People love you differently. Jen knits me a flower. Kate buys a children’s book. Liz says to call from India if I get sick and wants to know how morose I am when I write about getting on the plane with a heavy bag; later she asks for an address in Paris to send something for an old heathen feast. Emma looks after the house and uproots the garden.
Joe, who I met in Geelong years ago, takes me everywhere and pays for everything in Toronto and laughs when I tell him about the draft of the first Hemingway blog, saying it's from someone who couldn’t lift a club to kill a fish. Roger, from choir in Melbourne, wants me to text him the instant I walk into St Peter’s.
Then in Paris, on a morning I go for bread and croissants, Ian and Melissa's daughters draw pictures. Elizabeth does one of us holding hands so I won’t forget her when I’m gone. On the opposite side her sister Victoria draws all of us together with two butterflies floating higher than the sun and two love hearts above where we float as if in a Chagall painting. I keep the page in my wallet and look at it every time I clean out receipts.
A fortnight later, after Slovenia and Italy, I tell Bruno – my friend and host in Basel – about how homesick I am after ten weeks and that I want to delay Spain and maybe go back to Paris for a few days. He stands at the door to his terrace and blows a wisp of smoke from his cigarette into the fresh autumn night:
You are about half way through your trip? Paris is a good idea. It is more familiar to you than anywhere else in Europe and you could stay with your friends again. But there is no-one chasing you out of this flat.
I stay two more days and catch the train to Seville.
The only reply I can offer is to write people into these pages, but it doesn’t happen fluently. There are just a few blogs, unfinished pieces on Havana and Toronto, sketches on Italy, ideas for Basel and Seville and a blank page on Ljubljana. I am spinning in dry mud.
Havana, that bog of a place, has been the problem. I start to think about writing a story rather than an essay about a flabby pink-skinned tourist woman and an angular and angry-thin Cuban man I saw eat together in a tourist bar and leave without ever speaking.
It's not easy. My most recent stories were a late Spring afternoon’s work in Sydney, nearly twenty years ago, when I was avoiding composing an orchestral work for an end of year portfolio, and enjoying ham and baps and green olives with fresh green oil, cracked black pepper and amber beer for lunch.
A Greek bakery on King Street near Newtown station, long since closed, sold the big thick airy dough-laden buns, and an Italian delicatessen five minutes walk up the road (still there in May) sold the best green olives and ham. The extra-virgin oil was from Italy and a wholesaler on Norton Street in Leichhardt sold it in four-litre tins for ten dollars. I found the beer somewhere. It was a happy time.
The stories are here to evacuate them from my mind. I was thinking about lots of things then, mostly worlds within Blake's grain of sand, which could never be reached.
***
Simon sat working. He liked to work. Whenever he thought of what his life had become, he worked.
It didn’t cure his thoughts. They followed him constantly. Always ringing, ringing the same piercing pitch with the same piercing consistency.
In time he realised his condition. The rage he first felt subsided and he began to write monotone songs without words, beautiful songs of internal infinity, limited in their outer extremes.
And whenever he wrote he thought always of Whitman, but knew that the lines belonged to another, and not to him.
The birds
Megan sat in the park with a hidden flask of wine. She always sat in the park at this time of year, drinking wine from a hidden flask, but only because she knew the birds would not harass her for money or food.
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| Église Saint-Pierre de Montmarte, Paris |
Michelle watched the drop of wine fall back into the glass. Glass had mesmerised her from the time she started entering churches. Now as it made a ripple in the red pool she began to gently cry.
Michael put the tear on his finger. He knew that when she saw the stains from the outside she could see no way for light to enter. From the inside she could see no way of escape.
The same idea about living occurred to him whenever he shaved in the bathroom.
The loose tooth
Simon spluttered out a loose tooth across the table. He watched it dance around the blood that speckled out over the page with his convulsions. It was of no importance. He couldn’t think of anyone he wanted to write to.
The duel
In one last attempt Sarah put her hand on the table. The heel balanced an archway which isolated each finger. It could only have been meant for him to take, but he did not take it. They saw each other, hesitantly, only once more.
Years later he was talking to his friend who challenged him to a duel. One believed closeness was the start of misunderstanding you felt with someone you love; the other thought it was distance.
Exhausted, one said ‘I can live and make love anyone, but I cannot love, because I fear the weight of separation that comes when another dies.’
The other said ‘I can live and make love with no-one because I fear the weight of separation that comes when another leaves the room, but I can love any.’
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