Honk If You Are Jesus
Page 21
If the world is senseless — things and events without end or meaning, as some like to claim — then the news has not yet reached the city limits of Adelaide.
Or so it appears to me here, now.
I’m scribbling these notes — this gospel, of sorts — in the study at my mother’s home: our home again, I suppose. I’ve been writing for most of the day. It’s late afternoon, the gulf glitters far to the west, the sun is slipping ponderously into the sea. Some hazy quality to the air — summer dust, or smoke — has rendered half the sky an incandescent blaze. The house and the surrounding hillside are flashed, reddened, sunburnt, but the suburbs on the plain between are already in shadow. Down there, the first streetlights are twinkling into line, pricking out the shapes of a familiar grid.
Adelaide was mapped out a little too perfectly, some claim. As if the aim were to prove a theory, or score some sort of amusing debating point, not plan a city.
Perhaps, but I find only reassurance in a city that resembles nothing so much as a page of geometry. It speaks to whatever remains of the scientist in me, persuades me that even the bizarre events of these last two years might be twisted, creaking, into some sort of shape, into some sort of geometry of the past.
The sun vanishes, the first stars gleam dimly in the sky; leaning forward, pressing my face to the windowpane I can pick out — with the eye of faith — the familiar constellations: the Cross, the Bear, the Saucepan.
If I lean back my own image appears in the window, reflected, superimposed on the darkness outside, pricked through with those distant lights: another familiar constellation. The Sign of which zodiac? The Ugly Duckling? The Spinster Professor? The Crone? The Bitter Heart?
My mother no longer thinks so. I might be unmarried, still, and a year or two from menopause, but I am no longer a lost cause. I am Changed.
A Love Child, she likes to call it — a term lifted from the women’s magazines she reads addictively. A magical term, those words have somehow come to permit what was once impermissible: single parenthood. Bastardry.
She shed the expected tears at first, but pride soon suppressed shame: the strength of that pride far greater for being so long thwarted.
In her eyes I have finally, if at last gasp, fulfilled the essential female function. Little does she realise how close her attitudes are to the dogma of biology texts: reproduction is the beginning of death. From there it’s all downhill.
And in my eyes? I refuse — doggedly — to romanticise my plight. Once I had half looked forward to menopause; at times, perhaps, even longed for it. This, I hoped, would be the final metamorphosis: the butterfly — or moth, at least — of the mind shucking off its animal husk. Reason shaking free of unreason — the sex hormones dying in the blood, and with them their absurd moods and demands.
The Change of Life, in which we are raised up, incorruptible.
Or at least a little wiser. And certainly more serene.
Of course I had also half dreaded menopause. Odd moments of panic overwhelmed me as the years passed. My birthdays were the worst time — and Christmas. I told myself, repeatedly, that I never wanted children — but the panic still came, especially in the sleepless small hours, in surges, like a ghost of morning sickness. At those times my mother’s naggings still had power over me: What If I Changed My Mind, And It Was Too Late? The smallest phrase in her rare letters could trigger that panic: Met Anyone Nice In Queensland?
As the early evening lights — streetlights, kitchen windows, the windows of family rooms — prick out, dot-to-dot, the outline of Adelaide, I feel a sudden rush of affection for its neat orderly streets, almost a parody of good sense.
Is it chemical, this sudden optimism? So my mother would tell me. Contentment goes with the condition, she would claim, smugly.
Contentment goes with an original scientific experiment, I might counter, performed under optimal conditions.
In the next room she is preparing our evening meal: some ancient, country, folk broth that even a firsttrimester stomach might keep down. She is singing to herself, softly, innocently, transformed already into the sweetest of grandmothers. Soon she will seek me out, clucking her tongue at the scribbled gospel pages scattered on the floor about me.
‘You must eat, dear. And rest. All this work — and you a doctor! If you aren’t going to think of yourself, think of it.’
We shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank the following friends and family for their suggestions and criticisms: Michael McEvoy, Helen Goldsworthy, Anna Goldsworthy, Mario Andreacchio, Nikki Christer, Christopher Pearson, Jemal Sharah. He would also like to thank the Literature Board of the Australia Council for a Writer’s Fellowship during which the novel was written.
About the author
IF YOU ARE JESUS
Peter Goldsworthy was born in Minlaton, South Australia, in 1951. He grew up in various country towns, finishing his schooling in Darwin. Since graduating in medicine from the University of Adelaide, he has devoted his time equally to medicine and writing.
Peter Goldsworthy has published three collections of poetry, including This Goes With That: Selected Poems 1970–1990. He is the author of four collections of short fiction, including Little Deaths, and three novels, including Honk If You Are Jesus and Wish, his most recent work. He has won numerous awards including the Commonwealth Poetry Prize and an Australian Bicentennial Literary Award.
Maestro
Maestro, Peter Goldsworthy’s first novel, is a beautifully compelling and wonderfully crafted novel. It is set in the tropical hothouse of Darwin, when Paul Crabbe arrives there from the South with his parents. They are determined to find the best teacher for their musically talented son. And so they meet Herr Keller, an elegant drunkard with a shadowy past. As the lessons continue, and Paul experiences his first real love, Keller’s tragic story begins to unfold.
Wish
John James, also known as J.J., has had to use sign language from childhood, as both his parents were deaf. Now recently divorced, with a daughter, he has ‘gone back to school’ to teach sign language to others. It’s not long before J.J. meets a gorilla named ‘Eliza', and before long he is discovering the strange circumstances that has brought them together.
BOOKS BY PETER GOLDSWORTHY
Poetry
New Selected Poems
This Goes With That: Selected Poems, 1970–1990
If, then
Readings from Ecclesiastes
Short Fiction
The List of All Answers
Navel Gazing
Bleak Rooms
Little Deaths
Zooing
Archipelagoes
Novels
Three Dog Night
Maestro
Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam
Honk If You Are Jesus
Wish
Keep It Simple, Stupid
Magpie (jointly with Brian Matthews)
Copyright
Angus&Robertson
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, Australia
First published in Australia in 1992
This edition published in 2010
by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty Limited
ABN 36 009 913 517
Copyright © Peter Goldsworthy 1992
The right of Peter Goldsworthy to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him under the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.
This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
HarperCollinsPublishers
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National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Goldsworthy, Peter, 1951-.
Honk if you are Jesus.
ISBN: 978 0 2071 9609 6 (pbk.)
ISBN: 978 0 7304 9382 2 (epub)
I. Title.
A824.3
09 10 11 12
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