Five Bells Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  Also by Gail Jones

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright Page

  Memory believes before knowing remembers.

  – William Faulkner, Light in August

  Where have you gone? The tide is over you,

  The turn of midnight water’s over you,

  As Time is over you, and mystery,

  And memory, the flood that does not flow.

  – Kenneth Slessor, ‘Five Bells’

  1

  Circular Quay: she loved even the sound of it.

  Before she saw the bowl of bright water, swelling like something sexual, before she saw the blue, unprecedented, and the clear sky sloping upwards, she knew from the lilted words it would be a circle like no other, key to a new world.

  The train swung in a wide arc to emerge alongside sturdy buildings and there it was, the first glimpses through struts of ironwork, and those blurred partial visions were a quiet pleasure. Down the escalator, rumbling with its heavy body-cargo, through the electronic turnstile, which captured her bent ticket, then, caught in the crowd, she was carried outside.

  There was confusion at first, the shock of sudden light, all the signs, all the clamour. But the vista resolved and she saw before her the row of ferry ports, each looking like a primary-colour holiday pavilion, and the boats, bobbing, their green and yellow forms toy-like, arriving, absorbing slow lines of passengers, departing. With a trampoline heart she saw the Bridge to her left: its modern shape, its optimistic uparching. Familiar from postcards and television commercials, here now, here-now, was the very thing itself, neat and enthralling. There were tiny flags on top and the silhouetted ant forms of people arduously climbing the steep bow. It looked stamped against the sky, as if nothing could remove it. It looked indelible. A coathanger, guidebooks said, but it was so much grander than this implied. The coherence of it, the embrace, the span of frozen hard-labour. Those bold pylons at the ends, the multimillions of hidden rivets.

  Ellie gawked like a child, unironic. She remembered something from schooldays: Janus, with his two faces, is the god of bridges, since bridges look both ways and are always double. There was the limpid memory of her schoolteacher, Miss Morrison, drawing Janus on a blackboard, her inexpert, freckled hand trailing the chalk-line of two profiles. With her back to the class, there was a kind of pathos to her form. She had thickset calves and a curvature of the spine and the class would have snickered in derision, had it not been for her storytelling, which made any image so much less than the words it referred to. Roman God: underlined. The Janus profiles not matching. A simple image on the blackboard snagged at her feelings and Ellie had loved it because it failed, because there was no mirror and no symmetry. And because the sight of Miss Morrison’s firm calves always soothed and reassured her.

  From somewhere drifted the sound of a busking didgeridoo with an electronic backbeat, boum-boum, boum-boum; boum-boum, boum-boum. The didgeridoo dissolved in the air, thick and newly ancient.

  For tourists, Ellie thought, with no disparagement. For me. For all of us. Boum-boum, boum-boum.

  In the democratic throng, in the pandemonium of the crowd, she saw sunlight on the heads of Americans and Japanese; she saw small children with ice-creams and tour groups with cameras. She heard how fine weather might liberate a kind of relaxed tinkling chatter. There was a newsstand, with tiers of papers in several languages trembling in a light breeze, and people in booths here and there, selling ferry tickets behind glass. There was a human statue in pale robes, resembling something-or-other classical, and before him a flattened hat in which shone a few coins. A fringe of bystanders stood around, considering the many forms of art.

  Janus, origin of January.

  Ellie turned, like someone remembering, in the other direction. She had yet to see it fully. Past the last pier and the last ferry, there was a wharf with a line of ugly buildings, and beyond that, yes, an unimpeded view.

  It was moon-white and seemed to hold within it a great, serious stillness. The fan of its chambers leant together, inclining to the water. An unfolding thing, shutters, a sequence of sorts. Ellie marvelled that it had ever been created at all, so singular a building, so potentially faddish, or odd. And that shape of supplication, like a body bending into the abstraction of a low bow or a theological gesture. Ellie could imagine music in there, but not people, somehow. It looked poised in a kind of alertness to acoustical meanings, concentrating on sound waves, opened to circuit and flow.

  Yes, there it was. Leaning into the pure morning sky.

  Ellie raised her camera and clicked. Most photographed building in Sydney. In the viewfinder it was flattened to an assemblage of planes and curves: perfect Futurism. Marinetti might have dreamt it.

  Unmediated joy was nowadays unfashionable. Not to mention the banal thrill of a famous city icon. But Ellie’s heart opened like that form unfolding into the blue; she was filled with corny delight and ordinary elation. Behind her, raddled train-noise reverberated up high, and the didgeridoo, now barely audible, continued its low soft moaning. A child sounded a squeal. A ferry churned away. From another came the clang of a falling gang-plank and the sound of passengers disembarking. Somewhere behind her the Rolling Stones – ‘Jumping Jack Flash’ – sounded in a tinny ring-tone. Boum-boum, distant now, boum-boum, boum-boum, and above it all a melody of voices, which seemed to arise from the water.

  Ellie felt herself at the intersection of so many currents of information. Why not be joyful, against all the odds? Why not be childlike? She took a swig from her plastic water-bottle and jauntily raised it: cheers.

  She began to stride. With her cotton sunhat, and her small backpack, and this unexpected quiver in her chest, Ellie walked out into the livelong Sydney day. Sunshine swept around her. The harbour almost glittered. She lifted her face to the sky and smiled to herself. She felt as if – yes, yes – she was breathing in light.

  James DeMello was obstinately unjoyful. Even before the rattling train pulled into the station, he knew in his bones that he would be disappointed. He glanced at the leather hands of the old woman sitting beside him and felt the downward tug of time, of all that marks and corrodes. They resembled his mother’s hands, the sign of a history he did not want. So much of the past returns, he thought, lodged in the bodies of others.

  James rose from his seat to escape the hands and stood clutching a cold metal pole. The train swung in a wide arc around sturdy buildings and through his limbs he felt the machine braking and the stiffening of bodies encased in steel. When the carriage doors opened he followed the man in front of him, moving towards the down escalator with his hands in his pockets.

  At the foot of the escalator everyone swung out onto the quay, a mobile mass, subservient to architecture. Before him were ferry ticket-boxes hung with LED light timetables in orange and people of assorted nations, queuing for a ride. There was a tawdry quality, he decided, and too little repose. A child squealed and he felt an elemental flinch of annoyance; the rest was cacophony and the vague threat of crowds.

  Turning to the right, James walked automatically, trailing behind others. There were shop-fronts decorated with arty souvenirs, there were little white tables with empty wineglasses, there were waiters clad in black aprons and haughty dispositions. It was too early for lunchtime and they were in merely indolent preparation. A man stood with his arms crossed, scowling, emphatically doing nothing. James thought of Sydney as inhabited by a tribe of waiters, a secret society of men and women united by their contempt for those they served, and with rituals of smug superiority and arcane rules. They met mostly on
Mondays, when many restaurants were closed, and engaged in ceremonial meals at which they spilled food and swore.

  Umbrellas bearing coffee-logos fluttered in the breeze. James skirted one, then another, wondering if he needed caffeine.

  Then he saw it looming in the middle distance, too pre-empted to be singular. It appeared on T-shirts, on towels, even trapped in plastic domes of snow; it could never exist other than as a replication, claiming the prestige of an icon. Its maws opened to the sky in a perpetual devouring.

  White teeth, James thought. Almost like teeth. And although he had seen the image of this building countless times before, it was only in its presence, here-now, that the analogy occurred to him. The monumental is never precisely what we expect.

  At an Easter Show, long ago, he had seen the yawning jaw of a shark, the great oval of an inadmissible, unspeakable threat. Death was like that, he knew, shaped in ivory triangles. Death was the limp panic of imagining oneself as raw meat. Or even less than that; just a shape to be ravaged, just a drifting, edible nothing in blood-blurry water.

  At the entrance to the carnival tent, a sign read ‘Monsters of the Deep’ and an old codger with filthy stubble and an aspect of decay ushered him in by lightly touching the back of his head. He can still see the moment, those teeth gleaming in the brown light, bleak and distressing. He can still smell it: the reek of stale tobacco and unwashed clothes, and an acidic stench, as though someone had pissed in a corner. When the tent flap fell closed with a soft pffth, sealing him in, James felt sure he would die there, swallowed into darkness as in the belly of a beast. Superstitious and afraid, he had placed his feet in a slender triangle of sunlight falling through the entrance. He glanced from his shoes to the teeth and back again; shoes to teeth, teeth to shoes. He could not look at the shark-jaw entirely, nor could he resist looking. He was a child terrified by what his imagination might suggest.

  The stinking man moved up behind him and James felt a hand on his back. He froze there, submissive, and looked only at his shoes, aligned with tied laces in the slash of lemon light. And then, twisting free, James turned and fled. He pushed at the flap of the tent, panicking, and fell forward onto his face.

  Why, he wondered now, does time shudder in this way, and return him always to this inadequate boy that he was, in short pants, and afraid, and seeing white teeth in a jagged vision? The experience of a few minutes, years ago, and no doubt an exaggeration.

  James turned, pissed off by this ridiculous memory-siege. No, no, no. Coldplay’s ‘Clocks’ swam into his head: ‘closing walls and ticking clocks’ – it was the curse of his generation, to have a soundtrack enlisted for everything.

  James turned away and walked back down the pier. He saw the Bridge, he saw the ferries, he saw the peach-coloured façade of the gallery of contemporary art; it was hung with red banners advertising something or other. His gaze was listless, remote. Considering these sites unremarkable, dull in his own livid space, James turned his back to the Harbour and retreated to a café, as if he needed to defend himself from what might entertain others. People swept around him, each with their own thoughts, each – the idea was fleeting – with their own apprehension of what might undo a single life, teeth, a touch, a brown space held in time by a gape of open canvas. But the crowd was a collective, and indistinct. They were unconnected to him. They were blithely autonomous. The masses, he liked to call them.

  In the blue shadows of the café James found an empty chair with its back to the window. He was feeling slightly ill. He was feeling implausible. A waiter with a pumice complexion and a lank pony-tail took his order, professionally cool, and then slid away. One of the secret society, perhaps, a smarmy condescender. Chatter rose with the clack of cutlery and the chink of teacups, the infernal din of the coffee machine and the roar of steaming milk. Beyond that, what was it? The summer of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons playing in a jangled slur. How he hated this: music treated as a background accessory.

  When his espresso arrived with a glass of water, James swallowed a tab of Xanax, sucking down his own misery. Chemistry, he thought, to change errant chemistry. To be neurally synthetic, to be in biochemical kilter, to concoct homeostasis from this haggard sick self. He might look in a mirror and be startled by a handsome return. He might yet recover.

  Every sound was amplified; the café was no retreat at all. The glass walls were percussive and strangely radiant. A rack of grimy magazines, from which smooth faces pouted, leant against the wall for the customers’ lazy perusal. Everywhere around him James saw detritus – a serviette crushed into a flowery ball, ring-pulls from drink cans, a chocolate bar wrapper, its form origami, torn sugar sachets, food scraps, the bits and pieces of commercial junk people left everywhere in their wake, setting a litter trail, as in a fairytale, to be found in a mythical dark wood.

  Someone had left a tiny pyramid of sugar poured on the table. James pressed it flat with his index finger and thought he might sob.

  The traditions of the dead generations weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living. A favourite quote. Karl Marx. 1852.

  Even the coffee was bitter.

  Pei Xing had been here many times before, but she loved the elevated train, rattling through a grid of ironwork that resembled the old Waibaidu Bridge, and the press of the crowds, and the echoing noise as people descended to the quay. Westerners, she had heard, were lonely in crowds; but this seemed so wrong, somehow, since there was a vitality, a chi, moving between every body, a collective spirit, a complication. Jostling, touching, feeling the population in movement, this was a beautiful thing. No one saw her, she knew; just a nondescript grey-haired woman, and an Asian at that.

  Can’t tell us apart. All Ching-Chong-Chinaman.

  Her parents would not have understood this: living in Australia, finding a home here.

  Pei Xing turned with those around her and descended on the escalator. Before her stood a young man guiding his small daughter. He held her hand high as he nudged her forward. ‘Careful now, sweetheart.’ The child placed her feet gingerly on the moving stairs, watching them all the way down, as if afraid she might slip. She was pretty, her hair divided in plaits in Chinese-style, her face aglow and tremulous with anticipation and excitement. Pei Xing thought she might be from the country, seeing all this for the very first time. There was something tentative in her movements, and something wholly innocent.

  Pure heart of the peasant.

  It might have been the ripple of a dragon moving thus, these figures sliding on the escalator, and the way they all turned as one body, sinuous and flicking slightly, through the tunnel of glare towards the water.

  At quay level Pei Xing bought an ice-cream from her friend Aristos. They had known each other a long time and one of her pleasures in returning to the quay was to exchange a few sentences with the old man behind the counter. He had come to Sydney when she had, some time in the late 1980s.

  ‘Hey, China flower!’

  ‘Hey, old fisherman!’

  ‘Still too skinny, China flower.’

  ‘Still too fat!’

  The old fisherman laughed. It was a ritual they shared, an idiom of solidarity.

  Aristos scooped her favourite flavour – hazelnut – and pressed it with the back of his spoon into a messy double ball. As usual he refused payment, but detained her for a chat. His back was bad again, he said, and the arthritis was playing up. Voula was still nagging for a trip home he could not afford. Eleni was expecting their first grandchild, God be praised. And Dimitris, good-for-nothing boy, still drank too much.

  In return Pei Xing said Jimmy was still doing well in his business, a good boy, he tried hard. He was a loyal son. His girlfriend from Hong Kong, Cindy, was a lovely young woman.

  When Pei Xing reached up over the counter, she saw the future. Aristos looked vulnerable. Death was swooping towards him. She saw it in an instant: grey wings, a feathery presence, hung over his tired, flushed face. She saw his eyes softly close, as if in slow motion, and a sinking of
the supple animate face into a hard fixed mask. She heard a breath exhaled, the tiny wind that separates this life from the next. And in this half-second she saw too how he had laboured and suffered, and how he now entered his intractable dying.

  There are things one knows but can never say. There are intuitions that rise up, irrefutably, and one can only bow one’s head to Fate and stay sensibly silent. Flesh was always melting away, time was always churning in undertow. The history of peoples, and the slow dragging-under. For all this, the ice-cream, the crowd, the luxurious sunny day, no soul was exempt, Pei Xing knew, from sudden extinguishment. Aristos paused and closed his mouth, as if he had read her thoughts. He smiled, but was sorrowful. ‘Ay! What can you do?’ he said, shrugging his shoulders with extravagant melancholy, waving his spoon, looking to the heavens, signalling his interrogation of all that lay before him, the ice-cream, the crowd, the luxurious sunny day.

  Pei Xing looked into the multicoloured tubs arrayed in rows before her. They had beautiful labels: nocciola, limone, bacio, fragola.

  ‘You feed people,’ she said softly. ‘This is good. To feed people.’

  It was the only benediction she could summon, this small tribute to his trade. She wanted simply to impart compassion, and to tell him that she knew. His lined face crumpled. His eyes became moist. He knew too, she realised. Ah, he knew too.

  Pei Xing said goodbye, perhaps for the last time, and moved away slowly, trying not to consolidate her vision or to grieve in anticipation. Aristos waved, looking like a Greek Orthodox priest. His open palm lifted to the sky and hung for a few seconds in the air. He might have been a saint in an icon, already long gone.