The Broken Book

by Susan Johnson

  She stood between them, a colossus in skirts, holding them apart with bare hands. ‘Boys! Boys!’ she said, giving their shoulders a rough shake.

  ‘Ray! Come on now,’ she shouted as they continued to lunge for each other. ‘Bernie! Behave yourselves.’ Suddenly she let her hands fall to her sides; Bernie and Ray, unexpectedly released from her firm fingers, lurched forward. Their heads knocked.

  ‘Jesus Christ, your nut’s made of cement!’ Bernie slumped to the floor, rubbing his forehead.

  ‘At least it’s got something in it,’ Ray said, smiling at me. My dressing gown had come apart, right down the middle, and my curled mound of pubic hair was revealed, a dark nosegay in a sliver of light.

  I quickly covered myself up and rushed through the door.

  ‘Lovely. Just lovely,’ Snow White said as I closed the door.

  The Broken Book

  Ymay amenay siay Ressidacay Orleymay anday Iay atehay Istermay Unterhay. Istermay Unterhay illway ebay evengedray. Otnay odaytay, utbay neoay ayday.

  Ampay has promised to help me. We don’t know what we will do yet, but we reckon we will know what to do when the time comes. I tried to tell Mum when I got home but I could tell she was thinking it was my fault. ‘What are you saying, Cressida? Calm down! Please! Now, where did you see Mr Hunter?’

  ‘On the beach. He was sitting next to me.’

  ‘He’s allowed to sit next to you, isn’t he? What do you mean exactly?’

  My name is Cressida Morley and when I am sixteen my words won’t come out properly. I have a whole army of words in my mouth, a populous country, but none of them will march out to order. I am a dreaming head, a teeming multitude, a continent of unuttered letters.

  ‘Mum, he touched me!’

  Her face is shutting its doors! Her eyes are covered up against the coming storm. I am her worst dream, a grown-up girl of soft bosoms and hidden crevices, a girl of dangerous currents and oozing scent. I am all closet invitation, warm breath, a clearing house for every man’s worst intention. ‘I’ve got the curse,’ I will say, ‘I’ve got the curse and Mr Hunter knows.’

  ‘Oh, Cressida, how on earth would Mr Hunter know you’ve got your period?’

  ‘He was …’ My words are balking! They won’t reach the air, they won’t emerge into the light. My words are stuffed inside me, inside my head which is my world; I cannot get the world of myself into the air of the earth.

  ‘You weren’t flaunting yourself about the place so he could see your underpants, were you? I’ve told you about sitting and standing up properly.’

  ‘Mum! He tried to kiss me!’

  ‘A lot of men will try to kiss you. You have to learn to put a higher value on yourself.’

  I will not cry. I will turn and make for my room and my mother will grab my hand. ‘Cress,’ she will say, her face cracked, ‘you are a very pretty girl and men will try and take advantage of you. It’s going to be up to you to win their respect. You have to show them that you respect yourself first of all.’

  I don’t know what this means: respect myself. What am I supposed to respect: my perfect toes? Am I supposed to carry my body as if it is a prize to be won, a jewel destined only to be bestowed upon the highest bidder? Would respecting myself more have stopped the fatal trajectory of Mr Hunter’s penis, faultlessly aimed at my choicest prize?

  I am a pretty girl with a rosy site, at which all the penises of the world are aimed.

  Now I understand. I understand both that I need to be vigilant and that I have discovered the biggest secret which I did not know I possessed.

  Istermay Unterhay: atchway outay!

  Iay amay ayay irlgay ithway ayay eryvay angerousday ecretsay!

  The same summer that Mr Hunter tries to rape me I will play a lot of secret tennis. Secret attempted rapes! Secret tennis! That summer I will be one big secret, setting the template for the rest of my life, that upcoming life which will mostly be lived inside my head because the words inside it will continue to fail to come marching out.

  I will not buy my own tennis racket but I will borrow a lovely new one, the wood still golden, from my friend Dorothy (Dot) Barker, who has a handsome brother called Gordon who will grow up to die in the war. I will borrow, too, a white tennis outfit from my friend Dot and play doubles with her and Gordon and his friend Harry. Sometimes Ampay comes along, but only to watch, because she says she has never played tennis and is now too old to learn. ‘But Ressidacay’s a natural,’ she says and I cast her a filthy look for using my nickname in public. ‘The only sport Aboriginals like is boxing and only boys can do that,’ she adds. Ampay often makes remarks about Aboriginals, which are sort of like jokes, but when she does Harry and Gordon look embarrassed. They have never known an Aboriginal so intimately before. ‘What did you call her?’ Gordon asks, ignoring Amp’s remark about boxing. The oybays tease me for the rest of the day.

  Oh, the sun on the lawn! Grass courts at the back of the Barkers’ wonderful house! The power of my arms and legs, the cushioned swell of my calves! You would not know to look at me that I am indulging in a forbidden act, the playing of organised games: I am the family revolutionary, the player of sport, the asp in the sports-loathing bosom. I am playing a match, winning or losing, I am partaking of sporting civilities and rules. If my father finds out, will he cast me out? Will he feed me to the lions or bruise me with stones?

  I leave the house furtively whenever I go to play, for I have not yet completely lost the childish impression that my father can see right through me. Somewhere inside myself I still believe he can read my thoughts, see into my soul as if I were the clearest glass. Somewhere inside myself I believe he knows if I am telling a lie; in fact, I am still not entirely sure that I have the right to a private existence. I believe he made me, that I am a kind of perpetual limb grown from the trunk of his tree, and that I will never exist independently of him. I am born of my father and my mother and I do not yet know whether I exist as anything other than genetic DNA, like spit from their mouths, a mutant offshoot whose finished shape is already predetermined.

  Look at me: I might as well be the kind of girl who visits the Chinese opium den which still exists on the outskirts of town (public distaste will force its closure sooner rather than later, but for the minute it is the worst place of vice imaginable, where it is rumoured young girls are lured and lost). I could be the girl who too easily gave up her jewel, a girl who has already opened the floodgates to that most secretive of channels.

  But instead I am the kind of girl who is playing secret tennis. I am hidden by the hedge which runs down the back of the wire fence bordering the grass courts, where no one can see me indulging my secret vice. Oh, my brown arm swinging the racket! The thwack of the ball! The hypnotic play of tennis balls pushing through the air!

  Oh, Ressidacay: tennis. Whatever next? The full-blown crime of hockey?

  That same summer when I am sixteen my father will lead a campaign against the Blowhole County Council. His paper, the Blowhole Examiner, will run a series of articles and leaders arguing that public money should not be spent on yet another sporting venue, the proposed Kevin Beatty Oval.

  Now is not the time to be spending public money on sport. Events in Europe should make us mindful of the very real possibility of another war. But even leaving aside the large issue of an impending war, we might ask ourselves this: do we really need another sporting venue? Our community already supports a large number of sporting organisations, and there are numerous ovals, cricket grounds, tennis courts and football fields in and around our town already. If we have to spend public funds at all at this time, why couldn’t the money go towards the establishment of a community orchestra? Our own dance company? Enlarging our already beautiful library? This newspaper gives over a disproportionate amount of space every week to the listing of sporting results and it is time to ask ourselves why.

  ‘Because human beings love sport, Perce,’ Dusty Road will tell him when he reads this editorial. ‘They don’t want to
sit around in poncy suits getting bored listening to music they don’t like.’

  ‘Nonsense, Dusty,’ my father will snort, ‘which comes first, the chicken or the egg? You have to live with things in order to love them. The French have this expression, la bain de culture, which roughly means the culture in which you live. What is it that surrounds you? The latest league results?’

  ‘People will always love games with clear winners and losers. The Frogs will never fill a football stadium with art lovers. Even in bloody Paris.’

  ‘You’re a nong, Dusty—you don’t know what you’re talking about. When Victor Hugo died, you couldn’t move for ordinary Parisians trying to join the funeral. Workers, washerwomen—the whole of Paris came out to mourn, thousands of’em. Can you imagine Australians giving a stuff about Banjo Paterson? Look at the way they treated poor old Henry Lawson.’

  ‘He was a pisshead.’

  ‘Very profound, Dusty. Thank you.’

  But Dusty knew that Dad wasn’t going to win. Dad had already had to back down from his stance against the sports results: he had tried to cut them by half but Mr John Griffith had made him put them all back in. ‘It’s what people want, Percy. You can’t always swim against the tide.’

  Dusty gave him a pat on the back when he came out of that sombre meeting. ‘Mate, you’re in the wrong country. If you want culture you’d better move to bloody Paris.’

  At which point Miss Doreen Evans, long suspected of having plans upon Mr Dusty Road’s person, let out an unladylike guffaw.

  ‘What are you laughing at, you old boiler?’ Dad said, walking out.

  Miss Evans complained to Mr Griffith, Dad made his apologies, and by the time Dusty put his lead story in that week, Dad did not change a word. It read: ‘There were cheers, tears and of course beers last Saturday as the Blowhole’s premier rugby league team won against some quality opposition, the Wollongong Bears.’

  He came home, locked himself in the front room and read Shakespeare.

  Katherine Elgin’s World

  (NEWSPAPER COLUMN, 1969)

  ‘In OUR age,’ said Auden, ‘the mere making of a work of art is itself a political act.

  ‘So long as artists exist, making what they please and think they ought to make, even if it’s not terribly good, even if it only appeals to a handful of people, they remind the management of something managers need to be reminded of, namely, that the managed are people with faces, not anonymous numbers, that Homo Labourens is also Homo Ludens.’

  I was thinking of Auden and his Homo Ludens the other morning as I listened to yet another public figure on the radio getting cross about Christo’s plan to transform a slice of Australia’s coastline into a work of art.

  In case you haven’t heard, Christo plans to wrap up like a present one and a half miles of shoreline near Little Bay, north-east of Captain Cook’s landing site in Botany Bay.

  By concealing the cliffs and rocks and stones he hopes paradoxically to reveal it. Wrapped Coast will be on display for some ten weeks before it is returned to its natural state.

  ‘Puerile,’ announced one public figure on the radio show I was listening to. ‘Absolutely ridiculous,’ said another, ‘in fact, the most stupid idea I have ever heard of. This is exactly the kind of thing which gives modern art a bad name.’

  ‘But it’s a wonderful concept,’ argued my second daughter, who wants to be a poet and who naturally believes in the idea of artistic transformation: ‘Christo’s creating a living work of art.’

  All these divided opinions got me thinking. What is art for? Aren’t there more important, more constructive, things to be doing right now, such as protesting about our sons going off to war in Vietnam? What is the point of any art—good or bad—in times such as these?

  Specifically, what is the point of employing one hundred and ten labourers and fifteen professional rock climbers to haul one million square feet of fabric and thirty-five miles of rope to cover up naturally beautiful cliffs?

  All week I’ve been thinking about the meaning of art, its use in our lives, and yesterday I ferreted out a poem I used to love when I was a girl growing up near some cliffs similar to those that attracted Christo. I used to quote the poem to myself as I swam in the sea beneath the cliffs, dreaming myself into existence.

  The poem was Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh:

  … What is art,

  But life upon the larger scale, the higher,

  When, graduating up in a spiral line

  Of still expanding and ascending gyres,

  It pushes toward the intense significance

  Of all things, hungry for the Infinite?

  Art’s life …

  By yesterday afternoon I had worked myself up into such a state that I decided to have a look at Christo’s project for myself. I took a bus from the city down Anzac Parade, a trip I haven’t made for a long, long time.

  I passed the University of New South Wales (where my elder daughter studies the more reliable rules of mathematics rather than the lawlessness of poetry), then the old rifle range at Malabar where I was stationed briefly during the last war, and finally we came upon Long Bay Gaol. I wondered if the prisoners could see the drapery from their cells.

  It feels pretty remote out that way, a million miles from Sydney Town, rather than ten or fifteen. As the bus drew close to Christo’s project, you could see a lot of activity: it resembled nothing less than a building site, and conversation immediately started up.

  ‘Whatever happened to real art,’ said the woman sitting next to me. ‘I mean proper paintings of people with faces.’ ‘If that’s art I’m bloody Michelangelo,’ said the bus driver, turning around to join in.

  I was the only one who got off. As I walked towards the strange apparition I passed men in hard hats wearing special tools slung around their waists. ‘Beautiful day,’ said one.

  I stopped and spoke to a young man having his smoko. ‘What do you think of it then?’ He turned and looked out over the vast, weirdly covered landscape.

  ‘To be honest, I used to think Christo was a whacker,’ he said, ‘but now I think this is sort of like a dream.’

  Sort of like a dream. You couldn’t get a better definition of art than that: art is the place where we dream our lives, where we momentarily leave the heaviness of life behind.

  ‘Human life is a sad show, undoubtedly,’ wrote Flaubert, ‘ugly, heavy and complex. Art has no other end, for people of feeling, than to conjure away the burden and the bitterness.’

  I understood, looking at those disappearing cliffs, that in covering up such natural beauty Christo was asking us to see the grace within. By covering up the ordinary world in front of our eyes he was pushing us towards the intense significance of all things. He was reminding the management.

  For what is art but an act of grace, a creation of some alternative world so that our own world is momentarily shot through with meaning? If we don’t know why life itself exists, surely art is our last poetic gesture towards the mystery at the heart of us.

  This is the reason art still exists through wars, through famine, through our deepest misery. It is the reason why I welcome with open arms my second daughter’s potentially foolhardy vocation as a poet, even though she may well spend the rest of her life in poverty.

  Art is not measurable in dollars and cents, or only in proper paintings of people with real faces. Art is an invisible commodity with the highest of invisible values.

  ‘Surely the arm of this woman is too long?’ said a woman to Matisse of one of his paintings.

  And Matisse replied: ‘It’s not an arm, madam, it’s a picture.’

  To which I might paraphrase: ‘It’s not a wrapped coast, madam, it’s an act of faith.’

  Please, Mr Bus Driver, walk over from the bus depot one lunch hour and have a look. Each of us dreams, and sometimes it is not only the management that needs to be reminded that Homo Ludens translates as humanity engaged in joyful play. To dream, to play: art’s life, foun
d wherever life is found.

  Sydney, 1969

  Midnight

  Sitting here snivelling in dirty pyjamas, with a glass of whisky and a cigarette, David already slumped off to bed.

  We have not slept together as man and wife for the last two years. Something in me is repulsive to him.

  I wonder if there was some precise moment when he first began to hate me. Is hatred too strong a word? Sometimes I try to imagine his feelings towards me and I can only picture those magnified images of cancer cells, the way the rough and buckled nodules meet to form a malignant whole. Perhaps all our fights over the years, all those moments of bitterness and rage and disappointment and frustration finally joined up so there was no space left for goodwill, health, forgiveness.

  One of the first rough and buckled moments came when he found himself shackled to a dependent wife and two unexpected children just when he had planned on leaving journalism and devoting himself to writing full-time. My eyes were suddenly wrenched from him to the children; he was bitter that we had barely a year together before I was pregnant. He was bitter, too, when he found out I planned to keep writing, that I was the kind of wife who cared more for the arrangement of a sentence than the arrangement of a nutritious family tea. He began to hate those moments when my mind was elsewhere, when all my focus and passion and will was on my work instead of him.

  There were other buckled moments when I failed him, when I was not admiring enough or grateful enough or when I didn’t listen when I should have. The worst moments came when he was jealous, when he accused me of being deliberately cruel, of breaking the bond of trust between us. I see now that when he found out about Jerry some part of him turned from me forever.

  Sometimes if I haven’t drunk too much I lie in bed and imagine David lying on the other side of the wall. I remember a long time ago he said he could not believe his luck in having won me. He used to say I was like a prize he did not deserve which any moment might be taken away. I wonder if he remembers.