The Feel of Steel (10 page)

Outside, now, rain falls in a sudden, huge, light cloud between my window and the horizon. The smell of dirt and wetness comes to me in gusts.

Swam early at Bondi with Sally and Patrick. Crystalline waves toppled. We stood up to our chins in water of the palest, glassiest green and grinned at each other, speechless. A boy of the awkward age – thirteen – shot past us on a boogie board with a look of shameless ecstasy on his face.

The happiness I felt yesterday, when I came into the building, opened the door of my flat and walked through its rooms. A quiet evening, listening to the tango CD and hemming my remaining curtains – not eating a meal because I wasn't hungry – sleeping on my firm bed, with pleasant breezes flowing over it through the window.

Last night, five people here for dinner. I cooked two snapper. We played Ex Libris, the literary pastiche game, till after midnight. Mad laughter. Stretches of intense quiet while we fantasised and compressed our fantasies into sentences. As always, people began floridly, then simplified as they got the hang of it. A beginner will always betray himself by over-using adverbs.

I loved the game, handling words, trying to make a sentence that was direct and clear. How on earth did I write the way I used to? How did I write
Postcards from Surfers
? I had no plan for any of those stories. I wrote one sentence, then another. The intellectual approach, long-range planning, doesn't suit me. I don't need any great structural idea. One sentence, then another sentence, and ‘let the unconscious take precedence.' Later you think. At the start, you just write. If you have the nerve.

I have lost my nerve.

On Bondi Road I saw three young girls talking and laughing and gesturing together, all fresh and young. I envied them, as I sat there on the bench in my dark dress.
And shallow streams run dimpling all the way
, I thought, whereas I'm like a murkier stream, or a pool. A swamp. Water that doesn't flow. My attempt at a long poem abandoned. My stories barely begun. Like the baby next door that I sometimes hear crying bleakly, before it's attended to.
Sometimes the soul is tested
. Nothing I do
seems good or beautiful. Everything I think of writing seems trivial, pointless. I compare myself unfavourably with every writer in the world.

Still, I battle away at an essay about reading the Bible. I keep saying to myself, ‘OK – simple declarative sentences. Nothing fancy.' It's like exercising a stiff muscle. I've written a page. A page is better than not a page.

Marie comes to stay. ‘Cancers are moon people,' she says. She likes to watch the moon rise. One evening it sails free of a cloudbank: dusty straw-yellow, and squashed like a pickled onion. I call her and she comes running from the kitchen. She leans over the windowsill and murmurs, in a voice full of surprised tenderness, ‘Oh,
there
you are! Hello!'

A flat in the building next door to mine, and one floor lower, has been empty for several weeks. The curtains have been taken down and I can see through window after window as I go about my business. In the front room there used to be a grand piano; now there's only a patch of sunlight moving across a grey carpet. It's melancholy, somehow. Then late this afternoon I glance across
and see that in one of the quiet back rooms someone has made up a bed. Double, with crisp blue-and-white striped sheets, two pillows, a corner of the quilt turned back. All fresh and perfect. Otherwise, no human presence. I am thrilled by the bed. I keep kneeling up on my couch and leaning out to have another look at it. Order, intimacy, sleep, dreams – and waking in a new place, on a new morning.

I'm so tired of moving. But I long to feel the dry air and drink the water of Melbourne. One day soon, when I'm a person again, when I'm ready, I'll get my things together, and I'll go home.

Sighs too Deep for Words

ON BEING BAD AT READING
THE BIBLE

It would be absurd to pretend that I have ‘read the Bible'. Ten years ago I sat down with three translations and toiled my way through it, taking months. It was an experience of weird, laborious intensity. But you can't just read the Bible once. All that this endeavour did, in the long run, was to give me a sketchy map of an enormous, madly complicated territory (a map which passing time has blurred and distorted), and to offer certain touchstones of beauty or mystery which I desperately hang on to when life leaks meaning, or which leap spontaneously to mind when I'm ‘surprised by joy'.

Every two months the reading roster from church comes in the mail: a list set out in boxes with dates. A helpful person at the parish office has highlighted my name in pink or green. I never imagined that I would be one of the people who get up and ‘read the lesson'. I used to think that the people who were allowed to do this had something I knew I didn't have: unshakeable, worked-out faith. Well – there
are
people like that at our church. Or that's how they appear, from outside. One morning a woman whose husband, I'd heard, had died only a few days before got to her feet nevertheless to read her part. She held the book out flat in the air in front of her and almost shouted: ‘The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away: blessed be the name of the Lord!' Her face was shining, but tears were streaming down it.

I have done a fair bit of reading in public; I can get up in most company and read without raising a sweat. But when I have to read the Bible at church, my knees shake and I can hear my voice go squeaky. It's because I am having to struggle to get the meaning out of the words, and the meaning is often not clear to me. There's a man at our church who lost his job at theological college because he left his wife; when he reads the Epistle, he does it with a lovely intelligence and excellent intonation. It is clear that he understands it syntactically and as an argument: he makes it sound as accessible as ordinary
speech. I like the way the three readings in each communion service – Old Testament, Epistle and Gospel – are linked thematically. I like sermons in which these linkages are embroidered or explicated. Sometimes I take notes in the margins of the pew sheet. Often I think, ‘When I get home I will read these passages again and see what I can make of them.' But by the time I get home the concerns of ordinary life have overwhelmed me again and I have forgotten my resolution.

And anyway there is always this feeling of intellectual inadequacy: I don't
know
enough to read the Bible. The job of it is so colossal and complicated and endless; I am already too old; whatever response I come up with will have been shown by some scholar somewhere to be feeble and ignorant – or so my thoughts run.

In the early eighties, when I wrote theatre reviews in Melbourne, there were nights when I had to pinch myself to stay awake through turgid, self-important productions of the classics: my inner thighs were black and blue. But once, long before I realised I was interested in the godly business, I sat – and the punters, now I come to think of it, paid money to sit – in a dark theatre while an actor put his elbows on a wooden table with a book open on it, and read – or spoke – the Gospel according to St Mark. I can't recall the expectations I had of this ‘performance': just another job, I suppose I thought, and I must have
had the critic's notebook on my knee and the pencil in my hand. But Mark's Gospel was such a
story
– so fast and blunt and dramatic, skipping the annunciation, the birth of Jesus, starting with his baptism, rushing headlong to the Cross – that by the end I was on the edge of my seat, thrilled and trembling.

When I read in the paper, a few years back, that Rupert Murdoch was buying the publisher Collins, whose biggest seller is the New English Bible, I got hot under the collar.

‘Bibles should be handed round in typescript,' I said crossly. ‘Every hotel should have one ragged copy, and if you need it you call up the desk and they bring it to you on a tray.'

‘But what if more than one person calls for it?' said a passing sceptic.

‘Well – then they invite all of the inquirers into a special room, where they can share it. And maybe talk about why they feel they need it. Have you got a Bible?'

‘Yep. A bloke I know gave me one. It's a Gideon.'

‘You mean it's a
stolen
bible? He stole a
Gideon
?'

‘They
want
you to steal them. That's the whole point of 'em. Isn't it?'

I used to have an American friend who'd been a nun in a French order that started in the Sahara, the Little Sisters of Jesus of Charles de Foucault. She got leukemia, and for a variety of reasons, including the fact that whenever she left the nuns' house for a month or so her blood picture improved, she quit the order and went to live in a caravan at Wilcannia on the banks of the Darling River. She came to Sydney one winter, when I lived in someone else's house and couldn't offer her a spare room; but somehow we managed. One morning the excitement of being in the city, plus too much coffee on top of her chemo pills, brought on an attack of enfeebling nausea. She stayed all that day under the quilt on my bed, lying silently behind me in the room, while I sat at my desk and worked. I suppose nuns have to learn how to absent themselves: I felt as if I were alone. Later, when we had set ourselves up for the night, with the French doors open on to the balcony – she with her aching bones in the bed, I with my menopausal ones on a foam strip on the floor – she read me Rilke's ‘Ninth Duino Elegy'. She was such a pragmatic person, I was surprised – not only that she liked the Rilke, but that she read it with such ease: beautifully, with natural feeling for the syntax, so that it made sense as it left her lips.

Look, I am living. On what? Neither childhood nor future
grows any smaller . . . Superabundant being
wells up in my heart.

We lay there quietly. Then she said, ‘Read to me in French, Hel.' She passed me her Nouveau Testament: ‘It belonged to a Little Sister in Peru who died. And they gave her Bible to me because they thought I was going to die too.'

I opened it at random: ‘
L'annonciation
' in ‘
L'évangile selon S. Luc
'. (‘Yes, read Luke,' she said. ‘He's fairest to women.')
‘Le sixième mois, l'ange Gabriel fut envoyé par Dieu dans une ville de Galilée . . . Salut, comblée de grâce, le seigneur est avec toi . . .'

Yes, she did die. Of course she died.