Reckless, p.2
Reckless, page 2
We didn’t have to return the money at the end of the game; Tony won it all back.
Tony stayed the night and the next. And the next. He went back to Woollahra and picked up his belongings—two records (Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew and Dylan’s John Wesley Harding), a few clothes, camera, binoculars—and moved in.
Shakespeare was wrong about true love never running smoothly. Our relationship flowed effortlessly. Tony and I simply slid into the water with each other and floated along. An easygoing extrovert, he got on well with my housemates. When people dropped in he took care of the hospitality and entertaining. I could skive off those duties, retreat into myself to study or write poetry. Perfect.
It was some time before I told my parents that Tony and I were living together. ‘Living in sin’ was how my mother described it, lips tight with disapproval. While it was the 1970s in the rest of the world, in my parents’ house it remained the 1950s. ‘Have you forgotten all you learned at Sunday school?’ My mother’s tight lips were quivering. I don’t recall any discussions on marriage at Sunday school; it had all been about Jesus and lambs and little children gathering by the river. Tony and I were writing our own lives, committed to each other, we didn’t need a legal document or permission. Marriage was a bourgeois institution, turned a woman into a wife and a man into a husband. Unfortunately, my mother didn’t see it this way. I was living outside the bounds of morality, of acceptable behaviour. What was she going to tell the neighbours? My father, a returned soldier who had never fully returned, spent most of his time at home hidden behind a newspaper. Apart from the occasional unpredictable thundering bellow, he left the management of the house and his two daughters to my mother, but this time he took the unusual step of writing a letter, which brought me to my knees. I’d broken my mother’s heart, wasted my education. I was nothing more than an ‘international hippie’—the worst insult my father could think of. How much worse it might have been if Dad, the proud Rat of Tobruk, knew that Tony was a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War, had served time in jail for it; that when he was arrested at an antiwar demonstration he told the police his name was Joe Hill, the American trade unionist executed by firing squad and immortalised in song; that he’d won a Commonwealth scholarship but dropped out of uni to become a professional gambler. Of course, all of that was immensely appealing to me.
My parents’ disapproval brought Tony and I even closer together. He became my warm, feathered place. Tony knew what it felt like to be thrown out. He was estranged from his family and hadn’t been in touch with them for years. Politics, fights with his father who, like mine, was a World War II veteran. I imagined Tony’s father hurled the same ‘hippie’ insult at his conscientious objector son.
‘No. He called me a useless bastard.’
After I finished university, we moved from Sydney to a beautiful valley on the Mid North Coast of New South Wales. It seemed our whole generation was leaving the city to get back to nature and live an alternative lifestyle. Rewrite the rules.
We paid a peppercorn rent for a ramshackle house between a pig farm and a eucalyptus forest. No white picket fence; no fence at all. For the first time a house with just the two of us. The beginning of the rest of our lives together, a long happy ever after.
4.
Truck Stop
I WAS ON THE Pacific Highway, returning from a brief visit to Sydney, when I got the news. It was Friday, 13 January 1978, I’d spent a few days catching up with friends, seeing movies, attending the annual summer pantomime of the youth theatre group I had belonged to. For the first time I was watching instead of playing the hapless Fairy Futile whose wand regularly fell to pieces and whose magic went awry, much to the delight of the squealing audience. ‘It’s not Red Riding Hood, it’s the wolf! He’s right behind you!’
Tony was supposed to phone me at eleven o’clock that morning. We didn’t have a phone, but he was making a trip to Coffs Harbour, the nearest big town, and would call from there. I didn’t think much of it when Tony didn’t ring, although for years afterwards I would become anxious if someone didn’t call when they’d said they would or ran late. Tony had got caught up, or he couldn’t find a phone booth. No big deal. We were young and immortal.
I was getting a lift back home with PC, a bass guitarist and old schoolmate of Tony’s who had a gig further up the coast. The other band members were leaving Sydney later and driving up in the kombi.
Somewhere near Newcastle, PC’s VW beetle started sputtering and coughing—it had blown a head gasket, or there was a problem with the diff, the alternator, the carbie. Our cars were always breaking down but I could never fully assimilate the associated set of vocabulary.
We made it to a truck stop—a couple of petrol bowsers, a faded cafe, and a public phone. It was getting dark. While PC called Sydney to ask his bandmates to pick us up on their way through, I went over to the paddock next door. One of the horses—chestnut with a white blaze and white feet, like the pacer Paleface Adios, on whom Tony had won and lost a lot of money—approached the fence. Perhaps the truckies sometimes fed it salad bits out of their hamburgers. I didn’t have anything for Paleface but he let me pat that white blaze.
PC was taking his time. Eventually he came out of the phone box, but instead of coming over to me or going back to the car, he slowly walked away. The horse kept nudging my hand but I was watching PC. He walked beyond the lit-up area and disappeared into the shadows.
After a few minutes PC returned. He was having trouble breathing. ‘Let’s sit in the car.’
We sat in the car.
‘There’s been . . . Tony had a bad accident on his way to Coffs. Really bad.’
I already had a gnawing feeling in the pit of my stomach, was aware of my heartbeat, my mouth getting dry. I swallowed. ‘Is he in hospital?’
‘Worse.’
I was hit by something huge and powerful. Much bigger than an arrow and with no period of grace. Everything started spinning. I knew, but still needed to hear the words.
‘It was raining. Tony took a corner too fast, swerved off the road and into the trees. A couple of off-duty ambos happened to come by. They picked him up but he died on the way to hospital.’
Ten days before his twenty-ninth birthday.
Eventually the kombi arrived. I was unaware of any greetings, of luggage being transferred from one vehicle to another. I sat squashed in the front with PC and the driver. I could not stop shaking. I imagine PC could feel it but he didn’t say anything. No-one said anything. We just drove into the darkness.
It was after midnight by the time we arrived in the valley. A light was on in the house. My heart lifted. It had all been a mistake, a miscommunication. Tony was here, he was home. But it was Dick, the drummer from another band, who was waiting inside, half-asleep in a beanbag. Our doors were never locked. What was the point, in a house so dilapidated a swift kick could knock a door off its hinges? With no phone in the house with which to warn us of their arrival, friends simply turned up.
Dick got to his feet. ‘What’s happening? Did someone die? You all look like you’ve been hit by a truck.’
I had needed to hear the words but I couldn’t bring myself to say them.
Once again, it was left to PC to make the announcement.
I went into the bedroom, closed the door, and left the house to the others. I thought it would be better once I was alone but it wasn’t. I did not want to be alone and I did not want company. I wanted to be with Tony, even if that meant being dead. What would happen to all the love? It felt like I was haemorrhaging.
Tony had left the bed unmade, and his imprint, his shape, was still nestled in the sheets. I rested my hand on it but his body warmth had gone. Such a cold bed despite the heat of the summer night.
I tried to locate myself by seeking out the familiar—Tony’s racing binoculars on the bedpost, his clothes hanging limply in the wardrobe, the sunken bath just outside the French doors, the black bamboo growing up through holes in the verandah. At the same time I was somewhere I’d never been before, as if doors had slid open and I’d stepped into the never-ending darkness of an empty lift shaft.
We are beside ourselves with grief. I know how it is to have that cliché settle on you. Out of alignment. Literally beside yourself. Your spirit knocked out of your body, a ghost image.
Morning. The house was empty. I vaguely remembered a soft knocking on the door, then the rattle of the departing kombi as it drove over the cattle grid.
I had to tidy up. The book Tony had been reading was lying face down at the end of the bed, as if he hadn’t really gone forever but had just got up to answer the door and would be back in a minute.
No chance to say goodbye with death by accident.
The book on the bed was George Woodcock’s study of Aldous Huxley—Dawn and the Darkest Hour, the 1972 edition, a black cover with a block of red. Somehow the detail seemed important, as if now I had to remember everything. As I stared at the cover, the solid red liquified into blood like a Dalí painting.
I closed the book without noting the page it was opened at, an impulse I tried not to regret.
My sister told our parents about the accident. ‘If there’s anything we can do . . .’
Too late. I couldn’t help feeling the offer of help carried an implicit ‘I told you so’. Punishment for my sins. ‘Karma,’ my parents might have said if they’d been familiar with the word.
It wasn’t till the funeral that I met Tony’s mother and sisters. The same wavy chestnut hair, the same long-lashed welcoming eyes. It took my breath away. ‘Why didn’t Tony come home?’ his younger sister sobbed.
‘Arguments with your father,’ I managed to say.
‘Dad died two years ago.’
I stood there with the family I’d just met, all of us locked together in grief yet unable to comfort one another.
My sister Irene and her boyfriend, Big Mick, moved into the ramshackle house with me. Mick had identified the body. At first I could not ask him about it but later I plucked up the courage.
Mick took his time. ‘Tony was . . . recognisable.’
The death certificate, still to come, would list the cause of death as the effects of ‘multiple chest and abdominal injuries sustained earlier that date at Pacific Highway near Repton when the motor vehicle he was driving left the carriageway and collided with a number of trees’.
Left the carriageway . . . Pacific Highway near Repton. We must have passed the place in the kombi.
For the first three weeks Tony was somehow still around. I would look up, acutely aware of his presence, as if he was at the door taking off his boots before entering the house. In the case of sudden death, the deceased often doesn’t realise what’s happened; the spirit doesn’t have time to detach itself properly and keeps coming home.
Friends and well-wishers dropped in. News travels fast in small communities. Friends, strangers. Friends of Tony I didn’t know. Soft, smooth skin; damp skin; dry. Beards; bristle. The lingering smell of patchouli. I was hugged so much it began to feel abrasive, as if I were being sandpapered. We sat around smoking, as if it were a form of breathing. Smoking, cups of tea, and chocolate wheaten biscuits.
When I’d had enough of the company I moved to the edges of it and sat at my writing desk, a repurposed Methodist church organ—appropriate given my strict Protestant upbringing. Sometimes I had to leave the house altogether and go out onto the verandah, sit smoking on my own, gazing at the movement of breeze in the forest or watching the black bamboo grow. Often when I came back into the house the conversation stopped or the subject changed. As time went on this happened more and more frequently; out of consideration for my feelings, I suppose—it was obvious I was fragile and not handling things very well—but it made Tony’s death even more surreal. How could it be that this monumental event had occurred, this meteor colliding with the earth, yet no-one was talking about it? It pushed me even further into madness. Did it really happen at all or was I imagining it?
With Tony’s death my life ruptured. I could never go back to the garden of Before, there was only the wasteland of After. I became hypersensitive, couldn’t take any more of the hugs that were stripping the skin off my body. My throat was so swollen I had difficulty swallowing. Sometimes, even just with Irene and Big Mick, I had to eat meals in the solitude of the lonely bedroom. Tony’s binoculars were still on the bedpost, his empty clothes hung limply in the wardrobe, except for the Balinese shirts I wrapped myself in. I couldn’t bear to throw anything away. I felt sick, had digestive problems. My lungs were raw from smoking. I found it difficult to leave the house, to get into a car. My mother was right: the world was a dangerous place. Everything could change in a heartbeat and you wouldn’t see it coming.
In the weeks, months, even years after his death, Tony came to me in dreams. In the most intense early grieving, he was radiant, like a Hindu god, an aura bedecked in jewels. I wanted to stay permanently asleep and live this dream life, even if his visits were transitory, ephemeral. His ashes, his earthly remains, were under the bed in a box the size and weight of a house brick.
Tony was there in the slow drift of jacaranda flowers, in a leaf spiralling to the ground, in the sighing breeze. I imagined his breath on my skin, wished him well, tried not to hold on to him. The earth kept turning on its axis, through day and night, and passing through the seasons as it circled around the sun, but it felt like I was living the same day over and over.
I found it difficult to read, couldn’t concentrate. I was stuck.
After six months well-meaning friends advised me to get over it. ‘Move on,’ they said.
I couldn’t move. The grief was all-pervasive, I was riddled with it, right through to the bone marrow.
‘Go with the flow,’ they repeated like a mantra. ‘Go travelling again, you’ve got your whole life ahead of you.’
Yeah. I sat by the small creek near the ramshackle house, watched the water fill deep holes then move on, make its way around rocks. Moving, always moving. Go with the flow. My brain knew the lesson of water but couldn’t coax the rest of me to follow suit.
Almost a year now. I didn’t go to Sydney for the annual pantomime. A friend from the theatre group came to see me.
‘You were so vague, so distracted,’ he said later.
I was still beside myself, out of kilter. Grief triggers a tsunami of chemical reactions, leaves shadows on the brain. On the heart.
‘We thought we’d lost you.’
The first anniversary. Same humidity, same flowers, perfume on the air, thrum of cicadas. The visceral reminders intensified the grief. I found no joy in the thrust of summer heat or the purple haze of jacaranda; I had plummeted into the jagged darkness of that lift shaft and landed at rock bottom. On that first anniversary the future presented itself with plain-speaking lucidity—live or die. The decision came from the fundament of my being. Live. I had no idea how to do it.
That year, 1978, was when big things came at me out of the blue. It started with Tony’s death and ended with the news that the Australia Council had awarded me a New Writers Grant. Somehow, in those terrible grief-filled months, I’d managed to put together a grant application for a collection of experimental short fiction. I was still fairly new to writing—a few poems published in small literary magazines and, notably, along with 150 other Australian women, in the audaciously titled Mother, I’m Rooted. As well as generous financial support, the grant bestowed validation. If the Australia Council took my ‘hobby’ seriously, considered me ‘a writer’, so could I. Nevertheless, behind it all I felt some invisible mediation might have taken place. That the universe was bestowing the grant as a consolation prize—a prize to console. One loss, one gain: a cosmic balancing-out. Good and bad happened in every life. That year I received an extra-large dose of both.
When the grant money came through I bought a crate of champagne and an old Mercedes-Benz 220S—maroon with a cream interior—that I called Lily. A friend heading overseas was selling it cheaply. He could hardly sell it on the open market, not with the ockie strap around the column shift to stop it from jumping out of third gear.
I ran smack into life, hit it hard. I drank the crate of champagne, danced in the moonlight, learned tai chi, joined anti-logging protestors at Terania Creek and stood in the path of bulldozers. I left home with a new friend, Kamile, for a two-week trip to Queensland and stayed away four years.
‘The guy in the room opposite asked if we wanted to go to Asia by yacht,’ said Kamile. ‘I told him we couldn’t afford it.’
A youth hostel in Cairns. I’d just come back from a shower. We’d seen yachts—as white and preened as a flock of seagulls—moored at the yacht club on our way into town the day before. Even though the marina was on the Esplanade, within walking distance, the yachts seemed remote and unattainable, an exclusive world with its own exclusive language—halyard, cleat, bilge, beam, boom. Rigging, tacking, jibing, luffing.
Kamile continued strumming her guitar while I dried my hair. It didn’t take long in that hot little room. A yacht. I’d been on ferries, big motor-powered vessels, but never on a wind-powered sailing boat; I’d not even set foot on one. ‘We could at least check it out.’
The guy opposite, actually called Guy, was a strapping youth with a hint of a New Zealand accent.
‘You were telling my friend about a yacht going to Asia?’ I said.
‘I’ve got a place and there’s room for two more.’
‘What’s the fare?’
‘No fare. Share expenses and the work.’
‘We don’t have any sailing experience.’
‘I don’t think that’s important; you can learn. Let’s see what the skipper says.’
The persistent clink of ropes against masts accompanied us into the yacht club that evening, as if they were about to make a speech and were trying to get our attention. In the bar upstairs Guy, Kamile, and I sat down at a small round table with the skipper, Rudi. Lean, athletic. A bit starchy, but maybe that was the crisply ironed shorts. Rudi planned to cruise up the Queensland coast, turn left at Thursday Island, sail across the Gulf of Carpentaria to Darwin, then head north-west to Singapore, stopping in Indonesia along the way.
