Five Bells Read online

  From somewhere in the streets beyond a siren sounded. Then another, following, in a high panicked drone. Ellie wished to protect herself from what might overwhelm her mood. She read only the first two paragraphs on Iraq, then sought the national news. The stories were still of the change of government and the ‘honeymoon period’ of inauguration (how strange, she thought, this sexual connotation). But there was optimism about, and the sense of a new beginning. The youngish Prime Minister, his moon-face beaming, looked pleased with himself, like a school prefect dressed in his blazer, receiving a prize. Ellie was always struck by how many male politicians retained a little-boy visage. Or managed to look poignantly dazzled at their own ex cathedra announcements, insisting to the TV spotlights on the innocence of a feckless decision. The microphones looked like listening insects, leaning to suck up the nectar of scandal. Now the government had changed. One might yet be permitted to expect reform; and one might yet be disappointed.

  Ellie extracted the book review supplement of the newspapers. These she would save for later, for a casual perusal of the wordy dimensions of the world, the unremitting, mock-heroic, making-of-sense. She had no money these days to buy new books, but for now there were libraries, which she cherished, and these compact descriptions of other worlds.

  One of the workers in her local library looked like Miss Morrison. Why had she not made the connection before? And both, in weird likeness, resembled the Queen of England, that abnormally stiff face, that taut string of a mealy mouth. Miss Morrison would draw on the blackboard and write fancy words, underlining them with an oversized oak ruler that clacked as it struck. When Ellie recalled her now it was often in a static rearview, the woman of indeterminate age communing with her own messages, turned away, serious-minded, her back to the class. In their small country-town school, with James sitting beside her, the children were tempted by an impulse to mock, but somehow constrained and respectful. Away from school, however, James could be cruel. He was the child – there is always one – able to parody others. For the guilty enjoyment of his classmates he mimicked Miss Morrison’s hunched-over posture, he copied her rather high-pitched voice, he pretended to underline words on an invisible blackboard, turning back to face his classmates with a grimacing smirk.

  Ellie folded the newspapers and drank the last of her coffee. Frangipani scent hung lightly in the room. Another sun-drenched day, the kind that might sell a city. The kind that might signify package-holiday amusements, with volley-ball on a beach, frolicsome children and the shadows of palms quivering over impossibly bright water. Still, Sydney surprised her. Would it always visit her in this way? Would Circular Quay match up to its own publicity? Ellie touched her coloured lips, wondered about her hair, then was annoyed at these traces of vanity she had tried to eliminate.

  As she rose with her cup to the sink Ellie recalled James and Miss Morrison figured intimately together. James had developed a nosebleed in class and Miss Morrison was tilting his head back, her left hand placed on his forehead, her right holding a cloth, soaked red, clenched securely beneath his nose. It was a sort of tableau: the teacher solicitous, commanding, taking control of the child’s body; the boy morosely compliant, embarrassed by his bloody nose and the spectacle of his submission. Miss Morrison had clamped him down, held him there, and his classmates looked on with malicious fascination. Ellie had wanted to say something, or be a nurse, or put her own hands to his face, clammy and loving, but instead she sat in her place watching with the others, silently commiserating.

  James often developed nosebleeds. It was one of those afflictions that undermine the gifted, seeming to make them like everyone else, vulnerable and common. James took to carrying a wad of handkerchiefs and would disappear from class at the very first spot of blood. Ellie had felt a kind of frightened pity; the boy otherwise a class star, an intellectual champion, streaming with blood in some dank, hidden corner of the school, his head upturned, his throat draining with fluid, his mouth tasting the trace of something sour and internal like death. Each time James returned to the classroom he would not meet anyone’s gaze, but resumed his smart-arsed, cocky manner, showing off his learning and wittily denouncing his peers. Miss Morrison found him irritating – Ellie could tell – but retained the distant affection clever children inspire. Once there was a vulgar fleck of blood-spatter across James’s chequered shirt; no amount of bravado erased it, or reinstated his power.

  And now here was Miss Morrison, cradling him, holding his head like a mother. James had the drowsy, abandoned look of a child feeling faint or swooning, without will, falling inward, becoming limp and yielding like a plant. It was a vision that bound them like a fresco, varnished and cracked with age, shining its meaning through time as from beneath the archway of an Italian church. Ellie resisted the word pietà, but it hung around nevertheless, dignifying what was, after all, a very ordinary distress.

  Miss Morrison looked beautiful then, in the way tenderness is beautiful, a kind of indication of the soft collapse into which one might be held. Ellie was surprised to consider her teacher in this way, but found that her childhood was full, in retrospect, of exactly this tenderness, which she missed, and wanted to recall, and had found in the sleepy roll into someone’s arms that precedes a slumberous, post-coital confidence. Her former lover was a gentle man and she dreamt of him still, wanted him still. There was no conclusion in the matter. There was no cessation of desire. True feeling does not conclude; this much she knew.

  James had tracked Ellie down through a mutual friend, who wrote a small lifestyle column for the daily newspaper. Ellie had not seen him since they were fifteen or so and was curious as to why, out of the blue, James now wanted to meet.

  He had been a handsome boy, and tall – another high-school predictor of success – but she had also known the James who had lived half a block away, the single child of an abandoned mother. He was the boy who rode his bicycle alone and seemed to have few friends. She remembers him pedalling up and down the street in the grainy lavender dusk, doing wheelies, raising dirt, disappearing as nightfall grew. The shape of a boy. A lonely figure. Even then she saw a muted torment in his repetitious route, and in the meaningless display of skids over gravel.

  Sometimes she would hear his mother’s voice calling for James; she was bidding him to his dinner, wanting his company, calling in Italian for her son to return to her side. There were times when the calling went on and on. Ellie knew where James hid when he wished not to be discovered, but would never have told; it was part of their pact. In the small space between schoolday’s end and dinner, in which children might recover themselves, might find somewhere beyond the confinement of a desk and mean regulation, James would have returned to their hideout, our hideout, so that when he was not riding the street he was private and self-possessed.

  Adults underestimate the degree of solitude required to counter school-life. Whole populations of schoolchildren crave to be left alone. Everywhere. Millions of them. Just to be left alone. So that they can find in sulky noise or quiet the refuge they have lost.

  Between mockery and mastery, James made his way, and when at the end of tenth grade he won a scholarship to a boys’ school in the city, no one was surprised to see him leave. His mother was proud and heartbroken. Ellie saw her living a contracted life, lingering near the letterbox in her dressing gown at the end of the day. She’d not bothered to dress, nor to separate daytime from nighttime. Her face looked worn to a frazzle and her manner was infirm; her matted hair flew up around her sad, rather doll-like face. She developed a gesture of tying and untying the cord of her dressing gown so that her hands were a flurry of agitation and could not stay still. She spoke to herself in Italian, further marking her foreign state, announcing to everyone that she had returned to the country of her birth and was immured there, alone, tethered elsewhere by words. People gossiped, or despised her, or took pity in mostly blunt and unhelpful ways, taking her hands so that she burst into tears from a human touch, leaving food on the verandah that
she refused to eat. The Country Women’s Association tried to organise her into shopping excursions and social activities. Eventually Welfare had to be told: the woman, Ellie heard, was a danger to herself.

  One day James’s mother was no longer there. Ellie waited, and watched, but she did not return. She stared at the letterbox, as Mrs DeMello had stared, feeling a secret collusion.

  ‘Loony bin’, neighbours said. ‘She was chucked in the loony bin.’

  And Ellie imagined a mute, desperate place, full of people bereft in the ways in which Mrs DeMello was bereft, their faces lined nervously at barred windows, their eyes sick with betrayal.

  Ellie wished she had answered when Mrs DeMello had called for her son in the dusk. She knew by then what it might mean to have a call unanswered and to feel one’s voice not ringing as it should. And to have been part of this woman’s unhappiness, knowing that James had also left her, had been affrighted by what he had disclosed and the intimacy they had developed.

  Although Ellie missed James, she could tell no one about it. There was no summary of the overlap of two young lives, or of what they did, or where they hid. After he left for the posh school James had never written, or been in touch. He was simply gone. Nor did he answer letters or revisit their town. Only when he won a university scholarship did they learn the dimensions of his success and the public achievements of his shining life. Ellie’s parents read the article from the local paper on the phone, but by then Ellie was also living in the city, at another university, and leading another kind of life. She resisted, as much as possible, the effort of imagining him elsewhere.

  In her apartment Ellie looked up from the table. A tall tree outside the window had produced an illusion of swinging light upon the wall. She’d not noticed it before, how for a brief time each day the shadows at a certain angle might project a lightshow effect. Most days she had been working, whether studying in a library, or serving as a waitress in Gallo’s café on King Street, and this fleeting holiday vision gave her pause.

  Outside was seamless sunshine, promising a hot day; in here, swamped by memory, her rooms existed in another light, as if the power of remembering itself had altered the physics of her surroundings. This idea charmed her. This counter-time of James’s return that splashed light in its own theatre.

  Ellie sat looking at the watery radiance of moving shapes. It occurred to her then, irrelevantly, how bloody James was, how in recollection he was often not a school star, the clever kid, the ‘genius’, they once had called him, but one of the walking wounded. And another return: James flustered, his head lowered, his eyes downcast. James covering his ears with his hands as he read, as if holding his head together. James not meeting her gaze. James closing himself in.

  James slept badly in the room at the hostel. The bed was lumpy with the thousands of other bodies that had preceded him, their exertions, their tossing and turning, their own dragnets of haunted dreams, and the room was full of exhausted air and the trace of furtive cigarettes. The small window was stuck open, but the atmosphere was still and stale.

  When, in late darkness, he finally slept, something disturbed his self-enclosure that turned out to be rain, sliding into the room with gentle insistence and a light tapping sound, as if infant fingers were drumming or prying open his sleep. Rising half-blind in the half-light he had fumbled at the window, but he could not dislodge the frame and found himself leaning his face there, in a kind of dizzy spell, neither asleep nor awake, peering down into the black, rainy canyon of George Street. It must have been, he guessed, about 3 a.m. Up the street, just beyond sight, was the sandstone town hall, its façade beer-coloured in a strip of spotlights, and beyond that the shopping block that looked like a nineteenth-century exhibition hall and had a dumpy statue of Queen Victoria squatting at its entrance. On his side of the road, less salubrious, was a line of small stores that marked the beginnings of Chinatown – cafés for noodles and yum cha, Vietnamese bakeries, pawn shops, pubs, more backpacker hostels.

  A bus rumbled along the street with the stray vehicles of a Friday night, but the pedestrians had thinned out, fleeing the rain. There were a few desperate hookers smoking beneath umbrellas and a single druggie, trying to score. One of the women wore heels so high she looked as if she was constantly toppling, correcting her balance, then set to topple once again. This display was contrived to make you want to catch her, James thought, to stand Jesus-like, arms open, as she sexually subsided. That sense of dramatised risk and the anonymity of her body. Oneself a saviour. A car appeared from nowhere and slowed as it approached. James watched the woman leave the shelter of her friend’s umbrella and lean into the car window. There was something about how she leant – from the waist, like a doll – that called forth his pity.

  James felt the rain on his face. It was cool and light. He sensed a camaraderie with others awake at this time, the desperadoes of the city and its working drivers. The stragglers, lost and wandering. The sleepless. The deprived. Country guys like him, maybe, who found all this city shit too much and way too overwhelming. When an ambulance sped past, its siren moaning, James thought it emblematic of big city life: there was always an accident or crisis, there was always somebody bleeding or spilling their guts.

  He kept telling himself he had come to Sydney to speak to Ellie, to save something of his past, to atone and to tell her, but there was a desolation and finality about being here, here-now, in this rainy, woeful darkness where he felt truly himself.

  James must eventually have slept again because at nine he found himself waking. The name Magritte hung on his lips. It flared in his mind, then left. James felt groggy from too many pills and late-night vodkas, unfocused, dull. The day was already hot and the damp of the night was evaporating, and he roused himself because he had to walk down the hallway to piss. It was a queasy visit. The tiles were hospital green and the walls were grubby. He saw spiders beneath the pipes and the stains of other men’s emissions and the morning light that poured though a barred window and should have cheered him up was instead the garish inspiration for an early headache. As he shaved before the mirror above the sink he avoided his own glances. How many men shave thus, not wanting to see themselves? In the lopsided tilt of his head he was hiding from what might be revealed. Loss of faith. Loss of face. Some closing down of what once he might have dreamed or become.

  Back in his room James swallowed a handful of vitamins and analgesics, miming the crazy doctor on television, ceaselessly self-medicating. For a few seconds he considered returning to bed, locking himself in a winding sheet, shutting his eyes against the day, refusing the real-time of the city for a dead-beat retreat. But he rose and moved from the gloomy interior – Ellie, Ellie – watching his feet on the uneven stairs.

  The young man at the reception counter had also had a bad night and looked even more sordidly wrecked than James. He held up a palm, like a Catholic priest, in a silent greeting. Might be gay, James thought. He had the grey-skinned appearance of someone who lived in a capsule in a 1980s film, a sci-fi with drooling aliens and constant threat. Or of someone drowned, drained away, lost in watery depths. The pallor of the man’s face shone sad and unholy. James nodded hello, wishing not to think of priests, or drowning, or B-grade movies, and stepped quickly onto the street, so as to avoid any small talk.

  René Magritte; his favourite painter.

  At fourteen Magritte had gone with his father Leopold to the banks of the river Sambre to identify the body of his mother, Adeline. She had committed suicide by drowning and he stood there, solemnly and silently holding his father’s hand, a dutiful son, a reliable good boy, as they fished her slim body from the chill grey water. It was 1912. It was the end of his boyhood. Leopold had a face full of capillaries and was florid with crying; his knees failed, he released his hold, he crumpled before the corpse like a puppet articulated. But pale young René simply stood and looked. René was the strong one, emotionally composed. Cloth covered his mother’s face in a wet sucking shroud. Her dress had rever
sed as they pulled her from the river feet first, and yet he knew her from the brown shoes on which she had replaced a non-matching buckle and the signet ring on her middle finger that had once been his grandmother’s. When they peeled back the skirt and made her decent, she was grimy with river-silt and pretending to sleep. Her cheeks were sallow, caved in, her eyes were closed, and René felt his heart heave and capsize at the sight. Her face. His mother. Death deep enough to wallow in.

  It was not long after that, the soon-to-be-Surrealist began his first job, working in a wallpaper factory, designing repetitions. It was easy, to repeat. Any loose flourish would appear whole if chained in a repetition. Any single flower became many, any rough abstraction a pattern. There was a solace in blueprinted and easy decoration, the sweep of ink through a silk screen and the moist sheets carried away, the regularity of the copies and their filling up of parlours and bedrooms. He could have gone on like this forever, wallpapering the surface of things, printing the same image again and again.

  Later, when Magritte was an artist in Paris reinventing his own past, someone pointed out that his most disturbing paintings were of figures blinded or covered in cloth, and he knew then – as though responding to an accusation – how he had converted her, how he had made his mother Art, how everything stored away and given art-form was reborn as another repetition.

  James paused in the busy street, looking around, looking lost. Sydney, Saturday morning. January. George Street. Why, after all these years, was he thinking again of Magritte? Why did this recovery of Adeline seem so like his own memory?