A Body of Water

by Beverley Farmer

  Sometimes I miss Lorne. Thirteen years all told, of living in Lorne. Two years now since I left, and still…Going back is still like going home. Sometimes at twilight the water in the pools east of the pier went dark with a grey brown glint, a half-light inside it; and at the same time the rocks at the rim were grey and water-blue. Until it was too dark to see, water was rock and rock water.

  One night when Taki was three a friend came up from the beach and said to hurry, there was phosphorus on the beach down in front of the restaurant. So we went to see, Taki and I; we splashed at the water’s edge. Every step printed itself silvery in the wet sand. Everywhere we stamped glittered up and faded. After that he wanted us to go every night and see phosphos (‘lightlight’), and we often went, but never saw it again.

  H’s mind is so fertile, every seed can take root in him. I’m closed and cold by comparison, fearful of letting any new thing touch me, change me – less so now than I was, since knowing him.

  Sunset at the beach with the tide way out. The pier stood out of the water – you could see the bottom even at the far end, where a crowd of men were fishing for flathead. A pilot boat throbbed out and brought in a steamer with a tall bridge, inching past the pier. The white Tasmanian ferry came speeding through the Rip with its deck lights glittering. In the east the black lighthouse had its lamp on, sparkling on the hill; our lighthouse had its red lamp on. (The lighthouses are green-helmeted.) A haze hung over Queenscliff and out of it came rising a faint pink balloon that turned gold and sharp-edged, hanging over the roofs. Here the evening light was held in rock pools as if in wineglasses, and in each pod of grapeweed strung around the rocks. (Grapeweed, bubbleweed.) Other pools were shadowy, water and weed. Out of the clear gold light in the east came a white ship breasting its own white shadow that came swelling and dolphin-diving ahead, in white plunges and sprays, and now and then a groaning of engines was flung ashore on turns of the wind.

  Sandstone is honeycomb in this still afternoon sun, pitted with swallows’ nests. All this beach is the same colour – sand, rock and rockpool. The small mouse-shrieks of swallows skim and soar. The wave-shaped, whale-shaped headland is dark in the spray of the western sky. Into the eastern sky a ship surges from behind the lighthouse, trailing a smoke blur. Its surfaces flash. A point like a star pierces the masthead. My footprints flatten the crisp arrowheads left by gulls. At the high tide mark, along the hairline of the marram grass, clumps of feathers, all hollowed out, clench empty beaks and claws.

  Pairs of dark swallows

  swoop over the waves, the sand –

  half of them shadows.

  Switch on the lamp and

  blood will splash the cloth – claret

  alight in glasses.

  You raise your wine glass –

  in the sky now there are two

  pale summer half-moons.

  My white bedside cup

  is brimful of cool water –

  no, of dry shadow.

  Long spindles of light

  let their green threads unravel

  and wash loose and sink.

  The shadows of gulls

  splash the sand they move over

  in the hot north wind.

  A white moth is caught

  in the window cobwebs – no,

  a hovering gull.

  These long pink-white eggs

  are cuttlefish bones: stranded

  in nests of seaweed.

  White threads of moonlight

  swaying when the curtain moves

  startle the spider.

  Washed up: a small skull

  like fretty, translucent folds

  of blood-stained paper,

  beaked, waggled on a fine chain

  that pokes out from hunched feathers.

  Here’s a drowned penguin.

  Its dense wings fold under, they

  hang out like earlobes.

  Over the surf there are thunderous clouds.

  There are two long, metal staircases from the clifftop to the beach. When you walk on them in wooden-soled shoes or thongs they chime and resonate; when you run, the small sounds shimmer together like gamelan music. At the foot of one staircase there are two flat round rocks with a fan of flutings on their backs as if they were fossilised giant scallops. The other staircase passes a deep cavemouth. Black twisted straps of kelp on the sand and in pools. The waves in the shallows turn cloudy gold on the upturn, full of sand scooped up.

  While it may be true that I’m not passionate, as I (not he, he says nothing) as I said last night, I was in youth and I came to grief through it. By way of compensation – since I must have strong feeling – I became obsessive. Obsession runs deeper than passion, and runs inward, and so can escape notice. But it comes empty-handed. It has nothing to give. Nor can it take, receive, or accept, being hidebound by nature, turned in, and fixed.

  To have been pinned down to declaring this to him – it feels as if I’ve lost my shell – no, lost everything but my shell, am an empty shell. 16 February: four years since the Ash Wednesday bushfires. A pink belladonna has opened itself under the gum tree at H’s. Red stalks of belladonnas grew tall out of the ashes on the silent hills behind Lorne – the only colour in all those hills, their trumpets, their nude brilliance.

  Losar: the Tibetan New Year. A puja is being held at St Kilda, but I want to stay here. The Tibetan calendar is in a sixty-year cycle, the five elements combined with the same twelve zodiac animals as in the Chinese calendar: this is the year of the Fire-Hare.

  Taki on the phone last night was wet from a moonlight swim in the school pool, he said. I’m to collect him for the weekend and book him in for the dive tomorrow at Pope’s Eye, where they went on one day of his scuba course last month: his first dive since he qualified. (The gear alarms me, so heavy and clumsy. I can barely even lift the weight-belt.)

  The plumber has just climbed up and sealed my chimney off, so I won’t be kept awake any more nights by the rain splashing into the fireplace and filling the bucket I put there. Still, it was good to be connected to the sky by a long flute that boomed, whistled, fluttered at my ear as I slept or lay listening. But the rain came splashing in, sooty rain on the hearth, and besides every day more bees wandered down into the room to snarl ponderously on the panes, and I worried more that another swarm might settle in the chimney. So it’s better blocked off.

  The morning of the dive was wild, grey and gusty, a heavy surge out at sea. He didn’t go. I took him to H’s for lunch – difficult, with everyone somehow off-centre, awry.

  A blackout last night and the stump of candle I had gave out halfway…A huntsman spider came in the moment the power failed, a monster of shadow flickering on the wall – I hit and killed it with a broom. Hating myself, but hating it more. It went small, clenched on the carpet like a crab in sand – red-brown and translucent. I should have drawn its corpse. Attended to its intricacies. That might be a way of learning to tolerate these agile, springing creatures. They’re not furtive, not savage like funnel-webs, they don’t weave a furry hole and crouch in it. They have a young, wild gallantry about them. Leggy desperadoes.

  Colette’s mother, Sido, had a spider in her room which used to spin itself down at night over her cup of chocolate, straddle it, and sip.

  In his book about his time in solitary confinement under the Junta, George Mangakis wrote that there were two mosquitoes on his wall. He became fanatically devoted to them: as each evening approached he would lay himself down and, pulsing with love and joy, mutely invite them to suckle.

  It was some time after the lights came on before I felt safe enough to go to bed. So I sat idly reading. Suddenly a bull ant crawled by on the table. I had the nasty feeling it was the same one that I had found twice in the garden that afternoon, still tracking me laboriously down. It was not aggressive, it just crept wearily round my arm and the corner of the book, which I nevertheless slammed down on it. In any case, I told myself, its own kind would have killed it, had I put it
outside. When I went to bed I felt the skin of my house acreep all over with garden beings not to be seen in the windy moonlight.

  A hot still night, white once the moon rose. A wisp of web above the bookcase. I moved the lamp from there over to the table; the white linen shade is all over gnat-wings – single, dismembered – that hold the light.

  Each thing, insofar as it is in itself, endeavours to persevere in its being.

  Spinoza: Ethics

  The poplars in a line along the road are all golden. Mist poplars, pure bright golden – but isn’t it still summer?

  A dream of Greece, much as it was, a dream of our arrival in the village that day – poppies and chamomile and almond blossom, the watery Easter sun, the joy, the astonished tears, embraces. And after dark, in Vassili’s yard (Vassili is dead now): the babble, the dozens of unknown faces agape with shadows in the crosslight of the kitchen house and the stone wood-oven where two kids that Chris’s father had hurried to have slaughtered were roasting: all of them Chris’s people. The only one there that I knew, his brother Platon, had come up from Thessaloniki in the bus with us – Platon who had been so close to us in Melbourne and now as if three years counted for nothing – in an instant, calling us both karda (it means ‘brother’), as he did all his brothers, sisters, friends, and flinging one arm over Chris’s shoulders, one over mine – was just as close again.

  I’ll make a living some other way. I’ll wash dishes again before I’ll ever write for Mills & Boon (if any kitchen will have me). So goodbye Claudine, Colleen, Clarabell. (H: ‘You write for Mills & Boons, go on. And I’ll get a job with an escort agency…’) I can’t bear to read the romantic novels I got from the library, let alone write any like them. I believed in them when I was growing up: for me it could never be a matter of tossing off a light-hearted money spinner, as it could for a writer who was never hooked. I’d know I was peddling poison. It’s ludicrous and corrupt, ‘romance’ is, and (I fear) contaminating. Not only my real, other writing would be at risk: I’d have to fear its contaminating effect on the honesty of my love. Do I mean honesty? Or sincerity? Integrity? All these.

  I went there yesterday full of dread, as I haven’t for a long while. I sat in my shell of green pear shadow, he in the open sun. He was glossy, his shoulders shone like oiled wood. The set of his head is beautiful. His gravity. We had coffee and talked.

  Be able to be alone. Loose not the advantage of Solitude, and the Society of thy self, nor be only content, but delight to be alone and single with Omnipresency. He who is thus prepared, the Day is not uneasy nor the Night black unto him. Darkness may bound his Eyes, not his Imagination. In his Bed he may ly, like Pompey and his Sons, in all quarters of the Earth, may speculate the universe, and enjoy the whole World in the Hermitage of himself.

  Sir Thomas Browne: Christian Morals

  Now the berry tree is half-red, half-green! Each branch is underlined in red. A line for a poem? Self-transformations of the tree.

  The quince tree keeps tossing and groaning in this wind, burdened (burdened is a lovely heavy word) with great pale green quinces.

  A daddy-long-legs has hung itself from the ceiling in a motionless hug with the crisp skin of a fly.

  What were the conditions in which women lived? I asked myself; for fiction…is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly to life at all four corners…But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in mid-air by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.

  Virginia Woolf: A Room of One’s Own

  MARCH

  WE SAW STAMMHEIM, the film about the Baader-Meinhof trial (one hundred and ninety-two days it struggled on); afterwards we ran back and got the vodka from my place and sat in the hot darkness at a gutter table outside Genevieve’s, lacing our soda-water and ice from the bottle when the waiters weren’t looking – unable for the time to bear to be behind a closed door.

  This day, 2 March, in 1930 Lorenzo died in Vence in France – ‘Maria, Maria, don’t let me die,’ crying out to Maria Huxley in the days before that – midway through his forty-fifth year, so young; Frieda holding his ankle. Oddly enough, the date caught my eye as I was just skimming through Flame Into Being yet again. Anthony Burgess’s magnificent account of the life, the work. Burgess – so expansive, lordly, lofty, now intense, now bluff and slapdash, casually ruthless, wise and warm-hearted – is so like Lorenzo in lots of ways (some he points out for us). He quotes this passage as ‘the final manifesto, that of a dying man in whose rhetoric there is nothing moribund. It is, of course, more than rhetoric’:

  What man most passionately wants is his living wholeness and his living unison, not his own isolate salvation of his ‘soul’. Man wants his physical fulfilment first and foremost, since now, once and once only, he is in the flesh and potent. For man, the vast marvel is to be alive. For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. Whatever the unborn and the dead may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh. The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours only for a short time. We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos. I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea…

  D.H. Lawrence: Apocalypse

  (If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present… denn lebt er ewig, der in der Gegenwart lebt.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus)

  Vence: that’s where the Matisse chapel is with the cool windows, that I want to see one day – the chapel that Sylvia Plath found closed, and so was weeping outside when the Mother Superior let her go in. She told her mother about it in a postcard reproduced in Letters Home:

  I just knelt in the heart of sun and the colors of sky, sea and sun, in the pure white heart of the Chapel. ‘Vous êtes si gentille,’ I stammered. The nun smiled. ‘C’est la miséricorde de Dieu.’ It was.

  I bought plants today for the new garden: a broom, a lantana, a little hibiscus – a brilliant red one according to the label. But I dropped the pot on the way home and one of its two trunks broke off. Will it still grow? I’ve planted it anyway, out in the sun, and can only hope. The broom bush is outside my window, where a broom bush was when I was a child; and the lantana too, a gold and orange ‘prostrate’ one with rank dark leaves – what do they smell of? Resin, a sweet resin, but a hint of – is it straw? Yes, animal bedding, tainted with piss. Human, for that matter, a sheet, sweat-soaked and drying in the sun. No, ants! That black stink of crushed ants.

  Low cloud at sundown over Swan Bay, the sun spilling, a tented light. The sandbanks gold-outlined. Where the water was moving, long black swans were afloat. (The old name: the Swan Ponds.)

  A deep pad of sand has settled over the rock shelf below the lighthouse. Brown bubble-pods show through in seams of ripple, in grooved waves. The pools today are blood-hot, warmer than my hands. Out of the ones furthest out, one kind of weed has poked up white tags in pairs, like petals, or small wings – not flowers, only a spearhead on a thin bamboo-stalk opening up a twist of dry brown strands, white-tipped.

  MATISSE PRINT: VASE WITH RED FISHES

  On a stand with long grey wooden legs is a jar of thick glass more than half full of water in which are circling two goldfish, poissons rouges, red-gold fishes nosing at the fragmenting shrunken and swollen shadows they inhabit. They are in a window seen at an angle by someone leaning back to take in the bare wooden chair-seat, the divan with square cushions, the pot or jug full of pale green water or just glazed green (empty), in the foreground. Curls of black iron on a blue balcony. A small terracotta flowerpot
beside the vase holds two long plumes of black stems out over the balcony, which has a top rail of a darker brick red than the pot. Across the square, a sunny façade, three arched windows, a capped round tower. (The tiles are like the scales of a deep-water fish.) Carts crawl under the stone walls. The sky is blue, the heavy deep blue of the evening after a burning day. There is an archway below, sunlit serrations mounting beside it. The perspective is fractured, refracted.

  It is hot. It is afternoon, summer, a southern town emerging from its heat and shadow. Out of sight beyond the frame two people are sitting in the dark interior: a man, a woman. They are as much at home in this cool dignity and calm as the fish are in their vase: they too are translucent. Colours flow from and over them. They are listening to watery piano pieces: Debussy, La cathédrale engloutie, Reflets dans l’eau, Poissons d’or, Ondine. Or they have been listening and now the record has stopped and what sound there is, of a bird, a shouted exchange of words, a cat’s yowl, floats up from the square on a wave of silence.

  He is in the act of painting what he sees out the window. Or: he is painting her, having clothed her in red silk (like the two fish): he observes that she has become a shape like a pear, like a pearl, a vase, glistening among angles and rings. The images of her in his mind’s eye are flat, two-dimensional, all shape and no substance, like a sole or a flounder, those moon fish. When they make love he is astonished to find himself sinking through the surface into her embrace…For now she sits watching the fishes. They are two tipples of blood that dissolve and twine, red whips in the light in the water. In the glass with them are fragments of the hot blue and wheat-brown square with its turret and loophole windows sunk in a slab of shade. Their eyes, hollow black, look out at her. As if in a concave mirror they see hollow towering walls and encased in them a red bubble, which is the woman. She has on a long red robe and its folds and shadows of silk lap her whiteness, trailing loose from her arms and on the floor at her feet. The silk feels like cool water.

  She reaches for a white mug of water on the table inside the room, outside the frame, but the water has gone, the darkness inside is only shadow, hot shadow. She has no recollection of drinking the water. Perhaps it evaporated in the intense heat over the space of the afternoon, or is such a thing impossible? She is not at the moment able to coerce her brain into remembering whether or not it is impossible. If so, though, wouldn’t the water in the vase also have to be no more than shadow? The fish lying in draggled lumps on the thick glass of the bottom like the hanks of red seaweed the high tide leaves on the sand?