For Everyone Concerned, page 4
*
In the year following my appearance in the film for television of the book written by the man who had stood behind the perfectly black window, I wrote an expository essay of several pages for the Principal of my school so that I might become Headboy of my school. I had not been the chief character in the film, just as I had known in the moment of darkness in the sound-room that I would never be such a character, but I had been one of the boy-actors who were the friends of the chief character.
Two or three other boys were also writing expository essays for the Principal on why they, too, wanted to be Headboy of the school. We were all candidates for the position and it was understood that among this field I was favourite. I remember looking up at the Honours Board in the main foyer outside the Principal’s office and imagining my name being added to the select list of Headboys and Headgirls which went back to 1954 and which included the names of some boys and girls who were now dead but remained immortal.
I can recall no details of the pages which I wrote when I was aged twelve years, nor can I remember the name or the face of the boy who became Headboy after the Principal had read what we had written. I remember only that the reasons I wrote of for wanting to become Headboy were concerned, in the main part, with revenge.
I took for my exposition the case of my older brother who had left the school three years before I had entered it. I wrote of my brother as a helpless victim of numerous injustices at the hands of school bullies. I wrote of the cruelties he had suffered and of the anguish I had heard my parents express at my brother’s future when I had been standing in the passageway of our house late at night with bare feet. I wrote of my desire to see punished any boy who did such things to another boy as to cause that boy’s entire future to be put in doubt. I believe that most of the writing of the essay was concerned with my hatred of the boys who had done such things to my brother as to cause me to dislike my brother’s weakness.
I remember feeling humiliated when another boy whom I cannot remember was announced as Headboy. Yet, even worse than this, I remember the terror I felt when the pages of my expository essay which contained my secret plan of revenge were not returned to me by the Principal. I believed that these pages were being held in school files as evidence against me and that, at some point in the future, they would be used to bring me down.
I believe, now, that I decided then that I would never again be the sort of person who would run for any public office, or apply for any position of responsibility or leadership. I also believe, now, that I decided then that I would one day be able to write several pages outlining truthfully the story of my plan of revenge for the weakness I disliked in my older brother but until that day I would only be able to pretend to write such pages.
When I arrived in Melbourne on my fourth visit, my brother showed me the Melbourne Sunday Herald colour supplement in which there was an article about the writer who lived on Falcon Street, McLeod. I have kept the article not for the words but for the photos: the writer holding up his personalised racing silks to the camera; the writer, wearing his favourite hat with the feather in its band, picked out by the camera in a crowd at the racetrack. On my return to Wellington, my newly married friends wanted the silks photograph from this magazine but I told them I was keeping the lot. I was aware just now when I wrote about the silks photograph that this photograph is on the wall of the room in which I am writing this story. Over the next week while I was in Melbourne more articles appeared. They appeared everywhere. They appeared in newspapers and in entertainment guides. I remember thinking that the editors of all of the city’s publications must have been conspiring that week to provide me, and only me, with the pleasure to be had from reading about the writer and looking at photographs of him. And yet, because I was the only one who truly loved the writer’s books, I was also saddened to see his name in print in so many places. I felt indignant whenever an article appeared containing a biographical or bibliographical mistake and outraged when the hack journalist and the half-asleep subeditor failed to allow the writer’s extreme care to influence their own work.
On this fourth visit of mine to Melbourne in November 1989, my brother and I, together with some friends of my brother’s, though not including the woman who had sat a little way away from us in the backyard of the house in Brunswick, went to Flemington Race Track on Derby Day. Near the back of the racebook which my brother had bought to help us in our selections of horses was an advertisement for a film about the writer. Why such a film was advertised in the unlikely pages of a racebook could be guessed from sections of the film about the writer’s life, in which mention was made of free lectures given by the writer to the jockeys of the Melbourne Jockey Federation on the subject of English Composition.
The woman who had chosen not to come with us to the races had done so because she said it was too good a day to waste watching horses and that her plan of driving to the coast somewhere was infinitely better than ours of wasting the day in a crowd of people all intent on losing their money. I remember thinking that her plan had merit and that if anyone else had proposed it we would have had to consider the plan seriously. I knew, however, that there would never be a time when the woman and I could drive to the coast on a fine day and enjoy in any measure each other’s company. The woman also knew this. She had proposed her plan on an impulse, as it were, to rival our well-established plan of going to the races, although I believed she had had it in her mind to make her impulsive declaration of the senselessness of the Flemington Race Track for several days. The success of her proposal lay not in its adoption by us but in the shadow it would throw over our day at the races. She told us on the morning of the day we had planned to go to the races, as we were preparing the food we would take with us in the kitchen of my brother’s house, that it was a stupid idea to go to the races on such a day.
My brother and I looked for the writer on Derby Day in the Members’ area, but without any luck. The writer was everywhere except there. We looked through my brother’s racing binoculars at the crowd in the Members’ area from our position on the other side of the fence, within the public enclosure. We looked for his distinctive hat with the feather in it but saw instead the tanned dome of a prominent New Zealand businessman who had recently married and separated from an Australian socialite, causing the couple to appear in all the pages of newspapers and magazines, rivalling the coverage given even to the writer whom editors, for this one glorious week, had decided was worthy of space in the pages of their publications, and whom we were convinced was present that day, somewhere in the Members’ area.
I remember placing my first bet of this Carnival Week, as the week leading up to the running of the most famous race of the Southern Hemisphere, the Fosters Melbourne Cup, is known, on this day beneath a sky of brilliant, unbroken blue. This was also my first ever bet with a bookie. Five dollars a win on Gin Rhythm. It was only when I was walking away, having paid over my money to the bookie’s assistant and having watched my five dollar note go into the leather bag whose brown colouring reminded me of the colour of horses’ flanks, if that was the word for the area just below where the saddle sat, that I realised the bookie had thought I had said five dollars a win Impressionism. He had misheard my flattened vowels, though, in fact, when I’d been placing the bet I had been thinking about Impressionism. I was too humiliated to go back to my first ever bookie and tell him about the mistake. Anyway, I considered that by going to the bookie with thoughts of Impressionism in my mind when I wished to place my first ever bookie-bet on the horse called Gin Rhythm, I had contributed to the misunderstanding.
My sister, who also lives in Melbourne, had been standing behind me in line for the same bookie and had put a dollar each way on Impressionism. My sister had lived in Melbourne for several years and pronounced her words so that Melbourne bookies were able to allot the correct ticket. The race was number three on the programme and it was called the Hilton on the Park Stakes. Gin Rhythm takes it from Impressionism at the post.
I remember being so excited at the close finish of the race and the fact that it included both the horses’ names I had been thinking about—Gin Rhythm and Impressionism—that, for several moments, I could separate in my mind neither the horses’ names, nor the order in which they had finished—nor could I decipher the name of the horse which the bookie had scribbled on the ticket he had handed me in exchange for my five dollars. Indeed, I still count that as my first and only win of the day, if that Aussie bookie had cleaned out his ears.
In the year before my third visit to Melbourne, I had read in an interview with an American writer, though not the one who had suffered everlasting regret, that revenge had been one of the writer’s chief motivations in writing. The American writer had said that getting even had been a guiding principle in the composition of his books. I have often thought about this statement and, though I believed at the time, at the age of twenty-three years, that I was the only young would-be writer who truly loved the books of the American writer, yet I thought that I would only be a writer once I had forgotten the words of the American writer and had truthfully outlined the story of the pages I had written when I was aged twelve years on the subject of revenge.
I needed to forget these words, since I had to admit to myself that the actual reason for writing those pages was utterly base and totally self-centred; I had wanted to pretend to the Principal that I was anything but as weak as my brother and, for this reason alone, I had wanted to become Headboy of my school.
Between the times of my third and fourth visit to Melbourne, I sent my older brother by airmail a book by the American writer who had spoken of revenge. In this time I also received by airmail from my brother, a book by the writer who is the subject of this story.
The woman who was living with my brother at the times of my second, third and fourth visits to Melbourne, between the years 1984 to 1989, did not read the book I sent my brother. She did not generally read works of fiction and told me she preferred works of non-fiction because of their truthfulness and the fact that nothing in these books had been made up.
On my fourth visit she did not mention the writing I had done but occasionally mentioned its financial success, which was negligible in real terms, in terms of what real work paid, but astounding to the woman who saw the writing I had done as totally worthless and a complete waste of time.
*
On one of the days of my second visit to Melbourne, which the woman never tired of reminding me were being wasted in reading works of fiction and drinking the beer in my brother’s fridge when I should have been outside doing something, as she often said, I had put down my book on the arm of the chair, placed the empty can of Fosters beer in the rubbish tin, and had indeed walked outside.
I remember that this day was like any other day of those summer months of my second visit; it was unbearably hot and humid. The sky was not blue-coloured as I had imagined on those days which I had spent inside without so much as looking out a window of my brother’s flat, but a hazy washed out grey with a pale tint of blue showing behind. As I looked at the sky on this day, I remember imagining a swimming pool into which has been poured powdered milk.
I can recall no details of how I arrived at the room in a neighbouring suburb in which a three-hour seminar was being held on door-to-door selling of imitation leather credit card-holders. I remember on this day visiting the Student Job Centre at Melbourne University, as I had often been advised to do by the woman. And I remember, as I was reading the notices of available jobs on small filing cards pinned to a large board on the wall of the Centre, feeling, firstly, the freedom that paid work would bring me from my brother’s flat and from the woman’s constant reminders of my debt to my brother and the worthlessness of my pursuits—which exhilarated me—and, secondly, terror at the distance I had walked on this hot day and the thought that I was now separated from the work of fiction I had put aside on the arm of the chair in the lounge of my brother’s flat—which crushed me—and that instead of reading books which I sometimes dreamed I had written, I was now reading notices about the rates offered in the suburb of Prahran for lawn-mowing services.
The man who was taking the seminar on door-to-door selling was wearing a shirt and tie during the first hour of the seminar. During the second hour he was wearing a shirt, having taken off the tie. In the third and final hour he had taken off his shirt because of the heat and the humidity and underneath he was wearing a white teeshirt. I can recall no details of what the man in the shirt and tie said, though I remember the particular moment of his taking off the shirt and revealing the tattoos he had on the biceps of both arms. In that instant I knew that the man was taking more money in commission from his sellers than he said was the case in the seminar. And I realised that without his shirt and tie, I could now see that the skin on the man’s face was badly scarred. His shirt and tie had not been covering up in any way the scarred skin but it was only when he took off the shirt and tie that I could see the scars. Also I imagined that I was hearing his speech deteriorate across the three hours. Just as the man’s skin had deteriorated, so his speech had deteriorated, I thought. So that the man who had started the seminar in a shirt and tie, speaking very politely about selling imitation leather credit card-holders door-to-door, was, I thought, by the end of the seminar, only half-dressed, coarsely spoken, and, I imagined, moving his arms in such a way as to make his tattoos show exaggeratedly large.
During the three hours of the seminar I sometimes felt exhilarated that I would not have to pretend on this day to my brother when he came home with the tall bottles of Fosters beer that I had been outside and that I had not been sitting in the same chair all day wasting my time reading while, in the woman’s words, my debt ticked over. I felt pleased and triumphant to have something of interest to tell the woman when she came home from work to ask me again about the beer in the fridge.
While the man taking the seminar spoke, I was already forming in my mind the sentences which I would say to my brother and to the woman. I remembered thinking, as I watched the man’s tattoos, that the woman, after all, had been perfectly right about my laziness, my wastefulness, and my complete inability to move from the chair and pay off the debt of several hundred dollars which I owed my brother. I was, after all, I now recognised, a parasite on my brother’s good nature, and that what I had done was simply to move from the chair I had been sitting in in Wellington, fifteen hundred miles to the chair in my brother’s flat in Melbourne.
I now realised that until this day I had paid no attention to the actual sky outside the window of my brother’s flat but only to the skies which filled the pages of the works of fiction into which I sometimes imagined myself being lifted under the power of my brother’s blue-coloured cans of Fosters beer.
During the three hours of the seminar I sometimes thought of the work of fiction I had been reading and had put aside on this day. And I thought of how much I hated the woman who had made me do such a thing and who had made me see myself in this way. And I thought of how much I hated my brother’s weakness in living with the woman.
Several months after I received the phone call which is mentioned in the first sentence of this story, I was sitting in the same room as the American writer mentioned in another part of this story who had spoken of getting even through writing. The room was not in the house of the writer, though I had, at an earlier time, looked in the pages of the phone book and walked past the house which is listed as the writer’s address.
The writer was giving a lecture in this room on the subject of Philosophical Classics. I can recall none of the details of what the writer said about this subject, except an example he was giving as to the part Reason played in the life of our minds in which he mentioned a visit to the horse races. Say I go to the races, the writer said, and this is unlikely and indeed the Greeks would say I had lost my Reason by going to the races, that it was a waste of time, but I am at the races and how am I to pick my horse?
While the writer was speaking about picking a horse, I was thinking of the names of two horses, Gin Rhythm and Impressionism, and also of my brother who, for two years, had followed a system he had read about in a book on betting. It was a complicated system which involved entering in long, thin columns many numbers and then calculating mathematically a percentage figure which translated into that horse’s chances, with that rider on board, on that track, under those skies, of winning or placing in the race. After more than two years of following the system, my brother calculated that he had come out about even, or slightly worse in terms of money outlaid and money returned. It was not unusual for my brother to win up to a thousand dollars or more on one day and then to lose a corresponding amount the next. And that through these wild swings, he had come out after two years at about even, or slightly down.
