The Green Bell

by Paula Keogh

  I think of myself with Leo, going through the moves in the game of seduction, and I feel like a fraud. I remember Julianne’s scorn for people who played roles that had no truth to them. ‘They’re faking it,’ she used to say. And this is exactly what I’ve been doing for far too long. I have to endure the pain of my grief and loss; I have to learn to bear it. Otherwise my life will always be brittle and superficial. Although I enjoy the company of a few good friends, I have no genuine connections to anything beyond them. Kate’s passion for life inspires me, but I’m still locked into the tight personality that I’ve constructed to get me through the days.

  *

  The week following Sappho’s leap, I receive a postcard from Bill Beard, an old friend of Michael’s. I met him last year at Umbi Gumbi, John and Wendy Blay’s house near Bermagui. Bill is a wild man, a barefoot poet who spends his summers writing poetry and fire-watching in mountain ranges inland from the south coast. One inspired and hilarious night at Umbi Gumbi, his friends bestowed on him the nickname ‘onion’ – and, for me, it stuck, though I can’t begin to say why. Now Bill’s coming through Canberra and wants to meet up.

  After dinner, he and I sit together on the lounge-room floor, and he tells me about his trip to the Flinders Ranges and the camel ride he took through the desert north of there. His eyes shine as he describes the beauty of the desert in the springtime and shows me poetry he wrote while he was there. He’s living his life as a poem, and I must too.

  Before the night is over, I’ve made up my mind to leave Canberra and travel to the Flinders Ranges. I can’t wait – I want to be there by spring. The next day, I give notice that I’m leaving my job, withdraw from the last subject I need to complete my Arts degree, and buy a bus and train ticket to Adelaide. I visit my parents and, in the middle of the roast dinner my mother has cooked for me, I tell them that I’m leaving Canberra. We sip our wine, and they wish me well.

  I have to cut all ties with this city. I plan to work in Adelaide during the winter and save enough money to take off to the desert by spring. I spend the next two weeks packing up my Canberra life, and at the end of May I leave the city for the last time. I know I’ll never live there again.

  *

  I’m on the half-empty overland train, rattling through the night westwards towards the South Australian border. Passengers are asleep, lights are dim, but I’m wide awake. With my coat as a pillow, I curl up and read Patrick White’s Voss under a dusty yellow light, transfixed by the magnetic intensity of the writing. I’m compelled to take this journey just as Voss was compelled to take his. He wanted to map a continent; I want to create a new life.

  I have only one thought: to be in the desert in spring. See flowers bloom and excited birds gather at waterholes. I want to see it, but most of all I want to feel what it’s like to be there. Stand under the sky, be dwarfed by the horizon. Feel the flowering plants break through the hard crust of earth, smell the crisp air, listen to birds calling up the dawn. I want to lie under the stars and open myself to mystery.

  Images flicker through my mind as the night outside my window flashes by, taking my past with it. A future is rushing towards me. I want to be there when light breaks through the darkness, through my darkness.

  *

  In Adelaide, I open a wooden gate and see a house that reminds me of a child’s drawing. The dusky pink wall at the front has a rectangular shape divided by two large windows either side of a green door. Above this wall is a triangular roof with dormer windows. I smell burning eucalyptus in the air and see smoke curling up from one of the tall chimneys. The grass is overgrown, and a cat is sitting on the porch washing itself. And, just like in a child’s drawing, the angles are all slightly crooked, the fence is askew, the gate won’t shut and the walls pitch to one side. It’s one of North Adelaide’s classic nineteenth-century homes, and in spite of the cracks and the peeling paintwork, it retains its old-world grace. My excitement mounts. I could live here.

  A pregnant woman with a Madonna smile opens the door. She’s holding a straw broom, and dust motes swirl around her in the sunlit hallway. Following her inside, I’m surprised by the space and the light, with high windows in the two front rooms, a wide hallway and tall ceilings. We walk down the hallway into shadows, past closed doors that the woman explains lead to the rooms of the other housemates. About ten people are living here, but right now they’re out or at work. We move into light again as we walk into a long rectangular kitchen that has an open window above the sink and a table down the other side. By now I know that the woman’s name is Diane Gerard and that her baby is due in a couple of months. I also know that I like her, I like this place, and I want to stay.

  The room that becomes mine in the house on Mann Terrace, North Adelaide, is one of two that occupy the attic, on the left at the top of a narrow staircase. The ceiling is steeply pitched, sloping along the length of the space, forcing me to stoop on one side. An east-facing dormer window looks out over parkland.

  The room is empty except for a mattress on a faded rug, so I need to get to work. I paint the walls and ceiling white and the trimmings green, buy an old chest of drawers and a cane chair from a second-hand shop down the road, and find a wall vase that I fill with trailing ivy. With a candle and my small tape deck placed on an upturned wooden box next to the mattress, and my clothes stashed away in drawers, I settle in quickly. I’m ready to create a life for myself.

  Adelaide is exhilarating, liberating. Arriving in a place you’ve never been before is freeing in a way I’ve never experienced. I’m a stranger among strangers. The good girl, the mad girl, the beloved, the bitch are in the past, and the past is gone. No one here knows those people; here, I can be anyone. This idea is quietly astounding. No one knows my name. I have no idea who I’ll become. But for now, I can say, ‘I am.’

  Everything I see, I’m seeing for the first time, and every street corner poses a question of which direction to take. Adelaide is a small city with remnants of its country town origins still recognisable in its buildings, parks and especially its cafes. On my first morning, when I order tea and toast in a cafe, I’m brought a large teapot covered with a woollen cosy, a jug of milk, jars of vegemite and marmalade, butter in a dish, and two slices of toast each an inch thick. ‘Let me know if you want a top-up on the tea, love,’ the waitress says over her shoulder as she walks back to the counter.

  *

  A few weeks after I arrive, I put my name down at an employment agency. Within days they let me know about a job in research at One to One Films, a women’s film unit sponsored by the South Australian Film Corporation. When I’m offered the job, I panic. It’s a six-month contract, and I’m supposed to be leaving for the desert in early spring.

  I spend a sleepless night trying to decide what to do. As dawn breaks, I sit at my dormer window watching the sky pale into pastel colours over the dark shapes of parkland trees. I sense that the spring I’m craving is happening within me, here in this footloose household of nomads. I feel invigorated and buoyant, as if I’ve been underground for a long time and have just burst through into light and air. I decide I’ll take the job, spend the spring in Adelaide and go to the desert another time.

  I head into the city to get work clothes. In a small boutique on Rundle Street, a woman in a sleek green skirt offers to help me find what I’m looking for. I tell her that I’m starting a new job on Monday. She looks me up and down, registers that I have no dress sense at all, and selects a range of skirts and tops for me to try on. When I emerge from the dressing room in a green skirt like hers and a black fitted top, she nods her approval. I look at myself in the mirror – all I need to do is clip my hair up, and I’ll be ready to start.

  The idea of working with feminists to make films about women excites me. I imagine delving into issues that affect us and creating films that make a difference. It’s just the sort of challenge I want to take on.

  *

  My housemates are becoming important to me. They’re an eclectic group
, a tribe of travellers from England, Canada and New Zealand, with a couple of Australians thrown in. They’re living the dream of the decade with all its ideals and contradictions – and they’ve made space in their lives for me.

  The house buzzes with energy. It rocks to loud music, gets high on dope, trips on acid, dances all night and goes quiet in the early mornings. It overflows with the sounds of Bob Dylan; J.J. Cale; Bob Marley; Jefferson Airplane; Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young; and Fairport Convention. And it empties for occasional excursions to the corner pub or for picnics in the Adelaide Hills. It’s a house where people hang around the kitchen to gossip and cook, and children wear their dress-ups all the time. People fall in love here, break up, cook together, eat together, go to work, play, go to the market. People are light-hearted, and they take care of one another.

  No one has expectations of how you should behave, what you should say, how you should be. I can relax with the group, talk or not talk, withdraw to my inner world or take part in what’s happening. It’s easy to move in and out of conversations. I enjoy a gentle high when I’m with people who are stoned; they are loose, the conversation is loose, and my anxiety eases, floats away. I shared a joint one night but the effect wasn’t relaxing, so now whenever I’m offered one I pass it on, and no one cares or comments. But they do think it’s hilarious when I iron my jeans.

  This is the sort of life that Michael would have relished. The mutable moods, the anarchic way it all functions, the spontaneous craziness. I sometimes feel his presence here. The other day, I was so sure he walked past as I climbed the stairs to my attic room, I reached out to touch him. And as a group of us sat around the lounge room listening to music, I glanced up and saw Michael sitting on the floor, looking at an album cover.

  I feel my grief for Julianne and Michael in a new way. In Canberra it was an icy absence that I carried in my chest, but in this hippie household I experience the pain of it – and a whole range of emotions, both painful and pleasurable, emerge as well. I hold on to the toughness I discovered after Michael died. I listen to the lyrics of a Dylan song and think to myself, The noise should not think it can bury me; madness should not think it can destroy me. I will have a life.

  Through the nights filled with music and the days sitting in the shade under fruit trees in the backyard, Julianne and Michael are here, inspiring me to live life as a poem. I remember a line from T.S. Eliot’s poem ‘Little Gidding’ and think to myself: See, the dead return and bring me with them. Michael was right, ‘survival is the password’. And Rilke was right to insist that endurance is all. And when Julianne said that the world is music playing, she was telling me something that becomes more and more significant to me as time passes. I’m coming to believe that the essentials of a good life are kindness and music.

  I’m living my life day to day. I have no plans, no idea where I’m going. I wake up each morning to a new day and throw myself into its dramas and poetry. I discover a happiness that has roots in dark places but grows towards the sun. A lightness, a warmth – and the wish that Julianne and Michael were alive and could share these generous and uncomplicated days. It’s not that there’s no pain or confusion; what is different is the sense that I’m connected to other people and to myself. I’m no longer standing outside in the darkness; life has let me come inside.

  After seven months at Mann Terrace, at the height of summer and with the sun in my eyes, I have a car accident – and am very nearly killed.

  12

  The Quest

  My car is an orange beach buggy, a folly of mine, a flimsy vehicle I named Zelda. My accident happens when another car slams into Zelda just a couple of feet behind the driver’s seat – behind me. I’m only a second away from being a direct hit. The car rolls three times. Luckily, the buggy has a strong roll bar, and I have a harness seatbelt.

  The emergency room is a blur, moving into my field of vision then disappearing as I lose consciousness. It appears that I’m paralysed from the waist down. A specialist is called. He examines me – then, without warning, he hits me across the face. My body goes into a violent spasm that lasts for several minutes. Feeling returns to my legs. The doctor explains that I had shock paralysis, a temporary condition, and that being hit has brought me out of it. My injuries are minor, and I’ll be home from hospital in a few days. My friends from Mann Terrace visit with flowers and freshly baked caramel slices. I’m dazed and happy to have survived. Amazed at my luck.

  The next morning, Sean Mangan, the Irish-Canadian resident who occupies the attic room next to mine, comes in to visit on his own. I’ve had a crush on Sean for some time, but I’ve been particularly aware of it since I listened to him sing one night as we sat around the kitchen table. His voice is strong and deep, and after I heard him sing old Irish ballads of love and parting, I was hooked.

  Now, sitting next to my hospital bed and looking serious, Sean tells me that he loves me. He realised it when he heard about my accident. He knew he didn’t want to live his life without me.

  So much to take in. Perhaps I’m delirious. Or dreaming.

  Three months later, we fly away together on April Fools’ Day, our main destinations being Ireland and Greece. But, as we say, anything could happen. Taxiing down the tarmac, I put on my headphones and, just as we lift off into the air, into our future, The Eagles begin singing ‘Take It to the Limit’. I’m ready for whatever comes.

  On a hot night in Athens, we rest on the stone steps of the Parthenon and watch a blood moon break free of the horizon and rise like a god in the brilliant sky. We plan our next move. We’ve travelled around Ireland and lived in a clifftop room on the island of Santorini, and now we’re running out of money. The idea of travelling to Toronto and finding work there comes up.

  ‘Might be tricky for me to get a job without a visa,’ I say.

  ‘That’s a thought.’ Sean pauses for a moment, then says, ‘We probably should get married. That’d sort it.’

  ‘Married!?’

  ‘Yeah. What do you think?’

  ‘Okay,’ I say, amazed.

  Back at our hotel, we share our news with the night porter.

  ‘We’re going to get married,’ I say.

  ‘Ah,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘Finita la musica!’

  The reservations I once had about marriage haven’t crossed my mind. I care only about the journey with Sean, the momentum. The romantic in me has won out. That and the blood red moon rising behind the pillars of the Parthenon, the yowling of wild cats in the alleys below, and Sean’s hand holding mine.

  *

  Our wedding is just as we want it: low-key, no fuss. A couple of months after arriving in Toronto, we make our vows in the company of Sean’s parents, his sister and brother-in-law in the lounge room of the celebrant’s suburban house. My wedding outfit is a burnt-orange crêpe dress from the 1920s that I found in a country op shop, and Sean wears a white gypsy shirt with billowing sleeves that I made for the occasion. We pledge our love beneath a huge painting of the Rock of Gibraltar, then have lunch at a Holiday Inn, getting tipsy as we toast our future with champagne and Sean’s father bestows on us an Irish blessing.

  Falling in love is one thing; making a life together is something else. I’m living on the edge of a precipice, suffering vertigo, every minute gulping air, about to fall. My jaw aches from clenching my teeth, from holding the smile. I’ve discovered that I can survive the loss of people I love, but I don’t know if I can survive love. To be so close, so exposed. Love is excruciating. Maybe impossible. I can’t trust love. I can’t trust anything. I feel I’m about to fall into the mad pit and won’t be able to get out. Working, sharing a house with friends, travelling around Ontario. All the time, holding on to sanity with broken hands.

  Then, in the spring of 1979, Sean and I return to Australia and settle at Kangarilla in the Adelaide Hills. I’m starting life all over again. My mother sends a package of house-warming presents that include thirteen linen tea towels from her cupboard, all freshly ironed
and smelling of eucalyptus. I love being in the hills, and I breathe deeply the perfume of freesias on the roadside, wattles in flower along the track to our house, creamy jonquils massed in the garden. The sunlight in the Adelaide Hills is cleansing; the night sky is astounding. It’s so good to be home.

  We sit on the veranda of our rented cottage and look out across rows of grape vines to the hills and sky beyond. Sometimes at night I stand on the veranda in the darkness and peer through the window at our lounge room. I see the roaring fire in the grate, a coloured crochet blanket hanging over the back of a chair, a rug on the floor, and Sean turned towards the fire playing his guitar. I’m on the outside looking in, but now I can walk in the door and pull up a chair. The room filled with light is in my own house.

  Nine months later, our red-skinned, screaming daughter is placed in my arms. Rowan Kathleen becomes the pivot of my life. No one told me it would be like this – her existence marks the most radical shift in my life, in myself. I look at her, and I feel strong. I am a lioness with her cub; I would do anything for her, and the thing is, I could do anything for her. She has changed everything. I think of an image from a Francis Webb poem: ‘To blown straw was given / All the fullness of heaven.’

  *

  Four years later, I’m asking myself what’s happened to Sean and me, to our marriage. We are two people who shared a life for ten years but have now stopped sharing a life. As I learn to be alone, I try to find some meaning in the time we spent together. I want to understand what it leaves me with, what remains. I stand on Semaphore Beach, and I feel empty, like nothing, like night.