Five Bells Read online

  ‘No entreé?’ the waiter asked, in a tone that said ‘cheapskate’. He was perhaps seventeen and subtly fierce in his persecuting disrespect.

  James moved a small basket of bread rolls to disguise his embarrassment.

  ‘We have enough,’ Ellie said firmly. And the waiter turned away.

  So they were, at last, left alone to talk. James realised that he had chosen the wrong place for a rendezvous, too noisy, too Saturday, too public, too bright, too susceptible to his sardonic turn of mind and his disdain of relaxation. A dusky bar, late at night – that would have worked. A quiet corner with a banquette and the kind of sensual confinement that permits bodies to lean seductively towards each other, to find a whispery tone and a cunning route for confidences. Perhaps a trumpet, low-playing a plangent jazz solo. Perhaps a furtive tab of pharmaceutical stimulation.

  But he was here, here-now, and had much to say, and to confess. He must tell Ellie how he had carried her, all these years, how through everything there persisted the residue of her affinity and understanding. She was a voice in his head; she was a passenger he transported. Her shape, her face. Her grace a still incredible immanence that had tempered his fucked-up life.

  Her hair was short now, James saw, and seemed a lighter brown. She was looking down at her lap.

  And he must tell her of the child who died, and for whom he felt responsible. Only Ellie would understand. He must tell her of his mother, and of his long-time regret. It was a time of apology. He must also apologise. He must say sorry. He must drag sincere words from his heart to his mouth. He must say something, so that he might be cured of the ordeal of his own history, of his failings, of his loss, of his disabling culpability.

  Of these things, at this time, James said nothing. In the raucous restaurant, no place for a confession, Ellie and James spoke together in a casual way, ascertaining that each was still single, no kids, that Ellie had moved to Sydney to take up a post-graduate scholarship, returning to university after all these years, and worked part-time in a hole-in-the-wall coffee shop on King Street; that he was a med-school dropout but a committed schoolteacher, that he had declined the scholarship that had been proclaimed in the small-town paper, that he had bummed around Europe with a backpack and settled for a couple of years in London, that he was now visiting, just for a few days, with no declared purpose. There was a dark patch he skipped over, something he could not yet tell her. Yes, he still played the guitar, was still a crazy Bob Dylan fan; and no, he had never, never ever, returned to the old town.

  The meals arrived and both were relieved to have something neutral to claim their attention. James tore at the bread, using it to mop, as his mother had taught him. Italian, Mama. Today she was more than usually present.

  ‘Do you remember,’ Ellie said suddenly, ‘our teacher, Miss Morrison?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘The way she wrote arcane words on the board, and underlined them?’

  ‘Clepsydra,’ said James. He saw Ellie blush. ‘I was cruel, wasn’t I? Boys are such bastards.’

  ‘She liked you. Both of us. Teachers always like the clever ones …’

  James shrugged.

  ‘Well, she liked you best, teacher’s pet,’ said Ellie. ‘And she taught us all those fancy Greek and Latin words.’

  James thought of clepsydra. Across the table this young woman was recalling their first time: he knew it. In a confused second between mouthfuls he wanted nothing more than to slip his hand beneath her skirt and remove her panties, to find himself back in the foundry, to enjoy adolescent lust. Their love-making had been simple, blundering, making up in lewd vigour what it lacked in sure knowledge. James had no idea then how to treat a woman’s body; he entered, collapsed, found a momentary logic for his meagre boy’s life, pulled into hers. Still, it had astounded him, to be alive in that way at fourteen. To enter another body.

  James poured more wine for himself and knew he was drinking too fast. Ellie had barely touched her glass. James’s thirst was crude and demanding. He thought of slipping away for a moment to swallow another pill, but the compulsion of Ellie’s presence was too difficult to break.

  Fluids, essential for homeostasis. Polydipsia: excessive thirst, one of the indications of diabetes. Dipsomania: drunkenness.

  Not long after the death James considered returning to their town. His mother had died in the hospital in the city, where she inhabited her sad lonely skull full of snow, and a letter from a lawyer arrived, requesting a ‘consultation’. James turned up at an office in a tower block, one of those buildings that looks like a huge filing cabinet, and found there a gloomy looking man, Mr English, with marble eyes and a touch of brilliantine in his starkly black hair. He sat behind a wide desk, his hands shaped into a cathedral. After the antiseptic formality of condolences, none of which could assuage the guilt that had subsumed James’s grief, Mr English informed him that the house he had shared with his mother might now be worth something. The strip of land along the beach, once the space of outcast migrants, of dagoes and chinks, he might have said, was being redeveloped to construct a group of chalets for a beach resort. He pronounced the word ‘chalet’ as if he were eating a plum. And then there were the ‘goods and chattels’, he added (James wondered if lawyers lived, as doctors did, in a world of parallel vocabulary), since the house had been closed up when his mother was committed to the ‘institution’. Might there be something of worth locked away? He was acting, he said more formally, on behalf of the ‘institution’, which often had cases like this, of deceased estates ‘going begging’.

  James sat before Mr English, noted his large brow and his clean fingernails and the hairs curling on the backs of his hands, noted the framed documents on the wall, and the imposing beige surrounds, and felt too disqualified as a son to know what to say. He resented this horrible man, with designs on their house. It had been such a poor, despised place, symbolic of all he wished to leave; now this man who inspired such distaste was urging a conspiracy of profit. James had risen from the chair and without a word, left the lawyer’s office.

  ‘I once thought of returning to the old town,’ James said, out of the blue. ‘After Mum died I considered visiting to deal with her things. To sell the house. Tidy up. And I wanted to see you,’ he added shyly.

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘Almost ten years ago. You had left, I heard. So I never returned.’

  It was as close as he would come to saying that she was his only reason for returning; or more forcefully, that she was the only past he could admit.

  ‘Couldn’t do it,’ he went on, remembering the dreadful emptiness of that time, the funeral, oh God, that no one attended, the woman he was with, who found his prolonged weeping rather touching at first, but then disgraceful and unmanly. She told him so. After that they could only draw painfully apart. After his mother, the scale of his feelings shifted. After mother, the deluge.

  ‘I didn’t cope very well. The death, I mean.’

  Why was he telling her this?

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Ellie said. ‘I remember your mother. I remember her voice, calling.’

  It was the wrong thing to say. James looked at the mess of fish scraps on his plate. Jesus, she was sorry.

  As if telepathically called the waiter appeared to take away their plates. Coffee, yes. The waiter smirked at his small victory.

  The vast white silence of his mother’s death overhung their conversation. He had seen her on the very last day, summoned by a nurse at the hospital who believed in the spiritual solace of goodbye, and who, reading her details, had already called a Catholic priest. His mother was almost entirely vacant. She did not acknowledge her son. She could not speak or respond. Beneath the covers of the standard issue hospital linen, pale blue blankets with a honeycomb texture, her body had never looked so reduced and so small. The outline might have been of a child, or a victim of starvation. Her spotted hands clutched at the covers and her face was closed and unfamiliar. James thought her eyes enormous, s
unk as they were into their sockets, and was afraid she might open them, afraid of what they might see. Afraid for himself, perhaps, because while she lived, even in a snowstorm, he was still a little boy. While she lived, even evacuated, he need not be the grown-up and sensible one.

  So he stood there listening to the disastrous ebbing of her breath, he stood there, at her bedside, giving death its dominion, he stood there letting her slip into darkness without dragging her back, or following, or pretending – for whose sake? – that there might be a glow, a release, a transformation, he stood there in blasphemous misery hearing the priest’s words as gibberish and his own shabby muteness as a self-accusation, he stood there willing her to die more quickly.

  Go away, for Christ’s sake, go away, go away.

  Overhead a fluorescent tube quietly fizzed. The light it cast was knife-sharp and almost unbearable. There was nowhere to hide. James stood in silence under the shadowless fluorescence that already signified her absence.

  Afterwards the priest clasped his hands in an automatic handshake, and James found almost comical his earnest tone. ‘She’s with God,’ the priest said. James wanted in return to give hysterical, ungodly offence, to argue for the medical impossibility of resurrection, to send this man and his ingratiating theories packing. But the nurse was beside him, with a cup of tea, and he drank down his feelings, calmed his own mutiny, grateful to have a solid object like a teacup to clutch on to.

  The coffee arrived. Her flat white, his espresso. James drew his cup forward and looked up. Ellie was examining him.

  ‘You didn’t marry?’ she asked softly.

  Only then, hearing her blunt inquiry, looking into her eyes, seeing the slight moisture there and the intensity of her concern, did James realise there was lingering desire in her voice. Her lips were still slightly parted. She lowered her gaze and tore open a small sachet of white sugar.

  ‘Well, you know …’ he said vaguely. The noise in the restaurant rose, fell back, resumed its generalised clatter. He was distracted by the din and felt once again numb and dull. He glimpsed the threshold of what might be said, then retreated. ‘So what about this new government?’ He was trying to find another topic.

  ‘I’m full of hope,’ Ellie announced. ‘I believe, I really do, that the Apology will change everything. It will alter history. And it can’t be bad having a polyglot prime minister.’

  ‘You think that matters?’

  ‘Has to. Has to open his horizons.’

  James was silent. Ellie was still the optimist; she believed in redemptive futures. He repressed the impulse to lecture her on the necessity for political cynicism. Besides, they had reached that point in the conversation when both were disengaging, when too much remembering had eclipsed what it might be possible to say to each other. James was confused by his own responses to seeing Ellie so unchanged, and so self-possessed. This was her beauty, he reflected, her command of her own life, her staunch independence. Something about her concentrated presence was effortless and assured. And now Ellie was turning her silver rings on her slender fingers; she had the resigned, soft gaze of a passenger on a long-distance flight. He had bored her, he thought. He was an idiot, a fuckwit.

  The lunch concluded. Ellie was sending her mobile number to James.

  ‘Let’s talk again,’ she said. ‘In another context. Give me a call. Any time.’

  James’s phone rang. He silenced it. ‘Got it,’ he said. These were magical numbers. The code to find her by.

  There was a moment of tense hesitation as Ellie looked into his eyes. What must she be thinking?

  Her bright pink lips. Bob Dylan’s ‘I Want You’; its facile declaration.

  ‘Of course. We’ll talk tomorrow, if that’s OK.’ He looked down at his fingers, entering her name into the mysterious world of telephonic memory. ‘Thanks. For meeting up.’ He felt unworthy of her, a prisoner of his own skulking gloom and tongue-tied desire. A mug-shot of a man.

  Ellie stepped forward and embraced him. This time James felt her shape, the sturdy curve of her back, the soft and confident press of her breasts. He made himself let go, made the embrace unsexual. It had been like a bad date, a couple attracted but inert, a conversation that turned from easy news to freelance unhappiness.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ she repeated.

  James watched her walk away. He thought of the priest holding his hands, saying ‘With God’. He thought of René Magritte’s painting of the lovers, their faces smothered in cloth. Then he thought of another painting, the giant red lipstick lips, ludicrous, dream-crazy, floating like a joke in the sky.

  Pei Xing disembarked at Kurraba Point Wharf on the North Shore. She stepped lightly from the ferry onto the narrow gangplank, then onto the jetty, finding her land legs. Only a few other passengers ended their journeys here. She looked up at the high row of steps and the rim of houses overlooking the harbour, some of them teetering, it seemed, with the weight of their own importance. The wind was still fresh. She held her face to it, enjoying the sweep of scented air and the deep breaths of spirit. The Harbour was magnificent, and richly blue. From somewhere among the small yachts moored in the bay there was the clink-clink of metal hitting an aluminium mast. In her sudden lightheartedness Pei Xing paused to perform a Tai Chi gesture, right there, in the sunlight. And so, after placing her heavy handbag carefully to one side, she held out her right arm, lifted her left leg, leant sideways, swung back, swooping her arms in a restrained formal elegance before her, moving into eternity for a few precious seconds. She held the pose, staring at nothing. She felt the shape of her body and the fine balances it could achieve, muscles taut, or relaxed, or forming a woven pattern of crimson chords tucked deep inside her. The left leg down, the weight moved, the arc of her arms afloat on the air. Qigong. The life of breath.

  Then she began again, her arms upraised: the soft sway of a movement known as ‘cloud hands’.

  Behind her the ferry lurched away with an animist tremor of departure.

  The weekly visit was a source of argument between Pei Xing and her son Jimmy. Even Cindy, his girlfriend, did not understand, but was quieter about it and less confronting. Why would a woman want to visit her former prison guard? Why reattach to that history? Why torment herself so? And Pei Xing would pause, and collect her thoughts and say again that it was something difficult to explain, but that there were forms of forgiveness that make life go on, and forms of reproach that hold history still. She needed, she told them, to live in the aura of forgiveness. At this announcement Jimmy had almost guffawed. He had been sloshing noodles into his mouth, his chopsticks quickly scooping, and he threw his head back in an exaggerated, groaning laugh. He was eating pork heart and bok choy cooked in an aniseed broth, topped with glass noodles. Pei Xing looked into the bowl at his half-eaten meal and saw before her xin, the character radical of heart. One of the very first characters her father had taught her. She must have been only three years old. Four strokes of the brush. Simplicity itself. He had guided her hand. And almost immediately Pei Xing saw the character ‘heart’ everywhere, in ‘love’, in ‘mind’, in ‘remember’, in ‘forget’.

  Cindy looked critically at Jimmy, but said nothing. In the restaurant in Chinatown they had been enjoying their meal; now, Jimmy implied, she had spoiled it once again with all this talk of the old country, with all this returning to the past and her refusal to let go. Pei Xing considered continuing the argument (‘this is how one lets go, in sympathetic reconciliation’), but remained silent. She could not bring her words to her mouth from her own lumpish heart.

  It occurred to Pei Xing that there were things her son would never understand because he was not a reader. Reading had taught her that actors in history must find a logic beyond violence. When Jimmy was smaller they had watched action movies together; it was the one activity he allowed her to join. Now she wondered if, seeking his company, she had also encouraged his ignorance.

  Cindy was also eating like a starving peasant. Pei Xing flinched at their manners, a
t the voracity of their consumption. She averted her gaze. Another dish arrived, steaming mushrooms with shallots, and Jimmy stabbed at it with his chopsticks even before it hit the table.

  All around them were happy young men and women, many of them students, or like Jimmy, children of migrants who left China in the 1980s. Hong Kong businessmen, Guangzhou entrepreneurs. Dissidents, perhaps, from Beijing and Shanghai, even minority Uighars, a group of whom ran a small restaurant in a side-street not far from where they sat. They were gambling, every one of them, on another kind of life. Chinese people liked to gamble. You only had to go to Star City Casino on a Saturday night to see Chinese at the roulette tables, mesmerised by the wheel, or betting their savings on the capricious turn of a single card. They were the regulars, hailing each other in the timeless light, wandering the cavernous, cacophonous spaces, wondering what they were doing there and what happened to the dreams of their ancestors.

  Pei Xing had been tempted herself when she had first arrived in Australia. Incapacitated by migrancy, she had sought a dollar-sign solution. And after her brother’s sudden death, within weeks of her arrival, she lost most of her savings in a single, utterly desolate night.

  Pei Xing began the long walk up the hill towards the nursing home. Dong Hua would be waiting. Although she had experienced a stroke, the nurses said that she could still understand what was going on. She couldn’t speak and was paralysed in most of her body, but she waited, they said, she waited for each visit. The weekend duty nurse was a plump, efficient woman who ushered her in and the staff knew by now that Pei Xing visited every Saturday, bringing her lunch with her, to sit with Mrs Dong and read to her in English, or to talk softly in Chinese. They indulged and liked her; they brought her cups of green tea.