Five Bells Read online

  It was Pei Xing’s lot to know things in advance, her particular burden. Even as a child she had known things, had seen death arrive early, had read what is yet to come written in the lines of a face. She turned, as one does when one glimpses the future. The body is intelligent in this way, instinctively facing and refuting. She moved from the two teenagers who had now claimed Aristos’s attention. There was another old friend, Mary, whom she had wished to seek out. Mary slept with her belongings tucked in a corner under the railway arch, only partially hidden from the visitors to the quay. Her plastic bags were visible, but she was away somewhere, bedraggled and roaming, searching for a drink. The plastic pile looked flimsy, as though it could be dislodged with a sneeze. Pei Xing leant into the waste space that was Mary’s home, flinching a little at some rotten decomposition smell, and tucked a ten-dollar note where she was sure that her friend would find it. Then she stood still for a minute, looking again at the plastic bags, the sorry heap of a life, feeling a swelling of sadness for the inverted order of things, for Mary, now lost, her whole life a craving, for Aristos, who would die and be no longer by the water, for his wife Voula, who would weep, and never again see her homeland.

  Pei Xing waited in the queue and bought a ticket for the ferry. The man in the booth did not recognise her, though she had been his customer many times. She was glad it was one of the old ferries, green and yellow and wooden, like something she might have seen as a girl on the Huangpu River; the newer white ones, sleek and gleaming, were simply not the same. Supply, the ferry was called.

  Finding a seat towards the back, Pei Xing settled in and finished her ice-cream. The boat strained and creaked around her, rocking gently, then lurched away with a throbbing pulse she now and then thought of as human. People settled, talked on mobile phones, sent text messages that reduced the world and its vast feelings to a few shiny codes. All those swift, fidget fingers tapping into enigmatic circuits. All those micro-processed signs and electronic hallos. The man who claimed the seat beside her opened a book-sized laptop. It sounded a pleasant chime, G major, and lit up like a personal lamp.

  I am old, she thought, and turned her face to look through the window. Yes, I am old.

  There it was, jade-white, lifting above the water. She never tired of seeing this form. It was a fixture she relied on. The shapes rested, like porcelain bowls, stacked one upon the other, fragile, tipped, in an unexpected harmony.

  ‘He’: harmony.

  She saw the Chinese character, wheat and a mouth; she saw the flourish of eight strokes of the wolf-hair brush. She felt her father’s hand on her back correcting her posture, as he taught her calligraphy. Sometimes he corrected the angle of her chin, with the slightest of touches, with just the tip of one finger, then watched as she dipped, caught the ink, and tried a difficult character.

  The monument glided past. Pei Xing experienced the illusion that it was moving and that she was staying still. She looked back to see it floating away, diminishing, becoming an ornament, small enough to hold in the well of her hand. Someone leaning against the railing outside moved to block her view.

  Mary, where was Mary? Ah, poor soul. And Aristos, poor Aristos.

  Pei Xing felt the tremor of the ferry and heard the murmurous hum of its engine. She closed her eyes. She saw herself as others might: miniature, a Chinese woman with an inscrutable air. A kind of type, or an absence. Then she saw herself from the inside: those layers of self slowly, gently, time-travelling across the water, the child receiving a white thin-lipped teacup from the hands of her mother, the student in plaits taught to sit still with her hands in her lap, the lover opening arched spaces to the engulfment of a man’s body, the mother bent, cloudy with joy, over her infant son’s head. In the wilderness of leaving Shanghai, these selves had blended and folded; now, in meditation, she was able to fan them apart. This was her habit, these days, to see herself in this way, the concertina of a life in which she saw her own folds and crevices. I have lived many lives. There was something reassuring in this, not to be single but many, not to be of one language but several, not to have but one discrete past but a skein, and multiple.

  She must have dozed a little. When she woke, blinking, the ferry was at the north shore and the passengers were standing and ready to leave. There was a ruffle of bodies departing, voices lifting with their destination, handbags slung, or opened, or reached into for a mobile phone. Mozart sounded somewhere – or was she imagining it? – a trail of Cherubino’s aria floating in the air. Outside was luminous. High trees moved in a breeze from the water. There were rich people’s houses, and the concave sweep of a steep slope garlanded with creepers and flowers.

  The ferry bumped the small jetty of a paradise everyone took for granted.

  When Catherine stepped from the train, she dropped her ticket. Fuck; she needed it to exit.

  It fluttered under someone’s running shoes in the transitional light of the station. But then the ticket rested and she lunged for it, and rose up holding it aloft like a botanical specimen, the papery petal of a rare orchid, found only in railway stations.

  On a wet black bough.

  She descended on the escalator and moved as one body with the crowd.

  ‘Careful now, sweetheart,’ she heard a voice say to a child, and she was filled with poetic impulse and a disposition to tenderness. The child was a girl with sparkly pink clips in her divided hair. Her father held her hand above her head as he guided her forward and down. Catherine watched her swaying dress and her bare legs and the straps of her sandals. Some scrap of memory had been stirred that she could not quite capture.

  On ground level – quay level – Catherine looked for it immediately. She asked an Arab-looking man at a newspaper stand; he smiled kindly and stretched his chubby arm to the right. That way, he indicated, without saying a word.

  Catherine walked past serried ferry ports and cafés and the casual, milling crowds. There were lines for tickets on cute, old-fashioned ferries, painted uniformly in emerald and gold, and people just wandering, or standing, or having their photographs taken. There was a human statue, stiffly inhuman, posing as a Roman god.

  And beyond the farthest, and down a curving wharf, there it was, nestling before her, its folded forms stretching upwards, its petal life extending. The peaked shapes might have derived from a bowl of white roses, from the moment when they’re tired and leaning, just about to subside. Blown, that strange term, a bowl of blown roses. She had not expected intimations of wind and flowers from something so essentially hard and bright. She had not expected to be reminded, obscurely, of her own body.

  ‘Gis a kiss!’

  Catherine heard a Scottish accent, a trace of tipsy hilarity.

  And then: ‘Up shit creek, that car; bloody cactus, that’s what, done for, I reckon mate, trade it or what? yeah? what-do-ya-reckon? eh? what-do-ya-say?’ Spoken in an overloud voice to a mobile phone.

  Catherine loved Australian accents, the way they rasped in the air. The conversation unrolled in a friendly snarl. There was French, too – she recognised the syllables she had first heard as a schoolgirl in Dublin – and fragments, what was it? – of sing-songy Mandarin. Catherine saw a young man lunge for his girlfriend. He took her by the waist, swung her around, and kissed her dramatically, with a succulent smack. He was the Scot, another visitor, like herself. He wore a NYC cap on his head and had the indiscreet, restive confidence of someone newly in love.

  And that was when she thought of it: beauty like a kiss.

  On a day such as this, a bright January day with light pouring from the heavens, when the blown quality was not disintegration but a token of completion, when other lives seemed everywhere to open and effloresce, it was easy to believe there was an eroticism in the address of something beautiful. This was it, arousal, the pause of a new pleasure, the comfort of a sudden connection, intimate and unanticipated. In a kind of instinct of humility she bent her head, then raised it again, and saw the petals anew.

  Catherine found h
erself thinking of the lover she had left. She thought of Luc’s mouth, its fleshy appeal, and the ragged scar on his upper lip, the mark left by playing with a corkscrew as a child. It was a sign by which she knew him, the groove that was his wound. When they made love her tongue sought it, with a pre-emptive kiss. She thought now of her lips swooping his chest, tasting his skin. She thought of her hands clasping his cool buttocks on a warm humid night; how lovely, in general, men’s buttocks were, always unspoiled when other parts began to sag and discolour. She liked to watch him sleeping, face down, the way he hooked an arm under his body, the sweet and somnolent compression of his face. Even his snore had appealed, resonating in the depth of his sleep, making the sheets quiver, making him serious, somehow, older and more vulnerable. Catherine felt lusty here in public, standing at a distance from the monument. Beneath her sightseeing was this mayhem of remembered touch.

  And there was something else. As Catherine paused, she saw, to the left, the Bridge across the water, and the harbour, and a small ferry, chugging away to the north. Bridge, water, harbour, ferry: all were ablaze, all illuminate. This part of the world collected light as if funnelled double-strength from the sun. Perhaps some refractive quality of the water, or those shining petals, perhaps the geography of sheltered spaces or the winking skyscrapers on the far shore, perhaps these together contributed to an increased incandescence.

  Catherine fumbled in her bag for her sunglasses, thinking of Luc’s pale shoulder, glimpsed from behind. She felt the brush, ghostlike, of an unshaven kiss. Elvis Costello’s ‘I Want You’ trailed mournfully through her head.

  How did Australians cope with all this light?

  As Catherine sought a patch of shade and put on her sunglasses, she felt a fleeting nostalgia for dull sky and objects fogged over. Her mother’s sad face flickered into remembrance, framed by a cheap nylon scarf and squinting in sea-spray. It must have been Sandymount, and the sea like liquid ash. It must have been just after. A week, no more. Midwinter. Mourning winter. Chrysanthemums, not roses.

  It was like a still from a fifties’ black and white movie – the woman’s face turned just so, panning to the light-sliced ocean, the tone Irish, miserable, and a strained soundtrack, a Bach cello. This scene may have been fiction, but it was already ineradicable.

  And now she looked across the wide, encircling stretch of the harbour, the enormous glaze of sun-fire and surface-dazzle stretching into the distance, and wondered what she was doing here, in Sydney, in Australia. Restlessness had caused her to move across the planet. The job offer was a year-long placement, but it was enough; she had felt the need to flee London. She could not have stayed there, with Luc, becoming heartless in the mire of her grief. She hoped he would forgive her, and join her, and understand why she had fled. The calm of their lives had been destroyed by her obdurate mourning. It had deformed their conversations, interrupted their contentment, filled to the brim all the spaces between them. It was eleven months now, and still she could not free herself.

  Catherine noticed the tiny human shapes of climbers moving in a line upon the Bridge. They were cartoon-like in their simplicity and vaguely nonsensical in their endeavour.

  How small we might appear. Going nowhere, just up and down again.

  Flags waved at the summit of the bow, like a mountain conquered. There was not a single cloud. The sky was a high dome.

  I beheld the Bridge.

  Beheld. Where did that come from? Since the death there had been incursions of stray vocabularies, as though current language was worn and deficient. Hearken. That was another. Hearken. It suggested gold-leafed manuscripts, lovely decrepitude, and paper so brittle it must be held behind glass.

  Catherine turned away, almost tearful, from a jumble of associations she could neither disentangle nor inspect. How confused this place had made her, this Circular Quay, turning on the curve of lost time and unbidden recurrences.

  Catherine glimpsed the Scottish lovers retreating along the wharf. They were almost skipping. His arm rested around her shoulder and hers slid along his waist. The utter fit of their bodies was a beautiful thing to behold.

  2

  It was a kind of tropical summer, cool in the dawning, steaming up as the sun rose, raining in late afternoon or at night. Ellie had not expected Sydney to carry such moistness, such skin scent and sensuality.

  That morning she pushed open the sash window, lifting against the resistance of weathered wood and time, feeling grateful to have found an old apartment so close to the city centre. It had the semi-dark, compartmentalised feel of Deco buildings – all deep red brick and shadowed nooks, cosy, European, reproducing a foreign shade remembered slant-wise from elsewhere. But the apartment suited well; it fitted the austerity and quiet inwardness of her bookish life. It was not a slab of a high rise, glassy and tough, such as bordered the freeways that curved down to the city and the harbour. Instead there were Moreton Bay figs, jacaranda and eucalypts with shedding bark; there was birdsong – currawongs and honey-eaters – sounding above the buildings, and a scale of life beyond traffic-roar and the pitch of distraction wrought by cities. From here, in the bathroom, from the small window above the basin, Ellie could see the rooftops of her suburb, the TV dishes and antennas. She could see the renovated additions, the solar accessories and the rusted corrugation on the poorer houses. The whole vista of mortgages, families, graffiti in laneways, the desire for a second car, a bigger life, and the meaning of it all. Just visible was the spire of an abandoned church. It pointed to the sky like the aerial to a lost wireless code.

  Ellie would discover today that she will never escape James. He was pressed into her life as they pressed together as fourteen-year-old lovers. Into her memory. Now and for evermore.

  Ellie would recall, with sharp clarity, as if she had prised a fading photograph from a powdery album, dear Miss Morrison, her seventh grade teacher. Although she had not thought of her for years, she will carry her all day, close as a new baby.

  Ellie will be troubled by the newspapers – the war going on in Iraq, the cruel atrocities, the violence that had persisted beyond any war-monger or peacenik reckoning. For all this, her anticipation of James, her childhood recall, the disturbing continuity of tales about war, Ellie was predisposed, this Saturday morning, to joy. She woke each day to the world, not expecting catastrophe. She woke in blue light, to a damp clear morning, and before the sun was a lit fuse in the gap between the curtains she had already found five objects of interest to consider and contemplate.

  After rain during the night everything was bright and cleansed. There were still isolated pools of water, holding the sky in a sharp shine, and a fresh beaded gloss to the trees and the creepers. From next door a frangipani tree, an old twisted monster, sent fragrance into her rooms as a local blessing.

  Ellie had gone out early to buy the newspapers and found herself skipping over puddles and hurrying beneath dripping leaves. At each step she scuffed a fallen blossom. Frangipani stars lay everywhere, and sprinklings of jasmine; the browning petals of crepe myrtle had washed across the road and filled up the gutters. It was the world in a benign organic dissolution. Ellie collected a few of the frangipani blooms to place in a bowl on her table, holding them gently against her chest as she walked, her papers tucked in an awkward roll beneath her arm. Such a simple garnering. Such a fine clear sky. She was empty-headed and happy. She felt the frisky vague euphoria of a new day in a new city.

  In the bathroom Ellie applied kohl to her eyes and pink to her lips. She would be meeting James later on, after all these years, and was self-conscious in anticipation of the severity of his judgement. Her enhanced lips looked tarty and over-emphatic, but suitable for a harbourside lunch and the exhibitionism of Sydney cafés. She would go to Circular Quay early, since she’d not yet seen it, and wander about, lollygagging, as her father would say, so that she could look out when James came, and watch him unobserved. She would lollygag, people-watch, wander the city, finding the pleasure of eddying crowds and
the wayward motions of human traffic, their tidal sweeps at traffic lights, their rhythmic currents of locomotion, doing nothing-in-particular until it was time for their meeting. Six weeks. She had been living in Sydney for six weeks and had not yet seen the Quay. The business of finding her apartment, the settling in; now James’s email had given her permission to take a day to sightsee.

  Ellie made herself coffee and spread the Saturday papers on the table. There were the usual horrors. The war in Iraq, bombings in Afghanistan, the rapacity of large powers and the subordination of the small. There was a photograph on the front page of a distraught woman in a headscarf, bending in torn, rigorous grief over the body of her son. It was generic and familiar. She was a no-name mother who had lost a no-name son, the convenient portrait of another attack, and selected because the contortion of her face, and her anguish, and the plea of her uplifting hands, told in dumbshow what exceeded the journalist’s skill.

  Death’s enormous sickle.

  History would record this time as one of relentless repetition. How many images of grief might the reader of any newspaper see? How many scenes of blasted terrain, or medics rushing headlong with a stretcher on which lay a figure beneath a sheet, too small, too anonymous, and too deathly still? How long would they mean? Ellie thought of the Japanese photographer, Hiroshi Sugimoto, who photographed movies inside the cinema. He left the shutter of the camera open in the dark auditorium and the film exposed for the entire length of the screening. The result was not a wildly complicated superimposition of images, but simple white-out, pure light, a flare of nothing. Too many images, layered together, left only a blank. She imagined Hiroshi Sugimoto gazing at his photographs in a gallery, marvelling at the mystery of what excess might delete.