Yellow Notebook, page 17
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Dreamt I went to church and sat in a pew. I felt calm, and waited for enlightenment which I knew would come: I didn’t have to do anything in order to be enlightened, just sit quietly and be ready. A feeling of quietly simmering expectation. Something good and right coming, if I could be patient.
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The woman accused of the murder must have learned her evidence by heart. Would a girl who says ‘somethink’ and ‘anythink’ also say, ‘And I think on the odd occasion another female’ or ‘prior to reaching the service station’ or ‘the matter that I’d been taken into custody for’? She said she was ‘re-luke-tant’ to do something and her barrister had to correct her. The frightful pathos of this. I would say they were done like a dinner.
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The man was found guilty. And the judge directed the jury to acquit the woman because the charge against her could not be proved. We all stood up, incredulous. But then came to me a sharp flash of illumination: what we were bowing to was not this thin, tough-faced man in a red robe, but to the power that he exercised, that passed through him, that our society gives him. I felt the spirit of the law—something tremendous restraining itself by reason. They really do have to prove it.
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The class reunion, in a suburban backyard. People had brought their husbands. Nobody told me we could, and just as well, for I no longer have one. The men must have been very bored. They barbecued a creature on a spit and stood about drinking. A woman whose quiet, intelligent manner and thick fair hair I vividly remembered told me she was a hypnotherapist: ‘I like depressives. Suicides. People in extreme fear states. Schizophrenics.’ The woman who was head prefect the year before me, a powerful hockey player, seized my arm: ‘I read your book. Saw it on TV. Bloody awful. Sorry. Hated it. Not trying to be rude, but it was bloody awful. You won’t get any false praise from me.’ I shrugged, and folded my arms. She immediately folded hers. It was cold in the garden. Someone passed round an exercise book and we wrote our names. When I saw the way one woman wrote—left-handed, a thin brown claw—I felt a small rushof emotion: ‘Oh—the way you hold a pen—I remember it!’ People burst into shrieks and cries. I suppose we spent all our school lives together with pens in our hands.
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Marcos flees the Philippines. Photos of him, mouth agape, orating into a microphone on the palace balcony, and behind him, plump and coiffed and upholstered, the repellent Imelda, her face casting a slanted glance past him as if towards a mob.
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Pulling on his steel-toed boots, A sings to himself softly, tunefully and correctly, ‘Blame It on the Boogie’.
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The husband talks as if the wife were not present. He considers himself the main act and will cut across her quite ruthlessly, not even noticing he’s doing it, in the middle of her sentence. She neither objects nor submits, but lowers her voice slightly and goes on speaking as a subtext to his discourse, even though each of them might be talking about something quite different.
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J’s put on a lot of weight and looks brown, smooth and solid. I was so happy to see him, I wanted to curl up under his arm and stay there all day. We lay on the grass listening to the speakers. When I got up I had green duck shit on my linen jacket, and I did not care.
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They gave me the prize. I had to make a speech. My new black shoes were giving me terrible blisters. Thea Astley gave me some bandaids. She hugged me and said, ‘You can write about all those tiny household things, like scraping the food off the cupboard fronts, and validate them.’ Quite a few people told me that The Children’s Bach is ‘so small that it’s hardly even a novel at all’. One bloke remarked in a classic backhander that he liked me and Frank Moorhouse because neither of us was any good at writing novels.
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A hard-faced, blue-eyed poet in a singlet and jeans gave me tips on how to teach writing in Pentridge: ‘Take a packet of Camel. Camel plain. Chuck ’em on the table and say, “Help yourselves.”’
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I was the only woman writer at the dinner. As the evening progressed I felt the foreign writers’ egos balloon and take up even more air than did the pall of cigar smoke that issued thickly from their lips. Everybody deferred to the French nouveau romancier. He was actually rather pleasant. The Cuban big-shot avoided meeting my eye at all. I sneaked away into the garden after dessert. His glamorous wife, also Cuban, came out and sat beside me in the dark. I asked her, ‘What is your work?’ She looked at me with a blank surprise. ‘I don’ work. I maarried to berry fah-mous wriiiter.’
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The ravaged beauty takes me to her newly renovated pied-à-terre close to the city. We drink tea and coffee. She is charming in the way that women (especially beauties) of her age and class can be: ‘How dreadful! That must have been absolutely devastating!’ etc—those phrases of the consummate listener, women’s expressions that mean simply, ‘I am paying attention to your tale’, but which probably serve, as well, to conceal boredom and the fact that she is thinking of something else, something private, paying attention to her own silent story.
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I was taken to visit a high school. Some students read out their stories. I loved this and was able to show it. Afterwards their teacher and I laughed happily together about the frequent theme of shit. One girl’s story was even entitled The Droppings.
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At 4 am someone opened my door and walked in. Waking in the dark, I thought, ‘Oh no—I must have gone to sleep in somebody else’s room by accident.’
‘W-who’s there?’
‘Security. I can smell smoke. Is everything all right?’
‘It must be my mosquito coil.’
‘Sorry! Goodnight.’
When my heart stopped thumping I thought, ‘Well, at least somebody’s looking after me, even if I don’t know who he is and will never see him again.’
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In the long-term carpark at Tullamarine, waiting for the bus, sitting on an old hunk of timber against a cyclone-wire fence through which the morning sun is carefully warming my back. Birds. A phone ringing in the Budget office. Cars close and distant. Men’s voices shouting, a hose squirting air. A small, cool breeze. A smell of grass.
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My little niece gives me, Christmas-wrapped, a beautiful seaside stone, exactly the size to fit the palm.
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After a warm night: rosy sky; remaining darkness clustering inside trees; pale objects drawing the new light towards them.
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A party for Laurie Anderson in a beautiful gallery in the Domain. Arty people: some whose gender was not immediately apparent, others wearing exaggerated outfits—one bloke in a kind of helmet with shiny metal objects attached to it.
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The biographer is going to AA. She told me she realised she had spent a lot of her life feeling envious and jealous, but censoring these emotions and denying to herself that she felt them. And I remembered—but did not speak about it, for she seemed to need to be the one doing the talking, though I could see that it was tiring her—a day when she came to my house, sat down opposite me at the table, and said, in her determined, dangerously smiling way that used to make me shiver at what she was about to hit me with, ‘I’ve noticed that you use the word “envious” a great deal more than anyone I know.’
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I wonder if I will ever meet a man I can love. Love, let alone live with. At my age is this such a tall order? Yes, it is. In a shop window I saw a poster of a naked man in profile holding a naked baby. The photo was cropped at the point of the man’s torso where his cock began to be visible: I saw with a shock the stiff little bush of pubic hair. I had forgotten that such intimate sights existed. If I’m not careful I will forget my own body, too. Well—I may be lonely, but at least I’m not bored, and neither am I being hated by someone who is supposed to be loving me.
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The movie I wrote is going to Cannes. Fear of the pincer action: on one side, public attention, on the other, the rage of people who see themselves portrayed.
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In the Botanic Gardens A and I lie on two blankets that he’s spread on the Oak Lawn and read The Europeans aloud. The bliss of being read to. The speckled shade, small children shouting and running across the grass. We take it in turns, chapter by chapter. The long sentences tax our powers of forward-seeing, but our skills develop as we warm to it. My crabby temper evaporates in the beautiful autumn day. The leaves are hardly brown, let alone on the ground.
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The ex-junkie borrowed $68 off me ten days ago and has not been seen since. I thought I’d wait another week before I made inquiries. Then he called.
‘Sorry I haven’t paid back the money you lent me.’
Silence.
‘But I—umm—well, I need to borrow some more. I need $80.’
Pause.
‘No. I don’t want to lend it to you.’
Pause.
‘I’m crook and I need to go to work.’
‘No. I don’t want to lend you any money.’
‘Oh. All right.’
‘OK?’
‘Yeah. Bye.’
So the gossip is true. I didn’t hesitate, or feel guilty, or even give a reason. I must be making progress.
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Cool, cloudy day at Anglesea. They took us for a swim. Everyone was leaving the beach for lunch and it started to rain lightly. The water was green and the sky was grey. Big, cold, slow swells that didn’t break. P turned blue: ‘My teeth are what you call chattering!’ After five minutes it was no longer cold. We were all laughing and shouting—blasts of intense joy. On the way back to the house I looked around me at the low scrub and the greyish air and the massed tea-tree in a sort of bliss.
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A movie about war crimes in Poland. A small crowd had gathered to watch the exhumation of bodies from a mass grave. Two men at the very edge of the trench slipped on the crumbling soil and fell in among the blackened, rotting remains. Their frantic scrambling to get out was frightful.
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I thought my ladder had been stolen, but it turns out F had come over and taken it. What is the actual process by which one separates oneself from another person?
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I bought a cassette of Maria Callas and played it in the car. When she sang Io son’ l’umile ancella I amazed myself by bursting out sobbing. Not just a few tears but real weeping. All kinds of good and comforting thoughts rushed through my head. I want to be ‘the humble servant-maid’.
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I dreamt that someone threw blood on my long skirt. I took it off and wrapped myself in a towel while I washed out the blood. A young Eastern European man was anxious that someone would come in and suspect indiscretion. He stood in a corner with his finger across his lips. I couldn’t convey to him that there was nothing to suspect. Someone was playing a piano for children to dance to.
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The surgeon’s wife actually considered buying a watch that cost $700. The courteous young man serving her kept his face blank while she loudly bashed my ear about Australia’s descent into the maelstrom of unionism, high taxation and welfare. ‘Workers are bludgers,’ she said with scorn. ‘Rostered days off, one a fortnight.’ ‘What’s wrong with that?’ I said, really wanting to know. She didn’t have an answer.
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The law student came downstairs to tell me something he’d read in a judgment he’s studying. ‘This judge reckons the law says that as much responsibility is to be expected of a twelve-year-old as of a twenty-one-year-old.’ I noticed how white his face was, mauve shadows under his eyes. I said, ‘Do you feel sick? You’ve gone very pale.’ ‘No—it’s just the shock of the judgment.’ His emotions often show in the colour of his face. When his girlfriend was coming back from overseas his skin was green.
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The prisoners in the Pentridge writing group liked gasbagging about families, about touching people while you’re talking, and whether this habit came from your parents. One bloke said, ‘My family’s very close, always huggin’ and that. When my mum comes in here she throws her arms round me and starts bawlin’. I could’ve started meself—but you know—you have to—’ He mimes himself darting embarrassed, tiny glances to left and right. Imagine if everybody in Pentridge started bawling at once, screws and all. The tears would rise up and spill over the curved top of the bluestone walls.
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We walked out to Princes Park to look for the comet. A found it and I saw it, very blurred, six times as big as a star, like a headlight in a very thick fog.
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Walked to the shop. Picked a twig of bottlebrush with three flowers on it. Looked at it with extreme pleasure. At home I noticed a shifting and saw that a praying mantis was hiding among its spiky leaves. ‘Poor thing. Poor thing.’ I took it out the front and held the twig against the wisteria: it stepped across and, adjusting its camouflage, disappeared.
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M read me some Banjo Paterson poems. ‘Where the breezes shake the grass.’
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Peggy Glanville-Hicks was interviewed on TV.
‘You love it, don’t you—music?’ said the interviewer, in a shy, humble voice.
‘Well,’ said the old woman, holding a whining black poodle in her arms, ‘it’s international. It can go anywhere. It doesn’t need translation. And its manifestation is the displacement of air.’
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Once I accepted F’s analysis, in his letter—that we’d never really committed ourselves to each other as married people do—all my victim feelings and anger fell away. All that was left was a terrible sadness. Days of crying at the slightest stimulus.
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‘Afterwards she repented it bitterly, but she was hopeless at apologising: instead of retracting her feelings, what she always did was to say that she was sorry for expressing them, a kind of amends that costs nothing and carries the built-in rebuke that the other person is unable to bear the truth.’ —Penelope Gilliatt, ‘The Redhead’, in The Transatlantic Review
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Sick in bed. My sister came round and told me the latest family gossip. We laughed and laughed. I thought of a little movie about how information passes round a family—very sternly structured, solely in the form of two-way conversations—all in dialogue, clothes and body language. ‘And I said, “Look, Mum, there are dead letters in dead letter offices all over the world.”’ When I get better from this I’m gonna WORK. I’m going to make fur and feathers fly, I’m gonna ATTACK IDEAS and let the chips fall where they may.
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If I had a little boy I’d call him Angelo.
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‘What I missed,’ said the law student about the time his girlfriend was away, ‘wasn’t so much getting love as giving it. I just wanted to—I wanted to cover her with love.’
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A said that anger ruled my life. Which of course made me furious but I tried not to be. Once again his humility and ability to accept criticism took away my weapons. He was washing up while we talked. When he got to the saucepan he turned aside and left it lying in the water. All the while, as the talk went to and fro, I was looking at the saucepan in the water, congealing with fat, bobbing in the sink, and I was thinking, ‘Can’t you finish a job? That’s what makes me angry with you. You’re sloppy.’
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Dreamt I was doing an English exam and making a mess of it. I had missed one of the essay questions. I panicked, and began to give up. I looked out the window. A bird flew away. I felt sad and hopeless, as if all were lost. A woman supervisor looked at me through a grille. Suddenly I laughed and said, ‘I’m a famous novelist! I don’t need this exam!’ She laughed too but still I felt ashamed, as if a necessary step were missing in my self-preparation for life.
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A horrible nuclear disaster, a meltdown, at Chernobyl in the Ukraine. Nobody knows how many people have died.
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Dinner with the famous ones. Among men, as usual, I became aware that I have no subject on which I can deliver quantities of information, facts etc. Savage gossip. I wondered how many knives would be quivering in my back after the door had closed.
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All day at the Royal Women’s birthing centre. I longed to watch a birth but of course this was out of the question, though I did glimpse, through opening doors, several cunts—one bloody, with a doctor sitting at it sewing it up. A huge placenta in a metal dish, the young nurses examining it bloody to the wrists. The matter-of-fact calm of midwives. The premature babies, their shuddering and gasping, their appalling tininess, I wanted to sob out loud. As if a nose were not made for anything but to have a tube shoved up it.
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The nurse’s husband, in a letter: ‘Geez you women cry a lot but yer as tough as nails. I walk around feeling limp and inferior in the face of that iron-hearted sex you belong to.’
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I drove her to school at 7 am for camp. We laughed all the way at I have forgotten what. She’s had a dramatic, rather sixties haircut. ‘It makes you look older,’ I said. ‘At least eighteen.’ Her face burst into a joyful smile. I love her as one is afraid to love, through superstition. Even having written that…
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A letter from the American. ‘I swim beside you in spirit.’
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Dreamt I was to be ordained and to give the sacrament. Anxious because I hadn’t studied the liturgy. I woke thinking that if I were ordained I would be qualified to bury the dead. And the part I want to lay to rest is the girl I was in the 1960s. Who thought she was free but who was in fact chained. Who had two abortions and was not loved or respected by the men she slept with, although she believed she was, through inability to see the facts and insufficient imagination about what went on in men’s minds and hearts. Cruel to herself without realising it.
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Two people told me they’d seen me on TV. The man said, ‘You looked sad.’ The woman said, ‘Your eyes were twinkling, as if you were about to laugh.’
