Five Bells (4 page)

 

One day James's mother was no longer there. Ellie waited, and watched, but she did not return. She stared at the letterbox, as Mrs DeMello had stared, feeling a secret collusion.

‘Loony bin', neighbours said. ‘She was chucked in the loony bin.'

And Ellie imagined a mute, desperate place, full of people bereft in the ways in which Mrs DeMello was bereft, their faces lined nervously at barred windows, their eyes sick with betrayal.

Ellie wished she had answered when Mrs DeMello had called for her son in the dusk. She knew by then what it might mean to have a call unanswered and to feel one's voice not ringing as it should. And to have been part of this woman's unhappiness, knowing that James had also left her, had been affrighted by what he had disclosed and the intimacy they had developed.

Although Ellie missed James, she could tell no one about it. There was no summary of the overlap of two young lives, or of what they did, or where they hid. After he left for the posh school James had never written, or been in touch. He was simply gone. Nor did he answer letters or revisit their town. Only when he won a university scholarship did they learn the dimensions of his success and the public achievements of his shining life. Ellie's parents read the article from the local paper on the phone, but by then Ellie was also living in the city, at another university, and leading another kind of life. She resisted, as much as possible, the effort of imagining him elsewhere.

In her apartment Ellie looked up from the table. A tall tree outside the window had produced an illusion of swinging light upon the wall. She'd not noticed it before, how for a brief time each day the shadows at a certain angle might project a light-show effect. Most days she had been working, whether studying in a library, or serving as a waitress in Gallo's café on King Street, and this fleeting holiday vision gave her pause.

Outside was seamless sunshine, promising a hot day; in here, swamped by memory, her rooms existed in another light, as if the power of remembering itself had altered the physics of her surroundings. This idea charmed her. This counter-time of James's return that splashed light in its own theatre.

Ellie sat looking at the watery radiance of moving shapes. It occurred to her then, irrelevantly, how bloody James was, how in recollection he was often not a school star, the clever kid, the ‘genius', they once had called him, but one of the walking wounded. And another return: James flustered, his head lowered, his eyes downcast. James covering his ears with his hands as he read, as if holding his head together. James not meeting her gaze. James closing himself in.

James slept badly in the room at the hostel. The bed was lumpy with the thousands of other bodies that had preceded him, their exertions, their tossing and turning, their own dragnets of haunted dreams, and the room was full of exhausted air and the trace of furtive cigarettes. The small window was stuck open, but the atmosphere was still and stale.

When, in late darkness, he finally slept, something disturbed his self-enclosure that turned out to be rain, sliding into the room with gentle insistence and a light tapping sound, as if infant fingers were drumming or prying open his sleep. Rising half-
blind in the half-light he had fumbled at the window, but he could not dislodge the frame and found himself leaning his face there, in a kind of dizzy spell, neither asleep nor awake, peering down into the black, rainy canyon of George Street. It must have been, he guessed, about 3 a.m. Up the street, just beyond sight, was the sandstone town hall, its façade beer-coloured in a strip of spotlights, and beyond that the shopping block that looked like a nineteenth-century exhibition hall and had a dumpy statue of Queen Victoria squatting at its entrance. On his side of the road, less salubrious, was a line of small stores that marked the beginnings of Chinatown – cafés for noodles and yum cha, Vietnamese bakeries, pawn shops, pubs, more backpacker hostels.

A bus rumbled along the street with the stray vehicles of a Friday night, but the pedestrians had thinned out, fleeing the rain. There were a few desperate hookers smoking beneath umbrellas and a single druggie, trying to score. One of the women wore heels so high she looked as if she was constantly toppling, correcting her balance, then set to topple once again. This display was contrived to make you want to catch her, James thought, to stand Jesus-like, arms open, as she sexually subsided. That sense of dramatised risk and the anonymity of her body. Oneself a saviour. A car appeared from nowhere and slowed as it approached. James watched the woman leave the shelter of her friend's umbrella and lean into the car window. There was something about how she leant – from the waist, like a doll – that called forth his pity.

James felt the rain on his face. It was cool and light. He sensed a camaraderie with others awake at this time, the desperadoes of the city and its working drivers. The stragglers, lost and wandering. The sleepless. The deprived. Country guys like him, maybe, who found all this city shit too much and way too overwhelming. When an ambulance sped past, its siren moaning, James thought it emblematic of big city life: there was always an accident or
crisis, there was always somebody bleeding or spilling their guts.

He kept telling himself he had come to Sydney to speak to Ellie, to save something of his past, to atone and to tell her, but there was a desolation and finality about being here,
here-now
, in this rainy, woeful darkness where he felt truly himself.

 

James must eventually have slept again because at nine he found himself waking. The name
Magritte
hung on his lips. It flared in his mind, then left. James felt groggy from too many pills and late-night vodkas, unfocused, dull. The day was already hot and the damp of the night was evaporating, and he roused himself because he had to walk down the hallway to piss. It was a queasy visit. The tiles were hospital green and the walls were grubby. He saw spiders beneath the pipes and the stains of other men's emissions and the morning light that poured though a barred window and should have cheered him up was instead the garish inspiration for an early headache. As he shaved before the mirror above the sink he avoided his own glances. How many men shave thus, not wanting to see themselves? In the lopsided tilt of his head he was hiding from what might be revealed. Loss of faith. Loss of face. Some closing down of what once he might have dreamed or become.

 

Back in his room James swallowed a handful of vitamins and analgesics, miming the crazy doctor on television, ceaselessly self-medicating. For a few seconds he considered returning to bed, locking himself in a winding sheet, shutting his eyes against the day, refusing the real-time of the city for a dead-beat retreat. But he rose and moved from the gloomy interior –
Ellie, Ellie
– watching his feet on the uneven stairs.

The young man at the reception counter had also had a bad night and looked even more sordidly wrecked than James. He held up a palm, like a Catholic priest, in a silent greeting. Might
be gay, James thought. He had the grey-skinned appearance of someone who lived in a capsule in a 1980s film, a sci-fi with drooling aliens and constant threat. Or of someone drowned, drained away, lost in watery depths. The pallor of the man's face shone sad and unholy. James nodded hello, wishing not to think of priests, or drowning, or B-grade movies, and stepped quickly onto the street, so as to avoid any small talk.

 

René Magritte; his favourite painter.

At fourteen Magritte had gone with his father Leopold to the banks of the river Sambre to identify the body of his mother, Adeline. She had committed suicide by drowning and he stood there, solemnly and silently holding his father's hand, a dutiful son, a reliable good boy, as they fished her slim body from the chill grey water. It was 1912. It was the end of his boyhood. Leopold had a face full of capillaries and was florid with crying; his knees failed, he released his hold, he crumpled before the corpse like a puppet articulated. But pale young René simply stood and looked. René was the strong one, emotionally composed. Cloth covered his mother's face in a wet sucking shroud. Her dress had reversed as they pulled her from the river feet first, and yet he knew her from the brown shoes on which she had replaced a non-matching buckle and the signet ring on her middle finger that had once been his grandmother's. When they peeled back the skirt and made her decent, she was grimy with river-silt and pretending to sleep. Her cheeks were sallow, caved in, her eyes were closed, and René felt his heart heave and capsize at the sight. Her face. His mother. Death deep enough to wallow in.

It was not long after that, the soon-to-be-Surrealist began his first job, working in a wallpaper factory, designing repetitions. It was easy, to repeat. Any loose flourish would appear whole if chained in a repetition. Any single flower became
many, any rough abstraction a pattern. There was a solace in blueprinted and easy decoration, the sweep of ink through a silk screen and the moist sheets carried away, the regularity of the copies and their filling up of parlours and bedrooms. He could have gone on like this forever, wallpapering the surface of things, printing the same image again and again.

Later, when Magritte was an artist in Paris reinventing his own past, someone pointed out that his most disturbing paintings were of figures blinded or covered in cloth, and he knew then – as though responding to an accusation – how he had converted her, how he had made his mother Art, how everything stored away and given art-form was reborn as another repetition.

 

James paused in the busy street, looking around, looking lost. Sydney, Saturday morning. January. George Street. Why, after all these years, was he thinking again of Magritte? Why did this recovery of Adeline seem so like his own memory?

There were shoppers speeding into department stores and broad-spectrum hubbub. The buses sounded like thunder hurtling towards the Quay. Cars glowed in the morning glare and were burning and purposeful. Aware of the tenacity of crowds intent on a summertime bargain, James saw how they moved in urgent surges and breaking waves, the hiding place they offered, the self's liquefaction, the mad sense of being sucked inside a flexible organism. He walked without direction but was not really there. He was somewhere in the Belgium he had invented as a child from a book, somewhere in silvery light, by the grim river Sambre. Being René, the strong one. Being
the dutiful son, the reliable good boy.

 

Lives of Modern Artists
: James's mother gave it to him for his fourteenth birthday. He had been shocked to realise that the boy René standing on the riverbank was exactly his age and that
René's father, Leopold, was employed as a tailor. James's father had been a tailor in the Old Country, his mother said, before they came to Australia and he found himself labouring on building sites, steering wheelbarrows of wet cement along angled planks, shovelling, hauling, crippling his frail tailor's back. It was no surprise he had left them. He was
lost
here, his mother said. There was no work for a tailor when everyone was building houses.

James heard a tone of forgiveness in her steady voice. She met his gaze. Her face across the kitchen table was alight with this rare disclosure. She had been beautiful, he realised. His mother had been beautiful. And there was no taint of bitterness, or recrimination. She might still love him, James vaguely thought. Perhaps feelings of this kind do not conclude.

 

In the city of Naples beautiful Giovanna had fallen in love with handsome Matheus, the tailor. They had gone on an adventure together, floating across the ocean on the good ship
Oriana,
and found themselves in Fremantle, Western Australia, feeling stranded. They knew almost immediately that something in their marriage was wrong; but in those days couples endured, sometimes to despair. As if in resistance to migrancy, Giovanna learned almost no English and maintained a prideful and fierce isolation. Matheus joined his
paisano
for drinks and local advice. He worked hard, learnt English, took his wife to the south-west following an Italian building team. He demolished himself in physical labour. In this country in which men need not talk at all, except of workaday details over a beer or two, Matheus gradually grew silent and then he was gone. Giovanna had seen him retreating for years, becoming thin and stretched as a Giacometti sculpture. One day he stretched into nothingness and slipped over the horizon.