The Feel of Steel (13 page)

It
does
?

I had recalled only a tight plot, a boy and a dog, a sad girl with a curse on her, an angel loftily explaining to people who've seen him eating that it was ‘appearance and no more', and a blessing the father gives to his daughter when she leaves his house: ‘Go in peace, my daughter. I hope to hear nothing but good of you, as long as I live.' That's the blessing I've been longing for all my life, the one I have given up hope of getting from my own father and mother. I need it. I have to have it. What's the destruction of Nineveh, compared with that tender and trusting farewell?

Melbourne's Famous Water

I
n the last few weeks before I moved back to Melbourne, I longed to stay home all the time, as if to use up in a frugal way the remainder of my tenancy of the highest, airiest place I had ever lived in, the hill-top apartment past whose windows birds flew and called, in the volume of sunny emptiness on its eastern side.

I had forgotten about time, and effort. I had imagined that my furniture, like my body, would be transported as if by enchantment across the eight hundred kilometers to Melbourne, and that I would stroll to my new front door the very next day, just as the removalists drew up in their truck, ready to unload.

But there would be a five-day gap between ‘uplift' and delivery. I decided to drive down the Hume in a hire car loaded with immediate essentials – foam-rubber strip, skin cream, ukelele – and camp in the empty house till my stuff arrived.

The day before the move, the packer came. He worked like lightning. By evening the apartment was stacked head-high with cartons. The curtains had been taken down, and when night fell I stood breathless for the last time before the broad valley of lights that sparkled opulently below my bare windows.

Next morning three huge Samoans arrived and fanned out through the rooms to get the measure of their job. In their presence I became obsessed by a need to keep a grip on my backpack. I crouched in the corner of the stripped living room, squeezing the bag in my arms and scourging myself for my paranoia, racism, prejudice. The silent, courteous men, with their pigtails and biblical names, trudged in and out, carrying everything I owned past me and along the hall to the truck. Hours passed before I let up on myself and realised that I was clinging to my bag not because I thought the removalists would steal it, but because it was the only stable, untouched object left in a life that was once more being dismembered all around me.

I slept badly on my foam rubber in the denuded flat, and woke to a humid morning. The sky was pearly, with a streak of amber cloud above the large, quiet old apartment blocks on the downward slope of Birriga Road, north-facing among their trees. Kookaburras set up their jovial clamour. Way down on the golf course, sprinklers gushed in fountains all along the fairways. Sweating, looking neither left nor right, I loaded the hire car and headed for the highway.

At six that evening I stepped stiffly out of the airconditioned
car in Albury, and breathed in a lungful of such scorching heat that my head floated off my shoulders. Dry! Pure! Forty degrees! If I kept going I could be home by midnight. But I knew I was half crazy, so I checked into a motel and sat on the bed. The air cooler roared more loudly than my ears. I unpacked the ukelele. It was not even out of tune. I played a couple of chords, put it back in its case, and went out to the movies.

Next morning I dawdled: not the first time in my life I had hesitated on that border. I read the paper in the sun. I walked around the Botanic Gardens on gravel paths. When I could delay the moment no longer, I got back into the car and crossed the Murray into Victoria.

Until Wangaratta the sky was covered in cloud the colour and texture of a water biscuit; then it cleared. The day became a scorcher. The freeway was so wide and smooth, and the landscape so flat and uneventful, that I kept blanking out. I had to eat lollies to stay alert. Near Benalla I almost nodded off. I was frightened. I had slept well: I was not tired: I knew I must be resisting something. But I
want
to go home, don't I? I took the exit into Seymour and walked round the streets for half an hour, ate a Boston bun, drank a terrible coffee. Then I got back in the car, which I was beginning to hate, and pushed on. The only way I could keep myself awake was by singing songs out loud, taking big breaths, trying to remember the words and get them perfect.

How drab the northern outskirts of Melbourne were. There was a whole new road system. I got lost in its flyovers and coloured shards and incomprehensible
signage. What had they done to my city? And had it really always been so . . . flat?

My new house, a single-fronted, single-storey terrace rented on a flying visit a month earlier, had bulged and shrunk in my memory. The whole building, like my spirits, seemed sunken, unnaturally low. It had more rooms than I remembered but they were smaller. The backyard was tiny and closed off by a khaki rollerdoor that I had failed in my haste to notice. The kitchen was longer and narrower, the curtains stiffer and shabbier, the picture hooks higher, almost out of reach. One of the bedroom walls was bubbly low down with damp. But how could it be damp today? It was February. There was a drought. The mercury was touching forty.

I raised the bedroom window and looked out into the narrow light-well, where the metal coffins of the hot water service and the ducted heating unit stood in their casual ugliness. My eyes skimmed past them and up into the spindly foliage of a tall young eucalypt in the next yard. I saw the sky. It was a Melbourne sky, the sort whose hugeness you can know only by being a speck on a plain. It went up and up, a sublime blue, intense and pure, without a shred of cloud.

I laid the foam mattress on the carpet and stretched out. Whenever the hot air stirred, a metal wind-chime in the next yard struck a random cluster of notes: gentle, without force or pattern. Listening to it was like being sporadically stroked by someone whose mind was on something else. I curled up on my side, took three breaths, and fell asleep.

When I woke it was almost dark. The house was hollow and silent. Now: if only I had a glass I would drink a pint or two of Melbourne's famous water, and go back to sleep. But the glasses were in a cardboard carton, and the carton was in a truck, and the truck was crawling somewhere on the curve of the planet between Bellevue Hill and here. I had four days till my life caught up with me, heavy, smeared, blunderous.

I walked down the hall to the kitchen, and opened the door into the yard. My first breath of night carried the scent of the grasslands, the mighty Keilor plains that lie northwest of Melbourne. I grabbed hold of the garden tap, swung my head under it, and guzzled the warm water till it became cold, and kept on guzzling till my teeth hurt. Then I stood barefoot on the brick paving and looked straight up. The air was dry, the sky was dry; and in it hung two or three high, dry stars.

The night had only just begun. What would I do until morning?

Tutto Sereno

T
he day Stuart the removalist's packer came to strip my Sydney flat, he held my iMac poised over a carton and glanced at me with raised eyebrows. I clutched my temples: ‘Wait! I won't have email for
five days
!' He grinned, and with sadistic slowness lowered it into the box.

Already now, I've been in Melbourne a week. Standing among the boxes and wrong-shaped furniture, I struggle each morning to communicate with a cyber-kind at Bigpond: suppression of cardiac rage, abandonment of hope, phone flung down.

Where
are
all my emails? Are they clustering round the chimney, thronging there like the crows on the climbing frame in
The Birds
? Will there be a storm of beaks and claws and feathers, when I'm reconnected?

It takes me another three days to realise that I don't care.

Now I wake up early. What is this beautiful calm? No point rushing to the computer: I'm cut off from the fast world. I lie under my sheet and gaze at the light on the wall. The neighbours' chooks are quietly clucking. I get up, wash, make my breakfast, read the paper, start work – the way I used to, before email came into my life to obsess and fracture me.

Later comes the postie. He brings me two postcards, a glossy one from Italy with a Virgin and Child on it, the other hand-made from Sydney, showing a torn-out press photo of a steeple-chase. On the back of each of these, the sender has managed to compress in small handwriting a world of news, of intelligence, of affection – an urgent sense of reality.

What horrifies me about personal email is the vastness of its message field. This is chaos, the abyss. If you live alone, if you suffer at times from an anxiety that you might not exist, email tempts you to behave neurotically – to pour into its appalling infiniteness a cataract, a haemorrhage of words, bottomless, boundaryless. What feels like existential relief is in fact psychologically shallow, a dreadful and meaningless leakage of self.

How finite, by comparison, how human, how elegant and spare a postcard is! Its classic size, 100×150 mm., forces on the sender a stringent discipline – like algebra, or yoga. You cannot go on and on and on. It challenges you to get straight to the point, to fill its tiny oblong with energy. It's like trying to write a poem: the struggle with the constraints of form ignites the imagination, rouses the sluggish mind from its torpor.

The humblest provincial art museum is as likely as the Louvre to distil the pick of its collection into small saleable rectangles. Smallness is all. The best cards make a virtue of their limitation, and focus on a detail of a masterpiece: a disciple's wineglass sweating water-beads, an Empress's forgotten dog, a violet sprouting in the corner of a mighty massacre.

But postcards don't have to be bought. The newspapers of every land, including our own, teem with conveniently-sized pictures and paragraphs which, ripped out, stuck with Uhu glue on to a plain white system card, stamped and dropped into a letterbox, will carry to the hand of your friend, your child or your darling a perfume of place and of foreignness. My favourite is a little coloured weather map of Italy torn from a newspaper in Pisa: all down its length stretch the summer words
Tutto sereno
.

Sending postcards is a slow, amateurish game, physical, visual, with many stages, requiring contemplation and a certain amount of waiting. Not many people can be bothered any more to return the serve. But they will return your email so fast that it's winded you before you've raised your racquet.