted into high gear, ‘that there are different ways of accessing knowledge and that knowledge is not the same as understanding. This group can choose which way is likely to have the best yield in any particular situation.'

Luke has moved away from the set. He is clearly not impressed. In fact Luke, who used to be so close to Connie he would refer to him as his Boston dad, is not interested in anything Connie has to say these days. The producer is not
impressed either. He is trying to get the attention of the director, but she is fixed on Connie and looks to be entirely satisfied.

‘Now to the third generation,' Connie says, ‘the online, hooked-up generation who likes its knowledge fast and changing, the generation unlikely to include books as a knowledge source. This is today's youth for whom free time has always been organised time, from baby playgroups and toddler gymnastics to after-school ballet, piano, tennis, karate, to weekend sports and vacation camps. After days, months, years of timetabled activity, this group has little experience of idle time or time spent alone in thought. This is the communication generation, who will fill every vacant moment by connecting with real friends or cyber friends or indeed technology itself. The members of this group negotiate the web imaginatively but have little experience of wandering their own imagination. As for memory, with information on tap and an array of electronic notepads, memory is exercised far less than it used to be. To lodge something in the depths of memory requires stillness, it requires that other noise is silenced, but this is not a quality of these times, nor of the third population.'

Connie peers into the camera, his brow is creased, he is grappling with difficult issues. ‘If you believe as I do that memory is essential to identity, and if you further believe that memory and imagination contribute to the ability to abstract, then you will be concerned that the very cognitive sensibility that has taken us from the cave to the skyscraper, which has given us art, literature, music and technology itself, may now be under threat.'

Luke looks disgusted. He retrieves his backpack and, brushing past Jack, he quits the reading room. The director,
however, has no complaint. She indicates that Connie is to return to the red armchair. He settles into the leather and crosses one leg over the other. He is frowning, his lips are pressed firmly together, he is concerned.

‘We are faced with an ever-changing present,' he says. ‘We live in the ever-new. To exploit the new technology, to exploit the world past and present always at our fingertips we need to withdraw,
you
need to withdraw, to separate for a time from your computer, your cell phone, your PDA, your iPod. Otherwise you run the risk of becoming a person without memory, the quintessential person without qualities who flies fast and ceaselessly on a stream of changing images. You could even become,' and he is now speaking in such a rush that even the director looks bemused, ‘you could become like an old person lost in dementia who lives in the moment and a minute later has forgotten and moved on to the next moment and the next moment and the next.'