The Ninth Satire

T he Ninth S atire Stephen J. W illiam s

This is the typescript of The Ninth Satire, published in 1993 by Pariah Press (Melbourne).

Copyright © Stephen J. Williams, 1980-1993. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of the copyright owner.

Acknowledgement for work previously published, sometimes in a different form, is due to Australian Broadcasting Corporation (A First Hearing), Ash Magazine, Cargo, Fine Line, Imaging AIDS, Meanjin, Nocturnal Submissions, Outrage, Overland, The Perseverance Anthology, Quadrant, and Studio. ‘Big Orchestra’, ‘The Breach’, and ‘The King of Hate’ were first published in A Crowd of Voices.

‘First and Last Words’ was first published in Outrage, March 1989. It consists mainly of excerpts from the journal of a man who died of AIDS in September 1987. They are reproduced here with the kind permission of the journal’s owner. For their support for its publication, I thank ‘Wendy’, ‘Bob’, and Chris Dobney. Thanks to ‘Jim’, whose diary was the original material of ‘Uncle Stranger’, first published in Meanjin.

Thanks, also, to Barrett Reid for his encouragement and help.

And to the many others who will see themselves here.

And to Charles Blackman, for permission to reproduce, on the cover, his painting The Mask 1989 [Blackman, Charles; b. 1928, Australian; oil on canvas; 182 x 121.6 cm; signed: Blackman (u.l.); not dated; Collection: Museum of Modern Art at Heide, The Baillieu Myer Collection of the 1980s].

The Literature Board of the Australia Council provided the author with a writer’s assistance grant during a period when much of this book was written.

Printed by Aristoc Offset.

Williams, Stephen J. 1958—

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T he Ninth S atire poetry, fiction and biography by Stephen J. Williams

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Contents Last Word................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................7 Since Jerusalem...........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................10 Apology....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................16 Mr Thinnegen...............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................17 Thingward ho!................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................19 Description of the Struggle.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................22 Speech Acts in the Park................................................................................................................................................................................................................................24 Dog Day.................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................25 The Things in the Sea.......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................31 The Motions of a Sea..........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................33 Big Orchestra.................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................34 Red Streamer.................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................35 How We Sleep............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................38 In My Watchmaker’s Hands..................................................................................................................................................................................................................39 Idea for a Garden.......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................40 Dimitris is not Dead...........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................41 Domestic Suburban Vignette..............................................................................................................................................................................................................42 Dreaming of Zeppelins...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................44 Ishmael......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................45 Songs or People...........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................47 Body in the Water..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................48 ‘The Mystic Writing-Pad’...........................................................................................................................................................................................................................49 Self-Criticism..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................52 (1983, ‘The Breach’)..............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................53 (13 February 1988)................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................54

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(3 July 1987).....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................55 (5 April 1988).................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................56 (13 March 1989)........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................57 (23 February 1990)................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................58 (1984, ‘The King of Hate’)..........................................................................................................................................................................................................................59 (29 December 1989).........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................60 (18 March 1990)........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................61 (A Prayer, 8 April 1990, Palm Sunday)...................................................................................................................................................................................62 (8 April 1990, excerpt of a letter)..................................................................................................................................................................................................63 (18 December 1990).........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................64 (27 October 1991, Memoir of My Nervous Illness)......................................................................................................................................66 i..............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................67 ii............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................68 iii..........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................69 iv..........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................70 v............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................71 (28 February 1992, Advice to Myself)...................................................................................................................................................................................72 Exposed....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................74 Flowers for the Dead.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................76 The Black King............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................78 A Tall Unmarried House-buyer.......................................................................................................................................................................................................83 Man in Loft.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................84 First and Last Words..........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................86 Uncle Stranger.............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................92 The Faithful...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................102 Rehearsal............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................103 Middle Life Transcribed for ’Cello...........................................................................................................................................................................................104 Manifesto...........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................105 Out of Words.............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................106

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for Jeff Klooger

Oh Yeah • In France A Skinny Man Died Of A Big Disease With A Little Name •

By Chance His Girlfriend Came Across A Needle And Soon She Did The Same • At Home There Are Seventeen-Year-Old Boys • And Their Idea Of Fun Is Being In A Gang Called The Disciples • High On Crack And Totin’ A Machine Gun. Time, Time • Hurricane Annie Ripped The Ceiling Off A Church • And Killed Everyone Inside • U Turn On The Telly And Every Other Story Is Tellin’ U Somebody Died • Sister Killed Her Baby Cuz She Couldn’t Afford 2 Feed It And • We’re Sending People 2 The Moon • In September My Cousin Tried Reefer 4 The Very First Time • Now He’s Doing Horse, It’s June. Times, Times • It’s Silly, No? When A Rocket Ship Explodes And Everybody Still Wants 2 Fly • Some Say That A Man Ain’t Happy Unless A Man Truly Dies • Oh Why. Time, Time • P r i n c e, ‘S i g n

o T h e T i m e s’

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Last Word •This is a book of poetry, biographical fiction, non-fiction, dreams, fiction, portraiture, nonsense and comedy. •In a different way and for different reasons, this book, like the previous one, pays no attention to the interesting notion that writers should have identifiable, stable voices. •The effect is, no doubt, confusing. •Some writers can hide behind a ‘book’. I would not agree this is, in any sense, not a ‘book’. ¶•Much of the prose is, in one way or another, and in varying degrees, not mine, though I either wrote it or am responsible for its re-presentation here. •‘First and Last Words’ and ‘Uncle Stranger’ were, obviously, diaries. •The work of condensation has the tendency to remake texts in the image of a particular reading. •As well, ‘Uncle Stranger’ has been re -written in order to protect the confidentiality of the persons to whom it refers. ¶•Sometimes it has been necessary to tell a lie in order to record a lie. •The relationship between those people who prompted the stories and the stories themselves also varies. •The people were not ‘raw material’, as writers usually understand that term. •I’m sure what I had to work with was always more or less cooked. •Perhaps all stories are, in some way, only stories about stories. ¶•The origins of the poetry are more personal and less clear, being not always entirely mine, yet never like any of the voices I listened to. •Do poems have their writer’s voice hidden in them? — Yes. And, I hope not. •The purpose of a poem is to say what is.

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1 No more be grieved at that which thou hast done: Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud, Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun, And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud ‌ — William Shakespeare, Sonnet 35

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Since Jerusalem “… for those who have died but live again.”

The first thing I want to say is that everything I’m going to write down here is true. Obviously I’m going to lie a little here and there because you can’t tell everything you know about someone unless you’re trying to hurt them and I don’t want to do that. But as far as all the things that matter are concerned I’m going to tell the truth.

The notebook’s first page is a collection of titles. Most of them are crossed out lightly, or struck through; some have been obliterated by several layers of ink. Two of the titles are written in an unusually neat hand. They were the first and last choices. One of these two has been rejected because of its coincidental reference to a novel by Patrick White. Throughout the notebook the titles are repeated above versions of the same story or different parts of the same story. Everything in the notebook is unfinished.

There are two versions of the beginning: the first is a half-hearted claim to write nothing but the truth, and the second, in the middle of the notebook, is an attempt to begin at the beginning. He has decided this second attempt to open the story was too important to take the place it would naturally have in the record of a person’s life, and therefore adds the note, End — explanation?

The story is there, in the notebook, but, as it stands, it is little more than a record of the author’s failure to write it. “Story”, though, doesn’t describe it properly: some parts are like a diary, some actually a diary, some nothing more than notes on conversations. How much of it is true, how much fiction, doesn’t seem to matter.

I’ve been reading bits and pieces of The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. — For years. I have to admit I don’t like Ezra Pound. There are others I don’t like, which is only natural, but with Pound I feel like I should apologise, like it’s a sin. Father, forgive me my sins. It has been years since my last confession, father, and these are my sins: I don’t like Ezra Pound. It’s nothing about the writing. I think it’s something personal. Something to do with the ‘hieratic head’, the arrogance of it. Something about the way his poems are treated like holy relics. But now I’m not so sure, because there’s this ‘Portrait d’une Femme’, and it makes me cry. I slobber over it. It’s not a terribly sad poem — at least, I don’t think it’s supposed to be.

“Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea.” No need to look at the note to understand what it means. My aunt is my family’s sea, beautiful and dangerous. So much depends on her.

Her life stinks and, unlike Job, she hates god for it. There’s no point in thinking that god might not exist—someone has to be responsible. Her bravery in cursing him during thunderstorms frightens friends who happen to be visiting.

All references to religion have been deleted, except a kind of prayer which I will show later.

In the next passage, not really part of the story, there is the reason for the writing.

More than a year ago my aunt left her home and moved into a flat to live by herself. She left her husband and son. Everyone in my family was shocked by this and couldn’t understand it at all. I include myself, of course. I heard about it second hand, from my mother when she visited me one day, hunting for clues. She didn’t tell me the whole story because she didn’t know it all herself. She

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didn’t say, for example, that some people in my family had been saying my aunt was a lesbian.

“That’s the reason she’s done it. It couldn’t be anything else.” All I knew was my own disbelief.

When mum kicked me out of her house because she wanted to get on with her life, I left quite happily because I wanted to get on with mine. Kids run away just because they’re growing up, or because they think they’re growing up, which is the same thing. It’s about independence. A year ago independence was the only reason I could find for my aunt’s flight. I’d forgotten — not even thought, because it had never been necessary for me — it could also be about survival. Women know this other explanation deeply. Men don’t seem able to think it.

After the titles are four photographs, one to a page, pasted to the lined paper with art cement.

The aunt is first. She is cutting a cake (a birthday cake?) and there is a Christmas tree in the background. The uncle is second. He is holding up a glass of beer in the gesture of ‘Skoal!’ and grinning broadly. Grandparents are third. It is a portrait taken with a diffusing lens-filter. A window off to the left of the couple throws light into a dark room. The tan on the face of the sunloving husband and the flowers on the wife’s dress look painted. I am the fourth. My appearance, as a photograph in the notebook, is puzzling: the only other reference to me I can find is the letter “M” underneath the picture. It would have been more appropriate to include a photograph of the cousin, Robby.

Then there are two pages of scribbling. Two addresses, doodles, and a figuring of dates which arrives at the answer “1953?” The best, but still inadequate, version of this year is written like a report; the rest are only notes.

When she was thirteen everyone called her a tomboy. She used to box with a boy who lived down the street where she lived in Richmond. His name was Johnny Famechon and he went on to make a living beating young men to a pulp in the ring. When he was a kid, though, he used to come out second best against my aunt. In the same year, 1953 I think, there was a hot December night and nothing very important was happening. Anyone who was moving was moving slowly. Maybe half the women in the street were sitting out on their patios drinking beer. One of my aunt’s cousins, older than her but not by much, started talking about sex. It was a subject my aunt had not given much thought to. What was said — something crude and, in fact, a lie about my aunt’s mother — doesn’t matter in the long run. I’ve no intention of bringing it to life by repeating it here. It’s more important to tell how I was told of it.

My aunt was trying to remember how she felt. She said very clearly, very directly, “I hated her.”

As she said this I remember seeing this hate as though all the years which separated her present self from that former one were suddenly transparent and irrelevant, and I could see the core of what she was that night her cousin told her the lie. Now I don’t know whether she was referring to her cousin, her mother, or both of them.

That hate lasted eleven years, from the night in December, 1953, to the day she gave birth to her baby. What happened during these eleven years is difficult to explain, and I don’t pretend to understand it at all. She says that this hateful “thing” which had formed inside her was alive, but also silent, like a place where light and sound could enter but not leave, a listening, lizardy thing, coldblooded, not human. She became ill, and refused to carry on conversations even with people she had known for years. There was going to be a place no one else would know about, where she could be alone; and since there was no place in the real world she could make that happen, she created a place inside herself for that purpose. This place could be infinitely large, insatiably hungry.

There are more lies in here than are necessary to protect the people the writing refers to.

That first rule, Write about what you know, is not very helpful tonight. What I know tonight is that I have forgotten a great deal it would be useful to remember. There are only threads of

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conversations and stories left, which I pick up, trying to put them together. So, they’re together.

How many lies will make a pattern visible?

My aunt used to listen to doctors, friends, and family talking to her, asking her what was wrong, and it would seem she wasn’t listening at all. Nothing seemed to get through. That was a mistake. In fact, she heard everything and let everything in. In her secret place she would be listening and speaking all the time, saying things like, “You’re all idiots! You’re never going to get in here!”

Doctors can be idiots, too, of course. “It’s stupid to claim you know something when you don’t”, is her explanation of the work of psychiatrists. She does admit that one of her doctors came close to her.

He gave her paints and clean, white paper to work with. She liked painting, and still does, though she never paints people because she believes there is too much in people which can’t be seen. She paints only landscapes and houses. In Mont Park, the mental hospital, she painted what she saw and used only two of the colours in her set of paints, black and red. The whole surface of the white paper she’d been given would be covered with black, except for a thin, rectangular sliver of white right in the middle. At the end of this white sliver she put a red dot.

It was a cigarette. My aunt was certain that no one “in the whole world” would understand what it meant, but the doctor who’d given her the paints looked at it and said, “Well, there’s some hope for you yet. I’m glad you think there’s still some white to look at. It’s a window, yes?”

Less subtle, not-so-clever psychiatrists had already tried electric shocks to relieve her depression.

The idea is that, if you shoot a certain number of volts through someone’s brain, the poor bugger’s going to feel as though he’s died, first, and then feel like he’s been born again, which gives him a new start in life. It certainly gives him a start. It wasn’t electricity which shocked my aunt out of her private place but the desire for light and the surprise of a real birth.

The notebook, its leaning toward an always incomplete story, seems to skirt the issue of a scandal in the family, providing the motive to write, but surfacing only in phrases delaying its appearance — “until recently … ”.

By 1959 my aunt had already married. I don’t have the foggiest idea how this happened. The details of this part of her life have never interested me very much, but now that I get around to this part they seem important and I’m pissed off that I can’t record it properly. I do know that her husband is a good man and loves her. I know that most of the time they sleep in separate beds. I know that until recently her marriage was the happiest in my whole family. I know there was a baby, my cousin.

After a few years she was still not considered to be really well or, at least, “normal”, and there was a lot of talk about whether she would be able to cope with a baby. For a while into the pregnancy her doctors continued to ask questions, mainly about sex. Neither my aunt nor her husband seemed to be very comfortable with it, but then you could say that about a lot of people, including most of the doctors, I suppose. She got fat. It was the first time in her life she looked like her bulging, robust sisters, and she thought it was wonderful. It was wonderful being fat; she wasn’t yet sure about the baby. If you could see her grand, muscular son now when he stands beside his tiny mother you’d probably laugh at the miracle of it. At some point she discovered the baby was protecting her. The doctors stopped asking questions. Occasionally she heard people say things like “It could go either way”, which she supposed was a comment on her mental state. She got fatter. She became two people. And then one afternoon, after complaining to the nurses of the women’s hospital for more than an hour, her son’s leg “popped out.”

I think it was a leg but it might have been his arm. She remembers travelling in an elevator with one or other of the baby’s limbs sticking out from between her legs and a nurse saying “You’re not being very helpful” as she wheeled my aunt’s bed into the delivery room.

After that there was nothing real, only a dream.

There are two dreams in the notebook: one recording a birth and the other a death.

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Over the next few days the same dream kept coming back. She was being beaten cruelly by people who wanted to get inside her, and the baby wasn’t safe. Every night she had to fight these people off until her baby emerged with bruises on its face. The staff at the hospital and all the visitors recited a prepared speech when my aunt asked them why she could not see her baby.

“Everything is all right. You must rest a few more days.” Robby did have bruises on his head, caused by the large clamp which had been used to assist his appearance in the world.

He has tried to assess Ezra Pound’s poem against his aunt’s life. There are lines in the poem which made him think of her, but others apparently did not sit comfortably with his ideas about her. Two pages of the notebook are devoted to this strange assessment, most of it unintelligible, referring to things and events not appearing elsewhere.

“Oddments of all things” Pillow — Cigarettes — Huge jigsaw puzzle — Watches — Body — Toasters — Radios — Matches “Fact that leads nowhere” Doctors “No! there is nothing! In the whole world and all, nothing that’s quite yr own.”

Anyone? What rubbish!

These are the only three parts of the poem clearly connected with parts of the notebook text.

It’s now about thirty years since the first time my aunt died. I’ve promised her the next time she dies, which will probably be from lung cancer at the rate she smokes, I will arrange for her favourite pillow, cigarettes and a box of matches to be buried with her. She says these are the only things she couldn’t bear to live without — or die without, depending on how you look at it.

After Robby was born my aunt started pulling things apart to find out what was wrong with them. Wherever she’s lived she’s become famous (locally) for being able to pull broken things apart and put them back together again fixed. Neighbours bring toasters, radios, tape-recorders, hairdryers and children’s toys and puzzles for my aunt to work her magic. This is the way my aunt set about trying to repair the world and understand it, one thing at a time. Watches and clocks are her speciality.

One afternoon I went to visit her there were tiny pieces of metal scattered in what might have been an orderly fashion all over the kitchen table. She asked me whether I thought time was inside or outside a clock and I had to admit I didn’t have the faintest idea; so we just had another cup of tea while she put the clock back together again.

The meaning of the word ‘Body’ in the group “Oddments of all things” is not clear. The implication may be that the aunt’s peculiar mechanical abilities, her desire to “pull things apart”, were a substitute for a deeper interest in the workings of human bodies.

How can only three people be afflicted with so many unpronounceable names? ‘Von Recklinghausen.’ ‘Dupuytren.’ And so on. I imagine there are many like her, who live among the rest of us without ever telling us their special knowledge because they do not understand themselves it is something worth knowing. I imagine they have special powers given to them by their experience.

And I imagine their numbers are growing.

I wish I were one of those know all authors who write stories where everything just falls into place, who make their characters do things like it was obvious what was going to happen all along.

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In all the years I have known him I can only remember my uncle saying about a dozen things to me. Sometimes a few will come in combination: “Hi, how are you?” “It’s been a long time.” “What have you been doing?” I have a photo of him, glass of beer in his left hand and his mouth stretched to form an astonishing smile. It is really a picture of the mouth.

And then, the same thing over again …

Another Christmas has been accomplished. My aunt, her husband and son were absent this year.

If they had said nothing, which would not be unusual, the rest of the family could easily have thought the three of them were staging a protest. It was not a protest. They went to meet Ken’s father halfway between the present and the past.

My aunt’s family seems to spend a lot of time not speaking. That’s not quite right: they speak, but do not tell. In all the years I have known him, before the last year, I can remember Ken saying only about a dozen things to me. Sometimes a few would come in combination: “Hi, how are you?”

“It’s been a long time”, and, “What have you been doing?” I have a photo of him, glass of beer in his left hand, and his mouth stretched to form an astonishing smile. It is really a picture of a mouth.

The mouth that doesn’t talk, at least not to me. It’s no less a friendly mouth just because few words come out of it.

I called her today to find out what had been going on. She didn’t come to Christmas lunch this year because she, Ken and Robby went up to the mountains to see Ken’s father. It’s been forty-four years. Father and son sat on the grass up there for hours, crying and talking, talking and crying, while the others, eating cold chicken, watched from a distance. My aunt couldn’t hear what was going on because her hearing aid was pointing into the wind. All she got was a roaring hiss. On the phone she kept calling the whole thing “pathetic” — “It was so sad, pathetic.”

He is relieved, at last, of the burden of having no past. Now, he looks there, seeing something solid, a grey face, old, not very impressive as far as faces go — but a face, life in its contours, a real death and loss in its future, something to know, touch, and kiss, or to hate and to blame. With this relief there will also be change. That must happen.

But, as for me, I am unchanged. The photographs prove it. I stare into the lens, my lips closed tight, not in the pose of a man who will not tell, but like one who has nothing to say. The one photograph which is most telling shows me clothed in black, in a solidly dark room. A light to one side of my face half lights me, and appears to freeze me in a world without its own features. The other half is completely black, and this is the place where I dream, and where, I suppose, my aunt lived. Who knows if there is any change or life there, or whether it is just a slow accumulation of junk and memory, where we might, if we were brave enough, go to find all our other selves, and write.

O God, who made us, who knows us, who knows our future Who causes all our pain, and leaves us bewildered and helpless, And free to die, and without hope, I know you are the God Who is not God, who is our unfeeling, unthinking emptiness — I know you are the God my aunt married, the dull, cold-blooded, Blue-blooded lizard, and the dark, sticky resin where memory Is planted, and where our feet stick. I know that I must fear You As I fear the grave, and fear madness, because that is what you are.

I know that I must have you in my house and in everything I do Because you are the living God who is dead in everyone, Who sleeps and dreams with us, who arrives at breakfast Stoney-faced, formal, in a black suit, like forgetting, and Whose cruel, unbroken years of silence waits to break us.

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Last night I dreamt I had fallen to the ground. I could see faces coming toward me, the familiar faces of the people I work with coming toward me. Arms reach out to touch me. Just at this moment I realise I am about to die. There is nothing these people can do to help. Someone calls for an ambulance. Since there is nothing I can do I watch my self dissolve; the faces looking at me disappear as I might seem to be disappearing to them. Then I am in a deep darkness. There is no sound and I can feel nothing. My mind is alive inside a black box. At this point — it has only taken a few seconds — I understand I have dreamt my own death, or I have actually died and that I understand nothing. What do I do now?

“What is there left for me to do? My first death left me with a choice I could not avoid, to live forever in that black cave I made, with my own voice, or.... I remember the moment Robby was born, as though he were punching his way free of the place where he had been confined with me. I knew then that I was not alone, and never had been. This small thing had been with me all along, even from before I was married. He had been with me for as long as I have been here. I emerged, too, along with my boy, and found the other place outside not much worth living in. Every now and then I discover some thing, or a small area to live in, flooded with light, things or places where nothing is hidden from anyone who cares to look. — A clock or a watch, for example, inside which nothing can be secret, and where, because of that, there can be no real darkness or misunderstanding. The closed box of a jigsaw puzzle, too, is a place always containing some perfect picture; it only needs opening and patience. On the other hand, people are completely mysterious, and hopelessly dark. It is impossible to paint them. They are all odd numbers. My husband, whom I love, I have lived with all these years and I still do not understand him. I cannot explain the bad time we went through. The bruises, the drink, everything obvious about that time.... I know I have not been the easiest person to get along with. He saved me once. I think it must have been he who saved me. At some point I can no longer remember I must have willingly come out of my madness and loved him. This must be true. I am here, after all. And we have survived all this. We are no longer alone together, but together. Something deeper has saved us all, and continues to save us. When I was young, very young, my parents already knew I was to be the odd one out, and odd even among all the odd in the world. I was the last of four sisters. My father was going to the War, taking a ship to the Middle East. It would be a struggle with four kids at home. The wartime censors pretended to keep secret where the men had gone. I still have a letter which dad sent home that has a square in the top right hand corner neatly removed. But there is also a yellow-brown postcard with the word Jerusalem boldly printed at the bottom. On the docks, before he left, mum told me later, was where I was conceived, in the last ten minutes before all those years of silence. I can’t imagine where they found a quiet place to make me, or if they were worried about that. It was a quick job, but one well done, mum says. They never loved each other more than in that moment just before leaving, which was a kind of death, and never hoped more for the life that was promised after death. That is the reason I am here, and the meaning of everything that has happened to me....”

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Apology Today I sat with coffee and newspaper through the lunch hour trying to catch up with the whole world’s tragedy.

Over the weekend was the calmest, coldest Sunday for lunatics with guns, and there are six dead.

Monday all the wounded, the heroes, the neighbours, the journalists, the dogs and cats, have interviewed each other.

But today I was not living in a real world and I must apologise for this.

For this one hour, when I was not working and distracted, with time to think how life is, I remembered Figaro and Susanna, Cherubino’s love songs, and hummed Mozart, hummed through blood and black banners which came off on my hands.

Last night one fine lover pushed pain aside and held me still — the best duet, the friendliest, and quietest.

So, I’m sorry, today the world was not in the least bit tragic, not even a little sad.

I could not cry for any pain.

Happiness has hardened me against all sorrow.

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Mr Thinnegen Who once was thin And then was fat And now is Mr Thinnegen, Harangued by news-hounds At his door, Meringued by brats at Pleasure grounds, Now is asked With almost awe, “Oh, tell us, sir, your greatest feat, This fat to airy thinness beat …

Was it something cancerous?

Have devils come to dance with us?

Or was it just an act of will Which disappeared your grocery bill?”

Though constantly in quite deep thought On questions about Is and Ought , And often neverendingly distressed For creases that are not quite pressed, The asking makes him gird his loins And wonder how its clauses joined.

“Oh, well, you see, I’m not as big As I have been Since all things that Are very fat Are only fat When they’re like that.”

Perverse and strange, but palpable, The reason seems quite wonderful, And all who were impressed by that Seek his views on other facts.

“Oh, tell us, sir, how has it been We all eat strawberries red, not green?”

Or, “When will those who know have told us Who’s to blame and on whose shoulders

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Rests the weight of all the world? And, Does he wear his shirt-sleeves curled?”

Throwing off the answers quickly, Growing thin with each more sickly, He answers questions everywhen And how or where he comes on them.

He says: “I am he who once was fat, Who knew the truth of every fact.

I am he who now is thin, Who knows the waste of questioning.

And I am he who’s at his end To end all Ends, where questions Have no fat to spend, where bodies Made of skin and bone Lie silent in the sick folks’ home, And all that’s lovely, wise, and true, Sips tea and wastes the afternoons.”

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Thingward ho!

Humour is not a mood but a way of looking at the world.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

You admire and envy, don’t you, those people who can wear any crumpled, disorganised, unplanned mess, and still manage to appear attractive?

You are at a party, say, and two male figures, in unpressed, unmatching formal attire, Bollé sunglasses and designer stubble, let themselves in. It is not clear they have been invited, since no one appears to know their names, but they add to the still small crowd that touch of studied desuetude and are allowed to stay, for decorative purposes.

Or perhaps it is a club or bar …

Little constellations of self-proclaiming stars gather in every nook and corner, competing for the attention of any earthling with a telescope. There are a few dresses sewn together with things sparkling at the blue end of the spectrum; a few others announcing their social awareness with autumnal and earth-motherly oranges and browns. (I am referring mainly, of course, to places reserved, by unspoken agreement and the certainty of embarrassment, for people over thirty, since, being too ugly, too old, and too well-heeled, I would not be welcome anywhere else.)

Go any Friday or Saturday night to the streets of any major city and see how sartorial decisions follow occupation or preoccupation.

Young women in creations with fluffy shoulders and considerable padding can be seen accepting invitations to study at the School of Hard Cash. They are not prostitutes. Like many young women these days they have been confused by feminism. If one, by chance, happens to sit at your table in a café, obviously because there is nowhere else to sit, and you get to talking, you might eventually ask what it is she looks for in a relationship. She will begin by telling you she wants someone to support her, rich, tall, strong, handsome, as well as sensitive — not a ‘yobbo’ — and end by saying she would like to have a career. You might think, as I did, of objecting to this contradictory selfishness; but at least Simone and Germaine have taught her one good thing.

Recent survivors of Grammar School, now, perhaps, settled into a job somewhere close to the stock market, declare their aspirations to achieve the karma of serious money in tuxedos with satinised lapels.

During the day these same new recruits can be seen dressing down in Country Road and Sportscraft, or up, if they are regular readers of Arena, in something that convincingly imitates Jean Paul Gaultier (when at work, minus the designedly torn jeans) or Hugo Boss. The shoes will have been bought (that is to say, in the future perfect, on credit) at a shop frequented by people with less important things to worry about than money.

They need a face and body to go with all this, of course, because without those the effect is rather like cooking porridge up as soufflé. Though having both the face and body which make Gaultier look at home, there is no need to wear him for the purpose of attraction.

The new recruits know it is not at all fashionable to be too fastidious. For $300 anyone can get an adequately tasteful double-breasted suit with more buttons than NASA; and if you do this you

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had better have plans to live on the moon. Seriously and ambitiously fashionable people know the immoderate effort and expense which must be endured to achieve the effect of relaxation. …And that is the nub of the modern fashion problem, the veritable crotch of sartorial philosophy. For the sufficiently well-to-do, a shirt, jacket, pair of pants, shoes, and a few accessories, visible and invisible, are asked to carry the weight of a terrible cultural and personal problem — to be visual proof that the wearer is, in just the right degree, ‘thingwardly aspirational’, but also, down deep, where it really counts, a spiritually and psychologically balanced ordinary guy. Clothes do not make the man: they turn man into art.

An artfully clothed body is popular culture’s version of a mystery novel with the last page torn out. So long as the body keeps its mouth shut, and has no distinguishing marks, the dénouement of its promised satisfactions can be delayed while the reading goes on. Perfect fashion imagines undressing and, when it is lucky, or irresistible, carries its plot with it into the bedroom.

The thing is to keep the mouth shut, if it is likely that what is going to come out of it does not precisely match, or exactly compensate for, the artifice of one’s clothes. There can be no reason, surely, for the expense of even an attainably cost-moderate Country Road image if the shortest conversation convincingly demonstrates the model is in a state of permanent emotional anaesthesia.

If you have created the impression of being management material you must not natter like an intellectual twinkie. To be an unemployed Shakespearian actor with matching wardrobe is a socially acceptable misfortune, but you must not talk about it endlessly. Dressing for sex is, by definition, attractive. Verbal bonking is not.

So, beyond all the things which hang on the surface, much deeper and more important, there is the ultimate fashion accessory, which must be tailored and worn most carefully. — Not art-print boxers. I am thinking of speech, the sound a body should make a short while after thinking, the physiological antonym of wind.

You cannot imagine how pleased I am to make this discovery. It is only a personal discovery, though. There is nothing here I can patent or bottle. It is true that I am ugly; no one has been cruel enough, yet, to tell me this outright, but facts of this sort are known inwardly and should be admitted. Also true is I can, with some concentration and planning, turn out a phrase to make Arctic hearts melt, delivering it with conviction.

The more expensive fabrics of chatter are not necessary to achieve good effects and, in fact, these days, they can be a hindrance. In the fashions of speaking, as in everything else, quality and originality are important. (A little cribbing is OK, to gain momentum, but steal from the best.)

If you are, like me, one of the unfortunate multitudes for whom wit and charm must compensate for a paucity of attractiveness, you will be pleased to discover, if you haven’t already, that skill in their fashions can be learned, and memorising a few, simple rules of thumb will set you along the right path. Practice and more practice will enable you to play any part, to be, at a moment’s notice, the common bird admiring peacocks and the one they all want to take home with them, or Oscar making yet another American debut.

Keep these points in mind as you set out to develop your verbal wardrobe …

As with suits, so with words: you will be assessed by clarity of cut and shape of line. The speakers at the cutting edge of verbal fashion are always cutting out when too many others have cut themselves in.

Stream of consciousness is the Hawaiian shirt of conversational arts. Make sure your partner has one packed before you don yours.

Satire is proper and fair only among people capable of comprehending it, otherwise you’d might as well be wearing art-print boxers.

Sarcasm is verbal pugilism: it is best to let other people do it, while you take bets.

It is important to avoid clichés and any terms you have learned from newspapers, television, or in the workplace. For example, at very boring parties someone is bound to start talking about the

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economy and they will use words like ‘trickle-down effect.’ This is really the most insulting concept in economics. To most people it sounds rather like being pissed on from a great height.

Avoid truth and morality at almost all costs. These are the two most destructive forces in human relations. Besides which, they are a little like reigning monarchs: no one planning to have a really good time ever invites them to parties.

Self-deprecation is in most cases a more effective strategy of endearment than egotism, but you must try not to be too convincing.

Prepare and memorise about half a dozen casual and witty remarks which can be easily transposed for use in different situations and among people of different political (and even sexual) persuasions. For example, in the wealthier suburbs of our major cities, it is quite proper to begin a conversation with a remark that, “The New Right’s idea of entertainment is sneering at breadlines”, but if you have any ideas of laying your pre-eminently fashionable interlocutors it may be necessary to add, “— The Government’s idea of entertainment is making them.” Don’t be embarrassed about wanting to bet both ways: in the bedroom everyone pays lip service to Glasnost.

And as you reach for your Nautilus Vocab Expander, remember that it is only fashionable to be blonde by will if you have the audacity to show the roots. Words are the clothes, but the way you wear them on the tongue will show you either as a work of art or a bread pudding.

Then it is only necessary to colour co-ordinate mouth with wardrobe. In many cases this is easy.

Dressing in Country Road or Sportscraft you only need murmur nostalgically about life on the farm and express vague alarm at any harsh turn in the conversation. In Gaultier you are expected to be more aggressive and darkly witty, and the effect of such clothes is completely lost without some sullen and misanthropic complaint about the complexities of life. Wearing Yves St Laurent is an overture to talk which is mostly serious and always sensitive.

Matching inward and outward appearances, word with deed, mouth with wardrobe, you are fit for any conquest and thingward ho! But one more thing …

If you are ever cornered and asked to explain exactly what it was you meant by what you said, and suspect yourself of saying nothing and meaning less, remember Dr Seuss — “I meant what I said, and I said what I meant. My clothes say a mouthful, one hundred per cent!”

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Description of the Struggle It is true the movements can sometimes go according to a formula and this is when they are least satisfying. In their defence, though, remember how the mind works when it is alone, grinding from scene to scene. Touch me there. And now here. Then there. Tick. Tick. It is necessary, somehow, to act as though the other were present in your dream and also dreaming. You are neither completely free nor in any way constrained. Finding one who is imprisoned there is, because of that, all the more terrifying. That “one” — of which there are many forms and faces — does not see the real features of the face or form with which it is confronted, but remodels them in the image of the dream before the action began. The whole procedure is rigid and precise — it could be said ‘scientific’, ‘experimental’, ‘repeatable’ — and cannot be repeated exactly, even once, without risking boredom. Many men and women are willing to take this risk. A small variation is introduced into the action. It may not be a variation of action exactly, but a variation of the attitude with which the action is performed. I do this now, imagining that so-and-so is doing such-and-such. Does that feel better? The life of the dream and the life of the action play at endless comparison and assessment — afterwards, that is. It is destructive to bring the force of memory into the play of your movements. To be present, engaged and unselfconscious is important, and almost impossible.

Desire and love compete with each other. I want it this way, and that, then this. — Or — It is this way, and that, then this. You cannot take out wanting altogether, hoping to be left with a pure action. The wish guides you toward pleasure; without desire you have no identity, your ‘I’ disappears and falls out of your body as you say … am nothing. This is the struggle and the essence of struggle. What either one wants, at different times, is to be free of this struggle, to find the moment, several moments strung together, when the struggle disappears and ease and freedom take its place.

An ‘I’ announces itself in a shout, not at the end of the action but at the beginning, where it is least expected and most clear. Then, it must be said, the sense of struggle does not leave either one entirely — for without it there is no reason to proceed — but is suppressed and becomes the platform of a noisy, messy construction. Both of them talk endlessly. A rule is invented which can be more or less easily broken and replaced by another rule. Thousands of small objects and motions pile up one on top of the other. The hand goes here. “Balance it just there. It is going to fall!” The whole, stupid structure can fall in a heap of laughter and the ‘I’ must announce itself in a shout again for the construction to continue. The play proceeds in waves and froth, swelling and crashing, one disaster and joke after another, crude, violent, farcical. (The one thing it is not — when it is itself, and what it should be — is silent. Silence takes the action, by force, to a place entirely enclosed by the desire of one or other of the participants and where movement is confined by studied schedules and policies. When the struggle is silent it takes the form of the simple wish to shout, to announce the presence of meaning. — But it is precisely this sound which is forgotten by rigid desire, alone with itself in a noiseless oblivion.) (There are also modulations, musical, recuperative and quiet, in which the struggle allows a different kind of silence. It is easy to become lost. As an example, I refer you to the Aria (Cantilena) from Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5 1 by Villa-Lobos, where, from the beginning, voice and strings work in contrary motion but give confidence to each other, and each learns the other’s part. Voice and strings have the opportunity to speak a long melodic sentence, a 1 One of nine Bachianas Brasileiras, in which Heitor Villa-Lobos combines the ambience of Bach with Brasilian themes. Every movement of each Bachianas has two titles, one Baroque and one Brazilian. Originally scored for orchestra of cellos and soprano voice, there is also an arrangement, by Villa-Lobos himself, for voice and guitar.

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sentence without words — ah — endlessly wandering and climbing and soothing. In the middle, when the music appears to have stopped, exhausted, and for a moment does, in fact, stop, both parts then discover the same text — a series of difficult, straining notes, repeated and sustained, slowly descending and then ascending — in which speaking is agony. Near the end the contrary motion of voice and strings reappears, the music expressing only the desire for release by asking the voice to sing with its mouth closed — by humming — mmmm… ) So much energy is expended in the struggle, in the falls and repetitions that are its progress, that the mind becomes drunk with chemicals released into its blood, and it is because they are drunk that each one has no fear to die.

They do not know whether the struggle will fail and they will die or succeed and they will die.

Knowing is the first thing to die and they are both stupid with love and desire. (…until the very end where both motions play the same, new part. The singer takes a breath before the last note and, with the teeth still closed, forces air into the head on such a note as makes the skull resonate, like a finger on the wet rim of a glass, and “ravishes human sense.” )

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Speech Acts in the Park (with some words by Samuel M. Johnson)

Two lovers sat on a park bench, their bodies touching, holding hands. Theirs was not a profound love. It was an ordinary love, love of the ordinary kind, long-established, familiar, everyday and unexceptional, uninteresting and commonplace. It was love in an average situation, in an average amount and to an average degree. And it was not difficult, or against insurmountable odds, or against the wishes of their parents, and they were neither too young nor too old. It was just love.

And they sat on the park bench, their bodies touching each other, holding hands. They were in a state of strong, but not unusual, emotional and sexual attraction to each other. She was wearing a dress, which is something women still do. He was wearing trousers and a shirt, which is also not very unusual. There was silence between them. This silence was just the silence of lovers not talking, and it indicated nothing. Finally, she spoke. “Do you love me?” she asked. “You know I love you, darling”, he replied. “I love you more than tongue can tell. You are the light of my life, my sun, moon and stars. You are my everything. Without you I have no reason for being.” The story of love is being re-told. It is a familiar story, a story that is very old and very ordinary. It is the old and ordinary story of love. Two lovers sat on a park bench, their bodies touching, holding hands. The purpose of the story is to banish disturbing thoughts, to set at rest our troubled minds and to put at ease our ruffled spirits. That is the purpose of the story of love. Two lovers sat on a park bench, their bodies touching, holding hands. They had strong but not in any way abnormal, atypical or bizarre feelings for each other. Moderate feelings and emotions were arranged alphabetically in their hearts.

Affection. Attachment. Fondness. Friendship. Liking. Regard. Tenderness. Warmth. Once more she spoke. “How much do you love me, John?” “Count the stars in the sky”, he answered. “Measure the waters of the ocean with a teaspoon. Number the grains of sand on the sea shore. Impossible, you say. There will always be a cliché in my heart for you.” The old and ordinary story of love is being re-told. It fills the hollow, muscular organ enclosed in the cavity of the pericardium with alphabetically arranged feelings and clichés. Its purpose is to banish disturbing thoughts. It is what we want. It is what we need. It is the old story of love. Again there was silence as the two lovers sat on a park bench, and this silence was just the absence of clichés in the old story of love. It was just the silence of not talking, of lovers keeping their mouths shut and not talking. Once more her voice was heard. “Kiss me”, she implored. Leaning over, he pressed his lips warmly to hers. It is the old, old story of love and the importance of oral hygiene. And again there was silence as the two lovers sat on the park bench, and it was just the silence of lovers not talking and it indicated nothing. They kissed each other. The purpose of kissing is to banish clichés. That is what we want. That is what we need.

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Dog Day “Do you have to wrap that stuff in so much paper?” one of the brothers said.

“If you want to drink from broken glasses, no”, answered a woman’s voice from the kitchen.

“Hey, when are we going to start putting the stuff in the truck? It’s ten already.”

“Soon. Soon. As soon as the bows are on the boxes.”

“Bows?”

“Yeh, I think so.”

Jocey walked into the room with a stack of plates in her hands. “I don’t care. Take them all now and we’ll see what happens. Why you had to move the furniture first I’ll never know. Sitting on the floor for two days, it’s been painful.”

“I asked you what should go first last week and you didn’t have any suggestions. Just like a woman.”

“Oh, how’s that?”

“O, woman, so womanly. You can never — ” “You’re only like this because your brother’s here.”

“Now, now. Leave me out of this, please.”

“Yeh, go on. Leave him out of it!”

The brother at the door squatted, bending his knees around the width of one of the boxes and prising his fingers between it and the carpet. It turned out to be the heaviest of the boxes, the one with A to Q of the New World Encyclopaedia in it. The elder brother pushed down the flaps of the box containing plates and picked it up. When he was half-way down the driveway of the house the other man was just then opening the back of the truck.

It looked too large. Though the floor space would be barely sufficient for what had to be put in it, the ceiling was fifteen feet high. It would be mostly empty when they had finished.

“God, she’s so fussy.”

“Can’t be helped. Joan’s like that, too.”

“They’re all the same. Sometimes I wonder why I did it.”

“What?”

“Got married, of course, you twit.”

“It’s not so bad.”

“My dog’s more friendly.”

“Oh, come on … ” “Really!”

“I like her. She’s always been nice to me.”

“I noticed.”

“What does that mean?”

“I notice how nice she is when you’re around.”

“She was like that before.”

“Before marriage everything is nice … Your dog’s been making a hell of a racket.”

“Had strangers around?”

“Nup.” “We’ve trained our dog. He shouldn’t bark at nothing.”

“It’s both of them. Noisy when they’re together.”

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“Let one out in the front for a while then.”

“OK.” He slid the box containing plates down to the back of the truck and then jumped down to the road. “Drive this thing up closer to the house will you? And I’ll get the gate open.”

Tom started up the truck and manoeuvred it backwards along the driveway, and Mike released the Dobermann into the front garden.

“Have to travel to get to see you now.”

“It’s not that far.”

“Still, it won’t be the same.”

“Don’t get sentimental about it.”

“I’m not. It’s just that it’s really going to be the first time we’ve lived even in different suburbs.

It’s strange.”

“It’s not strange. It’s normal. Stop being queer.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“That’s OK. Any time.”

“Jocey, I really don’t understand why you’re moving. I mean, it doesn’t seem to have anything going for it. It’s further from Mike’s work. The house is smaller. There’s nothing wrong with this place. I can’t see anything wrong with it. There isn’t, is there? Is it haunted, or something?” Jocey was looking out the kitchen window with an expression that was a little cold, a little aloof, as though there were a performance in the garden, one too obviously intended to inspire pathos. “Oh! The place is haunted!”

“No. Not with ghosts, anyway.”

“With what, then?”

“Who knows? With Mike and me, I suppose. I was just thinking about the people who are going to live here after us. I can’t imagine anyone living here after us, after Mike and me. Not living.

Screaming, I can imagine. Or dying. Or murdering. But I can’t imagine anyone putting together something like a life in this place, in this particular house, in that garden.”

“You are in a bad way.”

“I’m in a great way. It’s a bad marriage I’m in. You know, it’s really funny, I like murder mysteries …”

“Yes. You like murder mysteries.”

“I can sit all evening at that bench with one of them, a different one each night. Mum says they’re trash; ‘escapist’ she calls it. But they’re not, because I set them all here. This place is full of suspects.

Mike’s half of them and I’m the rest.”

“I think I know what you mean, but … ” “We don’t like each other any more.”

“That’s terrible.”

“I’m not really sure that it is. Not terrible for me, anyway. After all, Mike is treating me the way he treats everyone. That’s fair, I think.” Jocey wrapped cutlery and kitchen utensils into tea-towels.

Joan stacked arm-fulls of linen she was moving from a hallway cabinet. “I haven’t answered your question, have I?” “I don’t know.”

“I like it here. We’re leaving because we like it here.”

“I’m going to make a cup of tea. Want one?”

“Yes, thanks.”

“Doesn’t sound like a very good reason.”

“With any luck we’ll have destroyed everything before we have any children. Then make a clean break.”

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“You’ve talked about that?!”

“Hardly.” The electric kettle began to rumble. Joan looked at it, thinking for a moment it might say something she could understand. She searched the benches for milk and sugar. “Milk’s in the fridge.”

“Tea?” “Oh, I don’t know. It’s a blue thing. Try in that box over there.”

“Blue? Here it is.”

“It should be blue, of course. Tea’s a blue drink. And gin, but I’m too young for that.”

“Have you talked about that?”

“Mike prefers non-verbal communication. Grimaces. Shrugs. Silence. Grabbing hold of me like a piece of furniture to be moved when I’m in the way. Maybe we shouldn’t have married so young.

There was no need to.”

“Milk?”

“Yes, thanks.”

“What are you going to do?”

Tom’s great Dogue de Bordeaux stepped up onto the back porch and looked through the kitchen window at the women talking. The wrinkles between its eyes and a mouth that hung down at the sides of the face made the animal look always perplexed. Taller than the Dobermann and more muscular, this dog, nevertheless, seemed to Jocey more lovable and more human. “Is there sugar in this?”

“No, sorry. Here it is.”

“What am I going to do?” Jocey’s head swayed a little side to side, like an unbalanced gyroscope, unable to find an answer. “What am I going to do?” She looked out through the window again. The dog was still watching her, as though he, too, were waiting for an answer to appear on her lips. “You know I appreciate having you to talk to, Joan. We’re like sisters. It’s us against them, I think. The women against the men. They’ll kill us if we don’t stick together.”

“All of them?”

“Mike and Tom.” “Oh, no, Jocey, that’s not right. Tom wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

“You don’t think they’re alike, then, that they don’t stick together?”

Joan felt a knot forming in Jocey’s words, one she feared she would not be able to untie, and it made her angry. The brothers were not at all alike, but Joan wanted to give some explanation.

“They’re brothers.”

Jocey stirred her tea then sipped it quietly. “The dog is watching us”, she said, as it turned its hindquarters to her. The head started its dizzy, rolling movement again. Joan thought she might cry.

Tom had moved quietly into the kitchen doorway and watched the women sitting in the sun beside the window.

“I must’ve married the wrong one, then.”

“You and Mike finished, are you?”

“No. Just come in to see what’s happening.”

“We’re having a cup of tea. Want some?”

“No, thanks.” Jocey was taking no notice of them. Tom mouthed a soundless word and tilted his head, signalling Joan should follow him out.

“I’m going to see how they’re getting along. Back in a minute.”

Tom looked back from the front door into the living room to see that Jocey was not following them. “What did you say to make her like that?”

“Nothing!”

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“If Mike had heard that he’d have killed me. It couldn’t be nothing.”

“I asked why they were moving.”

“That’s all?”

“Aren’t you curious?”

“No. Jesus!” Tom exclaimed in whispers. “Mike already thinks his wife likes me more than him.

Don’t make it worse, please.”

“She does!”

Mike stopped for a moment near the truck and looked at his brother standing in the front door of the house. The Dobermann ran across the lawn from the street with a ball in its mouth. “Good boy!” Joan looked over Tom’s shoulder at the dog sitting at Mike’s feet. “She does what?!” He threw the ball away again and walked past the two at the door to pick up another box. “What does she do?”

“Oh, nothing.”

“Who are we talking about?”

“A neighbour of ours.”

“Oh.” Tom followed him into the living room, leaving Joan at the door to stare into the dog’s black, almond eyes. She walked to the back of the truck. “It’s going to be empty!”

“Might’ve done better with a ute.”

“I want to get it over in one.”

“Whose dog is this?”

“Oh, that’s the photo I gave Mike when he said he wanted a dog. You’ve still got it! Framed it and all!”

“Nice looking dog, that.”

“You think so?” Joan asked. “I think they’re a bit ugly.”

Mike stopped to stare into Joan’s face, waiting for her to look up and notice his attention. When she did, he said, “ — Just like women.”

“I’m sorry you couldn’t show it, Mike.”

“Not your fault. Nobody’s really.”

“It was a terrific looking pup. Still looks fine.” Tom attempted conciliation. Mike’s dog had developed an hereditary fault, its hocks crowing visibly. He’d been sold a dud, but one he liked, nevertheless, perhaps more because it was now useless for showing.

Unwelcome or uneasy inside and outside the house now, Joan walked on the front lawn, pretending interest in the progress of the garden.

“He looks terrible. The hocks are shit.”

“That’s not much of a problem.”

“I’m not saying I don’t like him.” The brothers sat down on the porch steps, elbows on knees.

“This truck is big. We’re only filling the bottom of it.”

The Dobermann stuck its head and forechest between the brothers’ shoulders, then sniffed at Mike’s ear. “Life’s like that.” The dog walked through the front door of the house into the living room and put its square muzzle into several boxes.

Jocey, still in the kitchen, had begun to wrap glass bowls and small jars which she kept on the sill.

One of them, containing clear green marbles and eucalyptus oil, neck blocked with a cork stopper, she opened sometimes to cover unpleasant smells. She poured out the oil into the sink, ran hot water into the jar to clean it. Hearing paws patting on the linoleum floor, she turned and said “Hello, stupid” to the dog. It stood up, knuckled feet resting on the edge of the kitchen bench.

“Shoo! Go on. Get out of that!”

Jocey watched low, grey cloud move above the garden, moving apart, turning the day overcast to bright in a minute. A sheet of light entered the room, striking Jocey’s breast, passed her and fell to

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the floor. The dog lapped it up, lying on its back in the magnified heat. Jocey looked into the garden thinking how quickly its mood had changed, everything in it unmoved but suddenly luminous, green, and felt trapped by its life like a potential suicide opening the door on her own surprise birthday party. “Damn. That’s really ruined my depression.”

Roused by her voice, the dog patted across the linoleum to sniff at Jocey’s legs. “Oh, piss off!

You’re as bad as your master.” The dog persisted, pushing neck and withers between Jocey and the sink cupboards, getting stuck there until Jocey stepped back to complain again. Circling quickly, it stood up, forelegs at Jocey’s back and shoulder, muzzle in her neck, and red penis poking at her thigh.

Mike stiffened when he heard the sound of breaking glass and Jocey yelling “Stupid…,” “Rotten…,” “Mongrel!” He thought, and didn’t think, noticed himself concentrating on those sounds, repeating and reducing them to exactly the feeling they intended. They were no longer glass or word but an expression that could be read plainly on his face. The dog ran out the front door, but he took no notice of it. It was Jocey he wanted. Where was she? Where is the stupid, rotten bitch? He did not walk straight through the house to the kitchen, where the sounds came from, where he knew she would be waiting for him. He walked into the living room and looked at the floor as though he were looking for evidence or for something lost, knowing that he would find nothing. He stood there for a moment and looked at the blinds covering the window which faced the back garden, and the spears of light they sent into the room. He wanted her to come out and look into the dog’s face, chase it down the street, to scream, now, while he was there. “Where are you, you bitch!”

Jocey, though, would do none of that. She was already calm, exhausted. “Your stupid dog tried to fuck me. I can’t believe it. It stood up and tried to fuck me! Stupid thug. Now look what’s happened. That beautiful jar with the marbles. I’m not going to find another one like it.” She bent down to pick up a marble, and searched, crouching, for others. “These will be OK, anyway. I can’t believe it. Do you have to let that thing in the house?” When Jocey stooped to reach near Mike’s feet he thought he might kick her. He took a step back from the kitchen door and looked at her head. He could do it. It would be easy. The anger was written in red strips across his face; in clear, vivid stripes of light on his red face. Tom’s dog barked in the back yard.

“Get out of the way.”

“It’s your dog’s fault. The stupid thing.”

“Get out of my way.”

The absence of anything meaningful to say had paralysed them both, replaying, in this moment, the scene which was their daily life together.

“I can’t believe it.”

“Let me out.”

Mike gripped Jocey’s shoulders, lifted her up straight, and moved her aside. He walked out the back door and Tom’s dog rushed towards him. He led it off the back porch down into the garden and then to the gate. Jocey watched them from the window as they left the back yard to join the others.

The dogs barked together.

No one spoke a word but got on with the business of moving boxes. Mike and Tom moved back and forth between living room and truck. They moved more and more quickly, urgently emptying the house. Joan moved more slowly, slipping across the path of the busy brothers like a pedestrian through fast traffic. She stopped and laughed at them quietly, and then, embarrassed, thought they must have heard because the yard was quiet, too. The dogs were silent. “What’s happened?” Joan asked.

The dogs were there, standing on the street, completely still.

“What’s going on with them?”

Stephen J. Williams

29

The brothers stood together, looking quizzically on the quiet scene in which the dogs also stood together like statues left in the middle of the road. The black dog moved first. Tom’s dog ran second. They seemed to spring into a chase of something hidden in a neighbour’s garden, but nothing could be seen there.

Mike, Joan, and Tom moved out onto the footpath and looked across to the garden of the neighbour directly opposite them. The dogs had gone.

“That’s strange. What are they doing?”

“Shsh!”

Since they could not see anything beyond the row of low bushes except the row of higher trees, and not even anything of the house beyond those, except the roof, they waited with their ears more open, staring blankly into the leaves.

Next came the sound more musical and human than they expected, shrill and feminine and clear, a voice half wailing and half singing. It was not the cry of physical pain, but the tuneless singing of someone terrified and sad.

Mike crossed the road, looked up at the house, and decided to go in. He did not see the dogs anywhere in the yard. The voice had stopped its strange song, leaving Mike to listen to his own thoughts. He wondered if the dogs could have attacked the old woman or her husband. No, it is not that. He sees the old man standing at the door, walking backwards, turning, not sure how to move.

Closer, almost at the door himself, he sees the old woman raise her hands to her head, open her mouth, and release an odd note.

Beneath the note he heard the low growl and grunt of the two dogs, and then saw them, down at the floor in the middle of the old couple’s living room, tugging at a bloodied bundle. Mike shouted a command at the top of his voice and, when it appeared the dogs might not willingly give up their prize, moved toward them threateningly, with his hand raised, repeating the command to stop.

The dogs ran and Mike followed them out of the house. He watched the dogs closely, shepherding them back to his own territory where Joan and Tom waited for an explanation. He held his lips tight together, concealing the laugh in his throat. “It’s all right”, he said, and his teeth showed.

Stephen J. Williams

30

The Things in the Sea Two things in the sea We came to see, One, the great No, Monumental and black, And one, the white Yes, Lucid and clear.

We stood in the mouth, The world at our back, To hear the things speak.

Two things in the sea We came to hear, The drums of the No And the hush of the Yes. We stood in the ear Of the world at the sea And whispered our wish And wished it would hear.

Two things in the sea We came to taste, The salt of the No, And its bitterness, Yes. We stood in the hand Of the world on the beach And counted our lives In mouthfuls of sand.

We went there to ask, To see for ourselves, The puzzle that rises In seeing the sea — The curtain of sky And stage of the sea, The speech of the tide, The quandary of being.

Two things in the sea We came to see — To see the great No, To see the white Yes, Their drums and their hush, Their salt and their sand.

It did not show Or speak; it did not Hear, or care to know,

Stephen J. Williams

31

What wish we had, What pain we bear; It did not answer To our fears, though The things in the sea Were moving there, Beneath the foam And grey, they neither Let out any word, nor Sent us on our way.

Stephen J. Williams

32

The Motions of a Sea Hours in the light of perfect speech, we gloss the heart’s terms, wash the shape of this or that particular desire with words. But love’s unsayable, gathers its turns and ends, leaves you with the choice of doing. Why talk at all? To decorate an emptiness or speak of love are the same thing. All grown up and in deep water, we move with the motions of a sea, swim from the coast to middle life; some floating, some sinking, all willingly and forced. Who could not leave the children at the beach, or long for safety, wish not to die, or want playing forever in our own past?

The ones who stay, we hate, for leaving us with danger.

We do not envy them: monarchs of shallow, their toes barely wet, they live in a still pain, growthless and even, going nowhere, to be kings of sand, empty beaches, and alone.

Stephen J. Williams

33

Big Orchestra What we need is a big orchestra of at least one hundred players. We should make a surreal painting of our lives and be able to say, as though it were the only true utterance that ever stuttered off our lips: this is what life is like: a briefcase, a glove-box, stuffed full with an enormous orchestra of violinists, cellists, flautists, pianists, organists, trombonists, french-horn-players, clarinetists, timpanists, cymbalists, the whole-bang-lot, that we could open up like a magic box in those quiet moments for which our language has no words. You know the moments I mean, don’t you? You could be sitting at a table just looking out the window, or reading a book, or a friend may have just decided that it’s time to go home and leaves you, or the music from the record-player may have just stopped, and the room is suddenly quiet, and you then look up from your book or your dinner, or have stopped at an intersection waiting for the lights to change, and then, as though your eyes had been pulled out of your head and taken ten feet away and pointed at you, you see yourself, your whole self, and you wait for something, for anything. A car may pass on the street outside, or someone may make a little sound in the next room, or a fluorescent lamp in a shop window may be flickering on and off, or the books in your room may stare out at you, a company of objects full of meaning no one entirely understands. And standing there, or sitting there, just waiting there, you become an object. You are the object that arranges for the kettle to boil each morning, the fastidious object that periodically puts other objects back in their proper places, the object that, because it is not entirely without pity, sometimes almost spontaneously, acts with compassion toward some other object, a dog, a cat, a person, and sometime afterwards wonders whether it acted selflessly, and if so, Why? For what reason? That mad, suffering, ridiculous object which each day opens up its head and tears its brain apart, atom from atom, then throws them into the air, into the darkness. The atoms are like stars; the space between them the sum of all unanswerable questions.

Or else, they are something more humble: specks of dust suspended in a beam of daylight.

Whichever, you are the object standing there, watching, with its arms open to them as they fall.

Coming through each day is a miracle: the atoms, the stars, the dust falling into your arms. It’s a miracle how nothing is lost. Each memory persists: the dust and the stars falling into your hands, and all the atoms combining to make you whole again, the complete object, the perfectly still object with not a single word in its head. Words could not explain what it is like to be just a thing, an object. No language has words for such a terrible idea. It is a moment like that when you need a big orchestra; not just a radio or a record-player, but a real orchestra, made of real people and real instruments.

You need to have it straight away. There’s no time to go out and look for it; it has to be there, ready for you. And then you would want it to start playing slowly and quietly, there at the street corner, or at your table, or in your room: a single violin, or a piano beginning to play so quietly that you tilt and turn your head toward it, before all the others join in, making the music louder and faster, but even then only by slow degrees. It must be slowly, painfully slowly, because something terrible and unforgettable is happening to you. You had lost something and now it is being given back to you.

Stephen J. Williams

34

Red Streamer The Palace Hotel is nothing more than an ornate shoe box thrown on a hill. Bushes have had their hair cut. Trees are tall and lean. The lawn is green felt. There is a driveway snaking elegantly to and from the entrance. I am standing on the lawn in the middle of the dream of luxury. A car drives up.

Two Americans step out. I know the woman but not her name. Her daughter is with her. We exchange a few words and decide I will take a photo of them standing in front of the shoe box. She leaves the camera with me as she drives off with her daughter to park the car somewhere out of sight.

I frame the palace facade in the viewfinder of the camera, trying to get the right angle. The light is diminishing quickly. The woman and her daughter come back by foot but as soon as they reach me it is dark. There are no lights anywhere. The moon is out. There are no stars in this part of the country. “Why are there no lights?” we ask. We wander around, arms stretched out in front of us, trying to find an entrance or an exit. We are frightened and asking ourselves, “Why are the windows blocked so that no light comes through them?” We find an entrance and go inside. Inside is a great hall decorated with little more than a few plush chairs and sofas. Middle-aged and old people are sitting and standing around the room. No one talks. A woman in grey breast-coat and knee-length skirt, very prim and proper, hair bunched tight to her head, obviously a complete bitch, enters the hall. She says something about breakfast being served at 5-30. I immediately think that this is an odd time to have breakfast: too early, or too late, depending on which way you look at it. “What sort of dump is this?” the American woman says just before she and her daughter run out the door into the darkness. They obviously don’t want to have breakfast at 5-30. I run after them to fetch them back. Outside the palace there is no reference point. Someone’s voice calls out to me. I think it is a man’s voice but actually it is only a rasping whisper coming from the trees which line the facade of the palace. I reach out to grab whomever is there. I get hold of it. It may not be a person at all. Is it a dog? It runs away from me and I am falling over. I slip and fall to the ground, legs up in the air and my right arm being pulled down between my legs towards my feet. I’m horizontal. Whatever it was I grabbed has turned into a long red splash, lighting the road and lawn beside the palace. It stretches out across the lawn like a red streamer. The sky is lightening suddenly into an icy sea blue, the form of the palace and the colour of the lawn becoming visible. Though I tried to hold it, the red streamer curls and twists, climbing into the air. Breakfast is being served.

Stephen J. Williams

35

2 … And men make faults, and even I in this, Authorizing thy trespass with compare, Myself corrupting, salving thy amiss, Excusing thy sins more than thy sins are; For to thy sensual fault I bring in sense — Thy adverse party is thy advocate — And ’gainst myself a lawful plea commence.

— William Shakespeare, Sonnet 35

Stephen J. Williams

37

How We Sleep “How do we sleep while our beds are burning?”

— Midnight Oil

This particular white-fella, rather podgy, over employed, committed unionist and Nikon-owner, gets to a time of life (not even thirty) thinking about superannuation and which plan is best for safe retirement.

I cringe through the whole year, complain quietly of terrible excess in times restraint is hard to bear, and manage some murmurings about “the Treaty” — but that’s all. So, how do I sleep?

This far, I must admit, it’s been easy: buffered by green suburbs, relative riches and silence, I could not fail in ignorance.

Some excel in it, are proud to destroy, build on the ruins, and have no fear to rest with bones.

I have slept by forgetting.

Without pills or drugs, dope or whiskey, to sleep it is enough simply not to think, as though a thought or word would make the whole house burn.

Stephen J. Williams

38

In My Watchmaker’s Hands Showing my palm to the watchmaker’s tongue He licks the time-line right down The crease of my present senses and The clock stops just there.

Now, I take or leave god Depending on the weather And, like most of us, Consume astrology in small doses To guess at twists of plot in life.

As for clocks, there’s no mystery, They are purely functional: We tell them what to mean.

Like nothing else, these sudden stillnesses of love Make me wonder, Not what spring keeps the galaxy spinning, Rather, how In my watchmaker’s hands time dies, How my stupid body lives!

Stephen J. Williams

39

Idea for a Garden The beds in this ward are for certain death, for diseases even dear relatives fear and hate.

There are new lovers, though, as well as old, who make a plan for paradise in this hell.

When sun fell on a light sheet covering one man’s ribs, where carers look for signs of life, small movement, someone had the idea for a garden.

Friends brought small bushes that will be always green, signifying faith, endurance, bulbs for sudden happiness, stones and pebbles, showing some things never change.

They gather there to make a prayer of simple actions. Some to the God outsiders say forsakes them, some to the hope small happiness will last, they sing in whispers, put wishes to the edge of lips, where a wind takes their words away.

Stephen J. Williams

40

Dimitris is not Dead Another poet wrote, unpacking myths And colours for dying days, of meeting him, That special feeling, and published To confirm undying admiration.

Last night, though, Dimitris was at dinner, Wearing his old, aqua beach trousers, Comparing recipes for home-made bread — “Two parts wholemeal, one of plain…”

“The tasteless olives, promising to look at, Should be jarred in vinegar, water, a little oil.”

“And Greek bishops — the word for them Is despot — have reigned a thousand, stable years.”

Who knows if he will live that long, taking his pipe Out to the porch, smoking under a quiet April?

A little thin, perhaps, but as for ‘death’ — He has thought of it, and then thought better.

Stephen J. Williams

41

Domestic Suburban Vignette “40, and the kids at university, I will sit at home all day listening to Hinch and reading Derrida; myself in the mirror, the perfect picture of bourgeois complacency, the daze of my life as incomprehensible as a bar of soap. — And, of course, I will want something indefinable and leave my husband to get it....”

40, and the kids at university, I won’t take shit from anyone wearing a uniform or wielding a B.A. who bursts through the door and wants to rape me (phallogocentrically speaking); punishment for writing about mirrors or old photos of my mother.

I’ll write about firemen and policemen, the axes and truncheons of daily life, the ease of speech in Newtown cafés, about the light at the end of poetry and the bizarre satisfactions of golf; I’ll write about all those things, like one who knows their true meaning, when pigs fly.

“And having left him for good, for the thing I wanted, there will only be that square of light, the mother of myself that all mirrors are, bringing more, little, unhappy Mes into the world; more ghastly women, multiplying like rabbits before their mirrors: Lacanian, suburban, neurotic....”

I’ll be here, because he’s there, away from him, nestling in the comfortable poetry of distance between us: because it’s not just that book by de Sade my husband taunts me with — it’s the whole damned city and its monuments to poet-soldiers of commerce — I want distance from, we need to escape from, finally.

Who will circumscribe me, size me up, push me out, out here, then call it wilderness ?

The boiling kettle, boiling over,

Stephen J. Williams

42

tumble-dryer, its revolutions, this dangerous Sunday supplĂŠment, that is me, that so disturbs them and makes them go limp and fall over themselves with desire,

sits every morning with the smell of coffee in front of the window, practising domesticity, and perfecting it, against every possibility of violence or dissatisfaction. It’s an idea that tears down buildings and won’t allow the city of men to sleep at night.

Stephen J. Williams

43

Dreaming of Zeppelins for Barbara Giles, when aged six

If it’s a cold war, the telegraph wires Sing the air with a dull whir.

Fearing the thing that creeps, or Numbers mounting without control, No wonder our sleep’s uneasy.

Young as we are, we know A death on the wind is coming And what our dreams shall reap, we’ve sown.

Stephen J. Williams

44

Ishmael Sarah was adamant the other boy should not share Isaac’s fame and history.

“God has blessed our own son as you must now favour him alone.”

Uncertain, needing guidance, Abraham dreamt of God’s other nation, and offered the boy to all uncertainty, the wilderness of doubting God lives everywhere.

What was the farewell speech?

“Though men would die there, “He has promised you will be great.

So you will be great.

“I must not doubt it, but I do; and I will cry, enough to make a desert green “for you.” For Ishmael, a long time Abraham’s only hope, he may have promised anything.

• Mother and son leave with bread, a flask of water, and promises.

Not Abraham’s but mother’s weeping saves Ishmael: Men build a well, nature fills it.

“We’ll be more practical, make the promise happen

Stephen J. Williams

45

with work, not wanting.”

They master it together: Ishmael, the archer, Hagar, the matchmaker.

“What a place To make a nation!

But the ingredients are simple.”

• When sons return to their father’s death, burying Abraham at Machpelah, voices echo in the dark.

“Father, father”, on the lips of the boys: they might make the same prayer …

“You tempted us to hate you: me crying under the knife, me cast to doubt.”

But the prayer made by Isaac to a father’s history and fame is also his own to live in.

Ishmael whispers the first confession.

“What shall I do “About forgiveness, father?

You start the story, leaving me without end.

“In my new life I am rich with everything except belonging.

“I do not hate or love.

My life is the plain, the sun; and for my heart, an arrow.”

Stephen J. Williams

46

Songs or People Switching tunes to suit the mood — today it could be a slice of melancholy (sixteenth century, harpsichord and minor key) moving in to do the demolition job, or tomorrow something modern (with, probably, synthetic brass and barely human voice) — I’ll lay my head in any lap, prick up my ears to every sad, little wish of love.

Then, sung in a pressed school uniform or the diva’s silk gown, it all adds up to the same thing: screaming and loving the house down, from where the skin shivers and twists to where, deeper down, old dead things rattle their bones in time and weep.

Oh, it’s sad, it’s very sad, and the orchestra unpacks its strings to usher it in, or it’s glad, it’s very glad to see me and the band strikes up familiar melodies, drums up a bit of the devil dancing with his red hat and whiter-than-white wishes.

Either way, the very least I’d say is it makes you feel alive and, if you’re lucky, makes you feel, brush away the webs and dust from places that don’t get used that much, at the cornices and skirtings where spiders wrap old lovers up in string and listen in to new ones talk of new-year-things.

There are songs or people, waiting between miles and hours of static, and stones for me to sharpen on.

Stephen J. Williams

47

Body in the Water Going down to the water, dark, late, night-water, smoothing Under the moon, plate of light swaying on a mirror, witness To the weatherchange, coatless-cold or shoulder-bare heat, The year by year change I witness down by the water.

Not only the change of my face growing old by the water, But all its meanings and its story dug lines in the water.

I stand under the clear, blank sky, clean slate, waiting To be written on the skin; any hand or any writing, Any word or any sound will do; any cloudless clear And ink black thrill breathed leaves me wanting more.

Imagine, the body in the water sways with the moon, A harder me, more there, more real, fingers holding tightly Onto any skin, pressing till it breaks, and bone scratches bone.

The oldest whispers, his hand in the water, smoothing The side of the younger me’s face. “What do we do now?

What do you want? What can I do for you, here, in this place?”

Stephen J. Williams

48

‘The Mystic Writing-Pad’ In a book the lights of day and love gave me, life writes itself easily on the clear line of commerce: someone falls as simple as gravity, another climbs into strange, blue emptiness.

Between its lines, the mind’s silence, fires light night’s empty dome, and all my whisperers come to warm their hands and snigger.

We do not know whether darkness there or here, a sky of mind or night, protects us....

Only, the sun rises when that sky has washed us of our daily fear; and real, then, in a lion’s mouth we wake, the air is clean and ripe for breaking with the smell of oranges and burning bread.

Stephen J. Williams

49

3 “I shall instruct my madness to be proud For psychiatrists are proud and make their clients stoop.”

— by way of William Shakespeare

Self-Criticism

Stephen J Williams

52

(1983, ‘The Breach’)

Hide and seek is the game we play, alternating parts, clinging to walls just beyond reach.

Who can live with me? he says, mocking.

Come out. Come out.

Scar says hands on head, to your knees. Scar says shout, then says die.

Scar gives the lie to harmless thoughts, then settles down in the dark house, corrupt little animal gnawing at the heart and baring teeth that cut up memory.

Sleeping and dreaming he’s more alive, feeds on each hurting image, gorged and lying safe beyond the breach.

Stephen J Williams

53

(13 February 1988)

Mostly there is just this emptiness, being ignorant of truths that might make us happy.

Dreams peopled by strangers I’ve become familiar with, tonight, the stranger is a lover rejecting me and accepting me.

“I’m afraid of you”, he says as we begin the slow rock.

“And I am afraid of you.”

Stephen J Williams

54

(3 July 1987)

The pink cyclamen is doing well today.

I won’t water it so let it come to grief in some small way.

The fern though, which always struggles, is a bit brown and prickly; showing what a lot of life it’s had and how much care I gave.

Stephen J Williams

55

(5 April 1988)

“Oh, that sky looks painted!”

A tractor passes on the road we take toward the day’s colourful end.

“He’s just installed that sunset!”

“Your problem always was confusing life and art.”

Home in the evening, I check several times, the workmen are still there, chipping away the black dome to light my firmament.

Stephen J Williams

56

(13 March 1989)

When he is leaving and opens his arms around me I know there is one place I will be small and human, Breakable, weak, most unlike my other self.

Lips should be the most telling part. Kissing the rough, imperfect surfaces to speak another language, I learn how smart a silence is. And also, how love will turn my head off like a light, leave me stupid, thick and clouded honey.

It’s just as well I’m dumb with love — If I thought of danger or of pain, calculated futures or the interest gained, I would be alone.

Stephen J Williams

57

(23 February 1990)

Ask, as if to extract admission, or hoping to discover I am empty,

What do you believe? and I say, “There is nothing to be claimed today not wrong tomorrow.”

I laugh my loud, ungraceful laugh, rub two words together, making light for a blind and slippery god who, for all I know, may also lose his way …

“My god is the worm whose kingdom comes to everyone.”

Stephen J Williams

58

(1984, ‘The King of Hate’)

Years the beast spends dining on his own flesh, inexhaustible passions coming from who knows where beyond the breach.

My arms outstretched find a way through glowing darkness back to where the hate began a life of forgetting, bandaged head, a mask.

Come in. Come in.

He says, this dark house is larger than love, your heart unwired will warm to knowledge of superb pain, will grow to fill its infinite rooms.

He crowns me king of beasts, winds me in red fields and war, promises all the void will sing my name; if only I would stay.

Stephen J Williams

59

(29 December 1989)

I’ll go urgently to slay some small enemy, grind them to dust in my teeth; words wanting to make summer cold and, in this eye, a look that sours milk.

Having my own way, the mood would make love stoop and the world red.

It is madness. I admit it. I am mad.

— But you, who could be enemy, be grateful there are means to make me sweet.

Do not submit. I love strength.

Only point my head to the thing which is — whatever it is: the cup’s flaw; your or my own human ways. — And watch me melt.

My mad, sweet violence is completely modern.

Stephen J Williams

60

(18 March 1990)

Everything dies in my backyard.

The effort of planting is wasted on stone and sand.

Dear J., here is the thing I have learned about M. Merleau-Ponty’s the sayable and the unsayable … 2 Everything said was meant.

I tear it up with the roots to show you I am dead.

Though that unsayable part grows, next week I will bring flowers.

Don’t ask Where are they from?

I will buy or steal them.

2

Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s book is called The Visible and the Invisible .

Stephen J Williams

61

(A Prayer, 8 April 1990, Palm Sunday)

I pray to speak as musicians pray; those whom I trust, more than writers, since they may speak without need to tell.

With this desire, without end of longing for that sound to fill me, I am contrite, and offer my imperfect contrition to the hope I shall not end in Hell.

O Lord, whose music made me, I beg you, do not leave me soundless where I am, believing nothing, and my mouth numb with lies. I am in pain.

Say only — to this silent, shapeless form of life I have, you might give remedy.

With that uncertain knife I could untie my tongue.

Stephen J Williams

62

(8 April 1990, excerpt of a letter)

“… always at each other’s throats — and who has reacted to that in a similar way. I am shocked to find a person, my exact opposite in the choice of object, whose desires and the energy which drives them appear to be organised in exactly the same way as mine. The attraction — ‘curiosity’ would have been a better word — seems to go both ways. There are all sorts of questions which follow from this, like ‘Why am I not on Cogentine?’ I started ‘writing’ when ------’s illness started to become apparent (we are approximately the same age, he a little older).

“There are these short sentences which keep coming out of me now, saying ‘I am mad,’ ‘I am dead’ or ‘I am in pain.’ When I write them down, in the middle of short poems (they have always been somewhere physically in the middle of the poems, neither at the start nor at the end), I start to cry.

More curious: I have just noticed that each time I came to write them, I put them in italics, as though they were the names of books on which the poems were commentary.”

Stephen J Williams

63

(18 December 1990)

I am two men.

My head is a rock in shining sand.

And the sun, which is going down, leaves the sky the same colour as the ocean is. This rock — giant, lichen smooth, dark, as it always was — is fixed, one eye up, the other closed in sand.

I am half free, half blind.

My seeing eye rolls up to see the day is gone.

Stars light the way.

And the sea’s black waves pour in my sleep, and wash the earth and me.

Stephen J Williams

64

I’ve forgotten how the story goes. Wait a moment. It will come to me … we wake, the air is clean and ripe for breaking with the smell of oranges and burning bread. He interrupts me to complain that the dream I have been re-telling was cribbed from a poem called ‘Jerome’ — “And a man’s soul thankful for it knows not what, The air is washed, and smells of boiling coffee, And the sun lights it” — a poem called ‘Jerome’ by Randall Jarrell, and also that the writing he has seen — he has only seen it in bits and pieces — betrays a lack of that imagination which would press the facts of the life I wish to describe into a form able to be comprehended, tasted (he talks about writing as though it were a feast, something a person sits down to, to press into the mouth, which satisfies a hunger; and this, even if it is true, is what I object to), tasted and digested. There is no point in arguing. I have not cribbed. I have merely shown how I have dreamt another writer’s dream. One morning Randall Jarrell rose from his bed, after dreaming, after lying half awake, half dreaming, and his flesh was young, and his soul thankful for his body’s sleep, and there was the smell of boiling coffee. “Now you are talking to me of desire and love, and all that sadness which follows on the heels of wanting, and I tell you that a story, such as the story you want, cannot express the truth about these things. Desire is shapeless, painful, empty. — And love, love is the feeling which fills emptiness.” Naevolus, as I shall call him — not even knowing at this stage who he is or where he has come from — because he reminds me of that discarded gigolo with whom Juvenal spoke, wants, now, just at the moment it cannot be given, the story of love, in which everyone lives happily ever after, in which death itself is dead and life is the slave of fiction, forgetting how life ends. The slave who ploughs his master’s field has less trouble than the one who ploughs him! In all those fables of love, morality and hope (“‘Look, father, what we’ve brought home!’ cried the children, and they heaped the witch’s treasure onto the table so that pearls and precious stones spilled in all directions. From that day onwards all their troubles were over and they lived happily together for many years.” “They followed the piper down the road, never once looking back at the town of Hamelin. With him they danced over the hills and far away, to a new land where people were kind and generous and always kept their promises.” “Cinderella, who was as good as she was beautiful, found husbands for her sisters too, who were wealthy and kinder than they had any right to expect.”), in those fables which are the hope life is, their lie grinds screechingly to its end in a child’s sleepy head.

Stephen J Williams

65

(27 October 1991, Memoir of My Nervous Illness)

We hate the thing we fear, the thing we know may be true and may have a certain affinity with ourselves, for each man hates himself. The most interesting, most fertile qualities in every man are those he hates in himself and in others, for hatred includes every other feeling — love, envy, ignorance, mystery, the urge to know and to possess. It is hate that causes suffering. To overcome hatred is to take a step towards self-knowledge, self-mastery, self-justification and consequently towards an end to suffering. — Cesare Pavese.

Stephen J Williams

66

i It is always night here. I wait for blessings Which, to me, being a black creature — all unconscious, Never seen, ungrateful, hungry, parentless And discontented — shine like someone else’s sun, Pin-pricks in the dome.

To this darker self, The lighter one, with which I live, is alien.

“In the beginning of everything, he begged To enter, talked and talked like a salesman, Wanting to know all my secrets. I gave up And let the bastard in. … Now, he grubs around In all my dirt, builds verses in the cellar, And walks the wall between our rooms.

He will not let me sleep.”

Stephen J Williams

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ii My head, a crawling nest of insect thoughts, accuses, Rehearses, is bursting to release its teeming sound.

I no longer know whether I am sane or mad. My hatred Is an ecstasy, showing me I am alive; that will surely Kill me unless I free it from my mouth and speak.

I know what must be said, the truth which has pressed Its thumb into my eye and made me submit; it is simple Enough, and I will say it ‌ And I also know what cannot be Said, the same truth, ineffable and shadow, of my self Which falls behind me, a trail of words as long as a life.

The world is full of proud men weeping at the sky, Who will not learn that longing never dies.

I am one.

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iii “To be loved is better than freedom.

You are mine. I am yours”, we sing.

All lovers, loving done, lie together in their being, mouths stretched In the O of its silence and fatigue. An extinguishing quiet comes To rest on this skin where they went to say they were not vagrants And without meaning. — It was a fire in their being that lit the tree.

They sleep in the ashes of their act.

The dream they have, of wretched Animals, longing to possess, the quantities, the bartering and sums Of love — counted out in disappearing fragments —, Which whispers as they sleep, and wakes with them, is jealousy.

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iv I woke from a dream at three o’clock, my body thick with oxygen.

My ancestors, white-bearded and huge, wrapped in seal-skin, Whispered their language at my suit and hat …

I glimpse myself, And know what comedy the world has run to.

“Enough”, I said, fearing to know more.

Today I was the owner of my face.

I shaved and took it out, let the sun light it, made it speak.

I will not be an open wound.

I will become nothing.

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v My chronicle is a contest Between self-hatred and understanding.

I believed — “It is best not to have a head, best not to have those things That come with it. There’s beauty to see, I admit, But also, as Tolstoi said, the spectacular absence of meaning.

And there’s music, that promissory note whose sum Is never paid. I don’t want it. Cut off my ears.

And the dumbest of my senses — this nose. If only To tell me how rotten flesh is, who needs it? Not I. Spite my face and cut it off, too. A brain might be something To keep, don’t you think? — It is the home of memory.

Tear down the whole house.

The world has been shaved By a drunken barber. It comes, stumbling toward us, Bloodied and awful.

It is best not to have a head, Best not to live with pain. Beauty, music, senses, brain, Come to nothing. This is what I know today. And at my work With whiskey and razor, I cut at the past of things, The muscled and unloosenable fact of remembering, As if to cut would make me free.”

Now, you — those of you Who still have heads — look at what the headless world has come to.

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(28 February 1992, Advice to Myself)

A mother’s nose can smell a rat Before the vermin’s tail is fact; And teachers, in their classroom mode, Will point the way down any road.

Before you go, remember this: That getting lost is half the bliss.

— But take a compass and a map, The way ahead is full of traps; And pack some warm and woolly socks, The future is an oblong box.

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4 Though fires loiter, lights still fly on the air of the gulf, All fear another wind, another thunder: Then one more voice Snuffs all their flames in one gust.

— Thomas Merton, ‘A Psalm’

The slave who ploughs his master’s field has less trouble than the one who ploughs him!

— Juvenal, Satire IX

Oh, my common one with the light in her head And the coat so fine And the sufferin’ so high All right now.

Oh, my common one …

It ain’t why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why…

It just is.

I want to go to church right now and say It ain’t why …

It just is.

— Van Morrison, ‘Summertime in England’

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Exposed For James, who died of AIDS on 18 September 1987.

When death starts its process first we resist, hard to watch everything familiar and beautiful about the body shrink.

We say to ourselves, “I want him back” or “Give me back that firm, healthy person!” When we are in the room with him all of us want to shout “But where is David?! Where has he gone?!”

Then, all together, we have the knotted pain in the eyes, recognising him among us as a poor remaking of the other man we knew. “Michael, is that you I see? Is it really you?”

Bringing gifts and asking questions we have brought and asked many times before, when he was still himself, is a test.

“Here are some chocolates I thought you might like, and yellow roses.”

Are these pleasures the new Paul knows? And who are you now?

In the last year his head is full of creatures and animal hate, wide-eyed and terrified to live in the world where everything dies.

If he is fresh and strong in the morning, he is warm-blooded, huge, growling in the garden. Afternoons in the heat he is worn blue as a slim lizard, lies about, breathless, bumps into the furniture.

The old friends leave him, while he makes the real ones new.

No one dares come near who cannot answer questions: “Are you friend or foe?” “Will you fight me, even now, in the middle of all this?” and “Will I die? Will I truly die?”

Before the visiting hours the family takes a few stiff drinks, wanders in the numb maze of the hospital, with threads hanging behind them. All our tongues are pins and needles for lack of use, or telling lies. “Oh, he has cancer, a tragic disease; I did tell him not to smoke.” “Thank you for the card. He likes it very much, and sends you all his love.” “He is better and we hope for a remission.”

Afterwards, alone, he practises the scavenging happiness of birds, picks up crumbs from his own story, cries and laughs, vomits the soft dinner, starves quietly and more surely than anyone who waits for justice. Every sleepless night some part is stolen and in the morning he is less there.

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of planting onions, and hope for death. Even those who don’t believe can see he becomes more real; the soul is exposed and visible, resting on a cracked edge before it goes.

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Flowers for the Dead Ask me why I write so many poems about the dead And I tell you it is because there are so many of them.

Ask me why these poems must be written and I tell you It is because other poems are wrong and must be corrected.

What is wrong about these other poems? you want to know.

I heard one say, “My friend, who is dead now, sat with me All afternoon and there was nothing to say, and when I was leaving He stopped to take a flower from his tree and gave it to me.”

I heard another say, “Don’t be sad — This is only as This is, Things growing and things dying in their cycle, all In their own time and in their own way dying. The dead Are dead and gone. Life goes on. So, go.”

The purpose of a poem is to say what is — with the force Of a hammer. When it comes down, this hammer, the poem That comes with it, about that dead lover or that dead father, Should strike you in the throat and make you speechless.

So, when someone has died, do not take flowers with you.

When it is your turn to write about the dead do not write About flowers, or afternoons in the sun, or cycles, or God. Tell it as it was. Get out your hammer and drive the nail in.

For example, the poem of a father says, “He preferred Pain to morphine, hiding pills the doctor gave because pain Told him he was still alive. He died in a hospital bed.

His cleaning woman was standing beside him.

Yes. That’s right. The cleaning woman. Fearing love more Than death, Daddy would not let the family know He was human and in need of love. We read about it In the classified columns of the daily newspaper.”

For example, the poem of a lover says, “I thought — Who the fuck is this man with bones sticking up under The skin of his back, who looks jagged and cold as a lizard?

When you said you were hungry and I made dinner, I knew you were going to throw up, and you did — In my lap. Thanks. Let’s make a deal. I forgive you For looking at me with those weightless, jealous eyes, if Stephen J. Williams

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You forgive me for hoping you would die more quickly.�

When someone has died, do not take flowers with you.

Make poems in the teeth of your grinding jaw and bursting head.

The dead don’t need flowers or poems about flowers.

The dead leave pain behind them so we know we are still alive.

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The Black King The house has been quiet for more than a year. Parties, not wild but happy, used to distract the whole block, and several of the neighbours did not shy from joining in a celebration they knew nothing about or did not quite understand. The man in this house was an open neighbour. He did not have a history, nor did he seem to create any that could be seen from the street. Amiable and talkative when he stopped at a fence to say hello, and often seen carrying a face that was all smile, he was to some people eminently approachable, and to others plainly weird.

But women liked him. They liked him perhaps because he was conscious of not letting his eyes drop to their breasts and hips, or perhaps because, when he spoke, ordinary words would reveal an emotion.

The house was different. Unchanging. Weather and years had no effect on it. So, when he disappeared inside it, he was no longer a neighbour but a secret.

I don’t want to imply that the house was severe or gloomy. It was nothing like that. When he arrived, I think it was eight years ago, he stripped the ugly paint off it, planted evergreens front and back, and put startling pink azaleas in pots under the sills of the front window. On tables beside windows which faced the other street — the house is at a corner — he grew obconicas mainly, friendly flowers that I don’t like because when they are perfect they look artificial. From either street it was possible to see the rooms. They were sparsely furnished but painted in warm colours, and each of them differently. The picture of the house had been completed eight years ago and it never changed. A house should be a process, accumulating life. Parts of the garden should die, others flourish. Paintings, photos, tables and chairs, should move. Neglect should inspire unfitness of its looks, at least occasionally. And then, probably, there should be more than visitors. A family should scar it, graze the skin. A little mending and changing is good for a house. In this house, though, there was none of that. The house seemed inconsistent with the man. It had the rigidity of a silence intended to end argument and change. A picture of stability which could be happiness.

Through most of this time I never spoke to him. That was not willful. The opportunity never arose; though it could also be said I never made one. When we first met I was one of the team whose work would be to care for him during the last few months of his life.

“I’ve seen you”, he said and eyebrows lifted to form an irony.

“Yes, I live close by.”

“It must be strange. Is it allowed?”

“We talked it over. I don’t think there will be any problems.”

“If I’d known I could have invited you up for a meal”, he said, in that manner that was to become familiar, talking as though there were no more chances to do or to plan. For a moment I stumbled on the thought of objecting vigorously.

“You still can.”

He laughed, surprised to find he talked about himself in the past tense. “Yes, of course, though you may have to cook if I feel like shit.”

“I’m not that bad a cook, really. You may be disappointed.”

In the first half of the last year the house was noticeably closed. Window shutters locked a month at a stretch, the canary yellow car disappeared, and the grass, what small area of it there is, grew too long. He was in hospital while the burglars moved in.

I am told that when he was in hospital he was a different man completely. The place reminded him of his dependence on other people and the truth of his illness. Why would a perfectly able and Stephen J. Williams

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competent person be in hospital? He hardened against the forms of help and incessant prodding and testing which are natural (or at least unavoidable) in hospitals, so that it seemed to the staff he was normally unfriendly, plaintive, and terse. They were glad to get rid of him when it was decided he could stay at home, or, rather, that there was nothing more that they could do for him.

In his house he could be difficult, too, but here at least there was time for him to explain what he wanted and didn’t want, and the team considered it part of its work to make these adjustments — within reason.

With some people the problem is an excessive willingness to be helped; these people want servants who will turn dying into a style of luxury. —That’s what I’m told.

In the first weeks he would allow us little more than to drive him to appointments with his doctors, for tests at the hospital, or to visit relatives. He was uncomfortable driving when he discovered his vision could suddenly blur. For a long while he relied on friends, those who were not afraid to visit or, rather, to wait through the long silences or bouts of crying that could erupt at almost any moment. If it was not plain fear that kept some away, the uncertainty of dealing with certain death restrained the rest from visiting. It was to provide relief for those people who had helped most that we were here.

Elizabeth was the first of us to notice his passion for chess. Among the books in his library was a section devoted to the game, and in the living room an old cabinet contained at least a dozen sets of men and boards.

“Everyone says that. Without fail, it is always the first thing you hear.”

“No, really, I think I know the rules, but I’m sure I’m no good at it”, Liz replied. “I like board games, though.”

“I like them less now.”

“What do you mean?”

“For some reason people always advise a new opponent they are really no good at the game”, he said, setting up the black pieces on his side of the board. “They think of it as an intellectual game.

The mind goes on the line.”

“No reason for you to worry, if you’re good at it.”

“I suppose not”, he said with some anger.

“Well, we can just play. You don’t have to talk about it”, Liz said.

In the middle-game he started to talk again, looking at the board. “If I castle, plant a knight in front of this position, and play safely, the defence works itself out. I wouldn’t need to force a win.

Draws can be very satisfying. It’s not at all like life; there’s too much art in it.”

“Competitive, too”, Liz offered, struggling with his cryptic messages.

“With you, unfair competition.”

“I’m easy!”

“All of you together, it’s unfair.”

We learned not to be so rigid in our scheduling and we let him arrange us around him, realising that eagerness to help could destroy the will. It was unfair.

But this, like everything in the last few months, also changed. At first, he wouldn’t allow us to do the laundry. He persisted with this ban longer than anything else, for reasons that must have been quite irrational because he didn’t mind at all that we did the ironing. In the meantime, we restored the house when he wasn’t looking, repaired the garden, and potted plants. The picture of the house got better as he deteriorated.

He never forgot about the washing completely. His body would not allow him to forget. During long periods of diarrhoea he lost weight into his bedclothes and trousers; and when the problem wasn’t diarrhoea he would be throwing up every meal. We became adept with buckets and towels.

That was easy enough. It was much harder to cope with his embarrassment and sense of degradation. When he felt this most acutely it wasn’t strange he wouldn’t talk to us, answering with

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shrugs, grimaces, and nods, instead of words. Moods fluctuated with his body, though, and when he felt better, he talked more.

Twice he asked to speak to meetings of volunteers and it was during these meetings we heard what he thought about us.

“I hate every one of the people, every one of those volunteers who come into my house”, he said.

“I hate seeing my clothes neatly pressed. I hate having the bed made for me. I hate hearing questions like ’Would you like a cup of tea?’ ’Do you think you will be able to have some dinner tonight?’ ’Would you like to see your mother tomorrow?’ So I swear and curse. I think that if I hate everything that is happening to me enough, if I am angry enough, it will all go away. Stupid. What’s amazing is that these people decide they are not going to give up on me. Anger makes me feel better.

It keeps me going.”

At the start of summer his mother arranged a birthday party, gathering all the reluctant, complaining family at the house. She wanted us to be there, too.

It seemed to me the more light came into the house the worse he looked, the easier it was to see those purple blotches which had appeared on his face. — No, not really the light. It was seeing more of his family made me realise how divisive and frightening illness could be. Mother watched everyone keenly, afraid that at any moment someone would let a taboo word loose like a bullet in the air. Sister hugged him too quickly, and careful not to let her lips touch his face. Elder brother’s wife and child had conveniently found other duties with a mother-in-law. All this healthy prejudice and fear made him look ill.

I winced with embarrassment whenever someone took up their duty to make conversation.

His cousin, Tom, arrived like a change of weather, strode into the living room with a large, brown-papered parcel, and larger smile, planted himself on the sofa, and kissed the thin, sick man on the lips — leaving some of his smile there.

“Sorry about the paper.”

“Oh, god, not another one.”

“Who did you say was the chess player?”

“John. Over there”, he said, looking at me.

“Good. I’ll beat him first then.”

“Not if I have anything to do with it”, I said, accepting the challenge.

The brown paper tore open, revealing a new chess board and heavy, wood box.

“That’s the last thing he needs”, the elder brother moaned.

“Yeah, I know, aren’t they wonderful?” Tom replied, opening the box and taking out two of the pieces. “Come on, we’ll set them up on the table in there.”

Tom and I played chess, on the table with the obconicas. Brothers and sister talked, I thought too eagerly, with Liz and Mary, the two women on the team. Perhaps they thought if the conversation with the women lapsed they would have to speak with the men. With the women they could simply be grateful, but the men were another matter. They would have to ask, “Why are you doing this?” or “What are you really doing this for?” Tom, though, felt no need to avoid any of us.

“He told me you live near here.”

“Yep. Just down the street a bit.”

“You didn’t know him before?”

“No. We’d never met.”

“Well, he likes you. I mean he likes you more than the others. Not that he isn’t grateful to all of you, but he likes you the most.”

“I don’t understand that at all.”

“He says you say what you think and you wouldn’t let him win at this”, Tom said, nodding at the board.

“I don’t beat him anyway.”

“You will, though.... You know he uses the game to keep watch on himself.”

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“No?” “He doesn’t care about the Kaposi’s and the rest of it. Well, that’s not right: he does care. He just doesn’t want to go off his head as well. He couldn’t stand that. He’s afraid he won’t be able to think.”

“Oh, I see.”

“He’s got a nickname for you.”

“Does he?”

“Yeh.” “Are you going to tell me?”

“Guess.”

“I’ve no idea.”

“The black king. That’s what he calls you. Silly, isn’t it?”

“I hope so.”

“Well, you’re not doing too well today. I’m going to win, I think.”

“It does look bad for me.”

“So why are you doing this?”

“Helping, here?” I asked, to make sure I would answer the right question.

“Of course.”

“Lots of reasons. Just to help, for a start. Then, so he will know he’s not alone, I suppose.”

“What about you, though? What do you get out of it? And if you say ‘satisfaction’ I’ll hit you.”

“No … To tell the truth I don’t know yet.”

From its first days everyone thought that summer would be particularly hot and mulled over hot synonyms like an incantation. Scorch, blaze, and the rest.

A week after the birthday party another heat began. Mary telephoned one morning and waited at the gate for me as I ran down the street. We may have committed some indiscretion, or maybe one of the family had trusted a neighbour. It was just as likely that gossip and guessing had, for once, converged on the truth and spread like fire to the surrounding houses. On the footpath a great slash of red paint spilt from a can underlined the four letters of my neighbour’s new name, written with a thick, bold brush. I was astonished and Mary was crying. “That’s not all”, she said.

“What else!? What else could the bastards do?”

She took one hand from her face to point at the letterbox which was filthy with excreta.

“Does he know?”

“He can see from the window, John.”

“Please, you go inside, Mary. I’ll get rid of this.”

For a moment I thought of cleaning it, but really I wanted to kill, and might have except there was no one to lay my hands on. I settled for a sledgehammer, taking a swing at the box to knock it off the fence in one blow. There was nothing to do about the paint. Hosing down turned the red slash into a red blur, but the word was already dry and could not be moved. It stood screaming on the footpath for days and was never removed entirely.

There were more important things to worry about. Our friend joked about the shit. “You know, you are too quick to condemn my neighbours. It could have been a very agile dog, or that big cat a couple of doors down.” Or he joked about my sledgehammer. “I’m lucky I still have a house the way you people behave!” I think it was resignation that released this humour on us, turning everything terrible into laughter. Weeks of humid, breathless heat, which I enjoyed, suffocated him. “It’s all right”, he said, “this heat now and no hell later will suit me fine.” He flatly refused to return to hospital. No one there would understand his new jokes.

He died the night of the promised change, just to show that life really can imitate the weather.

Tom tells me that Liz made all the calls when it was clear he would not last. Tom knocked on my door and said I’d better come. He didn’t need to say why. I knew it would be like that.

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Large, cool drops of rain crashed on my glasses and shirt as we ran down the street. The house, which had been sealed tight against the heat all day, was uncomfortably still and warm. As soon as he entered, Tom cried out, “Oh, for god’s sake, open the bloody windows!” It was dark, too, and I stood, sweating, in the shadows of the hall that led to the bedroom. Now, I thought, if only the doctor and nurse will not come. I wished for them not to come so there would be no more injections and orders, no more parody of medicine. I stood outside his door and wished he would die. Liz went from window to window, almost in a panic, as though opening them would save him. I hoped and wished and knew that nothing would.

“Richard, it’s me — Tom. Do you want anything? Johnno’s here. Do you want to see him?”

Tom put out his arm to call me into the room. It was Tom calling, though, not the man in the bed. Except that his ribs moved under the single, light sheet, he was dead already, and I doubt he could hear Tom spluttering about a game and that the black king was here.

I sat behind Tom on Richard’s bed. I put my arms around Tom’s arms and chest to stop his fidgeting and prodding. While he sobbed, I closed my eyes and wished again.

Then, while the house cooled, before the others came, there were no more questions, only answers.

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A Tall Unmarried House-buyer Between the ages of 17 and 21 he was devout, and considered taking holy orders. Before that were several years of recreational drugs, “Grass mainly”, and afterwards, the steep decline of devotion into the present. He says there is a theory in psychology that the image of ourselves is moulded slowly by the way in which other people treat us and react to us; and also that he always thinks of himself as ordinary. But he looks down on everyone, talks slowly, because no one can look him straight in the eye. Taking no notice of his family, except to telephone every now and then to keep in touch, he is a little surprised and frightened that his lover finds them so disagreeable. The step-father sells sunglasses. The mother is a social worker. The step-father can spend hours giving instruction in the new technology of his product and the vagaries of the sales market; there is no division between the life of his work and his private life. During business hours mother discusses the horrible details of a child’s abuse, knowing that the world is painful and dirty and, for some people, without hope, and after hours switches on a Pentecostal fervour in which she imagines her son surrounded by religious ornament. She writes a letter saying what she would like for her birthday: “a cassette recording of you reading the book of Isaiah.” The son refuses, with a knowing laugh his mother cannot hear.

“They’re all weird.” “You’re the only normal one, are you?” “Yep.” There are very few people he does not like, finding something likeable in all of his fellow workers except one. His politics and hobbies are social. Hard-working member of the local branch of a democratic and socialist party, he brews beer at home. Examples of it turn up at parties, restaurants, the homes of friends, anywhere it is acceptable to be seen with a bottle, and sometimes places where it is not. Hobby, politics, and the local cricket team, define him as a social being. Three thousand miles from his parents’ home, even further from most of what he remembers, he has fitted comfortably into an unknown city, as if no place would be alien so long as there were people in it. Distance and change should have made him wary. He remains unmarried, but lives with a small and quirky woman. In their bedroom is a framed reproduction of a painting by Bonard. It shows a girl inelegantly lumped, face down, in a messy bed, sleeping. The painter must have known her very well, and must have loved her, less in the way some artists love each last painting than how, for others, there could be no limit of attention, or paint, lavished on unguarded poses. The girl isn’t always tired, but she does enjoy her sleep. They will buy a house, a study of desuetude, the only kind they can afford; and take the bed with them, and re-paint it.3

3

They did buy a house, and about a year later the relationship ended.

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Man in Loft (Bach, Emerson, Shakespeare, Schopenhauer, Mirabeau, Foucault)

“I have been taught to identify the mad, and to say ‘This person is mad and should be avoided,’ or ‘That person is not like us. He must be mad’ ; though the lesson I have learned, in fact, is that people we wish to avoid are, consequently, mad, or that people who do not choose to be, or cannot be, like us, are mad.” “You have to be schizophrenic to understand what it is like”, he says. “If I were to describe what goes on in my head you’d think it was crazy. When I am thinking it, it is very real.” In our first conversation he tells me “I love music. Classical Music. And pornography. That’s all. Just classical music and pornography.” Inside his flat there are clothes on the floor, along with a lot of dirt. It is not possible to wash yourself clean in the bathroom, though the bath itself is clean. “I clean the bath. The bath is clean”, he says. He plays the guitar, and then the mandolin, and then the banjo, and I notice there is a violin in a case on the floor of the living room. — But he does not get to the violin: suddenly there is no more music and it is time for pornography. “You’ll like this”, he says, as if by affirmation it would be true. A woman whose breasts are clearly too large for her costume gazes through a window. He goes to the record collection and asks, “What would you prefer — Shakespeare or, I know, yes, this will be great, Emerson.” He shakes with excitement. He takes out the spoken word recording of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poems. The woman who was gazing through the window is lying on a sofa, masturbating. “Thy trivial harp will never please Or fill my craving ear; Its chords should ring as blows the breeze.” Yes, Ralph — of course. There is an invisible world. He introduces me to a friend, also schizophrenic, but one who, unlike him, refuses to take his medication. John was a mathematician, and is still brilliant. Now he is Jesus. We sit in a café with Jesus, and I ask “What makes God laugh?” — immediately having to mask my wonder at hearing a precise and reasonable answer. There is a more perfect world than the one in which we live.

Inevitably, he will refer the woman he wants to love, by way of introduction to the disciplined and misogynist world of Arthur Schopenhauer, to a bifurcation of that world into the mundane and the transcendent. In the commonplace part he is only one of many. By a choice which appears to be not entirely conscious he keeps the windows of his flat covered day and night, day after day, and always.

Lonely, only early in the afternoons, when he is tired of practising a difficult piece by Bach, he says to himself, “Now, what shall I do with my penis?” and, in the absence of the woman whom he loves, it is time for pornography. The exceptional part meets the ordinary and, here, anything is possible. He takes the opportunity to improve Shakespeare. Once, in the asylum, he had read that “Such civil war is in my love and hate That I an accessary needs must be To that sweet thief which sourly robs from me.” Years later, in the afternoon, in a nausea induced by less than two milligrams of Cogentine, he remembers “As a necessity my needs must be To that sweet thief which hourly robs me.” Which is taking what from whom? Desire steals a part of everyone. There are moments I feel he is about to say, “The world is my idea”, and he would, as he did the moment the windows were closed and covered, look up at the sky, thinking to fly there, panic, look around him for something to hold on to; or he will, looking down at his feet, believe the world to be just a ball which will stop turning if he stops walking. “You should read Jean Paul’s Selina to see how a mind of the first order tries to deal with what he comes to think nonsensical in a false concept which he does not want to relinquish because he has set his heart upon it, although he is continually troubled by absurdities he cannot Stephen J. Williams

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stomach.” He decides “I cannot love anyone” but has set his heart upon it. One woman tells him, “You sound like a text book. You think too much.” These words come out of the mouths of people who love their own oppression, who have become insensible after having administered to their bodies a sufficient amount of pleasure (tennis once a week, nightly television, cheap but effective wine, a modicum of Faith). You cannot utter such words to a man who has lived in another world, where infamous excesses are committed upon the very person of the prisoner; … vices which the propriety of modern times does not permit us to name. In a word, you cannot say something so stupid to a man who has been mad with Desire . The next time his psychiatrist asks “How are you feeling today?” he gives my reply: “I shall instruct my madness to be proud, For psychiatrists are proud and make their clients stoop.” A small, typed sign is stuck to the door of his flat; it says, “Psychoanalysis: device allowing pigeon to enter but not leave loft.”

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First and Last Words Where words are scarce they are seldom spent in vain, For they breathe truth that breathe their words in pain.

— Richard II, 2.1.7-8

The first time I heard someone speak about AIDS Dennis Altman was warning the audience of a conference that AIDS would become a business, providing employment for professional educators, carers, commentators, researchers, opinionists and authors. At the same conference several people noted the absence of speakers directly affected by the virus.

Later, I spent a short time writing Question and Answer advertisements for the Victorian AIDS Council (Q: Is kissing safe? A: Yes. It’s as simple as that …). I signed, like everyone else, documents (loosely) binding me to an agreement of confidentiality. One night I spoke to a man, antibodypositive, who expressed the opinion the Council’s obsession with confidentiality was at least partly responsible for the crushing vacuum formed by not being able to hear the voices of people with AIDS He acknowledged the good intention of the Council policy to protect him but added the angry footnote, “I don’t want to be protected.” No doubt the policy also exists to keep safe from those who need no protection the ones who do.

The verbal litter of the media’s coverage of AIDS issues has been to some degree corrected by the sensible and compassionate commentary of Altman and a very few others. I waited for a while to hear how creative writers and artists would speak about AIDS, and heard nothing, or so near to nothing as makes no difference. I waited, also, to see in print the record of those personal experiences which only people with AIDS can tell and, again, found almost nothing. It is obvious confidentiality is not the only agent of the silence we are in. I cannot resist the temptation to tell a simple and ineluctable truth … There are too many creative writers. Quite a few of them are gay.

Hardly any of these (I’m being very generous, I think) have bothered to write anything about AIDS. Therefore, gay Australian writers are, on the whole, a bunch of fucking wimps. I feel better having said it.

Ending my own intransigence by seeking to promote the publication of whatever people with AIDS had written I found more disturbing reasons for the stifling climate. Writing requires an effort of concentration and endurance which people with AIDS often find themselves unable to afford. During periods of illness, if there is no one who can be trusted to transcribe a tape recording or to assist with the physical trouble of placing words on a piece of paper, no strength of desire can overcome the fact of physical weakness. — And when the writing is done there is no guarantee it will be published. One journal, written by a man who died of AIDS in 1987, has so far failed to be published because — the editors said — it is not very well written, and too short to stand alone. This failure makes me rigid with anger: considerations of ‘Literature’ and ‘Art’ should prevent the publication of almost everything we read these days.

Do I really need to give reasons for you to read the excerpts from James’s journal which are reproduced here? Perhaps not, but bear with me a while so I can list the most important.

First, James wished to be heard. On 29 July 1987, when it appeared his journal may have been lost, James spoke into a tape recorder recounting the anguish of a person who had been violently gagged.

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“I just cannot believe what’s happened! Yesterday Wendy looked for my journal but couldn’t find it.

She left and Bob rang. He said it was in the drawer. It wasn’t there. In fact it was nowhere and still hasn’t been found today. Yesterday I panicked and felt around, the nurses searched everywhere, people were phoned. It just disappeared from my room.

“I just can’t believe this. I was so upset, I’d lost a part of myself, yet how? How could it just go?

Who would take it? If someone came in, why would they take that? Wouldn’t they take my walkman? What if it got caught up in the linen? Where the hell is it? I felt bad enough before this; I was agitated, angry. I’d just been here so long, felt I couldn’t stand it, was upset. It was all getting to me: the hospital, drips, needles, tests, people in and out, noise—just too much! Then yesterday stretched it so far I’d thought I’d snap, even if they just wanted to take my temp. I didn’t think I could stand even that.”

Second, recording the ordinary facts of his own illness and death, James shows how unnecessary and wasteful ‘good writing’ is: lying requires an effort of will which the very ill are not likely to squander.

Third, I am showing only those parts of the journal which refer to James’s eyes so we can think, as we read, about how lucky we are; and to remind us that, by reading, we can silently agree James’s work was valuable and is not wasted on us.

May 24 My left eye is causing me some concern. Maybe I am worrying too much, as usual. It’s just that I’m scared it’s getting worse. I close my right eye, using only my left and it seems I can only see half of what I should see. I can see directly ahead but not below the centre or to the left side unless I move my eye right around and then I can still only see what I am looking at. So, if I look left I can’t see straight ahead. The same if I look right.

It is scary because it really does seem worse. And if it gets any worse than this it will really affect my day-to-day life. If unable to drive, I’d lose a lot of my independence. No — I just couldn’t stand it …

June 4 Bob told me some strange news yesterday. He said that a Scottish vet had found a vaccine that kills the AIDS virus in monkeys — that there was a vaccine against it, but they hadn’t tried it on humans.

It hit me very hard. Imagine the impact that news like that would have on me. And to make matters worse, we didn’t know any more than that. Could it ever be used on humans? Did it just prevent you from getting AIDS or could it be used on people who already have AIDS? There were no details, other than it worked on monkeys. And monkeys being so similar to man, it created a real possibility of hope.

My head spun with a hundred questions and no answers. Emotionally, I was stuck in limbo. I felt like crying, laughing, yelling, but I couldn’t. Because I didn’t know enough to know how to feel. We didn’t know for sure. But there was hope, a new hope!

Bob heard it on the news, so we thought that more information would be gained on the news that night. I looked at all the evening news shows and there was nothing! Not one mention! I couldn’t understand it. We both couldn’t. By then I was OK and wasn’t really thinking too much about it. I was thrown into such a state that my brain switched off to stop the torment of all these questions without answers.

And my left eye is getting worse. When I use only the left one, the lower right corner is distorted.

So if I look at the TV with the left eye, the bottom corner bends upwards. And I’ve had double vision, too. Before I could just hope it would get better. Now it’s painfully obvious that it won’t.

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But still I don’t think about it if I can help it, which is almost impossible because I use my eyes all the time. I can’t think of ifs and buts and what-ifs, because I don’t really know what’s going on. I only know I see less: this flat, all of a sudden, seems so much darker, and I can’t drive at night and even walking outside at night is very difficult. I could have cried a few times this week, but it just didn’t come out …

June 12 But the hardest part of it is that I am finding it more difficult to do things and if it gets worse then things become even harder. I lose so much independence, constantly in need of help. What about reading and writing? And driving and going where I want to go when I want to go?…

I try too much not to walk into things, so what happens? I walk into things. So I got out of there as quickly as possible and came home …

June 16 Things haven’t improved in the last few days. In fact things have become much worse. Even writing this is most difficult. My eyes have deteriorated in the past week and even more in the past two days.

I’ve also not been feeling very well for most of the past ten days or so, although today I feel good again physically …

Since Sunday my right eye has become fuzzy, making it very hard to read, write and drive …

Today I was wiping the bench and I double checked that it was clear of anything. I moved my arm across and knocked a glass across the room. I even made sure to check. The glass was right under my nose and I couldn’t see it. I can’t see anything down there. Anyone would have seen it. It’s been a pretty lousy few days …

June 25 When they went bad all of a sudden, over just a couple of days, it really scared me. I just hoped and hoped that it wouldn’t keep going the way it was. I guess I could say it’s been the worst few weeks I can remember …

I was convinced I had to feel bad about my eyesight, I mean angry and I should cry and throw things a lot. But now I see where I was going wrong. I wasn’t following how I felt. I was reacting in a way I thought I should, how I’d be expected to react in other people’s eyes.

So I guess Bob was right. The decision not to drive was the acceptance by me of the condition of my eyes …

July 3 I saw my doctor who suggested a new drug I could try if I wanted to. The only thing is it may do nothing. It may improve my eyes and it might have side effects. I said, “Yes, of course, I’ll try it.” I felt I had to try …

And the theatre was so dark! I just had to go very slowly and hang on to Bob. I’ve not had to hold on to someone before and that was hard to cope with too …

I was admitted into hospital for the new drug Phoscarnate4. It is a new drug from Sweden, with no guarantees, but it could improve my eyes. There is a very small chance of some side effects.

Hallucinations, anaemia, headache, epileptic fits, and a few I can’t remember, but really they were such rare occurrences, like 2 or 3%.

4

Foscarnet.

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When I arrived on the ward, no one knew exactly why I was there. Oh, but I did of course!

Someone said was my DHPG 5 ready? And I had to tell them, “No, I don’t have that any more.”

They said I should go to my room and settle in and all will be sorted out. I asked the nurse who took me, “Why am I here?” She said the doctor probably wanted to keep an eye on the cough I’d been telling them about for six weeks. I said, two weeks is a long time for a check up, that I was here for a new drug to try on my eyes. Oh, says she, I’ll go and check. Nurse returns: Yes, you are here for that.

Patient, who knows nothing, says: Yes, I had already told you all that! I knew why I was there, no one else did and when I tell them they check, come back and tell me why I’m here. But I’m the patient and they are probably embarrassed because they didn’t know. Oh yeh, they’d also lost my file.

Probably why no one knew what the hell was going on. It was all a bit of a joke, really.

The drug didn’t arrive on Monday. They said Tuesday, but Tuesday comes and the drug didn’t.

They now say Wednesday! I am handling being in hospital, it is a nice rest, I eat well when I can (I’ve seen the dietician about eating only what I want) and it’s warm. But I was getting agitated about being there for no apparent reason. But as always there was a reason for me, I thought, and the reason for this also caused me more worry and agitation.

Thursday — no drug.

It’s Friday, here I am and so is the drug. I am apprehensive, hopeful, determined, a bit unsure of its effects, all sorts of feelings. They want me now, to plug it in!

July 16 Today they told me the heart problem was probably due to the same CMV in my eyes. I seem to get worse: like 39° temps, not being able to eat, vomiting.

I was on the Phoscarnate for one week, and they took me off because it was affecting my renal functions and they’ve put me back on the DHPG with a much higher dose. What’s going to happen in the next few weeks? Well, nobody knows. The only good thing that came out of it was that I might be home in a week.

July 20 Lunch was lovely but the whole experience wasn’t easy. Last time I was in that restaurant, I could see the beautiful room. This time I couldn’t see any of it, and Bob had to cut my food. I’ll have to adjust.

I did something so stupid, walking from the cinema to the restaurant. I put in more of a limp than I already had, because I was holding on to Bob and I didn’t want people to think we were ‘together.’ Afraid of comments!! I felt a right idiot afterwards, when I thought about it. People that I couldn’t see and never would again, who cares about them? I shouldn’t, but today, well, I just got silly for a while …

July 21 The eye specialist came and said the number of white spots in my eyes had decreased. Good news for once. But he was concerned about my central vision: that the white area could spread to the centre, even though the number of spots is decreasing. That danger has always been there anyway.

They just will NOT grow there, they just CANNOT and I’m bloody determined they won’t. The main thing was that they decreased — so why should they grow any more? They will not! They will

5

A cytotoxic drug administered by drip. Nursing staff take special precautions to ensure that it does not come into contact with their skin; a performance which AIDS patients find either frightening or amusing, or both, considering that it is to be put in their bloodstream.

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GO! He left his report, the doctors are keeping me on medication. It seems obvious to me, seeing as it’s helping …

August 18 I guess I couldn’t be bothered, I wasn’t interested and I just can’t write any more. That’s why it’s on tape and Wendy is copying it into the journal, which I guess is basically the same thing. I’m not writing it, but they’re still my thoughts and words …

August 10 (By this time James was using a tape-machine to record his thoughts. The tapes were later transcribed to the journal by Bob and Wendy. In these tape recordings James often recalls the events of previous weeks, explaining the confusion of chronology in these entries.)

But yeh, I guess I’ve got something to complain about: who wouldn’t get angry, depressed, complain if their eyesight were just slowly going and if their life-span wasn’t expected to be long?

August 12 I was talking to my doctor, the day before, and I was telling her that I was thinking of getting a white stick, so if I was ever walking through the streets with someone and I bumped into someone, they would know that it’s because I can’t see very well. Maybe I wouldn’t get abused and if I had the stick people would move away and let me through. I’d have someone with me, of course, I couldn’t do it by myself.

She said that was a good idea and later that day the physiotherapist comes in and gives me a walking stick! I was quite annoyed really, that they just told this girl, “Give him that”, and hadn’t bothered to talk to me about it. I was just a patient. So then I thought, what the hell … If nothing else it might be a nice prop. But that’s just it. I was talking to my doctor about a white cane and somehow or other it ended up being a walking stick.

August 14 I believe my eyes are getting worse, I don’t think it’s working so why have the drug. It seems harder sometimes, to have my eyes deteriorating than it would be if I just couldn’t see. I would just have to get used to it, then and there and get on with it! But then I can see things close to me, like an ashtray, cigarettes or a cup: if I look around on the coffee table, I can find them. I should be grateful that I can still do those things and see. But I’m so fed up and angry, I’ve been so depressed. It’s no wonder I want to forget the drug, forget the hospital …

August 22 I think it’s going to be OK. I think everything is just going to be OK. I feel good and I feel less weight on my shoulders. I feel better within myself. It’s going to be OK!

• At this point the tape-machine James was using jammed.

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It is, I think, wrong to assume James’s last, hopeful remarks are an hallucination. Having, in the end, more conviction than most in the truth of his unusual spiritual beliefs, he refers to the future of his soul, not his body.

Wendy said of James’s last month that “Slowly, he retreated into his inner world and conversation with others became more limited. However, he would still assure us that he knew what was happening, even when he seemed to be asleep.”

A few days before his death, having already survived several weeks longer than some people expected he would, James appeared one night in Wendy’s dreaming. He was healthy, beautiful, and clear — the picture of his former and future self. In the dream they worked together in a field planting onions.

James died in his sleep on the evening of 18 September 1987.

1989

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Uncle Stranger They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you.

— Philip Larkin

•This story belongs to another writer, a man who kept a computer record of many months he spent on the ‘care team’ that provided support services to a man with AIDS. The original document is about 30,000 words in length. It is partly a straightforward diary, but several of the long entries are in fact letters written to another person, also a member of the care team, who wished to remain informed of the team’s efforts after he left to work overseas.

P----- enters the room. She’s a big woman, a bit fat, and she dresses like a tart. She married young, probably because that is what young people with no education and no future tend to do. Her parents didn’t do good by her, and she is not going to do any better for her kids. At least that’s the way it looks like turning out.

She has two kids, and her husband has AIDS. The husband is in the next room, gasping for air, coughing up blood. He will die soon enough, and she will still have two kids to take care of.

Naturally she’s very pissed off, and very scared.

The husband got infected by the virus that causes AIDS when he was fucked by a man in a sauna.

He liked having sex with men and women, but will only admit to liking sex with women. The men who fucked him were faggots, worthless. He’s a married man, after all, quite normal, and not one of §Support services of the AIDS Council are divided into them. Married men are not supposed to get AIDS. geographical ‘area groups’ relative to the city — North, That is what is happening. Naturally he’s very South and so on. Larger groups are subdivided again, to pissed off about this, and he’s very scared. He make meetings and organisation manageable. knows he is going to die. Though he has heard there are people who are ‘living with AIDS’, it feels like he is dying.

P----- enters the room. The place is a mess, though it’s not quite as bad inside as it is outside.

(Someone has been pissing in the elevator.) Eve was just showing me a book that Douglas left for her to read. Eve looks up at her mother and knows that it is all going to start again. I feel like I should be able to explain to her what is really happening. “Your mother is angry and has to blame someone. I will be here for you.” But I am not sure I will be here for her; not always, anyway. — Next week, certainly. For a while yet. But not always.

There she is, though, coming in again to give Eve another serve. Bitch.

“You little bitch! You fucking little bitch! Didn’t I tell you to clean up your stuff out of here?

Can’t you help me at all? What are you trying to do? Kill your father!?”

When I go home I can put on a record, anything by Mozart, and life comes back into balance. In the Commission flats little Eve is still in hell.

Dear Morris,

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I don’t really want to make you feel guilty about having to leave the team as soon as it was established—these things happen—but we are already feeling the strain of not having a co-ordinator who can co-ordinate us. The team they put together for M----- is already breaking up. At the area meeting § tonight several new people who had just finished basic training were told they would be needed to stand in. M-----’s wife is very choosy. No gays, she says, which makes it a bit difficult.

Who can remember everything they've done with their dick in the last five years? Does just thinking about something bent count? Lord, she is hard. She hasn’t got her way completely. Two of the team are gay, and four straight.

Another briefing and discussion on Saturday. M-----’s wife is very strong-willed and wants to be in control of everything. Fair enough, perhaps. Her house. Her family. Her husband! It is not her death, however, and I am concerned about her always being between the team and M-----. The new co-ordinator, Henry, tells us we're not to become emotionally involved. OK. Heard that advice before. M----- is not the average client. He's married, for starters. Two children. They live in a Carlton Housing Commission place. His eyesight is poor, and this may get worse, of course. Oh, lord, and there is lots else to worry about. I cannot believe some of the things that are happening in that place.

The kids are in a real mess. I cannot believe how little support they are getting. I haven’t quite sorted out what can be done about it.

Though relations with P-----’s mother and sisters seem mostly normal, I’m told that M-----’s mother, who tried to extract a promise never to tell anyone of M-----’s true condition — a promise quickly broken because no one believed it was leukemia anyway — rarely contacts him, and I suppose that there is some conflict there. I gather she has feelings of guilt about M-----’s sight impairment, an odd thing to feel guilty about since it wasn’t her fault. She didn’t like him wearing his thick glasses any more than he likes wearing them. They only get in the way of showing his handsome face. (Actually, it is rather comical to think of M----- in a sauna, with or without his glasses, totally helpless, not knowing what he was grabbing on to!) Is M-----’s father better or worse, learning of the diagnosis and packing his bags, without saying anything, and going bush? He has visited his son once, a big step no doubt, but I know nothing about what happened when they were together.

M----- has two brothers, one an alcoholic in a de facto relationship, and the other openly gay and in no relationship at all (as far as the family knows). Yes, that means it is a family with every known kind — straight, bi, and gay. M----- is candidly admiring of his gay brother, which only makes the hostility to his own one-night stands even less comprehensible.

Deirdre has been off really ill with flu. Douglas has been stricken with it, too, along with half of his Army Reserve mates. Fairfield (as well as other hospitals) is filling up quickly with victims.

Consequently there have been problems providing people for the roster, and I was feeling guilty about being on leave for a week. But P----- is down with flu, as well, apparently not too badly, and she is at home, so I feel all right about taking my time off. She can call if she wants anything, and I know she will. M----- has spent the last few days in Ward 4 being pumped full of Bactrim, and this seems to have warded off his fourth attack of pneumocystis, but I don’t think he is going to survive this winter. The decline is becoming obvious. He has lost several kilos in the last three weeks and has decided to cease all medication. It can’t be long now. At least, I hope it won’t be long. I don’t feel guilty about saying that any more …

Love, Jim P----- telephones Deirdre to ask if she will go out with her to the pub in Rathdowne Street.

Deirdre hasn’t the heart to say no, though she loathes the place. P----- telephones Deirdre to ask if she will take her and Eve to the market Saturday mornings or to other places for shopping on Friday nights. P----- telephones Deirdre just to talk, for an hour or more, at least weekly. Same with me. I'll get a call late at night asking me to come over. It's an hour-long return trip for me. I am expected to Stephen J. Williams

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be present when M-----’s brother is told the truth about the illness. I don’t know whether to think this is fair or not: since my brother died of AIDS, and they know this, I suppose they felt it would be easier with me around. I am counsellor and surrogate father as well as home help. The next day I take Eve to the dentist and then to school. The next day I am several hours with M----- after his father had rung to interrogate him about his sexual preferences.

Dear Morris, … your holiday. Deirdre is desperately in need of one. Those of us remaining are all headed that way, but Deirdre especially because, as you know, she was involved with ‘Themselves’ (as we have come to call them) since long before the team was formed. Marg and Chris (I think they joined the team after you — did you meet them?) want to come, too, if only to escape M-----’s silences — it is really remarkable how little he reveals of himself, especially now, when you’d think that he would stand to lose nothing and gain everything from opening up a bit. It is really a kind of torture.

— For us. I’ve just had the thought that maybe he is coping a lot better than we are. Maybe he’s the only one who’s really got a handle on the situation? We’ll never know if we’re waiting for him to tell us.

Though Douglas has only visited Themselves a couple of afternoons, he, too, has started to become worried about the way P----- is treating the kids. I can’t sort that out now — I’m too tired.

Deirdre and I are each spending about 20 hours a week with Themselves, and that’s plain bloody ridiculous. The area group leader says there is no one else available to lighten the load.

Thinking about joining you.

Love, •Discussions long after these events led members of Jim this care team to draw up a list of recommendations, the first of which was that there should always be a “Hello, Henry. This is Jim. How are you?” contract drawn up between the AIDS Council and the “Well, thanks. Busy, of course. And you?” client (or client group—all those significant others “Got a few hours to spare? It would take that attached to the client and with whom the team may long.” have to relate in the care situation). This contract “I know it’s been hard. We’re all… we’re all should be drawn up at initial assessment and should be that way now.” based on assessment of the client’s and client group’s “We could really do with an extra person on the needs and a realistic appraisal of how many of those needs can be met by the care team. The contract team. A few have dropped out, you know — would also serve to protect the team from demands effectively dropped out. They’re just not turning they could not anticipate. up to do their bit.”

“I’m sorry, Jim, there isn’t anyone else at the moment, but I know your problems. Hold on for a while longer and we’ll see what we can do.”

“You know Adam has left the team, too, after his mother died. I don’t blame him for that. He wasn’t up to it any more.”

“Yes. I heard. It’s sad.”

“P----- is calling on Deirdre and me all the time for all sorts of things. The family is really up the creek.”

“P----- isn’t your client. You have to get that straight with her. M----- is your client, not the whole family.”

“Oh, come on Henry! You’ve got to be kidding. You know this is a special case … ” “Look, what do you expect me to do? You’re on the team. I’ve warned you before not to get involved emotionally. I’ve got seven teams to co-ordinate and they’ve all got problems.”

“You have not given us any such warning, and what sort of remark is that, anyway? How can we not get involved?”

“You’re not taking on the whole family!”

“How do we manage that?”

“I’ve been telling you since last November that…”

“November? I’ve been on the team since January twenty-eight. What’s this about November?”

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“I’ve been telling you since … ” “Who have you been telling? I’m sorry, but I •The AIDS Council does not restrict its support programme to gay men. Increasingly, support teams don’t remember hearing anything from you, unless are needed for clients who are bisexual, or married, or we count what is said about the team behind our intravenous drug users, or teenagers (at around the backs at area group meetings.” same time as these events took place, the AIDS “Nothing is said behind your backs. You’re Council’s newest client was a twelve year old child). supposed to be at those meetings.”

•However, the care team (the two members of it the “Deirdre and I have got no time or energy for all client’s family allowed to provide assistance to them) came to believe that the AIDS Council’s attitude to the meetings when we’re with our clients all the families of clients was inadequate because it was week…” based on the model of clients as gay men. That is, it is “Client.” clearly easier to maintain the view that a team supports “What?” a single person with AIDS when the client has no wife “Client. You have one client.” and children.

“We’ve got four clients, two adults and two children, and the rest of their family.”

“You’ve got one client.”

“Oh, this is ridiculous. We’re not getting anywhere.”

Dear Morris, … I don’t think I like what the whole episode told me about myself. I like even less what it told me about some other people. It’s done now, anyway.

Both Adam and Henry have resigned. Did you hear what happened to Adam? It’s terrible. He went to one of those weekend things for team leaders—rest, recreation, and getting stuff off your chest about how things get done, or don’t get done, as the case may be—and had a good time. When he got back home he found his mother dead. We have all tried to console him. He can’t stay any •Several months after M-----’s death Jim was amazed, longer. reading his own journal, at how positively he reacted to There’s something about this, about the way it Henry’s initiative. — But his lasting impression was happened, that hits at the rest of us. Deirdre asks bitter: “Though the AIDS Council and the area group me whether any of us still have a life of our own, were notified within hours of M-----’s death, no one has whether we realise that our own lives have to keep yet called anyone on the care team to ask if we are OK. going on—knowing that the answer to both The neglect of the carers has been monumental.” questions is no.

Now I am going to have to swallow at least a few of the bad things I’ve said about Henry, because before he left he arranged with the new area co-ordinator to have a new person — Mark — put on the team as a ‘carer for the carers’. This is a good move …

Anyway, I hope you get the feeling that I think this is great. I’ve spoken to Mark several times already and feel a lot better for it …

I have only gotten half way through a planned two weeks’ rest from the team, and the urge to return has beaten me. Something to do with the weather. Violent gales, freezing mornings and rain all week. P----- has the flu (so do two of the team) and her children are home. I have put a casserole in the oven and called to say I will be over to take the children to a movie for the afternoon. No protest. They are always in need of relief. … picking up my report a week later, M----- has deteriorated quickly under the influence of a worsening chest infection. He slept through my visit, workmen banging in the flat above him, and the television on full blast. Nothing seemed to wake him except his own coughing, and perhaps he can do that in his sleep.

I feel we should be keeping a team journal that we could pass on to the Council’s training people.

The training of new volunteers is going to have to come to terms with the increasing number of married people in need of care. You learn a lot in the support training, but almost nothing about the kinds of things we have had to do — which is, basically, how to keep a family together and safe when it is suddenly without a father. … They’re on the eleventh floor up there. All the balconies have been Stephen J. Williams

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closed up to stop people jumping off and messing the footpath. When I arrived I discovered one of the glass panes of the balcony outside Themselves’ flat had been smashed, and there were slivers of glass almost the entire length of the walkway. It had been left like that for two days. I cleaned it up.

I really get sick and tired of being told that this has nothing to do with caring for the patient. It has everything to do with him …

Jim •Entries in the journal are not dated. For the period between August 1988 and January 1989 there are no entries at all, an effect of the deepening sense of crisis in the team and distrust of the AIDS Council’s ability to act on information being presented to it. •In particular there was the question of what to do about P-----’s abuse of Eve. There seem to have been several reasons for the AIDS Council’s intransigence on this matter. First, those on the team and some people in the area group differed on the question of whether care for the client’s family was part of the care of the client. Jim was told at one meeting of the area group, “I’m sick to death hearing about P-----. What about the client? He’s the one that’s dying.” Secondly, professional psychological support from the AIDS Council was completely inadequate. Jim’s requests for help had no effect; some of his letters to Morris are nothing more than catalogues of unreturned telephone calls and cancelled meetings.

Thirdly, there was the problem of confidentiality. Jim and Deirdre seriously considered reporting the case to the Child Protection Unit of Community Services, but knew that if they did this they would have to resign from the team and from the AIDS Council. •And there was P----- herself, a person whose largeness of character, vulgarity, sexuality, strengths and weaknesses, mocked the idea that care services might be delivered to her husband without in every way referring to her. It is remarkable how little of M----- and how much of P----- there is in the journal, and how ill-prepared the team was to deal with husband and wife—which is clearly what was needed. •Talking about P-----, Jim referred constantly to the ‘women’s issues’ that the AIDS Council, and the community, failed to acknowledge. “Who does a ‘respectable woman in the suburbs’ have to turn to when her husband contracts AIDS? A gay man has the gay community. A woman whose husband gets the virus in a ‘respectable’ way — through transfusion — isn’t so isolated.” If Jim’s diary is sometimes cruel in its depiction of P-----, it should be remembered that he understood and acknowledged, before everyone else, how much she cared for her husband. •The excerpts that follow show something of P-----’s urgent, and normal, need of love.

… P----- and M----- first met Hans in hospital when M----- was in there for a dose of Bactrim and rest and Hans was visiting his lover. Hans’s lover has since died. Hans is very handsome and fit and tall and blue-eyed, oozing sexuality. P----- is very attracted to him, and cannot hide the fact (not that she wants to), even from her husband. I can see the reason for the animal attraction, but don’t know why P----- falls for men whose preferences do not favour her more clearly. What is she looking for? M----- is naturally very angry with P-----’s performance with Hans; or perhaps it is straightforward jealousy? … M----- is feeling well enough to go out, so Deirdre and I drive the three of them, M-----, P----- and Hans, to a pub where there’s a band playing. Deirdre and I leave to go off by ourselves, finding somewhere quiet to get pissed (which I believe we are doing more and more of these days!). After a couple of hours we’re quite happy and decide to go back to see how the others are getting on. P-----’s abuse of Deirdre is astonishing. “Who do you think you are, jumping on Jim without telling me?!” She wants to know everything everyone is doing, with whom, when, and how often; and she asks me straight out, later, whether Deirdre and I are having “an affair”. “You’re guessing. Anyway, no.” Before we leave, P----- tells me she is in love with Hans. … I have given Eve many children’s books unused by my children for a long time. No one will read with her except team members. P----- interrupts the reading continually. I will not stop until I have finished the sentence I am in. She doesn’t like this … There is a nut missing on Eve’s little bike, and I point this out to P-----, saying that I will fix it tomorrow. “She’s a little bitch. She does it on purpose, you know.” “I don’t think so. It’s not her fault, I’m sure.” “You shit of a child.” … P----- told me this afternoon that she can feel something moving in her uterus. “Something is kicking or moving down there!” She also says that she’s been on the pill during Hans’s visit, in order to be period-free.

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… Hans has found a ‘new love’, a new man in his life. The penny dropped on P----- the other night when Hans was over for dinner. She rang Deirdre this morning, miserable, depressed. “I dinn’t ask for all this. I don’ need this trouble as well.” I went over this evening with a bottle and tried to cheer her. M----- is being difficult and short with everyone, but especially with P-----. … Themselves have gone on a holiday to visit •Both children stayed with relatives during this time.

When P----- and M----- returned, the children were not Hans in Adelaide. Isn’t this amazing?! M----- took collected immediately, despite their boy’s plea of incredible doses of Bactrim and other stuff to homesickness. suppress coughing, in preparation for the trip.

P----- returned with hideous souvenirs for Deirdre and me, things that I suspect were the produce of a sheltered workshop. “They’re lovely!” we said in unison, smiling. … P----- has been on a diet, lost quite a bit of weight and is beginning to look quite attractive (if you are attracted to that sort). … P----- and Hans had a great row when she discovered blood on his sheets (from his thrashing and heaving with the new man the previous night). … What a family. Just think of the men in it, on both sides. P-----’s brother has been drinking pretty well non-stop since he heard M-----’s diagnosis. Is it the men who are so pathetic? Is it the women? What is it about the women, on both M-----’s side and on P-----’s side, that attracts them to such hopeless men? … “You’ll ’ave to stay a day or two more. I’m really too stuffed to go an get you. Your father an I will still look the same when you get back ’ere. Don’t worry!” … “I know I told you we dinn’t do anything but that wasn’t true. I did ’ave my way with Hans when I was there. I know what you’re goin’ to ask—yes, he definitely did wear a condom, though I don’ know how he got it on because he’s got the biggest dick I’ve ever seen on a white man. I’m no longer in love with him. No. I’m not in love with him. I’m over that, I really am. But I still love him, sort of. —You know what I mean. You can’t just have no feelings at all. But I’m not ‘in love’ with him any more. I’m sure of it.” … Deirdre had dinner with Themselves last night. Dinner and everything else. When she got home she called me. She is very worried about Eve and could not stop crying as she told me of what must be counted as an assault. P----- strikes like a snake at the child, so quickly there is no chance to beg for moderation. One second Eve is sitting quietly beside Deirdre, the next Eve’s chair is balancing on two legs, about to fall backwards to the floor. Deirdre’s hands are occupied with knife and fork, and her mouth open, as Eve crashes. There is no sound for a few seconds before the crying starts. Eve picks herself up, looks at her mother, and says, “I hate you.” War being declared, the troops mobilise. M----- gets up from the table, muttering to himself, goes into the bedroom.

Deirdre wonders how he has suddenly got the energy to hobble so quickly. He comes back with a brush in his hand. “You can’t speak to yer mother like that!” She dodges him in the living room but gets caught in the bedroom.

“I’ve seen M----- use a piece of wood.”

“Jim, we have to do something, quickly.”

•During a period of four months Deirdre and Jim arranged meetings, made telephone calls, and had counselling sessions with AIDS Council psychologists. They got their hearing, eventually, and the message about the physical and emotional abuse of Eve was understood. Nothing happened. P----was partly to blame: she broke appointments easily and intentionally, knowing that giving a psychologist access to the children was a danger to herself. Independent family therapists negotiated with the AIDS Council to take over the case until they were assured by the Council that it would take some action itself; but again the Council failed to deal with the situation assertively. Deirdre and Jim were interviewed by the Child Protection Unit of Community Services and sought the Unit’s advice. The Unit encouraged Deirdre and Jim to make an official report immediately. On the same day, still considering what they would do, Deirdre and Jim spoke again with an AIDS Council Support Services Officer and mentioned their interview with Community Services: the AIDS Council was forced to act. •Deirdre and Jim were not alone in

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thinking action came far too late. One person, aware of the difficulties they had experienced, later resigned from the AIDS Council and officially reported the family.

Dear Morris, … You know the routine. It was all a plot against her. The kids have nits. I took charge, told her to go up to Lygon Street to buy some Quellada and combs. While she was out I stripped the beds and started the first four or five washing-machine loads. Everything. Bedding, shirts, towels, dressing gowns. I hung all the pillows, blankets and doonas in that concrete room they have at the flats.

There is not much sun in there, though, and I decided to take a lot of stuff home with me to give them a proper airing. While P----- was out, her mother volunteered the view that she would “dump” the kids as soon as M----- died. Apparently the family has discussed it and P-----’s sisters believe this is what she will do. Betty asked me what I thought would happen. I had to admit the same thoughts had crossed my mind. We spent four or five hours delousing the flat and the children.

Marg, our wonderful, absent team leader, returned with a vengeance and attempted to organise Deirdre and me. M----- couldn’t stand the sight of her, and P----- rang the area co-ordinator to ask that she be removed from the team, suggesting that someone else—anyone, straight or gay!—be got to take her place. So, Marg’s gone.

This will leave Deirdre and me in a worse situation, but we are learning to say no. I have just declined to spend five or six hours minding M----- at the flat on Friday while P----- goes to bingo.

Deirdre is doing the same. … and the trials of the hospital visits continue. Got M----- in the car and then went back to get the script from Dr Murray (I think you know him — he’s a good friend) and an appointment for blood tests next week. As I turned to say goodbye, Murray stretched out his arm for what was to be, I thought, a handshake. Instead, I got an enormous bear-hug. M----- was observing from the car, and when I got back to him he said, “He’s a homosexual, you know. You’ll be all right so long as you don’t take your pants down.” EEEEKKK! … M-----’s back is extremely painful and he is definitely showing signs of an impending crisis — perhaps within the next couple of months. He’s started coughing again during the night and the candida is flaring up again. He is always cold. Even on mild days he is in his room with blankets and a heater, shivering!

Love, Jim Sad today. It’s my twenty-second wedding anniversary and, at seven in the evening, I’m home alone. The kids have gone out to party and Elizabeth is in the Howqua Valley, walking with friends.

That’s it, I suppose.

Dear Morris, … undoubtedly flattered that she is still attractive to men. We all need our egos stroked in this way and it is important to her in her situation. P----- seems to be saying to Deirdre and me (but not to Douglas), “I need a regular sex-life but I really want it in a permanent and stable relationship.”

And why not? The men she chooses, though — remember Hans!? We have a strong sense of entering the stage where we have to help her prepare for the post-M----- days. That’s what Deirdre and I are currently trying to do. I can only hope that we are on the right track. She is certainly more forthcoming about her feelings, hopes and despairs. (But I wish she’d get some make-up and grooming advice to help her look less like a tart!) … movie about a man emotionally dead but rediscovering himself at the end of an eighteen-year marriage — a bit close to the bone for me. I should have gone to see a porno film instead.

P----- has just rung to give me all the amazing details of her relationship with yet another bloke, this time a Greek trucker. She insists that she is “not doin anythin — a bit a neckin, an none a the inout.” She says she is improving, and enjoying the limited physical contact.

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Every visit and phone call she mentions sex and what it will be like after M----- is gone (in a sort of testing-the-water way). Maybe she is using us to give herself permission to be herself? The atmosphere is heavy with sex and sexuality in this team — always has been. Why? And why not?

When we go over to visit Themselves, M----- is rugged up in exactly the same position he was in when we left him a few days before. He asks where we have been and then listens to the boring details of what we have been doing without uttering any further comment. I watch him as I talk.

The eyelids begin to close, as though he is falling asleep. He coughs up some deep yellow muck — and his eyes are open again. I continue talking. At these times I wonder whether he will, one day, just die in front of me, quietly, unnoticed, while I describe my groceries.

I took M----- to the hospital for a blood test and checkup. He has no T-cells left at all. He asked for “Morphine, poison or something” to relieve the pain. On the way home I broach the subject that has been on all our minds, the funeral arrangements, asking him what he would like to happen. He shrugs it off, saying “No fucking priests. Ask P----- about it.”

I bought Themselves some new pillows, as instructed, and took the receipt to the AIDS Council, where I was told the promised refund would take a few weeks — glad I’m not on the dole and desperately in need of money! Themselves were no more thankful. The covers were ripped off and the pillows put on the bed, without a word. Feeling miffed, after being asked how much they cost, that I hadn’t been thanked for getting the bloody things, I took one out to M----- for his approval.

“It’s only a bloody pillow, isn’t it?” he snarled. Herself was sipping a tea I had poured her. “Jesus bloody Christ! What’ve ya done with the tea? Dinn’t ya scrub the pot out? I haven’t used it fer days — the bags were probly mouldy!” Feeling seriously used, abused, misused et cetera, I made her another cup of tea (tea bag in a cup this time). — And then I cleaned the pot. … Understand that I am not paranoid; it’s just they’re all out to get me! I’ve a raging dose of thrush or tinea or something — down there. I’ll screw Deirdre’s neck, as soon as I stop scratching.

Am I boring you terribly with all this? Mmmm. Thought so. Yesterday P----- predicted that it would all be over in a week. Wife’s intuition, maybe.

Love, Jim The phone rang at half past three in the •Jim wrote in the margin, “And for nearly two years they had, mostly, disappeared, leaving the team as morning. Betty told me that M----- had “passed ‘substitute family’.” away” four hours before. I was not needed. The body had been removed and the kids were still asleep. The family were all together and “in charge”.

Don’t come over. “Ring before you come, to see if it’s convenient.” The family closed ranks as it never had before.

At four o’clock, after making some tea and toast, sitting in the kitchen, it was still dark outside. I telephoned Deirdre (it was her birthday) and Douglas.

Dear Morris, Thank you for your help and all your encouraging comments. You don’t know how helpful it has been to be able to write these letters to you. Writing is not enough — to write to someone is important. God knows the team has not had help from any of those who should have given it. There are more grievances, as you might have guessed, and much anger. I will take my time.

Though the AIDS Council was informed of •It was five weeks before the AIDS Council contacted the team, and a further three weeks before a meeting M-----’s death within hours, weeks have passed and was arranged between team members and a counsellor we have not heard a word from them. We all feel for ‘debriefing’. abandoned and adrift. I could kill.

I went to a florist in Fitzroy to arrange flowers from the team. After writing the cards, the nice old queen who runs the place looked at my name, then my face, and said that he knew my brother so there would be a discount. I left quickly, went and sat in the car and cried like a baby.

When I visited P----- she was red-eyed and talkative. “Oh, Jim, it was terrible. Jus’ terrible. ’E ’ad these awful seizures an ’is eyes rolled up so there wuz nothin but white there an I dinn’t know what Stephen J. Williams

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to do. I jus’ dinn’t know. I called the Nursin Serfice after the secon one an all they did when they did come was tell me it was jus’ the fuckin medication an that was it. That’s it. That’s all ’e said. An ’e started to give ’im a shave an a wash to make ’im comfy but ’e looked up an said if they fuckin moved ’im again ’e’d punch ’em. There was nothin to do, really. ’E ’ad anuffer seizure, almos’ jumpin, ’is eyes went again, all white, so that even the bloody nurse was frighted out’f ’is fuckin wits. The useless thing left soon enough an I made a cuppa tea. … I wen’ back inta the room an ’e lifted ’is ’and as if askin me to do somethin for him. I got there. I jus’ got there an had ’is head in me hands an ’e sighed an that was it. That’s all. I spent some time with ’im alone, thinking. An after a while I called the nurse back and we dressed ’im in ’is suit with a shirt an tie an called the funeral parlour. The kids were asleep. Slept through all of it. It was quiet an the nurse dinn’t say anythin. I called mum, of course. She’s been really wonderful, ya know. An she came an sat with me while we waited. Then they jus’ took ’im out. I dinn’t wanna wake the kids. That’s all … ” Deirdre was mad, having also been told she should call before she went over, to make sure it was ‘convenient’. “Fuck them, Jim. It’s never been bloody convenient! We’ve been there all along while the family just ran for cover.” We decided to go together, defying anyone to ask us to leave. The day before the funeral we arrived unannounced, with quiche, pie and flowers, which had the effect of thawing the icy stares we got from mother and sisters. — After all this time, to be less welcome than a pie!

The next day I was up at quarter past five in the morning, unable to sleep. I worked in the garden for a couple of hours, emptying the compost bin on my vegetables.

Later in the morning Deirdre, Douglas and I met for a drink before going to the service. A lump in the throat when I saw the children and the coffin. P----- was tearful. During the service the priest mentioned that P----- wanted the nurses thanked by name. When no mention was made of the team Deirdre turned to me and said, “I want to go.” “No”, I said, as I held her arm, “he hasn’t mentioned the doctors either, or the home help, or the health aide … ” On the way to the cemetery Marg and Douglas discussed the costs of male prostitutes, and the risks, and whether the boys practised safe sex with ladies from one suburb and gentlemen from another. She pontificates about married men who… “They should be one thing or the other. They should make up their minds. They shouldn’t sit on the fence.” Too many shoulds. I gave her the lecture about the Range of Human Sexual Expression. Will I ever learn? She will not be satisfied until I admit to fucking every married man I know — and a few I don’t —, to interfering with little boys, and to giving M----- the virus. Somewhere, feeling mad, I said, “And what’s wrong with a friendly wank between mates?” I don’t know who was more shocked — Deirdre, Marg or myself!

The question stands. Sod her.

P----- told us, when we got to the cemetery, that the priest had advised her against mentioning the team. “So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her. And again he stooped down, and wrote on the ground. And they which heard it, being convicted by their own conscience, went out one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last: and Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst.” The significance of this story was lost on them, of course. Himself’s family hastened to position themselves at the front of P----- and the children. Insensitive, phoney. The father, who had only seen his son for thirty minutes in the last two years, struck a ‘pillar of the family’ pose. A certain amount of ceremony concealed hostility between the families. Venomous? Once it is written here it is finished. — And thank you for listening.

What a day it was. Later in the afternoon I went to my weekly marriage guidance session — alone. And in the evening there was an area group meeting. Douglas announced his resignation from the AIDS Council. I think I will do the same, but not yet …

I still feel, after all this time, there is a lot unfinished. Gaps needing to be filled. I’m very tired, despite getting lots of sleep. I have not known what more there could be for me to do. We learned how to be part of the family; loving, hating and caring more strongly. I have to learn how to be a Stephen J. Williams

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stranger again. Uncle Stranger. Leave the gaps in the names unfilled. I won’t know what sort of person P----- becomes, how she will write herself. M-----? He was always unfinished. But I’m grateful that, because of him, I met Deirdre, who taught me to be sexually OK again; and because of him I met Marg (sod her), who taught me that I can’t be all things to all people, and I don’t want to be; and because of him I met Morris, who helped me find the spirituality I had lost in my life; and because of him I met Douglas — bless him — who taught me that I can ache for people who are graceless, but people, nevertheless. … Deirdre and I played the message you left on her answering machine several times over for the sheer pleasure of hearing your voice. Truly! We’d had a belly full of Themselves that day and when we returned to Deirdre’s house, with carnal intentions, you were waiting for us. You never imagined that what you said could be so much like music and accompany us in our fore- and after-play …

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The Faithful Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

— Hebrews 11:1

Lenny tells me it would be better if we all believed, Bended knee to the man in the cloud, consulted Bibles For solutions to dispute. Give in, he says, and be faithful.

Joyce, one of them that do believe, moves my head From the night sky, asking me to look beneath my feet.

The questions are up there. The answers are with us.

Eric, the poet, says all those dying fools in need of cure Should write poems, learn to live in their own words.

Don’t be a martyr, Stephen J. You can tell stories. Do it.

Mornings I pass St Paul’s, knowing so much stone cannot Hang on air. The builders who made it want me to go in, submit To dangers of believing the whole structure will not fall. — Come in.

On the day my father was buried the priest read Lazarus: To say that if I stumble it is because I have no light in me And to ask if I am dead, or only sleep. — Do you believe?

I know about the dead. They are all dead and staying That way. I ask them to visit, but they are busy in their graves And in the wind. — We’ve no time, they say. It’s all yours, now. Go.

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Rehearsal Consciousness can never objectify itself into invalid-consciousness or cripple-consciousness…

—Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘The Phenomenology of Perception’

The knife’s rehearsal sharpens phrases that impress And are meant to show the wearer in a state of dress That is his state of mind. If he has an ill body, That is not the Me of his mind’s face which, though resting With the cripple’s body, says “I do not like this body’s face, But would not change it for another.” Or if his days Are only numbers, and hours the decimals of a work Which was meant to fill those days, and money their reward, The cripple and his money sleep and dream together And will not be lonely. Tell the cripple or the handsome man, Then, or the banker or the florist, if they are mad, That their madness is the smallest part of them. Say what is — When it is not — to say what is possible and still true.

Say things that might, or things that can, and still be true.

Tell the chessman that he need not live in fear, And the lover that love lives when the other is not near.

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Middle Life Transcribed for ’Cello My lessons began with ‘A Bass to Heartsease’, The harder work done on grand piano, Comforting and accurate as a mother.

For being even-handed, there was the lesson Of double stops; in perfect fifths, delivering sound Which once was meant to be the sign of God. I’ve learned already, though cannot master it, That tension and position are closely linked.

No failure — and there are many — leaves me worn.

I squawk for hours, content with struggle, and pay For patience and advice while teachers sigh (“If only He were ten or twelve — we’d go farther, sooner”).

I’m late to understanding. It’s a common fault.

At 33, I could give up writing for the chance To know how one note, rightly sounded — round, Toneful, hair clinching string from top to end — Shakes the matter in my skull and rests all trouble.

Still to come are mysteries, endless scales, harmonics.

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Manifesto In a perfect society it would not be necessary to say In a perfect society the politicians should enact a law which provides a regulation for who may be a poet and this perfect law would not deny any person entry to the guild but only say If you do not tell the truth, you are not a poet.

A person with a script is standing in the middle of a room, saying The first thing I want to say is that everything I’m going to say here is true. Of course, you can’t tell everything you know about people unless you’re trying to hurt them and I don’t want to do that. So I’m going to lie a bit here and there. But as far as all the things that matter are concerned I’m going to tell the truth. And this may or may not be a reason to revise a perfect law. I don’t care. I don’t like poets, anyway. Most of them are just like me.

Who is a poet, then? I know one, a schizophrenic, whose head is nearly bursting with all sorts of delusions. He’s in the audience tonight. But you can’t see who it is. It’s dark inside. There’s another in the audience who has had a kind of cancer and has refused to die of it. And another one I know who — and I must be careful here because, though I have asked if it might be possible to write such a line, it is still a line that is painful to hear — … No, I won’t write it. Privacy has to count for something.

I say this only to remind you that there is a poetry of the audience.

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Out of Words … Life consists Of propositions about life. The human Revery is a solitude in which We compose these propositions …

— Wallace Stevens

Before any of these events happened, the story of them happening was already written. From the very beginning the story was in the hearts of its authors, and through it they made themselves and nothing that they are was made without it.

Dear David, a long time ago I promised to tell you the story which would explain our families to you — hoping that, by hearing it, you would know where you came from and who you are. Now that our grandmother is dead and our grandfather near death it is safe for me to begin to write it down. It is the story of how everyone’s story begins and ends in another story, and it is an answer to the puzzle of its authors’ unhappiness. It is also, of course, not a story at all but an understanding of how the many stories which have made us can also un-make us. In giving this understanding to you I must tell you all the stories you already know and which you told me.

You never explained why you were absent on the day our grandmother died. Here is the story of that day as I saw it, one end of the story I am beginning to tell.

I was at work when my mother called to say that I should come quickly, before the body was taken away.

I left without turning off or locking anything and caught a cab. I was angry with the Arab driver for not being able to understand the name of the street, which I repeated several times, each time more angrily. “Are you at work?” “No. A member of my family has just died — I’m trying to get to the house.” He drove more quickly and when I arrived my cousin, Robby, was walking across the lawn outside his mother’s home. We embraced quickly and I went inside.

The daughters were still weeping in bursts and waves: my mother in the bedroom, alone, where she told me that I was too late — and sorry that I had missed seeing my grandmother before she was taken away; and my mother’s three sisters — Emily, who looked sweetly calm but could not stop cleaning the kitchen and benches for fear that if she stopped she would have to cry; Patricia, quiet and confused; Anna, hypnotised by the telephone which did not stop ringing and by the valium she had taken to slow her thoughts. Grandfather, too, was composed — more than I would have believed possible. No one, though, was relieved enough by the suddenness of Nan’s departure to be happy with the performance of the ambulance men who had ambled toward the house and apparently made no attempt to revive her. The conversation at the kitchen table retold the details for each nephew and niece who arrived through the afternoon …

She had been in hospital for tests during the week and the doctors had not been able to find anything wrong which would explain her complaints about loss of consciousness and dizziness.

“They told us to ignore her if she held her breath again.” She decided on Friday that she wanted to come to see her husband. They had been living apart only because both were ill and neither strong enough to take care of the other. She got out of the cab, putting her walking stick, coat and bag on Stephen J. Williams

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the sofa in the lounge room, went into the kitchen to have a cup of tea with her husband, Emily and Anna. She was laughing and smiling. After twenty minutes, at about half past eleven in the morning, she turned her head to look at her husband and then collapsed forward at the table. Anna put her hand out to catch Nan’s chin. When Anna opened her mother’s eyelids she saw that the eyes were pointing into the head. “I knew then that she was gone.” As the story was retold people commented that it was good to go suddenly and without pain. “She must have known.” “I thought she was still alive when she was lying on the bed and her chest started to bubble as though she were breathing.”

“Yes, that happens.”

The grandchildren, my cousins, turned up one by one, Shaz first, with her three children, one newly born. They disappeared soon after arriving to cry in the bedrooms. From the kitchen we heard them sobbing. Sean was second. He did not stop crying all day and was inconsolable.

I stood at the sink. Emily cleaned things. Nan had been staying with her during the last few weeks. “I heard that she was really happy with you.”

“You’re the only one who’s said that. Thank you.”

Anna stood beside me, in a moment between telephone calls, and said “There is a God.” — And later, sitting at the kitchen table, she said, “I was down at the clothes line this morning and I begged Him to find her a home. Please, God, find my mother a home, I said to Him. And He has answered me. There is a God.” She cried and it was only then that I cried, too. I could not be sorry that she had died when for her to have lived and to worry about her was a continuous torture for Anna.

Late in the afternoon an arctic and bureaucratic minister arrived to make arrangements for the funeral. He spoke for a while, by rote, of the difficulty of coming to terms with the death of a “loved one”, and in sentences easily transposable to suit the loss of anyone or anything, wife, mother, keys or cat. Listening to him ask questions about the family, how many daughters, how many sisters and brothers, when was the marriage, where and why, I almost forgot what had happened to us and why we were crying.

No one was prepared to or could be bothered cooking. People put cold chips between pieces of bread and ate slowly, out of an obligation to eat.

Grandad was put to bed slowly. There was a pill for him to take if he needed it.

Robby drove me home. I had been falling asleep whenever and wherever I sat. Still, when I got home, I could not sleep when I wanted to. I telephoned David, Patricia’s son, my cousin, because he had called me during the day and left a message. “Come on, Johnny. I haven’t seen you in such a long time. We’re just sitting around here, having cups of tea. Sean is here, and Shaz. We can’t sleep either. Come on over, please. I want to see you.” I went.

Sean had not yet stopped crying. His fat body and weepy eyes now looked more comical than sad. The others, less determined to be grief-stricken or less feeling, were content to reminisce with lukewarm tea.

Later, as the children were put to bed, all the adults affirmed their intentions to keep in touch with each other and, as they did so, reached for their coats; beyond arrangements for the funeral, they knew there would be no reason for anyone to meet or speak.

Months after this I learned the reason for Sean’s distress, or what I have told myself is the reason for it. His mother, Emily, was unable to cope with having her own mother in the house with her.

You can imagine what it was like. Emily had told Anna that some new arrangements would have to be made to accommodate our grandmother. Sean was aware of this problem and has blamed Emily for his grandmother’s death ever since.

Emily fears some truth in the accusation. Sean is ashamed to have spoken it. Anna remembers that she prayed for release and was released. It is only in those moments they are exhausted by selfaccusation that the truth can be heard and their own voices tell them one fact cannot have so many reasons. — She is dead and there is the end.

Late that night, on the day our grandmother died, which others took to be an end, was only the beginning for us. You had been in prison for more than a year and I at my desk with a typewriter.

Stephen J. Williams

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We had both been unhappy. A man can lose himself in too much freedom or through lack of it.

When we went out that night to drink and talk, for the first time face to face in ten years, the dream I was in while listening to you speak showed me how I would find myself. You were lucky, you said, to have such big veins. There is now hardly any mark there.

“I was lucky I had big veins that stood up and were easy to find. You can still see a scar there … In the drug rehabilitation programme you’re allowed to just sit at the back and listen for the first few times. Then one day the guy just came up to me and handed me a texta and showed me to the board where I was supposed to write down everything about all the drugs I’d taken and what was happening to me when I was doing them. And when I was finished he went up to the board and divided my life into four clear parts. Basically, all stuff about my father … You even tell them about your dreams. I told them about my junkie dream where I put the needle in my arm and I miss. If you miss the vein you don’t get the rush in the head, it comes on slow and it’s like you’ve been done out of your money … I was punishing them by punishing myself … When I was a really young kid my bastard of a father promised me that he would buy me a rotten radio-controlled airplane and he did one day, and he got the thing out of its box and we went down to the park where he tried to get the thing to go. It wouldn’t go, no matter what he did. He got angrier and angrier and finally crashed it to pieces on the ground, poured petrol over it and set it alight. It went up in flames. I cried. Of course, by the time he got to telling the story in the pub to his mates it had changed quite a bit …

There were other things. I can’t remember. You’re quite right though, Johnny, like you said in your letter, he has punished himself. There isn’t any need to be angry about him any more. I’ve got my son, Matthew, from that bitch, Zara, and all I want is to give him what he needs as well as a bit of what he wants. I’m spoiling him, I know, but I love the little bugger … I started with my friends, the peer thing. You know. But then it turned into something else. It’s a weird life, Johnny. The cabbies get to know you, you know, so that eventually they won’t come to pick you up when you want to get somewhere. I don’t blame them. I used to go somewhere in a cab, trying to score some shit, and just get out and walk away. I didn’t know what I was doing. Sometimes I used to get into cabs with the stolen video under my arms. Fuck. They must’ve laughed … The ones in prison are the stupid crims.

I was stupid. I was always getting caught on the scene with the video under my arm, or else I’d get into a place and just fall asleep on some poor bastard’s couch. It’s fucken stupid, Johnny, I tell you.

The last time it was for getting caught stealing shit from a guy who was a dealer and he got up in court and played the good citizen, saying that he’d had all this jewellery and stuff stolen from his place, but it was nothing like that. I was scared when I was in there. It’s a bad fucken place … The first day I was in the remand yard, waiting to be transferred, a guy was holding something in his hand — it was wrapped in paper — and he walked up to this other guy right in front of me and stabbed him in the throat. Jesus. It’s bad. The guy survived. The screws took us up one by one and asked us all what happened. I just said I didn’t see anything — I was in the showers. There were eighty fucken guys in the shower that day. No one saw anything. So this screw asked me if I would say anything even if I had seen it, and I said No — don’t be stupid, and that was it … It’s best not to make friends in there, not to get involved in any of that shit. I just stayed to myself, did the weights in the gym till I had sixteen inch arms, acted tough and they left me alone. And they knew that my father had some heavy friends outside, and that helped. Some of them get in there and immediately start sizing everyone up — I’m tougher than him, but I’ll stay away from that guy — the top dog game. It’s no good. Someone’s sure to get you if you start doing that sort of thing — they’ll size you up and take you on … When they put me in the cell I heard this hammering on the other side of the wall and a guy yelling. He came out, still conscious — I don’t know how — with holes the size of twenty cent pieces in his head and covered in blood. Shit, it was awful. And he walked down toward the stairs. I don’t think he knew where he was going. And this crim who’d arranged it came up to him with an aspirin saying, ‘Looks like you got a headache, mate. Here, have this.’ … Most of the stuff that comes into the jail comes in up crims’ arses or inside their girls. If she turns up and doesn’t have the stuff in her, the guy tells her to piss off straight away as though he doesn’t want to see her. It doesn’t Stephen J. Williams

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count as a visit until after five minutes, so he can get her to come back until she comes with the stuff.

And there are a couple of corrupt screws, especially that one who got caught, P-----s, he was a real fucken dog. You can tell how it’s come in by how big it is. I saw a slab of dope so big it couldn’t have come in in anyone’s arse, not even if you’d been fist-fucking — it must’ve been a screw … They say that the crim who’s getting sucked isn’t queer, that it’s only the guy with the dick in his mouth, but I don’t believe it. A guy doesn’t do anything for me. You can’t just close your eyes and make it work like that. In the dorm they have one bunk down the end with blankets up around it and everyone knows what’s going on inside it. I used to just sit down the other end playing cards, really fast. This one guy, I feel really sorry for him, the poor bastard — I don’t want to say he was asking for it, but he would suck anything and he had both hands going, and you can’t do that if you want any respect — almost everyone would fuck this poor cunt. Someone got one of those kitchen things full of boiling water and poured it over this poor bastard in his bed. When they pulled the blanket off him all his flesh tore off with it. Shit. I was sick. That was the worst thing I ever saw … You’d have to be really fucken stupid or really fucken hopeless to want to go back there. I don’t want it, Johnny. It’s not for me. I’m doing OK on the methadone — it’s really good for me. I feel good. I just want to be with Matthew now, sort a few things out. I’m not gonna make that mistake again. I’ve gotta keep my head for Matthew’s sake, Johnny.”

Even as you were speaking I dreamt of God’s needle.

“It’s a headless world, David. People walk around without their heads — at some point they’ve decided that they don’t need them any more and have done a violence to their own lives, thinking it doesn’t matter that they no longer think — without their heads. It’s no wonder nothing gets said that makes any sense.”

I slept through Saturday, still dreaming. I must have dreamt and must have woken but I can’t remember of what or when. Then it was Sunday and then it was evening; and I was trying to sleep, to forget and to sleep, and to forget what was preventing sleep — my dream of needles. … “Mmmmm” — I remembered her becoming a child again as the strokes destroyed her memory and her ability to connect one thing with another. “Mmmmm”, she would hum with a lolly in her mouth, as if sweetness were something new. For twenty years I have loved to touch the soft, flabby flesh which hung from her old arms — and putting my head there, it was like resting in down. — And her cooking, in the tiniest kitchen I’ve seen, a meal that was spread twelve feet along the Christmas table. — And her smile, awkward while being photographed, the colours of the flowers on her dresses which are still there, in all our photographs, and packing bags and waking early to drive through the dark and the fog to Castlemaine where she lived with her husband, and the colours there, the wood stove, the table dusted with flour, and the story of how she and her husband made love in the last ten minutes before he went to the war. Oh, Jesus. O, God, why are you doing this to us now? We praise people by how much good there is to remember of their lives and there was so much and what good has it done her all that praying? Nothing. I’m not going to pray. I won’t pray ever again. Should I be saying to myself this is good? Yes. I’m glad she’s gone. For Anna’s sake — made weak by caring for them both, this will make the burden lighter. Or, No. She was the only person I knew who went in a covered wagon when she was a kid with her brothers and sisters. And the photo — torn down the side — of her in a long dress and her hair tied back for work at the boot factory in North Melbourne where Grandad saw her from high up in the flour store of the bakery and said “I’m going to marry her”. There’s a joke: how the needle came down when he said that, and it went straight in the vein, and what he had planned came true. It doesn’t always come true. It doesn’t always come out the way we plan, and we miss. That life, I see taking its whole form, now why do I want to take its end away from her: its sweet end looking into the face of her husband so long, from beginning to end? She sang, “There was a little girl who had a little curl right in the middle — right in the middle of her forehead.” “When she was good she was very very good and when she was bad she was horrid.” “Horrid.” O, God. Why? We wouldn’t have gone to those Christmases and everything, the sun, huge, the neighbours watching through their windows our lengthening table, Stephen J. Williams

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year after year, Castlemaine, Preston, Sunshine, the chickens in the yard and the dunny where she told us the redbacks hid, we wouldn’t have gone. No. We wouldn’t have gone. Everything we are she was and how will we tell where we came from now? How will we tell? This small woman. My head is … O, God, my head is bursting. I watched the skin under her arms fall, soft, down, like down, feathery and soft in them. Why? Gone. God. Why, if You are going to deal, do You get out the needle and miss the vein? Why are we, this dream? It comes on slow and my head aches. Fuck You. Why don’t you give it straight, put a date-stamp on it or something? Fuck You, You bastard. Fuck You …

What is the story through which I have made myself? I am ashamed to tell it.

David, you know that my parents separated when I was very young. Even a young boy tires of asking Why? and before long any answer will do. — My whole life has been the story of unworthiness: I am a man who could not be loved. And it was through this story that I made myself and nothing that I am was made without it.

My mother has a new child. The little girl is ten years old. I will admit that I have envied her, envied them both, for having what was taken from me. And I admit, also, to believing with my whole being that the reason for this child was to correct the error of bearing me: this sister was my nemesis, which my mother made to punish me. Even in the crib she appeared as one who would threaten my existence. Near the end, I was consumed with hate.

That story made me and the one that was to follow un-made me. I had suffered too long with hatred and in silence.

A woman’s face can change in a way a man’s cannot. The change changes her. This is not a shallow change but one which reaches into every muscle and bone so that nothing of the way she lives and speaks is like it was before. And this is what happened to my mother.

On the day our grandmother died I saw my mother’s new face. It is stupid to say — but true — that, even in her grief, she glowed with life. It was only with this light in her face I could see my hatred was wrong.

Later, I confessed my envy and she, in return, told me the story of her life: that, when she was young and I was a child, my father was a drunkard and beat her; that, being young and stupid, she thought her whole life and freedom waited for her if she would run away; that she left me and that this was a mistake; and that she now endures a man as bad as the first only to redeem herself, to prove to herself, and to me, that love is possible.

It is hate that causes suffering, David, and love which returns us to the world.

I am almost at the end and there is only one more story to tell. It is the story of our grandfather’s throat.

Fifty years ago our grandfather’s brother, it has been said, abused a little girl, his own daughter; and, sitting in her father’s lap, she did not utter a sound when his finger entered her. Caught in this moment, his hand hung dead from its arm even as he pleaded it was innocent.

Men listen to this pleading with a panic that comes from knowing where desires could lead them.

Our grandfather panicked, too, closed his mouth and feared he would be tainted by his brother’s act.

After this, all his daughters made their plans to marry quiet men and hoped that marriage would make their husbands speak. Out of these men’s mouths, they thought, would come the words their father never spoke. Or, perhaps it was not a word the daughters wanted, but a feeling or an openness that had been denied to them.

All four men were steadfast, though, and took more easily to drink than talking.

No evil word ever came out of our grandfather’s mouth, nothing bitter or false. Haven’t we always thought of him as one above reproach, so that now, when he is old and ill and has the habit of being unhappy with everyone and everything, it is easy to forgive him for being slightly mad? — It is only because he is afraid of dying; and that will happen to us all.

Stephen J. Williams

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— And it is difficult for him to swallow past the cancer in his throat, caused, I think, contrary to the doctors, not by smoking but by silence.

Are there any stories left to tell? I can tell you, David, because I know you will understand — there is no end to the reverie. Are we, even now, out of words?

I think of you often. I was angry when you returned to your prison. How can a man bear so much hatred of himself? I send you my love and the hope that, one day, you will need to be free.

Stephen J. Williams

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