‘There’s Helen, of course,’ said Anthea.
This entirely predictable turn provoked the usual spasm of disquiet. Vernon murmured, ‘Again?’ But it lacked conviction.
There were two grave impediments to Helen Neill’s career: she was a conscientious, gifted teacher, and she was bringing up two young children on her own. Years after enrolling in a PhD, she had yet to complete her thesis. Her scholarship had long run out. She lived on the contract teaching that came her way from tenured staff using research grants to buy themselves out of classroom hours and marking. Their careers prospered; hers did not.
Collective guilt about Helen ran high. It was assuaged by interviewing her for every entry-level lectureship that came up in the department. Afterwards, Anthea would take her out to lunch and explain that the panel had been compelled to appoint a candidate with publications and a doctoral degree.
‘She’s made excellent progress recently.’ Anthea spoke in the bright, determined tone she reserved for Helen. ‘I’m sure she’ll have a complete draft by the end of summer.’ It was a topic on which she was a practised liar.
There hung in her colleagues’ minds an image of Helen Neill: shaggy, overweight, fatally mild. She interviewed badly, lacking sleep and the necessary confidence in her genius.
‘We’re not obliged to interview her,’ said Dodd. ‘
Applicants
must have completed a doctoral degree
. There’s your bottom line. No reason to start shifting the goalposts.’
‘Excuse me—’
‘It would be grossly inconsiderate not to interview her.
Tom, Vernon?’
Tosh said in a rush, ‘Within context-sensitive parameters, HR strongly advises against unsuccessing in-house candidates.’ His hair had shaken free in two shining wings. He was an angel who did not fear to tread.
Kevin Dodd would have done very well as a goldfish; it was something about the set of his ears. ‘Well, if we’re pushing the envelope . . . The young English lass, what’s her name now— Felton?’
Tom looked up. Rebecca Finton was the DPhil on his list.
‘Becky Finton, that’s it. She was at the Modern Times conference
in Zürich.’ Dodd cleared his throat. ‘Very, ah, striking.’
Vernon angled his pad towards Tom. ‘SHAGADELIC!
PHWOAR!!’
The meeting went on being progressed.
Anthea held the lift for him. ‘Can you
believe
Kevin?’ She thrust
out her lower lip and blew a little puff of air upwards. The
springy red curls on her forehead shook.
A poster beside them warned of a graduate forum on
‘Performing Masculinity’.
Bruce Lee’s body, taught with fury . . .
Anthea said, ‘It’s OK for you to laugh. That’s one of my
students.’ Then she laughed anyway. ‘Lunch?’
‘Love to, but I’ve got to dash.’
The door pinged open. ‘We’re having a party. I’ll email you.’
Thirty seconds later she called, ‘Bring your girlfriend.’
When he turned, she was smiling. ‘So it’s true.’
He thought, then said, ‘Esther.’
‘Three degrees of separation in this town, Tommo.’
‘Really, that many?’
That Nelly and he were coupled in gossip pleased him. He
walked to the car park through light strokes of rain. From the
dome of an umbrella going the other way a voice said, ‘Yeah,
but will I like philosophy?’
In talk at least he lay enlaced with Nelly. Tom’s fingers curved
in his pocket, assuming the round weight of her breast.
On the way to the Preserve, his mood darkened. The premonition
of failure returned and spread its wings. Stuck in traffic he
stared past his wipers, seeing his book unpublished, his career stagnating. The pursuit of knowledge: as a young man he had thought it honourable, a twentieth-century way to be good.
His faith had wilted when exposed to departmental real-politik; had shrivelled before the academy’s whole-hearted adoption of corporate values and the pursuit of profit over larger aims. Yet a trace of his original reverence had endured, as a phial of scent perfumes a drawer long after the last subtle drops have evaporated. The constant element in a life is usually the product of illusion, dreams directing history with surer cunning than any charter.
Perfection of the life, or of the work
. Tom had never hesitated; never imagined he might botch both.
There came to him, with graphic intensity, a memory from his first year of teaching. Lecturing on
Dubliners
, he had looked up from his notes and seen a student slip from the theatre: silhouetted against a bright oblong before the door swung shut behind her. Tom found himself controlling an impulse to shout encouragement, urging her to flee while there was time. Only weeks earlier his appointment had filled him with elation. Now he gripped the lectern and saw the track on which his days would run.
He pressed the button that lowered the car window. Despite the gloom, the air no longer pinched. The mild, rainy afternoon, scented with exhaust, might have been Indian. Another self flickered at the edge of Tom’s vision: short-sleeved, subtitled in Hindi. He climbed a grimy stairway, through waftings of urine and mustard seed. On a bus bulging with bodies, he reached past layers of hands that matched his own.
For a period in Tom’s adolescence this parallel life had been very real to him. He could still call up a repertoire of scenes rehearsed to perfection. They were not nostalgic, not a revisiting of childish haunts, but sustained visions of an Indian existence. Their function was propitiatory. If he set himself to imagine an Indian life, he would not be returned to one. This bargain with fate involved dropping down the social scale, so that every element of his fictional existence—the clothes he wore, the food he ate, the language he spoke—was borrowed from lives remote from his own. Thus, at the sight of a Friday night treat of fish and chips, Tom pictured himself squatting over a tin plate of spiced pulses. He strolled between the laden shelves of a supermarket while serving glasses of germ-ridden water in a squalid teashop.
Then, quite abruptly, he had abandoned these dreamy designs. If an inattentive moment found him in their thrall, he would break free through an effort of will. He told himself the practice was frivolous, incommensurate with the gravity of his fifteen years. What he feared, in truth, was more insidious. His life in Australia was rendered superficial by the everyday density of his inventions. Beside his hardy Indian familiar, he appeared cursory and surplus. Even now, after the passage of so many seasons, Tom had no wish to prolong their encounter.
The rain had thinned. There were bundles of light above the river. Tom thought of the life he had led, and the life he had missed, and how he would never see his vague teenage face recycled in a child. A message loomed against the sky:
The More You Spend, The More You Earn
; and Tom, picturing his life, saw the impress left by feet on a beach; as if what mattered had walked away.
At the Preserve, Nelly was putting clothes into a bag for the country. When she got into the car, Tom noticed a wide black band of insulating tape stuck across the toe of her left boot.
They talked about Osman. Nelly turned a pink knitted hat in her hands.
On the freeway, she told Tom she had another piece of bad news. The Preserve had sold at auction in May, but the developers had overstretched their resources. Work on the building had been postponed and Nelly allowed to stay; for twelve months, she had been assured. But a letter had arrived that morning giving her until the end of January to move out. ‘I’ve seen the plans. They’re going to squish three apartments onto each floor and put a penthouse on the roof.’ She folded her hat down the middle and said, ‘I’m trying to think of it as a kind of collage. The uses and reuses of a building.’
‘Where will you go?’
‘Brendon’s mentioned some place in Footscray we could share. But I don’t think he’s planning too far ahead right now.’
Then she said, ‘There’s a six-month artist’s residency in Kyoto coming up. Starting next September.’
Kilometres streamed past. Tom said, ‘That sounds pretty exciting.’
‘There’ll be stacks of people after it. But some guy Carson knows on the board says my chances are good.’
I
N THE
mid-1990s, Nelly had begun showing photographs of wooden printer’s trays of the kind once used to store metal type in compartments of different sizes. She would paint the sides of her trays to resemble elaborate carving. Within these frames, some compartments were left empty; others held an object or image. Tom studied a tray whose sumptuous recesses had been lined with the royal blue velvet of jeweller’s cases. Nestled within were banal found objects, one to a niche in reverent display: a pineapple-topped swizzle stick, a hairslide, a condom wrapper, two dead matches, a doll’s dismembered arm. These items deposited by the human tide passing through its streets bore witness to the city’s energy and erosion. Tom was reminded also of the fascination detritus holds for the very young; of the way a small child will pass over a costly toy in favour of absorbed play with bottle tops or a rag or the foil from a toffee, investing the valueless things of the world with joy.
Nelly was given to recycling images: inserting them into new contexts, reproducing them on different scales. Tom noticed that she kept returning to the skipping girl figure. He came across a series in which a painting of the neon sign had been photographed, then smeared while the paint was still wet, photographed again, smeared again, and so on. The image disintegrated over five paintings, the last showing only billows of gorgeous, violet-tinged reds worthy of Venice. Tom pictured Nelly working with swift concentration, her photographer beside her, stepping back from her canvas with wet red hands.
In a museum’s online collection he found a photo of a painted child skipping on the wall of a factory, encircled by the caption Skipping Girl Pure Malt Vinegar. Nelly had montaged this old black-and-white image over a contemporary streetscape, so that while the painted child remained stranded in two dimensions, her metal twin rose airily above her in the sky.
Tom knew the advertising sign of old. His uncle had pointed it out, on a sightseeing evening drive, when the Loxleys first came to Australia; the sign was one of Tom’s earliest memories of the city. The skipping girl wore a scarlet bolero over a snowy blouse, with white socks and strapped black shoes. A neon rope lit up in alternation above her head and at her feet to simulate movement. Her red skirt flared like a night-blooming poppy.
Modern magic was at hand: Tom Googled the sign. He learned that it dated from 1936: the city’s first animated neon sign, calculated to imbue dull vinegar with the romance of novelty. Over time it had deteriorated, been dismantled and replaced; the sky-sign he knew as a child was that copy.
When the vinegar factory relocated to a different suburb, the skipping girl was left behind. By then neon was no longer glamorous, no longer a sign of the times. Besides, the skipping girl had become a landmark. There was a local outcry at the suggestion that she might be moved. Eventually, as buildings were demolished and the streetscape altered, she was shifted along the road to a different rooftop. There she froze in a deathly sleep. It had been years now since her turning rope had lit up the night sky. She had entered the memory of a generation as a spellbound red figure.
Tom could remember the contrary emotions his first encounter with the sign had brought. His instinctive surge of pleasure in the magical sight quickly turned queasy. The big red child’s mimicry of the human seemed tainted with malevolence. The boy twisting around in the back seat of the car for a last glimpse of her was reminded of the long, dim mirrors of India that rippled with secret being; objects that shared her strangeness, denizens of a zone somewhere between artifice and life. She called up a personage who had terrified Tom when he was very young, the tall red scissorman
who comes / To little
boys who suck their thumbs.
There was this too: the sign continued the kingdom of things into the sky. Fresh from a country where giant cutouts and logos and billboards were still rare, Tom was subject to a sentiment he was too young to articulate: that the skipping girl’s presence violated something that should have been inviolable. It was a perception that would dim over time, as he grew accustomed, like everyone else in the city, to the invasion of the sky by commerce. Now tiny silver planes routinely inscribed brand names on the atmosphere, as if the blue air itself were a must-have accessory. People stepping out of their houses in the morning lifted up their eyes to hot-air balloons emblazoned with trademarks, hanging from heaven like Christmas-tree baubles.
Nelly had a printer’s tray called
Own Your Own
that displayed an identical vinegar label, each featuring a skipping girl, in every niche. Tom studied a colour reproduction of the construction in
Art & Australia
. There was a depressing hint of the cage and the production line about the imprisoned, endlessly reiterated figure. It was reinforced by the fine white-painted wire mesh fastened down a vertical line of compartments. But closer examination revealed that in all but two recesses, a tiny box camera had been painted in at the girl’s feet. Its viewfinder faced out, suggesting it was for her use.
Tom supposed it was Nelly’s way of pointing out that the skipping girl had floated free. In acquiring mythic status she had become more and less than the product she embodied: a servant of the market who exceeded the commodity that bore her name. Once an emblem of modernity, she had fallen out of fashion and into a life of her own.
He walked up to Victoria Street one evening while the light still held, past a glass-walled gym where scantily clad bodies had the stripped look of fish. It was the first time in years he had scrutinised the skipping girl sign. He saw that the building on which it perched had been converted into offices and apartments. A woman came jogging out of the lobby, murmuring ‘Beat it!’ as she adjusted her earphones.