Five Bells Page 10
Ellie had not lost her thrill, or her bouncing heart. The white umbrellas were like flags, the colours of the crowd a festivity. The air still throbbed and hummed with a distant didgeridoo. It filtered and dispersed like religious communication, implying inner worlds and the dimensions of deserts. And in her camera lay the ghost arabesques of the Opera House, radiant as neon light, an image she could not quite comprehend. Photon capture and digital transfer did nothing to explain it. An idea about the thing, not the thing itself.
Ellie hesitated a moment. Download was not equivalent to presence. Or the same as memory, which happened in an enclosure of flesh and carried the blessings of the body, and its manifold complications.
James. She must find James.
Ellie shrugged to adjust her small backpack and glanced at her watch. Another half an hour. She decided to sit beside the water and stare into space. The ferries came and left, churning the glistening water.
Combs of light: where was that from?
On the water lay combs of light, shifting their patterns with fluctuations of current and wind. Ellie looked across to the Bridge and wondered if one day she might climb it. It must be a singular pleasure, with no end other than to rise, to see, to stand above the turquoise water and the green and yellow ferries and look out across the Harbour and the city spread between the ocean and the mountains. The great bowl of the water would shine up at the climbers, reflecting the sun like a giant mirror, and the faces of parents and children and taxpayers and tourists would be polished gold and transformed to mini-lights by its glare.
At first James and Ellie had groped at each other’s bodies – ignorant kids, filled with vague prohibitions and sexual platitudes – just clumsily exploring. Each watched the other with an ardent and shy fascination. James’s face was flushed coral, his eyes were bright.
After they discovered their hideout everything became possible. They would lie on a blanket in the dusty after-school light, read to each other and talk in soft voices. Once James spoke of clepsydra: Ellie remembered it well. Miss Morrison had told them of notions of time, and said that the clepsydra, the water clock, was one of the earliest inventions. The Chinese, she said, devised particularly ornate and complex clepsydra. The Chinese invented everything, she announced without explanation.
Clepsydra, from the Greek kleptein, meaning to steal.
She wrote kleptomaniac on the board, beside the underlined clepsydra and asked her class to consider how human time was measured.
‘Is it really kept inside your watch?’ Miss Morrison asked. ‘Does time really tick? Or work by numbers? Or pass in neat measured segments? Might there be a time that flows, or indeed does not flow?’
Clepsydra involved vessels that dripped or leaked, flowed or seeped, making use of floating pointers or measures, sometimes of gears. It was a process, she said, of emptying and filling, a fluent time-passing, not one chopped into pieces.
Most of the class looked bored and perplexed. Someone was flicking balls of paper polished with spit. But for intelligent twelve-year-olds this idea was a revelation. Ellie and James truly loved Miss Morrison.
And that day, two years later, James was lying on his back in the abandoned foundry, looking at the cobwebby ceiling, all girders and split tin, and speaking, almost whispering, of the invention of clepsydra. He was recalling the year seven class and Miss Morrison with a kind of delicate affection.
That day James turned towards Ellie and ran his hand under her blue dress and she thought not of surrender but that she would gather him in. Ellie could feel James’s warmth and arousal, and his body addressed and aroused her. What she loved in him was his presumption, and his lack of presumption.
That day they decided for the first time to remove their clothes. James, lying down, awkwardly wriggled from his shirt and his trousers, then kicked off his underpants, flinging them away. Ellie was slower and more self-conscious. She lifted her dress above her head and pushed it to one side, then became aware of how little her breasts were, cupped in their modest bra, incipient and girlish. But James was already pushing the bra away, so that together and laughing they managed to dispatch it. James threw it high and sideways, and something in its lacy construction meant that it adhered to the gritty wall, as if casually pinned there. Ellie hesitated only for a second before she slid off her panties.
Without a bed to lie in, with only their blanket and their randy, impatient immaturity, they wrestled for a time and then gripped each other. James’s mouth was at her nipple and Ellie was moved almost to tears; it was so tender a suckle, and so gloriously wet. His hand had wandered between her legs and slipped into the crevice. She knew now, with his boyish nakedness nothing like the pictures of statues she had seen in books, with this sense of urgency and novelty and trembling delight, why adults might want to cast off their clothes and enter each other’s bodies, and what the intensified, messy kisses on telly might signal and portend.
And then James drew her thighs around him and Ellie felt a sharp pain. Her face lay at his chest. She buried her feelings there. James was sweating and his scent was surprisingly lovely. He was labouring, and looking down at her, and in her inexperience she simply lay still, thinking, not thinking. She could feel the contours of his buttocks and the sensation of access.
‘Ellie,’ he whispered.
It was over very quickly. There was an aching pain, and a little blood, but she felt in that unlit and quiet space that somehow she had made them both coherent. Even then she was irrepressibly romantic. In the inept grapple of two children she found an exultation. Ellie kissed James’s damp forehead as he lowered sumptuously upon her.
‘I feel like singing,’ he said. ‘I feel like singing.’
‘Sing then,’ she responded.
That first time they heard afterwards a small animal scuttling nearby, and each flinched and looked about, conscious of another presence. A possum, they decided. They heard it invisibly skitter away. Ellie turned to James’s flushed face and saw him smile back at her and laugh.
She became aware then of the twilight and the need suddenly to hurry home. Light from the evening scarcely penetrated the room. But she stayed a little longer, feeling slightly cold without her thin blue dress, one of her favourites, covered in sprigs of tiny white blossom (how these details remain), noting the seep between her legs and its unanticipated warmth, smelling the almond scent she associated thereafter with men’s underwear, thinking, as she saw James flex his arms and stretch out beside her, of how vast a discovery this was, and how enticingly scary.
This cluster of illicit associations returned James to Ellie. Or meant rather that he would never be wholly released. The intimacy of their attachment was something neither could name. They did not call each other ‘boyfriend’ or ‘girlfriend’, they were too young to be ‘lovers’, yet they were the holders together of an intricate pact. When they met in the empty building where James spread the old blanket on the dusty floor – as if they were somewhere on a picnic, or inside a story or at play – it was the culmination of these affinities altogether unexpressed.
Her mother never guessed. Ellie was unconcerned about her father, since he looked at the world and everything in it through a scrim of shadows; but to her surprise, in that whole year, her mother didn’t notice a change in her daughter or sense a new maturity. At seventeen, before Ellie left for university, Lil gave her a private talk about what boys might do, about how sneaky and downright importunate they were, about how, after all, they wanted only one thing. Ellie hung her head, as though reticent, not wanting to betray what she knew. And each time afterwards, with each new lover, she sought the implicated traces of her encounters with James. More than his shape, more than his touch, more than his off-hand humour and his inexperienced fervour, she wanted returned to her the ordinary astonishment of that first known body.
Ellie rose in the bright light and began to make her way to the restaurant. She felt nervous, ill-at-ease. What if they didn’t even recognise each other? What if h
e leant across the table and tried to kiss her? Or worse, that they had nothing to say to each other, that the past was meaningless, and kiddie-romantic, and unfit for their adult-ironic thirties? What if he was married to someone called Emma or Claire, and had two delightful children, a boy and a girl?
In her nervousness Ellie decided to check her mobile: no texts, no messages. She was one of millions checking their phone at exactly that moment; she could see a dozen or so from where she stood. This community of the telephone, so pragmatically conjoined. Ellie stared at the sequences of letters and numbers. In the glowing alphabet in her hand lay every word in the world.
What was it Miss Morrison had said, all those years ago, about the invention of the alphabet? And why could she not stop thinking of her teacher?
Ellie walked with feigned confidence along the Quay, past the Museum of Contemporary Art, around which hung funky red banners advertising something-or-other, past the seagulls aflutter and the row of docks for small vessels, and further, towards the Bridge, to the harbourside restaurant James had chosen.
She was surprised at the size of it and would have liked something smaller. It had a wide glassy front, the better to see the operatic view, and furniture that seemed entirely to be made of chrome. Everything glittered in the noonday light. The cutlery glittered, and the crockery, and the smiles on the waiters’ faces, so that Ellie was reminded of a swimming pool, the shine rocking on water and the splashy, unnaturally echoey acoustics. She stood at the doorway waiting to be noticed.
‘DeMello,’ Ellie said, in an apologetic voice, and a jerky impatient waiter pointed to a table. She saw James, looking away, apparently deep in thought. Her first impression was that he might be ill, or had a terrible night.
He was wearing a denim shirt and black jeans and was still handsome in the way that ageing rock stars are, slightly wrecked, but with the charm of a wild history saved by the adoration of flashbulbs. Or someone nuts about Jesus, a holy roller, wanting to convert you on the doorstep or redeem the world.
James had not seen her. He was transfixed by a distant sight, his face faraway and half-dreaming. He had the look of a man who had forgotten something important. Ellie would have found it difficult to approach had he been tracking her walk towards him.
She dived into the mock-watery world of the waiters, past the women with heads like baubles, bottle-blonde and puffed, past well-upholstered men, anticipating sozzled entertainments, past the sinuous fish-moves of figures with wine bottles wrapped in serviettes, and oversized plates held high, dodging and swerving. She emerged standing before him: well, here I am.
James was taken by surprise. He stood up quickly, bumping the table. There was a moment of hesitation before he kissed her cheek, uncertain of how formally or informally to behave. ‘You haven’t changed,’ he said.
‘Nor have you,’ she lied.
A waiter appeared from nowhere to pull out the chair and guide Ellie into it. He fluffed open a stiff serviette and let it fall onto her lap, as if she were an infant or in need of basic forms of assistance. With one hand behind his back he made a dainty ceremony of pouring a glass of water.
The past caved in on them. In each other’s eyes they saw a dim, vertiginous slide backwards. Family. School. Small-town childhoods. The discontinuous histories each carried within them. They were part of that group for whom time past travels like a screen before them. In the opalescent day lay their shadowy hideout; in the chattering crowd a few preserved words.
Ellie thought: no longer children. She calculated the years that had intervened, and saw too that they were surely unknowable, each to each. Too much time between them, other lovers, other lives.
‘So, here we are.’
‘Yes,’ Ellie said.
Oh God, she was thinking, I shouldn’t have come.
But she was also thinking: it’s really him. This was the James who had been a stubble-headed boy covered with blood, who had cried to see a scrawny chicken decapitated, who had been the clever one, the teacher’s pet, always quick with the right answers, who had met her as a naked boy, nothing like a statue, in a filthy old foundry. She would have to make the effort for both of them. Why is it, she was thinking, it’s always women who have to keep the conversation going and find the right words?
‘Here we are,’ she repeated lamely.
By the time he arrived at the restaurant James was nervous and moist with sweat; it was a relief, having arrived early, to sit alone in the Antarctic air-conditioning. Faux alfresco. But he had to endure a supercilious waiter, overtly insolent, and the extra brightness of spotlighting, which would surely induce a new headache.
James looked out of the window at the view of Circular Quay. From his table he could see across the water the Opera House entire. He began vaguely to wonder how the Surrealists would paint it. Magritte would place it in a forest or let it float in the sky; Dali would melt it like ice-cream, like one of his dissolving clocks; Max Ernst would use it as ruffles on the cloak around a pompous figure. No: Magritte would set it adrift in the ocean, like a rare, efflorescent species of underwater life; Dali would refigure it as the chambers of a woman’s body; Ernst would have children fleeing it on a sparse, bleak plain, as if it had arrived from nowhere, from outer space, as a menacing apparition. And then there was the Australian, James Gleeson. For him the smooth arcs of the Opera House would be covered with excrescences; grim faces would appear, limbs sprout out, indefinable and disgusting matter would festoon the surface.
James was surprised to have relinquished his initial aversion; it was an art-object after all, it contained multitudes, suggested metaphors.
A woman at a party had once told him that surrealism was an adolescent taste, something for lonely teenage boys wanting to do violence to the order of things – and he found himself agreeing. He had discovered the instability of images when he discovered his own body; somehow these were linked, though he could not bring himself to consider why. He had slept with the woman from the party, whose name he could not now recall, and woke in the middle of the night, his heart pounding, his forehead aflame, his thoughts in a boring and groggy loop – surrealism is an adolescent taste – feeling he had been criticised for his judgement, and found pathetically wanting.
James entered the slack reverie of the over-tired. He was thinking randomly of the patina of light on the faces of pedestrians, of the ferries, the buskers, the wake on the water; he was wondering if the seagulls ever flew sideways and smashed into the glass. He tried imagining what it must be like to live here, not simply to visit. Do Sydney-siders regularly converge on this place, as if coming to a shrine? Do they esteem this monument, that from here, receding in the ultraviolet assault of the midday sun, appeared to be constructed of ancient bone? Or was it all rugby and beaches and the Good Life with a beer? Conspicuous consumption. Unreal real estate. The aspiration to a many-roomed immoderate house, shaped like a wedding cake, with a sweeping Harbour view.
But there it was: ancient bone. Imperishable, that was the word.
And then Ellie was before him, appearing without announcement. The Opera House disappeared; the commotion of the restaurant subsided. He lurched upwards, bumping the table, causing a little spill. He paused, and then cautiously leant forward to kiss her on the cheek.
‘You haven’t changed,’ James said, his voice rusty from pills.
‘Nor have you,’ she lied.
He was grateful for the small mercy she displayed in not confirming the wreck he felt himself to be. She had not recoiled, or thought him repellent.
Yet he spoke honestly; she seemed essentially unchanged. In her face he saw the girl he had doted on at school. She was still slim, though more womanly, and held her head just so, slightly inclined to the left, just as she did twenty years ago. And he remembered this: that she was tender, but not meek, that she had a street-tough element and a resilient streak, that she was bold and assertive in ways that had made him seem the weaker one. She wore a white blouse and a blue skirt of some fil
my synthetic material. Lipstick. Pink.
‘So, here we are.’
‘Yes,’ Ellie said.
She was stretching one arm then the other from the straps of her small backpack. James saw a glimpse of the skin on her chest as her blouse briefly gaped. A glimmer of sexual memory recurred, the moment of winsome recline, the arm cast back, the curve of an exposed breast, the unconcealed invitation. He suppressed the image almost immediately and looked away. On the path before the restaurant an overweight couple ambled past, their arms affectionately draped around each other’s backs. Both wore identical baseball caps and matching loose clothes, as if belonging to an exclusive club of two. James was moved; he was sentimental. He felt the same way watching old couples walk hand in hand, or bending solicitously towards each other over cups of tea. A gentleness of bodies long proximate and wordlessly comfortable.
It may have been the sedative effect of gazing out the window; James realised that he was no longer anxious. But he was dumbstruck and feeling foolish at the paucity of his words. What to say?
‘Here we are,’ she repeated, and with this forgiving chime, they began.
Ellie took a sip of water and seemed slightly abashed. There was food to order; the waiter was hovering and insistent. They busied themselves with gigantic menus bound with gold cord, like something one might see in a church, opened slowly by a priest. Both decisively ordered the grilled barramundi. Salad, not vegetables. And a New Zealand white. So it was quickly settled. Their instinctive unanimity made the first moments together easier.