The Feel of Steel (7 page)

I am invisible, in this apartment building. I enter through the front door. Coming out across the carpeted, panelled lobby are three young women, dressed for the office in heels, tight skirts and little sleeveless tops. My neighbours! I want to be greeted and to greet. The first two pass me with heads down, expressionless. The third makes as if to do the same but I force the issue. I say in a quiet, firm tone, ‘Good morning.' ‘Good morning,' she replies mechanically, without even glancing up. Her toneless voice. The duty she must feel – all the people she will have to greet when she gets to work – how laborious it must seem to her, older people wanting something from her, demanding she acknowledge their presence, their existence.

A warm day. I walk to Bondi Junction to bank my royalty cheque and to pick up some photos. Then I take the escalator down to David Jones' furniture department, arranged in a series of tranquil, dimly lit domestic spaces. On the most luxurious sofa I open the folder of photos, which have lain undeveloped in the camera for over six months. His sadness, and mine: haggard, exhausted, unable to smile, looking into the lens with worn-out faces and desolate eyes. I sit there quietly, and I carefully look at the pictures. Time seems to pass me very quietly and carefully, I don't know how long; and it occurs to me that here in the furniture department of
David Jones I am quietly and carefully mourning the end of our marriage.

Curtains of rain move across the valley. A rainbow flares, dropping one foot into a clump of young eucalypts in the next-door garden. The wind dashing through the gum-trees makes their wet leaves sparkle wildly. The beauty of it makes me gasp. More tears pour out. A bottomless reservoir of tears. I'll never be able to cry them all.

Martin at Braidwood has been thrown by his horse. I take the train to visit him in Wollongong Hospital. His pain and fatigue: last night a man died in the ward; others groan and snore. His smashed leg sprouts metal spikes. He flexes his foot and a bright rill of blood oozes from one of the spike-holes. Clumsily he tries to stroke the swollen, punctured surface of his foot and ankle: it relieves the pain, he says. I offer to do it for him and he lets me. I keep on stroking for a long time. People who live alone forget what touch is.

Bright morning. A very early walk. A fistful of flowers snatched from the edges and overhangs of neighbouring gardens. The houses are still closed up and sleeping.

Reading Ibsen,
A Doll's House
. The husband's question, when he realises at last that his wife is serious about leaving him: ‘Can you tell me how I lost your love?' Seeing the play again last winter, I cried at that question, its sudden weary humility. It would make a good line in a song.

Down on the golf course, this dry morning, the hoses suddenly come on. Bridal veils blossom in the long halls of sunlight.

In Dymock's I pick up a book called
Get Over It!
and skim it with sickened recognition. My state is fundamentally no different from that of a girl of twenty. Shame, rage, sorrow. The longing to have the last word.

An expensive couple in a Bondi cafe. She's in her twenties, glossy, slim, grittily determined. He's pushing sixty and his grey hair is receding, but money is oozing from his pores and she is soaking it up – on her terms. He stares blankly out to sea while she bores on in a mechanical tone, handing him an ultimatum: ‘You're not the problem.
I'm
the problem. They all love
you
. They don't want me to come. I'd rather be alone than get into trouble with people who are so stupid. If
you
don't understand me, I'll find someone who does. It might be a man – it doesn't matter.
Do
you understand me?'

There's a wife in this story and I'm on her side.

In a review of a novel about the current situation in Russia: ‘Far worse than not being able to trust anyone is not knowing where to place your mistrust . . . Nothing offers any purchase or guidance . . . The paranoia stretches back in time as well as forwards: everything you knew about the past is probably disastrously mistaken or fabricated, but what you are replacing it with is probably an invention.'