Five Bells Read online

  Parents stood on the beach and took photographs, proud of the nationalist fuss. The shire councillor and the school principal both gave little speeches. Birds on their broad elliptical migration from Siberia, small godwits and plovers and red-capped dotterels, ran fast along the beach or swooped in speedy arcs over the sober proceedings. Miss Morrison had once drawn on the blackboard their route from the Arctic Circle, sweeping from the tundra in Siberia down through Communist China (that was what she called it, Communist China) and on to South-West and South-Eastern Australia.

  ‘These birds curve around the planet,’ she had announced with glee, requiring her students to join in admiration of so arduous and poetic an achievement. Ellie remembered this phrase long after she had forgotten the names of most of the birds.

  So there was James standing quietly with the other convicts, holding an oar upright, his manner ironic. His trousers were rolled to resemble britches, and he wore a red scarf tied in a knot at his neck. And there were the adults, the town councillors and a row of dutiful teachers, lined up for a photograph, their faces searching for the elusive meaning of the artificial event.

  Ellie all the while was distracted by the birds – their Russian intervention and their international assertion, the way they crowned the sky in spirals and cut through it diving to the sand, the way they appeared, then vanished, blurring into the sunlight.

  In their hideout James told Ellie of the Aboriginal protests. Unlike her, he read the newspaper and listened to the ABC radio news. Elsewhere, over East, there had been demonstrations, he said, and the defiant display of Aboriginal flags. Aborigines had called Australia Day ‘Invasion Day’, and the year one of ‘mourning’. It was serious, James said, it was like the Bolshevik Revolution. He was critical of Ellie’s lack of political understanding, and for her part she was embarrassed to know so little, never to have thought about these things before, never to have considered race politics or the British-bloody-Empire, never to have imagined her nation as an entity once hypothetical and tenuous. At home her mother cut out a picture from the Women’s Weekly magazine. It was of Princess Diana visiting Australia for the Bicentennial. She had feathery hair and wore a peppermint dress with white trim, surmounted – that was the Weekly’s word – by a matching hat. She looked incredibly tall, shaking the hands of short, besuited politicians, and giraffe-gawky in her body as she retracted a gloved hand. Ellie could not reconcile James’s opinions with her mother’s monarchical gratifications.

  ‘Brainwashing,’ he declared. ‘It’s really that simple.’

  And so Ellie was obliged to learn if she too was brainwashed – a term she had only heard in James Bond movies – and to be led, irreversibly, into the beginnings of political knowledge. James lay beside her and instructed her on the Meaning of Australia Day, as Ellie, listening carefully, absorbed with fascination these new and impertinent opinions. She wanted this bigger world, of political meanings. She wanted the experience of shouting in a street for what you believed in, of seeing oneself in a community, of being caught in deep-dreaming utopias and a benevolent love of the whole world. She would later join the Trotskyists on campus, and then the Labor Party. She would never give up wishing for the potential of solidarity and social causes, would always refuse the arch and cynical explanation, desire, at a party, the left-leaning scruffy man with buttons undone and a slight air of dysfunction.

  Ellie’s father died during her second year at university. She took her pack and boarded the bus for the miserable three-hour ride home. It was her misfortune to sit next to a pinched, unhappy woman who told her all men are shits, all men are bastards, fucking bastards, that’s what men are, every bloody one of them, shits, all shits, no bloody fucking exceptions; and Ellie thought she would go crazy if the chatter didn’t cease. At last the woman fell asleep, her middle-aged, disappointed face pressed to the glass and her mouth open, vulnerably, like an exhausted child. Her talk was replaced by whiny country and western music broadcast throughout the bus; it must have been there all along, but submerged beneath the woman’s relentless complaining. The vast industrial area of Kwinana slid past, looking like satanic mills in the fading light. Flares, sulphur, who-knows-what emissions, flew up in particles and sparks from the tall smoke-stacks. The journey took her further and further into country darkness and at last, by nine o’clock, to her unhappy destination.

  Lil was there, patiently waiting at the bus station to meet her. She stood stiff and widow-like under the sodium arc-lights of the car park. They looked at each other, their faces crumpled, and together they cried. Lil was distant with the severe loneliness of the early stages of mourning. She was falling apart and coped by hugging herself. Her hands had disappeared into the ends of her cardigan.

  Ellie had just turned nineteen years old; her beloved father had been only sixty. He’d been pissing blood, Lil said, and probably in pain, but didn’t want to bother anyone or cause any trouble. It was a heart attack, in the end. Their neighbour found him dead at work when he didn’t come home for his dinner. There he was, behind the counter, still in his chair, a library book about spies lying closed on his lap. So she learned of it, her father’s death, and his lonely no-nonsense departure.

  Within a year, to Ellie’s surprise, Lil had remarried. Ellie had somehow not reckoned on her mother’s life continuing. He was a widower with four children, and Lil was happy to have gained a larger family. At the wedding Ellie hung in the background, trying to suppress the mixed emotions of the day, trying to control the grief that had insistently returned, trying to act cordially to the genial, nice-enough man, who confessed he’d loved her mother for years and years and was today the damn-luckiest bloke alive. He was a mechanic, a bridge player and a Grade A tennis champion.

  ‘Put it there,’ he exclaimed, and Ellie, realising her new stepfather conducted his emotions by handshake, meekly complied.

  Stan the mechanic looked pleased with himself. His smile was genuine, and he wanted to be accepted. Ellie felt a clogging of feeling and a stranglehold at her lungs. She felt a misfit and ungainly, a stranger in the home of her childhood. Somewhere nearby her four half-siblings, all in high school and still unknown, looked on suspiciously as if their father, in shaking her hand, was making her the boss.

  How the night had fallen. How grief had fallen. How, afterwards, she had seen her past tunnel into a blur and her father’s sign, Charlie’s Electrics, remain more vividly than the memory of his face. On her return journey after the wedding, the bus hit a kangaroo. It rose up out of the dark night in a horror-movie flash, collided, lifted higher, then fell away. The bus jolted, braked, there was a sickening, dragging sound of animal flesh upon bitumen, then it screeched to a halt. The bus reversed. In the pale headlights was illuminated the mangled carcass, still twitching a hind leg lacerated by impact or gravel, and holding its face as though inquiring what might happen next. Ellie always thought of kangaroo eyes as softly pleading, and this was no different. Its eyes, electrically red, shone with a dying address. Even from this distance the animal seemed directly to look at her. She rested her face on the window, needing to see. The corpulent driver alighted. Ellie watched him drag the kangaroo by the tail to the side of the road, then puffing climb back into the driver’s seat and resume the journey, as if nothing had happened. It was at this moment, one year later, that Ellie truly wept for her father, sobbing in the barely lit bus, folded over like one broken.

  ‘Plenty more where that came from,’ said a chiding voice behind her.

  Ellie understood the matter-of-fact brutality and unconcern, decreed by bush lore. She understood what it took to kill an animal, or to disregard one accidentally hurt. Tough farmers with their tough-as-guts and practical hearts. Kangaroo shooters. Butchers. And honourable folk who had to deal with creaturely lives, and not flinch, or pretend, or expect comfort where there was none, who looked at tumid fly-blown remains, muck-streaked and decaying, with neutral regard.

  But this made things no easier. She allowed the dying kanga
roo to stand in as her object of concern. It was her necessary cipher in the overwhelming night. Ellie hunched in the uncomfortable seat, in the bus vibrating with diesel power and pushing through the dark, and on a day marked so definitively by her mother’s new joy, allowed herself to mourn.

  In the shifting shade beneath the pepper tree at the bus-stop on George Street, Ellie could now recall her father with pleasure. The light bulbs bracketing his name were such a comic sign, half a lifetime away and secure in the dazzlement of childhood. Ellie loved that sign. She yearned for Charlie’s Electrics, for his voice telling her in a serious tone the twisted plot of a spy novel set in Africa, for his calm equanimity, his routine life in the shadows. And Miss Morrison. Clepsydra. Her face turned to the blackboard. Her vaulting mind. Her impressive hold on words. And the touch, yes the touch, of James’s boy-new body, warm in the cold space they had selected to hide in. She remembered sitting astride his hips, looking down at his face. The way his eyes shone up at her. Their interrogative candour.

  A bus-stop wait could cover all this, all this complicated history. A woman standing still in a main street on a Saturday afternoon could carry all this: death, time, recollected acts of love-making – all together, simultaneous, ringing in her head.

  Ellie felt blessed by today, the dense here-now. She refused the bullshit theories that life these days was thinner, and denuded. She refused to be pessimistic. To want less than this complexity and emotional ravelling.

  She stood for a long time at the bus stop, just near the overhead railway, listening to the community of life around her and the mechanical and human sounds that together, a rough orchestra, filtered through the streets of the city. From the direction of the Sydney Harbour Bridge noisy traffic flowed past, and in a surprise that broke her meditation Ellie saw suddenly that the bus, her number, 431, was hurtling in her direction. It stopped directly before her, expelled a low pneumatic sigh, and she climbed aboard.

  Air. Breath. In the time-lapse of his thinking he remembered the word pneuma.

  They had been studying asthma, lung cancer, bronchitis, pneumonia. James remembers he came in late to the anatomy session, his umbrella dripping and his mood wintry to match the season. Professor Heller was in front of the class, in full flight, pacing erratically and speaking with passion.

  ‘Those wily pre-Socratics,’ he said, ‘they were interesting guys. Anaximenes believed self and reality were both air: pneuma, he called it, literally breath.’

  He turned to face his class. ‘Today, these neat spongy bags we carry beneath our throats, this bubble-wrap inside, and our daily insufflation.’ He paused, smiling. ‘So let’s all get inspired!’ He tapped at his chest double-fisted, like Tarzan. He took a deep breath.

  ‘Jesus,’ muttered someone. ‘Here he goes again.’

  ‘Just as our soul, being air, holds us together, so do breath and air encompass the whole world. So said Anaximenes, about 540 BC. It was a Tuesday. It was windy. It was a very windy Tuesday in downtown Miletus.’

  The class relaxed into low giggles and a slight rustle of derision.

  ‘Pneuma accounts in his work for the functions of the soul – nutrition, growth, motion, sensation: they all have this single necessary condition we now think of as breath. For Aristotle, pneuma was vitality, like the fifth element, ether, which makes up the stars. It was from Aristotle these blokes inherited pneuma.’

  Here Professor Heller paused and removed his glasses. He breathed on them, wiped them and held them angled to the light. It was difficult not to find his theatrical turn endearing. ‘And now, my doubters of the soul, to the twentieth century; to the breathless cadaver.’

  James had taken his place with the others, in his white student-doctor gown, and peered, eyes agog, into the chest of an old woman. Her thoracic cavity had been sawed open and parted like a book. It was their job to extract the trachea and the bronchial tubes, and then lift out the lungs.

  The woman’s face was covered with a white cloth, and so was her lower body. There was just the gaping chest in which her lungs, dark cushions, lay indecorously exposed. The body as waste. The body splayed in bright light. Clearly visible were sinews and ligaments, gaudy planes of opened flesh, the corruptible substances of which every body is composed. The phrase ‘another living soul’ mysteriously surfaced.

  James felt he might suffocate. The grisly thrill of anatomy class had converted to nauseated recoil. It would be another humiliation. He would display once again his flagrant anxieties, how little he governed them, how futile and how foolish was his professional ambition. His own body offered a grim allegory of medical failure. The room turned before him. Faces slid away. His hands were hot, sweaty, his movements uncoordinated. So, having just arrived at the lab, James quickly excused himself. He whispered to the student beside him that he was feeling woozy from the flu and fled the room in haste, seizing his bag and his books, forgetting his furled umbrella.

  Minutes later, in the rain, James realised he could not now return to claim it. The umbrella was propped where it had been left, a symbol of his absence. Some sort of panic attack, yes, simply dumb panic. Outside he was panting, choking, fighting for air. He cupped his hands under the sky and collected water for his thirst, then threw back his head, and swallowed.

  James watched Ellie retreat and enter the Saturday crowds. Her body moved with an easy sway and a fast deliberate step. The back of her skirt flipped up around her thighs. She did not look back, though James willed her to do so. She charged off in the direction of the station and he assumed she would catch the train. He remained outside the restaurant, practising the deep-breathing exercises he had been taught in his therapy.

  James thought often of Professor Heller. He had once gone to see him, a raw new student not long into the semester, in order to discuss his embarrassing difficulty with the inner body. His teacher had an eccentric manner and a fatherly authority that James found reassuring. There was no reproach but Professor Heller did not, as he expected, suggest strategies to cope, or the shrewd psychological games by which he might outwit his aversion. Instead, he recommended the reading of philosophy. He seemed to believe that what haunts and damages us might be defeated by thinking alone.

  ‘A quiet room,’ he said. ‘It’s all anyone needs. To sit alone in a quiet room. Thinking. Reading.’

  It seemed such worthless advice. James left the appointment holding Professor Heller’s battered paperback of Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, his own student copy. The book was brown-coloured with age and lovingly worn. It took James a whole year to return the volume, and then by post.

  After the failed lung class, he consulted the section on Anaximenes. There he found a sentence of Russell’s commentary underlined in pale pencil: It seems that the world breathes. A rushed asterix, a graphite star, lay in the margin.

  Medical school defeated him. When James thought of it now it returned with a tang like child’s vomit and a sequence of gory revelations, held back by steel implements. So many bodies, ransacked and despoiled. And that girl, Sally, cleaning the floor with a stained mop, her face emphatically hidden and turned downwards to her task. And Professor Heller, once again breathing on his glasses, wiping them, and then holding them upwards to the light. This repetitive sequence, with the implication of stench and disgust, with one face turned down and one lifted up, would summarise an entire year in which he struggled for control.

  James travelled throughout his twenties, doing casual jobs, fucking around. Then, at the age of thirty, finding himself back in Perth, he enrolled to train as a primary schoolteacher. He would never be able to explain, to himself or to others, why he made this bold and improvised decision. But he did the requisite three years, working in a bar at night to pay the rent, then applied for country service, to teach in a small town. He was posted to the wheat belt, to a place that had a single main street: a general store with a petrol bowser, a pub, a butcher and a baker. There was a Returned Soldiers’ club, a Country Women’s hall an
d an eroded sandstone plinth that served as a war memorial. This was true Australia, he told himself, sun-cracked and quiet. The size of it slightly alarmed him, but he could rest here, become other, live in a kind of disguise; and he could drive to the city at weekends and maintain his half-committed relationship with his new girlfriend. The illusionist expanses of wheat shifting from green to gold, the wave motions of the wind and its susurration, the sense of calm labour and community spirit, these addressed, as art might, his secret insufficiency. In the windy country air, James felt ventilated, released. Most of all it was like starting again, with a brand-new boyhood.

  There were long afternoons that might have seemed insufferable to others, in which James found himself talking with excitement to a class of young faces all turned directly towards him. Their avidity, their interest, inspired his own reconstruction. He was reminded that he possessed a sense of humour; he was reminded how interesting were the various facts of the world, first met; he saw again the pleasure when a hand shot up in excited salute to answer a question, and the intelligent-dumb inquiry that illuminated the class.

  In the town he was considered a good teacher and an alright bloke. He was a success. Everyone liked him. Bit of a loner, but OK. Wheat farmers touched the tips of their hats when they saw him, nodded a light nod and invited him to barbeques. They asked about his surname, DeMello; yes, Italian. They found him a curiosity, told him of the Italian prisoners sent to their farms, years ago, during the Second World War. Good workers, not slackers. Liked to sing in their Eye-talian. But prisoners all the same.