The Feel of Steel (22 page)

The Feel of Steel 1

O
ne day in the late 1950s, when I was fifteen and a failure at sports, a Hungarian fencing coach turned up at our school. Eager to avoid the brutality of hockey, I went to his first demo lesson and was amazed to find that I could pick up the moves with ease.

The coach's name was Mr Les Fadgyas. He'd fenced for Australia in the 1956 Melbourne Olympics. He was terribly impressive, but also funny, sweet and patient. We loved and respected him. When he met my mother, he clicked his heels and kissed her hand. Even in her dementia, now, she laughs with pleasure when reminded of that.

No doubt he wore an ordinary tracksuit, but in my memory, over these four decades, he has metamorphosed into a European nobleman – a hero in white jacket, mask and glove.

What Mr Fadgyas had at his disposal was a way of focusing and directing aggression: of making fighting beautiful. The aggression in me, however, was deeply buried. Though I was quick on my feet, I was scared – not of getting hurt, but of attacking. Before competitions I was sleepless with fear. While one of my sisters made the state team, my fencing career involved a couple of inglorious competitive bouts and a slow fade-out. I left Geelong for university and never picked up a foil again.

Until this winter. My sister faxed me, for a joke, a flyer she'd picked up in the Brunswick library: ‘Fencing for Older Adults.' Something stirred. On the advertised day I pulled on my runners and drove to the industrial back street of Brunswick where the Victorian Amateur Fencing Association (to which I must have once, incredibly, belonged) has its HQ, on the upper level of a huge warehouse.

I clanged up the fire escape and found a vast, bare, white space, daylit through the glass of a saw-tooth roof. The whole floor was a line of pistes, the raised fourteen-metre strips on which bouts are fought. There was nobody around. It had the stillness and the weird attractiveness of a place devoted to a formal discipline.

Four ‘older adult' women turned up to the class. Judi and I had learnt before. Alice and Josie were complete beginners. The teacher, Ernie, was a small, chunky, friendly seventy-year-old with an English accent, in glasses and grey tracksuit. I was thinking wistfully of my Hungarian hero when Ernie seized a foil, raised both arms and fell with easy grace into the basic position. To
see someone do that can take your breath away – the authority of it, the quiet readiness.

I've heard musicians and psychiatrists talk about muscle memory – how the body carries memories that the mind knows nothing of. Now for the first time I understood it. When he gave out the masks and I pulled one on, the smell of cold wire shot up my nose, so familiar that I thought I was going to faint. When I took hold of a foil (‘Pick it up lightly,' said Ernie, ‘not with a battleaxe grip!') it fitted my hand as if I'd laid it down only yesterday. When he called out ‘
En garde!
' my body dropped into the posture of its own accord. He showed us the salute: heels together, foil to the nose and down to the floor.

We were hooked.

By the second lesson we'd learnt three moves. While Ernie and the others worked on the basics, Judi and I pulled on masks and breastplates, stepped on to the piste and crossed swords. I went for her. She blocked me. I went again. It was thrilling. Adrenalin streamed through me. I wanted to attack, to be attacked, to have to fight back. I remembered the lunges, the sliding clash of metal, how the sword hand rises as the foil-tip hits the target. It was glorious. We both burst out laughing. We only stopped because she didn't have a glove: I almost struck her hand and she flinched back. We lowered the blades. She pulled off her mask. Her eyes were bright, but I saw with a shock how gentle her face was, how feminine, under the cloud of hair.

The language of fencing is old French, beautiful and
severe. Ernie used the phrase
le sentiment de fer
. The feel of steel. That's what I want. I want to learn to fight, but not in the ordinary wretched way of the worst of my personal life – desperate, ragged, emotional. I want to learn an ancient discipline, with formal control and purpose. Will my body hold out? I hope it's not too late.

Our Mother's Flood 2

I
n the middle of the night, at the holiday cottage, there was a loud thump and a scrabble outside the door. From the next room my sister called: ‘Did you hear that?'

I crept out on to the verandah. A full moon blazed on the dams. Nobody there. No rustling of leaves or heavy breathing.

‘Don't worry,' I said, going back to bed. ‘It was probably just some beast.'

Next morning my sister found one of her shoes, chewed, on the path outside. The bottom panel of wire had been ripped right out of the screen door.

In a couple of hours sixty people from my mother's side of the family would converge for a reunion on our cousin's farm in this pretty valley. I was dreading it. I could not concentrate on her shoe.

‘It must be that beast we heard. Maybe it was a wombat,' said my sister. ‘The shrubbery looks sort of squashed.'

What would we know about beasts? Crabbily I girded my loins. My sister, as an instigator of the reunion, was excited. Sporty and sociable, she has always been at ease in the wider family; but I could feel myself regressing to the gawky, anxious, lonely bookworm I was as a girl.

By noon the clan was gathering up at the big house. There were name tags. Everyone was shouting and laughing. Teenage boys with small kids clinging on behind were tearing up and down the drive on motor bikes. Each family had brought its own food and established a separate encampment in the garden. A young woman passed me with a platter of barbecued chops held high. Thinking we were all going to share, I reached out to take one. She pulled it back against her chest. I saw a cousin's husband approach with the same gesture a plate my sister was carrying. ‘No!' she cried. ‘These are
ours
!'

My parents arrived. Dad installed Mum's wheelchair beside a fire. She became weepy with happiness at the sight of her only surviving brother, then sank back into the paranoid gloom of Alzheimer's, spinning out fantasies of persecution. The wives of her son and grandson pressed close to her in sympathy, holding her hands. Dad set himself up on the verandah and hoed into a plate of food.

At the dining room table my architect brother-in-law was drawing up a family tree. While the multitudes feasted, he worked patiently for hours, pencilling, erasing,
pencilling again in his beautiful, accurate script. People holding dripping hunks of barbecued meat filed past his shoulder, shouting corrections, reminding him of the rumours and scandals of the past: embezzlements, suicides, skiing deaths, divorces, disinheritings, opera singers, Polish counts, a bizarre religious sect.

Then everyone crowded into the living room while one of the youngest of my generation, who had quietly been organising the archives, loaded into the VCR some home movies he'd had transferred to video. Expecting weddings, I sat down out of duty.

But it opened in trembling sepia: a river breaking its banks. We all went quiet. Water surged and roiled mightily down a Melbourne street: the Yarra was in flood. One of the men called out, ‘Those cars. It's not . . . the thirties, is it?'

It was. Pop had bought a movie camera, way back then. He's been dead for forty years but suddenly we were seeing through his eyes. Our parents, aunts and uncles were children again, in indecently clingy togs, doing bellywhackers into the Kew Baths, swinging on a rope over the Yarra, or dashing about on grass with tennis rackets. My ten-year-old mother, wearing a winged rubber bathing cap, swam to the edge of a pool and smiled shyly up at us. My father in his twenties lounged among Mum's brothers with a cigarette hanging off his lip.

Colour was invented. My part of the family disappeared to Geelong: I stopped recognising the actors. Someone younger inherited the camera. Decades flashed
by on beaches. A baby learnt to roll over, crawl and stand. A small boy trotted past the camera on rickety legs. Mothers put on weight and lost it again. A kid elbowed his cousin in the jaw and slouched away. Skirts shortened then bouffed out under boleros. The room rang with cries of jovial mockery.

Suddenly, a low hedge. A line of laughing children burst out from behind it, running in single file past the camera. The viewers did a double take, then began to shout their names. They were running in order of age. The first one was my cousin. The second was me. The third was my sister whose shoe last night the beast had gnawed. And so on, in descending order, down to the tiniest ones who needed their stooping mothers, in big-skirted fifties shirt-waists, to lead them by the hand. It was weirdly comic, and beautiful. The archivist had to rewind it several times, till we had gazed and sighed our fill.

I cried all the way from Alexandra to Healesville. What sort of miracle can it be that proved to me my mother's flood was a memory and not a hallucination? And what does it mean that there has existed all these years, unknown to me, documentary proof that I was not a gawk at all, but a slender thirteen-year-old in a rose-coloured cardy and a full skirt of sky-blue cotton?

Can it be that, in the end, nothing is ever lost?

Is this what family reunions are for?

The Ukelele Club

A
fter Grant Hackett beat Kieren Perkins on Saturday afternoon, our suburb was very still. The air was warm, motionless, dense with spring. The pittosporum hedge of the Hispanic kindergarten threaded its subtle perfume between the houses. Doves were calling. On the other side of my back fence a neighbour rummaged quietly in his shed.

What does one wear, on such a mild evening, to a meeting of the Ukelele Club? None of the outfits I assembled seemed right: too light, too thick, too short, too pale. I dragged out my ripple-soled sandals from last summer, and buckled them on over little white socks. Was I mutton dressed as lamb? Sitting on the floor to reflect, I noticed something hard and round wedged between the treads of the left sandal.
A cherry pip
. At the sight of it I leapt into a linen dress and cardy,
grabbed my uke and sheet music, and rushed out the front door.

By the time I got to Sally's place, evening was falling. Patrick, our baritone player, was up in the Mallee, she said, on family business. While we waited for our sister Marie to arrive with the food, we sprawled on the couch and inspected the athletes on the Olympic channel.

‘How can they run, in all that weighty gold jewellery?' said Sally.

‘And what about that swimmer in the lane next to Susie O'Neill, who had great big hoop ear-rings sticking out under her cap? Two in each ear!'

We shook our heads and clicked our tongues.

The doorbell rang. Marie made an entrance, carrying her Kamaka and a white plastic bag. ‘There was a huge queue at Thy Thy,' she said, arranging twelve rice paper rolls in a cartwheel, with the sauce in the middle. We fell upon them.

Marie announced, with her mouth full, that she was thinking seriously of changing her name, and asked us which we liked best out of Margaux, Marion or Madeleine. We said we'd give it some thought as the meeting progressed.

While we were tuning up, I reported having received an inquiry on my answering machine from a bloke who was interested in joining the Ukelele Club.

‘Whaaaat?' gasped Margaux. ‘Has he got any idea how hopeless we are?'

‘How did he hear about it, anyway?' said Sally, running off a clumsy little riff.

‘Remember that cute and efficient guy I bought our Kamakas off,' I said, ‘at Zenith Music in Perth? Well he told this man there was a club in Melbourne, and gave him my number.'

‘Where does he live?' said Madeleine.

‘Sydney,' I said.

They stared at me.

‘Is there such a thing as a ukelele nerd?' said Sally.

‘It can get pretty lonely,' I said, ‘playing the ukelele. He probably just wants some human contact.'

Marion's even more of a beginner than we are, so we warmed up with ‘Our Boys Will Shine Tonight', ‘My Darling Clementine', ‘The Marines' Hymn' and ‘Camptown Races'. Every time we made it to the end of a song we fell about, laughing incredulously. Then we got serious. Sally, who's a real musician, transposed ‘After the Ball' and ‘Don't Get Around Much Any More' into a girls' singing key, but we had to keep breaking off to watch a race.

‘He's going to
run
in those rigid-looking golden shoes?' said Sally. ‘I thought they were just for show.'

We sat in a row with the ukes on our knees, swept away by the lunchy, bejewelled prayerfulness of the black sprinters, but all the while mechanically forming chords with our left hands and strumming softly with our right.

Around 10 p.m. Madeleine/Marion/Margaux displayed with pride her ridged fingertips. She was exhausted from learning
at this age
, she declared, and was going home, even if her name-change was still unresolved. When she'd kissed us goodnight and driven away, Sally
and I tackled the old standard ‘All of Me', with what we thought of as some success. Then I produced the Beatles' songbook and we chopped a path through ‘With a Little Help from My Friends' and ‘When I'm Sixty-four'. But our
pièce de résistance
, we agreed, was ‘I Will'. We played it twice.

‘What a pretty melody,' said Sally with a sigh. ‘They really knew how to write a tune.'

‘Let's sing it one more time,' I said.

And as we laboured over the chords, struggling to make the song sound sweet and light, it seemed to me that what the three of us had been making, that evening in early spring, might almost pass (at least on some distant, benevolent, tone-deaf planet) for the phenomenon known to us hopeful earthlings as music.