Zigzag Street (12 page)

This is all new to me, this letter in my grandfather's hand, written when he was maybe six years younger than I am now. I look for others, but it's the only one in the cigarette case, and the only one in the box.

This is like finding one piece of a 3,000-piece jigsaw puzzle and knowing you're a few months too late to find the other 2999. Is the cigarette case part of the same puzzle? It's tempting to say that they mean something together. That maybe Tom came back from France in 1917 and brought the cigarette case, and Edna had it with her while he was away in the north-west. But I'm not entitled to such assumptions.

I knew he'd fought in World War One. He died a while ago, when I was ten, and I can always remember him coughing, particularly early in the mornings, as if he started every day by clearing his lungs. He was tall and stooped and gentle and he had big hands and spoke quietly. He had a pen knife and when he peeled apples with it the peel fell off in one long green ribbon. That much I know.

And my grandmother said once,
You know, until your mother came along we always thought it was just going to be the two of us
.

Maybe these are more pieces, but of course they don't fit. There are too many pieces still missing to think these might sit even close to each other in the finished picture.

Tom sold insurance, I think. Before my mother was born and when she was young he travelled the state selling insurance, and by the time he retired he was state manager. But in 1923 he had nothing to do with insurance. He was a young man wandering with his dying sheep and a head full of war, even though the war had been over for years.

His family came from the Darling Downs where they owned property. He was tall from an early age, and with the body of a farm boy probably, so he enlisted in 1916 when he was fifteen years old. He went to France soon after and was back here the following year. So what I knew was that he had missed Gallipoli and the end of the war, and I always thought of him as just having been away for a while in between. It only occurs to me now that he was at the Somme, that that's what he did in the war.

I wish I'd asked him. I wish he'd told me more. I wish I could know more than this one letter. This is years later, and he's still not even twenty-two. A white house with a red roof and a family. He had done his wandering. He had sat under the stars and worked through what he had to, and now he was ready. And Edna had waited. Had waited in Brisbane, surviving on the occasional letter.

I always looked on them as grandparents. As though they were born grey-haired, met each other grey-haired, as though we came to exist at the same moment, and while I grew up they grew old. It never occurred to me that they were young, or if it did my view of their youth and everything that followed was quite uncomplicated. They knew each other on the Downs. He went away to France. He came back. My mother was born. He worked in insurance. I have telescoped this, without thinking how they might have filled the in-between years.

He went away to France (1916).

He came back (1917).

My mother was born (1936).

With nearly twenty years in there that I didn't seem to use in reaching my understanding of them, as though anyone can go from mid-teens to mid-thirties without incident. As though this whole time was some kind of pause where nothing happened but the house and the selling of insurance. But it was far less simple. It wasn't easy for him, at least not at the start. And why no children? Why no children for years, when it looks like they both wanted them?

We always thought it was just going to be the two of us
.

So was my mother an accident, or an unexpected gift? I wonder if she knows.

Jeff calls. Tennis is on for tomorrow.

I should talk to my mother about this, the letter, the cigarette case, my questions. But I don't. For the moment it's all just mine.

Sunday morning is busy with phone calls, all to do with tennis. This is the Sunday morning we all dread, when the numbers are wrong, and it happens every second or third week. This is best explained by one of the less acknowledged laws of nature.

Today it's the Rule of Three. We have Jeff, Veny and me. Freddie and Gerry are in Sydney for the weekend for some gathering of romance writers and Tim, a large-familied man, has one of his frequent Sunday barbecues.

After a series of unsuccessful phone calls to a mixture of workmates, squash players, confirmed cheats and people we don't really like, we're getting desperate and Veny says he could try his friend Jordan.

He's pretty hopeless but at least there'll be four of us. It's better than cut-throat, maybe
.

Maybe. Jordan, like me, is in the state of imposed
freedom that occurs between relationships. The only time he played with us before, Veny agreed to pick him up and found him lying face down on his polished wooden floor, having a bit of a rest after reading Graham Greene's
The End of the Affair
. And he played like someone face down on a polished wooden floor, as though nothing existed beyond his own nose. But just before Veny makes the call, Tim phones Jeff and says his family barbecue's been cancelled.

I arrive early and stand near the tennis centre window, swishing my new racquet but trying to do so unobtrusively.

Alone on the concrete in this ball-free sport of the mind, I am champion and the racquet is the racquet of the gods.

On court, I am not even the champion's bodily wastes. The racquet of the gods hits the ball fearsomely hard, and almost anywhere. Jeff tells me it shows about as much judgement as my previous racquet. People almost fight to be on my side only because it's less dangerous (as long as my serve doesn't take them in the back of the head). After Tim and Veny win two quick sets we all agree it would only be fair to Jeff if we rotated partners.

In the end I go home about as vanquished as is presently usual.

I don't feel like dinner. Or really, I don't feel like the hassle of making dinner. It even seems like too much trouble tonight to go down to Baan Thai or to order a pizza. So I prepare myself a straightforward two-course meal. Barbecue chips and flavoured mineral water, followed by Tim Tams and coffee.

I read through the letter again, but they know each other too well for him to need to say much. It won't tell an outsider any more than it has.

At nearly twenty-two he's been through a lot, and he's getting over it. Not getting it completely out of his head, but managing well enough to be ready to commit himself to moving on. This young man, coughing but not yet stooping, wandering the west with his crowded head. And some days make sense to him, some don't. People are kind to him mostly, let his sheep stay alive by giving them a day or two on their dead grass, probably out of some sense of debt. This soldier settler whose land turned dry, who shouldn't be abandoned now.

So how did he get over all this? How did he clear his head? Did he work through it till it made sense to him? Did it just fade slowly further away, allowing him to notice there were other things around? There is no sure sign of the answer here, just a man deciding he must move on. Deciding there is more to him than just the past.

I look for more letters, more of anything. And if my mother came over now she would see me sorting through boxes and she would be happy with me. I don't want to tell her this yet. I don't want to talk to her. She wants to change this place.

I find no letters, just a few things from my own past, when I was twenty and twenty-one.

This is not, in any sense, archeological, genealogical or otherwise, a big find. Nor is the video
The Importance of Fruit in Art
, a protracted extemporised exploration of almost nothing, involving a banana, a mandarin, an old brown turtleneck jumper and a beret. Or its sequel (and companion in the archive),
Bedroom Bondage
, a re-make of a Bond movie, almost any Bond movie, shot entirely in one person's bedroom, using only everyday bedroom items as props. In the end, Blofeld is fatally wounded by a Walther PK thong.

I think the theory behind all this is that the more you restrict the range of props, the smarter you have to be to pull it off. And I think we thought we did pull it off. But these are clearly the documents of a far less critical age, and we all look young and hopeful and uncluttered by any sophistication. Each time I watch these videos I feel stranger than the last. Back then it all seemed very satirical.

So I think of my grandfather, the poor, wandering, war-shattered bastard with his starving sheep and I wonder, if he was in his twenties now, would his life still be documented with simple poignant letters, or would he leave a disturbing legacy of video-crap? I can't answer that, of course. Video has now been invented, he isn't here, and none of us fought at the Somme. And it's quite possible that he might have picked up the banana and the beret and talked importantly about fruit. Or played guitar badly in some appalling non-band that didn't quite get to Wembley, but at least they've got the poster to prove it.

Who knows what awful ideas he might have had in the age of irony, how he might have run amok with his risky notions of comedy? How he might have suffered the stresses of purposelessness and trashing, rather than those associated with being face down in mud for a year while a million people die nearby and wondering if you're next.

These are different worlds, and he was always a generous man. He would not compare our experiences. This is what I hope now as I live in his house.

And besides, if Edna had trashed him back in ‘23, I don't think it would have been easy.