by Luke Carman
Realising how entranced the young people are, I begin to grab at their clothes. When this fails to break their focus I resorted to clawing at their faces with my nails and to kick at their shins with my steel-cap boots, to scream in their ears with all my will. When that has no effect, I start to argue with them, then merely to insult, to call them selfish and stupid. I try to incite them with ever greater insults, call them racists and bigots and cowards, but this too has no effect. I succumb to fury, start to punch them, I strike the back of their heads, their mouths and kidneys, but my arms move as if underwater. What’s worse, I can still hear Peter the poet talking, and he is saying, ‘Once we accept these basic axioms of the universe as a place of sheer, selfdefining meaning, it is only logical that we are empowered to conceive of ourselves as the highest approximations of the mind of God – whose pantheistic presence is manifestly demonstrated by the extension of this arithmetic – there is, therefore, an absolute truth shining out from the beating red heart of existence.’ Now, beyond desperate to save the crowd from the threat of immolation, I plunge my hands into their pants and tights and jiggle and pluck at their genitals, and I bite the skin of their necks, but still they will not notice me or the fire around us, and I sob and cry and at last when the smoke makes me cough and choke, and I begin to smell an awful burning stench, I drop to the floor. There, through their unmovable legs, I crawl towards the stairs, and roll down them in a desperate fall as the heat pushes at my back and licks my limbs with sudden ferocity.
Outside in the cold street I look up at the stained-glass window and watch the flames dancing, thinking of the young people being incinerated inside. Through the coloured glass the red and yellow of the fire spreads a halo of blue and green out into the deserted Sydney night, while the walls of the library smoke and I can feel the pulse of steam hissing through the body of the building. Peter puts his ringed hand on my shoulder, having apparently escaped with me, though his hair is singed and smouldering, and his face is covered in soot like someone in a children’s movie who has played with fire and been scorched. When he speaks his manner seems tempered, as if the harshness of the inferno has burned out his mania.
‘The Hebrews,’ he says, ‘have a story about Joseph that always makes me laugh. He finds himself in an Egyptian prison, and there he comes upon a royal baker and a carpenter. “Why do you guys look so miserable?” he says. “Because,” the carpenter tells him, “there’s nobody about to read our dreams.” So Joseph gives them a look at his technicolour coat and says, “Give me your dreams, and I’ll have a word to God”. The baker goes first, and says, “Every night I dream of seven balls of dough rolling down a hill, I chase after them, but they go in seven different directions, and I end up empty-handed.” Joseph furrows his brow for a bit and says “Good news! I’ve asked God and your dream means that seven days from now the Pharaoh will have a change of heart and you’ll be invited back to the palace.” “Oh God thou art merciful!” the baker cries, and falls to the floor of the prison and kisses Joseph’s feet in joy. The carpenter is overjoyed too, on hearing this revelation, because his dream is almost identical to the baker’s, only it’s seven logs in his that go rolling down the hill, and take seven different paths, and so he leaps to his feet and says to Joseph, “Quick, do me next!” Joseph listens to this virtually identical dream, furrows his brow again and says, “God says Pharaoh is going to crucify you and your family in the centre of town.”’ Peter takes his ringed hand from my shoulder, wipes a smear of soot from his face and says, ‘Always makes me laugh, that does,’ as the two of us watch the auroral arrangement of reds and blues and greens glimmering in the dark.
The colour fades, and my eyes open. The dream is over, and back in the daylight world, things remain as ordinary as ever. The neighbour has ceased his barking. I can hear him knocking now – a hammer against the wall. That man is always doing three or more things at once. Talking to his son now, between swings, then his wife. What is he saying? Car boots are being slammed outside in the street. It must be time for church, and the slow parade of ancient people on their way to service will be coming down the footpath. My eyes are tired and my mother has left the frame. There is no one in the house, and the smell of smoke from the barbecue next door wafts through the open window, the rich scent of charring meat and coal. For a moment the shock of the real makes it hard to recall what I’ve just seen in my sleep, but, thread by thread, I pull it back into mind, and move to the table to write it down.
THE CULT OF WESTERN SYDNEY
There were six of us facing the director in the backstage area, far enough away from the curtain closed across the stage of the Bankstown theatre to keep our nerves in check. The theatre itself was a recently opened building, a local council triumph of tall glass perimeters, stainless steel handrails, and an elegantly minimalist architectural blandness. They’d named the place in honour of an actor who’d made it in Hollywood in the eighties and was now, in the eyes of the Sydney arts community, the suburb’s strongest case for artistic and cultural relevance, though few who passed beneath the grand transparent doors would recognise his face or the titles of his films with great accuracy. Our stage director, a short thin woman with dark close-cropped hair – well known for bringing an experimental type of theatre to Australian shores – was walking us through a series of exercises intended to hone our plosives, sharpen our fricatives, and counter the deadening effect of our collective tendency to mispronunciation, so that the opening night’s performances would be as fluent and nuanced as we’d all rehearsed them to be. At her instruction, we flicked our tongues against clenched teeth, popped our puffed-up mouths in a flatulent manner, and pretended to yawn till our jaws ached with repeated over-extension. These drills were then topped off with an intense regime of tongue twisters, all of us repeating ‘selfish shellfish’, ‘she sells sea shells’, ‘a big black bear sat on a big black rug’ and ‘six sleek swans swam swiftly southwards’ to the point of semantic discombobulation.
We’d been told to expect a full house in the hall that evening; the Sydney Writers’ Festival had included our ‘performance reading’ in its vast catalogue of literary events as part of its ‘way out west’ outreach program. Reminded of this fact, the more politically savvy amongst our crew began to grumble that we ought to have been invited east like the rest of the writers on the festival program, adding that it was a predictable demonstration of the hierarchical behaviour of a white, middleclass institution. Thinking on this, another member of the group added that it was patronising to marginalised groups to deploy terminology like ‘special programs’ and ‘outreach’, especially when the real agenda of the festival was clearly to co-opt our crew’s diversity and dilute the subversive nature of our writing without allowing it to disrupt the seamless veneer of faux-inclusivity that characterised the Australian literary world. Were anyone to counter that we were lucky to be asked to be part of an internationally recognised writers’ festival when none of us had ever actually published anything, the obvious rejoinder would have been that if Australian publishing was focused on the potential of up-and-coming talents – especially those in marginalised and oppressed communities – rather than those white-bread authors whose appeal is limited to an ageing middle-class population, then perhaps more of us would have been able to publish books of our own. This analysis was augmented by another member of the crew, who scoffed that it was evidence of the dehumanising and adversarial extent of late capitalism’s toxicity that our status as ‘bookable’ artists was determined by having our names attached to a commercial product.
The director interrupted this discussion to take us through the final exercise, where we were asked to close our eyes and envision the sun setting over a tropical beach at dusk, raising our arms slowly as we inhaled a deep, slow, soothing breath, and then – luxuriating momentarily in our calm fullness – we were to exhale, gracefully letting our arms float down to our sides like feathers moving through thick air. We were each asked to repeat this meditation three time
s in slow succession, our stage director encouraging us to keep our eyes closed to guard our attention against the growing intensity of the arriving audience, whose presence was unmistakably audible as they made their creaking way into the auditorium’s seating area, the growing background noise of their excited chatter pushing in at us through the winding corridor’s crisp acoustics and carrying with it an irresistible contagion of ecstatic terror. It was a struggle to keep the eyes closed against the thought of the faces accumulating before the stage we were moments from stepping up onto, but I managed to hold myself in the thrall of the meditation by substituting the mental picture of some vague tropical beach with the familiar view of the skyline from my home in Mt Pritchard, where great ash-green ghost gums swayed in a burly wind, and on the horizon, the sight of Centrepoint Tower was a spindle of steel the size and shape of a turntable needle.
It occurred to me – eyes tight, the image of my childhood background bright and blue in my mind – that because it was now late in the evening, the tip of the tower would be flashing an electric violet light, like the first lick of flame from a birthday candle, which would be just discernible from the back windows of our house. This view of the city on the horizon had been the ever-present background scenery of my life, the entirety of which had been orientated by the distance between the landmark of the tower – made miniature for us outside the window – and my suburban existence of Colorbond-bound yards with dried-out lawns on which utes, trucks, and swing sets sank into the climbing weeds and the Hills Hoists tilted their grey skeletal limbs towards the earth. The scene pinned my life into place, not least because the Centrepoint building happened to contain the office where my father worked. Home from school I’d stand by the window in my blue uniform, contemplating the thin sliver of the tower on the edge of the visible world with a melancholy of familial longing – wondering how the bustle of the city was treating my dad: his black suitcase and polished shoes, his starched white shirts, the black hairs furling down from his beard onto his collar, the tensed plane of his squared shoulders and his rolled sleeves when he went marching, at the end of the day, from out of the immense building at the city’s centre and into the thrumming life of the streets with a lit cigarette on his lips. If I closed my eyes by the open window of the house and pressed the top of my nose against the flyscreen I could almost smell that distinct sweet odour of his sweat and the trace of smoke and coffee that permeated his tanned skin. At seven in the evening, when the clocks of the house would chime and my stepdad would settle down to watch deranged neighbours feuding over fences on A Current Affair, and the sun was starting to sink behind our hill, I’d sometimes imagine my father leaving the British-Ex where he used to drink, catching the train west to his home several suburbs away from ours, wondering what expression he had on his face while the world of skyscrapers and suits gave ground to the low and level fibro of the suburbs. Despite working in the city’s tallest building, the immutable logic of geography meant my dad could not see our place, even if he went out onto the tourist section of the tower and dropped coins into the telescopic binoculars on the outer rims of the structure’s enormous head. If he ever stood in the treacherous winds out on the deck and looked to the west and scanned for us in the plains of fibro homes with above-ground pools and trampolines in their yards, he never said so to me.
All these impressions went with me up the stairs and onto the Bankstown theatre’s stage, but when the velvet curtain came up and we were immersed in the collective energies of the audience whose faces were obscured by the ferocity of the spotlights aimed at us, all thought of the past was obliterated. We were perched on thin stools with microphones angled at our faces, and our stories were printed in the form of booklets and placed on music stands at arm’s length. We were supposed to follow along as each member of the ensemble read, turning the pages of the script in unison so that no one would be out of place or miss their cue. I listened to the readings of the other writers go by, their voices rolling over the sentences and exclamations I’d heard a thousand times in our rehearsals, sweat running down my temples and pouring from my armpits. The idea that in a matter of moments it would be my voice passing through the amplification system and out into the brutal mix of blinding lights and darkened faces in the hall sparked through my nerves like an electric scream that lasted right up until the story before mine ended and the dreaded cue to begin reading arrived like the fall of a guillotine blade. The internal apoplexy of screaming nerves leapt up and took possession of my mouth, which moved through the motions and made the approximate sounds the words on the page were supposed to represent at a rapidity and volume far exceeding what I had intended. I read so quickly and maniacally that the whole thing was over in a burst of nervous seconds, and the instant the last sentence had been spoken my body slumped into a post-adrenaline delirium during which the only thing that kept me erect in the stool was the collective force of the crowd’s thousand invisible eyes.
After a few more readings the event was over. An applause rose up from the crowd, and we were sent out down the stage’s stairs and into the audience by our director, who gave us a beaming smile with her perfect teeth and touched our shoulders as we went by on our way to meet what she was calling with earnestness ‘our new fans’. With the lights on I could make out my mum and my brother in a centre row, and I waved at them so they’d know it was okay to leave. They smiled back, looking a mixture of proud and uncertain, my mother’s deep blue eyes and my brother’s lips tensely pursed, revealing that concealed contradiction of affection and mistrust he carried with him everywhere in those years. While my family was waving themselves outside, a diminutive ageing actor, whose decades-long career consisted of having his scenes cut from some of Australia’s finest films, shook my hand and announced with a sardonic smirk, ‘I really enjoyed the way you read. I was laughing the whole way through.’ I thanked him, but he held onto my hand and added, ‘Was I supposed to be laughing though? Cause I really wasn’t sure if you’re just like that?’ I thanked him again, not sure what else to say and he laughed. I went out to lean on the stainless steel in the lobby and be away from the crowd, which was hurrying towards the hall’s glass doors. A rotund gentleman in a Grateful Dead shirt under a suit-jacket snuck up behind me. He had one arm tucked firmly around the waist of a tall, bosomy woman who seemed determined to look over her shoulder and out of the lobby at something happening in the darkness, her long hair tumbling around the man’s shoulder as if attempting to grasp his enormous throat in a noose of locks. ‘You mentioned Nietzsche in your reading,’ he said. ‘But what of his have you read?’ I put my hands in my pockets and attempted to list the little of Nietzsche’s back-catalogue I’d managed to slog my way through, but his companion interrupted, saying ‘He’s read his name somewhere so he regurgitated it in his stories,’ and flashed him a wide-eyed look as if desperately begging to cut short a tedious subject and leave the scene. ‘Is that right?’ he asked, his eyes narrowing and his fingers sliding down into his shirt so that the hairs on his pale chest were visible. Then he coughed loudly and said, ‘Well aren’t you a little moron then!’ just as his wife managed to pull him away so he was free to walk out through the tall glass sliding doors and into the night.
After several encounters like these, including one in which an elderly woman thanked me for representing the travails of Asperger’s syndrome sufferers so courageously, the crew regrouped in the backstage area, our smudged scripts tucked into our pockets or stuffed into handbags or tossed into the theatre’s bins. The night, our first public performance as a group, was deemed an unequivocal triumph by those whose voices mattered most. The more vocal members of our group were certain that the audience who had come to the Bankstown theatre that evening would never forget what they’d witnessed. Were any one of us slow enough on the uptake to question what it was that the attendees had seen or heard in the hall that they might be inclined to retain longer than a week or two, thorough expositions by one of our more perspicacious members could ea
sily be provided to demonstrate the uniqueness of the writing that our collective had read aloud on the stage. Since none of us had been published before, the spokesperson might say, there was no way anyone in the audience could have experienced writing like ours. What we represented as a collective was not merely another group of unknown artists – we were the manifestation of a new literary movement from the margins of a society that was debased by its domination under a malignant white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal status quo. This unspoken case was persuasive, and I suspect it was in the dim gloom of the Bankstown theatre’s backstage area, laughing and sighing in the relief of having made it through our readings without much error, drenched in sweat and high on the vestigial electricity of having performed our work for the reward of applause, that the seed of an insidious grandeur began to flow from the vainest members of our collective and into the general heart of our Western Sydney writing group.
Despite acquiring a newfound sense of our own gravitas, many of the members of the group had a hard time committing words to the page, and our momentum stalled. Slaves as we were to the barbaric necessities of a capitalist economy, many of us were too worn down by menial jobs in call centres, bowling clubs, or working as checkout chicks in shopping centres to actually do any writing. New, more disciplined members were sought to increase the group’s productivity, and regular workshops were established so that we could keep track of one another and encourage slower members to keep the production line of poetry and prose flowing. These workshops were not the usual writers’ group meeting where a bunch of ineffectual hobbyists massage each other’s egos and smother one another in vague platitudes – they were adversarial and caustic events, a place where sloppiness and inattention were considered intolerable. Because our duty to represent a new and radical movement in Australian letters was so immensely serious, it was necessary that the work we produced was flawless. As it happened, much of the work our members brought to the workshops was under-cooked, over-written, full of erroneous grammatical eccentricities, and, most egregiously, the drafts our members produced were often at odds with the political aesthetic that our more senior members were committed to fomenting. The intensity of the workshops was an essential means of correcting these deviations from our collective, and a chance for those of us who knew most about everything to lend their knowledge to those who knew close to nothing at all.
