For Everyone Concerned (4 page)

My brother and I would sometimes discuss the book which I had been reading for several hours that day and which I had left in full view on the arm of the chair in which I had been sitting all that time, though we would never discuss the debt I owed him. My brother would then bring into the lounge two tall bottles with the blue-coloured labels of Fosters beer which he had bought on his way home from work and we would drink these until the woman came home. Just before the woman came home I would put the empty beer bottles in a cupboard in the kitchen and I would carefully move the book which I had been reading for the whole day down beside the sofa in the lounge so that she would not immediately guess that the position she found me in when she came home was exactly the position I had been in for most of the hours during which she had been at work.

When my newly married friends returned from their honeymoon in Australia in the final week of February 1989, in the time between my third and fourth visits to Melbourne, they told me of looking in the phone book
for the phone number of the writer who is the subject of this story and then of visiting his house. They told me of the shelves of books which lined the walls of the rooms of the writer’s house and that of all the books only a few were paperback books. My newly married friends told me that the writer had spoken to them of the advantages of a hardback over a paperback book. He spoke to them of often approaching his many shelves of books not for the purpose of reading or rereading from cover to cover the contents of a book but simply to find or re-find certain sentences which, having been found or re-found, might allow him to return the book to its place on the shelf for another two or ten or twenty years until he could imagine himself again approaching the shelf for those sentences. He spoke to them of sentences while pouring my newly married friends several glasses not from the gold-coloured cans of Castlemaine beer, nor from the blue-coloured cans of Fosters beer, nor from the tall bottles with the blue-coloured Fosters label, but from the brown-coloured bottles of Coopers beer, dark as soil, as they sat in the backyard of the writer’s house, with the writer’s wife sitting not a little way away but close to the man she had married some thirty years before, when he had been a young would-be writer drinking beer alone in his room for whole days while reading books which he sometimes dreamed he had written.

In the year following my appearance in the film for television of the book written by the man who had stood behind the perfectly black window, I wrote an expository essay of several pages for the Principal of my school so that I might become Headboy of my school. I had not been the chief character in the film, just as I had known in the moment of darkness in the sound-room that I would never be such a character, but I had been one of the boy-actors who were the friends of the chief character.

Two or three other boys were also writing expository essays for the Principal on why they, too, wanted to be Headboy of the school. We were all candidates for the position and it was understood that among this field I was favourite. I remember looking up at the Honours Board in the main foyer outside the Principal’s office and imagining my name being added to the select list of Headboys and Headgirls which went back to 1954 and which included the names of some boys and girls who were now dead but remained immortal.

I can recall no details of the pages which I wrote when I was aged twelve years, nor can I remember the name or the face of the boy who became Headboy after the Principal had read what we had written. I remember only that the reasons I wrote of for wanting to become Headboy were concerned, in the main part, with revenge.

I took for my exposition the case of my older
brother who had left the school three years before I had entered it. I wrote of my brother as a helpless victim of numerous injustices at the hands of school bullies. I wrote of the cruelties he had suffered and of the anguish I had heard my parents express at my brother’s future when I had been standing in the passageway of our house late at night with bare feet. I wrote of my desire to see punished any boy who did such things to another boy as to cause that boy’s entire future to be put in doubt. I believe that most of the writing of the essay was concerned with my hatred of the boys who had done such things to my brother as to
cause me to
dislike my brother
’
s weakness
.

I remember feeling humiliated when another boy whom I cannot remember was announced as Headboy. Yet, even worse than this, I remember the terror I felt when the pages of my expository essay which contained my secret plan of revenge were not returned to me by the Principal. I believed that these pages were being held in school files
as evidence against
me
and that, at some point in the future, they would be used to bring me down.

I believe, now, that I decided then that I would never again be the sort of person who would run for any public office, or apply for any position of responsibility or leadership. I also believe, now, that I decided then that I would one day be able to write several pages outlining truthfully the story of my plan
of revenge for the weakness I disliked in my older brother
but until that day I would only be able to pretend to
write such pages
.

When I arrived in Melbourne on my fourth visit, my brother showed me the
Melbourne Sunday Herald
colour supplement in which there was an article about the writer who lived on Falcon Street, McLeod. I have kept the article not for the words but for the photos: the writer holding up his personalised racing silks to the camera; the writer, wearing his favourite hat with the feather in its band, picked out by the camera in a crowd at the racetrack. On my return to Wellington, my newly married friends wanted the silks photograph from this magazine but I told them I was keeping the lot. I was aware just now when I wrote about the silks photograph that this photograph is on the wall of the room in which I am writing this story. Over the next week while I was in Melbourne more articles appeared. They appeared everywhere. They appeared in newspapers and in entertainment guides. I remember thinking that the editors of all of the city’s publications must have been conspiring that week to provide me, and only me, with the pleasure to be had from reading about the writer and looking at photographs of him. And yet, because I was the only one who truly loved the writer’s books, I was also saddened to see his name in print in so many places. I
felt indignant whenever an article appeared containing a biographical or bibliographical mistake and outraged when the hack journalist and the half-asleep subeditor failed to allow the writer’s extreme care to influence their own work.

On this fourth visit of mine to Melbourne in November 1989, my brother and I, together with some friends of my brother’s, though not including the woman who had sat a little way away from us in the backyard of the house in Brunswick, went to Flemington Race Track on Derby Day. Near the back of the racebook which my brother had bought to help us in our selections of horses was an advertisement for a film about the writer. Why such a film was advertised in the unlikely pages of a racebook could be guessed from sections of the film about the writer’s life, in which mention was made of free lectures given by the writer to the jockeys of the Melbourne Jockey Federation on the subject of English Composition.

The woman who had chosen not to come with us to the races had done so because she said it was too good a day to waste watching horses and that her plan of driving to the coast somewhere was infinitely better than ours of wasting the day in a crowd of people all intent on losing their money. I remember thinking that her plan had merit and that if anyone else had proposed it we would have had to consider the plan seriously. I knew, however, that there would never be a time when
the woman and I could drive to the coast on a fine day and enjoy in any measure each other’s company. The woman also knew this. She had proposed her plan on an impulse, as it were, to rival our well-established plan of going to the races, although I believed she had had it in her mind to make her impulsive declaration of the senselessness of the Flemington Race Track for several days. The success of her proposal lay not in its adoption by us but in the shadow it would throw over our day at the races. She told us on the morning of the day we had planned to go to the races, as we were preparing the food we would take with us in the kitchen of my brother’s house, that it was a stupid idea to go to the races on such a day.

My brother and I looked for the writer on Derby Day in the Members’ area, but without any luck. The writer was everywhere except there. We looked through my brother’s racing binoculars at the crowd in the Members’ area from our position on the other side of the fence, within the public enclosure. We looked for his distinctive hat with the feather in it but saw instead the tanned dome of a prominent New Zealand businessman who had recently married and separated from an Australian socialite, causing the couple to appear in all the pages of newspapers and magazines, rivalling the coverage given even to the writer whom editors, for this one glorious week, had decided was worthy of space in the pages of their publications,
and whom we were convinced was present that day, somewhere in the Members’ area.

I remember placing my first bet of this Carnival Week, as the week leading up to the running of the most famous race of the Southern Hemisphere, the Fosters Melbourne Cup, is known, on this day beneath a sky of brilliant, unbroken blue. This was also my first ever bet with a bookie. Five dollars a win on Gin Rhythm. It was only when I was walking away, having paid over my money to the bookie’s assistant and having watched my five dollar note go into the leather bag whose brown colouring reminded me of the colour of horses’ flanks, if that was the word for the area just below where the saddle sat, that I realised the bookie had thought I had said five dollars a win Impressionism. He had misheard my flattened vowels, though, in fact, when I’d been placing the bet I had been thinking about Impressionism. I was too humiliated to go back to my first ever bookie and tell him about the mistake. Anyway, I considered that by going to the bookie with thoughts of Impressionism in my mind when I wished to place my first ever bookie-bet on the horse called Gin Rhythm, I had contributed to the misunderstanding.

My sister, who also lives in Melbourne, had been standing behind me in line for the same bookie and had put a dollar each way on Impressionism. My sister had lived in Melbourne for several years and pronounced
her words so that Melbourne bookies were able to allot the correct ticket. The race was number three on the programme and it was called the Hilton on the Park Stakes. Gin Rhythm takes it from Impressionism at the post.

I remember being so excited at the close finish of the race and the fact that it included both the horses’ names I had been thinking about—Gin Rhythm and Impressionism—that, for several moments, I could separate in my mind neither the horses’ names, nor the order in which they had finished—nor could I decipher the name of the horse which the bookie had scribbled on the ticket he had handed me in exchange for my five dollars. Indeed, I still count that as my first and only win of the day, if that Aussie bookie had cleaned out his ears.

In the year before my third visit to Melbourne, I had read in an interview with an American writer, though not the one who had suffered everlasting regret, that revenge had been one of the writer’s chief motivations in writing. The American writer had said that
getting
even
had been a guiding principle in the composition of his books. I have often thought about this statement and, though I believed at the time, at the age of twenty-three years, that I was the only young would-be writer who truly loved the books of the American writer, yet I thought that
I would only be a writer once I had forgotten
the words of the American writer
and had truthfully outlined the story of the pages I had written when I was aged twelve years on the subject of revenge.

I needed to forget these words, since I had to admit to myself that the actual reason for writing those pages was utterly base and totally self-centred; I had wanted
to pretend to the Principal that I was anything but as weak
as my brother
and, for this reason alone, I had wanted to become Headboy of my school.

Between the times of my third and fourth visit to Melbourne, I sent my older brother by airmail a book by the American writer who had spoken of revenge. In this time I also received by airmail from my brother, a book by the writer who is the subject of this story.

The woman who was living with my brother at the times of my second, third and fourth visits to Melbourne, between the years 1984 to 1989, did not read the book I sent my brother. She did not generally read works of fiction and told me she preferred works of non-fiction because of their truthfulness and the fact that nothing in these books had been made up.

On my fourth visit she did not mention the writing I had done but occasionally mentioned its financial success, which was negligible in real terms, in terms of what real work paid, but astounding to the woman who saw the writing I had done as totally worthless and a complete waste of time.

On one of the days of my second visit to Melbourne, which the woman never tired of reminding me were being wasted in reading works of fiction and drinking the beer in my brother’s fridge when I should have been
outside doing something
, as she often said, I had put down my book on the arm of the chair, placed the empty can of Fosters beer in the rubbish tin, and had indeed walked outside.

I remember that this day was like any other day of those summer months of my second visit; it was unbearably hot and humid. The sky was not blue-coloured as I had imagined on those days which I had spent inside without so much as looking out a window of my brother’s flat, but a hazy washed out grey with a pale tint of blue showing behind. As I looked at the sky on this day, I remember imagining a swimming pool into which has been poured powdered milk.