Five Bells Read online

  ‘Real life,’ he once told her, ‘is really overrated.’ He said really with elastic and cynical emphasis, as though he was weary of the entire world.

  And she remembered with heartbreaking clarity the look on Brendan’s face, wide open as the ocean and joyful-miserable, as he led a farewell sing-song over drinks at the Penthouse pub. They had their arms around each other and sang at the tops of their voices. Using the excuse of her departure, friends and family drank too much and afterwards staggered addled and idiotic around the streets and the car parks.

  Brendan said: ‘You’ll miss the piss in the lifts of the towers of Ballymun. You’ll miss the screechin’ of priests and the flappin’ of nuns. You’ll miss the seagulls diving for vomit on O’Connell Street at five on a Saturday morning.’

  ‘Disgraceful,’ Mam said. ‘Disgraceful.’ She was wearing her best frilly white blouse for the occasion, and touched the frills lightly when emotion overtook her.

  Catherine hooked her arm and leant against her mother’s shoulder, warm and full of love. She steered her home, through the pile of rubbish and the syringes and the graffiti in the lobby, up the stinking elevator, all the way to the sixth floor. She made her mother a cup of sugary tea and put her to bed.

  Brendan wept at Dun Laoghaire as she waved from the ferry; and waved to her as if he was a man drowning, not waving. He made a scene, Mam would have said, embarrassing them all, and was foolish and emotional and brotherly loving to a fault; he shouted from the wharf to the deck that they’d meet up in China. Yes, yes, he shouted. In China, in China. The semaphore of waving continued until he could not be distinguished from the others left behind. This was ever-Ireland, Catherine thought, those departing, those staying, and the frail signs in between, resting, fading, on the cold trembling air. The Irish: always leaving.

  The images on telly were all of the shot-up car, Guerin long gone. Catherine dreamed of it; it scared her. A cherry-red something or other, an unpretentious little car, with blood on the front seats.

  At their first meeting Luc had seen her reading an English book and shyly struck up a conversation. She was suspicious at first, a guy with a literary pick-up line, taking a chance with tourists. We Irish girls, she thought, are wise to the pick-ups. But she was reassured by his lack of confidence and his apologetic English.

  ‘I read it better than I speak,’ he said. ‘You can test me if you like.’

  And she liked that too, the quiet humour, the self-deprecation. So Catherine had tested him then and there with Nabokov’s memoir, and he filtered the ornate prose to say that this was a book about memory, and that the poor man was so afraid of passing time, and so confused, so desperate, that he considered the baby’s carriage a sinister kind of coffin. Every shape, said Luc, was already filled up with death.

  ‘I read it in French,’ he confessed with a smile. ‘Poor Mr Nabokov.’

  Luc was a translator, from Russian to French, originally from Besançon. He was struggling, he said, to make a living. Russian literature was out of favour.

  ‘But only temporarily,’ he added softly. The Russians were ‘eternal’, he insisted, and sombre enough and broad enough to express life for all of us.

  ‘It is something to do with scale. The consequential and the inconsequential. They are not afraid of history; or the smallest human endeavour. Side by side.’

  It sounded formal, like something he had read in a book. But Catherine was attracted to the way he implied that words mattered. She saw in him seriousness of mind and an endearing manner, both youthful and old.

  Catherine and Luc spent four weeks together, then parted. It was a relationship with the economy of a holiday romance, strictly contained, without obligation or the projection of a shared future. In Luc’s tiny room in Belleville they had sat up in bed together eating raisins, talking of books and exchanging stories about their lives. It was a happenstance affair, genial, uncommitted, and she discovered he was another of those souls who carry the past before them, who somehow understand the compulsion to repeat and revisit. They recognised this in each other. They liked each other’s stories. Into the shell of each other’s ears they poured random narrative seductions. Catherine found herself telling Luc about Ming Ming and Ping Ping, as though she understood at last how so humble an excursion might bind children together. She told of the grander trip to Ballinspittle and of her mother’s godforsaken disappointment. She told of her brother, how he was word-filled and crazy-like, and her best and truest friend. She told of the assassination of Veronica Guerin, Irish heroine. She told of where she grew up and of the sorrow of Dublin, a sorrowful city if there was ever one.

  Luc had fewer stories he was prepared to impart. His childhood was a cloudy, obscure place, which he was always on the brink of clarifying. When he spoke of it, without fluency, he seemed to Catherine to be picking his careful way through a fog, as if he had never spoken of anything personal before. But he told her this: that his maternal grandparents were from the town of Pont-Saint-Esprit, in the south, where in 1951, in the early years of their marriage, there had been an outbreak of ergot poisoning. Infected rye bread had been sold at the local bakery, and his grandmother was among the many who suffered appalling hallucinations, most of which involved blood-letting, dismemberment and scenes of atrocious violence. Ergot poisoning, Luc explained, has effects like LSD, like a bad trip. There were only seven deaths, but there were widespread delusions of a mostly fearsome kind. A town gone mad. Everyone remembers a tailor rushing through the streets believing he was pursued by spiky devils, and a young woman who ran into the river, believing her body was on fire.

  Grandmother was hospitalised and never really recovered, Luc said, and his mother, then a baby, was raised by her aunt. In her late teens his mother had moved to Besançon, but could not overcome her guilt at leaving her mother. When he was eight they made the only visit he can remember: they took a bus to Pont-Saint-Esprit and saw her briefly. He remembered the sound of the river beyond the window and the distant wailing of herons; he remembered how his mother’s guilt transferred to him, that he absorbed it there and then, blotting its darkness in, standing before this old woman who neither greeted nor spoke to them. She had purplish-grey skin and flapped her hands like a moth, he said. He was afraid. He felt alone. He had felt the guilt entering him. He looked out of the window at the river, and wished he could dissolve there.

  ‘And translation?’ Catherine had asked.

  ‘It could have been any language, anything other than French. I loved literature and longed to be transported elsewhere, to exist inside a language. Russian appealed because of the alphabet, which seemed to me as a child like something from a dream in which meaning was coded, but not immediately evident. Backwards-facing letters. The mystic glyphs of Cyrillic. Serifs. Ligatures.’

  Here Luc paused. ‘And because of the novels, of course. Those weighty novels you fell into for weeks and weeks. As a teenager, I read the classics, all the great works. I fell into Pushkin and Dostoevsky. I loved Gogol and Tolstoy.’

  Luc warmed to his explanation, as if it was a summary of his passions. ‘And Doctor Zhivago,’ he added. ‘I really loved Doctor Zhivago.’

  When Catherine left for London they stayed in touch by email – thinking phone-calls were much too intimate. In this way she knew of his brief marriage, his translation commissions, the death of his mother. He knew of her job with Reuters, her ugly flat in Golders Green, the on-off affair with one of her colleagues in the office. They remained friends against the odds, practising a long-distance affection.

  When Luc at last visited Catherine in London, almost eight years after their friendly Nabokovian encounter, they were two foreigners who both found the English amusing, who were carrying bundled in themselves the mosaic of displaced lives, who were sentimentally fond of the unencumbered month they had once spent together. Luc looked older than Catherine expected. He had grey at the temples and deep creases beside his mouth, as if some sadness had afflicted him that he had never told her
. Men have secrets, many secrets; she knew this by now.

  But his body was unchanged. He was still slender and milky-white, he still had bluish flanks in the cold and a lovely tilting step when he emerged naked from the shower. She would kiss his goose-pimpled flesh and make a show of drying him, wrapping him round as if she had discovered the young boy still inherent. Beneath the towel, almost imperceptible, she felt him shiver. Kissing his neck and his shoulder, rubbing her nose down his ridge of his spine, smelling the gardenia perfume of the soap on his body.

  Once, lying in her arms, he whispered: ‘As a child I was really afraid of moths. There are giant moths in the south of France: they have furry grey abdomens and coarse rustling wings.’

  ‘Moths?’ Catherine asked, expecting a funny story.

  ‘Yes, moths.’

  There was no funny story but only a cosy moment, like that of the confessional in Our Lady of Victories on a cold winter’s day, with the scent of damp wool, animal and acerbic, and the priest’s voice, and her own, and the muffled sound of the rain, pouring in a light steady veil, washing into the shadowy car park outside.

  Catherine was not sure now, on a Sydney Saturday, why she should remember this fragment of conversation. Moths, fear of moths. It was the gift of tenderness, perhaps, to persist and return like this, delivered wistfully and for no purpose other than to recall the texture of an affair. And it was a token between lovers: to confide the vulnerability that might have followed from childhood.

  She rose from the table and paid her bill. Outside the light was startling and the sky avid and aflame. Catherine walked towards the Museum of Contemporary Art, breathing in the voluptuous light, thinking of the clean, sleepy body next to hers, of the melodious quality of his voice after they had made love, of a childhood faraway, in Besançon, and another parallel, in Ballymun, and thinking of the rhyme in her head, Besançon/ Ballymun, of its inward music and the trinity syllables, thinking too how romance is no longer possible, how Doctor Zhivago is no longer possible, that epic perspective on history, that snow-decorated love, and she decided, there in the sunshine: I must ring Luc this evening.

  5

  Something in the prodigious quality of the light, the way it gathered in the Harbour, cobalt and gold and sparkly as an advertisement, made Ellie think for a moment of her father, Charlie.

  He had owned an old-fashioned electrical goods store, the kind that is disappearing all over the world and which only still exists in a few small country towns. He sold cords, bulbs, lamps and steam irons; he sold switches and cables for electricians and household goods for families. It was a narrow, cramped shop, just off the main street and out of the way, and had about it the air of a forgotten or essentially forgettable place. It seemed silent, sepia and fixed in the wrong time. There was a bell on the front door and one stepped immediately into a room in which cables hung in thin loops like snakes from the ceiling and dusty objects, long neglected, lined shabby shelves. Her father sat behind the counter, reading obsolete manuals on do-it-yourself radio or adventure novels set in Africa. As she entered he would nod and smile and slowly lower his book. Sometimes, out of boredom, or because they had little to say to each other, he would tell her the plot of the novel he was reading. There were inevitably hidden codes, or spies, or nefarious subterfuge, there were wild life encounters, there were beautiful but evil women, limply inviting, there were dashing heroes with whom they eventually entwined. Ellie loved these charming and slightly absurd meetings with her father. At some point in their conversation he would hold up his palm and say: ‘That’s it. That’s enough. Back into the light!’

  And it was true: leaving the shop was like stepping from shadows into light. Outside was a sign: Charlie’s Electrics, painted in flaking paint, and two simple light bulbs, such as one sees in cartoons signifying bright ideas, bracketing his name. When she was a young child Ellie believed her father actually created light – something her mother said, casually vague, she had misinterpreted. They laughed about it later, but the association stuck.

  Her father never played golf or joined the Rotary Club. He didn’t drink at the pub and seemed to have no friends. His was a self-enclosed, modest life, the centre of which was his wife and daughter, his chickens, and a rectangle of vegetable patch, which he tended with regular, fastidious care. There was something, Ellie thought later, Chekhovian about her father. He was a man who was waiting, always waiting, for life to happen, and in the meantime was content to sit quietly in his shadowy shop, selling the occasional lamp or fuse card or extension cord to customers, whom he treated with an almost abject politeness. His only distinctive quality was the headaches he endured, a feminising trait, Ellie reasoned, which assailed him all his life. This explained the shadows. Charlie believed life in the shade somehow protected his sore brain. It was a joke in the town: the bloke who sold lights had the gloomiest shop in Australia.

  Ellie’s mother Lil was the active one. She played tennis and was a member of the Country Women’s Association. She was capable, talkative and worked part-time in a bakery. Her own parents had been farmers and this showed in her body. She moved sturdily and with a strong at-home-in-the-world stride; she had firm arms and conveyed a sense of ease and authority. Ellie wondered often how it is we combine our parents, how the genetic stuff of being both follows and splits us, how it is we embody them, or don’t, and find our own, singular self. She wondered too how her parents had ever met and got together, and only as an adult realised how arbitrary love was, and how easily one fell into the arms of strangers.

  It was to her father Ellie first disclosed her wish to travel. She could speak of other places without it seeming a betrayal.

  ‘I will leave,’ she had warned him. ‘There is so much world out there.’

  And though he couldn’t understand, he loved her for her difference, and did not tell her mother nor try to dissuade her.

  Ellie had a compulsively joyful disposition. She was not naively or always happy, but she was disposed to liveliness. This was something her father understood. He doted. He indulged. He marvelled at his clever girl, so unalike, and so radically separate. And knowing this, Ellie grew up secure and strong, so that when she gathered James in and made him whole, there was no girlish trepidation or glossy-magazine agony; it was an assertion of her confidence and her wish to enlarge her experience. And when James left to move to the city as a scholarship boy she was, for a time, hurt and confused, but his leaving encouraged her own volatility in the world, and made it possible for her to leave too.

  Walking the path beside the ferries and the sleek Captain Cook Cruise boats, bobbing catamarans onto which a line of jolly people filed, Ellie imagined she was carrying James’s gaze on her back. She would not turn and wave; let him watch her walk away. Tomorrow he would ring, or she would ring, and they would contrive to meet again, somewhere less bright and more peaceful, a wine bar perhaps, in which they might lean close together, at kissing distance, and softly confide.

  Seagulls fluttered in the air, children called out. The Harbour was busy with ferry traffic and over all spangled with light. On the lawn in front of the Museum of Contemporary Art family groups and couples stretched out and sprawled with untidy snacks. Their bare summertime legs jutted from patches of shade and they tilted back water or sucked melting ice-creams or lazed torpid over the bulging Saturday newspapers. Ellie realised she could hear the didgeridoo once again; it had maintained its low reverberating drone. She wondered how many hours the player stayed at the Quay, and how he kept up his stamina and concentration. How, indeed, he managed so much circulating breath, this strenuous inhalation-exhalation that made such continuous sound. Some people persevere, she thought; some just keep on, and on. Ellie paused for a moment, listening carefully, but then strode towards George Street to catch her bus home.

  That year, their fourteenth, 1988, had been the year of Australia’s bicentennial commemorations. Odd now, to think of it. Odd to retrieve it on such a day, with her lover from the past watching her
walk away, with them both, she was sure of it, recalling their adolescent lust and the sweet assurance it had given them.

  Into this very harbour, in 1788, Captain Arthur Phillip had sailed his first fleet of convicts. Bosomy sails against the blue. A criminal nation boldly inaugurated. Men in three-cornered hats posed before a flapping flag, shading their eyes as they squinted into the unknown future. In the history book they read at school, Captain Phillip had a poker face and tight-pursed lips, as if he held firm against whatever it was that he saw. Their town council in Western Australia arranged farcical forms of celebration. There were lawnmower and egg-and-spoon races down the main street, there was a scone bake-off to raise funds for a statue to early pioneers, and the high-school arranged patriotic rituals and historical pageants. Ellie happily missed being chosen for a landing re-enactment, performed two months late, but James found himself duly nominated a convict, which he rather enjoyed, since his main task was to steer a rowboat. A group of ethnically mixed teenagers were chosen as ‘natives’: it was their role to welcome the arriving colonisers, to bow, to remain silent, to be ceremonially obsequious.