Five Bells (26 page)

The sunlight now was orange and the day was drifting away; it gave the shoppers a healthy non-commercial glow. They were defeating all market predictions by their delight in trash and treasure; they held up crumpled cast-offs and cracked old teacups; they leafed through children's books from the 1930s, they paused over someone's collection of rusty tools, most superceded these days by something electrically loud. Ellie bought an old hammer so that she could hang a small print
on her wall. The man who sold it was pleased, he said, to see that his hammer was going to a good home: it was a small courtesy he offered her, a sweet civility. He reminded Ellie of her father. He wore a scraggly cloth hat on his thin white hair, and read a novel, self-contented, when he did not have customers. She saw that his hands were callused; he had been a hard worker.

Ellie moved then to rummage through trestle tables piled high with discarded clothes. They gave off a slight whiff of naphthalene flakes and were remnants of every era and style, mostly retro-shaped and of fabrics one no longer saw, velveteen, chiffon, Crimplene. She extracted a cheongsam dress of a dense woven silk, covered by tiny emblems of cranes and pagodas. It was of shiny teal blue, with cloth fasteners at a slant and a small mandarin collar. Ellie stretched it across her breasts and hips to gauge if it would fit and decided yes, it was worth a try. She would wear it when next she met James so that he might remove it slowly.

 

Though he had looked nerve-wracked and bloodshot James still carried timeless appeal. Ellie was not sure how much this was overcoded by memory, but there was a charge to his presence and an arousing promise. His proximity in the restaurant had made her want to lean closer. She could feel her naked thighs beneath her thin skirt and had imagined his hand there, gently exploring. Her sexual fantasies all had this efficient simplicity. She would ring him in the morning and arrange another meeting, possibly at her apartment, with a bottle of wine. She would have indirect lighting and a melodious CD.

 

At fourteen they had been inept but lusty lovers: they didn't know what was what. But they knew that there was a world
of feeling awaiting them, and the opportunity to talk. The space of disclosure, when they lay in a sweaty embrace in late afternoon, was a sort of second home, so that they were homesick when they were apart, needing the wrecked foundry to rest in, and their own rug upon the floor, and the way light flowed and settled there, needing the bare talkative intimacy of one other person. The meaning of their meetings eluded them, but there was a sufficiency, a self-sufficiency, and a kind of sensual arrogance. Some afternoons they had thrashed about, in sheer heedless pleasure, and it took months before they each learned to slow down and take their time, and for Ellie to learn that she might instruct and more fully participate.

 

She remembered when James first discovered that women menstruate. He had not known how clandestine women were obliged to become, how curved around their own bodies. He told her then of the terrible shame of his nosebleeds and how he feared that he would never outgrow them. Imagine an adult, he said, bleeding from the face like that. Ellie had gently reassured him. It would pass. Everything passed. They were kids, just kids. No one, she told him, would remember his nosebleeds.

They had sex, but they did not know what ‘sexy' was; their responses were untutored and without any deception. They shared pleasure and discomfort. They told each other funny stories. They discussed books they had read and whacky teenage ideas. Together they enjoyed unusual words, those that described something in the world of ravishing or antique particularity.

The word ‘
clepsydra'
became a kind of code between them, an erotic trigger and a flag of assignation. No one else knew. When she leant over in class to whisper it, James would respond
with a little nod, and sometimes reach, surreptitiously, to squeeze her hand. Neither she nor James had ever uttered the word ‘love'. Both were too shy. Both were troubled by what might dissolve if they dared to name it. Neither wished to alarm the other, or to reach and find their hands empty.

 

Clepsydra
, the water clock, time rendered continuous. Time in transient light, talking softly about everything they were and might be. And now he was returned, her James, the body remembered above others, and in the saturated time of his return Ellie felt something open before her, another scale, a refashioned future, the glimmering of something half-concealed up ahead. She had always hated driving along country roads in the dark, seeing only in the pale stereoscopic limits of the headlights, sure only of things weakly illuminated, shapes, barest presences, rushing forward in the dark, atomised, gone. Now, looping back to the past, everything had changed. It was like recovering sight. It was like moving more slowly, watching objects solidify, and seeing the way. With her father they had driven cautiously, to avoid hitting kangaroos. ‘See?' he once said, when they braked in time. ‘They rise up in the dark and you have to be careful.' From the passenger seat she had watched the animal bounce off into the night, a silver outline, a mobile arc, energetic and unharmed.

 

Some of the stallholders in the market were beginning to pack away their wares. There were Turks selling Gözlemes; they had turned off their hotplates and were scraping leftover tabouli into plastic containers. There was an African man wrapping wooden statues, elongated human figures and animals with horns; there was a Hungarian baker, over-supplied with poppyseed cakes, and a Thai woman who sold jewellry made from sea shells. Merchants of many parts of the world were here,
in a hippy leftover rehearsal of united nations. Ellie found heartwarming this Sydney of mixed populations. As she left the market – how everything converged – she saw a little stall behind which a Chinese woman sat. It occurred to Ellie she might discover a trinket to go with the mandarin dress. The woman was sixty or so, and sitting by her side was a girl about eight, who was likely her granddaughter. Her stall was a fold-away table covered with oriental odds and ends. There were jade charms, pink coral ornaments and a few hexagonal coins; there was a row of brass-handled magnifying glasses of different sizes; there were small cut-paper pictures in crimson and embroidered silk dragons. Objects from another world. Objects from
Communist China.

Ellie picked up a magnifying glass. No reason, really.

The little girl said gravely: ‘you can make fire, as well as see,' and she held a glass to the fading sun to show Ellie how rays might concentrate. Ellie pretended she didn't know and tried to sound amazed. The girl was pleased. She beamed at her grandmother. So Ellie left the market with a hammer, a Chinese dress, poppyseed cake and a magnifying glass, and walked up the hill and a few blocks further, back to her apartment. She was sweating when she arrived and unlocked the door. The air was heavy with the threat of a coming storm.

 

It was difficult to filter all she had remembered that day, all that circulated around seeing James again, after so many years. Ellie took a shower, dressed in a sarong and prepared herself a gin and tonic. Then she sat for a while in front of a small electric fan, letting it blow cool over the damp surface of her hair. Miss Morrison had taught them about birds that came from Siberia, migratory birds that flew through China, then continued all the way to south-west and south-eastern Australia.
These birds curve around the planet
, that's what she had
said. They had chanted out the names of the birds in a sing-song fashion, the way they had been taught their maths times-tables, and Ellie had loved the way the listing and repetition became a kind of music. She must ask James if he remembered the chant. She would ask him to do the sing-song of the birds that curve around the planet, to give voice to the vectors Miss Morrison had described. James had talked of this once as they lay on the blanket; he had chanted the names and then turned to embrace her. These fragments they shared. They were more plausible, more secure, less private and idiomatic, now that he had returned to her. And it seemed to Ellie that there was an unexpected profundity to these recollections, as though they portended the completion, at last, of something long ago begun.

 

Ellie found the print, an old one and foxed, of native Australian flowers, and standing balanced on a chair hammered a nail into the wall, taking care not to make the plaster crack. Then she hung the picture. It was the simplest of pleasures and she loved the feel of the hammer in her hand, the warm wood, slightly concave for a labourer's grasp. Lovely old bloke, he was, who wanted his hammer to go to a good home. And the print of a bunch of flowers,
dryandra,
another item she had rescued from obscurity at a market stall, here glowed in the pallid twilight and was suddenly redeemed and beautiful.

 

Ellie made herself a snack of cheese and poppyseed cake, opened a bottle of red wine, and decided against turning on the television for the news. Instead she stretched on the couch and resumed her reading of a Russian novel, one she was hoping to write about in her thesis. She took notes as she went, placing tiny coloured stickers on significant pages, so that the book was
already looking half-transformed, an oddball art object, sprouting a rainbow of rectangles. If she were to write on this book, she reflected, she would have to learn Russian, and in a casual half-serious way entertained the idea of looking up courses on the internet, before the weekend was over. It appealed to her, the idea of learning the Russian language. There might be curiosities of translation that would remake the novel and transport her to a different kind of European otherworld. The novel was called
Petersburg
, by Andrei Bely. It was written in olden times, in 1913. The young revolutionary, Nikolai Apollonovich, must assassinate his father, Apollon Apollonovich, with a complicated time bomb. Wonderful names, these Russians. Ellie would compare it, she thought, to James Joyce's
Ulysses
and find intelligible links between cities rendered in words. The intellectual adventure of comparison excited and moved her, so that when she returned to her Sydney world it was thundering outside and it was eleven, perhaps, or nearing midnight. Time had leaked as she read, time had lost its authority, the peculiar duration of reading had entirely taken over.

Ellie stood up and slowly walked to the window. In the distance she heard the low rumble of a storm, and saw flashes of lightning tearing the sky. There was sublimity to thunderstorms and a sense of barely withheld threat. She watched for a while as trees sparked into seconds of existence, then fell back into darkness; she saw the ragged skyline in electric shock; she saw the undersides of clouds illuminated, like surreal creatures floating there; she saw the city take on a quality of abstraction, doused with crude light. Then the rain broke and fell heavily, in loud-roaring sheets. The air was filled up with noise and agitated presence. Each raindrop a small lantern.

Ellie closed away her book, undressed, and went to bed. In the darkness she lay listening to the sound of the flooding rain.
It was a betokening, somehow, of another kind of engulfment, one of time, of memory, and of James returned.

And they are sinking now, all of them, into the wet sleep of the city. Rain is falling all over Sydney.

 

Catherine is still mourning her dead brother and still speaking to him in silence, summoning his company in the torrential night. An altar boy swinging a censer and smoke filling the transept of the church, and her mother's face, and Brendan's, like faces in an old film. She is remembering the summer he made a trolley-cart from a broken-down pram; it was the summer, light-lit, of her holy communion, and her little communion bag with the rosary beads in it, and a fiver, a gift from her parents; and everything then was white, her knee-socks were white, and her dress was white and her gauzy veil, white as those petals at the Quay, perpetually subsiding; and now she is seeing no floral emblem to carry her feelings, but enormous white eyelids, one resting upon another, the rims overlapping in a bulbous, rhyming fold, and the eyelids are closing, slow-motion, closing into dreaming; and she is thinking, so she will remember, so she will remember in the morning,
must Google Woolloomooloo, must Google Woolloomooloo
…

 

Pei Xing is preserving the lost child on television by magical-thinking the number five:
Wu, wu; wu, wu; wu, wu; wu, wu;
and remembering ancient men painting with water on the footpaths of People's Park, practising calligraphy. The signs disappeared almost as they produced them, elegant broad flourishes with oversized pens. And returning half-sleeping in rain-sound to the park in Shanghai, she remembers old people performing
cloud hands,
swaying their bodies in the air, then walking backwards, stepping carefully, stepping beautifully solemn. It was another Tai Chi practice, walking backwards, backwards. And before she slips into dreaming Pei Xing realises this is her: some of us walk backwards, always seeing what lies behind; and she falls asleep like this, reversed into her own history, seeing her own childhood and what she has lost, walking backwards, and backwards, walking forwards backwards …