by David Brooks
She was on her way back from a funeral. She shouldn’t have been on that part of the highway in the first place. That’s the irony of it. And Lord knows she wouldn’t have wanted to be, given its reputation. We could only think that she must have missed the Goulburn turn-off in the downpour and, when she realised, decided that it would be just as easy to drive on to Yass as to go back, and to turn in to Canberra from there. Coming down from Sydney you go in from Goulburn. Coming up from Melbourne you go in from Yass.
She must have left home in a great hurry, since she scribbled only the barest note. It didn’t say whose funeral this was. All she wrote was that an old friend had died, she’d read about it in the Sydney paper – she read the Sydney Morning Herald as well as the Canberra Times, for the alternative versions of the news, or so she said, though she’d always had a morbid interest in the death columns – and that she just had to go; that she wouldn’t be more than a couple of days. It wasn’t all that unusual. She’d done this sort of thing once or twice before. But she hadn’t mentioned it earlier that day, at breakfast, before she went off to work and I walked in to the university. The note was the first and last thing I knew about it.
I suppose I think about beginning this way because it was on my own way back from Sydney, from a funeral, three years ago, that the whole business started to come together, like a strange game of snakes and ladders, or maybe Chinese whispers, and I began to realise that it was myself who stood at the end of it.
Benedict. My mother called me Benedict. As if, I have always thought, I was supposed to give blessing, as if some day something might actually be said right.
The funeral I was coming back from, twenty-three years after my mother’s, was of a woman I might have said I had barely known – known far less, as it turned out, than I thought I did. She had been a friend of my mother’s back in Sydney, before my mother came to Canberra, or at least that’s what this lady said, and that is why she had made contact in the first place. Ten years after my mother’s death, a letter had been forwarded to me from the house where she and I had lived. The letter itself was from Diamond Beach, seventy kilometres north of Sydney, telling me about the friendship and that this Mrs Darling had some things of my mother’s that she thought she should pass on to me. She asked me to come up to Diamond Beach to collect them.
I can’t say that I was all that tempted. She was an old lady, or so it seemed from the spidery handwriting and the general loose-jointedness of the letter, and I’m not good with old people, or wasn’t back then. I had so many things of my mother’s already that I couldn’t bring myself to throw away and yet didn’t quite know what to do with, and I couldn’t see any point in adding to the pile. It took me months to get around to answering. Eventually I wrote back apologising for not being able to come – I had just started a new job – and suggesting that if they weren’t all that heavy she might mail my mother’s things to me, and that I’d be happy to have them sent c.o.d. if she would arrange it. I heard nothing more. I suppose, in retrospect, that I’d been a bit rude, but even a decade after it the whole business of my mother’s death was still fairly raw. Grief’s a strange thing that way: it can take you a very long time, sometimes, to realise how it’s been affecting you.
Eventually, though, I did go, two or three years later. The paper had sent me up to the Sydney office for a few months and a friend, knowing my own family in Canberra was away at the time – Dita had taken Jack and Jennifer back to Vietnam to meet their grandparents – had asked me up to his beach-house at Umina for a long weekend. On one of the days I was up there it rained and I went for a drive through the National Park toward the Patonga Ferry. On the way there was a turnoff to Diamond Beach. I hadn’t realised I was in the area. I ignored it at first and drove on to have a desultory lunch at a fish-and-chip place by the ferry stop, watching the rain. By the time I started back I had had time to think about it. Just after the turn-off I stopped the car, and then – the National Park is on a kind of plateau just there, and there’s a short, steep, winding descent to the beach – turned around and began to go down.
I remember the moment vividly, or rather the sequence of moments. As I began to drive down I had the distinct and eerie feeling that I should not do so, that I should go no further, that in some way or another to do so was going to change my life – even more than that, that in some way it was going to end it. But it was such an absurd feeling that I dismissed it and drove on. The light had that peculiar intensity that it can sometimes get after rain, as if something – the moisture in the air, perhaps, or a particular quality of the sky’s prevailing grey – had given to everything a softer shadow, acted like a lens bringing the world into a new and sharper focus. A few hundred yards from the turn-off men were working on the road – I remember the bearded one holding the Stop/Go sign stared at me from under a broad, wet hat and another, wearing a bright orange safety-jacket, waved – and a few hundred yards beyond them the first houses became visible, old weatherboard cottages mostly, deep in thick and overgrown gardens that came right to the road’s edge. Cocos palms, lantana, bougainvillea, a bright purple fuchsia, a fountaining of cannas. Further on I came to a cross-street with small shops on two of the corners and a pub on another, a few men sitting on benches outside it with beers in their hands.
One block past them was a T-junction – Diamond Beach, it seemed, had only two cross-streets – and I recognised the name of the road. Still undecided as to whether I would look for the house and try to visit the old lady, if indeed she were still alive, I parked at one end of the street – it was Beach Street – at a dirt roundabout where on sunnier days people would park for the surf. I could hear the breakers as I got out of the car, and not knowing what else to do walked through the high sandhills toward them. Dune redevelopment was under way. Low treated-pine barriers discouraged one from walking anywhere but on the one narrow track. Signs explained the procedure and gave maps of the bushwalks nearby. It was clear that this area was more well-to-do than at first appeared.
The beach was a long one, with high bluffs at each end and low, flat shelves of rock protruding beneath them. The storm out at sea, of which the present rain can have been no more than a ripple, had obviously been a severe one. Huge breakers were dumping rhythmically onto the sand and had already eaten away a part of the beach. A wind I hadn’t felt on the other side was coming in straight off the ocean, carrying spindrift right up to the dunes. The screen of trees was so thick, and the beach so deserted, that there was not a house or person as far as I could see. For several moments, exhilarated by the unexpected wildness, I thought that the place might have been just as it was before white settlement, or far before that, right at the beginning of things.
It has often surprised me how some moments, not seemingly marked out by any one thing in particular, stay with you in extraordinary detail while others fade, as if there’s a particular quality of the light or the mind or the weather that the memory craves, but that is only present serendipitously. I walked a hundred yards or so along the firmer sand at the waves’ edge, enjoying the salt spray and the wind on my face, the raw power of the ocean beside me. At one point, a few yards ahead of me, a small flock of gulls that had been standing staring out at the waves, hunched and squinting against the blast, rose all at once, in absolute unison, without signal, and then, banking to the left, settled again in what could have been exactly the same formation twenty yards further down. I remember, too, a tree, or the crown of a tree, in the thick dark canopy on the head at the northern end of the beach, that stood higher than the rest, so like someone standing out above a crowd that I tossed about in my mind for several seconds whether it reminded me of a pulpit or a gibbet, and that, just at the moment I turned about, I had opted for the former.
At the house – I was surprised that I could remember the address with such confidence, but procrastination will drive such things deep into the memory, and perhaps 10 Beach Street has a certain ring to it anyway – I was greeted by a small, strange, bent
woman of indeterminable age – she might have been anywhere from fifty-five to seventy – who, when I introduced myself and asked if she were Mrs Darling, simply nodded once or twice, smiling enthusiastically, and motioned me in, standing aside to hold open the fly-wire door for me as if I should go first, and should somehow know the way – as if, indeed, formal greetings were hardly necessary and we had known each other already a long time. I had the uneasy feeling of being the dupe of something, or that I had just been mistaken for someone else, but could see no way of finding out without going where I was bidden. The house was only of weatherboard, but dark enough for all that. I wanted to pause to let my eyes adjust, but feeling this woman’s expectation like a physical pressure behind me I began to move, with more confidence than I actually felt, down the central corridor toward where I could see a lighter room, resisting with difficulty the temptation to stretch out my hands in front of me to grope for invisible obstacles, assailed all the more powerfully by the smells of the place – their peculiar familiarity – than by anything my eyes could see. They say smell is the oldest of memories, the most primitive and strong. And certainly even at the time I thought that there must have been something in that combination of old people, old cooking, old books, old woodwork, dust, that echoed with something deep within me.
There is something about the first experience of a place or journey – even if it is only a journey down the length of a short hallway – that makes it longer and larger than any subsequent time. Now it seems to me that that afternoon must have been very overcast indeed. I came eventually to know the contents of these five rooms well enough – three of them especially – and always, in memory, for all their darkness on that first occasion, it is as if the sun outside has just broken through to illuminate, in the first room on the right, the old pianola, topped by a huge inlaid bible and a teetering stack of boxed piano-rolls, then in the kitchen beyond it the long scrubbed wooden table with the cups and battered teapot, a spill of onions, a cutting-board – and that strange hunchbacked creature ever behind me, herding me, as on that first visit, toward the final room in which, to my relieved surprise, taller and clearly some years older than her companion, thinfaced, lips pursed as if in an answering apprehension of her own, her eyes none the less piercing behind her round wire frames, I found the real Mrs Darling, a beer bottle in front of her and two tall glasses, one full, one empty and clean, as if waiting.
‘You have certainly taken your time getting here,’ she said almost as if she had been rehearsing the line and was relieved at last to be saying it. ‘Will you have a beer?’ and then, allowing no time for a reply – to this day I do not know if the empty glass had been set out for me or for her companion – ‘I do not trust a man who doesn’t drink.’
3
‘She Told Stories …’
(1985–1997)
Evidently she knew who I was, or thought she did, since I had apparently needed no introduction and certainly hadn’t received one. To this alarming prescience was added, as the afternoon progressed, a peculiar sense of urgency, even a kind of mission, which seemed to involve me only marginally if at all, giving me at last a sense that my principal role was to be that of Audience: that, known or otherwise, I served as a kind of attendant vacancy, a fortuitous receptacle for whatever it was that she needed to rid herself of. I suppose I told myself, that first time, that she would very likely ramble on in the same familiar way to the postman or to anyone else who might happen to arrive.
But I’m making excuses. Something held me. I don’t know what it was – or, rather, do, though now that I write it down and look at it, it doesn’t seem enough to explain.
She told stories. One could almost say she rushed into them, on the merest of pretexts, as if the world was ending very shortly and they had to be got through before it happened. I mentioned my mother – one of the first things I said, in reminding her of the letter – and, nodding, looking first obliquely at the lemon tree just outside the fly-wire door that opened from this makeshift living room onto a small back yard and the dunes, she began immediately, and I do mean immediately, talking about a small logging town somewhere on what I eventually worked out was the coast south of Sydney. She talked as if I should know the place, as if I should know the people – as if, somehow, a connection with my mother should be obvious, or would soon become so, though I can’t say that it ever did, at least not in those years, not while Mrs Darling was still alive. Even while I sat there I asked myself why I continued to do so, but the voice, the stories were compelling. She had a kind of authority I didn’t feel I could question. Somewhere in the back of things, too, there was the journalist in me, always looking for a story of my own. She might have been worth one, who knows? And it would certainly have been a change from the insider political stuff in which I was trying to make a name for myself back then.
She was at least eighty, perhaps several years older, and she was talking about another place and time entirely. I hunted through her sentences, interrupted as they often were by long silences that would end almost exactly at the moment I was about to try to rescue them with a repetition, or prompt them with a question. Eventually I had to admit that she was not as mad as I had thought she was, and that the gaps, the silences, were not incoherence but someone carefully choosing their path, so as not to give themselves away, or trying to pull from their memory things that had stubbornly lodged at the back of it. It all seemed to promise to hang together eventually, and I suppose I stayed that first time because I was intrigued to find out how. From questions, promptings, further details let fall – I did not want to collapse the whole edifice by revealing outright that I didn’t know any of the places or people she seemed to think I did – I gathered that the town she was speaking of – rather a small village than a town; a settlement – was somewhere on the Wollongong escarpment, or perhaps just below it, or maybe somewhere just like it but further to the south. One of those cliff-hugging places overlooking the sea, in a patch of coastal rainforest.
I enjoyed myself well enough, listening, drinking the beer, looking out at the tree full of lemons, watching the rain come and go, as it did at least twice that long first afternoon. With the sound of the ocean in the background it was all very seductive, even mesmerising in a way. When I left, with the last story unfinished and a large paper shopping-bag full of the lemons the old ladies insisted would go to waste if I did not take them, Sim – for by now I had learnt the companion’s name – urged me to come back while I was still in the area, saying how much good it had done Mrs Darling to be able to talk like that. I explained that I could not, at least not during that visit, but promised that I would do so if ever I was in Umina again, half thinking it a promise I would be unlikely to have to deliver.
Even before I had reached the main road, however, I found myself tallying the unanswered questions, not just concerning the stories, though those were intriguing enough, but as to how they had known me, if they had known me at all, and as to what Mrs Darling’s relationship had been with my mother. Beyond the dismissive nod when I mentioned her, as if that of course were something we would get to soon enough, nothing whatsoever had been said about her, let alone of the things of hers that the old lady supposedly had for me. Even that nod, when I thought about it, might have had more to do with politeness or miscomprehension. And as to the things themselves, well, it’s not that we never mentioned them, in the years to come, but I didn’t press for them. I was on the verge of it, time and again, but I didn’t press. It’s hard to say why. As though there had been some tacit understanding, from that very first backing away, that all that – the letter, my mother, the things Mrs Darling had for me – had been a necessary pretext to something quite different, that might never reach its end if those things were pushed to conclusion before it. Bizarre and inexplicable, I admit, but whose life has ever been totally free of inexplicable things, if only of inexplicable procrastinations? In the long run it made sense enough. In the long run it all made sense.
A f
ew weeks later, in any case, I was back in Umina – to make up, as my friend put it, for the poor weather of the time before. The weather was better, certainly, but only a little. I swam the first day, read a book on the second, and on the third went to see the strange couple again. And there was, as I’d suspected there might be, another tale, unfinished like the last (the first had finished, eventually, with an unexpected suicide). Before I left – I had a week off this time – I went back again to hear the rest of it. And so it continued. I told my family about my friend’s house and they were keen to go, and so, ironically, I found myself in Umina yet again in the autumn school holidays, and – pressed by Dita, whom I’d told about them, and who’d become curious in her own turn – paid the old ladies a fourth visit. In the few years that followed, this became something of a pattern. At least once a year we would borrow the Umina house, and each time a strange mixture of curiosity and duty would lure me over to Diamond Beach. And every time there was another rambling account of some kind, or rather a continuation of a whole group of them, since one thing seemed always to lead to another and Mrs Darling seemed incapable of telling a story whole, at least not in the one sitting. You’d lose a thread for a visit or two, then catch up with it again, as often as not as an offshoot of something quite different.
Perhaps that’s what made her talk so addictive. I found myself having to make a kind of mental patchwork of all the different things she’d told me about, not so much in the hope of finding a pattern to them – there was none – as because the lady herself so often needed prompting, and might never get to the bottom of something if I couldn’t coax her along. And all the time there was the beer, of course – she always had a good stock of it, and could drink almost as well as I could – though if it helped loosen her tongue, it didn’t always keep her to the point.
