Singularity

by Charlotte Grimshaw

  She would write to him. That was the way to deal with this humiliation. She would put it to him in writing, in a dignified way, what she had been aiming at when she wrote the story, and where he’d got it wrong about her.

  She hurried up the steps and into the foyer. She was late, but she thought she’d be able to get away with it, since she was in sole charge of her section that afternoon. She ran up the stairs to the second floor, to her work station in the children’s ‘Weird and Wonderful’ rooms. Here she had her desk among the plaster dinosaur bones and aquariums and drawers full of preserved insects. She took school and kindergarten children on tours around the rooms, explaining the exhibits, and when there were no groups to lead, maintained the collection and worked on the colourful displays. She made the eye-catching signs and banners and charts that were designed to draw children’s interest. She had always been good at art. She was the one management came to when they needed a new laminated sign or wall diagram, or materials and ideas for school holiday art activities.

  The section was empty except for a couple of glazed mothers, gossiping as their toddlers played on the jigsaw mat. Viola moved a mobile of the planets off her desk. She sat down and got out a piece of paper.

  Dear Simon, (Could she call him Simon now? She decided she

  could.)

  Just now you said that writing could be a form of therapy.

  I’ve been thinking about this. If fiction is written as

  therapy, it isn’t going to be any good. The point is, fiction is

  produced out of experience, but it has to become something

  beyond just emotion and reaction. It requires a distancing,

  an exercising of talent and literary skill. This is what I was

  trying to explain, very ineptly I’m sure, that the source

  is experience but the true creative process changes the

  material, changes it utterly (to quote Yeats) and it should

  become something that is true only to the shape of the

  composition. Like, for example, Picasso making a sculpture

  of a monkey out of nuts and bolts — the end result, the

  composition, isn’t nuts and bolts any more, it’s a monkey.

  And even if someone personally recognises those nuts and

  bolts it doesn’t matter, they’re not what they were any more.

  They’re a work of art, they are the monkey. Does this sound

  ridiculous? Not if you’re in the monkey business. Anyway, I

  know you said you’d never actually looked at the ‘monkey’

  (the story I mean) that I was going on about. I also know

  it might seem strange to acknowledge that one regularly

  makes things up, and to assert that on this occasion one is

  making nothing up, but merely speaking ‘after hours’, when

  all the tools of invention have been laid down. But that’s the

  case. Everything I said when we met just now was true.

  Viola Myers

  She read it through, agitated. This was more like it — to engage on a serious level, to impress him with her dedication to her craft. She sat chewing her pen and gazing at the rows of preserved specimens floating in their disgusting formaldehyde. The bit about the monkey, that was good. To call it monkey business — showing she wasn’t too solemn and pedantic. She pictured Picasso’s monkey sculpture. But was it really constructed out of nuts and bolts? Or was it made out of a toy car? She couldn’t remember. She could only be sure by looking it up, and felt knackered at the prospect. Should she just cover herself by changing ‘nuts and bolts’ to ‘bits and pieces’? The whole thing was a bit rambling. It was good to quote Yeats — that showed depth, seriousness. But did a reference to ‘talent’ matter? Did that sound conceited? And what about referring to herself as ‘one’? Was that pompous? As for ‘the tools of invention’ … God.

  A door slammed, sending an echo up the stairwell. She heard a voice raised in a foreign language in one of the adjoining halls. She looked up. On the wall in front of her was a section of her latest poster series: The Life Cycle of the Dragonfly. It showed how a dragonfly develops from an egg to a nymph to the beautiful, glittering adult creature.

  Next to the photos she had written in large letters:

  The dragonfly lays its eggs on or under water. The eggs hatch

  into a creature called a nymph. The nymph, a tiny bullet-

  shaped creature, has a system of breathing and propelling

  itself through its own rectum.

  Viola stared at the words, written in her own careful capitals. She thought about her hopes, her ambitions. Talent, literary skill. Yeats, Picasso. Who was she to spout these words, to claim them as if she and they were part of the same grand process?

  A system of breathing and propelling itself

  And what was the real reason for her high-minded note to Dr Lampton? Was she writing it out of a passion for art? Or was it nothing more than an angle? A cheap attempt to impress a man who regarded her as beneath contempt.

  Simon spent his days honourably, did his work well, looked after his patients and his family. He had what she had dismally failed to achieve. He had a decent life.

  She felt dazed. How had it happened? She had always hoped for, expected, great things and yet somehow she had found herself in this strange position, shut out, continually looking into other people’s lives, wishing for what she saw there, and only able to enter by a series of tricks. Stunts. Acts of disingenuousness.

  I have no centre. No self. I am beneath contempt.

  A party of small children rocketed into the room, herded by two harassed teachers.

  Viola opened her diary in which, that morning, in a mood of wicked expectation she had scrawled: Chapter Three. Viola messes with Dr Lampton’s mind again.

  She looked at the words. She saw herself writing them. She thought about her life. Excitements. Disappointments. The hoping and the waiting. The careful spinning out of days.

  She thought, I can’t write him. I’m no good. I can’t write Simon Lampton down.

  A woman put her head over the partition. ‘Hi? Hi? We’re from Bayfield Primary. Are you our guide?’

  ‘Yes. Coming,’ Viola said.

  She would never finish a novel. She saw that clearly. She didn’t have it in her. If she couldn’t put Simon Lampton on the page, then there was nothing else but life. She pressed her fingers against her eyes. She felt herself spinning; something in her head had come loose and was whirling madly round.

  The teacher popped her head up again. ‘Excuse me.’ And then, kindly, ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I’ve just got to make a phone call,’ Viola said.

  She rang his home number. Karen Lampton answered. Viola sat in the rowdy room, listening. This lightness. So strange. It was frightening. And yet, it wasn’t all bad. She had a sense of having thrown off a burden at the end of a journey; as if, at last, she had properly arrived. I’ve given up writing, she wanted to tell Karen. I’m facing up to things. It’s just me and life now. Here I am.

  ‘Hello? Hello?’ Karen Lampton said.

  One of the children smacked his head on a glass case and began to wail. Viola looked at him with glittering eyes. She smiled.

  ‘Hello?’ the tiny voice buzzed in the receiver.

  ‘Quiet everyone,’ the teacher called.

  Viola replaced the phone. She rose and went towards the children. She clapped her hands and they gathered around. One of the teachers pulled the injured boy onto her lap and rubbed his forehead. There was a general settling down. They all looked at her expectantly.

  ‘Welcome to Weird and Wonderful,’ Viola said. ‘All the exhibits are specially laid out for you. You can pick them up and handle them as much as you like. In the drawers along this wall you will find the preserved insects, and on this wall here we have creatures preserved in formaldehyde. Across the room we have some live specimens, and the aquariums. Some of our creatures are shy
, so please don’t bang on the glass.’

  The teacher with the boy on her knee was gently, absentmindedly rubbing his bruised forehead. Viola looked at the hand stroking the small, soft face.

  ‘We have lots of interesting bones for you to look at.’ She swallowed. ‘If you’d like to ask me about them …’

  She stopped and turned to the teacher. ‘I’m sorry. I’m going to have to get a replacement.’

  In the surprised silence she went to her desk, picked up her bag and her diary and went to the door.

  The teacher followed her, exasperated. ‘We’re booked for a full session.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Viola said. ‘I’m sick. Maybe it’s something I’ve eaten. I’ll get you another guide.’

  She went into the back room and told them she was sick. One of the other guides, Gavin, put his lunch away, saying he didn’t mind taking over. There was some half-hearted sympathy, tinged with scepticism. Viola was quite good at her job, but they all agreed she was hopeless with the public.

  There was another adjustment, more clapping hands and quelling of the restless kids, the teachers rolling their eyes, shrugging capably at one another. Gavin launched into his fluent, jokey spiel. There was a sense of relief in the room as Viola left.

  She walked down the steps. It was a beautiful, clear autumn afternoon. She turned her face to the sun and closed her eyes, feeling the heat on her face. She had a shivery feeling all over. Perhaps she really was sick.

  She thought that she was leaving the museum for ever. She assumed that she would be fired for walking out in the middle of a session. (But they didn’t fire her. Two days later she went back to work and no one even mentioned she’d been away.)

  She saw herself travelling towards the Lamptons. Here I come. Remember me? I went away but now I’m back. Why? Because words fail me. Because I can’t forget you and I can’t write you down.

  It was a beautiful day. It would take her twenty minutes to walk home. It would take her an hour to walk to the suburb where Simon and Karen lived. She was capable of walking any distance. She liked ranging through the city. Exercise was a good way to get over things, to pick up your mood and clear your mind.

  Over the following days and months, each time she left the building at the end of the day, Viola would pause on the steps to decide. How far would she dare to go that day? Would she walk for twenty minutes, or an hour?

  SINGULARITY

  Emily sat on the plane. Out the window she could see the endless red desert, stretching away across the curve of the earth. The bright light, angling through the window, made shirred patterns on the seatback, and the man beside her, tugging on a small punnet of water, peeled the foil lid off and sprayed drops across her tray table.

  Immediately, involuntarily, she apologised.

  ‘My fault,’ he said, in a heavy German accent.

  She smiled and turned to her own meal, not wanting to talk.

  She had arrived in Melbourne, transferred onto a smaller, more cramped plane, and now they were flying into the centre of the country, over thousands of miles of empty land. To be flying away from civilisation and into nothingness was striking to her, almost frightening. The idea that the country had this space in the centre of itself that was so vast and forbidding, so empty … In the departure lounge she had read about a sheep station that was the size of Belgium.

  She thought of her daughter far away. Her mother soothing little Caro to sleep and outside the rain falling on the trees in the reserve and the lights coming on in the wooden houses. Her father Per in his study staring out at the rain. But she was flying away, into silence, endless skies, parched land. The air hostess came singing down the aisle, ‘Tea coffee? coffee tea?’

  Emily could see something shining at the horizon — a mirage or a lake? A silver patch, just where the earth rolled away. She had dreamed more than once of a building so vast that no one knew what was in the centre of it, and in the dream she was always walking in, leaving the known world behind. She thought of Lampedusa’s The Leopard; in it there was a vast palace of abandoned rooms, ‘dark and sunny rooms, apartments sensual or squalid’ into which Tancredi and Angelica ventured, further and further, until they risked being lost. And in there they found — she tried to remember the phrase — ‘the sensual cyclone’. She wanted to laugh. Beside her the German coughed and dipped his head seriously over his guide book. The hostess walked backwards holding her silver jug aloft. ‘Tea? Tea?’

  Two weeks ago, in Auckland, her editor Angus had leaned on the edge of his desk and said, ‘I’ve got something good for you. Four nights at Ayers Rock. It’s a circle of linked hotels. They fly you over, you do all the tourist stuff — look, you can even go camel riding. Then you write a nice big piece. I’ll give you plenty of space.’ He took a black pencil case out of his drawer as he spoke, and detached a plastic syringe. He pulled his shirt up, pinched a roll of his stomach and stuck the needle in. He performed this diabetic’s ritual as casually as if he were marking corrections with a pen. She’d worked for him for two years. She liked him. He was large, expansive, sharp — he understood everything she said immediately, even though she was sometimes vague and inarticulate. She was fluent where it mattered, on the page.

  She said, ‘Shouldn’t Claudine be doing this?’

  ‘No, you go. You’ll enjoy it.’ He put his black pencil case away.

  ‘I’ll have to get Caro minded. She might not want me to go.’

  But little Caro, instead of protesting, had bounced up and down: ‘Can I stay with Beth and Per? For long? Will you bring me a koala?’

  Only later, in bed, did Caro say, ‘Can I come? Will you take me too?’ Emily thought, if Harry was around we could all have gone. I could have taken notes and you and he could have played by the pool. But Caro’s father was far away — living in Spain, last Emily had heard.

  ‘I’ll bring you a koala bear,’ she said.

  The plane tilted, changed direction. The hostesses moved up and down the aisles. The puddle of silver gleamed at the edge of the earth, then vanished as though it had slid off the world. Emily looked up into a sky so blue it seemed to pulse. Light struck off the wing. They were lower now, gradually descending. The land was red, a Martian desert, without towns, crossed by the occasional road or tiny dotted fence line. The pilot’s voice came over the intercom, telling her to look for Ayers Rock — Uluru — out the left side of the plane. There it was, redder than the desert, softly contoured, vast, rippled with black shadows, a great blemish on the face of the ancient land. It was strange, uncanny, beautiful.

  Voices along the rows. What a landscape. How about that. I get another coke before we land?

  And the hostesses backed down again, collecting headsets. Emily held onto hers, and listened to loud rock music as they came in to land.

  They were directed onto a bus. Over the intercom the driver introduced himself as Travis. As they drove into the national park, Emily saw that the landscape, so red from the air, was surprisingly dotted with feathery vegetation, beautifully green and incongruous against the red sand. Travis kept up a commentary: ‘Notice the plants, folks? We’ve had something unusual here in the last few days: a bit of rain.’

  But today the sky was clear, cloudless blue. And when she got out of the bus she noticed the silence. Heat and stillness, no cars once Travis had driven the bus away, everything silent and clear and exquisitely sharp, a weird landscape, cut in bright light.

  The hotel was a series of little houses set about the grounds. She walked along a stone path, following a golf cart loaded with her luggage. Bright birds flashed about. She was shown to her room, up a flight of steps. The room was big and fiercely air-conditioned, with a balcony looking over the road that wound away across the land. She looked out at the gum trees, the road, the unfamiliar colours. She hadn’t expected it to be so beautiful.

  The Outback. This was where a dingo had taken Lindy Chamberlain’s baby. This was where — somewhere out there, far away along the lonely road —
a man in a ute had attacked two English tourists. The man’s body never found. Signs in the room said, ‘Danger, extreme heat. If you go out into the park, drink a litre of water every hour. Wear strong, closed shoes. Inform others of your plans.’ Emily took great pleasure in these warnings. There was a pamphlet displaying a picture of a smiling Aboriginal boy. It invited her to pay a modest tax for the upkeep of the fragile indigenous community — a conservation notice, reminiscent of notices at the zoo: this creature is endangered. Programmes are in place … She hadn’t seen a single Aborigine since she’d arrived.

  Angus, wielding his needle kit, had said, ‘Good you’ve never been before. You’ve got a fresh eye. If I send Claudine she’ll just write about the food.’

  Emily unpacked her swimming gear and headed for the pool. Figures lay slumped on loungers in the shade. The sun beat down, hot and fierce; ribbons of white light danced above the pool. The silence and stillness seemed to gather and press down; everything lay exhausted in the heat. She lowered herself into the water and swam slowly back and forth. The people on deckchairs spoke in low voices, somewhere in one of the rooms a woman laughed. A huge wasp zoomed down and hovered above the water. The size of it — it was twice as big as a wasp back home, cantilevered and elegant, souped up, a Ferarri, a sportswasp. On the steps of her room she had noticed ants that were similarly enhanced, their shiny bodies disconcertingly plump. She lay on her back. Another wasp zoomed down, then another. She swam away. And at the end of the pool, peering over the edge and waggling its feelers at her, was the most marvellous, strange beetle, beautifully shiny, its wings a deep, iridescent blue. She imagined showing it to Caro.

  Strange, for a moment, she couldn’t picture her little girl’s face.

  She lay on a lounger reading a book she’d borrowed from Angus: The Chekhov Omnibus. The heat. It was like a substance, it turned the air into a force. On the way back to her room Emily forged through it. A man looked out of a doorway and silently withdrew. People were hiding in their cabins, waiting for the evening.