When did death enter Lenny’s life? When did she slide from the domain of fruit trees and storytelling into the sphere of silence? Did it happen all at once, the night of the killings? Or did death enter stealthily, sliding like a serpent from some moss-covered well, grey and white tessellations camouflaged against the smooth pebbles of the formal rock garden?
Lenny had known death. She’d loitered by death’s door, then crept forward quietly and sat by its bedside. It looked out at her through her grandfather’s eyes, and it fixed her in its gaze. She recognized death for what it was: finality. Death, somehow, misidentified Lenny.
“Edie,” said Death, speaking through her grandfather’s thin, scaly lips.
“I’m here,” she replied, taking Death’s hand. Her grandfather’s fingers were mottled flesh and bone.
“Edie,” the ventriloquist voice of death repeated. “You’re here.”
“Of course I’m here,” said Lenny, holding Death’s gaze, holding her grandfather’s fingers. “Where else would I be?”
“I thought you were gone and now you’re here. I still have you.” Death smiled at Lenny.
“I’m always yours,” said Lenny, and now her voice was not her own. “I’m always here.”
The body on the bed was long and lean. If it raised itself up, it could run marathons.
“You’ll never escape me,” it whispered.
“I’ll come to meet you,” Lenny said. Silence smothered the room.
Silence filled the space and squeezed out the air. Lenny couldn’t speak. There was nothing she could say.
“I met you under a plum tree,” the living corpse said suddenly. “You were maybe thirteen. You look just the same.”
The death’s head turned towards her. Its face flushed pink and her grandfather’s eyes animated its eye sockets.
“You are unchanged, Edie,” her grandfather said. “You will always live.”
“Tell me the story, grandfather,” Lenny pleaded. Time stretched forever on that bed but now she felt urgency. Her grandfather was with her.
“You were just thirteen,” he smiled. His tongue moistened his lips. It was not quite blue.
“You stood beneath the plum tree and the petals showered down. You were laughing. You were beautiful and I knew you were the one. The one who would live. The one who would live always.”
“What was I doing, under the plum tree?” Lenny asked.
“Doing? You were being. You were being the eternal one. The one who cannot die.”
“But grandfather,” she said. “I know I must die. I’ve seen it. I’ve dreamed. We will all die. Buildings will burn and my family will be torched. There was blood. Blood everywhere.”
“Petals were falling. Stars burned in the sky.” Her grandfather’s words were suspended in air. His mouth hung open. Lenny was afraid the silence would return.
“You were standing in the moonlight. You shook that tree and its blossoms fell. You laughed at the sky and then you saw me. You put your fingers to your lips and told me ‘Shhh. Don’t tell.’”
“I said that?” Lenny laughed. “A storyteller telling a storyteller to hush? What was I thinking?”
“I have no idea,” her grandfather smiled. “I never understood your stories, Edie. But here’s what I think. I think you knew the end was coming. I think you had dreams. You woke up screaming. But I know you always laughed at death.”
Lenny felt abrupt grief. Her voice fell flat. “How can I laugh, when I’m not allowed to speak? How can I live, when the silence rules?”
The bones entwined in her fingers squeezed lightly. The bones were lightly padded and lightly veined. She could feel their faint warmth, feel their faint pulse.
“You will climb to the heights and hide in the depths. You will cloak yourself in silence. You will learn to use the silence to punctuate your tales. You will bury yourself in your heritage and live forever through it. You know who you are.”
“The one who cannot die.” Lenny breathed the words.
“The one who will not die. The one who refuses.”
“How can you know this?” Lenny demanded. “How can I know who I am? Even you don’t know me, grandfather!”
“Of course I know you, Lenny.” It closed its eyes. “You are the one who evades and confronts. The one who lives.”
Lenny stared at the death’s head and knew her grandfather had gone. Where had he gone, her grandfather and Edie? To what night-land of star-lit plum blossom had their spirits flown?
She let go of the bony hand.
“Grandfather,” she said softly. “Can you hear me? Is it silent where you are?
She paused, and listened. She thought she heard voices, soft murmured voices. She thought she heard laughing.
And she knew. She knew who she was.
“I am a story teller,” she said to the silent room. “I am the one who will not die. I am the one who tells.”
*
Here, in this hole in the ground, she lay in damp mud, a fugitive curled up alongside three survivor comrades.
“Chapin,” She said, grabbing Chapin’s arm. “I’ve dreamed. I know what I need to do now. We need to get out of here.”
Chapin, half asleep, nodded.
“We need to get back into the light to tell our stories. Not the mythic ones. The stories about what happened to us, about the killings, and after.”
She pressed her face close to his. “We’ve been in a hole. We’ve evaded and hidden. Now we need to confront.”
Chapin, now awake, rolled towards his rifle and rose to his knees.
When the war was over the true terror began. It was the time of the Servants. It was hard for those of us who had been child soldiers. The Servants sent us to re-education camps to learn what service means. We learnt the tea ceremony and how to fellate our teachers. We spent dawn hours in the fields and afternoons doing data entry. In the evening we had group sessions to confess our service failures. Then we poured more tea.
I enjoyed the war. I lived in the hills, sometimes with other child soldiers, sometimes alone. When my home was first burned – when my family was burned – I escaped into the forest and lived alone for months. Mostly on raw bats. Bats taste foul but they’re easy to catch. Beetles are OK. You have to find big ones to get any juice, but the crunchy thing satisfies. I dreamt of pumpkin soup.
But I enjoyed it. The war. The way the sky lit up. So frequent yet so unpredictable. I loved those huge chutes of purple and pink. And yellow. And peach. I wanted weapons of my own, but all I had then was a knife. I wanted to find Servants so I could try it out.
Finding Servants is even easier than catching bats. They don’t take a lot care to cover their tracks. They’d say they do. They’d say they wear black and observe vows of silence to be unobtrusive. To be self-effacing. But except during the hours of the Silent Vow they talk all the time. They yell, they shout, they gossip, they grumble. They’re men. They even piss loudly.
That’s how I’d take down my first kills. They were outliers, men who’d left the group to piss or wank or just be alone. Me, I like being alone, but for a Servant it’s a vulnerable place. If you come up with a knife, unobtrusive, you can angle it upwards under their lower ribs and slash the vital organs. Lots of juice there. They generally die silent.
Sometimes they grunt, and once in a while they roar. If they make too much noise other men come running. That’s when it pays to be self-effacing, and it isn’t something I’ve needed to practice. Though as it happens I’ve accumulated experience.
When I was small my sister said I’d be handy in a war zone. And that was before the war. I don’t know if she saw the war coming then – if anyone did – but that’s what she said. It didn’t help her any. I couldn’t help her. When war arrived she died just like the others.
A war arrives like an unwanted guest. You’re going about your business – working or playing, quarrelling or hugging – and suddenly there’s this presence that interrupts everything. Suddenly everything, everyone, is enforced into its servitude.
I served the war for countless months and I mean that. I lost count. I have no idea how long the war went on. It just went on. Raw bats and blood and beetles and knives. Weapons of all kinds and smashed up entrails. Smashed in heads. Shattered hips and crushed legs. Smears of blood with just traces of bodies. It was good up in the hills where it was green and not red, and where the sky lit up like a pageant nightly. Sometimes there were other kids to talk to, and other kids to fight alongside. Sometimes there was food.
In the tea ceremony, we have to pour just so. The tea must reach a certain depth of colour – not lighter, not darker. We use a certain quantity of tea powder and whisk just so. The texture must be entirely light. We pour precisely to a certain level. We serve with a smile.
I don’t know what end purpose we serve here for. When we reach a certain level we are disappeared. The Servants tell us if we fulfil our potential we will be permitted into their community to represent redemption and model service values. I think they kill us.
The thing is, the Servants have always killed us, and it’s not like they’re dependent on us to serve them tea. They could do their own tea if the tea was what mattered. What matters is the service, which is what they’ve always been about. Once we erase ourselves and are effaced into pure service they’ve made their point; they might as well kill us. Or not. We’ve ceased to exist at that point. But they like to kill, so I think that’s how it ends.
But then again, I like to kill too, and I know who I am. I am a soldier. The more I meditate on serving the more I want to serve, just not quite the way the Servants have in mind. So maybe it’s not over. Did I say the war was over?
*
The tea ceremony? I could perform the tea ceremony with my eyes put out. Maybe some day I will.
These are the elements for the tea ceremony: tea, a small knife, a small mortar and pestle, a tea bowl, a bowl stand, tea cups, a whisk, a low table, a kettle, a kettle stand, a stove (with charcoal), a trainee, a Servant (or several). The teacake is pre-prepared. It’s imported from somewhere, I don’t know where. I believe it grows wild on forested cliffs. It’s white tea, rare and precious. Only the new shoots are picked, when they’re whitish, almost translucent. The shoots are picked at dawn, plump with dew. I’m told they must be picked by long fingernails; finger pads would bruise them.
Who told me this? A girl in the camp. She was a bit older than I am. I only talked with her once, after that she disappeared. I would have liked to ask her more.
The tea leaves are steamed, then crushed, then shaped by a mould into the form of an egg. Why an egg? I don’t know. I think it’s just aesthetically pleasing. Then the tea-egg is dried. It’s wrapped in a very fine tissue, each tea-egg stored in its individual container. The containers are carved from fragrant wood but unembellished. The tea-egg and the containers are smooth.
When I am called to perform the tea ceremony I am required to be washed first. I report to the cleansing studio. In the cleansing studio I am entirely passive: everything is done on my behalf. I am stripped of clothing and my intimate parts are scrubbed using sponges soaked in tepid water. By “my intimate parts”, I mean everywhere there is a hinge joint: between and under my toes, around my ankles, behind my knees, in my groin and where thigh meets hip, under my arms, under my chin, in my elbows, around my wrists, between and around my fingers. Also anywhere there are flesh flaps: my genitals, around my lips, my nostrils, my earlobes, around the top cartilage of my ears, my eyelids.
My scalp is washed. If hair has sprouted, it’s shaved again. It’s important that no blood be spilt so they’re careful not to cut me. The women who prepare me are expert. They do this fast and silently, never making eye contact. When they’re done they step me into a simple undergarment and wrap a large shawl around me. The shawl is fine cotton and feels not unpleasant. The women tuck and fold so the shawl covers me entirely. There’s no risk of it coming undone. I can move my arms and my torso without fearing cloth will fall into the tea bowl.
When I am clad the women paint a single spot on my face, a red dot just below my lower lip. I don’t know what it symbolises but I’m guessing it means something.
The oldest of the women then presents me with a tea-egg container. I am escorted out of the cleansing studio and guided to the tea house. As if I don’t know where it’s located. Tea is only ever served in the tea house. Everything is already set up there. The Servants are waiting.
So when I enter the tea house I see the Servants, sitting cross-legged on cushions alongside a low table. The table is plain and utterly smooth. The Servants wear black, as they always do. For the tea ceremony they wear their indoor robes. The fabrics are fine textured and deepest dark black, but devoid of ornamentation. The Servants’ Silent Vow applies during the tea ceremony, so they do not speak. I keep my eyes down and kneel before the table with the tea-egg container held in front in both hands. I place the tea-egg container on the table, pause, than prostrate myself, forehead to floor. Then I sit back on my heels and pause again.
I open the tea-egg container and lift out the tea-egg in its tissue wrapping. Very gently, I unfold the wrapping so the egg is exposed in my hands. I take the small knife from the table and here I always falter. I am expert with a knife. I can kill with a knife. If I smashed it into an eyeball, or up under a jaw, through the soft part, I could kill at least one Servant. Or through the base of the throat, I’m spoiled for choice. I always look too long at the knife. Then I take it – it’s very small – and ever so carefully shave a tiny piece of tea from the tea-egg. I do this as carefully, as expertly, as the women shaving my body.
Because I shave the tea-egg so carefully the fragment I shave does not break up. I place it in the pestle and crush it with the mortar. I grind for just a moment or two and it becomes fine powder. A kettle has been brewing on the small stove to the side of the room, which is fuelled by charcoal and stoked by the women before I arrived. The kettle is a metal ewer worked in a cylindrical shape – tall, flaring out from a flat small base then narrowing to a small, mouth-like opening. Ovoid,like an elongated egg. The water is boiling now. The water is pure. It’s been sourced from a stream or lake, or so I am told. The higher in the hills the better. I could take the boiling water and fling it in a Servant’s face. There isn’t a large volume of water, just enough for a few tea cups, but hot water stings and I could use that moment to knife a Servant or simply run.
I don’t do that today. Instead I use a section of shawl to wrap my hand and lift the hot kettle from the stove. I pour a small amount into the tea bowl then place the metal ewer back on the stove. Very carefully, I smooth the fine tea powder into the tea bowl with its shallow portion of hot water. This creates a paste. Then I retrieve the kettle with my left hand, wrapped in its shawl, and pick up the wooden whisk with my right hand. I pour and whisk simultaneously, ensuring the paste is diluted only gradually, so that it retains a milky white colour. I rotate the kettle as I pour. As I whisk, using a circular motion, a light head of foam develops. This is known as the Milky Way or Star Flight. It is very important that the Milky Way be frothy yet quite firm, so that it remains in place even as I pour the tea into cups.
The utensils matter. The tea bowl must be thick ceramic, pale duck egg blue. It must be deep, to get a good head of foam, and wide so I can whisk without spillage. The upper lip opens outwards, the texture is entirely smooth. The tea cups are the same duck egg blue, the same smoothness, but thin to the point that to pick them up by hand appears unseemly, even brutal. They look fragile. But so far I have never seen one break, so there must be something in the way they are fired that results in unexpected strength.
I don’t touch them myself. They are arranged on the table and my task is to pour tea. I place the kettle in the kettle stand and the tea bowl in the bowl stand. I bow lightly towards the Servant furthest from me. I say
“May you live in peace.
May you live in harmony.
May the universe shape itself for your comfort.
This is what it is to serve.
You do me honour.”
When the words are said I pour tea for that Servant. He then reaches out and takes his tea cup. The tea should look like cloud against a pale blue sky. Then I turn to the next furthest Servant from me, bow, say the words and pour his tea. Then the next, till however many Servants are present are served.
When the Servants have been served tea they drink in silence. They drink slowly, as tea cannot be rushed. During this time I kneel with my head bent. I do not move until I hear knuckles rapped on the table. This signals that the Servants have completed drinking tea. Now it is time for me to sing. It is always the same song:
“For as long as worlds suffer
I will serve.
For as long as chaos threatens
I will serve.
For as long as darkness rends daylight
I will serve.
For as long as time continues and change reigns
I live only to serve.
O teach me to serve.
Let me honour you with service.”
Then the Servant closest to me lifts his tunic and I am required to kneel over his crotch. I am required to serve. I serve each of the Servants in turn, in silence. When each Servant has been served, the final Servant, the one furthest from where I started, raps the table to signal me to leave.
I return unescorted to the cleansing studio where the women await me. The roster of women changes from visit to visit but the women who prepare me are always the same team who debrief me afterwards. First they use a sponge to wipe off the red dot beneath my lower lip, assuming it’s survived. They wipe my lower lip regardless. Then they unrobe me. Naked, I kneel then prostrate myself. Three times I say “I have served. I have served. I have served.” Then I extend myself fully like a snake, belly to ground, face to ground, and I say “I live to serve.” The women pick me up by reaching under my armpits and hauling me to my feet. They hand me back my regular coarse clothes and turn their backs on me. I walk to the door and exit, returning to the afternoon’s data entry, if this had been an afternoon session, or retiring to barracks if an evening session.
Generally I do two sessions a day. Some of us are seldom called but I have much to learn about service. Since I am a slow learner I’m not afraid I’ll be disappeared soon, but eventually I’ll be deemed proficient in the tea ceremony and then my ultimate self-effacement will be imminent. I am planning. I pride myself on being canny at planning, even if my service failures are gross, so with luck I will have a plan that works before I graduate as a tea ceremony adept.
*
I don’t know what you look like but I know one day we’ll meet. There will be an investigator and there will be a witness. I will be that witness. You’ll ask me about the Servants, and I’ll tell you there’s a lot I don’t understand, but this is what I know:
My family were at home watching TV when a newscast came on to say the Ruler for Life had been in a military plane which exploded over the hills. The Storytellers live separate from other Divisions, in villages clustered in the foothills. Somewhere mid-air between take-off from the airport outside the city and the hilltops near our home, the Ruler for Life had been assassinated.
That’s when war broke out. A lot of us didn’t know how to respond to the newscast. We stayed by our TVs and radios to listen for updates. We logged on to the internet. Within hours we were dragged from our homes and slaughtered, our houses set ablaze. The roads were cordoned off and anyone caught trying to escape was killed. I was lucky. I wasn’t caught.
This is when the Servants came into their own. The Servants started as the Ruler for Life’s bodyguards. After the Ruler for Life was killed, their numbers swelled. The Servants became those who serve the memory of the ruler. The killing was an unspeakable act, so the Servants take a vow of silence. They don’t speak between nightfall and breakfast, nor for an hour either side of meals, and they don’t speak during the tea ceremony. They are required to take part in a tea ceremony daily. The Servants take a celibacy vow. That’s OK. What they do in the tea ceremony isn’t sex. The tea ceremony is about service. Anyone can tell you that.
Service is the Servants’ highest value. Art is ornamentation, is embellishment, elaboration, lying. Art is self assertion. To be a Servant is the opposite of being a Story Teller. The mission of the Servants is to stamp out Story Telling.
That is why I am in a re-education camp. I am being trained in service. I might not like the means by which I am being retrained, the medium by which my voice is smothered, but my likes and dislikes are irrelevant. I am irrelevant. That is why once I fully understand, I will be killed.
My mission is to find you, the investigator, and tell my stories before I am killed.
Hugh is getting tired. The more tired he gets, the faster he drives. His eyes are glazed; he should be wearing glasses, but he always manages to leave them behind. Constant small losses; Hugh isn’t thinking about it.
Hugh, in all truth, is trying hard not to think at all. The highway is hypnotic – not winding (no deviation), but occasionally undulating, up and down. Endless white dots are an arrow down the centre, an imperative leading straight to the horizon. Hugh feels as if the white dots power this road. The van is on a conveyor-belt; the white links are the chain on which the mechanism turns. The van rolls forward, propelled by white lines, and to Hugh it seems that speed and destination have been pre-set. A process is in train, and no choice remains but to keep the van on course.
“Where are we heading?” asks Liam, from the back. Part-Irish, part-Aboriginal, Liam is low-voiced and sleepy-eyed. He trusts Hugh.
Hugh does look away from the road. “Wherever the white lines take us”, he says, and Liam, who is used to Hugh’s deadpan humour, nods.
“You’re not still thinking of Jim and Derry?”
Hugh thinks too much. He loves Liam for his intuition; Liam can always tell what’s on Hugh’s mind.
“Naah”, Hugh mumbles, after a pause. He knows he should throw out a throwaway line. Failing anything suitably ironic, he bites his lower lip. Liam leans forward; all he can see of Hugh’s face from behind is the harshness of the ridges marking brow, eye, cheekbone and jaw. Hugh is craggy, closed and worn – sensitive to too-close scrutiny. Right now he feels alone. He can tolerate Liam, but Hugh’s glad the rest of the band is asleep.
The van crests a slight rise. Hugh feels completely disconnected. He imagines he is dreaming, sitting in the care of a long rollercoaster, staring at ground far below. In the dream his hands are off the wheel. He’s waving at the ground, and the expression on his face is amazed.
Over the rise, on the upwards side of an oncoming hill, a roadtrain is ditched. All down both lanes of the bitumen behind it are black and grey skidmarks, coiled tight, doubling back almost over each other. Gouges savage the sides of the road; gravel has thrown up banks, furrowed troughs. As Hugh drives by he stares at the truckie, squatting beside his broken rear axel. The truckie looks scared. Half-blocking the road on the far side of the truck is a long, dented wheatbin. All down the road, twice the roadtrain’s length, are its entrails – spilt wheat, training blood betraying a wound.
Hugh can’t take his eyes off that truck, that wheat, that man. In the late afternoon glare he sees the wheat’s brightness not as gold or blood-red but as flame. He sees Derry and Jim, trapped in the cabin of the roadcrew’s truck: Derry unconscious, barely breathing, Jim screaming, desperately trying to bash through fire. The truck, glowing molten, roars in the heat. It lies on its side, by the side of a highway. Jim can’t get out, and even in his dreams, Hugh can’t reach him. They’ve been trapped there in Hugh’s mind a year now.
Bev looked across her bed to Deb’s, and saw her sister as a mountain cat crouched low along a tree limb, eyes burnished by the dark.
“I can’t.”
“Go on, Bev. Do it. Tell me a story.”
No, thought Bev, and rolled over, flat on her back. She placed her hands under the bulb of her skull, and relished the ‘V’ between nape and elbows. Toes pointed, she stretched her feel away from her head. Her body worked – everything in order.
“No”, she said. “I think it’s childish. I can’t just make up nonsense any old time, anyway. It’s bad enough having to share a bedroom, without having to tell you bed-time stories every night. Go to sleep.”
“I can’t”, said her sister. “I feel bad.”
Bev thought this over. It felt bad just to think about Deb’s problem, let alone to have it. She softened. She sat up.
“Are you going to tell Mum?”
“No”, said Deb.
“You could, you know.”
“Yeah.” Deb sighed. “Sure I could tell her. She’d cry and I’d cry and we’d both feel lousy. It wouldn’t change anything. What could she do about it? Why bother hurting her?”
“I guess so”, said Bev, humbled. Somehow it seemed very brave and adult for Deb to refuse to inflict pain.
“She’s got enough to worry about, anyway”, Deb continued, suddenly less generous – even oddly resentful. “It’s hard enough putting us two through school and having to work at that horrible job, without Dad going crazy as well. He really picks his times!”
That’s not fair, though Bev. It’s not as if he had any choice – any more than you did.
“What will they do to him this time?” she said, instead.
“God, I don’t know! Why should we bother? It’s not as if he’s bothered with us for years!” Deb snorted harshly. Then, as if chastened, she added meekly “Put him in a funny farm at last, I guess. Let him draw it out of his system.”
Bev nodded uncertainly. Their father had been a commercial artist, employed to draw fashion designs in dress-pattern catalogues. Always highly stylised, the limbs and faces on the mannequins he sketched had grown longer and more gaunt with every season; their colouring had paled, grown ashen, turned blue. Last catalogue, his folio figures were grotesque: emaciated corpses, stretched as if broken on a rack. Their jaws lolled. Their creator was fired.
“Do you think he’s really crazy, Deb?”
“Yup!” Deb chewed the syllable, then spat it out again. “Yup. I sure do.”
Bev sat back in her blankets and pondered. “If we tell Mum she might tell Dad.”
“No way!” A flat, emphatic statement. “And we’re not going to tell Mum anyway, are we?”
“No”, said Bev, brave and obedient.
Last summer Bev and Deb had squandered at the beach. Every weekend, and all the holidays. They even wagged a day from school. With a group of friends they’d caught the train to Geelong, and from there they’d hitchhiked down the coast. Bev had turned fourteen that week. It was the first summer she’d looked good in a bikini, and she’d sauntered around the sands all day, trying out effective hip and leg angles as she walked, as she swam, as she shook out her beach towel.
On the train coming home, an inspector had asked to see their tickets. First the others, then Deb and Bev.
“Names”, he demanded, in a disinterested tone, and not knowing any better, they’d given them.
“Same surname, eh? Sisters?” Not knowing better, the two had nodded.
“How old?” barked the ticket inspector. Deb – who was travelling on a half-fare ticket – dumped fifteen months and answered “Fourteen”.
“You?” the inspector asked Bev, and she – more tall, more solid than her sister – had whispered “Fourteen” too.
“Really?” the ticket inspector sneered. “You can’t both be fourteen, sisters!”
A moment’s awkward silence. Then Bev, the unembarrassed liar, said quickly “I’m adopted”. A self-serving faker, only part way developed.
Bev was growing up, and she learned fast. Deb could trust Bev, and she did.
“I don’t want a baby”, Deb confided.
“You’re not going to have one”, Bev reassured her, adding, confused, “I am mean, you may be going to have one at the moment, but it’s not going to really happen, is it?”
“No”, said Deb, shaking her head slowly. Both lay quiet in the darkened bedroom. Deb, sighing, added the unsaid.
“Rob wants to marry me, Bev. Me, at sixteen, married with a baby! I couldn’t bera it!”
Bev couldn’t bear the thought of it either. Deb didn’t trust Rob, and she didn’t love him. Not like she loved her sister.
“He’s getting really heavy ‘cos I won’t, Bev. He shouts things at me when he sees me at the pub. I can’t hang out with the beach crowd anymore. He’s told them all sorts of lies about me.”
Don’t cry, blossom, Bev consoled mentally. “I don’t like any of them anyway”, she pouted.
“No”, murmured Deb. “Maybe not. But I did.”
“There are lots of better people in the world than that, Deb. There are better parties than the ones they give, and better pubs to go to.”
“Yeah”, Deb agreed. “And there’s more to life than people and parties and pubs and things. I can do better than that.”
Bev remembered the beach last summer. After the pub one night, Rob had thrown a party at his parents’ beach-house. All the local kids had turned up there too. She’d got really drunk on bacardis and coke, and Jamie took her for a ride in his new van. He’d driven up to the look-out on the sand-dunes, and they’d just sat there, saying nothing. She’d had the feeling she should do the talking, and that she should know what to say. But she didn’t, and before long Jamie sighed, and drove her back.
At the house, she felt ill. She wanted to go to bed. Rob had told her she could have the room upstairs, but when she turned the lights on, someone else had already claimed the bed.
“This is my bed”, insisted Bev stoutly, yanking the coverlet towards her. The stranger took no notice.
“All right”, said Bev. “If I can’t get you to move, I’ll just have to get in anyway.”
So she did, and that was that.
“Does it feel good?” the stranger asked.
“Yes”, Bev lied. She would not breathe another word, not then or later. She nearly did, at one point – when he moved on top of her, he hurt so much, and for so long, she was just about to cry out “STOP! Forget it. Pleeease stop!” But then it hurt less, and she was so relieved she really didn’t care that less was still a lot.
She felt she was brave, and adult – like Deb about her baby, or (she imagined) like women giving birth. She felt suitably initiated, as if at last let in on a fundamental secret, and the secret (she believed) was that no matter what they tell you, it’s horrible. It hurts. Reality, she now knew, hurts.
Deb’s baby would soon be a reality, but Bev felt confident that here, reality could be thwarted. Out-manoeuvred. It wasn’t going to happen, was it? Not if Bev or Deb could prevent it. They lay there in darkness, counter-plotting.
On the morning, the two girls wagged school and instead caught a tram to the clinic. They walked in past protesters bearing placards, picketing outside. They walked square-shouldered in private school uniforms. Bev wanted to follow Deb and the woman doctor into the surgery, but the doctor told her to stay in the waiting-room, and so she did.
The uniform made her self-conscious. She placed her feet primly together, and was surprised and impressed by how long her legs had grown, shaven and smoothly brown. She looked across at the wall-mirror: all her limbs were long, straight and gleaming, like her hair. She picked up a magazine and leafed through it. She looked at least as enticing as most of these models, Bev realised, with a thrill tempered by alarm. She’d never before thought of herself as ‘enticing’. ‘Appetising’. ‘Desirable’. Foreign words. Yet she was all this; she could con with the best of them. The thought gave her pleasure, yet it also disturbed her. She put it aside, intending to take it up again later.
Deb and Bev caught a train home from the clinic. Neither had anything much to say.
“Are you okay?” asked Bev, and Deb insisted she was fine. Bev, content to believe her, was massively relieved.
“Here, I’ll tell you a story on the train,” she beamed at her sister, who smiled back wanly. To the station attendant, she held out a handful of silver and said “Two adults, thanks”.
Last week I was listening to a radio program where the guests being interviewed had both recently published memoirs. One person, radio broadcaster and Australian arts identity Sian Prior, had published a memoir exploring the issue of shyness through her personal experience and research. Her book is called Shy. The other, Bev Brock, had written what she sees as essentially a self-help book, titled Life to the Limit.
Besides being intelligent, adult women who are published authors, these two have this in common: they are former partners of famous men acclaimed as Australian cultural icons. Sian Prior was for nine years partner to Paul Kelly, the much-loved Melbourne-based singer-songwriter. Bev Brock was the long-time partner of motor racing hero Peter Brock; Bev adopted his surname and the couple had three children.
I knew Paul Kelly in the ‘80s. Not well, but enough. He was the brother-in-law – and for a time, the housemate – of a friend and neighbour. I’d interviewed him in my capacity as a rock music journalist and I’d reviewed his records. In the early ‘80s I was a regular at his band’s gigs, where I loved to dance and sometimes hang out with the band afterwards.
I never met Peter Brock but I did know one of his girlfriends. What she had to say about Peter confirmed the sour opinion I’d had of him since the mid-70s, when his second wife claimed he’d battered her from the outset of their marriage, leading to her suicide attempt.
The interviewer, ABC Radio’s Jon Faine, asked both authors challenging questions about, essentially, the ethics of writing about famous others. He grilled Sian Prior on why in her memoir she chose to give her ex a pseudonym rather than using his real name. They’re both public figures, most Australian readers will know who she means, so why not name him?
With a degree of graciousness I have to admire, Sian pointed out she gave pseudonyms to all her friends mentioned in the book. She pointed out that her book, Shy, is about shyness. If she were to use Paul Kelly’s name, people would assume it was primarily a memoir about their relationship, which it is not.
Bev Brock explained her book explored emotional issues and challenges and needed to be truthful. The truth was, Peter was a shit (I paraphrase).
I was surprised by how tough the questioning was, especially the questions put to Sian. People who disclose unpleasant aspects of our idols are often censured. But the reality is, we, the public – listeners, viewers or readers – experience a frisson when the shadow side is revealed. Hypocritically, we might wag the finger of reproof. But we listen up.
I was even more surprised when I went online at my local library’s website to request a copy of Sian’s book, Shy. It was released two weeks ago, and 22 people had logged a borrow request and were on the waiting list. I live in a small town. My small town has the nickname “Sleepy Hollow”. It’s possible 23 of us jumped at the chance to read a book about shyness immediately on its release, but I’m guessing we’re mostly motivated by prurience: a chance to peek inside Paul Kelly’s private life.
As I was listening to Sian and Bev, the program host interrupted the interview to report the death of another Australian icon, Doc Neeson, frontman of the band The Angels. I knew Paul Kelly only in passing, and Peter Brock only through hearsay, but Doc I’d known as a friend. I was prompted by news of Doc’s death to start writing a series of short memoir pieces I’d been considering for some time; over this past week I’ve written five short tributes to five people who I cared about deeply and who mattered in my life.
I think of these linked pieces as my Five Dead Rock Stars series. That’s sounds callous, and doubtless is. It’s a nod to my friend Vince Lovegrove, the fifth of my Dead Rock Stars, who planned to call his memoirs Twelve Angry Women.
Engaging with the writing, inevitably the ethics of writing about people who are famous arose. Sian and Bev wrote about intimates; I was writing about famous people I thought of as friends but whom others might say were acquaintances – certainly, there are many people better placed to write more insightful accounts of my subjects’ lives, having known them longer or more fully. My pieces were not biographical; they were personal reminiscences, and fragmentary.
There was a lot I left out. It wasn’t needed, or it didn’t fit. Or it was impertinent. Or best forgotten. Or I am not ready to write about it yet.
In writing about our experiences, we process them anew, and sometimes gain clarity. I read – then re-read – a paragraph I wrote about myself at 21, accepting a handful of white powder backstage, Angel Dust or PCP. I can’t remember much of the events of that night, but I remember trying to walk home, through suburban Melbourne, from the bayside red-light district St Kilda. I could have died that night. I could have died during that horrible aftermath of strangulated breathing and turning blue. I could have died – as another young female rock writer did, in Kings Cross in the ‘90s – if a rapist-killer had spotted me vulnerable in the night.
If I had died, the futures of the bands who played at that venue that night might have been very different.
Reading that paragraph, I remembered another occasion, in 1981. I was visiting a musician friend at the house he shared with his girlfriend and a couple of Class-A drug dealers. I wasn’t taking drugs; I did drugs on four occasions across a 12 year period and that night was not one of those four nights. Someone OD’d. I remember one of the other people present, not the musician, urging the others to dump the unconscious body in an alley. Whatever happened, it could not be linked to them.
Happily, I can report this suggestion was rejected. The suspected OD case was revived and life when on.
For obvious reasons, I’m not willing to name names when writing about this incident. But as I read my own account of the night I almost OD’d, the chilling realisation hit me that the people backstage that night might readily have dumped my body in an alley. I was writing about the dread I had at that time, the dread that people I thought were my friends, were not. As I read back what I’d written, I knew, and I knew that I knew then: Of course these people were not your friends – how could your “friends” have let you stagger off into the night, alone?
How could I have continued in contact with those people, knowing I knew? Knowing they didn’t care if I lived or died, as long as I didn’t die at their gig, backstage? Of course I must forget.
As I tossed and turned, literally, unable to sleep, remembering what I’d forgotten, I started getting feedback on the memoir blogs I’d posted. I got no comments whatsoever, from any one from that period, on the first three blogs. But the fourth one, the one which recounted the incident with the white dust, that one drew comments from two old friends.
They were angry comments.
I’d written about my reaction on hearing of the blog subject’s death: since we’re not naming names, let’s call him Mickey Mouse. I wrote rather histrionically – “self-dramatisation”, as one commenter opined – about my shock at logging onto a news site and seeing a headline reporting his death. Except the headline didn’t name him, not by his real name nor as Mickey Mouse. The headline referred to him as the drummer in x band (not x, let’s call them Bedrock, in honour of the Flintstones). There had been several Bedrock drummers, so for a moment I had the wild, savage hope it was not my friend who’d died, that it might be another. Let’s call that other Donald Duck. In my blog I used Donald Duck’s real name.
I am told the use of his real name was callous and indefensible. I was told I suffered moral blindness, a failure to imagine the pain his family and friends would suffer, when, inevitably, they read my blog.
I don’t see it, myself. For starters, who is actually reading my blog? I can count the comments on the fingers of one hand. More to the point, if a septuagenarian veteran muso is traumatised reading that, given the choice between his death and her friend’s, some stranger would rather he had died, just hand me a dose of white powder right now. I don’t know Donald Duck, but I strongly suspect he’s old enough and ornery enough to cope.
In writerly terms, using the name was a harsh counter-note to the sentimentalism immediately preceding and following. It’s discordant. It’s nasty. And I never said I was nice.
I have however removed the name. Not because I think the use of the name has magical properties that could harm the person named. Not because my friends called me names. I removed it because the piece was intended as a tribute to someone I thought I loved, and I did not want what I consider a nonsense issue to detract from that.
I removed it with regret. I think the paragraph, and the piece, is weakened by not having that moment of authentic nastiness.
I remain perplexed that people who have been important to me could read all that I’ve written this past week, without comment, read the incident where a young girl is abandoned while seriously drug-impaired (though they might discount this as self-dramatisation), yet a few paragraphs later hurl into moral paroxysm over two words: the real name of Donald Duck.
But I guess there are multiple categories of people, quite apart from cartoon characters. There are famous people, lovers, acquaintances, friends, and “friends”.
Note 14 December 2016: The ‘Five Dead Rock Star’ pieces were written when I was depressed. I’ve left them to stand in their original versions, but they could be written very differently.
Vince Lovegrove told me once that he planned to write his memoirs and title them Twelve Angry Women. Only twelve? I asked.
Vince angered a lot of people in his life. He was confrontational. Combative. Phenomenally passionate, with an immense capacity both for love and hate. Vince valued loyalty and yet too many of his relationships – sexual or otherwise – ended badly. He believed in living life on the edge; life without adrenalin was no life at all.
Vince is remembered, rightly, for his massive contributions in two domains: he was a champion of Oz Rock, the Australian pub rock music scene and its bands who went on to success internationally; and he raised awareness of AIDS, becoming a public symbol of tragedy and hope. I remember him as a hero who first appeared in my life when I was age eight, and who, of all the people I knew in my teens and 20s, I most trusted, could say with certainty was solidly my friend.
I turned eight in 1969, when Vince was singing in a Perth-based pop group called the Valentines, sharing vocals with Bon Scott, future lead singer of AC/DC. I met Vince the summer of 1970, not long after he moved to Adelaide, when he was dating the woman who became his first wife: Helen Corkhill.
It’s strange, writing memoir pieces. Every so often, just as a life threatens to flatten into a chronicle of years and events, a name or an incident will come alive as I type, spring up with vitality, and make me pause, and smile. The thought ‘Helen Corkhill’ does that for me. Helen was glorious. She was a drop-dead gorgeous, strong Aussie sheila who hailed from Broken Hill, the mining town BHP built on flat red desert in the Outback, in far west New South Wales. She’d come to Adelaide to train as a nurse, forming a tight clique with a bunch of other gorgeous, glorious girls: among them, Gill Harrington and Gill’s Adelaide cousins, Mary and Ully Christie.
Mary had been one of my mother’s students. She baby-sat me and my sister. She became a close family friend. My parents liked to party, and Mary introduced into our lives a bunch of party people, among them Helen and Vince.
I remember Vince at a party, telling me earnestly as long-haired hipsters milled around, “You are way too clever for a child of eight. You are too clever by half. You are scary clever.”
In 1973 my family moved to Melbourne. Vince and Helen, with their baby, Holly, moved to Melbourne in 1978. Vince had been working as a rock journalist and producing and presenting music television and radio shows, including, that year, Australian Music to the World. In Melbourne, he produced the top-rating variety show, The Don Lane Show, and was youth issues reporter for A Current Affair.
But his marriage to Helen didn’t survive. I left home and moved to Sydney in late 1979, and early in 1980 (a year earlier than Vince’s Wikipedia entry states), Vince moved to Sydney too. Vince and I shared an overnight car ride between Melbourne and Sydney. We dissected the hit singles on the car radio. I liked Linda Ronstadt’s single from Mad Love, How do I make you? I loved Tom Petty’s Refugee. We fell silent as Martha Davis from The Motels sang their hit Total Control. We talked and talked and laughed a lot and bonded.
I hasten to point out the timing was coincidental. It was coincidence, again, that I rented a small flat in Paddington close to the Paddington townhouse Vince rented with his girlfriend Daina. But that did prove handy. I was often at Vince and Daina’s place, for company and morale-boosting, and I baby-sat Holly when a babysitter was needed.
In Sydney, Vince hung out with his rock scene mates who included Cold Chisel lead singer Jim Barnes and the other Chisel band members. In the early ’70s Vince and Helen ran a booking agency in Adelaide called Jovan, which managed AC/DC at that band’s inception and also managed the embryonic Chisel, at that time – in the words of rock journalist Anthony O’Grady – a “hard rock jukebox”. By early 1980, propelled by original material by keyboards player Don Walker, Chisel had two successful albums to their credit and were preparing to record the classic Oz Rock album, East.
Again by coincidence, Cold Chisel were among the few people I knew in Sydney who I had met prior to relocating. Vince tutored me in the back-stories – personalities and music industry politics – of the people I met as I started out as a rock writer. He helped me navigate some of the risks, steering me well clear of drug use and watching out for me as I fielded predators. Because Vince had my back, I felt able to stand up to bullying. Because Vince had my back, I was targeted less viciously, perhaps, than I might have been otherwise.
I do remember standing in the kitchen at Vince and Daina’s place with a group of people, drinking, while a record producer on the ascendant sneered at how I was dressed.
I threw it back at him. “My skirt is $18 from Target. My shoes are $10. The shirt is from K-Mart. The earrings are $300 from Manila.”
Vince thought that was hilarious.
At about that time Bon Scott died. Vince loved Bon. After the Valentines, they were bandmates again in Adelaide, in the Mount Lofty Rangers, then there was the Jovan-AC/DC relationship. I remember the night we heard Bon was dead. It hit Vince hard.
When Vince’s relationship with Daina ended, he moved to a dilapidated top floor flat on or just off Womerah Avenue, near Kings Cross. He was rock music columnist for the tabloid newspaper, The Sun. I was there with Vince one day when I heard the wooden stairs that led up to his flat creaking as a visitor climbed up to join us. I heard the visitor sing, soft and low, no hurry, her voice languid molasses. I was startled by that voice, so distinctive. I stared at Vince. He was ready: he’d anticipated the question.
“That’s my new girl singer,” he said. “Her name is Chrissy Amphlett.”
Chrissy became the lead singer of the band Divinyls, who were managed by Vince in their early years. In her autobiography Pleasure and Pain, Chrissy writes at length about how Vince influenced the Divinyls’ sound and stage act. He believed rock’n’roll should be explosive, should always feel threatening, never safe. He insisted Divinyls gave their guts, every time. Vince’s drive and aggression doubtless took its toll on individual band members. But it got them to America and it bred hits.
In the States, Divinyls were signed to Chrysalis Records. Vince got involved with a Chrysalis publicist. I spent a few months in Los Angeles in 1982 and Vince’s friend, Eliza, was hospitable. She moved to Australia to work for Divinyls with Vince but it didn’t work out, professionally or romantically. She saw herself as a skilled professional who’d been demoted to answering phones. On his home turf, Vince’s macho traits were less attractive. By late 1983, Eliza had a new man, a young New Yorker called Chad or Chip or Chuck, and Vince was increasingly appealing to me to divert them away from him, to keep them occupied socially. I tried. It was complicated by Chad or Chip’s occasional violence. When Cold Chisel split and did a final tour, I was not thrilled at once again being asked to baby-sit, this time for Eliza and Chad/Chip. On New Years’ Eve 1984 I abandoned Eliza at a beachside pub, at a round table of drunken journalists. She never spoke to me again.
I worked for Divinyls with Vince myself, for one day. At the end of that day we tacitly agreed I had no future answering phones.
Vince’s relationship with Eliza overlapped with the early phase of his relationship with his second wife, a thin brunette New Yorker who called herself Suzi Sidewinder: Sidewinder, both for the venomous rattlesnake and for the short range air-to-air missile. Suzi had danced with New York club act Kid Creole and the Coconuts.
Vince was entirely enamoured of Suzi and once she moved to Australia, we stopped being close. I found her abrasive and I thought in her company he was doing too many drugs. I might have been wrong. One time when I was climbing William Street, up towards Kings Cross, I saw them in my favourite pizza shop, waiting to collect their takeaway pizza. I tried to engage in what I considered normal conversation, but what met me was glazed eyes, giggles, and that odd knowing stare that says, “I know what you’re up to. Don’t think for a moment I trust you.”
Next time I saw Vince I remarked on his strange behaviour. He countered that I was the one who’d been strange.
Vince and Suzi had a child, Troy, and married. The bride wore black. Within months, I was hearing gossip. Suzi at a party, asked about her baby, flinging back, “Vince’s baby. Not mine.”
After Troy was born, Suzi had shingles. If you’ve had chicken pox, chances are the virus is lying dormant and may be reactivated as shingles, a painful rash, at a point in your life when your immune system is vulnerable. Usually in old age. It is not usual for a healthy young woman to have shingles. Testing showed Suzi was not a healthy woman. She was diagnosed in 1985 with HIV/AIDS. Further testing showed Troy had HIV/AIDS too.
Vince told me Suzi felt gut-wrenching guilt over Troy’s condition. Her seeming rejection of her baby was the grief of a woman who thinks she’s killed her kid. In 1985, AIDS was thought of as a ‘Gay plague”, confined to male homosexuals. Many people saw it as a consequence of an immoral lifestyle, of promiscuity and, specifically, anal sex. The other high risk group was intravenous drug users. Vince and Suzi rejected any suggestion Suzi injected drugs. As one of the first women diagnosed with AIDS in Australia, Suzi presented a face of AIDS that shocked the heterosexual community: a young mother – a beautiful girl connected to celebrity, her life ahead of her.
Suzi’s life after diagnosis was short and painful. I visited Vince in the large house moneyed friends had rented for them. (Some of their friends, like Jim Barnes, were generous. Others disappeared.) Vince and I talked for a long time. I was hesitant to go upstairs and visit Suzi; Vince told me she did not want strangers to see her as she was.
Suzi died in mid-1987. A documentary, Suzi’s Story, was screened on Network Ten and caused widespread reaction, from concern to consternation. The documentary won awards. At about that time the notorious ‘Grim Reaper’ AIDS awareness advertising campaign ran, delivering the message that anyone was vulnerable. As it happened, during that period I knew the advertising director who created the ‘Grim Reaper’ campaign, through our mutual involvement with a seminar-based, personal effectiveness organisation in Sydney. I knew Vince was flailing, caring for Troy and trying to think through what his own future might hold, so I invited Vince to an information evening held by this organisation to promote an upcoming “transformational” seminar. Vince came simply because I asked. Because we were friends.
Vince was broke and embroiled in legal actions. He was doing his best by Troy and it was killing him. Troy spent countless hours in hospitals, undergoing countless medical tests and procedures. Vince told me Troy would scream when they headed to hospital; what Troy went through looked to Vince like torture. Troy had contracted AIDS in utero and there were few similar cases in Australia. Vince’s baby was effectively a medical guinea-pig.
The public interest in Suzi’s Story meant people recognised Vince in the street. People he didn’t know were constantly coming up to him and sharing their responses, sometimes clumsily. People wrote to him. Some saw him as a hero for his fundraising efforts on behalf of AIDS research and for going public with his family’s tragedy to raise AIDS awareness. Some saw him as a hero for attempting, as a widower, to care for a child born with AIDS. He received marriage proposals by mail.
I asked Vince whether he planned to continue his involvement in AIDS activism after Troy died. Vince was adamant: once Troy died, he wanted nothing to do with it. He wanted his life back. If he couldn’t have back the life he’d had, he wanted a new one. He wanted to go somewhere far away.
Troy lived longer than expected but died in 1993. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) screened a documentary called A Kid Called Troy. Vince wrote a book, A kid called Troy: The moving journal of a little boy’s battle for life. Once that was completed, he was a man unanchored. Fortunately, his friends cared.
Jimmy Barnes, who had established a successful solo career after Cold Chisel split, invited Vince to manage a European tour for him. This was generous of Jim but proved confronting for Vince, who told me years later he was shocked, on the tour, by the state his friend “Barnsey” was in. It’s no secret, now, that Jim descended into a hell of drug and alcohol misuse before getting sober in 2001, a sobriety he’s maintained. In the early ‘90s, Vince saw his friend in a state of self-loathing. Vince didn’t want that to be him. He wanted his new life.
So in 1994, Vince moved to London, where he returned to writing about music. I’d moved to London in 1992 but I didn’t learn Vince was living there until 1998, when I saw articles he’d written about Michael Hutchence’s death. Vince was writing an unauthorised biography of the INXS singer, which came out in 1999. We had some long phone conversations, where Vince talked through how he saw Michael’s life and death; we’d both known Michael and this was personal. The Hutchence biography came out in 1999 and resulted in immediate law suits initiated by Michael’s partner Paula Yates. In his book, Vince contended that Paula Yates ensnared Michael by falling pregnant. (I don’t recall this as one of the “Michael life theories” he floated with me. I would have warned him off.) The libel case was settled, with an undisclosed sum paid by the publishers in Sydney and London and by the UK tabloid, The Mail on Sunday, which had serialised extracts.
Beyond discussing Jimmy Barnes and Michael Hutchence, Vince and I talked about his life in London. He was newly single, his third wife having left him the previous year. He joked, “I’m always left with the baby!” Lilli-Rae was maybe three.
This was when I heard about the Twelve Angry Women.
“How come all the women I get involved with turn out to be psychos?” Vince demanded, with what sounded like genuine perplexity.
We discussed meeting up. But we didn’t meet. I’d heard something in our conversations that made me worry Vince might hope we’d get together romantically, which had never happened in the past and was not something I saw in our future. I did not want to turn psycho. For his part, Vince might have heard the same echo down the phone line, and might have drawn the same conclusion. He was 50, fat, bald – no longer the brutally handsome heart-throb.
Vince returned to Australia with Lilli-Rae and settled near idyllic Byron Bay in northern New South Wales. Holly and her son Arlo lived nearby. In 2011, Holly gave birth to Marlon, a second grandson for Vince.
In late March 2012, as I was sitting in an office reception area waiting to negotiate a return to work plan with my employer, following an injury, I flicked through a newspaper and saw a headshot of Vince staring out at me. Vince was dead. His Kombi Van had left the road, rolled and exploded in flames in the small hours of the previous morning. Positive identification was yet to be made.
Vince’s death was reported in the media. His loss did not go unremarked. But somehow, to me, it did not feel enough. Vince was bigger than that. I felt like a bigger noise should be made at his passing, a much louder keening.
So here’s my attempt:
Vince Lovegrove was a legend of Australian rock music. He started as a pop singer, managed bands who remain Oz Rock icons, knew everyone who had any kind of profile in ‘70s or ‘80s Australian rock, had his byline as a rock writer in mass circulation publications, and produced landmark music television shows. In the troughs between successes he always returned to writing about music. When he died, at age 65, he was due to start work in a few days’ time at a small regional newspaper, with a minuscule daily circulation.
Vince could be pugnacious. He laughed like a pirate. He was foolish and wise, all at once.
Note 14 December 2016: The ‘Five Dead Rock Star’ pieces were written when I was depressed. I’ve left them to stand in their original versions, but they could be written very differently.
I want to write about Steve Prestwich without writing about Cold Chisel and that’s not possible.
I wrote about Cold Chisel, a lot, between 1979 and 1984, when I was a young rock music writer immersed in Oz Rock – the Australian pub rock music scene of the ‘70s and ‘80s. I was a fan. I was more involved with Cold Chisel – its music, its band members, its trajectory – than with any other band I wrote about. Cold Chisel is why I moved to Sydney. Cold Chisel is the reason I became a rock writer.
There was a night, in suburban Melbourne in 1979, when I was in a speeding car with hoons – okay, young male tradies, only slightly drug affected – with the car radio playing. There were too many of us in that car. I was squatting in the well of the back passenger seat, curled up to fit, squeezed in. I could hear on the radio the opening notes of a song that stopped my heart. There was a keyboard line – the same notes a metal wind chime plays – and there was a percussive build, a drummer getting jittery with his high-hat. That drummer was Steve Prestwich and that band was Cold Chisel. The song was Conversations, from their second album, Breakfast at Sweethearts.
I interviewed the lead singer, Jim Barnes, and the keyboard player and songwriter, Don Walker, a few months later, as designated music reporter (only very slightly drug affected) for a student radio station.
It wasn’t a great interview – Jim later pointed out my interviewing style was seriously stilted – but next time the Sydney-based band were in town, I interviewed them again, this time as a writer for the indie rock magazine Roadrunner. I interviewed Don Walker and Steve.
Mostly I interviewed Don. The interview was at 2pm, in the hotel room they shared, and Steve hadn’t quite woken up to the day. He was awake: he just wasn’t out of bed, and he wasn’t clothed. In anything. Just sheets. He stayed under the sheets, mostly keeping quiet, while Don and I talked.
Don and Steve encouraged me to move to Sydney and Don Walker always encouraged my writing – my rock journalism and also, later, the creative writing (poetry and short stories) I published across the mid-‘80s. My friendship with Don Walker had highs and extreme lows. His support for my writing endeavours was constant.
But it’s Steve I’m writing about.
I learned from that hotel interview a little about Steve. I learnt his father had been a drummer who played at the Cavern, the Liverpool club where the Beatles built their following. I learnt he came from a large family of boys and had a lively – and sharp – sense of humour. I think I understood from the outset that Steve was a straight talker, a ‘what you see is what you get’ lad, with no time for posers.
Steve was always Steve. He didn’t waste energy on pretension. Not long after I moved to Sydney, I was in another speeding car with hoons – this time, Cold Chisel, heading back from a gig at the Dee Why Hotel on Sydney’s northern beaches – and once again, that car was too full. I was squeezed against the rear passenger door, seated alongside Don Walker and his partner, rock writer Jenny Hunter-Brown. Steve was in the front passenger seat. The car radio was playing Top 40 soft pap: Babe, by Styx. The lyrics go like this:
Babe, I’m leaving, I must be on my way
The time is drawing near
My train is going, I see it in your eyes
The love, the need, your tears
Steve was making retching noises.
But I’ll be lonely without you
And I’ll need your love to see me through
Please believe me, my heart is in your hands
‘Cause I’ll be missing you
Steve by now had the passenger door open and was hanging out into the highway, poised to jump.
That was so Steve.
He was the guy who would chat with young fans, approachable and friendly, then break off mid-sentence to say, “Whoa! Railroad tracks! Get a load of the metalwork on YOUR TEETH!”
Steve didn’t do tact.
When I had a one-night stand with the guitarist, Steve made it plain he thought it laughable. There was an awkward few minutes when he teased me backstage. Jim Barnes, whose relations with Steve could be combative, stepped in, demanding ‘What’s this about?”
“Steve’s giving me a hard time because I fucked Ian,” I snivelled.
Jim looked from me to Steve then back again.
“Jesus, Elly,” he snorted, “I wouldn’t fuck Ian. Do you want me to beat Steve up for you?”
It might be only night in my life I had men fight over me.
This is not to say Steve was not sentimental. He believed in love. Real love, not the soft pap media drivel. Not long after we met he started going out with Jo-Anne, the woman he married, with whom he eventually had two children, Melody and Vaughan. Jo-Anne when I first met her seemed shy, which baffled me, as she was classically beautiful – tall, elegant, with high cheekbones. The two held hands. She sat on his lap. They nuzzled. Steve told me he believed in the wisdom of the phrase, “my other half”.
“Jo-Anne is that,” he said. “She is my other half.”
Steve wrote beautiful love songs. His melodic sense is often remarked on, but what I notice is the minor keys. Steve’s songs were wistful, poignant. They spoke of loss. Steve wrote Cold Chisel’s biggest hit single, Forever Now, and its most covered track, When the War is Over. With Don Walker, he wrote Flame Trees, a song about small towns and times gone by that I sing to myself, in the small town where I live.
I’ve never written a novel. But I have written an extended novella, and its opening line is “When the war was over…”
“When the war was over, the true terror began.” Thank you, Steve.
In the mid-80s, when my poems began to be published in literary journals, Steve asked me if I could help him get some of his mother’s poetry published. He gave me a sheaf of her work. Freda’s poems were good. It was a simple matter of formatting them and sending them to literary journals. I was happy for Steve, and for Freda, that some appeared in print.
Steve and Cold Chisel parted ways during a disastrous European tour and in 1983 the band broke up. Fifteen years later they came together for a “reunion tour”, which blew up in an explosive fight between Jim and Steve. I saw every one of Cold Chisel’s farewell concerts, and I’ve twice seen Jim Barnes live as a solo artist in the 30 years since then, but I’ve never been to a live show by any of the other band members or listened to their post-Chisel music.
I regret that. I would have liked to accept Steve’s invitation to be in the audience when he played at the Basement in Sydney. Except that I live 950 kilometres away. I did suggest we might meet up when I visited Sydney one time. But Steve was living in New South Wales’ Southern Highlands by then, taking sensitive photographs of nature, listening to wide-ranging music, and making a life with a new love. We were Friends on Facebook, so I could see he was happy.
He could see I was not.
“You sound depressed,” he messaged via Facebook. “Are you okay?”
Not long after, I received a Facebook invitation to ‘Friend’ a second Steve Prestwich page. Steve explained in the accompanying note that he was setting up a page specifically for family and personal friends, separate from his public page where fans could post.
I teased him, telling him he’d finally grown pretensions.
A few weeks later when I logged on my pc, I saw a sidebar headline on a news site: Cold Chisel drummer dies. My heart seized up, like it did that night in 1979, when I heard the first notes of Conversations. Please God, I thought immediately, let it be one of the other drummers who filled in with Cold Chisel after Steve was sacked. Let it not be Steve.
It was Steve. News reports informed me he had died during surgery to remove a brain tumour. I learned for the first time that he’d had surgery for a brain tumour 18 years earlier, while I was living in London. I read that he’d suffered head pains while rehearsing for a planned Chisel reunion tour and had recognised the symptoms. Cold Chisel band members had been with him as he was wheeled into the operating theatre.
I can only imagine how Steve’s death impacted Don, Jim, Ian and Phil. I can’t begin to imagine its impacts on Melody, Vaughan, Jo-Anne and Victoria. I know I felt wrenching grief.
When Steve asked was I depressed, asked me what went on, I told him I felt I was at a crossroads. He responded that crossroads are a good place to be: you get to make choices, you get to journey, new horizons open up. I can’t say for sure those were his exact words, because after Steve died, I Unfriended his Facebook pages. I couldn’t bear Facebook’s yearly reminders each time it was his birthday. I didn’t realise that by Unfriending his page, I would lose the messages he’d sent me.
Nearly two years after Steve’s death, I was at a writers’ workshop. I hadn’t written a poem since 1987 – 25 years. We were given thirty minutes to write free-form, and I was not the least surprised to find that what I wrote was a poem, For Steve:
Time was, you set the rhythm.
You kept the beat.
Singing, all the time, your head
Nodding to a melody line.
Your feet forcing out that beat.
You kept
The best memories, the ones that made me
Laugh. And smile. And grow pensive.
And now
I cry for you. Cry me a river, jazzman.
Let that river run through
A cavern, where the beat boys
Burst into the night.
Take me to that river.
Doc Neeson / The Angels 1981 in Adelaide Photo by Eric Algra
Note 14 December 2016: The ‘Five Dead Rock Stars’ pieces were written at a point where I was depressed. I’ve left them stand in their original versions, but they could be written very differently.
I never slept with Doc Neeson. Not that he wasn’t a charismatic man. Not that we didn’t share moments that felt intimate.
Doc is dead. Doc died today. It’s been months coming, but I cannot say the words. I hadn’t seen him since 1985. My memories of who Doc was are necessarily subjective, and partial to the point of being atomic fragments. But Doc made a powerful impact in my life. As I grow old – my vanity says, as I grow older – I realise the men I loved are the men I never slept with. Doc was, is, someone I loved.
We met in August 1979. I was enrolled at Monash University but spending all my time at the student radio station, locked in a DJ booth, smoking dope and spinning the first LP by The Police. I had fallen into doing radio interviews with touring bands, who included Talking Heads and Doctor Feelgood but also Australian acts like Cold Chisel and the Angels. The touring Australian bands stayed at the Diplomat Hotel in St Kilda and played gigs at St Kilda’s Crystal Ballroom. My Angels interview at the Diplomat was with Angels’ drummer Buzz Bidstrup (then calling himself “Buzz Throckman”), and, I think, Angels’ lead guitarist Rick Brewster and bassist Chris Bailey.
I don’t think Rick’s brother, Angels’ rhythm guitarist John Brewster, was there that day. I’d be confident Doc was not – but then, when and where did he tell me about his interest in the Black Theatre of Prague, its lighting effects and puppetry, and about his time at Flinders University, where, during Doc’s student days, my mother was a senior lecturer in Sociology?
Somewhere in a box in my parents’ garage there still exists the cassette of that interview. I played it to a man a few months later who commented quietly, “You sound scared.”
I showed up at the Diplomat lugging the biggest, clumsiest cassette recorder ever. It had two mini speakers – and by mini, I mean the size of wombats. Buzz and Rick were curious. “Are you setting up for feedback?” Rick asked. Buzz pulled a mini-cassette recorder out of his jeans’ pocket, the size of a cigarette pack: “Have you thought about getting one of these?”
Buzz tells me he remembers that interview. I don’t flatter myself when I say I’m not surprised.
Maybe I first met Doc backstage at a gig, maybe that night. I don’t remember at all. The first Angels’ gig I actually remember was at the Stage Door Tavern in Sydney, the first week after I moved from Melbourne to Sydney in September 1979. The bill was all bands booked through the hot agency, Dirty Pool: INXS, who’d moved to Sydney about that time – must have been one of their very first gigs; Matt Finish, whose lead singer and writer Matt Moffitt was a talent who achieved minor success but died young; Mi-Sex, a New Zealand band then enjoying a Top 40 hit (“Com-pu-pu-pu-pu-pu-com-pu-ter GAMES!”); and, top of the bill, the Angels.
I’ve just realised all four of those bands’ frontmen are now dead.
The Angels at the time were the top live act in the country. They had broken through with their 1978 album Face To Face and were touring in support of their third LP, No Exit. My favourite Angels’ songs date from those albums: After The Rain, Take A Long Line, Straight Jacket, Love Takes Care, I Ain’t the One… everything on Face To Face. Their live show was extraordinary, with Doc’s legendary frenetic performance and its dark twin in Rick Brewster’s entirely impassive figure, nonchalantly tossing off riffs that rang in my head and rebounded in crystalline spirals. For me, Rick’s guitar was musically analogous to the castles of Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria; I think of Rick’s playing as baroque on speed. Though speed was not his drug of choice. (In about 1986 I met Rick in the street and he claimed not to recognise me. We’d slept together a few times, so I was stung. “Must be the drugs,” I’d laughed. “What drugs?” replied Rick. “I don’t do drugs.”)
Doc’s intense kinetics and Rick’s cardboard cut-out guitarist were flooded and swathed and swamped and lashed by vertical bars of blue and white lighting, then red, then yellow I think too, constantly changing, owing much to experimental theatre and German Expressionist film. The Angels’ lighting man was a rangy, laconic introvert named Ray Hawkins, who had done a university thesis on ‘Sydney arts bohemians of the 1930s and ‘40s”. I asked him – backstage, at a Hitmen gig – what that had involved. “Talking to a lot of old artsy Sydney bohemians,” Ray deadpanned. Then he looked me in the eye and said, “They are terrific.”
I realise I am now the approaching the age Ray’s Sydney bohemians were when he interviewed them. The rock musicians I met in 1979 have reached that age, if they’ve lived this long.
The Stagedoor Tavern that first night was crowded so close it was hard to move. I couldn’t see the young Michael Hutchence perform, couldn’t see any of his INXS bandmates: the crowd obscured the stage. I could hear Michael, though. I never had the best ears of the rock critics based in Sydney at that time, or the “best” musical “taste”, but I knew at once Michael and INXS were special.
That night, the Angels ruled. After the show, I stood near the mixer desk and watched as band members filed out through the audience (why would they do that? Memory is nothing but questions!) I remember what I wore: black suede strappy stilettoes; a tight black pencil skirt, from Target; a black short sleeve shirt; beaten gold hoop earrings from the Philippines; a lot of black kohl around my eyes, and copper-red lipstick. When Rick Brewster walked towards where I stood I stared him straight in the eyes, without smiling, almost hostile, and he winked.
A month or three later and it was New Year’s Eve, with the Angels playing on the steps at the Sydney Opera House. A massive, roiling crowd completely filling the Opera House forecourts. I was getting man-handled, so I made my way to the tower where the mixing desk was perched and showed my homemade ID card where the masthead for rock magazine Roadrunner displayed my name as a contributing writer. The crew were kind and hoisted me up into their tower. As a result I had a perfect view when a champagne bottle hit Chris Bailey in the head and a beer can hit Doc Neeson. Chris died last year, from throat cancer. He was a gentle, courteous man with a lovely wry sense of humour.
I must have seen a score or more Angels gigs between New Year’s Eve 1980 and 1982, when Chris Bailey left the band. After Chris left, I never saw them live again. But I did see Doc on occasion socially. I have particularly fond memories of the night Doc tried to teach me to drive. I don’t know how we connected that night – did we coincide at the same Japanese restaurant? Saki was involved – but in the course of the evening we visited my Kings Cross flat, where Doc went straight for the fridge, which was empty, except for a lemon and some lipsticks.
“I see you don’t cook,” he correctly surmised.
“If you want to lose weight,” he continued, ‘There’s this product called spirulina. I stir a few teaspoons into a glass of water before I go onstage, to give me energy. It expands in your stomach and fills you up so you’re not hungry.”
I was thin and had no interest in losing weight. Doc was thin too. Whip thin. Whippet thin. I find it hard to take in photos of him as he looked in later life, during treatment for brain cancer, suffering side effects of the treatments, his hair still its trademark black. I am certain it must have been painful for Doc to see how he looked, too. He was a performer; he had an ego. More than that: Doc was a handsome man – a dynamic, flirtatious, sexual man.
I remember him as he looked that night: so tall; his bright eyes blue; his hair a natural black, and strong; his long dark eyelashes and his crazed, cunning Irish smile, that smile like sunshine on hillside, emerging from cloud.
That night, Doc tried to teach me to drive. I told him how my dad tried to teach me in an empty parking lot outside Safeway on a Sunday (no Sunday shopping in those days, so no cars). When I reversed, a large metal object – a part of the car – had dropped out of the undercarriage, leaving me and dad staring at each other, aghast. So Doc proposed teaching me himself. He had a beat-up car with manual gears and he’d show me how – in Kings Cross, Sydney’s nightclub quarter, on a chaotic, bustling Friday night. We were doing alright for about 100 metres, down Elizabeth Bay Road. We made it past the corner of Roslyn Street, almost made it to the Sebel Townhouse, home away from home for rock stars in Sydney. Outside the Sebel, there’s a hill. Okay – a bit of an incline. I pulled the hand-brake and it came away in my hand.
I will never forget the look on Doc’s face as I turned to him, holding the steering wheel with my right hand, the hand-brake loose in my left. I remember us giggling in the closed space of that small car, celebrating automotive malfunction on a night bright with the lights of Kings Cross.
The last time I saw Doc was in Kings Cross. It was 1985, just before I self-published a small book of poems, outside what was once the Plaza Hotel. We talked about writing, about my planned book. Doc told me George Bernard Shaw wrote a quota of 2500 words every morning. I was hungry. I don’t know how that came up in conversation but Doc produced a $20 note and insisted I take it. I didn’t want to. He insisted. He said he was commissioning me to write him a poem. He was wearing black stovepipe jeans. I was wearing loose black cotton ‘Chinese’ pants and a faded indigo short sleeve shirt. He smiled at me.
Last year, when Doc was sick and his friends were raising money for his treatment costs, I repaid that $20. Twenty dollars is nothing to repay Doc for how he contributed to my life, in that vivid time, when we were both young.
The poem? Not one of my best. But here it is, and it’s for Doc:
Cheap Poem, Winking
For B Neeson
As a shadow, she’s much bolder
than I – looms much larger
takes more risks, stretches out and
intrudes: she
ignores bolted gates, and enters
other people’s homes; has no fear
of anything concrete, anything private
anything closed. Unafraid
and irreverent, she touches
those I fear, and smothers
those I love
has no shame, no sense of place
reaches out: no restraint
In a mirror she’s much sharper
than myself – she’s much
lighter, more quick; so much more
the creature of light
being of colour
of angles, so much more
somebody’s dream, someone’s
image – a reflection, my opposite number
laughing back at me, wherever I
look: winking up
from whatever I make
I create
spotlit flirt, knowing
on paper
she’s more brilliant, so much braver
much more startling, more broad
for your dollar
(more a tease)
more alive, even disguised
even dismissed, even derided and
tossed off as a
cheap poem
Eighteen months ago I left a brave child in a mud-hole. Her name is Lenny and she is the main character in an untitled, unplanned novella I’ve left stranded on 25,000 words.
Lenny is a child soldier. She is a victim of genocide and extreme abuse. She is also an alter ego, despite the obvious differences that I have not experienced genocide or war or significant violence, and I am 40 years older than she is. Oh, and I am flesh and blood, while Lenny is fiction.
I feel survivor guilt in relation to Lenny. She struggled so hard to come into being, and she’s fought like a fiend to make it this far. Worse, in the framework of the narrative, Lenny is the one who cannot die: the one of who refuses to die, who insists her story be told.
For her story to be told, first she needs to break down her creator’s obduracy. Believe me, I am resistant to looking up the dictionary definition of “obdurate”, let alone loosening its grip on my writing behaviours.
Yet I do want Lenny to live. On a fundamental level, enabling Lenny’s story to be told gives me permission to tell my other stories. It is vital to me that I offer Lenny a hand-up, out of her mud-hole, and help her on her way.
I know she faces many challenges once she gets out of that hole. I know, because I created her universe – and believe me, a friendly cosmos it is not. Lenny’s world is a domain of warriors and heroes, demons and magic, and savagery. I did that to her. I put her there. The savagery and killing is of my making. So in a ‘real’ sense, in a fictional domain, Lenny’s greatest adversary is me.
This is a relationship between the writer and the written.
Shakespeare understood this (not that I compare myself to Shakespeare). At times he put his characters in situations of extreme duress. He sent them mad. He tortured them. He killed them in callous and brutal ways.
I left Lenny in a hole. The Bard exposed a good man to the cruel elements on a windswept heath. In King Lear Act 4 Scene 1 he had his character lament:
As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods,
They kill us for their sport.
But Lenny is the one who refuses to die. And I am the deus ex machina who can lift her out of that hole.
My first home in London was in Little Venice, a picturesque neighbourhood in Maida Vale, which boasts a canal with bright-painted canal boats and was at that time home to Annie Lennox. It’s a tree-filled, leafy, moneyed suburb a forty minute walk from Central London. I know, because each week day for my first weeks in London I trekked down the Edgeware Road to the Strand to my job in a government trade office.
I arrived in London at the same time winter did. It was cold. I lived in a basement flat beneath an elegant Georgian terrace house in impeccable condition. I woke early, because I had a long walk ahead to get to work. When I left work at night it was already dark and when I reached my basement cave I’d deflate, exhausted.
One evening I arrived home to find a note for me hand-written on high quality cream card. Mr Michael Browne, the owner of the Georgian terrace, my landlord, requested the pleasure of my company for cocktails.
I had never been invited to cocktails – except once, for a Bellini party, and on that occasion I misunderstood the invitation as a “blini” party and showed up, without champagne, expecting small Russian pancakes. This time I prepared carefully. I put on my rather starchy, conservative and formal Laura Ashley best: a mid-calf grey wool skirt, with pleats; and a short box-jacket in wool, in a shade I can only call banana. My hair looked lank. It seemed it never dried, in London. I composed myself to climb the front entrance stairs, off the street, and I knocked on the front door.
I swear a butler answered. A butler ushered me in and down the hallway. There, in the … the reception room? The parlour? … There, in the centrepiece room of that household, let’s call it the attendance room, an elderly man rose from his chair to greet me. He took my hand, graciously, and introduced himself as Michael Browne.
Mr Browne was approaching 80 years in age but stood unstooped. He had handsome features, a well-modulated voice and beautiful manners. He invited me to sit in a plush armchair and offered me pistachio nuts from the bowl on a clear glass coffee table. I think the armchair was a soft shade of green, not sage but soft olive with a touch of chartreuse. Behind where Mr Browne – call him Michael – sat in his chair was a walled lined with glossy hard-backed photographic books.
Mr Browne – Michael – was alert and intelligent and showed considerable interest in who I was and what I was doing in his basement room. He told me he knew I was an early riser: when I turned on the bathroom and kitchenette taps, pipes throughout all five levels of the Georgian house rattled into noisy action. He was politely curious about my secretarial employment.
But the life of Mr Michael Browne was way more interesting than my story. Not that he boasted. He wasn’t a braggart. He was a gentleman – a gentleman with an interesting past.
Michael Browne, I learned, had been a young man who loved night clubs and dancing. He loved dressing well and bright young things. He’d lived it up in London’s pre-War party scene but when War came, he joined the air force.
Michael Browne was a Battle of Britain pilot.
After the War, Michael moved to Hollywood. As a handsome War hero, with a British accent, he was in great demand socially, frequently as a studio escort for female stars. He’d stepped out with Rita Hayworth and Ava Gardner and enjoyed the Hollywood high life. But it didn’t translate into a movie contract, if that had been what he wanted.
Instead, he met a beautiful heiress from Virginia, and married her. Together, they’d set up a resort in the then-obscure Italian fishing village Portofino, on the Italian Riviera, in the province of Genoa. They persuaded their celebrity and socialite friends to holiday there, and before long Portofino was to Italy as St-Tropez was to France – synonymous with the jet-set at play.
Portofino became the holiday home-away-from-home for Michael’s fellow Brits David Niven and Rex Harrison, and for Charlie Chaplin; it was Princess Grace of Monaco’s “retreat” from Monaco. Michael and his wife were beautiful people, living the life of the beautiful and rich.
“She was very beautiful,” he nodded. “Here. See this copy of French Vogue? I still subscribe to French and Italian Vogue, to pick out the dresses that would have suited her.”
He showed me a fashion editorial photo of a New Look-style cocktail dress, full calf-length layers flaring from a fitted, sleeveless torso. The fabric was filmy, some kind of organza.
After I moved into more affordable accommodation, a dank dark flat in Marylebone Lane, just behind Selfridges, I received a further handwritten invitation at my workplace: Michael Browne Esquire hoped I might join him for cocktails, prior to his departure for a spell at his home in the South of France. I delayed responding, feeling a bit depressed by my dark wintry circumstances, distinctly unglamorous. When I did phone, my call was answered by his housekeeper. She sounded suspicious. Why did I want to speak to Mr Browne?
Because he invited me, I replied, weakly. He invited me to cocktails, before he headed off to the South of France. Mr Browne is gravely ill, the housekeeper informed me sternly. There was a pause. I think she thought I might be some kind of ghoul, a fortune hunter. She said, I don’t think he’ll be coming back.
Years later I was seated in the front seat of the 53 bus, top deck, travelling up the Old Kent Road, when a different elderly man approached and sat down.
“I always sit front seat, top deck!” he beamed.
“So do I,” I answered. “I’m Elly.”
“I’m Jim,” he said, then proceeded to tell me about his life.
He was the same generation as Mr Michael Browne. His life was as interesting. Their stories had some common ground: the night clubs of London, before the War.
Jim Lodge had been a saxophonist in a dance band. His band were regulars at a club called the Silver Spoon, a favourite of “David”, the then-Prince of Wales who led London’s fast set and later became, briefly, King Edward VIII. Jim would watch “David” dancing with his ladies, who might have included his married mistresses Freda Dudley Ward, Thelma Furness, and Wallis Simpson.
I think Jim said he served in the War. I don’t recall. Later he married and one of his children is the novelist David Lodge.
A few weeks after meeting Jim I wrote to David Lodge, through his literary agent, saying how much I enjoyed chatting with his father and asking whether Jim might like me to visit him occasionally. The author wrote back to say his father had told him about our conversation and he (Jim) had enjoyed it too, but he (David) didn’t think it was necessary for me to visit, as his father was very social and had many visitors in his retirement.
In 2008 David Lodge published a novel called Deaf Sentence, a meditation on ageing, death and reconciliation in which the central character is, like the author, a former academic with a nonagenarian, ex-band musician father who is in steep decline but remains irascible.
From The Guardian review:
But while the novel’s autobiographical framing is self-advertised – we know that Lodge himself is a former academic who suffers from deafness, and that his father, like Harry Bates, was a freelance musician – the authorial presence is much more saturated than these instant identifications might suggest. […] Appropriately enough, the novel ends with both a birth and a death, a marriage back on an even keel and, in the case of masochistic Alex, an incriminating exposure. In its wintry considerations of impending decay it bears a superficial resemblance to John Updike’s Villages, but a comparison between the two books is oddly revealing. Updike’s oldsters are still shagging heroically on, indomitably priapic until their final seizure. Lodge’s are keener on quiet comfort, calm companionability – modest aims that have some chance of being realised. There is a wonderful scene towards the end – again the image looks as if it came from Larkin, specifically “An Arundel Tomb” – in which Des and his wife lie chastely side by side in the old man’s house while awaiting the news of his death.
I haven’t read Deaf Sentence, but I will. I take it to be David Lodge’s tribute to his father, Jim Lodge. This short piece is mine: to Jim Lodge, and to Mr Michael Browne.
Let’s suppose, for the sake of argument (because I do love argument), that I write some short stories that pivot on actual incidents from my own life.
For example, tales from the 53 bus, the routemaster bus – along with the N53 and the 54 – that travels through south-east London to Trafalgar Square. The linking theme here would be race.
Or the curious incident in Fez, Morocco. Theme: state repression, terrorism and the clash of North African and Western cultures.
Or something about the poison of gossip, running like mercury through corridors in glamorous West End offices. I’m thinking of the First Emperor, in Ch’in, whose tomb – legend has it – is lethally protected by a moat of mercury.
Or something about a cat that died. Make that two cats. Maybe four. No cat death should go unremarked.
Maybe something about families where children’s names and pets’ names constantly get mixed up. Or perhaps it’s not a cat who died but instead a father.
Maybe something about disorientation and over-stimulation in a megametropolis? Being lost? Being scared?
Lots of places to start.
Second: how to change the POV. The protagonists might be someone else who witnessed or participated in those episodes. Someone actual or fictional. Or it might be me only older, or younger, than I was at that time. Or me as I might have been had my history then been other than it was.
Lots of places to go.
An image of a black cat crosses my mind. Heading somewhere I might follow … ?
HUNGRY GHOSTS SUITE– Exercise towards short stories 4/3/14
Hungry Ghosts on the N53
It’s night
And this bus takes forever.
This is the endless bus
The one that travels everywhere.
The ghost bus.
Spectre people sit glum
Sunk in jackets
Flesh grey and loose
The air about them heavy
with the absence
of connection. No conversation.
This bus tours history
Traverses an empire
Conveys a common wealth
But inside all are worn
Too tired
Too hollow.
It’s too late
For the dead.
Subversion
Under an overhang
Where no one can see
No one is watching
You and me.
Tales of subversion
Resentment and pain
No one is watching
Nothing to gain.
Tear down a village
Put up a fraud
No one is watching
Maybe they’re bored.
Theme park Morocco
Fuchsia and blue
No one is watching
Me and you.
No one is watching
No one can see
They’ll come to take you
They’ll ignore me.
Grunts
The office is divided
by corridors: this side
that side
In the centre a common meeting ground
Reception
With its wall-size red logo
W for War
The foot soldiers tramp
through the common area
primed for hostilities
ready to do damage
and die. Metaphorically.
They know so little.
God
God sees the sparrow fall.
But does He care for cats?
ICU
The shadow puppet is practising for death.
It moves in jerks.
No voice.
It is diminished,
Its rictus face a memento mori.
It dances, stiffly, behind a screen.
Big City
It’s a laser beam battle
In the city centre
Spears of light thrusting forward
Flung backward
The angles are askew
The speed an assault
The sound all surrounding
the pavement in revolt.
I cannot find my way.
The light darts target me
Shattering what’s solid
Glaring through dark space
Spinning me off centre
Blaring blasting blinding
I cannot find my feet.
Elly McDonald 
HUNGRY GHOSTS SUITE – Exercise towards short stories 4/3/14
Hungry Ghosts on the N53
It’s night
And this bus takes forever.
This is the endless bus
The one that travels everywhere.
The ghost bus.
Spectre people sit glum
Sunk in jackets
Flesh grey and loose
The air about them heavy
with the absence
of connection. No conversation.
This bus tours history
Traverses an empire
Conveys a common wealth
But inside all are worn
Too tired
Too hollow.
It’s too late
For the dead.
Subversion
Under an overhang
Where no one can see
No one is watching
You and me.
Tales of subversion
Resentment and pain
No one is watching
Nothing to gain.
Tear down a village
Put up a fraud
No one is watching
Maybe they’re bored.
Theme park Morocco
Fuchsia and blue
No one is watching
Me and you.
No one is watching
No one can see
They’ll come to take you
They’ll ignore me.
Grunts
The office is divided
by corridors: this side
that side
In the centre a common meeting ground
Reception
With its wall-size red logo
W for War
The foot soldiers tramp
through the common area
primed for hostilities
ready to do damage
and die. Metaphorically.
They know so little.
God
God sees the sparrow fall.
But does He care for cats?
ICU
The shadow puppet is practising for death.
It moves in jerks.
No voice.
It is diminished,
Its rictus face a memento mori.
It dances, stiffly, behind a screen.
Big City
It’s a laser beam battle
In the city centre
Spears of light thrusting forward
Flung backward
The angles are askew
The speed an assault
The sound all surrounding
the pavement in revolt.
I cannot find my way.
The light darts target me
Shattering what’s solid
Glaring through dark space
Spinning me off centre
Blaring blasting blinding
I cannot find my feet.