The Pages (5 page)

‘He took us by surprise when he came back here to live – the way he straight off began decorating his room with fancy chairs, sofas, some statues, silk curtains – you name it – it cost an arm and a leg. He had some idea in his head of the perfect environment. Anything that could help him in his chosen work. I don't know how he could make sense of the problems he was trying to solve. Way over my head.' Lindsey rubbed her eye. ‘It wasn't long before he threw it all out, the cushions, the lot, and just had a card table, a kitchen chair, no books, not one, and nothing on the walls. I called it the “piano room”. He called it his “simple room”.

‘A woman came to stay with him once. She was from Sydney. I wasn't sure about her. She had a nice figure, and she knew it. Perhaps that was it. After about a week she left.'

Listening to Lindsey talking about her invisible brother, Erica felt her energy return and found herself nodding at the bits and pieces on him, though she held back even in anticipation from what remained ready and waiting for her, his life-work.

Later in the morning, she decided to get up.

Sophie called out from her room. Seated naked in a small chair she was removing her nail polish; her body, exaggeratedly soft and pale, overwhelmed the chair. It made Erica consider the smallness of her own body. ‘What is a comparison?' had been the subject of one of her earliest papers (took an early things-in-themselves line; well-received).

‘And you are feeling?' Without looking up Sophie went on, ‘I'm not sure I enjoy staying in someone else's house. What to make of that woman? I'm talking about Lindsey. She cultivates a sort of privacy, which I assume encourages us to try to look at her. Do you know what I mean? I'm not sure what she thinks of the two of us. What do you think?'

Finished with her nails, she smiled at Erica.

Sophie wanted always to understand the other person, every person she met. She liked nothing better than trying to fathom a person's behaviour. She waded in. It was what she was good at. Unable to stop, she would first try to establish the source of the behaviour, and by so doing she could for a moment put her own self to one side; at least it seemed that way to her.

‘Guess what? The brother didn't turn up. You don't suppose he's run away from us and is out there hiding behind a tree?'

Erica smiled. If anyone should be running away it was her. Through the window she saw a tall pale-grey eucalypt surrounded by a darker cluster of pines, elms, cedars. It pronounced a solitary, take-it-or-leave-it way of being. The simple strength of the tree: stand it alongside the lack of statement, on her part. For a moment – before looking away – Erica saw herself as resolute only in a few minor things.

Sophie, she professed a low opinion of nature. ‘Basically, it is merely visual,' she had been heard to say. ‘It just happens to be there, and that's it.'

8

TRAVELLERS AND strangers to all parts of Australia, especially away from the coast, can expect wonderful hospitality. The country has its faults, as any country does, but lack of hospitality is certainly not one of them. Only when hospitality is little more than an excessive informality, when an entire nation breaks into premature smiling and all-teeth, small-talk mode – which betrays an absence of philosophical foundations – does it appear as nothing more than an awkward type of lightness.

The more isolated and hostile the terrain, the more authentic the hospitality. In their falsity the travellers are made to feel at home. Desert people are renowned for sharing with strangers their last handful of dates and puddle of used coffee, often without saying a word. There is a courtesy here – without naivety. The world is inhospitable; the cold earth. Assist another person if encountered on its surface. The instinct is a basic one. In modern times it can be as minor as changing someone's flat tyre by the side of the road. In a poor farm or village in Spain or somewhere it is common for a crust of bread and a lump of cheese to be wrapped in cloth and given to the traveller about to continue the journey. It is unsmiling hospitality. Other places are known to share their women with travellers.

At first glance you would think that the psychoanalytical person would understand hospitality, and be hospitable, whilst the philosophical person would remain distant to the point of turning away. The opposite happens to be the case. The psychoanalytical person plumps up the pillows and leaves it at that. To extend hospitality to another person subdivides aspects of their difficult, hidden self. And any suggestions of a food offering acting as a language is brushed aside: for it could only reduce the amount of language available to describe their own attention-requiring state of mind.

But then it could hardly be said the philosophers have set a cracking pace in generosity to strangers either. Almost to a man they practise in their daily lives a specific remoteness, a behaviour verging on abstraction. Et cetera, et cetera. Oh, yes.

9

INSTEAD OF learning the fine art of wool-classing, Wesley had thought he might try something entirely different, such as science or languages at one of the universities. His father had other ideas. A push, which is eventually necessary between father and son, turned into a full-blown shove, and Wesley watched as his father, still reading the riot act, tripped and fell on his knees, kicking up a puff of dust. A scuffle near the veranda steps, Lindsey in a short skirt looking on. This was at the beginning of 1978.

By ten o'clock, not-so-young Wesley was on the train to Sydney, where he camped in his mother's apartment at the Astor. He soon realised he couldn't stay there. It was the powdered humidity, mirrors wherever you turned, the bathroom with its array of milky jars, bottles in the shape of hearts, tweezers and pencils, the miniature soaps from the south of France, little things, potpourri, the embroidered foot-stools – and his mother, the docile tea-drinker, long-fingered, a woman of taste, interested and yet not really – enough to have him step out after less than a week and find somewhere else.

The first apartment he saw was good enough. Typical of the buildings around Kings Cross it had a chrome-plated bolt of lightning decorating the glass doors, and a maroon carpet of floral pattern which darkened the foyer and continued into the lift. It was strange living in a tall building where so many other people lived – all those nearby lives, attended by the water and gas pipes and the electrical wires. Wesley's apartment on the fourth floor faced Macleay Street. A thin man with out-of-control black eyebrows, which gave him an untidy bachelor look, claimed to be the oldest resident, and made it his job to latch onto any new tenant, to help them ‘acclimatise', as he put it. He was known as Joseph. No abbreviation was possible. With Wesley he went around and pointed out the fuse boxes and the location of the rubbish bins; along the way he kept noticing things which reminded him of certain tenants and their exasperating behaviour, and he went on complaining, shaking his head and so on, as he led Wesley onto the roof to show him the clothes line, raising his voice as he stepped over a young woman in a bikini lying on a towel.

People in the building came and went at all hours, and looking down from his window Wesley could see figures moving along Macleay Street, stopping now and then to talk. Where he came from, in the country, there was no movement after dark – nothing. By eight fifteen, everybody was asleep and loudly snoring. In the city, people couldn't sleep; and they talked more. Always someone, somewhere. Much of the talk was in the realm of small courtesies, although a man could often be seen arguing on the footpath to convince another to his line of thinking.

As for his own talkability, the endless paddocks and the creaking tin roofs had passed through him and left behind a teeth-sucking way of speaking/smiling. It suggested some sort of face-in-shadow reserve; but soon enough he joined in giving the standard nod and ‘Good Morning!' to people in the building. Straw blonde about fifty-plus applied lipstick in the lift. She was the one who always asked him the time, yet didn't appear interested in the answer. Most mornings he had bacon and eggs at a café next to the Sicilian barber's. It was one of the side streets that form the misshapen asterisk, Kings Cross. He bought his cigarettes at a place that sold complicated mechanical ashtrays, the genuine Havana corona. He was twenty-two. Of course he liked the idea of smoking and looking thoughtful. Along the streets were spaces into which were fitted cramped enterprises, where figures bent over needle and thread, while others nearby did their best to resurrect wrinkled tan shoes, sandals and ankle boots, so reproducing the craftsman's atmosphere, not much different from the Middle Ages – one bloke still held tacks between his lips, as he cut leather and hammered. Others there on Darlinghurst Road had tired expressions as they cut pizzas into bleeding triangles which drooped over plates, day and night, like Dali watches. Bottle shops, money-changers, the fluorescent optimism of the all-night newsagent. Strip joints – ‘nite spots', they're advertised as – had a door opening onto stairs going up to nowhere, to darkness and pounding repetitious music, a spruiker or two on the footpath pointing up the stairs. To kill time or just being polite they listened half-heartedly to tarts bitching about the other girls. A stripper in a short coat looking cold and hungry running across the street to her next venue. Opposite the fountain, a butcher sold basic cuts and Australian sausages, unaware of the shifting demographics; Wesley noticed the way this gangling slack-lipped countryman sat down to his lunch at the back of the shop, tucking into two freshly fried lamb chops with liver, no vegetables. Pawnshops are drawn to the intersections, variety in all its messiness, no more surprising than the banks in there too, adopting a patient, resigned air, at least architecturally.

Street people spotted Wesley as a yokel, not only for his red ears and premature crow's feet, and the tan boots – only missing item being the hat – but also his wide-open gaze of one who had never before seen at close quarters eye-sliding men and women, jittery, and yet matter-of-fact types, flaunting themselves to make a quid – and the wear and tear it takes out on the eye, mouth, skin and sympathies in general. In the first week his wallet had gone. But this was a man earlier on Bayswater Road who saw a twenty-dollar note on the footpath and kept walking. Even back then he could hardly be bothered bending down – or seen to be stooping for anything.

At night he was a large slow fish with bulging eyes passing through the channels, changing mind, turning back, taking in and digesting the many different movements between people, and the people themselves, their expressions, temptations. In fact, the world had turned its details in his direction; every little thing seemed to wait in bright, clear light for his inspection. Edge of building, one eye bigger than the other, pigeons unafraid of that fat woman. He felt like squatting down to examine the very small and ordinary. Early in the morning, streets were watered and along the gutters flowed bus tickets, dry leaves, dead matches and toothpicks, cigarette butts, torn notes, trimmings from fingernails, hair – all manner of leftovers, discarded things. And as he kept seeing each day something fresh on the street, he felt he was gaining experience, or at least complexity, even though it was only observation.

To have her boy within reach his mother had a telephone installed in his apartment. And it became more or less established Thursday nights were set aside for her, his mother. If other people were invited she'd phone and suggest he wear a necktie; otherwise, it would be pasta or Thai takeaway from trays, not saying much. A daughter might have been better, but Mrs Antill and Lindsey didn't get on.

Early on she enquired, ‘What did you do last night?'

‘I went to a brothel, on Darlinghurst Road.'

‘Oh, that's nice. What was she like?'

‘Blonde.'

‘I suppose she would have a nice figure.'

‘I think all she wanted was for me to make her laugh.'

As for what his mother did all day in the city in amongst its verticals and congesting horizontals he could only wonder. To hear her women friends, she was incredibly, determinedly active, and – news to him – a bridge player at state championship level.

Whenever his father turned up he stayed at the Australia Club. It was a few minutes from the Astor – same street. After finishing his business or attending the races Cliff Antill went back to the property without looking in on his wife. And when after almost a year Wesley and his father eventually spoke again it was in the dining room of the club, where the oil paintings were benign and the lunch specialty was the steak-and-kidney pie.

Because there was no point going over their argument, and Wesley showed no interest in the horses, his father looked into the distance as if he was back on one of his paddocks, and talked about his stamp collection. There were collectors and there were philatelists, explained his father who had plump, weather-beaten fingers. And there is a difference. He was a philatelist. Look at the near-completion of his collection: among its treasures, the blue first kangaroo, 1912. All a man needs is a preoccupation, preferably involving classification. Later, as Wesley walked home by the water at Woolloomooloo, he saw how philately was a solitary pleasure which centred, unusually, not on the specimens secured in rows, but in the contemplation of those that were
missing
. Now there's a strange pleasure. And he could see his father sitting in his office at the homestead – could go for weeks without a word – identifying from his swivel chair the gap in the pattern of his life. His wife as a rare postage stamp! A figure of theatrical design who had to be handled with tweezers; for the moment unattainable, out of reach.

‘Have you found your feet?' his father managed to ask as he bent into a taxi, not turning around. ‘More or less,' he would have said at that early stage.

At one of the Thursday dinners Wesley found himself seated next to Virginia Kentridge, a friend of his mother's. Instead of talking he fiddled with his knife and fork, and considered the farm shed with its hard dirt floor, and on the bench the grey metal cabinet, which held in drawers, at different levels, screws and nails of various sizes; always interesting pulling them out and having a look, even if you didn't want anything. Under the bench old bottles, sheets of tin, lengths of wood.