Five Bells

by Gail Jones

  After the inquest into the death of Amy Brown, after the scrawled, childish-looking note from her mother, James decided to write a letter in reply. He was unable to face the parents, unable to drive out to their dusty farm and knock on the door, bend to pat the dogs, smile weakly in embarrassment at the dire cause of his mission, fumble for words while Mrs Brown offered tea and cried. So it was the least he could do. In the little wheat-belt town where he had known such happiness, he sat in his room and composed a note to try to make things right. He can still see himself in the act of writing the letter, sitting on his bed with his knees pulled up and a pillow tucked behind him, hunchbacked, sleepless, half-destroyed.

  Dear Mr and Mrs Brown,

  I am writing to express my condolences over the death of your daughter, Amy. Amy was an excellent student and much admired by her peers. She was always helpful, courteous and well behaved. She will be missed by her friends and those who loved her. As her teacher I want to offer my deepest sympathy at this time of loss.

  James DeMello

  He sent the letter, and almost immediately regretted its inane formality. He had made grief tedious, had stuffed it like a cleaned corpse into a freezer of stiff words.

  James had wanted to say: Forgive me, forgive me, something went wrong. The world collapsed and Amy was under it. There is no word I can offer, there is nothing I can say, that will make things right. I, a poor son, who ceased visiting his own mother, can only tell you that I tried on the beach to bring her back, I tried and tried but she was already gone, and I shall never forget this, oh God, oh God, this wanting to breathe into her and bring her back, and the desperation I felt and the God-awful failure. And my own grief, I know, is nothing compared to yours, but it is huge and it is dark and I am not sure how to go on.

  If he could have retrieved the letter, and sent a symbol or an image or some other wordless emblem, he would have felt more honest. At the funeral there were flowers, and suddenly it made sense, why this might be so. In this town with no florist, this tiny town on the edge of nowhere, somehow roses and lilies had turned up, somehow there were elaborate wreaths and cellophane-wrapped bunches, and he had no idea how or from whence they had arrived. Yet it made sense. Something offered so that everything did not have to rest inside words. Something silent delivered from the living world. Something with no purpose other than to declare that the beautiful exists and will not last.

  Rough farmers were standing around in hot suits; many, James guessed, retrieved the suit they’d been married in, and left it unbuttoned to accommodate their older body. The women were also dressed up, and some wore hats that looked as if they too belonged to an older generation. Mr and Mrs Brown, broken-hearted, stood silently holding hands.

  James does not remember anything that was said, not a single word. Only this: the flowers wilting beneath a sheen of sunlight and cellophane, and what people wore, the way they stood looking down, and the heat on their heads, and the absence of children.

  At Circular Quay James was now at a loss. Having met with Ellie, having gulped back the words he might have said, he felt aimless and without purpose. All around him were families in a kind of festive mood, and couples strolling together, looking at the sights. He glanced up at the Sydney Harbour Bridge and could see a line of people, barely visible, climbing its bow. What must they see, he wondered. There would be the Harbour below them, and all the wake-patterns on the water, there would be a bird’s eye view of boats and of the meringue peaks of the Opera House, and perhaps there would be a view much further, out eastwards to the ocean. Flags flapped on the summit, in a playful image of triumph.

  James’s attention was caught by a family he overheard to be Italian. They had spread a rug on the grass and were unloading a late picnic, and there were three generations, a Nonno, a Nonna, a Papa, a Mama, and two small children. One of the children, a boy about four, kept breaking away and chasing sea-gulls from the grass, so that they flapped messily about him, rose upwards and squawked. The little boy was pleased to have such evident effect in the world, to stir birds into the sky and scare them with his arms. And then the Nonna called out: Matteo, Matteo, and the boy turned and ran on his fat little legs into her arms. She said Matteo, bello; Matteo, bello, and the child sank into her lap with a lump of bread she had torn for him. His little sister, about two, reached over to take the bread, and he pulled it back, kicking and wriggling, setting off a squeal. But then the mother intervened and found bread for her daughter. The child flopped back into her mother’s lap and Mama cuddled her, and blew on her hair, and took up her toddler toes and sucked them.

  It was a simple little drama, everyday, unremarkable. But what had snagged in James’s heart was Matteo, bello. It was as if he had heard it before, in the distant past. His own true name, given by his father, was Gennaro, Gennaro DeMello.

  He had never told anyone, not even Ellie. At some stage his father had left and when he was enrolled in school someone persuaded his mother to call him James. And so he became James, a fake Anglo translation. But on his birth certificate and passport, there it was, Gennaro DeMello, symbol of something he had one day lost. The sing-song of someone he used to be, but now orphaned and contracted and misidentified.

  Si parla Italiano.

  James thought of lingering longer near the happy family, but was afraid he would look suspicious, a guy just hanging around, a guy seedy-looking and ill. They would think he was a druggie, or someone who liked to look at small children. James gave Matteo a little wave as he walked past the family, and to his great surprise, Matteo waved back. Ciao! the child called. He waved in the Italian child’s manner, closing his hand and opening it, closing and opening. In that second James lost his miserable nonentity. He became the man heralded by a child, caught in the egalitarian affirmation a small child might bestow. James smiled. Spent as he was, alone, the small wave moved and pleased him.

  Auguri, he thought.

  It was the wine, James decided, that made his mind swim in this way, and caused him to feel sleepy at only four in the afternoon. He considered visiting the Museum of Contemporary Art, but decided instead to take a short nap in the sunshine. He found a spot on the grass, on a slope, and laid himself down. He closed his tired eyes. He could hear a didgeridoo playing, a muffled soothing sound, and the distant busy din of traffic and people; he could hear the whole world jangly and abuzz on a Saturday afternoon. But he slipped away within seconds into a dreamless sleep, his body finally yielding to bone-aching tiredness. It was peace, it was retreat. The oblivion was sweet.

  When James awoke it was just after six o’clock. Surprised to have slept for so long, he glanced at his watch a second time, for confirmation. It was as if someone had scissored out a slice of the day, destroying time. So he rose and sat for a while, calculating the shift of scene. The light had altered to what painters used to call Naples Yellow and the air had turned unusually humid and heavy. A change in the weather had begun to travel in from the sea. The crowds had thinned a little. The didgeridoo hum was gone. The non-stop faces and noises were less invasive and compelling. No sign, anywhere, of the Italian family, or the boy who had offered such an innocent and easy salutation. It was good to have slept, after so much wakefulness. James’s mind felt clearer; he did not have a headache; he was relocated in the present tense, here and now.

  James stood, shook off his doze, and set off in a semblance of true volition to visit the nearby Botanic Gardens. Inattentive to the crowds, conspicuously alone, he walked once more around the circumference of Circular Quay, crossed in front of the Opera House and headed up a hill, finding himself in a space of leafy parklands and wide expanses of grass. A strong wind flew in off the ruffled waters of the Harbour, and James, with no reason to be there but to wander and look, simply drifted between the trees, followed the winding paths, read the Latin tags affixed to little signs below exhibitions of plants and bushes. In dwindling light he saw there was a native garden, marked with a placard that acknowledged that the land was first poss
essed by the Cadigal people; there was a begonia garden, a rose garden, an oriental garden and a succulent garden.

  At length James arrived at something called Mrs Macquarie’s Chair, a bench carved by convicts out of sandstone in 1810. Mrs Macquarie, wife of a colonial Governor, liked to sit here, the sign said, to watch tall ships enter the Harbour. He imagined a woman in Regency dress, like someone in a television drama, decorous, prudish, moving with stiff reticence. She would speak in posh tones and gaze into the far distance, her tendril hair blowing.

  There was no one else present, so James sat down on the chair, displacing Mrs Macquarie’s ghost and acting colonial. He stared at the water. It was bucking under the wind and iron-toned with the coming night. Almost at once a kind of aggravated disquiet assailed him. James could not release himself from the pressure of absent others, Amy Brown in particular, and the tragedy of her death, Ellie and all that she urgently signified, his mother, vivid still and intolerably memorable. So long in inertia, so long sealed away, he was now made restless by his understanding that there would be no conclusion to all this, and that Amy’s death had punctured or ripped something, had opened him both to devastation and to revisitings from the past. He was oppressed, all at once, with a sense of her plea from beyond the grave, as if she were a vision, transparent, with the world shining through her. Ghosts disobeyed time. Their flimsy bodies were interminable. They were at once long-lasting and bizarrely sudden. Afflicted by what he could not name or speak, James needed once again to move his body.

  With dusk the light had become purple; yellow was draining to the west. Bats rose in flocks from the Botanic Gardens and were streaming across the sky; though distant and high above, they were a loathsome presence. With no plan, with no purpose, James began the walk back towards Circular Quay. In the twenty minutes it took, night had fallen; out here, in the open, it was like parts of the world silently ceasing to be, a downward bending to nothing. The sensation of disappearance was contiguous and threatening. James quickened his pace, almost afraid.

  But as he approached the Quay he saw that everything was transformed. The Opera House was illuminated against the dark sky and looked still and shiny, like something made for a church. It seemed to bulge in his direction, as if it had grown in his absence and possessed an organic life he’d not noticed before. Beads of light picked out the shape of the Quay, most of them ornamental and over-powered; so too the Bridge was visible as a pattern of dots following its shape, the faint outlines of girders and struts, the honey-coloured pylons, a single crimson light blinking at the high point of its arch. Beneath the Bridge, far to the north, James could see the shimmering icon of the amusement park: a face hideously smiling, its lit hair in afrighted spikes. Along the near side of the Quay the white umbrellas were still up, massing like wings over the heads of customers now beginning to gather for dinner outside. High palms were moving slightly in a rising breeze. Most impressive of all was the Harbour itself, which was black now, pure metaphysical black, and covered in a net of broken light. The ferries were still heading out and returning, their beacons shining, their little windows lit. And there were red buoy lights on the water, showing the way.

  All this came towards James in a lustrous rush. He couldn’t help thinking of the adjective ‘cinematic’, the way everything with perceptual force, everything city-scale and spaced out, was nowadays described. There was flicker and montage; there was the strangely versatile and celluloid shine of the darkness. It was so: cinematic. Faces manifested before him, veering in and out of focus, and a continuous ribbon of activity seemed to catch at his vision. The crowds had grown once again, and included the smart set heading for dinner and those anticipating a night at the theatre or the Opera. The elevated train rumbled and raised voices sounded. Everything was converging, everything was ample and ablaze. This was one of those parts of a city that passes for a myth.

  James walked along the Opera House side of the Quay and took a seat under one of the umbrellas for something to do. A waiter appeared instantly, bending like an actor taking a bow. There was generosity in his manner, a calm assertion of connection. James was not hungry but he ordered a meal and a bottle of wine because he wanted to prolong whatever abnormal feeling this was, waking to a new time, into this cinematic illusion, waking into the visionary present after so much smothering past. His steak came, dribbled with sauces, and he looked at it without interest, but he began drinking almost immediately, feeling the Cabernet Sauvignon suffuse his body, falling into him, warmly, like a familiar drug. His metabolism recognised the stimulant whizz in the bloodstream, the cheap revival of chemical life.

  Oh Ellie. The ledge in time that was their bed had forever gone. He realised he was leaning on the table, drinking alone, looking to all the world like some miserable bastard whose girlfriend had just left him. An Agelasti, that’s what he was. James could not remember the last time he had laughed.

  After the unfinished dinner he rose wide-awake, and walked, wishing to lose himself, into the streaming crowd. James made his way to the steps of the Opera House and sat looking at the sky. Then, as the numbers swelled, arriving for concerts and plays, he walked back again. He might have been floating, the loose crowd parting before him, voices circumambient, a sense of idiosyncrasy to his sensations and being in the world. Faceted faces drifted past, the crowds moved gently around him, he saw figments, apparitions, as an artist might have seen. Magritte. He was Magritte, who had lost his mother.

  At a small liquor store facing the city James bought two large bottles of whisky. These were of thick glass, expensive, and reminded him somehow of a fist. The young man who served him thoughtfully put each bottle into an eco-friendly bag. Drug of choice for the evening, James thought, for a silhouette of a man, false-hearted, misnamed, thinly sketched in graphite by a schoolchild in another time and place. He was not worthy of Ellie. He was too wounded, too lost, too finally disconsolate.

  He thought of his cock in a woman’s hand – any woman – as she guided him in. A woman’s mouth half-open, and the carnal, comforting sigh as he fell into her body. This was the imprecision that desire might become, the unbearable paraphrase and substitution.

  A drum of voices hung around, creating the resounding white noise of a busy Saturday night. James wanted silence. He sat on the ground in a dark corner behind the ice-cream stand and took a few gulps of whisky. Then he retrieved pills from his jeans’ pocket, and complicated his tox result. Slurred his sick-drinking self, destroyed his sexual imaginings, wanting the peaceful ruination of not having to remember. And though he’d given them up long ago, he was desperate for a cigarette.

  On impulse James bought a ticket and boarded a ferry, any ferry. Randomly chosen. He was not sure where the ferry was headed as it surged into the night. It was like entering a small, unstable and generalised world: the rocking seemed exaggerated and the passenger compartment confining. He couldn’t bear the overhead lights and the neat little seats, the young people talking in puerile witticisms, the mobile phones and the texting and the Saturday night excitation, so he moved to the back, outside, into the moist gusting wind. It was like being alone, being wholly alone. His nerves settled, he felt himself return, he began again to look. There was the wake, lush white and sucking under the black water; there was the Opera House sliding its great and singular form, and the reflection of the Opera House, which looked thin and unabiding and made of snow. And there was the city, retreating, all those towers of lights, all those engineering wonders, high-rising and firm.

  It was not a decision, but an act. James slipped over the edge and the whisky pulled him down. At first it was a bounteous wash of dark and light, the water colder than he had expected and covering him quickly. The Harbour seemed to throb around him as the ferry pulled away, and then slacken and gently take him and require his surrender. There were verticals of filmy light and fish-shapes breaking open. There was a winding embrace so that he opened his arms like a lover. There was pressure. There was night, the tide of night,
flowing in. He was thinking of his true name, Gennaro DeMello, which came to him as a song, Gennaro bello. He imagined singing from the Opera House penetrating the water – Gennaro bello, Gennaro bello – an extended melisma, a round pure moment.

  He felt the water of the Harbour enter his body. His chest was filling. The black wet pushed its thumb-balls in. He felt the sad sinking of giving up and letting go.

  He was washed and washed into the mothering darkness, a release, a release, as sound releases; into the wake, Gennaro’s wake, and into waves, in waves.

  The market was a joy. Ellie had caught the bus up Glebe Point Road and disembarked before her stop when she saw the market. It was near closing time, so stallholders were looking rather hot and bored, but pleased too to see browsers still wandering about and relaxed into friendly chit-chat and casual light banter. The market was a mixture of craft, new goods and second-hand junk – clothes, knick-knacks, books and collectibles. Ellie walked past the vendor roasting caramelised nuts in a big open pan at the entrance, and headed straight for the second-hand stalls and the trays of old books.

  The sunlight now was orange and the day was drifting away; it gave the shoppers a healthy non-commercial glow. They were defeating all market predictions by their delight in trash and treasure; they held up crumpled cast-offs and cracked old teacups; they leafed through children’s books from the 1930s, they paused over someone’s collection of rusty tools, most superceded these days by something electrically loud. Ellie bought an old hammer so that she could hang a small print on her wall. The man who sold it was pleased, he said, to see that his hammer was going to a good home: it was a small courtesy he offered her, a sweet civility. He reminded Ellie of her father. He wore a scraggly cloth hat on his thin white hair, and read a novel, self-contented, when he did not have customers. She saw that his hands were callused; he had been a hard worker.