The Chelsea manifesto: A novel

the

CHELSEA MANIFESTO

‘I’m not going to settle for the ordinary, Ben. Or rather, I want ordinary to have a new meaning. I want ordinary madness, ordinary orgies, I want sitting around ’til three talking politics to be ordinary, I want to be ordinarily surrounded with colourful, creative people who smoke too much, I want to live in extraordinarily beautiful and wild places with ordinary exotic women, leading a lavish life of ordinary decadence and excess!’ ‘You want to burn the candle at both ends?’ I said. Ben Wallymacher has always struggled to keep up with Francis. Friends from childhood, their lives diverge as they battle with the big questions — relationships, fathering, the limits of spontaneity, the usefulness of seventies obsessions like the ‘human potential movement’ — until they’re drawn together again by Francis’ elusive daughter, Piaf. This ironic, comic novel flits from the past to the present, weaving a tale of life’s journey with some pretty interesting pit stops — geodesic domes, psychodrama and gurus, armed robbery and prison, New York and Fremantle, the Chelsea Hotel and Adele’s B & B. It’s about an ordinary man trying not to make too much of a wally of himself.

Bruce Russell is the author of Jacob’s Air, winner of the T A G Hungerford Award in 1995. Since the mid-1970s he has won a number of awards and prizes for his short fiction and is represented in Fictions 88, an anthology of stories chosen by Frank Moorhouse for ABC Books. Bruce grew up in Sydney and in the early seventies lived and taught in North America. He now lives in Fremantle, Western Australia.

the

CHELSEA MANIFESTO

a novel by

Bruce

Russell

FREMANTLE ARTS CENTRE PRESS

First published 1999 by

FREMANTLE ARTS CENTRE PRESS PO Box 158, North Fremantle Western Australia 6159. http://[email protected]

Copyright © Bruce Russell, 1999. This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher. Consultant Editor B R Coffey. Production Coordinator Cate Sutherland. Typeset by Fremantle Arts Centre Press and printed by Australian Print Group, Maryborough.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-publication data Russell, Bruce, 1943- . The Chelsea manifesto. ISBN 1 86368 263 5. I. Title. A823.3

The State of Western Australia has made an investment in this project through ArtsWA in association with the Lotteries Commission.

Publication of this title was assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the relevant copyright, designs and patents acts, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publisher. eBooks Corporation

For Alena

You then will awaken as radical freedom, and sing those songs of radiant release, beam an infinity too obvious to see, and drink an ocean of delight. Ken Wilber

It’s May 14, 1974 and Jacob Levy Moreno is about to die. In a narrow bed, in the wooden gatehouse in Beacon, New York, the house he shares with Zerka, he has stopped taking water. He knows he is dying, and like Abraham or any other patriarch, he is finishing his business, receiving visitors, preparing for the next great journey. Moreno is dying and the world is still spinning. One by one, the pilgrims have filed past his bedside in these last weeks. They have spilled out words rehearsed on the way from Poughkeepsie or New Paltz, Los Angeles, Amsterdam. A woman wants to re-publish something that is not yet free of copyright. A man wants to settle the matter of the old man’s successor in the Society. Yet another wants to revive the public performances in Manhattan, the ones Moreno started forty years ago when he was newly arrived, the young

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existentialist from Vienna who had once said to Freud: ‘You analyse people’s dreams. I help people to live them.’ He was the God-player, the man in the green cloak. Like hooded moons, his eyes are the feature most remembered by all the people who have encountered him. His eyes, and the encounter itself. No one who has met him has forgotten the encounter. His son is sitting in the room, helping the queue to keep moving. No need to dress himself in pelts and pretend he is a hairy man. It was Jacob the father who had to fight for acceptance. For the son and his mother everything is in place. The battles have been fought and won, the empire secured. The lifework of the father is taking seed in Europe, in Australia, in the Americas. Soon it will take root in Asia. It is an honourable thing that he is doing, paying attention to unfinished business. Unfinished business, the spontaneity killer. One of the central tenets of his therapy, in which spontaneity is the key to everything else. How can one leave life with spontaneity? There have been so many deaths and he is about to create a new one, one that is adequate to the moment. Farewell to sweet life, my wife, my son. Farewell to my work. Farewell to my creations, great and small, the organisations which bear my imprint, the people I have healed. Farewell to America, New World no longer new. Beware of the conserve, Americans. It lives on in the Pentagon, in Washington, at Kent State. In South-east Asia. It was there at Woodstock, when armies of young people thought they’d begun something fresh. Don’t allow yourself to get stuck in the familiar. Invent life anew as it comes to you, in the moment, hear its music as you might if you were a composer. Act on the melody

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that hums through your soul, act now, before you try to get it down on paper. At eighty-four, his face is sunken a little. Many women loved him, he was of gypsy stock. They gave him a Hebrew name first, Morenu, ‘our teacher’. Then hispanicised it, Moreno. He achieved greatness, the boy who loved playing God. Yes, says Moreno. Yes to life. Yes to love. Yes to Zerka. I am ready to give up the ghost. Outside the gatehouse is a man from Australia, a traveller. He carries an ungainly yellow rucksack on his back and he appears to be in a rage. Daniel, a gentle man from Toronto, is keeping him at bay. ‘You don’t understand,’ says the Australian. ‘I must see him.’ He pulls a cutting from his pocket. It’s a magazine image of Moreno, his arms outstretched like Jesus healing a leper. The creases in the paper have worn away the ink, leaving a white cross on the healer’s chest. ‘I know you must,’ says Daniel. ‘I know.’

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One

1 These days, I live in an old two-storey limestone house in Tuckfield Street. Like a lot of old houses, it has more than two stories and so do I. It was originally called Duncraig and they say a timber merchant named McPherson built it at the end of last century. Whoever he was, he imported an architect from England for the job, which accounts for the slate roof, cast-iron lace, timber balustrading and intricate plasterwork. Apparently he paid for it all from clearing just one of his holdings in our once forested South-west. How many men died in the process of cutting and hauling all that jarrah, we don’t know. Adele wants to research it all down the library. She’s into heritage. You might be familiar with the place, it’s at the river end of the street, between Tuckfield House and the Catholic college. At the end of the street is another gem, called Mutiara, which was built by a pearl trader.

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Someone had the good taste to locate these houses on the last grand sweep of the Swan River before it cuts through the sandbanks and surrenders to the sea. That’s how it used to be, of course. Now it’s all groynes and embankments and the live-sheep trade. To the north-east, the house is guarded by a fortress of limestone cliffs, occasional home to sea eagles and swallows. From the tiny window in the loft where we sleep, I can see the Indian Ocean to the west and on a summer night, if I pause at the right moment, I can catch the last rays of the sun before it drowns in the mother sea. In the foreground, the silver river mouth sparkles and trips its way past the docks and all the cranes take on a cut-out look, like they were made of black felt on gold backing. If it weren’t for BP and the grain silos, I could see Rottnest Island. Across the river from my backyard, melaleuca trees once held the bank together and water reeds would’ve protected duck, iris, cormorant. Now the units and shops and offices of Northbank Riverside Village are taking shape and there’s rolled-out turf and wooden walkways and seahorse ceramics pressed into concrete borders. Ahoy there! Come and inspect the Northbank lifestyle! Beyond the limestone cliffs is the beach where I take my daughter Olivia to play and swim. We paddle there on my ski and sit for hours, contented, while her mother has time to herself. We throw boondies into the water and laugh as the surface breaks and swallows the sand with a pchaaaaoumpa! Galump! Other times we drift inside the limestone caverns on the ski and sing songs that echo, songs with her name in the lyrics, like ‘Olivia Goodnight’ or ‘Olivia’s Retreat’ or ‘Waltzing Olivia’.

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Where we live is like an isthmus, part of the fragile coastal fringe of the island continent, Australia. The whole country is like this, green jewels strung together around an arid heart. The government, which is responsible for my white teeth and strong bones — free milk all through primary school — tries to hold on to the string of jewels and control things. It helps me to conserve my money through a web of tax laws and concessions. In midlife, I have a wife, a child, a serene existence and a heritage house on the river. It surprises and pleases me. I had to take the Merc in for a service last week and the white-coated manager asked me was this my grandchild in the back seat? Although my vanity was pricked, it was easy enough to flick my ponytail and say: ‘She’s my daughter. Don’t underestimate a Wallymacher, son!’ That’s my name, Ben Wallymacher, German and Irish roots, the sort of name that gets you into fights in pubs and schoolyards. I’m proud of my name and I know how to look after myself. The Merc? All German, a 600, handmade in Stuttgart in 1969, brakes and rides on air supplied by a compressor. Gleaming white with red leather upholstery and a burled walnut veneer dashboard. Weighs two and a half tonne. When they stopped making the Grosser Benz in 1981, it was selling for $247,000, the most expensive production car in the world. I acquired it from a business contact who was in a hurry to shed some of his earthlies. That was in one of my former incarnations as an importer. What I do now is help Adele with the family business. It was Adele’s idea. ‘Bed and breakfast,’ she said. ‘We don’t need to live in Victorian splendour, do we? We could get a hundred a night for the main room and sixty-five for the singles.

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Eighty-five for the upstairs and fifty for the dormer.’ So we changed the name from Duncraig to Adele’s B&B and ran off some leaflets and put them around Fremantle and Northbridge and sent them off to selected travel agents and sat back and waited and sure enough the calls came in and a trickle of travellers began to land on our front doorstep and before long we had an eighty percent occupancy rate and a steady, if not abundant, income. My old man had a hardware shop in Mosman Park, formerly known as Buckland Hill. He started the venture on a war service loan and built it up from nothing into what it was worth when he died: nothing. I never wanted to go back to the family business scene, all that bickering and heartache. But then I decided I could do it if I had the right attitude, if I acknowledged that my woman was really much better at attending to the minutiae, just as my mum had been better at it than the old man. He’d hate to hear me say that, but it’s the truth. Adele’s Bed and Breakfast. I fixed up what used to be the double garage with a sleeping loft for us to bunk in, then added a simple kitchen and a bathroom plus a cookout for the long summer evenings. It’s an ideal set-up from my point of view and it recalls another life I used to live, a time when I came close to living like a gypsy before fate intervened. But there’s something about our simple life that feels like it’s nomadic, even if it isn’t. We all need to nurture our illusions, don’t we? It gets a bit crowded with Olivia and every so often when there’s a vacancy, we book ourselves into the front bedroom with the ensuite and views down the Swan to the city and pretend we’re tourists from London or Capetown or Nagasaki. Another illusion. My wife, Adele. She’s a lot younger than me, but by no

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means a bimbo. Some older men find their heart’s contentment in exotics, belly-dancer types, bagswingers. I found mine in the girl-next-door. There was a bit of fuss, given the age difference. But Adele is practical, she’s my tribe, you know? Tall, serious, trained as an executive secretary. She wears glasses, doesn’t flaunt her looks. I like that. She knows her way around the bedroom as well. People who say I’m a cradle-snatcher don’t understand love and don’t know Adele. It’s time for our morning business meeting. Olivia’s at kindy, I’ve swept the yard and checked the sprinklers and we’re sitting in the cookout with the easterly ruffling the shadecloth overhead and the odd jacaranda blossom surfing the thin November air. I’m brewing a cup of killa-brown-dog tea and I’m drifting back to the time when I lived outdoors all year round, just me and Ralph the Clydesdale. ‘Have you paid off the chef?’ ‘He’s a cook, love. If you call him a chef he’ll get shitty and spit in the porridge.’ ‘I think it’s time we switched to Variety Packs, Ben. No one’s interested in porridge when it’s thirty degrees outside.’ ‘Some of the Nips …’ ‘Japanese people.’ ‘Some of the Asians seem to regard it as a novelty. That Malaysian couple told me they have porridge at home with chillies and fish. You know, those tiny little buggers, ikky bills I think they said.’ ‘Ikan bilis. Have you fixed the leaky tap in the ensuite?’ With Adele it’s all business. That’s what I like about her, she’s focused and ambitious. I’m at the time of life when I can afford to be flippant. I’ve paid my dues, it doesn’t

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matter to me whether we make a profit or not. But Adele treats the enterprise as her own and me like a shit-kicker. I enjoy it, I’m like a goat that’s happiest when it’s tethered. My job title is caretaker and I regard that as an honourable calling. Put it this way, I’ve been called a lot worse. Turning to the West, I note that the Royal Viking Sun is due into the Passenger Terminal at 6.30 am. I doubt she’ll be carrying any prospects for Adele’s B&B . All right. That’s the shipping news taken care of and I’ve got my orders for the day. At last I’m free to get on with my project. I take the daypack and my tape-recorder and some notes and walk down George Street like any local burgher. There’s an old school desk in the antique shop, which would be good for Olivia, but they’re asking an arm and a leg. I head up Hubble Street ’til I reach my quiet place, a self-proclaimed ‘community seat’, set among the mad collection of kitsch which the resident artist has used to decorate his high fence and sealed-up garage doors. There, among the faded snapshots, postcards, matchbox cars, dolls, clocks and figurines, a thousand bits of junk all lovingly araldited in their place, I take out my machine and pick up from where I left off.

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2 S ESSION #3 Piaf, in my previous tapes I’ve talked about postwar Perth and the changes I’ve observed, particularly in relation to architecture, society and what you called its Weltanschauung. I’m not an academic, as you well know, but I do like to think and I’ve enjoyed the journey so far. I hope I haven’t rambled on so much that it’s become uneditable (if that’s a word). Or perhaps inedible. Anyhow, you’re asking me to focus on the Anstey family, to move the camera a little closer, and of course to do that, I must first talk about my own family. You can’t talk about the sun without making reference to the earth. Your father and I were parts of a bigger system and I will try and describe the system in a way that throws light back onto him. Francis would appreciate that. He was never one to shy away from the spotlight. My father grew up in the country but moved to what was then called

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Buckland Hill after his marriage to my mother. In the late 1940s, he obtained a war service loan and my parents bought a hardware business at Cottesloe. He was a classic-looking man of his time, who could have understudied Victor Mature if it weren’t for his stutter. My mother was Irish, born in Donegal and to me, a woman of great beauty. Like a lot of people who’d been through the war, they were self-sufficient types, not all that outgoing. My memory of those years includes the rich smell of my mother’s stews, the way my father wore his Bombay bloomers all summer, the fuss my sisters made of me, the usual childhood memories. When the opportunity came, we’d motor down to Harvey to visit my paternal grandparents. They kept horses and there’s a photo of me astride a fine-looking Arab cross, looking like a gypsy prince. I like horses. They’re a lot less complicated than people. My father’s endearing weakness for fixing things caused lots of blues with my mother because she wanted him to make money. But when the Ansteys moved in next door at number 97 Prince Street, sometime in the mid-fifties, it was his handiwork that initiated a neighbourly exchange that would last most of my adolescence. The wooden gate he installed in the paling fence between the two backyards clicked reassuringly when it opened and cur-lacked sadly when the spring returned it to its place. More often than not, the click would signal the arrival of Francis, who fast became a favourite in our place. A young twelve, your father had good manners, he was charming and most of the time he had a bubbly sort of enthusiasm for whatever was going on. Occasionally, he would fly into a dark rage when life wasn’t going his way and he’d sulk or run home to his mother. In my family, only sissies acted like that. But we soon got used to each other and decided to grow up together for as long as it lasted. I was dark and straight and Irish looking, he fair and curly and Welsh and the two of us made good mates, given the difference in our social class. Both of us were on the edge of

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adolescence, as though we were standing on the diving tower at the baths, wondering how many somersaults we could do before we hit the water. Your grandfather Anstey was a schoolteacher and valued what my father called book-learning. He was sprightly and aggressive and had a peculiar repertoire of vocal riffs and snatches which he used to cheer himself up while he worked around the yard. Mrs Anstey had ambitions for her children, particularly Francis, and would cart the whole family off to plays and musicals, something we never did. Francis raved about My Fair Lady for weeks. I never warmed to her much — Mrs Anstey, that is. Is she still around? The Wallymachers were more basic. Everything needed to work well: the car, a 1953 Chevrolet Bel Air; the Fridgidaire and the Sunbeam Mixmaster, which together made memorable icecream; and what the social workers would now call ‘family dynamics’, which in our case were lubricated once a week with confession and Mass up at Corpus Christi in Palmerston Street. The Ansteys were Anglican. They belonged to St Luke’s, in Monument Street. They seemed to owe less to organised religion, although your father was a soprano in the church choir and later an altar boy, like me. I think the Anglos called him a ‘server’. You grew up regarding television as an amenity, like water. It hit us like a bloodless coup. From the moment it arrived in 1957, we might just as well have been Yanks. ‘Highway Patrol’, ‘Leave it to Beaver’, ‘Dobie Gillis’, the Mouseketeers, ‘77 Sunset Strip’ — the whole American culture package was there in black-and-white and it changed us, ready or not. I attended the Catholic Boys College at Fremantle and your father followed his father’s path through Perth Modern. After school I’d dump my bag, cur-lack the gate and we’d both stuff ourselves full of milkshakes and Mrs Anstey’s oat biscuits before launching into the afternoon’s sport, wrestling. Why wrestling? It was one way to balance out the enmity that

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flowed invisibly between families like the Wallymachers and the Ansteys. It wasn’t anything you could see, more like an accumulation of European history which had been unloaded with the first supply ships and built into the new colony as surely as the ballast blocks they used to pave the roads. Have you ever wrestled someone with the intent of bringing them to the ground and pinning their shoulders under your weight for the count of three? Of course you have, you’re a martial artist. We would begin by facing each other, hands on each other’s shoulders. At the agreed moment, we would clash, spitting and grimacing, the taste of blood in our mouths. There was only one aim, to annihilate your opponent. Francis had what I would later recognise as a fast warm-up. He would come out of the start like a thoroughbred and often have me on the mat — in this case, Mr Anstey’s springy buffalo grass — in a matter of seconds. I was leaner and more of a stayer, so if I didn’t get too winded by the first assault I could lever him off me and try to push his face into the grass while I threw a leg over his waist, going for the scissors. We could go for half an hour before one of us would decisively sit on the other’s chest and, completely winded, count to three. We were twelve or thirteen, virgins, hairless young gods with adoring sisters who acted as seconds and could revive us between rounds — this was before they turned scornful. We each had a growing sense of potency, as if we could somehow sculpt ourselves into distinctive shapes rather than accept the standard die. Inevitably, all that intimacy led to sex, of a sort. Masturbation, anyway, as often as possible, usually in my father’s caravan. We kept each other company but at the same time maintained an almost chaste privacy about the act, refraining from touching each other and content to communicate our passion in gasps and groans and straightening of the legs at the moment of orgasm.

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We were found out, of course, and the van was declared off-limits. After that we would each do it in the privacy of our beds and perhaps talk about it in whispers when our puritanical sisters weren’t around. So you might say it was sublimation that forced Francis to begin the backyard happenings that were to dominate our early teens. And perhaps it was this drive he had to express everything that came back on him later, I don’t know … His first organised effort was a play in which he took too many roles while the rest of us — his sister Bryony, my younger sister Trish and the Hawkins tribe from down the street — were cast as reluctant auxiliaries in Francis’ monologue. He was trying to show how switching channels on a television set could lead to unexpected and amusing juxtapositions: for example, a dog food commercial clicks across into a sitcom about the evening meal, with plate throwing, which switches to a documentary about flying saucers. ‘New Wonder Spam! Good for your Dog and Good for your … zzzzzt … supper, darling? Again? Didn’t we have that last week? Junior! No need for that! Watch out! … zzzzzt … I’m in the space lab here at Palo Alto and I’m looking at some remarkable pictures …’ Francis got hold of an old wooden door and removed the top panel, which became the television screen. The actors had to crouch down like Punch and Judy puppeteers and then pop up on cue. The trouble was that Francis hadn’t thought about some minor technicalities — like how to create a long shot. So we’d rush off some distance to establish the scene and then all run forward and jam our faces together like canned peaches for the close-up. There was no script. Your father coached us once and we were expected to remember every line, including when to change scenes. ‘Listen, Doc,’ I said to him when it was over, and the conscripted audience of parents and aunts had dispersed, ‘you’ve got to be better organised than that. I know you’re a genius and all, but we need

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teamwork.’ Following that first backyard performance, Francis developed a more serious attitude to theatre. In spite of family pressure to aim for one of the ‘professions’, he immersed himself in school productions and local drama classes at the school of arts with a dedication that surprised everyone. By sixteen he had the confidence to devise a production based on a Stan Freburg record that was popular at the time, purporting to be an interview with a yeti. Freburg had been an advertising man on Madison Avenue and had a fine Jewish irreverence that appealed to both of us more than the thin, British humour current at the time. ‘We’ll mime the record. You and Mick can be the snowman,’ he said. ‘He’s light, he can sit on your shoulders. Then we’ll make one big suit to cover the both of you. I’ll be Freburg. I’ve got the glasses for it.’ I think it was his enthusiasm that blew away any reservations I nursed about my own lowly status. We entered a talent contest at the local pub — having boosted our ages on the entry form — and readied ourselves for the show. Mick was a school friend of mine who came from a big Irish family from the high-rise public housing, which everyone knew as ‘the Flats’. He seemed to have a natural talent for delinquency and was therefore more fascinating than any of the middle-class kids around our street. He came around one Sunday for the first production meeting. We met in Francis’ bedroom. ‘Piece of piss, it’ll be a piece of piss. We’ll kill ’em dead, you watch,’ said Mick. Francis looked embarrassed at this show of amateurish enthusiasm. ‘The timing is what’s important. We have to rehearse it ’til we know every word.’ ‘I’ve got good timing, you watch this,’ said Mick. He was sitting on Francis’ bed with his back to the wall, thin knees almost touching his ears. He reached into his shirt pocket for a box of matches, lit one and held it between his legs. The fart coursed through his jeans and flared the match into an aurora of green and orange.

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‘Fuck! I think I’ve singed meself,’ said Mick, fanning his crutch. I could see Francis holding back his mirth, and to speak the truth, I think if we’d decided to feature Mick and his Matches, we’d have been more appropriate for the Oaks Talent Quest. But we pressed on with our piece. On the night, it was hard to know what we were getting into. Backstage we met a man with a singing dog, an overweight opera singer, a geriatric stripper and a drunken harmonica player called Wally. Mick was in his element. I gathered it wasn’t all that different from a normal Saturday night at the Flats. Mick introduced me to my namesake. ‘Wallymacher, this is Wally. Wally, this is Wallymacher. Just thought you’d like to see your future, Ben.’ Francis called us together for a quick conference. ‘The audience is nine-tenths pissed,’ he said. ‘I asked for full volume on the record and we have to ham it up a bit, you know … exaggerate your gestures and your facial expressions.’ It was all drama class talk to me. I was in the engine room. When the stripper went on for the Dance of the Seven-Slightly-Soiled-Veils, that was our cue to get ready. I was already dressed in the bottom half of the yeti suit, which came up to my armpits. My mother had stitched up a basic outfit in hessian and we’d spent nights sticking on strands of hemp while my father frowned and stuttered at our foolishness. ‘You’ll have a there melt, there melt, there m-m-m-meltdown in that thing, son!’ Mick had the top half on and around veil number six he climbed up on my shoulders and rolled down the overlap, which covered my face and shoulders completely. We’d worked out a series of signals, since I was blind and he was the jockey. As the applause for Lil died away, we began to move. On my feet I wore rubber thongs nailed onto size eighteen plywood soles. Yetis apparently were distant relations of the North American Big Foot. We clomped onto the stage, with Francis leading the way, fake microphone in hand. ‘I’m on a ledge here in the Himalayas this morning and I’m talking to …

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talking to … talking to …’ I heard a thump from offstage. It was the soundman, helping the stylus of the record-player move onto the next groove. Mick dropped a quantity of unlit methane into the suit. I clawed at the hessian, going for air, and left a big rip in the suit and my nose visible for the world to see. In the wave of ribald laughter that followed, I began to enjoy myself, imagining I was an actor in the time of Shakespeare. I had no idea who was out there, or how many. All I could do was to stand as solidly as I was able and listen for my cues. ‘Sure,’ the yeti was saying, ‘that’s my brother. He jumps centre for Abominable State.’ I gave a little spring, as rehearsed. Mick rose off my shoulders and we both landed heavily, causing me to lurch a few steps to regain my balance. Down we went in a tangle of wires and hessian and hemp. The soundman killed the record and Francis, like the trouper he’s become, grabbed a live mike and continued the interview. ‘Well I can see you’re not that light on your feet, huh?’ He’d learned to talk like that from watching a hundred episodes of ‘Beaver’. It was second nature to him. The audience seemed to accept the change. All that needed to happen now was for me and Mick to recover our footing. Someone was rolling me up into a sitting position and someone else was taking Mick’s weight to allow me to do that. Whoever it was smelt of whisky and some other indefinable thing … excitement. Adrenalin maybe. Back in an upright position, Mick was adlibbing to the best of his ability. The trouble was, he couldn’t modify his speech the way Francis could. ‘That snow’s certainly coming down now, huh?’ said Francis. ‘If it comes down any more, me fuckin’ sneakers’ll get all gooey,’ said Mick. ‘Say, how tall are you anyway, feller?’ said Francis. ‘Fuckin’ taller than you, four-eyes!’ trumpeted Mick. I got the giggles, which transmitted themselves to Mick. I could imagine

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his birdlike face, peeking out from behind the yeti mask and taking his revenge on Francis, America and the world. The crowd picked it up as well and a few chuckles became a river of laughter, drowning out Francis’ immortal last line. ‘You take care now! Why don’t you drop by and see me next time you’re in New York!’

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3 There being vacancies all week, Adele has asked me to do the shopping while she does a major house clean in preparation for the next intake. I drop Olivia at kindy and head for Gino’s. The recordings I’m making for Piaf seem to fill my head with stories. They crowd in on me like commuters at rush hour. What the next part contains will come to me soon enough, but it’s not that easy, sorting things, present–past, true–false, remembered–imagined. Two old lags are selling poppies for Remembrance Day. At school we used to stop and have one minute’s silence at eleven o’clock and someone from the cadet corps would play the ‘Last Post’ and some kids would cry for an uncle or father whose number came up in some far away place like Berlin or Kokoda, or maybe they were crying for the way their mother looked when she remembered the hole his death had made in the family and the way

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war can rob a country of its finest young men. If I concentrate I can see my own father now. It’s the kind of morning when the world seems to be holding its breath: overcast, twenty-three degrees Celsius, sultry and still. Let’s say it’s this same day, November 11, 1943. At home in Mosman Park, my mother Pat has finished listening to the morning news on the wireless and is scanning the sky for rain, any excuse to put off washing a dozen nappies which I have carelessly soiled and which she keeps soaked in bleach in a covered bucket in the laundry. I am lying on my back in my pram, gurgling and kicking, trying to destroy a mobile dangling just beyond my reach. Karl Wallymacher, my father, is on his back too, feet up in the dunes at Bickley Point, Rottnest Island. Battles are raging from Dusseldorf to Guam, but the great white chief is rolling another Champion Ruby while he waits for the war to come to south-western Australia. He is tall, clean-shaven, shirtless but he has retained his Bombay bloomers and boots, in case duty calls. The world seems to be holding its breath but Karl is simply holding in a lungful of smoke long enough for the nicotine to fan out and enter his bloodstream, where it seems to calm him. Why he needs calming, it’s difficult to say. He doesn’t have a wife and child in his face every day, like I do, and the war is a long way from Fremantle. Perhaps it’s patience he’s trying to inhale, patience to wait for the unknown. That’s his job. If he had a more active imagination, perhaps the pep talks at the barracks could take hold and help him to worry. But there is nothing and Karl Wallymacher has to wait for it. Out under Gino’s canopy, I run into my old surf club

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mate Phillip Ianatelli. He’s a lawyer, taking time off to write a play about bouncers, the hired bodies who stand outside clubs and weed out troublemakers. Lately we’ve heard some unkind suggestions that organised crime is involved in bouncer recruitment. So Phillip is on the case, writing a play and not being a lawyer for a while. I suppose his head gets a bit crowded as well. Everyone at Gino’s considers himself an artist of some kind, each one sitting in the sun and sucking coffee for inspiration. ‘Ciao, Phillipo,’ I say. He doesn’t have a lot to say about the play. Maybe it’s not going so well or maybe he thinks if he talks about it too much he’ll lose his inspiration. Instead we tackle local politics. There’s a big shitfight looming around something called the Eastern Bypass, a road project that has everyone offside except the politicians and me. I love the port and I want those big noisy trucks with Maersk and Nedlandia containers bolted to their backs to keep right on rolling out onto the Stirling Bridge and puffing their air breaks and shrieking their gears, reminding us all of the luxuries we consume daily and where they all come from: overseas. I want to tell Karl, my father, that the war has finally come to Fremantle. It’s an economic war, a road war. The great nineties lifestyle battle.

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4 Session #4 I left school early and enrolled in architectural drafting at technical college. Francis stayed on at Perth Modern to gain his matriculation, not because he was an outstanding student but because his father valued learning above all else. He was brilliant at English, good at the social sciences and a dud at maths and languages. I was average at everything and interested in having a good time. It was the beginning of an invisible rift between us, one that neither of us recognised until much later. I had a car and he didn’t. My father gave me a ’54 Ford Anglia on the condition that I learn to maintain it myself. I could strip the motor down and put it together again by the time I was seventeen. That first summer when we had our own wheels, your father and I would motor down to Denmark in it, where we got involved in the surf lifesaving club. Denmark was our version of paradise: a long way away, a place of

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beauty, somewhere you could try on your own fragile version of young manhood without being punished for it. It was around this time that Francis and your grandfather Anstey got involved in one of the most vicious fights I’ve witnessed, and I’ve seen a few. Apparently the argument began one Sunday night. Francis came in from a weekend down the coast and forgot to amend his language. If you weren’t on the alert, it was easy to say things like ‘pass the fuckin’ salt and pepper’ to one of your sisters after a weekend away with the boys. I can imagine your father making it worse through his own sense of righteousness, a trait I’m sure you’re familiar with, Piaf. The argument began with him slinging off at old man Anstey’s favourite game, cricket. Your grandpa told him he was full of piss and wind, like the barber’s cat, and your father replied that he was just a boring chalkie and what would he know about life anyway and that was the trouble with the whole Anstey clan, they’d stuck to these sheltered occupations for generations now and none of them knew what it was like to do a real job. Which is funny, the way things have turned out for your father. Old man Anstey said Francis probably thought he was tough because he paddled around in a surf boat and then drank a lot of beer with those morons in cloth hats tied under their chins and if he would care to step outside, they could sort out who was really tougher, the cricketer or the lifesaver. The teacher walked out first and Francis, sensing his advantage, gave him no time to get his dukes up but weighed in with a swift headlock, followed by an elbow to the face. His old man had grown up in a big Victorian family and knew something about street fighting. He slithered out of the headlock and grabbed a lump of four-by-two he used as a door jam and clobbered his son across the temple. Francis went berserk and ran out the front to where the Anstey family car was parked, all shining and tyre-blacked after the Sunday treatment. I was following the action from our front porch. He ripped the weather shield off the driver’s window and then scraped the flange all the way down the side of the duco, leaving a very expensive

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looking scar behind. Then, blood running into his eyes, he pulled out his pocket-knife and stabbed the upholstery, shouting at his father that he was a jerk and a bourgeois idiot. Then he stepped out of the car, hit him with what was left of the weather shield and stalked off down Victoria Street to the railway, where he boarded a train without a ticket, was arrested by railway police and shipped home to his parents later that evening with a few more bruises and welts to add to his collection. I suppose fights like that can be some kind of watershed in a family’s life. They could have made it up and become closer and mellowed and maybe your father would have grown old more gracefully, kept his family around him … but it went the other way, he’d made some kind of declaration which would drive him on to live the sort of life which opposed the Anstey’s comfortable existence. Many of us threw over the old values in the late sixties, followed the Woodstock thing and became hippies; but nobody I knew left their family quite as irrevocably as Francis. Perhaps he was half-aware of what he was doing, clearing the way for his own journey, with nothing to tie him down. Two weeks later he had found himself a job as a photographic salesman in the city, left school, found a flat in Highgate and swore he’d become a new person. I went to see him at his work in London Court and we caught up over a sandwich. He’d started combing his hair in a wave and pulling down a kiss-curl like Bill Haley and he was wearing winklepicker shoes and pegged trousers, part of a suit which he’d had made up at Finkelstein’s. He seemed to be engaged in a dress rehearsal, for what he wouldn’t say. Me, I still had a couple of years of slouching around in jeans and eating chiko rolls and chips and finishing my diploma. Your father seemed to be spending a lot of time sharpening up his photographic skills, employing the same confidence he’d displayed as director of our backyard dramas. Someone told me he took pictures of body-painted models in the sand dunes at City Beach. Whatever the reason, I didn’t see much of him, save for the occasional meeting in Aherns coffee shop

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where he would let crumbs from his sophisticated life drop in a way that left me feeling like a hick. One day I snapped out of my self-pity strongly enough to challenge him. ‘Who do you think you are, Salvador Dali or something?’ He looked at me coldly, severely really. ‘I’m not going to settle for the ordinary, Ben. Or rather, I want ordinary to have a new meaning. I want ordinary madness, ordinary orgies, I want sitting around ’til three talking politics to be ordinary, I want to be ordinarily surrounded with colourful, creative people who smoke too much, I want to live in extraordinarily beautiful and wild places with ordinary exotic women, leading a lavish life of ordinary decadence and excess!’ ‘You want to burn the candle at both ends?’ I said. This was Karl speaking through my mouth. This was a moment in my friendship with Francis when I could have engaged with him, entered into a deeper dialogue. So what do I give him? A Karlism. What he was saying was that he wanted to live his life spontaneously, ready for anything. Which is interesting when you consider what his teacher Moreno had to say about spontaneity. It derives from a Latin word, sponte, meaning free will. To quote the master, and I’ll try to inject the necessary amount of Teutonic solemnity: Since we have shown the relationship of spontaneous states to creative functions, it is clear that warming up to a spontaneous state leads up to and is aimed at more or less highly organised patterns of conduct. Disorderly conduct and emotionalism resulting from impulsive action … belong more in the realm of the pathology of spontaneity. In a funny way, my Karlism contained some truth. But as a mate, I could simply have shown him that I understood his wish. That would have been a response that contained the affection I felt for him.

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5 I turn off the machine and remain in my place. I’m thinking about that time and I’m thinking about Marion, why she seemed so important, still does. I don’t want to bore Piaf with my first relationship, but when I think of that early failure of male friendship — and there have been many more — I think of the compensations we found for ourselves in women. Francis was the same, maybe because neither of us had the sort of transition to manhood that you would wish on your own son, if you had one. Marion Beaumont was my humanities teacher. Humanities was something they inflicted on us to make sure we didn’t become complete tech-heads. It consisted of visits to the art gallery, the movies or some historical precinct, followed by a discussion afterwards. As long as Marion was in charge, I was prepared to invest it with my attention.

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She was a striking looker, dark hair in a ponytail, nice legs, and a forties film-star bosom, all in one piece like a pillow. Her taste ran to silky dresses and nylons in summer and a pants-suit, considered quite radical at the time, in winter. Her eyes were black, her skin olive and she helped me to form my ideas about the ideal woman. The first time we went to see a movie — I think it was West Side Story — I found myself sitting next to her and enjoying something I’d never sensed before: the smell of a mature woman. I let my leg rest against hers and felt the rough scrape of her nylons once against my jeans. There was a smart arse called Alfred Van Nuys in the class and he dominated the discussion afterwards by making comparisons with the stage version, which he’d seen with his family in New York. Then he said that urban renewal was changing all that and that the film would soon be an anachronism. I felt the same inferiority I used to get when Francis was warming up for one of his productions. I was sick of feeling that I was destined to spend my days in the engine compartment of other people’s lives, the way my father had. After class I went up to Marion and asked her how I might improve. I wanted to read, I wanted to be smart, I wanted to be able to rave on about production values and genres like Van Nuys did. She told me to come and see her in her office in General Studies the next afternoon after class. The college was located in the inner city. It was a technical college, not a university. The college had expanded higgledy-piggledy, swallowing an iceworks, a snooker parlour, a department store and anything else that stood in the way of progress. Marion’s office was in the old department store, which still boasted an art deco dome on its roof, underlined with

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the motto: Ad Astra. Corridors and offices and classrooms carved up what must have been the sales floors. Marion’s office was on the third floor at the rear of the building, lit with low-hanging neon lights and a filthy skylight made of glazed chicken wire. There didn’t seem to be anyone else around except Marion, who was bending over a filing cabinet when I tapped on the open door. ‘Come in,’ she said and gave me a broad smile. ‘Close the door behind you.’ It was the sort of lock you could open with a metal knob from the inside, but once shut would need a key to enter from the outside. I wondered why she hadn’t snibbed the lock. I slammed it shut and immediately felt the same weird intimacy that Francis and I used to create in the caravan when we were jerking off. ‘Sit down, Ben. So you want to learn about the higher things in life. Art, music, drama? Is that the story?’ She said this in a playful way with a throaty sort of texture to the words, not the way she addressed us in class. I sat on one of the brown swivel chairs and swung myself very slightly from side to side. Some of the chairs had arms but this one had none. It had a spring in the back support which screeched every time I put my weight against it and castors which contributed to the feeling that I was not on solid ground here. I can remember her taking off her shoes and me telling myself to calm down, it was a perfectly normal thing, that teachers would get sore feet after a day of work, why not? She hitched her dress up and unclipped the tops of her stockings from her suspender belt. I could see her white panties and some fine tendrils of black hair spraying out from under the seams like ferns looking for light. It might have been possible to pretend that this was also normal

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but I’m not slow and nor is my old fella. It started to uncurl inside my jeans, pushing against the heavy denim like a demanding reptile. Marion was peeling off her stockings in a leisurely sort of way and then she stood up with her dress still hitched up, pulled off the suspender belt and walked over to where I was sitting. ‘I’ll bet you’re feeling a bit of pressure inside those jeans of yours, Ben. Would you like me to help you?’ She undid my zipper with the top stud done up. She knew what she was doing. Then she went back to the stud, undid that, pulled my jeans down to my ankles and reached inside my jockeys until she found what she was after. Then she sat me down and kneeled on the floor and began to suck it and lick it until it was red-faced and ready to burst and then she stood up again, hitched her dress up and lowered herself down on me, ever so gently, until I was up to the hilt inside her and her face was level with mine and all I could do was kiss her and moan and she hushed me and hissed ‘don’t come!’ Then she showed me where the buttons were at the back of her dress and she shrugged herself out of the top part and had me undo her bra and her pillow bosom divided into two beautiful breasts, big and soft and white with nipples like some sea creature and I put my face into them and she moved on me, ever so slightly and kept on whispering ‘don’t come!’ until I was wet with her juices and then I smelt her again, the same aroma I’d discovered in the movie theatre and this time it drove me wild and I pushed into her and covered her mouth and told her to shut up, I was coming anyway and she grunted like some night creature and slapped up and down on me, her buttocks loose and sweaty against my thighs and then she tore my hand away from her mouth and laughed and

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laughed and curved around me while I let go my sperm inside her and the back of the chair shrieked like a banshee and the whole construction, she and me and the squeaky-backed chair began to roll majestically across the room until it tripped on a crack in the linoleum and spilled us out on the floor, still joined and wondering what hit us. Eventually we separated and I helped her up and we dressed ourselves and she took my hand and said we should go and have a coffee and I said yes and she let go of my hand and we walked down William Street like a teacher and her student and ended up in Boan’s Cafeteria. ‘That was drama,’ she said. ‘We’ll do art and music next week.’ We laughed until the booth rocked. The waitress frowned at us. I had probably just overtaken Francis in the experience stakes, although the feeling of superiority didn’t last long. I didn’t know much about women then, particularly women like Marion, who was married to a Dalkeith lawyer. I guess she was bored and looking for a good time. I started lurking around after class, hoping to talk to her. I tried going to her office again. She was never there. If I followed her, I’d end up feeling foolish in some car park as she climbed into her BMW and drove off, looking aloof in her sunglasses. Drugs were a new thing back then. Most of the guys I knew were on the way to becoming pissheads like their fathers. I found pubs uninteresting and alcohol a very clumsy way to change my reality, especially after the Marion experience. I wasn’t aware of an alternative until I met Richard in the beer garden of the Railway Hotel one Friday night after a drafting exam. Richard was tall, with

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little round glasses and a denim jacket. He had a very pale face and fine features, which he would contort into a sneer to accompany his acid comments about most of the people around him. I asked him what he was doing there. ‘I’m waiting to score,’ he said, arching the thin line of his eyebrows. I decided to watch him and perhaps learn something. About half an hour had elapsed when a guy in a safari suit walked in and ordered a glass of stout. I watched Richard go up to the bar and stand next to him and then they both took a table near the door. They chatted for a while, the other man passed what looked like a book over to Richard, who appeared to browse it briefly, then hand it back. In return, the stranger gave him an envelope. They finished their drinks and the great white hunter disappeared. Richard came back to the beer garden, stuffed the envelope into his brief case and announced his departure. ‘Which way are you heading?’ I asked him. ‘To the trains,’ he said. ‘Do you want to walk?’ I grabbed my stuff and headed off in a state of dread mixed with excitement. I suppose I was learning to tune into feeling states and at the same time to override them if it seemed worth it. That’s what had made the Marion encounter such a high, that I’d known all along that she’d surprise me in some way but I somehow overcame my reservations in order to have the experience. Richard lived in a crumbling terrace house with a backyard overlooking a railway siding. The rooms were small and ratty and strange characters would enter and leave the place without any greeting, girls in black stockings and knitted hair, men in op-shop suits who looked like jazz musicians. In one room a big-breasted girl

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in a slip entertained a room full of people. She was sitting up in bed and singing blasphemous songs at the top of her lungs, a bottle of Chianti in one hand and a fag in the other. I longed to go in and join them but I felt too clean, too suburban. Plastic Jesus! Plastic Jesus! Sitting on the dashboard of my car. I don’t care if it rains or freezes, Long as I’ve got my plastic Jesus, Sitting on the dashboard of my car. It was like early rap and I loved it. I reluctantly passed on down the corridor in search of the toilet, my bladder full of Swan Lager, wondering what Richard wanted of me. Back in the ratty kitchen, I found out. ‘We’re gonna bust a chemist shop. If you go on watch while I clean it out, I’ll deal you in. There’s money to be made.’ So that was it. He was a minor crim and he was cool enough and confident enough to recruit accomplices. We jumped into his battered Morris Minor and puttered down Barrack Street to a corner pharmacy, dimly lit, with a roller door a little way down the lane. Richard tucked a jemmy into his trousers and told me to shut up and follow him. There was a hatchway cut into the roller door and it gave way like playdough. He showed me where to stand and shoved a packet of rollies into my hand. ‘Roll a smoke. Gives you something to do. Whistle once if you see anyone approaching and twice if it’s the fuzz. I’ll be three minutes.’ He took a yellowing pillowslip out of his jacket and disappeared through the hatch. I’d barely had time to roll

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up the fag and he was back, jacket bulging. ‘Let’s go,’ was all he said. He let me drive while he assessed the loot. He had street names I can’t remember for all the drugs. What he’d scored was various varieties of morphine, cocaine, synthetic heroin. It had all been there for the taking, in bottles with nice labels, sitting on the shelves of a glass-fronted cabinet in the dispensary. In the morning, the news would carry an item about a pharmacy bust in Barrack Street. For the initiated, this was code that there’d be some drugs available and customers would flock to the Railway and other known distribution points. It was as simple as that. It wasn’t that Richard was a big-time drug dealer. He was more of a consumer with a need to control his supply. That was the main motivation for the pharmacy busts. A little dealing financed the drugtaking. Then it started getting heavy. The pharmacists grew tired of broken doors and empty cabinets. They installed safes. The small-time dealers-cum-consumers got desperate and acquired guns. To my shame, we joined the trend. Looking back, it was where my life took a distinct fork away from Francis’. I wish I could explain this to Piaf. In her questing for news of her father’s journey, she seems unable to move outside the frame of what happens in decent, middle-class families. I sense there’s an itching to break out of that frame for herself but no concept of what that could be like for others. The identity her mother reached for after Francis left, that of a bereaved Jewess who must attend to business for the good of the family, became a viewpoint from which criminality and other aberrations were nonsubjects. I want to enlighten Piaf, but I must wait for her to ask the question, of her own volition.

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Richard was pragmatic. If the game meant armed robbery, he’d do it, and I was his apprentice. We acquired pistols from the pimp of one of Richard’s customers. Smith and Wesson thirty-eights. It was exciting and I barely knew what I was doing. I knew I was going up a few degrees on the risk scale. Instead of back lanes in the dead of night, we began to engage real humans, face-toface in daylight. People tend to turn into limpid pools of funk when faced with a gun. No one says ‘make my day’. We went to the same Barrack Street pharmacy about a month later, after they’d had time to stock up. It was just like you see on TV. Get in and get out fast. A bit of cliched dialogue. Cooperate and you won’t get hurt. Looking back, it was an awful thing to do to another person. Seeing someone that scared stays with you, if you have any sensitivity at all. You remember the eyes and the sudden draining of blood from the face. Richard was really quite sensitive. He started getting twitchy about the new game. I became the senior partner, more or less taking over the business side from him. He admitted himself into a private psych hospital and came out a wreck. They’d been doping him up on so much shit his resistance dropped to zero. He asked if I could come around and keep him company after his discharge, he was feeling low. We decided to shoot some pethidine, his favourite drug. He overdosed and died on the spot after going into this horrible convulsion. The look on his face was frightening. Stoned out of my gourds, I managed to call an ambulance. The driver tipped off the cops and they came bursting in to discover shelves full of bottles with pharmacy labels, all around Richard’s room. It didn’t take too much brilliance for the detectives to connect us with

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the armed robberies. I named Richard as the mastermind. He would have liked that. I ended up on remand for three months up at Geraldton. It was the worst possible experience for someone like me. It’s no accident that incarceration is used as a punishment. One of the low points was being forced to spend time with the sort of idiots who end up in gaol. They used to have this program called ‘Introduction to Punishment’. You’d team up with two or three others and they’d put you in these minuscule cells called pigpens. An area about eight by five feet, around a table. You’d be sitting on benches. Brick structures with no roof. There’d be eight of them in a block. I’d try to grab a couple of people I got on with and go and play cards for the afternoon. I used to really look forward to that. I made friends in there, like Bernie, a gentleman accountant who’d been caught embezzling the contributor’s funds from a private health society. He’d intended to go to Florence and study painting. A month before he reached his goal, he got busted. You’d be surprised how many respectable citizens have gone down early in life. I discovered what it was like to be locked up, to be deprived of your freedom. It didn’t matter if you cried or protested, whether you were big or small. People complain about not feeling free, but this was literal. Forget freedom. I was inside. There’s no sidestepping it, no going back. It’s like an enforced lesson in Zen, the real Zen. It sounds corny, but I learned acceptance. The cell had nothing in it. All you had to sleep on was an inclined board, with a large block of wood at one end and a small one at the other. Two unwashed army blankets. That was it. A great place to reflect on what you’re doing with your life. When that became

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unbearable, my brain just wanted to crawl out of my skull and slide out past reception and go home. Luckily, I became institutionalised quickly. I adapted. At night, I dreamt I was going about my normal life and then in the morning I would wake with my face against the painted brick wall of my cell. The food was genuinely inedible. Most times you’d queue up, get your plate and empty it into a bin without even tasting it. Then you’d make yourself some bread and jam to tide you over. I used tobacco, which my visitors gave me, like money. Whenever there was any decent food on, like sticky rice or plum duff, Bernie and I would buy up as many desserts as we could get hold of, line them up and eat the lot. To shave, you had to wait your turn at the courtyard tap for the only razor. Cold water of course. After three months I went to court, was given a bond and walked out into the sunshine on Stirling Street with my parents. It was like tripping, all that movement and colour, no restrictions. Prison had changed me. I hardly recognised myself. I stand up and walk back down Hubble Street. Time to be getting on with things. I like myself well enough, but sometimes when I recall those dark days at the end of my adolescence I feel a shadow coming over me. The old lady walking this way is looking for a wink or a nod but she won’t get one out of me today. It’s head down and kicking stones all the way home.

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6 ‘I see that St Pat’s has run out of food and money.’ It’s Saturday morning, the guests have all been fed, and we’re doing a fair imitation of a family taking a break and reading the papers over morning tea. ‘Mummy-I-wanna-have-my-hair-up-like-yours.’ I can see Adele out of the corner of my eye. Her brain is numb from spending too much time with a three-year-old and now she’s trying to cope with Olivia and me both seeking a response at the same time. ‘Later, Olivia,’ she says. ‘We’re trying to read. Why don’t you play with your Lego?’ ‘Yeah, the head honcho is saying everyone’s so worried about their own job and place in the world, they haven’t got time to think about the other guy. “Economic rationalism does not allow for people and their needs,” she says. That’s a bit strong, don’t you reckon?’

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‘I want a cuttle, mummy. A CUTTLE!’ ‘Don’t yell like that, Olivia. Do they want donations again? We’ve got some cans of Milo that are past the useby. Do you want to pack those up with some lemons off the tree, Ben? You and Olivia could take them down after lunch …’ ‘I can pick the lemons. I can do it. Ben, I can do lemons. Let me, Ben. BENNNN!’ ‘Well that should make a huge difference to the welfare industry. Three cans of mouldy Milo and some lemons. “We need to develop a society where everyone can participate in a meaningful way,” it says. Let those bums from St Pat’s come and pick their own lemons and then make a few beds and do some sweeping up. I already pay them enough in taxes.’ Olivia is trying to move the stepladder over to the lemon tree. Down it comes with a crash and smashes the teapot, which shouldn’t have been on the ground in the first place but we ran out of room on the table. This is trying my patience. I’m not going to get a bite from Adele about taxes and welfare, so I turn the page. ‘Check this out! Robert Bropho and the Noongar Circle of Elders, standing in front of a dome. It’s like the one Francis built. That’s pretty high-tech for a fringe dweller, isn’t it? I thought they all lived in packing cases.’ Adele comes up really close, on her way to get the dustpan and brush. ‘I told you a hundred times, Wallymacher. Keep your opinions to yourself. That’s a racist comment. If the guests hear you they’ll think you’re serious and that could be very bad for business. As for what Merle would say … ‘ Merle is a high-flying Aboriginal bureaucrat we’re friendly with. I never think of her being a Noongar, one of

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the dispossessed. She’s just Merle to me, the cheeky one with the skinny legs. I suppose the thing about being fifty plus is that you get a bit disinhibited, without chemical assistance. Adele cringes because she’s embarrassed for me. Or for herself. On the other hand, she knows what she wants from the business and she’s not afraid to say it. In a way, I’m like some troublesome employee who relies on the goodwill and self-confidence of the boss to work out his wrinkles. It’s a nice arrangement and if we can maintain the delicate balance, no one gets hurt. There are other kinds of days, like Christmas eve, when I’m up too early sweeping the leaves in the courtyard. I’m not doing it for myself, it’s to keep the guests happy. But mainly to placate the Adele voice in my head. I love the old man jacaranda and don’t mind the cycle of blossoms and tiny leaves that it dumps into the yard from May to December. But some clown planted a ficus carica that is slowly strangling the laundry and I’ve taken a dislike to the broad unlovely leaves it sheds at this time of year. A few months ago it was figs, inedible and messy. As I scoop up the brittle leaves I seem to be scooping up half the garden as well, dried-out soil, sand really, scurrying and dribbling out of my reach, always in motion. It’s a bit like my rambling answers to Piaf’s questions. The point keeps moving and I lose momentum. I tell Adele I’m going for a walk and head off in the direction of the open sea, onto the docks and past this week’s crop of foreign vessels, all heaving and seeping and straining against their hawsers like animals. I follow the line along North Quay. Corriedale Express, Bunga Kenari, Hansa Coral. At the end of the wharf I can see the

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Anangel Dignity riding high and ready to depart the bulk cargo jetty. Fishermen have settled in already and there in the scrum is my mate Dieter, the wharfie, casting a line before work. He works on the container wharf, doing just about anything the bosses ask him to do. ‘How’s it hanging, Diet?’ We chat for a while and when that runs out we simply sit together, our feet dangling ten metres above the waterline. Dieter is the most cultured man I know, trained in Italy as an operatic tenor, chest like a draughthorse. Some mornings you’ll find him singing his scales out on South Mole, keeping in shape for the day he gets a telegram from Pavarotti. I walk home the way I came, under the old bridge and up the embankment in time to play chicken with a scrap metal truck. The truck wins. At breakfast I put on my most receptive face while Adele tells me her plans for Christmas lunch tomorrow. Her idea is to invite a few friends and have open house for the B&B guests. That way we get cultural enrichment along with the turkey. We used to have Adele’s mother over but she’s past it now. On my side there’s my mum Pat, but she lives in Sydney where she can be near my older sister Judy. My younger sister, Trish, teaches in New Guinea and usually joins the other two for Christmas at Bondi. But of course, families shape your expectations and even though I can’t be there in the East with them, the idea of having some Japanese honeymooners, a Dutch professor (male) and a Finnish photographer (female) for your Christmas bash seems a bit … well, foreign. I don’t feel that desperate for company, if the truth be known. I drag out the trestle table and the folding chairs and

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place them centre courtyard, in the shade of the jacaranda. I’m wiping the dust off artistically when Yoshiko, the female honeymooner, comes out to chat. I find her totally unintelligible, even though she thinks she is speaking English. If we were smart, Adele and I would learn to speak Japanese ourselves since we’re in the hospitality business. But some part of me, the Karl Wallymacher part, rebels. Adele says I’m racist, but I notice that she herself is more distant with our Japanese and Korean guests and will book Westerners ahead of them if it comes to a contest. Anyhow, Yoshiko says something like: ‘You maku ah dina!’ I agree. We will be maku ah dina, but it’s more Adele’s idea than mine. ‘Have you been to the beach today?’ I shout. ‘Dina is not ’til tomorrow.’ Adele has warned me against shouting at the guests, but it relieves my anxiety. Yoshiko looks at me shrewdly. ‘I will maku ah foto!’ I continue with my preparation. The best way for me to approach the whole thing is to think of it as work.

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7 Session #5 Hi Piaf. I’m glad you enjoyed my German accent and the reference to Moreno. I never thought about it before, but it’s interesting and perhaps not so surprising that Francis would fall under the spell of a Jewish intellectual and guru of spontaneity later in his life. The way he fell for your mother says a lot. I spent some time away from the mainstream in the early sixties; doesn’t matter why. It’s impossible for me to capture the chemistry of your parents’ first meeting, the glance across the crowded room, whatever. I wasn’t there. But I’m sure it would have been powerful. In the version I have, Francis met Ruth in his professional capacity as an assistant in a photographic studio. She’d just graduated from teacher’s college and wanted to give her grandparents a formal portrait of herself in her mortarboard and gown, holding her degree. It was the sort of job Francis hated, known in the trade as a ‘grip and grin’.

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Like most refugees, the grandparents had made big sacrifices to get their family established in the new society, in this case the raw, sprawling place called Western Australia. When the first daughter of their own daughter, Ulla, sailed through university with distinctions and became an accredited secondary teacher of German and French, it was as if Ruth had saved them all from a sense of permanent dislocation from Europe. She was teaching the languages of culture and science here in the sun, a place merely grazed by the passage of the war that had ruined them and driven them into exile. Apparently, Francis put the hard word on your mother in the same way he might have approached a dozen women of his acquaintance. He invited her up to Quinns Rock, suggested that she strip for some less formal poses and tried to go the grope on her as soon as she’d sipped her way through the first glass of Barossa Pearl. ‘What do you think I am, a prostitute?’ she had demanded. According to Francis, this was what entranced him the most, her direct manner and her strong sense of self. From her point of view, he was an unusually gentle gentile, he could take ‘no’ for an answer. She was also fascinated by the creative artist in him, the same role that would give Francis hell when he eventually settled down to the business of family-making. That’s the part that puzzles me — how Francis ever considered that he was cut out for marriage when he was so young. It took me ’til I was in my late forties and even then I had my doubts. Yet here was the boy who’d pushed aside all family ties in his rush towards self-fulfilment, falling for the first sensible woman he met. Had he thought about it, committed himself to the rigours of family life, imagined the long haul of parenting? Probably not. I imagine that he operated out of instinct and in a way, that Ruth fitted in with his ideas about spontaneity. There was nothing ordinary about her and as we all do when we’re in love, he’d fitted her to the template he already had in his mind for the sort of companion that would suit a man who wanted to lead an extraordinary life.

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By this time I had lost all interest in architectural drafting and scored a job out at Ascot grooming racehorses for a big-time trainer that Bernie knew. I learned a lot about gee-gees and I managed to stay out of trouble long enough to build up a bankroll. Soon I was punting modestly and winning. I lived in a room near the racecourse and had an almost nonexistent social life. One Saturday during the spring carnival, I ran into Francis. He was with a good-looking woman who could have been older than he was. She had a strong nose, a generous mouth and a lot of sparkle. He introduced me to Ruth Spiegelman. They looked great together, dressed up like gentry and out for a bet, and I told them so. Afterwards we went for a drink at the Four Seasons. I kept quiet about what I’d been up to. Your father was like a kid with a new toy, very proud to have this exotic-looking woman, your mother, on his arm and hinting broadly that they were about to name the day. ‘Ruth’s family are Jewish,’ he told me at the bar. ‘We’ve decided to ignore that for the moment. It’s only a problem if there are children. That seems well down the list. We’re planning on doing lots of travelling after we’re married.’ My eyes were on Ruth, who was sitting at the table looking poised and faintly amused. I wondered how much Francis had contributed to the decision. She looked like the sort of woman who could run rings around the vague arty man who was to become your father. Also, as I think of it, I was a little put out. He was leaving his Buckland Hill background for something much more exciting and he hadn’t even asked my permission! As you probably know, your parents were married in the Murray Street Registry Office in the spring of 1968, the year ‘Get Smart’ appeared on television screens in this country. On your father’s side, your Aunt Bryony was the only Anstey witness. I was his best man and brushed down his coat in the anteroom for want of anything more useful to do.

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Ruth’s family was there in force, dressed to the nines and dripping with jewellery and shiny spectacles. To me, the men all looked like the Marx Brothers and the women were straight out of ‘I Love Lucy’. When the registrar walked in and said ‘Hello, my name is Vineberg’, there was an audible sigh from the Spiegelmans. If the ceremony had to be outside of the synagogue, better you should have a Vineberg than an O’Hara! I had a great time at the reception, flirting with Bryony, drinking champagne and eating too many smoked oysters. I had a friend in the car rental business and had lined up a Ford Galaxy for the young couple’s getaway. They changed into their going-away outfits, a quaint custom of that era, and were farewelled in a shower of confetti in the driveway of the Squatter’s Lodge, Highgate. As at most wedding parties I’ve ever been to, that left all of us guests at a loose end. I asked Bryony if she’d like to bat on somewhere. We walked down Sherwood Court to the Gaslight, a coffee shop with black walls and hessian curtains. A folk singer was warbling the extended version of Mathy Groves and there were lots of people trying to achieve the Dylan/Baez look and still remain artless. ‘So what do you reckon?’ Bryony enquired. She was referring to her brother’s wedding. She had grown up into a true beauty, with Francis’ brown eyes and tight curls, an elegant neck and a bouncy, energetic body. ‘I reckon Francis has broken out of Buckland Hill with a vengeance,’ I said. ‘What do you mean?’ ‘That’s a pretty cosmopolitan family he’s hitched himself up to. And Ruth doesn’t look like she’s too interested in rotting away in suburbia.’ ‘Bit of a value judgement there, Ben.’ Bryony was majoring in psychology at UWA. She wasn’t about to let me get away with anything. ‘But you may be right, he was always dying to escape his

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background. That’s what the big fight with Dad was really about. He’s always had grand ideas, has our Francis. From the time he was very young. Did he ever tell you about his King of the World game? Never mind king of the castle, this was a serious domination fantasy. He’d pile up all the toys he could find, when he was quite small, crawl up on top and try and get everyone else to look up and hail him as the king.’ ‘How old was he?’ ‘About fifteen.’ She arched one eyebrow and we both roared, having suffered together in the backyard theatre. ‘Actually, three or four I would think. Before we moved next door. But he was obsessed by it, he’d bring more and more things into play and the more people gathered around the base of his creation, the better. In a way it was a perfect image of creativity, you know? You adapt what’s around you, stick it together and then see how others respond.’ ‘You’re putting a bit of spin on that idea, aren’t you?’ ‘Am I?’ I sensed she was holding something back. Maybe she was about to introduce the family madness, the maiden aunt with staring eyes locked away in a rambling house with nine cats and paranoid delusions. Whatever it was, she pulled back into her psych student role and continued the lecture. ‘I suppose that kind of all-powerful creativity is normal for two-yearolds. It’s the god in all of us. The trouble is it seems to get distorted in adulthood.’ I thought for a while and drank my coffee. I could see Francis directing the snowman skit, his fervour and absolute commitment to the creation. I could also see him sitting on my gut, pinning my shoulders to the ground, the sweat-soaked victorious wrestler. ‘Francis is all right,’ I said. ‘At this very minute he’s probably …’ I almost said ‘banging his brains out’. Bryony just looked at me, waiting for me to finish the sentence.

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‘He’s probably very happy.’ She nodded. Suddenly there was nothing to say. I made excuses about waking early and walked her to the cab rank. We’d come to the border of what ex-neighbours might discuss and neither of us had the guts to go on. ‘Keep in touch,’ she said.

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8 Sitting on my pew in Hubble Street, it isn’t hard to recall the sense of inferiority I carried around with me in those days. I’d put myself on the outside of society, and that included Bryony and a lot of other people like her, nice people who dressed well and led productive lives and didn’t have to self-censor their conversations when they met someone they liked. Maybe that now includes Piaf as well. It’s not as if I haven’t felt the urge to confess. But then she’ll judge me to be unreliable. That’s the trouble. Once you’ve been inside — actually it’s outside, outside the law, outside the bounds of decency, outcast — you’re not to be trusted, ever. I can remember how conflicted I’d felt meeting Bryony again. Sooner or later, if I kept up the relationship, I’d have to talk about myself and that would only amplify

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my sense of shame. Later, the shame would turn into something else, a sort of defiant pride and a judgement about the ones who are playing it safe. If you like, a misguided attempt to live spontaneously. I’d been brave enough to move outside the bounds of conservative society and it was the others who were lagging behind. Looking back now, I can see how this linked me with Francis. His Daliesque pose was just as vain as my tough con image. The only difference was that he was more socially acceptable. And now he was married. So what does the best man do when his job is done? I remember mooching around town in my flares until I came to the Parmelia, enjoying the anonymity. Right there in the piano bar was Marion Beaumont, all alone and ready to cry into her Bailey’s. She wasn’t making a lot of sense but it seemed she’d lost her husband to a younger woman, found an apartment in Nedlands, kept the BMW and had no idea whether she’d come out in front or behind. Around midnight, when the piano player quit, I was happy to take charge, drive home along Hackett Drive and help her find her way into the lift of a very tasteful three-storey development on The Avenue, looking out across the reserve to the black band of river which sweeps around Pelican Point into Matilda Bay. I helped her into the shower and I helped her into bed, then I stroked her softly and kissed her and she went to sleep happy and I stayed awake all night listening to the lap of the river against the stone embankment and in the morning when she woke up hung-over and horny, I was ready for her. Perhaps we never recaptured the blind passion of that first time, I don’t know. Sooner than I would have liked,

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we’d become an item. I’d finish my week’s work out at Ascot and cycle over to Nedlands and we’d spend the weekend walking and talking and fucking, or drinking at Steve’s and then fucking, always fucking. Marion had grown flabby, her body had taken on a different odour and her voice grated on me sometimes as she directed me in her schoolteacherish way to pleasure her, the same voice she used when she was telling me where she kept her serving plates or the carving set or the garden tools. She’d moved on since Tech College days. Her divorce settlement had been generous and with the change remaining from the apartment purchase she had acquired a gallery in Claremont, which she was able to use as a social base as well as a tax write-off. Perhaps that’s not entirely fair. She actually wanted the best for all the young artists she attracted and would encourage them with lavish openings and high rewards when the red stickers were counted at the end of the night. But I always had the feeling she loved the atmosphere more than the works themselves. She kept up her social life and quarantined me nicely out of it. Her gallery openings and cocktail parties and business breakfasts all seemed to occur through the week, when I was swilling out stables. The weekends were for us, she insisted, and I guess it was this ‘us’ that was shaky, too intense, unbalanced. We started to argue. And paradoxically, given our beginnings, we argued about sex. I can remember a Saturday afternoon, could have been early winter. In response to my complaints about feeling shut out of her art world, she took me along to the museum where there was a travelling exhibition of early Australian ceramics. There was a lot of dreary notes and

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fancy graphics and a collection of butterdishes and serving platters and other domestic items that was about as exciting as a lecture on headlice. Desperate for some entertainment, I walked over to the middle of the floor where a circle had formed around a more sizeable exhibit. It was a toilet bowl, just like the one I grew up with on Buckland Hill, except there was no cistern overhead and no rusty chain to flush it with. There was simply the can, the dunny, the thunderbox in all its glory, encased in perspex, with a number and a blurb, surrounded by serious people reading catalogues and half looking at the thing over their reading glasses. I stood at the back of the circle and thought about the gallery scene and thought about my job and curled my lip and since I couldn’t see Marion anywhere and wanted to grab her attention and get out of there, I allowed myself just two words, delivered in basso profundo, words that echoed around the gallery and brought the guards scurrying like cockroaches into that absurd display of materialistic fetishism. ‘SHIT EH!’ We laughed about that when we were safely away from anyone she might know and the mood of careless frankness stayed with us through a couple of drinks at Steve’s and a brisk walk home. And then we arrived at the bedroom scene. I began to massage her. I’d bought an imported book about massage. It was Danish and the customs men had had a field day with it, checking for pornography. There were red marks on every second page. But to me it looked wholesome and here was a chance to practise. I heated some scented oil I’d kept for the occasion and I lit some incense and followed what I remembered of the routine.

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You had to begin with the abdomen and chest, performing all kinds of healthy steps along the way, like draining the colon. ‘Hey, I’m not a horse you know.’ I could tell she was uncomfortable, it wasn’t her idea of love at all. I persisted, hoping the incense would do the trick and help her relax a little. That’s all I wanted, that and being in charge. I was tired of her being boss. When I got to her breasts, I’d read that you missed the nipples and worked the pectoral muscles. Marion would have none of it. ‘Come on baby, touch me, here and here.’ She shoved her breast in my face and dropped one leg down the side of the couch, opening up to me. I was beaten and I knew it. I covered myself with the massage oil and plunged into her. When it was over, I realised I hadn’t felt a thing. That’s when I first heard the muffled drumbeats. The end had begun. But if the funeral drums were sounding for our sex-life, there were some parts of my relationship with Marion I still liked. For one thing, she introduced me to situations I could never have imagined, like modelling for life drawing classes at Claremont Art School. I managed to talk the stables into letting me off one morning a week. They already regarded me as a bit of an eccentric, so the reason came as no great surprise. ‘You say you’re gunna be a model?’ said Keith. He was the boss, a little man with a vicious temper when aroused. ‘Hey, Doug. Wallymacher reckons he’s gunna be a model over at Claremont Art School.’ ‘He’s making it up, Keith. No one would give him a job as a model. He’s too ugly! With that hair of his, he looks like a horse’s arse!’

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This sort of thing passed for normal morning chat over a cup of tea. It wasn’t all that different from being in the slammer. You had to take part or you were punished. ‘They’re not interested in my head, Douggie. They want me for my body.’ Most of the Ascot types were ex-jockeys. When it came to physical stature, I had it all over them. They fell silent, then moved the searchlight of their discontent onto someone else.

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9 Session #6 You’re asking for my take on the times, the late sixties. What was it like then, how do I think it was different from the nineties? Tough assignment, Piaf. Let me begin with a broad brush. I think of it as an innocent time, a time of few choices. We were at war with a small country in Asia because the United States was at war. If you wore a tie you were a white-collar worker. Everyone else was a housewife or a real worker, the blue-collar variety. Or a student or a baby. There was no unemployment. The divorce rate was low, the pill was new and the Beatles had just released ‘Sergeant Pepper’. Few of us understood what it was about. The national drug was booze, followed closely by headache powders and horseracing. There was little room for dissent. People believed what they read in the newspapers. Television was black-andwhite and so was politics. Happy times. The Spiegelman clan bestowed monies on your

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parents, in lieu of the usual coffeemakers and crystalware. Ruth announced they would travel to distant places, see the sad land of her parents, and seek work. This was before backpacking became an internationally transmitted disease. Your mother packed four matching beige suitcases, ready for shipboard life, French nightclubs, whatever came her way. Francis protested. Surely they would learn more from staying in campgrounds. They left on board the S S Patris equipped for both contingencies, the nightclubs and the campgrounds. But not before Francis had been reminded of what was expected when they returned. Kurt Spiegelman in the saloon bar of the Hotel Australia, across the tracks from the Fremantle Passenger Terminal. Better your children should know what you believe in. But we’re not even thinking of children, says Francis. You will, my son, you will. Enter your Uncle David, the budding architect, who affects a bow tie in the manner of Buckminster Fuller. You are one of us. I looked at your photographs of Ruth, he says to your father. Such a tukas! You looked at the nudes? Your grandmother Ulla, weeping and chirping in her own, opaque version of migrant English. The steamer hooted, the streamers stretched and broke, the great anachronism chugged out through O’Connor’s Harbourworks like a cliché. I wouldn’t see Francis again until after your birth. By that time he and your mother would have done some growing up, the way people do when they take a journey together.

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10 Christmas Day in the colonies. Adele has sprinkled talcum powder around the floor of our room and stamped what she imagines to be reindeer footprints in it. How she learned about reindeers in the desert at Leonora, I’ll never know. There’s a tiny pine tree in a bucket, some presents and of course the scraps of fruitcake that Santa couldn’t manage and half a glass of port wine. Olivia is rushing around in her Snow White outfit and I’m outside in the courtyard trying to blow up the inflatable wading pool that the reindeers carried all the way from Taiwan. I’m wishing Santa had taken the trouble to inflate it, or to include a pump with the thing. It’s already twenty-nine degrees Celsius and it’s only 8.30. They’re predicting thirty-six and humid. As I lean over and blow into the dead whale of a pool, Santa’s port weighing me down like a cross, I think how easy it would

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be to have a mild heart attack. That way I could spend Christmas in hospital and rise above all this aggravation. By eleven, the pool is inflated, Adele and I have had a stinking argument and Olivia is splashing happily with Yoshiko while her husband Tojo records the event on video. His camera is what I would have liked for Christmas. The first friend to arrive is Annie, Adele’s matron of honour and first big-city friend. With Annie is Kapo, my oldest pal with the exception of Francis. It was Francis who introduced us, back in the golden seventies when we were all hippies, trying to get back to the garden. His real name is Harold Boyce and he was enjoying a successful career as a musician until he turned orange in the late seventies. He travelled to Poona, lost his wife, gave up the guitar and returned to Fremantle a poorer man with a funny name. Kapo isn’t really the disciple type. I guess he was seeking something when he went to India, still is. It’s one of the archetypes, isn’t it? The Seeker. The other male ones are Warrior, Father, Sage, from memory. I read somewhere you can only cover two of them in a lifetime. Me, I’m back to seeking, after a burst of warrior activity during the eighties boom. I guess Adele would like me to explore the Father a little more eagerly. But I told her about the rule of two. Today Kapo is wearing sandals made from old tyres, a Balinese shirt, linen shorts and his famous expression of noble suffering. I know exactly where he’s coming from. We seekers don’t adapt well to shallow, two-thousandyear-old festivals like Christmas. Next on the scene is Piet, a professor of drama from Rotterdam. He is tall, fair and loves the ladies. The

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summer has been hard on his white skin and he is wearing a straw hat that makes him look like a plantation owner. With him, on a strictly platonic basis, is Airi, all in blue, another B&B guest, from Finland. She is trying to communicate with Tojo, who is beside himself with video opportunities. Then comes friend Phillip, well into his writer role in Country Road whites, Italian sandals and a silk vest. He hands me a present, which I open immediately. It’s a book by Paul Theroux, My Other Life. ‘I know you don’t read fiction, but this is real life. Dressed up as a novel, but really it’s his own story. I hope you like it.’ He gives me a rare hug and I start feeling better about my hangover and my life. Adele has appeared in her pink and white frangipani sundress and I can feel desire, mine and every other man’s, melting away what’s left of my resistance to this festival. Tojo has finished his videotaping and is walking around the yard with both hands behind his back, like the Duke of Edinburgh. The difference is that Tojo has his palms facing out, with his hands actually clasped across his back passage rather than resting on his buttocks. I walk over to him and disarm him with a friendly smile. ‘Does that feel good?’ I say, taking up the same stance. ‘Keeps away ewil spirits,’ he says. I keep circulating, working the crowd like a politician. ‘How’s it going, Piet?’ ‘This sunshine, Ben. You’re a lucky man. And your beautiful wife. Your daughter. Yoof got it all.’ He smiles broadly and spreads his arms wide enough to take in his version of ‘all’. Merle arrives, in spunky pedal-pushers and a Jimmy Pike T-shirt; then Dieter, the

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operatic wharfie, all in black. Everyone seems to be coping, so I go and stir up Digby, the cook, give Adele a pinch on the bum and it’s time for lunch. Everyone wolfs it down, the turkey and the salads and the Mount Barker wines. Then I stand up and deliver the King’s Birthday Message. ‘Adele and I are really happy you could come and share this meal with us. I guess it’s an orphan’s Christmas, because many of us are separated from our families. But let’s make the most of it, drink up — unless you have to drive — and be merry.’ ‘How much is it going to cost us?’ sings out Merle. She’s got a raucous Noongar voice, unmodified by her profession, which is Aboriginal bureaucrat on her way to the top. ‘It will cost you putting on an act, that’s what,’ I tell her. There are groans from our friends, baffled looks from the customers. Merle rises to the challenge immediately. She stands up and looks around. We all shuffle and try to look serious. ‘This is the story of Moocheth the ibis. Moocheth the ibis ran off with Enjarl the goanna. She took with him her son Golpondon the little black-and-white bird. Moocheth’s husband Arone the stork was sad and angry.’ We wait for more. ‘That’s it?’ I say. Airi is nodding vigorously. ‘Beautiful,’ she says. ‘That is a traditional story from your people, yes?’ ‘No,’ says Merle, laughing that laugh. ‘It’s printed on a tea towel someone gave me and I read it every day in my kitchen. I just wanted to see if I could remember it. We don’t have traditional stories, darling. We’re like the Jews. We’ve been scattered all over the place.’

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Dieter passes, on the excuse of a cold. I suspect he doesn’t want to scare anyone. That’s why he does his scales down at South Mole. There he’s got the whole of the Indian Ocean as a theatre. Tojo and Yoshiko stand up and sing ‘Crick Go the Sears’, which they learned on a bus tour to the Pinnacles. They’ve got guts, these people. I wish I hadn’t learned to hate their race. I look at them as they sing, island people, tough, adaptable and I wonder if I’ll be so ready to soak up their culture when I visit them. They receive a roar of applause and bow ceremoniously, very pleased with themselves. Airi and Piet have had lots of English in their schooling. They sing ‘Good King Wenceslaus’ in rousing fashion, desperately trying to conjure up images of snow and roaring fires and cruel frost while the sun blazes through the leaves of the jacaranda and we all turn a bit pinker, except Merle. Adele and I have no idea what to do. We whisper for a minute, then I strip down to my jocks while she stands on her head. I stand behind her, smiling, trying to ripple my triceps the way I used to do at the art classes in Claremont all those years ago. It’s a tableaux about a modern Australian family, the woman strong and supple and independent, the man in the background doing something old-fashioned and useless. I’m not sure how it translates, culturally. This leaves Annie and Kapo. Kapo has brought his guitar. He sits solemnly apart and tunes it, then turns to his partner and nods. ‘This is a song we pinched from Kavisha,’ says Annie. ‘The words were written by the poet John Masefield quite some time ago.’ And she starts to sing the song that’s

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familiar to me because we all bought Kavisha’s CD, she’s a kind of saint around here; but I’ve never really tuned into the words and now I can hear them, here in my own backyard on Christmas Day, year of our Lord 1997. I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life, To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife; And all I ask is a merry yarn with a laughing fellow rover And a quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over. The song finishes and there’s a soft sigh and a silence. I want to wail and cry for the gypsy life I missed out on, but Olivia beats me to it. ‘I want to sing my song, Ben. Beeennnnn! The Yellow Taxi! Play Yellow Taxi!’ I turn to Kapo to see if he can accommodate this change of pace and a slow smile reaches his gargoyle face, he changes to barre chords and I grab Olivia and jiggle her on my lap like a teabag and away we go, wailing and hooting to Joni’s antidevelopment anthem: Don’t it always seem to go You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone They paved paradise And put up a parking lot, Woo, wop wop wop wop! We’re all rocking now, Merle’s on her feet doin’ the bump and Kapo brings it right down to the basic riff for

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the last verse. A waif-like woman wearing a daypack, Ray-Bans and a Sony Superscope emerges from the side gate. ‘Ben Wallymacher?’ she says. ‘Yep.’ ‘It’s Piaf. How are you?’ She takes off her shades and I look her over and welcome her back into my life without thinking. I love her for coming back so bravely to confront the past and before that, for preparing the ground with her questions and assignments. ‘The tapes,’ I hiss. ‘I haven’t bothered telling Adele. So …’ ‘That’s cool,’ she says. I take her around the circle and introduce her. Everyone’s pretty high and she looks a bit wiped out, so I carry her stuff into the big house and show her to our one vacant room, an attic with a dormer window and a view of the container terminal. ‘An interesting time to arrive,’ I say. ‘Not if you’re Old Testament like me.’ ‘You can be our three wise men,’ I say. If I had any straw I’d make her a palliasse.

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11 Session #8 Francis was proud of his new wife and pleased with his good fortune. He wrote copious letters to the rest of us, the ones he’d left stranded back home on the edge of the desert. On board the Patris, your parents presented as a handsome young couple and spent much time on the back deck, which heaved and settled and heaved again until they reached the equator, when everything levelled out. There was ouzo and Turkish coffee, card games, patriots in the process of exing themselves. Francis met and photographed a racing car driver, Alan Jones, who would make his fortune in Formula One in England; another photographer, linked with the Beatles; a beautiful model from Lebanon who was returning to Beirut; and Victor, unshackled but under arrest, being deported for unspecified crimes against the island nation. In the middle of the morning in the middle of the ocean, the

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propeller a distant sound effect, the sky hazy enough to protect them from the sun, your father embarrassed everyone by wanting to take portraits and group photographs. ‘I’m happy where I am. Why do I want to sit for you?’ said Victor. ‘What is this? Work?’ said the model. ‘Francis!’ said Ruth. But they conformed, even the racing car driver. And Francis had them posing and posing again, until he had what he wanted. The next day it was more of the same. Prone poses. Theatrical poses. Dolphin poses. ‘I can see a bloody dolphin. A real one. Look!’ said the racing car driver, and everyone left the circle and looked over the side to watch a pair of them, mother and child, doing tricks just out of reach of the ship’s wake. This didn’t deter Francis, it gave him more ammunition when they drifted back and sat in his circle as if they’d all been hypnotised. A wonderful group study, like the cover of a record album. Like the dolphin family, theatre and photography were all one to your father. Late at night in the tiny cabin where all the water pipes of the vessel seemed to converge, I imagine Ruth questioning Francis about his actions. ‘I don’t know,’ he probably mused. They’d had dinner at the captain’s table, they’d been to the Acropolis Lounge in the stern and the Copacobana Club in the bow and he was tired. ‘I suppose I think that art is important. Self-expression, you know. Rather than we all should sit around like zombies.’ Some of the Spiegelman speech patterns were rubbing off on him. Soon they would be in Europe and after that, North America. Who knows what your father would sound like then? ‘You surprise me sometimes, Francis. I didn’t think you were like that.’ ‘Like what?’ ‘Like a … rabbi or something. That’s what the family calls my father.

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The rabbi. But you’re just as bad, maybe worse.’ ‘Is it bad? He told me our children should know what we believe in.’ ‘He meant spiritual beliefs,’ your mother whispered fiercely. The pipes were clanging and she could feel the sickening judder of the ship as the propeller cleared the swell and for a moment whirred aimlessly in the equatorial air. ‘It’s the same thing,’ said Francis. ‘If I believe in this … this need for expression strongly enough, it will become spiritual. God made us to be expressive beings.’ When the Patris docked at Djibouti, in what was then French Somaliland, your father remembered what it was like to be torn from his mother’s breast. Below them on the dock was an explosion of life: the burp and sputter of two-strokes, cab-drivers and truckers jockeying for room, cranes at work, beautiful dark-skinned people everywhere. The same people who would become famine victims or war fodder within a decade. Your mother was spending a lot of time shaking hands with the captain, a handsome Greek man in his forties, resplendent in his whites, with just the right amount of grey at his temples. They spoke French, like civilised people everywhere. Francis didn’t understand a word of it. He had located the four beige suitcases and his camera case and the rucksacks and was standing guard over them like a Rottweiler, ready to maim anyone who came near the last bit of certainty in his too-fluid life. His quest for the spontaneous life had foundered temporarily in the mayhem of an African port. This was a ship-jet service designed to circumvent the Suez Canal, which had been completely stoppered in the Six-Day War. Most of the rear deck club were flying on to Athens and thence to London or wherever. Your mother, who liked to be different, intended to travel by rail to Addis Ababa, then back to the coast where they would take a steamer to Haifa, linger in Israel and then continue across the Mediterranean to Europe by sea.

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Your father was finding it difficult to make the leap from map to reality. When the train pulled out of Djibouti, he had his first adult thoughts about mortality. This was Africa, not Buckland Hill. It was possible to die here. At the border with Ethiopia, an armed black official failed to recognise the visa they had carefully obtained from the downat-heel trade commissioner in West Perth. Ruth’s French saved them from embarrassment or worse. The train tracked into the foothills beyond Harare and Francis picked up the smell of the dark continent, pungent and exciting, as they climbed higher through villages where women with babies lashed to their backs pounded grain and men with machetes tucked in their belts walked to work holding hands with their mates. In Addis Ababa they found a hotel built around a dusty courtyard. The desk-clerk washed and oiled your mother’s feet and Francis found himself back in Sunday school, hearing stories from the Bible, where the illustrated faces were all white, European; here the faces were black, beyond his experience yet somehow essential. He sat quietly and watched and later they ordered some food and passed up the salad, ate the bread and meat, became sick anyway. Halie Selassie was the emperor. His picture appeared everywhere, a short, stern man in military uniform holding a sword. The country was poor. Kennedy’s Peace Corps were there to ‘help’, young Americans, most of them trying to avoid military service in Vietnam. Some were harmless potheads seeking nirvana. Others were transplanted southern racists intent on recreating the plantation lifestyle, in spite of the fact that the domestics were incapable of tracking down any maple syrup for the hot cakes. It was a dangerous place, one that would erupt into civil war in less than a decade. Somehow, your parents found a way of travelling which bound them together like kids in a three-legged race, oblivious and happy. For Ruth, this was a shake-up of everything she had learned as the child of a refugee. The beige suitcases, symbols of affluent travel in pre-

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holocaust Europe, had been left in storage at the coast. Your father’s knowledge of bushlore and backpacking seemed to translate adequately into solving problems like how to make a cup of tea; how to wash your clothes. Ruth watched while Francis brewed tea on his bushwalker’s stove and admired the ingenuity of a pegless elastic clothesline he’d remembered to pack. She’d overcome your opa’s objections to the mixed marriage on the grounds that he wasn’t like other antipodeans — he was European in his manner and outlook. She liked his Aryan looks and healthy body. He was no child of the ghetto, he’s grown up in the sun with lots of milk to drink and a national health scheme, yet somehow avoided becoming a yob. They visited Rick, an American who lived on the edge of the escarpment near the source of the Nile. He shared his house with half a dozen orphans from his assigned village, young boys who were pleased to have visitors and even more pleased to decapitate and gut a chicken in front of the ferenji, squealing with glee as blood spurted and feathers flew. After lunch they walked out to the edge of the Great Rift Valley and held on to each other in awe while Rick provided a lesson in physical geography in that articulate, intimate way that Americans have. Ruth believed that the idea of you was born there, close to the source of African life, in the country where the Falashas claimed they were the lost tribe of Israel and practised a corrupted version of Judaism. She held on to the idea, all through Israel itself, Cyprus, Greece, Italy, Germany. In England, in an unlikely hotel room in Cornwall, she relaxed enough to allow the idea to bear fruit. You were conceived on a morning in May, with fog rolling in from a temperature inversion off the English coast. Ruth claimed in one of her rare missives that she felt the union of two cultures within her womb and could calculate exactly how long you took to incubate.

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12 There’s a certain time after Olivia has gone down and we’ve washed up and there’s still a hint of colour in the sky when Adele and I will sit and murmur to each other over Madura tea or a small scotch, and occasionally consider taking a new idea into our lives. ‘She was a lovely child,’ I say dreamily. Piaf’s off for a walk around the port. She loves the smell of the sea and what she calls the reality factor of rusty hulls and sheep shit. ‘That was twenty-two years ago, Ben,’ says Adele. She’s being a realist. ‘Sometimes help comes knocking at the door at the right time.’ I’m trying to sound like Adele’s mother. Two Swiss girls come out to bid us good evening. They are going down to Fremantle to make some enjoyment. I wish them gute Reise.

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‘I think that means “good travelling”, Ben.’ ‘Whatever.’ ‘What if she doesn’t fit in. What if she can’t work?’ ‘She can work all right. Anyhow, let me pay her wages. We’ll call her the au pair. It’s very fashionable and if it doesn’t work out, it’s no skin off the nose of the business.’ ‘I didn’t know businesses had noses, Ben,’ she says. ‘I think you’d better come with me,’ I say sternly. She stands up and I can see the shape of her buttocks under the sarong. ‘No! I think you had better come with me.’ We stand up together and walk inside. She climbs the ladder first so that I can follow her like the blind genius I am, her lover for life.

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13 Session #9 What sort of life did your parents live when they returned to Australia? Had the travel and living away ‘improved’ them? Had they grown up enough to give you a good start? And how had the marriage of theatre and photography worked, not to mention your father’s growing belief in the spiritual significance of self-expression? From the time Francis and Ruth settled in England, the letters dried up and I lost touch. After a year or two of Francis playing the expatriate photographer, and as far as I know ignoring the vibrant theatre scene there, your parents returned to Australia. Ruth, who had been teaching in the melting pots of London and paying the bills, insisted that they resettle in Mount Lawley, close to her relatives. My mother, ever vigilant, clipped the birth notice:

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ANSTEY: To Ruth and Francis, of Mt Lawley. A beautiful girl, Piaf Natasha, born on February 1st, 1972. Many thanks to the staff at KEMH.

Meanwhile, I’d quit Ascot, moved in with Marion and become an assistant gardener at Kings Park. The life-drawing gig was still alive, and we enjoyed our drinking bouts at Steve’s. The rest of our life as a couple was up for grabs. It could only get better, I thought. Moving in didn’t seem like any great commitment. It had taken me fifteen minutes to pack up my room at the stables and leave all that horseshit behind. It must have been early spring that year, August or September. I was working the terraces overlooking the old brewery, moodily mulching a bed of kangaroo paw, when a young family set up for lunch on the lawn. I was going to warn them about the kookaburras but couldn’t be bothered. I wasn’t really into active communication in those days. In my role as King’s lackey, it always seemed better to keep your head down and pretend you weren’t interested. Sure enough, they’d just set out the picnic things and settled down for the first bite when old Ken, the wily kingfisher, did his stealth bomber approach and snapped a sausage out of dad’s hand. The man stood up and abused the kookaburra roundly, but there was little he could do to retrieve his sausage. The baby, who was half sitting in a bouncinette, gurgled and the woman, an attractive dark-haired woman, laughed her head off. I decided to share the joke and walked over in the role of yokel mixing it with the gentry. I didn’t recognise him at first. The last time I’d seen your father, he was dissolving into a crowd of passengers on the Patris, heading for Africa. But it was him all right, a few years older, tougher looking while Ruth looked fuller and more Australian. All I noticed of you was your wispy hair and large brown eyes. I walked over, wondering how long it

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would take them to strip away my disguise and discover the wayward Ben underneath. ‘You planning on picnicking here?’ I said. ‘That’s right,’ said Ruth smoothly. ‘It’s the people’s park, isn’t it? We often come here.’ ‘Just arskin’, that’s all.’ I was really hamming it up, testing them. My ponytail and beard made me look biblical, I was leaner and fitter than ever and in any case the context was confusing. And I was wearing my battered suede hat glued to my head, my trademark in those days. ‘Locals, are you?’ I asked gruffly. Francis was eyeing me closely, his photographer’s eye zooming in. ‘We’re from Perth,’ said Ruth. ‘But we’ve been away in England for a few years. This spring sunshine is a treat, isn’t it? And yourself? This must be a good job to have on a day like this.’ ‘I’m an itinerant,’ I said, continuing the game. ‘I take what I can get. What part of Perth are you from?’ ‘Mount Lawley,’ said Ruth. ‘Fair dinkum, eh? I would have picked you more as Buckland Hill types.’ Using the old name of that suburb did the trick. Francis exploded. ‘Who are you? I know you. Come on, take off that hat. Let’s see your face.’ I took off the hat. Francis saw me all at once, his friend and wrestling companion. ‘BEN!’ he cried, and danced me around like the daffy Celt he is. ‘You know Ruth and this is our baby Piaf.’ As I have said, Piaf, you had the most remarkable long-distance eyes and a quick winning smile. I was taken with you immediately. I took my lunch with them and tried to catch up three years in half an hour. We quickly exhausted the topic of travel. They were full of a new project that was taking shape in the bush outside Bridgetown, in

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the south-west. There, on a recently acquired forty-acre lot, they were planning to build something alternative, possibly a geodesic dome. Domes were supposed to be energy-efficient, low-impact and a lot of other hyphenated words I’ve since forgotten. My lunchtime was short, but my interest was sufficiently aroused to accept an invitation to visit them in Mount Lawley the following evening. ‘And bring your lady friend,’ said Francis. The flat in Mount Lawley was above a bread shop, an art deco building with a balcony overlooking Hyde Park. The first thing we noticed was the wallpaper in the kitchen, a repeating black fleur-de-lis on white background. It was very busy, like them. We sat in the lounge room and chatted. You rolled around on the floor, occasionally making it to an upright position. Francis was busy checking the roast and setting the table. Marion and your mother were talking fashion. The atmosphere was cosy. Just before the meal, your uncle David arrived, an architecture student from WAIT. He was an intense young man with bulbous eyes, a large mouth and a confident air. We found some common ground and I enjoyed the dinnertime discussion about what it is that makes a building soar rather than simply function. ‘I’m afraid David is being held back at that place,’ your mother said during dessert, as if her brother were somewhere else. ‘He needs to be able to express his ideas and the only way he can do that is if he’s got somewhere to build. That’s what pushed us to buy the block, isn’t it darling, rather than do the quarter-acre thing here in the city.’ Your father didn’t look all that excited, but it could’ve been indigestion. David Spiegelman was already affecting the hand-tied bow tie of all architectural geniuses. It looked odd in one so young, but his eyes burned as he spoke and he seemed to be putting the utmost effort into being misunderstood. ‘I don’t understand why you can’t express your ideas in the city,’

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said Marion. ‘Surely more people would see them here than in the backblocks of Bridgetown.’ ‘I need lots of room because I’m adapting the icosa shape from nature to the site itself, not simply to the building as Fuller did, but look, if you imagine a vertical section like this …’ He grabbed one of his sister’s paper napkins and began to sketch. I could see he’d lost Marion but I was happy enough to see his abstract ideas take shape on paper, here an excavation, there a tunnel, here a girder, there an aquatic environment, all of it capped with an exquisite dome of shade-capable perspex. I looked across at your father and wondered whether his heart was in it. ‘So you’ll be sinking a lot of money into this project,’ I said. ‘Not at all,’ said your uncle. ‘Most of the work will be done by hand. We’ll have to rig a few levers and hoists for the overhead stuff, but it’s no big deal. The main thing is, we don’t want to interrupt anything that’s happening in the ecosystem.’ He said ecosystem, which was a new word then, the way a Muslim speaks of Mecca. Then he looked around the table with his burning eyes and nodded. No one, not even his sister, nodded with him. We washed up, hemmed in by wallpaper and everything that had been left unsaid. Back home, my Marion turned her wrath on your uncle. He was a wanker, a madman, a dilettante. He was things I couldn’t even pronounce. ‘Not unlike some of your young artists,’ I said. ‘Byron Underwood for example.’ ‘Byron is an accomplished painter and will go a long way. David Spiegelman is unlikely to complete his studies, let alone leave any sort of mark on the world of architecture.’ ‘So that’s what it’s about, eh? Leaving a mark. Not having a go or experimenting or even finding your creative feet. You’re born a genius and thereafter, everyone else should simply stand back and cheer. Or faun all over one, the way you do with Byron.’

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Marion didn’t like it when her former pupil questioned her attitudes. She went to bed early and next day took off for the gallery without breakfast. On a whim, I rang your father. He was off on a photo shoot, said Ruth. Was there a message she could pass on? ‘I’ve been thinking about your land. I’d be quite interested in helping you build. I like the bush and I was thinking that perhaps I could, you know … pitch in.’ ‘That’s sweet of you, Ben. But Francis and David had a hell of a fight last night after you left and I’m not sure where it’s at right now.’ We chatted some more and I told her about the state of play between Marion and me. That night I spoke to Francis who was gung-ho about his part in the building project. He’d patched things up with David, there was plenty of land. David could experiment as much as he liked but Francis was intent on erecting a threefrequency geodesic dome, straight out of Dome Book Two. The sooner the better. He would be very happy if I could help and there was no problem about me staying down there as a sort of part-time caretaker if I cared to.

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14 Adele’s at yoga. Piaf and I are having our third breakfast coffee. Olivia’s over at her friend’s place, with Piaf due to mind her after lunch, the first real test of her role as au pair. ‘So where were you living when you decided to flee Sydney?’ We’re getting down to it, filling in the gaps. Ask someone about where they live and they usually tell you a lot about themselves. ‘Do you know Chippendale? Close to the university, once the centre of the rag trade. Schmutters business, as my family would say. It’s being gentrified rapidly, cheap and nasty warehouse conversions. Great for students and artists, you know? What they don’t tell you, the developers, is that when the rent returns lag behind inflation, they’ll be demolished and replaced by high-rise

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flats. Anyhow, my stars say it’s time to fly free like a bird over the ocean. Swoop and dive and race with the winds of destiny. The vast open skies are all mine. I’ve got six planets going for me at present. Couldn’t be a better time to quit full-time work.’ ‘And the tapes? You’ve been getting the tapes?’ ‘Every one of them. I have them with me, all carefully labelled and dated.’ ‘Just remind me what it’s about? I’m sure you told me, but it’s slipped my mind.’ ‘I’ve got an idea that I can edit them and sell them to the National Sound Archive. But I have to admit that I’m seeking some answers myself. And what you’re doing is so fantastic, Ben. And funny! I can’t think of a better way to learn about self. I don’t know … they seem so complete, like you’re being completely frank and open, as well as knowing the times the way you do.’ ‘So you want me to continue? I mean, we could just sit around the barbie and talk after tea, couldn’t we?’ I’m anxious to avoid any discussion about frankness. ‘How do you want to do it, Ben?’ She’s got me there. I realise that I’m addicted to the whole process and it’s being alone with my memories that I love, just me and the machine, shaping the story the way I want, no questions, no corrections. I can present the large reliable Wallymacher boy my mother wanted me to be, a similar version to the one I sold Adele when we met. Like my old man in those Rottnest photos, the archetypal coastwatcher rather than the lazy shopkeeper. ‘You’re looking great,’ I say. ‘The climate must be doing you good.’ I’ve already decided to keep it going. I’m glad she’s learning about herself. I hope she sells the tapes and gains

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more confidence in her skills as a sound editor. I’m learning too. Every time I confront my own history, I want to erase it from the official record. Maybe evasion’s a skill as well. But it feels like the truth’s building up in big black banks of cloud, like a Rottnest thunderstorm.

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15 Session #10 I’m sure if someone of my mother’s generation had been asked to comment, they would have wanted you to have more of a baby’s life, all swaddled and talcumed and itchy-kitchy-goo-gaa-mumma. Instead, there you were, bare-bummed and filthy-faced, playing in the bush while your father prepared to create the dome on the block they called Xanadu, in the vicinity of Bridgetown, a place so remote it was at that time considered to be the safest place to live in the event of nuclear war. I should say something about the urge to build in the bush. A lot of city people were influenced by all that back-to-the-garden Joni Mitchell stuff, you know. You didn’t have to be a drop-out to pick it up. Woodstock was over, Australia had followed with its own Aquarius Festival up at Nimbin, and quite ordinary people developed this urge to establish a rural retreat where they could build what they liked, grow their own dope, and not be hassled about anything. Hassled! A great

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word, eh? Of course many of us did get hassled, about dope, about money, the usual things. But that came later. Also, there’s a link with the spontaneity theme I think. The average suburban house takes about a year to complete, even allowing for the trend towards prefab and all-round tackiness. The idea of building freely was an idea of the time, one that had great appeal for the now generation. Your father moved fast. He’d located a man with a radial-arm saw and converted seven hundred and fifty lineal feet of radiata pine into the full collection of struts required to build his dome, all angled and precisely drilled and colour-coded, ready to assemble in the intricate pattern of hexagons and pentagons which the architect Buckminster Fuller had developed as a challenge to the world’s obsession with rectangular buildings. By the time I’d been able to organise myself out of the city, Francis had rented a truck, collected the necessary tools and spare parts and erected an old army tent for the three of you to stay in. He then went about clearing the space that your parents had chosen for their pleasure palace. It was spring, 1972. Dome Book Two was written by a bunch of hippies from Pacific High School on the Californian coast. It was produced in the same style as The Whole Earth Catalogue: large-format layout, folksy illustrations and lots of boldly self-conscious opinions. Building is a time of expansion. Writing about it is a contracting, a gathering in, putting years of work by many people into a book like this. There’s even an analogy between building/communicating and framing/skinning a dome. Putting up the framework is exciting, moving, joyous; putting on the skin is difficult and meticulous.

I could see why Francis was attracted to it. But I think I mistrusted

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the manual from the beginning, probably because I’d been trained in architectural drafting. I couldn’t see how the dome was going to stay up. Francis was moving into it bull-at-a-gate. He hadn’t even bothered to level off the site, but surrounded by his struts and with his strapping machine ready to go, standing there in his blue singlet and his carpenter’s apron, his baby daughter grinning up at him, there was nothing else for it but to begin. And there was a lot of me that wanted him to succeed, even if I mistrusted the blueprint. It doesn’t take all that long to erect a dome. Bucky and his mates did it on the lawn at Stanford University, before an audience, in one afternoon. A performance piece. With us it was more like a sporting event, Francis calling for a particular strut, me holding it against the hub while he strapped it on. On a log by the side of the clearing, you were breastfed by Ruth in a scene worthy of McCubbin. After a picnic lunch and a good look at the two-dimensional plan, we powered into the second layer, working about four feet off the ground. Within the hour, it was clear that the whole thing was turning outwards, more like a stinging nettle than an icosa. To Francis’ credit, he didn’t throw down his hammer or his cap the way Mr Anstey used to when we were kids. Instead, he packed up his tools quietly, put them back in the truck and then burst into tears. I didn’t know what to say so I patted him on the shoulder to let him know I was there and said, ‘it’s all right mate, we can pull it down and start again. No sweat.’ Francis recovered quickly. With my encouragement, he built a paper model of a three-frequency dome. Then he began to see the pattern, the way the pentagons repeated five times around the equator as it were, with a sixth pentagon crowning the whole structure. It excited him and it excited me. We built a proper floor, tongue-and-groove, without the aid of power tools. The drill bit would smoke from overuse and we’d rest and roll a joint, afraid we’d break the last precious bit and have to knock off and go all the way into town to get another.

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The floor was built with bearers radiating from a central point, a huge stump of black butt, which we’d rolled up from the creek and buried so that a small part of its bulk rose above the ground like a wooden glacier. From there we sent oregon bearers spinning out to brick piers held together with mortar made from ants’ nests. You could still find those piers today, if you knew where to look. They would probably still bear the weight they were designed for. Photographs of your father at that time show him to be thin and wild looking. He seemed to be fraying at the edges, his obsession for building diluted by some other, unseen force. Still, he rallied himself for the assault against conventional housing and by the time the big weekend came, he and Ruth and I had gathered a team of dome builders, strappers and crimpers, all prepared to work together past sunset and then sleep in tents after a session around the fire. Next morning more strapping and crimping, the pieces meticulously coded now, eighty longs, fifty-five middles, thirty shorts. Only two strapping tools, one on the ground and one off, with Frances insisting that he work the top level, roaming the scaffold, his face glowing as the dome grew into itself. A cheer as the last pentagon is strapped into place. And your cue to begin victory-lapping the floor, chin tucked in and a careful grin on your face. It was the Anstey’s finest moment as a family. The triangular panels, which were cut from marine grade five-ply, refused to fit. Error number one. An electric jigsaw could have corrected the error in less than an hour but there was no electricity. This was ironic since the valley was filled with ugly steel towers and high-tension wires conveying electricity to other places. There were other forms of high tension. Your mother had quit teaching and was developing an import business, specialising in Aquarius clothes and hippie paraphernalia, an occupation that necessitated trips over east on a regular basis. You were being farmed out to relatives. Francis was losing it, trying to finish a Fine Arts degree

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and keep the dome on the go. Rather than cut the panels to size, he decided to store them and simply cover the whole structure with sheets of plastic, heat-welded into one giant raincoat. A flaccid solution, if ever I heard one. If the completion of the framework was the zenith of Francis’ longing to be united with the divine and the deathless, covering it all with plastic represented the sunset of his career as a builder, at least as far as I was concerned. This is where I’ll start to sound like an old aunty. I think they took on too much. It wasn’t that they were neglectful as parents. But they might have found a way of enjoying you more, making you the centre of their life instead of all this building and business. Perhaps this is me, father of Olivia, speaking from the privileged position of comfortable semiretirement. Perhaps it’s always that way with young parents, trying to make their way in the world. I guess you can be the judge of that. But let no one tell you we weren’t materialistic. All the ex-hippies and alternatives that I know were obsessed with ‘getting it all together’, which inevitably meant putting a lot of effort into shelter, gardens, water supply, daily living. Material things. I was no exception. I decided to look for a place to settle around the Upper Blackwood. Maybe if I built a place, I’d be able to attract all the other things that were missing from my life. I didn’t want a dome and I certainly didn’t want a wife but I was interested in the idea of constructing a dwelling intuitively, one that challenged the building codes and used recycled materials in a creative way. Did I know anything about building? I thought I did, growing up as I did surrounded by hardware, watching my father sort and price all those nails and screws and bolts and hinges. I wanted to make something, as if the Wallymacher clan was somehow going to evolve by joining all those components together into one solid structure. I was also presented with an opportunity to do something that wasn’t really countercultural but arose from a simple childhood wish: to buy a working horse. The Arabs say that the horse was bestowed on

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man as a supreme mark of God’s favour; in fact it was the horse that saved man from being enslaved by all the other beasts, which were clearly faster and stronger. More poetically, God was said to have created the horse from the wind, as he created Adam from clay. The horses I worked with at Ascot were thoroughbreds, every one of them. They were worth a fortune and they could all of them run like the wind. The trouble was they’d been bred for a sport that was rotten with privilege and corruption. The whole system was so tainted with man’s baseness that the animals at the heart of it, those beautiful creatures, were often treated badly and, when their racing life was over, discarded like broken toys. I wanted a horse I could get to know, one that would help me build and grow old with me. Now that I was caretaking for Francis, I had the opportunity I needed. I put it around that I was after a Clydesdale, the breed that built Australia. I knew them to be superlative working horses, capable of swift movement either walking or trotting. They could plough, move loads or draw a cart and still look like circus performers with those amazing feathered feet of theirs. I contacted a mate from Ascot who knew a farmer from Kojunup who might have the horse I was after. Ralph had an impeccable pedigree, was generally pleasant and stood nineteen hands high, which made him one of the biggest nags in Australia. He’d been working a Heritage Ride over east and I sensed that he was as ready for a change as I was. I helped load him into a king-size horse float and we headed off for Bridgetown, Ralph with his head up into the breeze and me looking nervously behind to reassure myself I wasn’t dreaming. My heart was full, I felt complete. When we unloaded him at Xanadu, he took the apple I gave him with an appreciative grunt and then butted me right in the stomach with his big nose, just to let me know he was there. I took his halter and pulled his big boofy head down to my level so I could whisper in his ear. ‘You’re all right, Ralph. And so am I!’

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I had an idea that most of the farmers around Bridgetown would be willing to lease some of their land and allow a bloke like me a plot to build a modest shelter. Roy Haney was no exception. His father had been a soldier settler after the first war and he was well established in the area. I’d developed the habit of yarning to him at the Bridge Hotel on Friday nights. He could be dogmatic, like Karl, but we started off with a clean slate, he knowing none of my history, I knowing little of his and that made it easy to be friends. I decided that what I was after was a site where I could build a ‘studio’, with views of the Blackwood. Roy’s eastern boundary, for example. I would pay a weekly rent of fifteen dollars, including agistment for Ralph and give Roy a guarantee that I would grow no dope. I could also help him out from time to time when he needed some extra labour. He didn’t give a stuff about building permits or red tape. An additional bonus for him was that he’d see me working Ralph, something that seemed to excite him more than he could say. On top of that, he was intrigued to learn that I wanted to build on the slope. We sealed the arrangement one Saturday morning at the laminex table in his neat modern kitchen while the wife, as he called Joanna, brought scones and tea. They were a very level couple and they’d built on a level site. ‘That’s to buggery away from the track. No one’ll go near the joint,’ he said. He didn’t understand, that was exactly why I wanted to build there. I planned to use one hundred percent recycled materials, based on ideas I’d picked up from reading Grass Roots magazine and some shelters I’d seen on my travels. I’d sketched it often enough, a simple idea which involved sacrificing some live trees to act as foundations once I’d lopped off the top with a chainsaw. Then I’d measure up the distance between the stumps and cut milled jarrah bearers to size. It didn’t matter how the basic shape came out, pentagonal, a rhombus, whatever. It was the opposite of a dome, if you like. Design as you go, adapting your plan to fit the materials you have to work with. Then fill in

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the spaces as imaginatively as possible. If you need steps between the eating space and the sleeping space, so be it. The main criterion was that it had to be ultra low-cost and energy-efficient. Meanwhile, the foundations would be growing and sprouting beneath my feet. The deal done, I moved my camp from Xanadu to a rotting feed shed on the Haney’s south-eastern corner. It had a tap and a trough for Ralph and the rest I could improvise while pouring most of my energy into the new building. I unpacked and set myself up in basic gypsy style. Then I sent off a postcard to Marion to let her know where she could find me. I was sure the picture of a settled me, productively occupied, would be more appealing to her than the idea of a pathetic young man going off in search of Dharma. She might even come and visit. I was missing her white throat and her dry martinis. After a week of getting settled and fossicking for materials, I was ready to go to work on my building site and was hoping that Ralph shared this sentiment. I walked down to the feed trough late in the afternoon and banged the tin scoop on the wall until the steady ringing brought Ralph up from the bottom paddock at a lope, ready for his supper of oatcakes. Some people think Clydesdales look a bit dopey, something about the shape of the head. This one was no dope, in fact he was way ahead of most of the mammals I had known in my thirty years. I made a fuss of him, hugging his trunklike neck and kissing the coarse red hair on his cheek. ‘Ralphey boy! How is my man today? Are you settled? How do you feel about tree trunks, Ralph? And jarrah beams. Fuckin’ big lumpy ones. We’re going to learn about shifting materials. No more joy-rides for snotty tourists. Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of our lives.’ In between bouts of working and talking to my horse, I daydreamed a great journey, an odyssey involving myself, Ralph and an as yet imaginary gypsy caravan. The caravan was all painted and new and the line of pots hanging off the tailgate rattled in time to the rhythm of the

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road. I would stop wherever I pleased and old timers would talk to me about their horse-driven days and every place I camped was near a river and under a gum tree and the weather was always late spring or early autumn. Sorry Piaf, you’re probably wondering where all this is leading, but I’m trying to give you a picture of the times. It’s all coming back to me now in flickering images, black-and-white, like an old spool of film you find in someone’s garden shed. Every time I ran out of money I’d have to shelve my own project in favour of someone else’s. It was frustrating, but not unbearable. Marion would drive down every so often and I’d show her some new thing I’d discovered, like the old flax mills at Boyup Brook or a new swimming hole on the Blackwood and then she’d shout me out to dinner and we’d go home to my camp and fuck ecstatically on the armchair or outside under the stars. I remember worrying about her cries and what Mrs Haney would think. It wasn’t a bad time and yet I had a sense of searching for something more. I think I still wanted to banish that feeling of being an outsider but I had no idea where to begin. In Bridgetown one day to buy some nails, I saw this flyer outside the health food shop. PSYCHODRAMA WORKSHOP Harry Billington is running a weekend workshop in Psychodrama Easter weekend. At the Bridgetown Mechanics Institute. Participants must be functioning adequately in daily life. $75. Concessions available.

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The Reverend Harry Billington brought the methods of J L Moreno to Australia and New Zealand after completing his training at Beacon, New York. Come and experience this unique action method of healing old hurts and renegotiating your relations with the world. Contact: Francis Anstey, PO Box 73, Bridgetown.

I remember curling my lip in true Wallymacher fashion. Maybe it was the quaint language or maybe it was the idea that you could renegotiate anything with the world. I thought about it all day and then dismissed it from my mind. I’d been promising your father I’d help him get started on cladding the dome, tearing off the plastic raincoat and starting again, the next time he came down to stay at Xanadu. The next week he sent me a postcard to say he’d be there for most of October. He was hosting the psychodrama workshop, as well as participating. He had some issues he wanted to work on. Your mother wasn’t a starter, she had too much to do. Presumably, she’d already worked through all her issues. Either that, or she didn’t have any. The day Francis arrived we got stuck into the building and finished late. He’d had some windows made which would follow the path of the winter sun and as we began the task of framing them up and discussed the skin of ferrocement he was proposing to use as a seal for the whole structure, I thought he might have been calming down a bit, getting centred, getting better. I stuck around for tea, nothing elaborate, some sausages and salad as I remember. We had a drink, your father lit the fire and before long we were yarning away as usual, blisters forgotten as we watched the flame take on power and the day fade to black. After dinner I let myself drift off as

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Francis related a dream he’d had of being cooked alive in a big black pot, just like you see in those cannibal cartoons. I rallied to show I’d been listening at some level. ‘You must be thinking about putting yourself in some hot water, Francis,’ I said. ‘Not hot water,’ he said. ‘I was being warmed up, ready for action. Here, look at this.’ He pulled out a faded photocopy of an article from the Saturday Evening Post. It was all about Jacob Moreno, the founder of psychodrama. There was a picture of him hovering over one of his patients, like some kind of angelic wraith. He had a large head and hypnotic eyes. He would have been in his sixties, I guessed. A breeze came up and we moved inside the dome and lit the fuel stove. In spite of the deteriorating plastic cover, it was a cosy space, furnished with dhurries and a pair of old barber’s chairs, covered in red leather. It was funky, like the pictures in Dome Book Two. ‘What’s the big deal about this Merino guy? I don’t get it,’ I said. It was like the old days when Francis had an idea and could see it all unfolding before him while everyone else struggled to keep up. He unfolded the picture again and started slapping the cutting excitedly, sitting forward in his throne. ‘Moreno, Ben. He grew up in Vienna, and began something called the Stegreiftheater, literally the ‘theatre of spontaneity’. He got together with a lot of actors and theatre people, including Peter Lorre and Elisabeth Bergner, and they used to do this thing called ‘The Living Newspaper’. Before that, he’d worked with all kinds of people, including prostitutes and refugees, refining his ideas about groups and how they worked. Then he brought it all to America and called it psychodrama.’ ‘When was this?’ ‘The 1920s. All the immigrants were bringing something. Moreno brought his vision of a world that could rediscover spontaneity. Don’t you think that’s amazing, Ben?’

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I wasn’t sure whether it was amazing or not. I was reminded of what he’d said to me years earlier, about leading a normally extraordinary life. By now, I’d armoured myself in a sort of horsy, country persona. Your father had to work hard to overcome my natural scepticism to the point where I felt curious. We chatted away until the fuel stove cooled down. I remember your father cleaning out the firebox fastidiously, sweeping the dead coals into a steel drum. ‘Watch it,’ I cautioned him. ‘Some of them will be burning still.’ ‘That’s all right,’ he said. ‘I bury it. Good for the soil.’ The next day I enrolled in the workshop. It was to be held at the Bridgetown Mechanics Institute the coming weekend and it would prove to be another watershed in my relationship with Francis Anstey.

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16 Olivia is going through a phase of clinging to her mother and rejecting me. She won’t even talk to Piaf. This morning, when I return from my Saturday morning walk to the newsagents, I find Adele in a mood and my daughter running out of the room at the sight of me. It’s not what I would call a hero’s return. But hey, I was only gone for half an hour. I scan the news and remind myself that we’re living through the last few years of the twentieth century. Men have served their purpose. Women have changed and men haven’t. What few changes we have made don’t get reported. I finish the paper and decide to take my arse for a paddle. Once on the ski, out beyond the reef, I know what to do. I take a wave or two and return home early, way before lunch. Adele looks a bit shocked. For a man

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of regular habits like me, it’s too early. ‘I thought I’d take Olivia away camping for a few days, down to Yallingup. Give you a break, darling. Unless you want to join us, of course.’ The plan is safe. Adele hates camping. She grew up in fettlers’ camps and that’s what it reminds her of, wind and sand, deprivation, salted beef. With her, holidays need to be a king-size bed at Marriott’s or nothing. ‘What about Piaf?’ she objects. ‘She can come too. That way she’ll get to see some country and I’ll stay sane.’ The truth is, I can’t stand it when Olivia gives me the cold shoulder, so I’m thinking a couple of days in the bush with the old man will reverse the trend. The Theory of Relative Influence. All parents know about it. Piaf is incidental to the plan. Adele agrees and I go down to the shed to pack up the camping gear. For a moment I picture myself preparing the caravan I never had, catching Ralph and heading off into the blue, gypsy style. But you can’t go back and I don’t want to think about Ralph so I content myself with dusting off the tent and selecting some implements — plates, cutlery, the lamp, the butane stove — all of which I pack into milk crates in an orderly fashion before filling up the boot of the Merc. I go and rouse Piaf from her sleep-in and put the idea to her. She agrees without hesitation. Adele serves us lunch and I can see the clouds behind her eyes lifting like the end of a summer squall. We set out around Olivia’s naptime and within minutes she is nodding off, which means I can turn up the volume under Iris Dement.

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And ya know the sun’s settin’ fast And just like they say, nothing good ever lasts Go on now and kiss it goodbye But hold on to your lover ’cause your heart’s bound to die Go on now and say goodbye to our town, to our town Can’t you see the sun’s settin’ down on our town, on our town? Goodnight. ‘I love music, it’s a fast track to the soul,’ I say. ‘It’s a sad song,’ says Piaf. ‘It’s how I felt when I left Sydney and my mother saw me off and made a big fuss and I thought, well, that’s the end of our town or at least the end of what Sydney means to me. By the time I ever get back there, it won’t be the same, not for me, not for Ruth.’ ‘You call her Ruth?’ ‘Always.’ ‘That’s a relief. I can stop saying ‘your mother’ on the tapes.’ ‘Whatever. It’s fine Ben. I appreciate all your work. And this is great.’ We’re passing Lake Clifton and the trees stand out around the edge like sentinels, gnarled survivors drawing sustenance from the shimmering flood plain. ‘I suppose Francis felt something like that when he took off in search of Moreno,’ says Piaf. ‘Like what?’ ‘Like he was leaving our town. That’s what Perth was, I guess. Our town?’ At Busselton, Olivia wakes up and demands hot chips.

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We park under some pine trees and walk across the road to the local grease pit. Inside we find a cosy booth, where Olivia can tread all over me. I order chips and pink lemonade for her, a tofu burger and coffee for me. Olivia is an additives freak and ends up with sugar, tomato sauce, salt and vinegar all dressing up her chips. She eats two of them and asks me to feed her. This is a good sign. Her mother fixation has been suspended. I’m absently stuffing chips down Olivia’s gob and looking at Piaf. Maybe the point of taking her on is to tinker a little, open out the tight little triangle Adele and Olivia and I have built together. We’re strapped in as tightly as the struts were on Francis’ dome, all depending on each other to realise the overall shape we’re creating. ‘Wallymack! Horse and cart! Look!’ I can’t get her to call me Dad. Someone in Busselton has got hold of a Clydesdale and an old brewery wagon and is carting people around the beachfront on joy-rides. I’m glad I saved Ralph from that, if nothing else. ‘Come on Olive Oyl,’ I say. ‘Finish your chips.’ ‘Had enough,’ she says, and pushes the plate so hard it catches on the tablecloth and spills the lot. ‘OLIVIA!’ ‘I wanna ride. I wanna ride on the horse. I want mummy. I wanna go home.’ Piaf picks her up with surprising force and slings her over her shoulder, quelling all resistance while I pay the bill. ‘I wanna pay the lady,’ Olivia wails, but Piaf has her number and is whisking her across the road, making a game of it, so by the time we all get in the car she’s giggling and wants Piaf to sit in the back seat with her. At Yallingup, I head for the camping grounds and find

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us a spot under some scribbly gums, in the lee of a grassed-over dune. Piaf walks down to look at the surf while Olivia helps me unpack the tent and pitch it, in the way an elephant might help a man building a ship in a bottle. The fourth time she trips over the guy rope and pulls the peg out of the sandy ground, I am gruff with her, never a good idea with Olivia at feeding time. She throws a huge paddy, causing the neighbours to stand up out of their webbed camp chairs and scratch their bums and look at me as if I’m a child abuser. I set up the bedding as fast as I can, grab Piaf and we all head down to the Lobster Pot for dinner. Olivia drags Piaf off to the playground, which leaves me free to sit at the cocktail bar and unwind a bit while the chef attends to our order: fish and chips for Olivia, grilled snapper for Piaf and marron for me. ‘She’s a lovely child, Ben,’ says Piaf as we watch her tuck into her meal. ‘What was it like, you know, coming late to fathering.’ ‘Thereby hangs a tale,’ I reply, ‘and I’ll tell you shortly.’ Olivia pushes her plate away. ‘Had enough,’ she announces. ‘I wanna watch Peter Pan, Ben. PETER PAN!’ Her favourite and only video. Piaf walks her over to the kids area, which has a telly tuned to ‘Saturday Night Live’. That does the trick and Piaf is released to hear ‘Olivia’, the opera, starring Adele’s sister, Cazna Yang, Harry Yang the horrible, plus sundry low-life in the chorus. ‘Her name sounds exotic, but it’s actually Anzac (the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps), reversed. Can you believe that? Harry Yang, that’s Adele’s father, has a lot to answer for really, a lot more than his god-awful choice of names.’ ‘My wife grew up in fettlers’ camps on the Trans line

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out beyond Kalgoorlie. When she escaped and went to Perth and enrolled in Miss Hale’s Secretarial School for Girls, it was Cazna that took the brunt of Harry Yang’s mad aggression. With no big sister to look out for her, Cazna succumbed to all the vices that save a person from looking too clearly at their own reality.’ ‘I’m sure you’ve known people like Caz. In and out of rehabs since she was eighteen, too many abortions, toughened up on the streets in a way that makes her seriously unemployable. Then she met Gaby, a mad Hungarian who promised her everything, became her pimp and very nearly murdered her when she announced she was pregnant with Olivia and planning to keep her. In the end she just caved in, packed a few things, caught the train down from Kal and booked herself into a private hospital at our expense, on the understanding that we would bring up Olivia as ours and she would be the fondest aunt around whenever she could manage it. That was three years ago.’ Piaf was shaking her head, like most people who hear the opera for the first time. ‘Olivia arrived with those same dark ringlets, the same cherubic expression and her father’s fleshy mouth. We both fell for her immediately and as Adele loves to say, but not when Cazna’s around, she didn’t even suffer stretch marks.’ ‘What I love about her is the way she thinks all of life is just a big game and all things in it are made for her enjoyment,’ says Piaf. I’m about to ponder how a foetus maintains that belief in the womb of a troubled soul like Cazna, when I see the star of the show making her way back to our table, collecting greetings and tributes along the way.

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After coffee, we head home in a fine mood. I dig out Olivia’s pyjamas and get her settled and Piaf reads Where’s Spot? to her by the light of the candle lantern and then pats her until she’s asleep. I snuff the candle and zip up the door and we both walk up onto the dune where we can see the sky. The Way is pumping out watts like there’s no tomorrow and the Cross is a kite you could ride as far as China. ‘What you said about our town today. And Francis leaving. Do you want to know?’ I say. She nods next to me, a frail component of a flickering universe. ‘I heard his leaving was quite sudden. I don’t know what Ruth told you. Someone had told him that Moreno was dying and he more or less packed up his things the same day and left. Or that’s what I heard. I wasn’t around.’ ‘Where were you? I thought you were living down at Xanadu.’ She gives a little snort and because I don’t know her very well, it’s hard to know if she’s disagreeing, if she has a different version of events, or whether the whole notion of calling a place Xanadu is fucked, ditto the counterculture, ditto a whole generation of post-Woodstock counterfeit hippies. I decide not to get into versions, particularly since I haven’t reached that part of the story on tape yet and who knows how that’ll come out? ‘I was attending to my religious obligations.’ ‘You’re a dark horse, Wallymacher.’ In the morning, we pack up the tent with the sort of energy you get from a change of scene. Olivia is loudly instructing me in how to fold up the tent poles while Piaf cleans out the car.

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‘You’re not the boss of the world you know, Olivia,’ I suggest. ‘Who is, Ben?’ says Piaf. Good question, Piaf. I have no idea. By 8.30 we’re on the road, humming up the highway and singing along with John Williamson, Olivia’s favourite. Dingo, dingo, why you get so mad? Dingo, dingo, why you get so mad? Guard dog of the desert Keeping the roos from eating it all away. ‘That was my role in what was left of our family after Francis left,’ says Piaf when the track ends. ‘Again,’ screams Olivia. ‘Play it again, Ben!’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘I was the guard dog of the desert. He deserted us. We became desert. Ruth went nuts. And it was my job to stop the blue roos from eating us all away.’ I don’t know how to respond to that so I rewind the tape as Olivia wants. I notice the song sounds different the second time.

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17 Session #11 The night before Hal’s workshop, I can remember lying in my gypsy bed, ‘horizontally integrating’ as I called it. Suddenly I started imagining all the possibilities a man has in life for making a fool of himself. And here I was about to pay someone so I could do it in front of a group of strangers. By the time sleep found me, I’d fought off a host of night terrors. When I awoke at dawn, I was knackered. The Mechanics Institute was pleasantly situated on the banks of the Blackwood, just out of town, and had been saved from demolition by a group of citizens who fixed it up as a meeting house. Inside the main hall, a horseshoe of chairs was half-filled with people. There were windows, no curtains, wood panels, bare floor, a comforting smell of oil polish. Someone had lit some patchouli incense in one corner. Billington was there with his clipboard, greeting people and warming himself up. At that time he was about forty-five, fit, red hair in

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a crew cut. If we were the counterculture, he was the counter-counterculture. He looked like a boxer, the way he moved on his toes, adjusting the chairs, being affable and keeping one eye on something bigger, something I hadn’t yet learned to see. I dropped gratefully into the empty chair next to your father. I noticed that Ruth was absent. There were a couple of familiar faces, Juliette from the environment centre and Byron Underwood, the artist that Marion had been so impressed with and me less so. The horseshoe was filling rapidly and people were coughing and turning towards the ‘stage’, the open space at the top, waiting for Billington to sit there, smiling and nodding, ready to begin. I counted the places — thirty-three, not counting Billington. At one-hundred-and-twentyfive dollars each, that made over four thousand dollars gross for the weekend. Not bad, I thought. I’m in the wrong business. ‘Let’s begin,’ said the Reverend Harry. ‘Let’s make a start.’ He was wearing a T-shirt with Keep Breathing! printed on it. ‘I’d like to meet with anyone who hasn’t finalised their account at morning tea. We need to get that stuff out of the way before we get any further into the weekend.’ Someone coughed and Billington paused. ‘Groups are places of healing,’ he continued. He was speaking quietly, his voice soothing and honeyed. ‘We come to the group to be cured of our neuroses, our hang-ups. In the group, we recognise our sisters, our brothers, our parents. This work we do, which Moreno called psychodrama, invites us to work with the ghosts of those people, our original circle. It also works in the here-and-now. Look around you and say something to another person in the group. Say it out loud, so everyone can hear. Let us encounter one another, fully.’ He pulled out a sheet of paper from his shirt pocket and began to read: A meeting of two: eye to eye, face to face. And when you are near I will tear your eyes out

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And place them instead of mine, And you will tear my eyes out And will place them instead of yours, And then I will look at you with your eyes, And you will look at me with mine. I could feel the silence and knew it would be a long morning. I thought of my sisters, each one a Wallymacher to the bones: big, kind and judgemental. They’d both been appalled when I turned my back on college and the career my father had planned for me. They’d clucked and tutted and turned away from me, as though looking at my life might subvert their own. I looked across at your father and wondered what was going on with him. On the face of things, he seemed to have everything: a great job, plenty of time, a beautiful wife, a precious daughter. But with Francis, there was always something cooking just below the surface. He was staring at Juliette, one of the greenies who’d moved down here from Perth. She was sitting up on the right-hand prong of the horseshoe next to the Reverend Hal. ‘You scare me, Juliette,’ he said, his voice ringing out across the room. The group seemed to exhale as one. ‘What is it that scares you, Francis?’ said Billington. ‘List the things you see in Juliette that scare you.’ ‘First there’s the red hair. All that fire!’ said Francis. ‘And her body.’ ‘Make it personal,’ said Billington. ‘Say “your body”.’ ‘Your body, particularly your thighs. And the way your left eyebrow goes up and you seem to be smiling disdainfully. That’s it. I hate that smile.’ ‘So there’s some hate and some fear. What else is there?’ ‘I don’t know. Something …’ ‘Why don’t you stand up and come and have a closer look. That’s it.’ Billington steered your father over to where Juliette was now tucking

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her chin down and folding her arms against the expected assault. What is this, I thought? She’s all right. Leave her alone. ‘Use this chair. Sit in front of her, here. Look don’t squint. Let her in. What else is there?’ Francis seemed to be drowning in Juliette’s green eyes and the swell of her breasts under a peasant shirt. She did have big, generous thighs, I thought. I’d seen her in shorts down at the environment centre and she’d looked a little Amazonian for my tastes, but today she was wrapped in a Balinese sarong with only her ankles showing above runners. Tanned ankles. ‘Keep eye contact. Tell her what else,’ said Billington. ‘I want to fuck you,’ he said. He didn’t sound very convincing, as though he was saying it as an experiment, trying it on like a new pair of shoes. Of course he’d say that, I thought. He’s been goaded into it. ‘Everyone stand up,’ roared Billington. Obediently, we all stood, chairs pushed back, ready. ‘Pair off! Face your partner. Look your partner in the eye. Use your pelvis. Plant your feet on the ground. Now say it, any way you want. I want to fuck you. I WANT TO FUCK YOU!’ There was no time to think. On our own, we might have found something nice to say, something with the protective aura of mainstream culture. This seemed to be reaching down into your gut and dragging out the most primal thing there was. Is this what your father had meant when he said he wanted to live in an atmosphere of ordinary madness? The room echoed with what sounded like an exordial chant, the first mating call. Juliette’s voice rose above the rest and I could see her chest heaving as she stood there, taking her turn. Your father was red-faced, he’d started a grassfire and now it was out of control. The lusty shouting died away and people turned towards Hal with looks of rage and lust and serenity. ‘Sit down on the floor with your partner and tell him or her of your experience. Take three minutes each.’

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My partner was Tom, a young man with a ponytail and a quiet voice. I was actually a lot more interested in Francis and Juliette than anything Tom had to say. I’m sure neither of us had ever faced another man in a public place, thrusting our pelvises into space and shouting ‘I want to fuck you’. Anyhow, what was the point of it, I wanted to say. In later years, I’d know enough to challenge these insults. At the time, it seemed all right to indulge in some small talk about rock singers and how they did the same thing in a more permissive environment. It’s amazing how you can bullshit when you have to. Some other part of me was keeping an ear out for how Francis was going. There he was in the middle with a very pumped up Juliette. He seemed to be apologising. She was shaking her head, apparently in disbelief. I heard Francis say fairly emphatically ‘I didn’t mean it, I didn’t SAY that!’ Juliette’s wail came out loud, thin and keening, a sound to set your teeth tingling. Billington came and put his hand on her shoulder and she sobbed more quietly, the tears streaking her face and dropping from her chin like tiny, transparent pearls.

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18 Piaf is pregnant. What is this, a Victorian novel? Fortunately, everyone is remaining calm. Piaf says that at least it proves she’s fertile, but that she’ll terminate as long as the foetus is less than twelve weeks old. Modern young women are well educated about such things. ‘I’m just an organism, taken over by a single-minded little invader!’ she says to me in the yard one morning, as she follows me around, smelling every bloom in sight. ‘All I seem to care about is eating and sleeping. If I seem all vague and hormonal, blame the invader.’ If anything, Piaf seems to have mellowed out into a mood of west coast nonchalance that would be dangerous if it weren’t for her steely interior, something I’ve noticed in the one or two minor skirmishes we’ve had about household chores. I tried to palm off the task of sweeping the yard and she complained of calluses a quarter way

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through the task. I pointed out that from a martial arts perspective etc. … and she cut me off with a flash of her wise old eyes and a shoulder the temperature of Helsinki. Billington would’ve said she had an ‘authority issue’ and blamed it on the absence of a male parent from an early age. I tend to blame it on feminism, not the heroic early variety but the modern glossy sort, as packaged by Dolly and Cosmopolitan and all the rest. I talk about it with Adele one night after we’re safely tucked into our loft bed, with Piaf in the main house, possibly jawing with the Korean couple or abed herself. ‘It’s not that she’s rude, just a bit abrupt,’ I say. ‘At times.’ ‘Did you order the economy bacon pack? We’ve got that English family coming in on Friday,’ says Adele. ‘Of course, maybe it’s a cultural thing. The Jews, you know? Her mother was a straightshooter as well, I seem to remember.’ ‘I won’t be around next Monday, Ben. And Piaf is having her procedure. Can you take Olivia to playgroup?’ ‘What do you mean, procedure? She’s having an abortion, right? The big A!’ ‘Don’t be so gross, Ben.’ ‘I hate playgroup.’ ‘All right, you can play with her somewhere else. Just do it, all right?’ ‘What will you be doing, Adele?’ ‘I’ve got some business to do.’ ‘What sort of business?’ ‘Secret women’s business. I’m going along with Piaf to hold her hand.’ ‘Would you describe yourself as a feminist, Adele?’ Monday morning turns out to be demanding. Piaf’s

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appointment is early, so straight after breakfast I take Olivia down to Bather’s Beach and watch her enjoying the ‘installation’ there, an arty rendering of the old pier with different levels and planks for kids to play on. I wonder how much they paid the genius artist who produced this splinter factory with a view. After an hour of this, we go to the library and dig our heels into the jigsaw section. Olivia spies a friend from kindy and they do all the same jigsaws over again while I catch up with the newspaper. Next stop is the Aquatic Centre, a teeming carnival of waterspouts, whirlpools, slides and spas, all coated in brightly coloured plastic, a genuine kid’s paradise. Olivia can spend hours here, happily engrossed in water play. Today, she’s in the shallow end for five minutes before limping over, an embarrassed look on her face. ‘I’ve done a poo, Ben,’ she wails. This is the everyday reality of child rearing. She’s toilet-trained, but she’s forgotten to go in all the excitement of the moment. I walk her over to the men’s and clean her up. There’s a sign that says For the privacy of men, girls over six should not enter the change room. I’m over fifty-four and I’m doing what I should have been doing twenty years ago. Soon enough I’ll be following the sign at our local Vet: Old Dogs and Wheelchairs Use the Ramp at Rear. By 11.30, Olivia is waterlogged and I’m tense. We drive home in silence, no word games today. Out in the courtyard Piaf and Adele are sitting under the jacaranda, feet up and sharing a pot of tea. They look like sisters. I grab Olivia and walk stiffly over and drop her at Adele’s feet. ‘Here’s your kid, safe and sound,’ I say. Then I stalk off down to the shed where I keep my ski, throw it in the

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back seat of the Merc with the nose sticking out of the sunroof and head for Swanbourne. Out in the great blue forgiveness of the ocean, I begin to breathe properly, calming myself down, paddling at the same time, wondering what I can do with this childishness that I’ve rediscovered since Olivia came along. I thought parenting would bring out the best in me and instead it often seems to do the opposite, reducing me to an angry jellyfish instead of the silent lion that is my ideal self. A roller rears up behind me and I dig the paddle in, sharp power strokes to lift the dead weight of the ski and give us some chance of cracking the wave. The mass of water moves under me, the ski teeters on the top and I manage to pull it down onto the face of the wave and lean back for the ride, keeping the paddle ready to change direction or increase speed as necessary. The wave breaks around me and the ski tries to slew left. I dig the paddle into the right, against the rush of foam, and the craft comes around like a tired horse. I ride out the spent energy of the wave into shallow water, then spin around for another run. It’s midsummer but the air here is as crisp as an apple. There’s an offshore breeze and a steady swell rolling in over the reef, the spray peeling off the peaks like sweat. I paddle out, digging in hard and feeling the tail of the ski bounce and slap back down on the other side of a sixfooter. I’m burning adrenaline and not thinking at all, simply surfing the way Francis and I learned to surf when we first hit Denmark on a south-west family holiday, impressionable and ready to learn. Francis was more of a swimmer but I loved the idea of being on top of the waves where you can see, hurling yourself against whatever Hughie, the god of the ocean,

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sends your way. You make it out the back, riding the swell and waiting until you have the courage to ride a wave back to shore. I learned to paddle twelve-foot plywood surf skis that performed like locomotives: you picked your track and down you’d go in a torrent of foam and flailing paddle, no corrections possible on those beasts. But what am I going to do with the flood of my own emotions? Some people have gurus they think about, or a meditation practice. Even God. I’ve got Harry Billington, a good man, a human with failings, but one who earnestly tries to work with what’s before him. I have no idea what he’s up to these days but I see him now, as the tide moves beneath me like a whale. We’re both in the kitchen at the Mechanics Institute and I’ve just said something to him about the last session and he laughs and speaks in his big booming scout-leader’s voice: ‘You’ve got a red aura, Wallymacher. That’s what you’ve got. It’s crackling and spitting around your head right now. Can you feel it? Can you feel it?’ And he laughs as we wash out our coffee cups and walk off together to the next session. If I’d had horns and a tail I’m sure he’d have affirmed I was Satan in exactly the same way, lightly, with acceptance. Acceptance was Billington’s secret, not a new thing, as old as Europe, but it was Billington’s capacity for love and forgiveness and acceptance — all those sucky seventies things — which gave him his integrity. I hope Olivia meets someone half as inspiring in her lifetime. And Piaf. Maybe she should meet him, not just rely on my version of the man who turned her father’s head around. I catch the next wave in and it shoots me out in front of the break, holds me there for a moment like a puny

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swallow, and then buries me in foam and turbulence. There’s no way I can hold on so I surrender, shooting sideways ’til the craft catches on a cross-current and tips over. I release the safety belt and keep hold of the paddle. It’s my lifeline back to mother ski. We’re goin’ down the mine! I flip off the ski into the roaring soup, my body curled into a tight ball to protect my neck. After a lot of carry-on, the wave abates and I’m able to re-mount and paddle into the beach through a gap in the reef.

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19 Session #12 If you try to tell people about the workshop scene, you quickly discover that they don’t want to know. They roll their eyes, they shuffle their feet; pretty much like Ralph when he’d get spooked by a snake or a rabbit. So why am I trying to tell you about Billington and your father and Juliette and me and the others, chasing the genie of spontaneity all those years ago in a remote hamlet in the antipodes? Perhaps we were the puritans of the human potential movement, bringing our boats into shore and colonising the frontiers of our own awareness. Or perhaps we were having ourselves on. Imagine for yourself: Easter Saturday, 1974. Outside, normal tourists and townsfolk were doing normal things in the normal sunshine. Inside the Mechanics Institute we were all at work, struggling with our demons, getting pissed off, feeling sick. It was like a casualty ward in there, with Billington the orderly administering a transfusion of insight,

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a drip of kindness, a massive infusion of truth — whatever the situation demanded. He began the evening session in a playful mood. He directed the group to lie down on the floor, face up and forming a circle, such that each person’s head was on the stomach of another person. Then the first person goes: ha! The second person follows with ha! ha! And so on, until the group breaks into uncontrollable mirth. You try it, Piaf. See if you can keep a straight face. I ended up being the cushion for Francis and in turn was cushioned by Cassandra, Byron’s wife. I could feel that she had the most delicious solar plexus, full of scents and suggestions and ripples and rills, combined with a musical laugh. My strongest urge was to turn my head and bury it in her soft flesh or under the Indian cotton skirt she was wearing. I resisted. We kept on playing until Billington called a halt. ‘Sit up and tell your partner what you would like to work on tonight and what might get in the way.’ Francis’ giggles trailed off into sadness as he said that all he could think about was how he would let you down if his marriage failed. And yet he and Ruth were becoming estranged and he felt despairing about any future with her. As his partner, I listened gamely and gave him back the gist of it, as I’d trained myself to do in life. If nothing else, reflective listening had always proved to be a great device for staying out of trouble. But it didn’t suit your father. He leapt to his feet and pointed at me as if I’d just knifed him in the ribs. ‘Don’t do your technique on me, you bastard. This isn’t an exercise. THIS IS THE REAL THING!’ I found this offensive and hysterical. As well as being out of order, he hadn’t even listened to me, his partner and old mate. Billington shooed everyone off the floor and grabbed Francis by the hand. I walked back and sat next to Cassandra, who seemed to see the pickle I was in and

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reached over and held my hand for a few moments. Her fingers were long and brown and elegant and as they laced through mine, I felt as happy as a cocky in a pine tree. Billington had taken a firm hold of Francis and was standing at the top of the horseshoe, on the stage. ‘So you’re pretty warmed up already, Francis. How warmed up would you say you were, on a scale of zero to a hundred?’ ‘A hundred-and-twenty!’ The group, still tickled by the ha-ha exercise, found this funny. Billington just waited for the twitters and chuckles to die away, like a bushman waiting for the last kookaburra to finish its song. ‘Well if you’re that warmed up, it must be something that’s giving you a lot of trouble in your life. Does that something have a name?’ ‘Ruth. It’s Ruth, my wife.’ Francis was quieter now, looking out at the group the way a goldfish looks at you from the wrong side of a fish-tank. ‘Pick someone to be Ruth.’ He picked Dulcie, an Italo-Australian who worked in the Post Office in Bridgetown. She was short and dark with a strong face and no-nonsense attitude. She stood to one side, waiting for more direction. ‘Who else is involved in this?’ ‘Piaf. My daughter.’ ‘Pick someone to be her.’ ‘Umm … Cassandra could do it. Will you?’ Cassandra walked out and stood next to her stage mother, ready to play you. I guess in real life, you were about two-and-a-bit. ‘You might need a bit of support. Have you got a brother or a mate who could be with you while you explore this issue?’ ‘I don’t feel close to any men, except … Wallymacher. Will you do it?’ I walked out, still feeling a bit angry, but glad to be chosen, in a perverse way. I thought of himself as an activist and I wanted to have a go out on the stage and get my money’s worth. Also, I remember

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drawing some sort of glee that it was your father, not me, in the spotlight. Some kind of revenge for the backyard theatre, you could say. ‘Let’s go to a scene where we can explore the source of your sadness, Francis. What will the scene be? Where does it take place? I want you to set it up, the way it was.’ ‘It’s sort of in the future,’ he said. ‘Is that all right?’ ‘Of course. Set up the house where this future scene will take place.’ Francis did just that, spending a lot of time describing the living room and hallway of the house he and your mother had recently bought in Shenton Park. They’d moved out of Mount Lawley and found a house of their own, a house made of stone rubble. It worked well at the turn of the century. Forms were erected, rubble was thrown between the forms. The whole lot pasted together with a slurry. It worked well for about fifty years and then began to deteriorate. There was no damp course and the plaster was impossible to restore. Pictures fell from the walls like anvils. Francis said he never believed in that house, once the pictures began to drop. ‘Now stand over there and be your wife, Ruth. Are you divorced yet?’ ‘No, but I’m in the process of leaving her. This is how I imagine it will be.’ ‘All right, you’re going to do this first scene in surplus reality. That’s fine. Be her. What is she doing in this scene?’ ‘She is standing … over here, with Piaf.’ ‘How old is Piaf?’ ‘She’s only three.’ At this, your father began to sob. Billington just kept going. ‘Speak as your wife. What is she saying?’ Francis walked over and took up a position in his imagined living room. His expression changed from grief to a hard, assertive look. ‘What are you doing, Francis. What’s taking so long? We’re waiting to say goodbye to you.’ ‘And where are you when she is saying this?’

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‘I’m upstairs in my study, trying to decide what books to take with me.’ ‘Are you going on a journey?’ ‘You might say that.’ This came out ruefully. ‘A very long journey.’ ‘Take up your position upstairs and reply to your wife. Dulcie, you stand here as Ruth and reply.’ ‘I’ll be down in a minute! Can’t you ease up a bit? I’m just trying to decide on what books to take. I won’t be around much longer you know.’ Dulcie hesitated and then came back: ‘Your wife and your daughter are waiting to say goodbye to you forever. Hurry up!’ There was a titter from the group. In the Billington method, the group remains as witness to the protagonist’s drama. They represent reality, the rest of the world. ‘This is NOT FUNNY,’ thundered Billington. ‘This man is about to leave his family. Did the auxiliary get that about right? Good. Well done. Reply to your wife, Francis.’ ‘I’m coming.’ ‘Now reverse roles and be your daughter. Cassandra, you be Francis and listen for Piaf’s lines and how she speaks.’ ‘Where is Daddy going, Mama?’ ‘All right, now everyone in their place and take up the action from there. Go!’ ‘All right, I’m ready. I’ve got everything I want in my backpack and I’ll be back on the weekend for the tea chests.’ ‘Your father is leaving us, Piaf. He is crazy, this man.’ ‘Don’t do this to me, Ruth. Don’t do it to Piaf. Look at her.’ ‘Where is Daddy going, Mama?’ It was the saddest thing I had ever seen. And it may as well have been me. I gave up my superior attitude and watched, agape. There was Cassandra playing you, just with the look on her face and a few words and there was Dulcie being the formidable Jewish momma and there was

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your father, walking around in a trance. Then Billington turned up the heat a bit. ‘Choose someone in the group to be your backpack!’ Francis picked Tony, a chubby forty-year-old from out of town. ‘Do the scene with the backpack on.’ Tony draped himself over Francis’ back and dragged his feet while Francis repeated his entrance. ‘Don’t do this to me, Ruth. Look at Piaf!’ ‘You’re doing it to yourself, you idiot! Look at you. You look ridiculous with that great big pack. You look like … like a BUM!’ ‘What’s the big bag for, Daddy? Where are you going?’ ‘I have to go away and lead a different kind of life, darling.’ ‘Great work. Now go and be Piaf. She wants to know where her daddy’s going.’ Francis walked over to your place and left his backpack slumped in his spot. Cassandra stepped aside for him. He was really bawling now, along with me and half of the people in the group. In your place he said: ‘I don’t understand, Papa. Why have you packed up all your things? You can stay here. We won’t hurt you.’ It was too much for him. He pitched forward onto his knees and sobbed into his hands. His glasses were misting up and he looked done in. Was this some kind of sadism on Billington’s part? Now I wanted it to be over. Billington stood his ground, bouncing on the balls of his feet. ‘Address your rucksack. Tell your rucksack what’s going on. No one else in this system seems to understand you! The rest of the auxiliaries: return to your place on the stage.’ Your father turned around in a daze and started talking softly to Tony. ‘I want you to follow me wherever I go. You are all I have. You contain my poetry, my favourite books, my most comfortable clothes, my most personal and portable possessions. You are my freedom. You encourage me to keep moving, not to sit down and grow old and rot in sameness.’

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‘Auxiliaries! Respond in turn, starting with you, rucksack.’ ‘I will be your companion,’ said Tony, moving back behind Francis and locking onto his shoulders. ‘Wherever you go, I will follow. I will try to protect your possessions from the weather and from thieves. I must warn you, though: I am not bottomless and I cannot guarantee to sustain you. You may have to put me down in order to work and feed yourself.’ ‘Put it down, Papa. Put it down. It will only make you slow. Stay with us, you’re safe here. We will feed and protect you.’ ‘My husband has gone crazy. You will miss Piaf and me, Francis. And you can never come back. If you walk out that door, there will be no more chances. This is it.’ Francis walked over to you, dragging his burden. He embraced you once, then moved in front of his wife, his hands outstretched in a futile, empty gesture. It didn’t seem like a play any more, it seemed real. Francis was crying still. Ruth had her arms folded in defence. Francis turned and walked off stage without a word, staggering a little as the rucksack exerted its full weight on the man. ‘Auxiliaries, return to your seats, except Ben. Excellent work, all of you.’ I stood waiting, no idea of my function. I was amazed at how polished we’d become. Some of these players had doubtless done it before, but considering all the business there was to get through on stage … I was suddenly aware of how vulnerable we both were, me and your father, standing out there in front of all these people, supposed to carry on as directed. What did I really know about the Reverend Hal, apart from a few stories around Francis’ fire? Reverend Hal, but revered by whom? Ordained by which church? Qualified at which place of learning? As if sensing my doubts, he walked over to me and put a warm hand on my neck. I could hear him breathing and smell the sweat on him. He seemed to be working hard. Then he moved next to the protagonist.

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‘Well here you are, Francis. You’re out in the world, you’ve left your family behind. Who is this before you?’ Francis looked at me and dropped back at the same time peering out from behind his glasses. He looked like a man who’d been to the far side of the River Styx. He laughed in a brittle sort of way. ‘You look like the Buddha, and I’ve met you on the road. Should I kill you, like Sheldon Kopp says?’ ‘Who is he really?’ ‘The big brother I never had.’ ‘Tell him what you want from him.’ ‘Safety. Protection.’ ‘Tell him.’ ‘I want you to protect me. Will you?’ Acting’s wasn’t really my thing. I felt clumsy and out of place, the way I’d always felt when Francis was acting. I decided to go with my gut feeling. ‘No, I won’t.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Because I’ve got a life of my own to lead. You might slow me down.’ ‘Yeah … I’ve just been carrying a rucksack and that was a hell of a burden. And I thought it was supposed to be liberating. Well … if you won’t save me, what will I do?’ ‘Start again.’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Start again. You’ve just thrown away something that took some time to build. Now you’ll have to start again.’ ‘Why should I?’ ‘Because if you’re not building, you’ll go backwards.’ Billington was chuckling, fuck knows why. I was running out of steam. ‘Thankyou, Ben. You may resume your seat. Good work.’ Francis was as surprised as I was at the sudden shift. I went back

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and sat next to Cassandra. Once again, I received a squeeze of the hand and a warm look of encouragement. It was great to be on friendly terms with an attractive woman and not to be obsessed with making a move on her. ‘Francis, I want you to pick someone to be your father.’ Francis’ drama was about to take a spin into the past. I sat up and tuned in. Francis was looking around the group for the right person and came to a man called Arturo, a therapist from Adelaide. Billington did the usual role reversals to begin with. Headmaster Anstey had as little tolerance for his son’s creative bent as I remembered. Your father went back to one of the backyard skits, how his father had watched it performed and then demanded to know who wrote it. Francis of course had been too embarrassed to admit that he was the playwright. ‘How many others in the group have trouble with a critical parent?’ said Billington. ‘Think about how much you’ve taken the critical parent inside, as part of your own intra-psychic dynamic!’ There was general nodding and affirming, including a loud grunt from me. It was getting late, people were slumping down in their chairs. The Bridgetown evening was cooling off. I’d have been quite happy to lie on one of the beanbags and cuddle up with Cassandra. Francis went on to the building of the dome and how he imagined his father would respond if he’d been there. I wasn’t sure whether Arturo was acting or being himself, but he did a great job of being an insensitive, rigid, pedantic old git. It seemed impossible that father and son could be of the same blood, so different was their approach. When they arrived at the part of the story where Francis incorrectly assembles the dome, Billington let it rip. ‘All right!’ Billington said. ‘We want people to be struts. Three different piles of struts, shorts over here, mediums, longs. That’s it. Keep going Francis. Don’t drift off. Show us how you cocked it up!’ Billington seemed to have the ability to appreciate whatever was happening for the protagonist. He didn’t adopt the long face of the

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social worker, finding misery in all of life’s twists and turns. Not that he was without empathy … but he was unstinting in his enjoyment of his work. That sums up the edge he was working on: how to be dynamic without losing your humanity. I could see future successes founded on that same principle. Your father carefully placed people together, finding a way to link them up. At the second level, it was beginning to look like a human pyramid. Billington was trailing behind Francis as he built, whispering to the struts. Suddenly there was a loud yelp and a key strut went down on one knee. The person above followed him and the whole thing warped crazily, as we all held on against impossible tensions. ‘Address the universe, Francis. What’s happening?’ ‘I’ve stuffed it, I’m stupid, the whole thing’s a disaster.’ ‘Reverse roles! Be your father.’ ‘But he never knew about any of it,’ Francis objected. ‘That’s right. He never knew, but he really needed to know. Just like his father needed to know about his stuff-ups and to forgive him for them. Again, we’ll do this in what’s called “surplus reality”.’ As Mr Anstey, Francis walked over to where his ‘son’ had been standing and looked at the mess that had once been a dome. ‘You’ve stuffed it. You’re stupid. It’s a disaster. You’re not worth worrying about. You’re WORTHLESS!’ ‘REVERSE ROLES!’ ‘YOU’RE WORTHLESS!’ Francis slumped down onto a beanbag while Billington dismissed the auxiliaries. There was a lot of giggling and scraping while people disentangled themselves, then a peaceful moment while everyone gathered in for what had to be the climax. ‘Choose someone to be your mother.’ By some kind of weird logic, which I came to discover was usual in these settings, Francis picked Juliette. He’d been ambivalent about his feelings for her earlier and now here she was, perfectly cast by the

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same man who had rejected her earlier in the day. My mind was whirling and banging like a spin drier out of balance. ‘Respond to Francis’ father.’ Billington was leaving it to the auxiliaries to come up with the goods. ‘You shouldn’t talk to him like that, Frank. He’s sensitive and artistic. You know that. You’ll crush his spirit.’ It was perfect. There wasn’t one person who wasn’t fully involved at that moment. ‘You’re spoiling him,’ said Arturo as the dad. ‘You’ll make him into a little pansy. He has to learn to face up to his mistakes.’ ‘Come over here, darling,’ said Juliette as mum. She sat down in a second beanbag and beckoned to Francis. She was revelling in her sexual power, her thighs open to him, her arms wide. It seemed dangerous, yet somehow just right. Francis went to her like a puppet and lay down in her lap. ‘Is that how you like it, darling? Does mummy’s boy want anything? Snuggle up, that’s the way.’ The picture they made gave off a certain beauty, there was no doubt, but I resisted it with all my might. This was off, this was bordering on obscenity. It was taboo, like incest. I was clear that he was no longer part of any sort of ‘family’, just a bunch of crazies who’d given up a perfectly good long weekend to delve into things best left alone. Billington turned down the lights and left them to it. I’m sorry to say your father was enjoying himself. I was watching them in the gloom, my attention drifting, when Juliette did an incredible thing. She unbuttoned her shirt and placed one nipple in your father’s mouth. He appeared to take it quite happily and even put one hand on the side of her breast, the way babies do. Billington seemed completely unfazed by this and spent some time with Tony, who was sobbing quietly to himself. I was at the end of my rope. I gathered in my energy, preparing to explode off the floor and tear into them when Billington started whispering into a few ears around the group.

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In no time the auxiliaries had rebuilt the dome. This time the human struts were symmetrical and stayed put. He slowly returned the lights to full strength and signalled Juliette to button up. Arturo walked on as Frank, centre stage and looked squarely at his son. ‘You’ve done very well, son. I knew you could do it.’ Francis looked about ten years younger. He walked around the human dome, touching it, laughing. ‘You’re beautiful,’ he kept saying. ‘You are the whole of my universe.’ Billington led him by the hand to the place of honour, two chairs at the top of the horseshoe. Somehow he had reined it all in and brought things to what I suppose you might call a satisfying conclusion. He’d acted like a pharaoh to do it, he’d been forgiven, he’d had his way. The method seemed to depend totally on the group’s trust in its leader. I was seething with unanswered questions and challenges. But how can you challenge a pharaoh, especially when he’s just built a perfectly adequate pyramid? Some slaves may have died in the construction, but the task had been accomplished, the problem buried in its stone sarcophagus and now it was time to stand back. ‘Let’s have some sharing,’ he said. ‘Then we’ll call it a night.’ It took me a week to get over it, a week in which I spent a lot of time wandering around and looking at clouds. I didn’t want to read, I didn’t want to work and the last thing I wanted to do was visit your parents. So of course, they visited me. It was morning, a Friday perhaps. They were going into town. Would I mind looking after you? You were tired of town and you’d been pestering them to let you visit Ralph so you could feed him an apple. Would it be too much of an imposition? Of course it wasn’t and you were probably the very thing I needed to get me functioning again. We fed Ralph the apple and I taught you about grooming a horse and care of the hooves. The old Ralph was a beauty with kids. He’d probably been through hell at the hands of children in his pioneer village days, so a gentle spirit like you would be

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no problem. I set you up on a plank between two oil drums and away you went, brushing his coat till it gleamed. I wouldn’t let you do the hooves — each one was as big as your head — but you helped me to mix the varnish and watched fascinated as I dug out stones and other gunk from the old boy’s foot. As kids do, you told me lots of news about your family. Daddy and mummy were arguing a lot and it was getting worse. The other day, after the shopwork (that’s what you called it), papa had ripped off the leather vest that mummy had bought for him and burnt it. Mummy had said he was crazy — you used the Yiddish word meshuggah — and slept in the car with her baby that night. We cleaned up and made some noodle soup, your favourite. You were so innocent, it made me very sad. I found myself coming down on Francis in that judgemental, Wallymacher way — until I remembered what Billington had said about no one in the system understanding how your father thought. Like a lot of things Billington had said, that one would stay with me for a long time. It made me think about this rough place we live in, our wonderful wild Australia, and what terrible yobs we can be when we want to. I’ve never blamed Francis for going elsewhere to seek understanding, if that’s what he did. I don’t mean any disrespect to your mother. It’s this place.

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21 For the next little while, we all settle into a routine of work and talking and some play, a happy time for Piaf and a chance for Adele and me to build up the business ready for the coming year. Olivia is due to start at the local Montessori school, half a day each weekday until she’s ready for more. We mourn and celebrate this next stage of her life. Across the river, near the old bridge, is a failing pub, a place known to generations of port workers, but falling prey to competing elements such as videos, coffee shops, mechanisation on the wharves and general yuppifying of the whole area. We’ve been thinking of diversifying for some time and now seems like a good time to buy it and make it into a backpacker’s hostel. Piaf is enthusiastic and, fully revived after her ‘procedure’, proceeds to butt into every conversation I

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have with Adele on the subject, full of information on the backpacker scene in Sydney, which she seems to know well. ‘You need to aim it that little bit up-market, Ben,’ she says in her confident way. We’re sitting outside, it’s February, a humid night. All is quiet on the Olivia front following a hard day at school. ‘That’s where you don’t understand Fremantle, Piaf. This is a port, a workingman’s city. If you start bunging on airs here, you get ignored and you’ll sink beneath your own bullshit.’ ‘You’ve missed the point, Ben. Look, there are backpackers in Sydney that depend on a semi-permanent population of bums. They’re mostly British, down and out, just pissheads really. Believe me, I’ve worked in these places. These guys fill the dormitories, refuse to wash, sleep all day, party all night and draw social security.’ ‘What was your role?’ ‘Reception. Across the road — this is Bondi I’m talking about, a prime eastern suburbs tourist location — across the road was a place that targeted your moneyed backpackers: Japanese, northern European. See, the market is huge but there’s a range of incomes and spending power, depending on the exchange rate, and you have to tap into the top and the upper middle … unless you want to run a dosshouse. With this downturn in the Asian economies, you’ll be looking to the European market, Germans, Scandinavians, Italians and the better class of Brits. They know doodly-squat about your workingman’s port. They’ll be looking for a window through which they can contemplate their desert escape. When they’ve done the outback bit, they’ll be looking for a nice place to sort out their slides and party a bit.’

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She seems so fast and sure, the same way her father used to wrestle. Adele blows the whistle and calls for time out. ‘How about I make the tea? Piaf why don’t you help Ben with the dishes and then we’ll keep talking. I think you should listen up, darling. This woman has some moneymaking ideas.’ Over the washing up, I ask her about Francis, perhaps innocently, I don’t know. It just comes up. ‘The last I heard he was in some place in New York State. New Pulse or something. I write to him occasionally. He writes back.’ ‘You’re lucky. Karl died of lung cancer when I was seventeen.’ She’s unwilling to be drawn on that issue. Maybe she wishes her own father dead. Then she wouldn’t have to agonise about missing him. I can feel the cold shoulder coming up and I want to avoid that. I actually like her. She reminds me how out of touch I am with people of her generation. She was born at the dawning of the age of Aquarius. She’s the future. Maybe I should listen to her and give her the space to be overconfident and all knowing. She’ll learn. ‘How would you like a day off tomorrow, Piaf? Olivia wants to go swimming with Donna and Katrina after school, so I’ll do all that and you can have the day to yourself. If you like.’ With this she doesn’t argue.

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22 Marion decided to take a week off at the end of April, 1974. She arrived in a heavy Indian cotton dress and stylish parka but announced she was prepared to work and was keen to see Ralph in harness. She said she’d imagined the three of us labouring in the fields together and that the picture was always a big turn-on for her. She unloaded her usual array of treats, including some rich-looking heads of Mary-jane and enough imported delicacies to unbalance the balance of payments: French camembert, German pâté, Italian chocolate, South African wine. At the bottom of her basket was a book she’s thought I’d like. It was called A Guide to the Woodbutcher’s Art, by Art Boericke and Barry Shapiro and it contained a heavily ideological preface and hundreds of colour plates of owner-built houses. No plans of course. That would have run counter to the philosophy of improvisation in the

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face of an oppressive, centralised ‘them’. I thanked her and put the book on an old trunk, the nearest thing I had to a coffee table. I suspected that she was trying to improve me in some way but I let it pass. Instead of picking a fight with her along our usual battle lines, pragmatism versus aesthetics, I invited her to take a walk with me up to the building site. I called Ralph and he came too, butting Marion in the back every few steps to let her know he liked her. Up on the ridge it was a glorious morning, sunlight slanting down through the stand of radiata pine Farmer Roy had planted to hold the soil. Ralph and I had worked hard, and Marion was delighted at the way the structure, what there was of it, hugged the hill, yet promised views of the river from the high side. We walked around on the jarrah floor I’d scored from a demolition in Bridgetown and came to the stairway I’d built down to the kitchen floor, which was to be finished in sawdust and sump oil. It was cool and dark down there, with one wall cut out of the hillside and the ceiling simply the underside of the floor above. Some of the tree stump foundations were greening again and it wasn’t hard to imagine the finished result. Perhaps it wouldn’t be quite as ‘artistic’ as the perfect hippie houses in Marion’s book, but I actually believed, still do, that aesthetics and pragmatism wind around each other. It’s called architecture. ‘This is the Hill of Delights,’ I said. She looked at me for a long time and then pulled me gently down to the dirt floor. ‘Delight me!’ she commanded. And so I did, pushing her dress up around her waist and pulling down her Claremont knickers as roughly as I could. Although I

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hadn’t read him yet, I realised later that she must have been fixated on D H Lawrence. The dirtier I was, the more I smelt of saddle soap and horse sweat and raw wood, the more excited she’d become. Sometimes, her excitement would wind me up, especially after some time apart and that happened now. I was taking longer and longer strokes, drawing myself as far away from her as I could, threatening to leave her, pausing there for a second before descending again, down into her as far as I could go and feeling her soft cheeks and the dirt with my hands. She tore open the top of her dress and held her breast up for me to suckle and we both moaned while Ralph greedily tore up the soft grasses outside and stared at us through the kitchen window frame as he chomped. After lunch we smoked a joint and read for a while, sitting outside my shed on a rug and letting all the sounds of the country drift up and reach us, like smoke. Marion said she’s like to explore the area while she was here, maybe drive down to the coast, following the Blackwood. Around 5.00 we decided to go in to Bridgetown and have a beer. In the back bar of the Bridge Hotel, Marion and I racked up for pool, bought a couple of Emu Bitters and settled in for the evening. During the game, which Marion was winning, a weedy fellow with tatts and short hair placed a coin onto the edge of the felt. Would we like to play doubles with him and his mate next game? Marion looked at me for guidance. I couldn’t see why not. This was Bridgetown, not Melbourne. Bradley turned out to be from Melbourne, in fact. He’d driven across the Nullabor in his panel van and now he was thinking of staying, he liked it so much. His mate

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was called Steve. Steve didn’t have a lot to say, but Bradley was full of bonhomie, buying beers and spilling a bit more of his life story with every break in the play. Eventually the game ground to a halt when we couldn’t remember whose turn it was to take the cue. I could see Marion was a little uncomfortable but then I remembered some of her parties where I’d felt the same. She’d cope. I bought another round. ‘See the thing is,’ Bradley was saying, ‘I’m sort of stuck here at present. Me Kingswood’s done in a big end, Steve’s no help, he’s got no wheels at all, have ya mate? But we’ve got plans to set up a house painting business around here.’ Steve’s no help with what, I enquired. Marion was making desperate let’s-get-out-here motions. ‘No help getting down to Nannup. Mum sent me a parcel from Melbourne, something to set me up over here. It’s in the Post Office at Nannup. See?’ He pulled a Post Office card from his pocket. It was greasy and creased, addressed to Bradley Nimmo, Youth Hostel, Bridgetown. ‘Why didn’t she send it to Bridgetown?’ said Marion. ‘We changed our itinerary,’ said Steve, deadpan. ‘We’re going that way on Monday,’ I said. ‘I can get it.’ Bradley gave me the postcard and I folded it away, our ticket of escape. Marion carped about my gregariousness on the drive home and I remember trying to tell her how things worked in country towns, how trust and friendship were vital. They could save your life, I said. She thought Bradley was a desperate, to be avoided. I secretly agreed, but didn’t see how doing him a favour could hurt. I woke up on Sunday to find Marion dressed for work,

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the tea made and Ralph fed and watered. Since I was framing up the top storey of my cabin, I could make good use of a spare pair of hands. By the time the light started to fail, we had most of my collection of window frames in place. As we walked back down the hill and turned to look at our work, the sun picked up the one unbroken pane on the living room corner and fired it cadmium orange, a breastplate for an Aztec warrior. ‘That’s the best day we’ll ever have,’ said Marion. It sounded optimistic, the way she said it, although I would have cause to reflect again on her meaning in the coming months. Come Monday she had lost all interest in the drive to Nannup. We squabbled again about Bradley and she said she’s be damned if she was going to do him a favour and I said I’d be damned if I let him down. In the end she admitted that she was tired from our day of work and just wanted to lie about and read. ‘Take my car, Ben,’ she said. ‘I’ll cook you something special for dinner.’ That seemed all right. It was always a bit intense when we spent time together. I’d enjoy the alpine feel of the road and the change of scene. I arrived at the Post Office about 9.30 and presented myself to a man with rimless glasses and a pale face. He looked about as tired as the clock on the wall. When I handed him Bradley’s card he peered at it for a second and walked out the back without a word. I read the posters on the wall reminding me to vaccinate my children. I nodded and smiled at a young mum waiting her turn. Before the clerk returned there was a crunch of skidding gravel and the syncopated clunk of two car doors. Footsteps. Big feet. Coppers.

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‘PUT YOUR HANDS UP! DON’T MOVE!’ So now it was my turn. I’d terrorised the chemists in my day and now the unlucky chocolate wheel of karma had spun back to me. The big pink copper had a service revolver pointed at my head and the smaller brown one dragged my arms down behind my back and put the cuffs on. In the short ride to the station it dawned on me that I was about to be sent down again and that Marion and her BMW, Roy Haney, Francis, even Hal Billington could do nothing to save me. I phoned Haney and asked him to drive Marion down to Nannup Police. They gave her the keys to her car and five minutes with me. She said she’d do what she could but I could tell she’d lost faith in me, perhaps accepting the coppers story that I was dealing heroin and that it was Bradley Nimmo who was the innocent pawn. Or perhaps she was punishing me for abandoning her. I was held on remand in the Perth lockup after a spooky blind ride through the South-west in a paddy wagon. At the end of the month, I was tried in the Central Magistrates Court. The beak didn’t even look my way. Eighteen months in Fremantle. Next!

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23 One of the first things I did on my release was to call Francis. The number was dead. I found his sister Bryony easily enough, not too many Ansteys in the directory. She sounded remote. ‘He’s gone on some wild goose chase to America,’ she said. ‘Abandoned his family because some guru was dying. Moreno. He writes us strange letters. I don’t think he’ll be back.’ So that’s what psychodrama does for you, I thought. Of all the time I’d spent thinking while I was inside, at least thirty percent would have been about that bloody workshop and all the things I didn’t say or do. It was all locked in my mind, frozen in time. I decided that Billington had some accounting to do, Billington who made so much money out of other people’s miseries. I was tired from the shock of hitting the streets again and a bit jumpy. I still had ink stains on my hands from

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the prison print shop and I felt reduced and degraded, no longer the man I’d been when I’d enrolled in his weekend all those moons ago. I caught the red rattler up to Cottesloe, the station not the beach, and walked up John Street as far as Broome, the street not the town. Turned left and along the perimeter of the golf course until I reached Salvado. Ocean views to Rottnest and beyond from the top of the hill. It was probably a spectacular dune in the time before, a good place to meet and chew the mussel fat. It was all so familiar, part of my childhood, yet it might as well have been Beirut, for all the feeling I had for the place. I walked down the hill and rang the office bell and there he was, suburban man between workshops, mortal, waxy skin, distracted. I got right down to business. ‘I thought you’d like to know what happened to at least two of the people you workshopped in Bridgetown that time. One of them has spent the last eleven months in the slammer. That’s me. And the other one went troppo, left his family and took off to America chasing fuckin’ rainbows. That’s Francis. ‘Ben,’ he said carefully. ‘I’m very glad you’ve taken this time to come out and see me. I can tell that you’re a man of action and psychodrama is an action method. So that’s a good beginning.’ He roared laughing as if he’d just said the funniest thing ever. ‘However, I have to tell you that psychodrama doesn’t cause people to do aberrant things, things they wouldn’t normally do.’ His eyes bored into mine. For the second time in my life I wondered what sort of a reverend he’d been and how many souls he’s saved before transferring all that zeal into group therapy. ‘Second, we have to be prepared to go down into the

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depths of the human psyche and experience what it’s like to ah struggle for meaning in the face of … apparent nothingness. Experience pain, sorrow and embarrassment. As well as joy, laughter, pride. It’s a profound journey, Ben. Profound.’ Again the piercing eyes. ‘That’s what we have to think about before we embark on the great journey of therapy. Am I ready for all that? Am I ready to believe in the possibility of change and to overcome the power of that self-belittling judge. Eh Ben? That little bastard.’ Another round of laughing. He laughed and I cringed. ‘Because if you’re not ready, you shouldn’t begin. You don’t have to say anything. I just want you to think about it. All right? Come with me, I’ve got something to show you.’ We walked outside to the courtyard, where he had set up a mini gym. In a corner, fixed to a steel beam, was the punching ball. He started in on it slowly, waiting for the rhythm to settle, then speeded up, banging the thing into its cavity with a steady accretion of force, the blows raining down with a surprising ferocity. Then he stopped, steadying the popping ball with both hands. ‘Your turn,’ he said. ‘You have a go.’ I was strong in those days. I’d been pumping iron and defending myself, something you need to do in a prison environment when you’re the big, slow-tempered guy. It’s a bit like that old Returned Soldiers motto, ‘The Price of Peace is Eternal Vigilance.’ Before the bust, I’d been working Ralph, chainsawing trees, manhandling jarrah beams the weight of two men. Anyhow, I took one poke at Billington’s pissy little ball and broke the chain. The whole thing came down at

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my feet, like an old dried-up watermelon. ‘Sorry Hal,’ I said. ‘I went to hit it again and all I got was apparent nothingness.’ It was my time to laugh and Hal’s turn to spew. He told me not to worry, he’d fix it later. He had a meeting to prepare for. The Board of Examiners. I said no worries, I’d think about what he’d said. I’d already decided that what Hal had to offer, past and future, would be of no practical assistance to a man in my position. But I liked him, in a funny sort of way. On the way out he showed me the theatre he’d built, with a circular stage, just like the one this Moreno character had built in Beacon, New York, three tiers like a wedding cake and coloured lights to represent the emotions. Hal looked at me keenly to gauge my response. ‘Does that bring on a little act hunger, Ben?’ He couldn’t know where I’d been or what I’d been through. That was to be my experience for the next few years, interacting with people who were nice enough, sound enough, even empathetic, but with no handle on the other life, the life of the dispossessed. I know it sounds melodramatic but think back to schoolyard bullies and multiply that by a thousand. Then strip all the teachers of their dignity and their nice humanistic training and turn them into screws. Then brew it all up on a hot day in a confined space and throw in some Noongars straight from the bush. Then see what you get. I looked at Hal and saw the light in his eyes and decided then that I could never be as good as him. I mean that seriously. To work with people the way he did, you have to be good and it would take me another ten years to rediscover the good in me, if I was lucky. ‘I’ll be in touch, Hal.’ ‘You do that Ben, and keep well. Keep breathing.’

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24 It’s funny the places you choose to live when you’re on the loose. At the bottom of High Street, Fremantle is a place called the Roundhouse. Underneath, cut through the limestone cliff, is a tunnel which was originally used to cut up whales. In the Roundhouse itself, Aboriginal prisoners were kept six to eight in a cell, awaiting transportation to Rottnest, which they knew as the devil’s island. I’d heard stories of prisoners escaping from the island and swimming back across what is now a busy sea lane to the mainland. It would have taken all day through waters infested with sharks. But I knew the feeling behind such feats. There are times when you’d do anything to escape humiliation. I must have been looking for somewhere to incarcerate myself again, in case I became too intoxicated with freedom. So I found myself a room upstairs in the Orient

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Hotel, not the trend palace you see today but the way it was in the mid-seventies, with a Japanese bath for visiting seamen and lots of lonely rooms with mouldy mattresses for permanent and occasional semen. At first I simply washed a lot. I’d sit in the bath, which was as big as a bedroom, and sweat. Sometimes to amuse myself I’d block one jet with my toe, which would cause the other jet to flow twice as fast. I would develop theories about displacement and wonder how I could check them scientifically. Then I’d start thinking metaphysically. If I could block the part of my brain that was sodden with regret, maybe another part, say the creative part, would flow twice as fast. After the soak, you grab a plastic seat and squat under the cold tap. If you’re after a fast cool-down, present your wrists and ankles first, those crowded alleyways of veins and arteries and tendons all jammed together like it’s rush hour. I made a few friends. There was a whore called Margaret who liked to pretend she was a waitress. One day she wanted to go to Japan, I never discovered why. Maybe she spent so much time at the Orient, she couldn’t imagine any other sort of culture. Then there was George, the busdriver. His much-prized Harley had been stolen two days after the insurance ran out, so now, whenever he saw one from his elevated driver’s seat, he would run it off the road and check if it was his. And I remember an old guy called Hector, on crutches and dressed in pyjamas, high-tailing it away from the hospital so he could down a couple of sherries before they caught him and locked him up again. And there was Ma Prem Sandy, a sanyassin. This was a time when it was good to be young and ‘orange’ and

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hang out in Fremantle. I first noticed her bum, peeking out from a cut-down terry-towelling jumpsuit. The bum said something to me about enjoyment, hers and potentially mine. She played the music machine for Dynamic Meditation every morning at the Collie Street ashram. The first time I presented myself for one of the sessions, 6 am, half-asleep, embarrassed, broke, she managed to break through all the shit I’d walled around myself with a simple comment: ‘You’re game!’ That phrase can mean a lot of things, but the way she said it helped me remember who I was, which is funny really because the whole room was filled with mad orange bastards all jumping up and down chanting ‘Hu! Hu! Hu!’ Who indeed? I fixed on Sandy as the person who could help me answer that question and I developed a mighty tender love for her, or a potential love, simply by focusing on her every morning as we pounded the room in the Baghwan’s recipe for awakening. She knew I would never become a sanyassin and I remember thinking this could mean points in my favour, if I could lure her up to the Orient we could get away with it because it was outside of the whole ashram thing. No one would know. One morning following Dynamic, while she was busy putting away the tapes, I asked her if she’d like to have a carrot juice with me at the Happy Buddha and we soon moved on conversationally to this and that and oh yes, I’m staying at the Orient, it’s interesting living in a hotel, would you believe it has a full-size Japanese bath up on the first floor? WHY DON’T YOU COME UP AND GIVE IT A TRY? IF YOU’RE GAME, YOU SAID I WAS GAME, HOW ABOUT YOURSELF? ARE YOU GAME? Well, it felt like I’d been shouting, but she smiled and

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her eyes lit up with speculation and she said when and I said that very afternoon and that’s where I waited for her, way past the appointed time. It was lonely, it was fruitless and after about an hour I wandered down to Bather’s Beach and sat there for the rest of the afternoon. That’s when I began the habit of visiting Karl over on Rottnest. Karl who was also waiting, not for love, but for war. He flirted with love but this was 1943 and he was a man with a purpose. Let’s say the love interest was named Sadie. She’s at the table in the plotting room beneath Oliver Hill. It’s a simulation exercise and the outposts are reporting the bearings of the supposed target. Two women are ruling lines at the plotting table and where the lines cross, Sadie has a bullseye, miles distant in the unseen sea. She relays the information back to the guns, the trajectory is corrected, and they fire again. No sound reaches the room. It’s a familiar routine, dawn to dark every day. There are lectures, drills and no action. Hanging out her washing, with the view of the salt lakes and beyond them the ocean, she wishes for a box of paints. Karl, who is also hanging out his washing, imagines he might sit next to her at the outdoor movies, he could pass a note to her in gas drill, not here, not in front of everyone else. But some contact would be good, even if it means sitting through another Gene Autry movie. When he can, Karl borrows a bicycle from Signals and pedals over to the north side of the island. He doesn’t see the pink lakes or the salty foam that floats across his path on windy days. He doesn’t see what it is that Sadie yearns to paint. He is looking for the enemy, something irregular. He wishes to shoot the quokkas, the kangaroo rats, which

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he regards as vermin. And he is waiting for the war to come, as his father promised it would one day. He wants to define himself in mortal combat with another man. Or a plane. A warship. Anything. He passes the cluster of wooden buildings that belong to the Royal Australian Air Force. Air Warning Radar Station Number 32. Up on the hill, the big fish trap turns this way and that, searching for that elusive miracle, the enemy plane with sufficient fuel capacity to launch a raid on Perth and bring the war to Karl’s doorstep. At Abraham Point he parks the bike and walks out to the promontory facing the great empty ocean to the north-west. Out there lies HMAS Sydney, sunk by a German freighter, possibly assisted by unidentified warplanes. Karl leans his wiry frame into the breeze, takes a breath and shouts. ‘Come on you little yellow bastards. Come and show yerselves. HAVE A FUCKEN GO!’ That night at the flicks, he passes a note to Sadie: ‘Meet me at 10, Point Clune’. She doesn’t show and he is forced to wait, watching the new moon grow larger and turn orange until it dips into the ocean to the west, a fiery sickle that burns brighter than war before it’s extinguished in the empty black sea.

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25 When I get low, I think that Ben Wallymacher is just a made-up identity, a mask I wear when I want to feel better about myself. Ben Wallymacher is a big, softly spoken guy with a ponytail. You know, Olivia’s dad. Wouldn’t hurt a fly. He’s married to that nice Adele, you know. She’s younger than him. I invented this guy and as I sit here at the Riverside Cafe and listen to Olivia showing off in front of her friends, I worry about what I’ve got myself into. As I worry, bits of my mask crack and fall away and I don’t know who I am. A deckhand from the Rottnest ferry comes in to order some cheezels and a coke on the run. He’s dressed in clean white shorts, white shirt with epaulettes, white everything and a nametag: Ross Slater. Ross seems to know exactly who he is and Doris, the dragon waitress, appreciates it. With me, she’s more circumspect.

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‘I’ve just been swimming with three young girls. I must be crazy,’ I volunteer. ‘In the river?’ she says. ‘No, down at the pool. What a handful,’ I add, full of self-pity. ‘That’s normal,’ she says dryly, and proceeds to draw me a cup of her foul ‘express’ coffee. It takes a long time. The second term inside was both better and worse than the first. Better because I knew the ropes. Worse because I was innocent. That’s what they all say, right? Someone had set me up, must have been Bradley. But what if it was Marion? Or even Francis? Whoever had it in for me, I was consumed with rage and visions of revenge. When that wore off I realised that I could poison myself thinking that way. It was my thinking I had to work on. They call it ‘reframing’ now and that’s what it felt like, knocking down a wall on one side of your brain so you could see the sky. I decided that every man was an outlaw and that in many ways, at least in Australia, an outlaw occupied a noble station in life. I started lifting my chin and looking at certain bricks and graffiti that were above my line of vision, as if they were the tops of tall trees. I learned that it’s very difficult to get depressed if you maintain your gaze upwards. It took me a longer time to re-invent Ben Wallymacher. I did have some influence with the younger, less hardcore types, plus I was slow to anger. I could look after myself in a scrap and I wasn’t afraid of thinking. I applied to the chief screw to see if I could get a book club going. The library cooperated, as did a couple of visiting nuns. We read eclectically, literature, pulp, New Age, it was all grist for the mill. Then one day we received a

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remaindered box of Making Money Made Simple. The other guys laughed, they had no interest in simple things. But I summarised it and learned from it and when my time came and I walked free, I began to apply those principles and they worked. I made a pile in the eighties boom, pulled out in time to stay ahead, married, bought Duncraig and the rest is history, the history of me and Adele, I suppose. But first it was me. By a strange twist of fate, it was Marion who introduced me to my wife-to-be. Marion and I never recovered from the drug bust. I’d like to say she waited for me, she wrote me letters, she visited. None of those things happened. I guess that sort of devotion simply wasn’t included in our lovers’ script. But we did stay in touch, like cousins. I was changing, building up my business, determined to make up for lost time. I must have been hard to keep up with, but Marion phoned me regularly, we would meet for coffee, she would resist any randy urges she or I might have and we would talk, soberly and respectfully, until the next time. Once we were having coffee upstairs in her gallery when Adele happened to call in with her résumé. She was looking for a job, any job and she was hungry for progress, like me. She and her suit didn’t quite get on but there was something very appealing to me in her wideopen eyes. I sensed she was doing a reclamation project of some kind on herself. It was Marion who encouraged me to join hands with this young woman with the oriental eyes. When Adele left, Marion could see I was affected and predicted, without a lot of bitterness, a future for me and the young woman down from the goldfields. I protested that she was too young, that I was interested in futures, not ‘a

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future’. I meant commodity trading, the way I made my living in the eighties. The next time I set eyes on Adele was the following year, when I had expanded my business activities to importing coffee and needed to learn Italian in order to relate to my clients more effectively. The classes were run by Enzelia from her own kitchen in South Freo, twelve of us gathered around the long table, ce as in chat, sca as in skirt and what a lovely skirt was Adele, still is, lean and elegant, could pass as Italian if it weren’t for the eyes; and keen as paprika to hear my reasons for joining the class. ‘Per motivi culturali,’ I said, lying. For cultural reasons. ‘Per migliorare la mia esperienza di Fremantle,’ she said, sincerely. So that she might deepen her experience of Fremantle. We learned about each other’s families, work, eating habits. ‘Mia madre è Irlandese,’ I declared. My mother is from Ireland. ‘Mio padre è Australiano,’ she replied and I could see she was sorry and hoped for better things from the rest of us males. I’ve never discussed my criminal background with her in any language, but I’m sure she knows. Adele isn’t stupid. And it’s possible that Marion briefed her about me, in general terms. Whatever. She decided to take the risk and most of the time, I’m sure she feels justified. And then something happens that threatens to erode that position, something out of the blue. I drop the girls home and return to find her reading the paper. She hates newspapers, particularly the Australian, and only reads it to signal that she is furious and is not going to do anything until I ask what’s upsetting her. Instead, I take a counterphobic approach, as Billington

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would have called it. In other words, I act like she’s doing the most normal thing in the world. So does Olivia, of course, by crawling into her lap and destroying the paper. ‘There’s a message for you,’ says Adele acidly. ‘Rosata from Frangipani’s wants you to call her.’ ‘Is that a florist or something? I didn’t call any florists.’ ‘It’s not a florist, it’s the brothel down on South Terrace. Maybe that’s where you picked up your little dick problem.’ I’d had some trouble pissing a few weeks ago, normal for someone my age. ‘Does Ben have a dick problem, Mama?’ says Olivia. ‘What are you talking about? I’ve never been near the brothel on South Terrace. I wouldn’t even invest in it,’ I say, trying to be funny. It doesn’t work. I locate the message and call Rosata. She answers, Australian accent, coarse voice, tough cookie. ‘Wallymacher,’ she sneers. ‘What sort of a name is that?’ ‘I beg your pardon?’ The difficulty is, once you’ve been inside a couple of times, you’re never sure that the call isn’t some nightmare visit from your past, a promise gone wrong, a payback in disguise. ‘You stop booking my girls up. I know what you’re doing. I’m calling the police if it happens again.’ Adele and Olivia are both looking at me as if I’m a fish on a hook. Interesting, but possibly inedible. I cover the phone and give them an update. ‘She knows what I’m doing and she’s calling the police if it happens again.’ Adele deliberately screens out the ironic eyebrows and nods, as if she’s known all the time I was involved in the brothel business. Olivia has her face buried in her hands,

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shamed by her Ben father beyond belief. I decide to get tough. ‘All right, you listen to me, Rosata. I don’t do brothels, all right? I’m married and you’ve got the wrong end of the stick.’ Adele is laughing hysterically. Olivia is crying. Rosata is shouting. ‘I know it’s you been doing this Mr Smartywacker, and it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that you’re in the business yourself. It sounds like the sort of trick Caesar’s would get up to. Or Executive Girls.’ ‘What is it I’ve been doing exactly?’ ‘Making bookings for car sex and not showing up. And this is the phone number you left us.’ It’s hopeless. She’s got the wrong number, she’s heard my name on the answering machine, she’s jumped to more conclusions than a talk-show audience. There’s no going back. I decide to talk to her in Italics. ‘Rosata, see, you’re right. I am in the business. And so is my partner …’ I mention one of Perth’s top racketeers, known for his ruthlessness around kneecaps and soft body parts. ‘So as you can see, you have my home telephone number by accident. We are not interested in your piss-tiny operation. Nor are we interested in your fucked-up administration. If you take my number off your records now, I’ll forget this happened. I want to hear the sound of your pen scratching it out, Rosata. That’s a good girl. Now don’t ever call this number again.’ Adele is shaking her head. Olivia has found something else to do. I feel strong. In charge. I start stacking up the breakfast plates that Adele has neglected. I’m about to ask her what’s for dinner when Piaf walks in with a uniformed American sailor.

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‘Hello sailor,’ I mutter. Piaf looks triumphant. The sailor, who is black, stocky and young, looks smug. Adele practically turns herself inside out trying to look welcoming of him and disapproving of me. ‘This is Orville Johnson. These are my friends and bosses, Ben and Adele. And this is Olivia.’ We shake hands and I offer beers all round. Outside the courtyard is in shade and it seems a good time to move beyond the petty concerns of the day and talk about the larger issues, like what Orville does to defend the Indian Ocean from would-be aggressors and stirrers. ‘I’m a chef’s assistant, night watch, sir.’ ‘Call me Ben.’ ‘Ben, sir.’ ‘And where are you from, Orville,’ says Adele. I feel like cheering her for the tremendous effort that she’s making to resume normal human interaction. ‘Originally from Indiana, ma’am.’ ‘Just call me Adele.’ ‘Adele, ma’am. But then my family moved to California, and that’s where I signed on.’ Piaf seems to be modelling peace, brotherhood and international goodwill with every breath. Olivia is standing in front of Orville, mouth open and staring frankly at his meaty black hand, which is holding Piaf’s tiny white one. ‘I’m going to take Orville into Northbridge,’ says Piaf. ‘It’s not exactly the eighth wonder of the world, Orv,’ I comment. ‘But that should be a nice thing to do on a night like this.’ We all finish our beers and Piaf stands up suddenly. ‘Do you think I could have the use of your car for the night, Ben?’ she says.

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‘No, sorry.’ ‘You can use my Corolla,’ says Adele, obligingly. ‘It’s just that I thought the Merc would give Orville more of a chance to see. I thought we’d drive through Kings Park, do the tourist thing. But that’s all right.’ ‘Can I just have a word, Piaf?’ I point towards the loft. Up the stairs, I search around ’til I find what I’m looking for. ‘You’d better take a few of these, just in case.’ I hand her the rest of my packet of condoms. Now I’ve really done it. I’m in loco parentis.

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26 Adele’s still snaky about Rosata. I’m sure she believes in my innocence, but outrage is the sort of emotion that cuts little runnels into your psyche. It’s a bit like soil erosion. I decide that staying out of her way is one way for me to hold firm. On what, I’m not sure. I cycle down to the port to attend to a pressing matter: my watchband has broken. The woman who attends to me at the jeweller’s isn’t interested, really. I think it has something to do with the chip on my shoulder, wider than her doorway. I retire to the back corner of Papa’s where I can have a good sulk and look out the window at the same time to see if there’s anyone worth talking to across the road at the Dome. I feel part of the common horde here. A man with a facial tic is enjoying some special attention from the red-haired angel of a waitress, while the macho Italian

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boy on the espresso control platform launches another perfect cap into space. I note from the West that the Barbican Spirit and Kasuga are docked at North Quay, British Spirit is in the Outer Pilot Ground and that the Wadi Al Natroon is due tomorrow. What are we going to do about Piaf? What am I going to do? Is it just me, growing old, having prostate problems, getting cranky? It’s hard to relax around her, it always feels like she needs some help. The sort of help I enjoyed giving, the tape-recordings, have stopped. Phillip is walking down Collie Street, right past my window. ‘Ciao, Phillipo,’ I say softly. ‘How’s the writing?’ ‘Harder than you think,’ he says. ‘You deserve to be recognised as a cultural icon, comrade. When do we get to see it?’ He signals that he’s coming in to join me. I tell him about Piaf and her American sailor. Phillip grew up in Busselton and met Francis and me surfing down at Denmark. I think he’s always been fascinated by the way Francis lurches through life, in contrast with his own well-planned journey. Maybe he’s writing his play as a corrective to his own stodginess. ‘So what’s Piaf like?’ ‘Young,’ I say. ‘Young and silly?’ ‘Silly on the surface. And deeply serious underneath. She’s a dedicated martial artist, studies Hapkido. Also carries a heavy-duty tape-recorder in case she wants to interview anyone.’ He’s interested because some of the bouncers he’s been talking to are into karate and regard Claude Van Damm as a god. How would she react to that view, he wants to know?

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‘You’ll have to ask her, mate. I think her stuff’s more esoteric. But still lethal if required.’ We lapse into silence. I stare at a freshly hung portrait of a topless nun, thinking how crude it is, how needlessly attention-seeking. ‘What do you reckon she’ll do? Do you think she’ll stick around?’ ‘Doesn’t seems to have any clear direction. She has this vague idea about collecting oral histories and selling the tapes to radio. But I know where I’d like to see her go.’ ‘Where’s that?’ ‘New York. I’d like her to visit her father and sort it all out, find out what he thinks of her. Ask him why he left. Until she does something about that early stuff, she’ll just go on acting out her disappointment in all men.’ Ye gods! I sound like a two-bob therapist, but it’s a bloody good idea, the more I let it echo around between Phillip and me and the topless nun. ‘Shit! That’d be interesting, Ben. I’d love to see the look on Anstey’s face when she turns up. Hell hath no fury like a daughter spurned.’ I cycle back up High Street with a lighter spirit. At home, I’ve got sweeping and cleaning chores to do, including the upstairs veranda, which collects a lot of crap blowing in from the docks. I’ve got my squeegee and bucket ready to do the windows and I’m going well until I reach the end where Piaf hangs out. She’s set up a little card table and some folding chairs and she and Orville are having brunch. They’ve obviously spent the night together. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, except that it could lead to an international incident, bodily fluids may have been exchanged, and I want her to be sober, straight and on time when she goes to pick Olivia up from school.

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‘Hi, Ben!’ She says it with a mix of good cheer and patronising indifference. I feel like she’s one of the guests and I’m the forelock-touching manservant. ‘How was clubland?’ ‘Groovy,’ says Piaf. ‘Doesn’t take long to do the rounds in this town.’ Orville is looking even smugger than yesterday. He is wearing Bermuda shorts down to mid-calf, long black socks, no shoes, a Chicago Bulls T-shirt which he might just as well have bought in Fremantle — they’re everywhere — and a lot of gold jewellery. ‘How long you in port for, Orv?’ I ask. ‘Tomorrow if I can tear myself away, Bensir.’ ‘I’m sure you’re used to it,’ I say meanly. ‘Don’t sailors have a girl in every port?’ ‘Well I never met one like this girl,’ he says and shows Piaf his pink gums and pearly whites. And I think yeah, what’s so bad about that? She could probably use some affection and she doesn’t think like I do, she’s got a newager’s appreciation of the world in all its diversity. She doesn’t carry around the Karl Wallymacher guide to geopolitics in her head. ‘Are you right to pick up ’Livie?’ ‘Yes Ben. You don’t have to worry. Orville’s going to show us around his ship.’ I wonder what Phillip and the rest of the coffee shop ideologues would make of that. ‘I’d better get on with my work,’ I say. I continue with the upstairs windows. Piaf appears to be downloading her life story. ‘My dad lives in New York,’ she says. ‘The city?’ says Orv.

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‘No, some other place. Is it New Pulse?’ ‘You mean New Paltz. Upstate, in the Hudson Valley. A cousin of mine goes to school there.’ ‘Do you think it would be an interesting place to visit?’ ‘Uh-huh. Could be. But if you live in California, you love it, right? So you wouldn’t think New Paltz was worth a dime. Besides, the surf is real bad there!’ Piaf has realised that Orv is not a reliable source of information. On top of that, he makes bad jokes. She gives me a smile over his shoulder. I’m glad to have stayed out of it. I secretly want her to reject him. But she continues to brave his shallow sensibility and is fielding an enquiry about her father’s profession. ‘He’s into impromptu theatre,’ she says. News to me. ‘Is that, like … when the actor forgets his lines?’ ‘No, no. Impromptu. All one word. It means in readiness or something like that. It’s like … making it up as you go along.’ ‘We do that all the time in the galley,’ goes Orv. Wurf, wurf. ‘No, not just talking. Theatre. But there’s no script. The audience and the actors interact. He’s trying to develop the ideas of a man called Moreno, who came to your country from Vienna in the 1920s.’ ‘I saw Phantom of the Opera in San Francisco,’ says Orv. ‘That was real good.’ ‘What Francis is doing is the opposite of that,’ says Piaf. ‘He wants audiences to wake up, to break out of the spell. All of that dress up, go out, let someone else entertain you, have a cocktail … that’s all a big con job. Nothing changes. We should all be actors and playwrights. We know what’s going on, why be passive?’ ‘You’re sounding like a real radical now.’

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Did he just roll his eyes? Save us from actors like Orv, I think. But Piaf is obviously full-bottle on Francis’ new life. Or else she’s making it up to impress Orv. ‘Do you know what the word radical means?’ she says. Orv is shifting in his seat. He’s not saying, even if he does know. ‘It means from the root. That’s why I admire my father. He’s tried to change things radically, get to the root of the problem. Which in this case is the apathy of theatregoers. He believes in spontaneity.’ ‘Remind me not to go see a Broadway show with that man,’ says Orv. He winks at me and stands up, his Bermudas still hitched up above his knees. I remain the inscrutable caretaker, my goal to produce streak-free glass. The same night, I decide to sit down and pen a letter to Francis. Orv is safely locked away on his ship, Piaf is having an early night, Olivia is flaked out on our bed and Adele is teaching yoga. Space! Writing to another person feels a lot different from talking into a tape-recorder. I might even score a reply. Dear Francis,

3 February, 1998

How are you, old friend? You’ve been on my mind a lot lately, mainly because we have the wonderful Piaf staying with us. She’s our au pair — isn’t that flash for an old Buckland Hill boy? Let me remind you of what it’s like at this time of the year. The temp has dropped down to about 68 degrees in your language. It would have been up in the nineties today but the blessed doctor is doing his

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rounds, sneaking around doorways, tickling our ears and if we leave our front door open, likewise a window at the back, he just comes surging through and we all feel a lot better. Nothing has changed on the beach scene except that the kids have all got belly boards — called boogie boards — and there’s not a surf-o-plane in sight. I walked with Phillip Ianatelli today. Remember him? He sends his warm regards and says you’re a lucky bastard living somewhere civilised and he’d come and join you if he had the guts. We walked the water’s edge from Port to the Vlamingh Memorial and back. Dog beaches have really taken hold now and there are poo disposal units and special bags, the lot. As usual, we passed half the people we know and you’d know them too: Valerie Southwell, separated, and Dalmatian. George Gross, prosperous, and Blue Heeler. Gail McColl, depressed, with Dachshund. My osteopath, laughing, with Labrador. Phillip himself has a Jack Russell, and is on leave from work to write a play about bouncers in clubs (do they call them that in Amurrika?) Piaf is a genuine delight and Adele and I are really chuffed that she chose us to fall back on. Makes us feel like family. And of course her job is looking after Olivia, our much-loved daughter. I finally get around to being a family man, in my fifties. And that makes me wonder how you are, whether you’ve started another family over there, how you manage being so far away from your grown-up kid here? Piaf has been pretty tight-lipped about you. I overheard her discussing your theatre activities with a friend. She is very proud of you, Francis. How do

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you feel about yourself? Has it all been worthwhile? I’m interested, because I believe that it’s possible to see clearly at this age, to know where you want to go but not feel too driven about it. We have a little Bed and Breakfast here, at the end of Tuckfield Street. We’ve named it for Adele and it keeps enough income happening to pay the bills. We’ve got some other plans as well and if Piaf decides to stay, we’re thinking of offering her the management of this place. I’m sure she’d do a good job. Must take after her mum, eh mate? Just kidding. Seriously, though, have you considered paying a visit? Because you’d be absolutely welcome to stay here, you could catch up with your kid and we could have lots of Stolly’s and tonics, or Redbacks if you prefer, and talk about all those old times. (Redback is a local boutique beer with a strong following. I doubt it’s made it over your side of the world.) Who knows, we might chase up Billington and a few of the old mates and have a reunion. What do you say? With warmest regards,

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Ben.

27 Next morning at breakfast, Piaf comes down to join us and she and I hatch a plan to visit the Swan Hotel across the bridge and suss it out as a business prospect. I’m feeling warm and close with Piaf, as if writing the letter to her father and giving up the recordings has pushed me in closer to her. We drop Olivia at school first. The parking lot is awash with overbearing off-road vehicles and expensive latemodel imports. Piaf walks our girl into school for the ritual good morning handshake with Olivia’s teacher. Rottnest Island is just visible on the horizon. The mirage effect from the ocean means that parts of it are missing — the middle of the lighthouse, the hill behind Thompson’s Bay. What’s left is shimmering in the uncertain haze like a dancing skeleton. The pub is a typical wharfie’s watering hole, with a

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commanding bar, some accommodation upstairs, a poolroom and a ‘dungeon’ for special occasion pissups. Concessions to the modern age include Sky Channel and a TAB agency. The blackboard has the week’s program on it, including skimpies on Thursday and Friday nights and a ‘dance show’ on Saturday. ‘What’s a skimpy?’ says Piaf. ‘A skimpily clad barmaid. They’re usually very young and not noted for pulling a good draught beer. There’s a long tradition over here in the wild west. They used to be topless but there’s been a bit of a cover-up in recent years. Some places advertise ‘raunchy dancers’. Not sure what that means.’ We take our drinks back to one of the large kegs that have been painted up to serve as tables. They seem miserably uncomfortable to me. I’m already visualising a bistro with plain tables covered in butcher’s paper and smart waiters in ankle-length white aprons over black trousers. ‘Are you missing Sydney?’ Piaf has taken on a tan and her features have softened. She’s wearing less make-up and it’s becoming harder to pick her out from a thousand good-looking local girls, except for the eyes, which burn more fiercely than most, seem to seek more than might be found in this outpost. ‘There’s not a lot to miss, Ben, except my mum and I think we were ready for a holiday from each other. Friends? One or two, the kind you run into at Paddington markets and have a beer with. Lovers? Good riddance.’ ‘I wrote to your father last night.’ ‘Why?’ ‘You remind me of him. We were close, once. Having you stay with us reminds me of how close and how long ago.’

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‘You’re sounding all gooey, Ben. If you were that close, where were you when he needed you?’ ‘When was that?’ ‘I mean when the dome burnt down.’ ‘What do you mean, burnt down? I imagined he simply abandoned it when he broke up with your mother.’ ‘There was a big fire. That was the reason they broke up. He thought she’d done it. She said he was crazy. They called the police. You can imagine what a thorough job Bridgetown’s finest made of the investigation.’ I’d been busted, and I missed it. Probably Bryony wasn’t interested enough in the dome to mention it in on the phone. As far as she was concerned, her brother had followed a cult to America. As a psychologist, she possibly got a bigger kick out of pathology than catastrophe. The burning of the dome was nothing. She was probably correct. The dome was always notquite-Francis. Why else would he have stuffed it up so badly in the first place, not even reading the manual properly? All that therapy talk about his father complex and needing the space to make mistakes. He wasn’t interested! Nor was he interested in psychology, I concluded. He was interested in drama, loved it, would do anything to be in the spotlight, witnessed by an appreciative crowd. He didn’t want to study it, he didn’t want to write the script. He wanted to be inside it and that was the fundamental difference between us. I like to build and finish and sculpt and see an end product. I should have told Piaf that a long while ago. If you want to get to the bottom of what your father’s about, the dome is a red herring. For me, the loss of something like the dome would have been catastrophic. Even now, if we travel south, I

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always follow the coast. I never want to see any of it again, Xanadu, the Hill of Delights and whatever became of my building. Least of all do I want to see Farmer Roy, who sold Ralph at auction to recover his back rent. But how to explain all that to Piaf now? ‘I wasn’t around, Piaf. If I’d known about any of it, I’d have been there for your father.’ She went to speak then closed her mouth. Then she let it rip. ‘As far as I’m concerned, any man that leaves a twoyear-old child has definite psychopathic tendencies. From what I can gather, my father’s version of fathering was very hit-and-miss. Somehow, he imagined that I’d just grow up on my own, without any input from him. And then he could come back into my life when he felt like it and take me on some bloody holiday and I’d think he was wonderful which of course I did but that that would be enough. And it’s not. And for him to think it was enough points to a serious delusional disorder, if you ask me.’ ‘Are you telling me he’s crazy?’ ‘That’s what Bryony reckons.’ ‘Would you like to see for yourself? We could fly to the States and see him. Make an assessment, if you like.’ ‘I can’t afford it.’ ‘What about if I paid the fare?’ ‘Why would you do that?’ ‘To help you give him another chance.’ ‘What would be in it for you?’ ‘I’d come too. I need a holiday and I could …’ ‘Look after me?’ She says it scornfully, with more than a touch of derision. ‘Yeah, that too. But mainly for the holiday.’

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I’ve planted two seeds now, one for Piaf and one for her father. With a bit of luck, the seeds will germinate at roughly the same time and grow together. I’m turning into a social worker! I can’t wait to tell Adele. We finish our drinks and head off down to the Worker’s Club. Piaf wants a haircut and there’s a barber there who’ll do what she wants, my old pal Bob Phipps. High Street Mall is filled with the usual suspects, Italian men discussing the soccer, various beneficiaries of the state’s largesse scattered around the public seating under the trees; and outside the bookstore, Ernie Warble, an Aboriginal busker with a truly sincere approach to the meaning of lyrics, even when the song is patently meaningless. Across Victoria Street, in Town Hall Square, a pair of public intellectuals engages in a chess performance, each pretending he wants to win. The Worker’s is mostly empty. There’s one customer ahead of us in Bob’s ornate Victorian chair, having a short back and sides in the true tradition of the port. I got to know Bob when I was staying at the Orient, in the days when I had to communicate with straight people like my parole officer, and so needed regular attention for my mane. I still see him when I want my neck shaved or my sideburns trimmed. In other respects, my glossy black ponytail is self-maintaining. The SB&S man leaves and I introduce Piaf to Bob, who immediately appreciates that he is dealing with a modern young woman and that any oppressive references to the female condition will not be tolerated. Embarrassingly, the wall in front of the chair features a calendar pic of a naked woman holding a mag wheel in front of a dragster. Piaf ignores it and gets straight into what she wants. ‘A number one, then shave the scalp please.’

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‘I’m sorry, love,’ says Bob, ‘I can’t do that. The shave, I mean.’ ‘Why not?’ says Piaf. She seems truly curious. ‘Because I love women too much,’ he blurts out. Bob is actually a very modern and sophisticated thinker, but he maintains a fifties barbershop image because he reckons that’s what his customers like. The whole boutique/ unisex/salon/blow-dry holocaust left him more determined than ever. Why he’s putting on this performance I don’t know. I’m browsing National Geographic and saying nothing. ‘And how would shaving my head conflict with your love of women?’ says Piaf. Good point. ‘Uh … because I think the Sinead O’Connor thing was a media event and didn’t really help the cause of young women entertainers very much.’ ‘And?’ ‘And … uh … I think the Beauty Myth backlash has gone a bit too far and that lots of young women are ruining their looks by slavishly following antifashion fashions.’ Good one, Bob. ‘Anything else?’ ‘Yeah, your ears’ll look funny. Can I talk you into a number three, with a ducktail at the back? Suit you down to the ground, love. No bull.’ Piaf looks at me in the mirror. I am a study in neutrality. Isn’t that what parent figures are for? She gives Bob the nod and twenty minutes later she is ducktailed and number threed. She could have come out looking like a heavy metal moll, if it weren’t for her lean, springy body and her Hapkido alertness. I finish my conversation with Bob about the investment potential of the Swan

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Hotel and then Piaf and I walk around to Gino’s and join Phillip, who is staring at a blank page in the book he carries around to convince himself he’s a playwright. ‘I’m truly glad to meet you, Piaf,’ he says, turning on the charm. ‘Ben told me you were here. I hope he’s treating you fairly. If you ever need a lawyer …’ We settle into the goss, including the pub thing. Piaf relates her negotiation with Barber Bob around the question of length. ‘It looks fantastic,’ says Phillip, smitten. ‘I think it’s a travelling haircut,’ says Piaf mysteriously. ‘Are you leaving us already?’ says Phillip, wounded. It remains in the air, cappuccino talk. It’s time to get on with the day. We head back to the car. Piaf takes my arm in a daughterly way as we cross Victoria Street on the way to the Woolsheds carpark. A Kingswood with quads booming cuts across our path and a leering yob sticks his face out at me: ‘Leave the young chicks alone, you old WANKER!’

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28 One of the disadvantages of marrying a younger woman — Adele is twenty-two years my junior — is that she has an impossible lot of work to do before she can equal you in the experience stakes. Meanwhile, you’re busy soaking up life’s lessons, hopefully gaining wisdom, and unless you become senile or she’s into accelerated learning, she can never catch up. I honestly think I’ve given Adele every opportunity to narrow the gap. I’ve taken a low profile in our business, allowing her to make the major decisions; I’ve stayed out of prison for the whole time I’ve known her, a model citizen, thus depriving myself of the opportunity for extended periods of quiet reflection and reading the classics, another way of getting out in front; and I’ve taken a major role in fathering her sister’s bastard child, a job that reduces most people to babbling idiocy within a

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very short time and is one of the reasons that a lot of primary caregivers — in other words, mothers — appear to have a low IQ. In view of these major concessions, it’s hard to fathom her objections to my travelling to America as Piaf’s protector, while Piaf works it out with her father. I suppose a trip to America is something to be envied, but the thing is, it’s an ideal opportunity for Adele to get ahead in every way. Admittedly, she loses her au pair and the father of her sister’s bastard child in one fell swoop, but look at what she gains: the learning you get from overcoming bitter disappointment; full-on involvement in all aspects of the business, including sweeping the yard; and a closer relationship with Olivia. ‘Look, I know it seems unfair, darling,’ I’m saying to her. She’s washing up in lukewarm, greasy water, which is her way of lodging an objection with the Universe. I’m drying up, standing next to her as supportively as a man can stand. While Piaf and I slaved over our business research and the care and feeding of Olivia, Adele was visiting her friend Hedda Thorpe-Jones, an artist with a studio in Beaconsfield. Hedda is all right, but Adele always seems to return from her visits there in a disturbed state, because she thinks that Hedda has really got it together and she has missed out. Also, Hedda is very wild and expressive and Adele temporarily borrows these traits and tries them on when she gets home. She’s doing this now, as she tosses her neat head and splashes the fatspotted grilling tray into the water. ‘It’s so unfair, Ben. Just when we were going so well. It seems completely heartless, leaving me and Olivia like this.’

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‘It’ll only be for three weeks, darling. The time will fly and we’ll be back so soon you’ll be wishing for your peace and quiet again.’ ‘CRAP! I’ll be wishing for my husband to be here, like he’s supposed to be. Nannies come and go, but …’ ‘Piaf doesn’t like being called a nanny, darling. It makes her feel old. Au pair is what she likes.’ ‘You seem to be pretty tuned into what Piaf likes. Why don’t you tune into me? DON’T GO TO AMERICA. She can do it alone. Stay HERE, where you belong.’ ‘Now who’s being heartless, love? She’s never had a daddy, and she needs one.’ As I argue with her, I think of Adele’s old man. I doubt she ever called him daddy. Harry Yang was by all accounts a real prick. One eighth Chinese, a fettler, he used to hit the bottle and his wife in equal measure. Whenever Adele talks about him, I see their bright, sandy yard, thick with flies. It’s midday and the clothesline is filled with linen, hanging stiff as corpses in the desert wind. I see the Transcontinental racketing past, the passengers peering out at the first sign of habitation for five hundred miles. And I see two terrified girls, Cazna and Adele, hiding in the laundry from their father, who is in a rage. I try to take the dishmop from her and turn her around for a hug, but she is beyond comforting. For some reason, she is wearing one of her op-shop dresses, a lumpy, cotton thing with long sleeves and strange desert colours. It makes her look like an orphan, covers up everything that is graceful about her. Suddenly she spins around with a spiteful, darting movement and fixes me with a glare that cuts through all my carefully polished armour. ‘You’re enjoying this, aren’t you Ben? You’re getting

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old, that’s it, isn’t it? Can’t always get it up when you want to, but this Piaf chick does something for your ego. Why don’t you admit it?’ I can feel the muscles going at the base of my neck. I have large hands, strong from working a Clydesdale. I never want to use them against anyone, most of all Adele. But she’s into me, damn her eyes, and the buzzing has started in my head, so loud it hurts. She’s staring at me, boring into me, I want her to stop, stop blaming me, I’m a good man … I grab her orphan’s dress by the neck to make her stop but she won’t stop and now I’m pumping so much power into my arms I could pick her up and throw her. Instead, I let out a roar like a container truck and with that, my arms begin to work the way I worked the bullworker in the prison gym until the stitching around the throat gives way and the whole garment starts to split down through the bodice, through the waistline and all the way down to the bottom hem, which surrenders without a whimper. I stand there shocked, still holding the torn thing and looking at Adele who is standing there in her knickers and sandals like a plucked chicken. On her face is a look I’ve never seen before, fury and contempt and fear, playing on her features like theatre lights. I walk across the courtyard and dump the rag in the bin. I can see her through the window of our little room, still standing by the sink, her breasts quivering as she cries and I can see my mother’s pinched Irish face and her warm brown eyes, scolding me, you must never hit a woman, no matter how much she provokes you. And again, I see her face when she and the old man picked me up after that first time inside, the shame she felt that her big Ben should make such a botch of his life.

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Back inside, I find my wife crouching inside the broom cupboard. It’s mostly fear that fills her face now and perhaps some shame that her marriage with me is no longer the safe haven she’d imagined it might be. I take her up to the loft and I hold her rigid body until we both find some sleep and in the morning we are stiff and strange with each other. We find ways to work together and we laugh over something Olivia says. We are already apart. It takes me less than two weeks to straighten out my affairs and book the flight to New York. Piaf feels the tension between Adele and me and stays out of the way. Olivia cries when she hears the news and walks around the house singing snatches of ‘Silent Night’ to comfort herself. On Saturday morning, February 14, I rise early and finish packing. The Australian trumpets the news: ‘A Republic in 2001. Now the people will decide’. Phillip drives us out to the airport and as we board the plane I feel the same panic I felt when they locked me in the police van at Nannup for the long drive to Fremantle. We lift off and bank right over the city, the river and bridges clearly visible, likewise Perth’s skyscrapers — both of them. I’ve never flown before, I’ve always chosen the slow way. As we cross the Darling Range I can see the road to Xanadu and then that’s gone and soon it’s the wheat belt and the marginal country north of Esperance and then it’s water, we’re over the Bight, and I stop looking out the window and turn to Piaf and laugh with my headphones on as we settle in for the first in-flight movie.

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Two

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1 ‘Hey Wallymacher, we’ll hit the ground running, yeah. Jay Eff Kay. Doesn’t that sound … but we’re off to meet him, to blow his cover, and I’m filled with …’ Something’s happened to my hearing since the plane change in Sydney, but Piaf seems to have so much to say it’s probably a blessing. We’re climbing up through heavy cloud after losing sight of North Head. ‘All I hope is that New York is nothing like the rest of America,’ I say over the jet thrust. ‘Maybe it’ll be like “Seinfeld”,’ she says. ‘I wouldn’t mind seeing Kramer. Apparently there’s a real Kramer now, Kenny Kramer, the guy they based the character on. He’ll take you on a tour of the actual Seinfeld apartment and all the other sites of the Seinfeld action. Cool bananas, eh.’ She’s enjoying herself, using cabin service to the full, on a high-altitude high. I feel like being quiet. I want to

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know facts like our cruising altitude and what time we’re expected to reach New York. Piaf is more interested in attitude. And how long before her molecules settle back into … what did she say? I’m also bored. They’re showing The Madness of King George, which is all right, but the cabin is a pigsty and no amount of coffee-tea-or-me is going to retrieve the iceclear image this airline tries to project with its monotonous corporate messages of aircraft bursting though clouds. Basically, flying sucks. I should also note here that jet engines suck and that’s a good thing. I pass Piaf New York: the Rough Guide and point out the chapter on ‘Chelsea and the Garment District’. I told Adele we would camp there for a while until we get our bearings. Chelsea took shape in 1830 when its owner, Clement Clark Moore, anticipated New York’s movement Uptown and laid out his land for sale in broad lots. Enough remains to indicate Chelsea’s middle-class suburban origins, though in fact the area never quite made it onto the shortlist of desirable places to be. Originally set in the heart of the theatre district, nothing remains of the theatres now. But the hotel, which put up all the actors, writers and Bohemian hangers-on remains a New York landmark. The Chelsea has been the undisputed watering hole of the city’s harderup literati for decades. Then I remember I’m carrying a letter from Francis. I discovered it as we were leaving and I stuffed it in my

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shirt pocket and forgot it. While Piaf drools over the Rough Guide, I switch the headphones over to classical, put the letter inside my in-flight magazine and begin to read:

Dear Ben,

49 Academy Street New Paltz NY February 10, 1998

Thanks for your letter of February 3. It’s good to hear from you. I could certainly do with some of that sunshine you mentioned. It’s down to 29 degrees here, below freezing, and there’s a bitter wind blowing all the way down from Canada. I won’t be coming to Australia in the foreseeable future, and in case you get any ideas, you should under NO CIRCUMSTANCES come here at present, particularly with Piaf. You said Piaf’s been tight-lipped about me. What about herself? Did she tell you about wrecking the Avis car I rented for her the last time she was here? Or about the drug bust, which almost resulted in my deportation? I don’t want to badmouth her and I’m glad she’s been a help to you and your wife, but until she’s through acting out all her anger with me, I’m afraid there’s little point in our meeting at all. You ask me has all the time away been worthwhile? I would have to say no. If you ever do come over, I’d like to show you what we have achieved here, with the relocation of the Moreno Stage and running regular Living Newspaper shows

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here in the mid-Hudson, in the original Viennese format. But there is little interest in purity in the modern world. My belief is that Moreno was seduced by American razzmatazz from the moment he arrived and that his practice went downhill as a result. Very often, we are reduced to selling souvenirs of the great man and conducting tours, when we should be developing the method along the lines he originally invented. Zerka, to give her her due, has done wonders in keeping alive classical psychodrama and has even managed to take it as far as Korea! They probably need it. If this Hapkido stuff that Piaf does is any indication of where the Koreans’ heads are at, let them do psychodrama with Zerka, is my druther. The reason I wouldn’t welcome a visit right now is that my partner and collaborator, Patricia, has just left me. We met in the late seventies in Guatemala and have been together ever since. I’m pretty broken up about it and am trying to drag my miserable carcass around to fulfil my obligations; so naturally I’m not very interested in visits, even from a friend as old as yourself. Take care, Ben. It was great to get your letter. Give my love to Piaf. All best wishes, Francis.

I close the magazine around the letter and stuff it back in its place. The plane flies into night-time over the Pacific and the crew decide that it’s bedtime, no more movies, close the blinds, douse the light, we’re staying home tonight, far away from the bustle … and so far away from

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the city lights that San Francisco may be locked into the navigation system, but it’s still only a theory as far as I’m concerned. The flex and movement of the plane gives it a live feeling, like surfing. That’s it, we’re surfing air currents all the way to California. Out the back! Piaf’s strong, quiet voice comes out of the gloom beside me. ‘What were you reading back there, Ben?’ ‘You mean the in-flight mag?’ ‘No, I mean the letter you hid inside it. Do you think I’m stupid? Peripheral vision is a Hapkido essential.’ ‘It was a letter from your father telling us not to come.’ ‘Didn’t you say you’d arranged it?’ ‘I lied. I just wanted you two to get together. Initially, I asked him to visit us. Then somehow that changed to us visiting him. I think you and I just talked it up together. With a little help from the furious Adele.’ ‘I think you talked it up by yourself, Ben. And Adele, who is an excellent woman, has every right to feel pissed off.’ She remains silent for a long minute. The flying light on the wing seems to be beating in time to the heart of the great bird. What a piece of work is man and what a mush of old song lyrics is my brain. ‘I don’t understand baby boomers,’ she says. ‘I hope you’re not about to launch a cowardly attack on an old man,’ I say to her. ‘Otherwise I may be forced to call a steward-person.’ She laughs. I think she likes my clumsy attempts at correctness and feels comfortable that I’m not about to try and create some sort of phoney intimacy between us. Which in the way of all such things, leads to more trust and intimacy. ‘I used to get suicidal when I was seven or eight,’ she

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says. ‘Or at least, alarmingly despondent. The school I went to in Sydney was really tuned into environmental education. My mum tells me I’d come home and look at the pictures of whales and dolphins on my bedroom wall and sob my heart out because I was convinced they were all going to die.’ ‘Yeah, it was touch and go there for a while,’ I say. ‘Mum told Francis about it and he basically took an existential position on the whole thing. In other words, Piaf will work it out somehow, without any help.’ ‘And you did, obviously.’ ‘Yeah, but at what cost, Ben? If Olivia felt that way, you’d do more than take a position. You’d spend time with her. I think Francis might have really put himself out and come back for two weeks that year, to see how his little Piaf was. His little Piaf was busy nurturing a psychosis, that’s what she was doing.’ The plane absorbs a hiccup in the atmosphere, flexes its spine and then locks in once more to the task of shipping three hundred grimy people around the world. ‘And you think this is symptomatic of a whole generation?’ ‘Yeah, that hippie thing, you know. It’s cool, get stoned, pay no attention.’ ‘I have news for you. Francis and I don’t qualify as boomers. We’re too old. We’re war babies. Our fathers helped save the world for demarkcrassy, in their own inept ways. But they also managed to get us started, around about the time there was an all-out war going on right below us, in this very ocean. And other places, of course.’ ‘I don’t mind war,’ says Piaf. ‘At least it sorts out where everyone stands.’ I drop my seat back as far as it can go and before

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passing out, observe that Piaf is listening to one of my tapes on her Walkman. Next I know it’s 1630 Eastern Standard Time, whatever that means, time for breakfast before dropping into San Francisco for a plane change, then on to New York. We navigate our way to Gate 98 and take cultural readouts to pass the time. ‘Look at that guy,’ says Piaf. ‘He looks like Helen Hunt’s husband in Mad About You. What’s his name again?’ ‘What about the groover in white? Is she an astronaut, or what?’ It takes four hours travelling time and another day out of our life to reach New York. Kennedy is like a giant complex for the rehabilitation of the world’s flotsam. We reach the Carey stop and hang out in a biting wind while a dozen East Europeans giggle about the Free World. I am feeling more than somewhat washed out. The bus pulls in, a silver diesel, sleek and worn out at the same time, like space junk. Piaf sits next to a red-headed woman who is marking up a manuscript. I squeeze past an enormous black man and sit behind them. ‘Are you a writer?’ Piaf asks. She looks like Bette Midler. Even sounds like her. She crinkles up her eyes at Piaf like she’s another refugee teetering on the rim of the melting pot. ‘That accent! It’s so cute! You’re English, right?’ ‘Nope, guess again,’ says Piaf, as cutely as possible. They talk animatedly about writing and publishing. I’m amazed at how lucid Piaf can be on any number of subjects. Piaf tells her everything about our quest, introduces me as her ‘bodyguard’ and has exchanged names and phone numbers before we cross over into Manhattan. She also mentions that she’s here to record

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interviews with ‘ordinary New York citizens’. A new one on me. At Grand Central we stumble out into the cold shock of a New York evening and retrieve our bags. Paula, the writer, is waving down at us from inside the bus. I nudge Piaf and she waves back, but already she’s sniffing the keen smoky air and looking around ready for her next peregrine experience. ‘Open your eyes,’ she says. ‘You’re in New York City!’ We engage in a brief scuffle with a golfer for the only cab within reach and win. It floats off through the movie set around Vanderbilt and Madison and heads downtown to the Lower West Side. The driver is a dentist from Calcutta and wants to know if there are any jobs where we come from. No. At the end of the ride we get a taperecorded message about taking our bags with us. We’re dragging our stuff across the sidewalk and it suddenly takes me by the throat. Panic. Get out of here. I don’t want to be a do-gooder. I want to be home with Adele, lighting the barbecue and checking out the sunset and cuddling Olivia. If I were alone, I’d disappear into some nice NYC bar and comfort myself that way, but instead we’re standing here under the tall neon sign,

H O T E L CHELSEA

the old lacework frowning down at us, the historical plaques trying to impress me with their antiquity. So what

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if Arthur Miller lived here, Dylan Thomas, Brendan Behan? I note they haven’t erected one for Nancy Spungen, stabbed to death by Sid Vicious. I grab the bags, stack them inside the door and with Piaf beside me walk up to the desk where a man who looks like the Martian from ‘My Favourite Martian’ is recklessly sorting guest mail into pigeon holes. As an operator in the hospitality industry, I’m always interested in how others do business. ‘Benjamin Wallymacher,’ I announce, ‘from Australia. And my niece, Piaf Anstey.’ ‘I’m not your bloody niece,’ hisses Piaf. ‘If I’m your bodyguard, you can be my niece,’ I hiss back. ‘Yes indeed, Mr Wallymacher,’ says my favourite concierge. ‘Patti, there’s some mail for you.’ He’s calling out to a thin woman with a distracted air and two teenagers in tow. It’s Patti Smith. The night may have once have belonged to lovers, but she’s doing some normal thing, like being a single mother and going out to dinner, and she lives here and there’s some mail for you, Patti, of course there is and certainly Mr Wallymacher, we’ve been expecting you, we’ve got you all in #311, that’s the suite Arthur C Clarke used to occupy, Mr Anstey thought you’d appreciate that. I’ll tell him you’re here. I’m jet-lagged and I’m getting dizzy looking at all the paintings around the lobby, including one by Brett Whitely. Hanging from the ceiling is a figure of a girl on a swing. Mr Anstey? What the fuck is he doing here? ‘I called him from San Francisco,’ says Piaf. ‘When you were in the toilet. Best to have everything out in the open, I reckon.’

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Top marks for spontaneity, Francis. I’m looking at both elevators, wondering which one he’ll use. The girl in the lobby is still swinging, cabs are hooting outside in West 23rd Street, a tour-group of Germans is trying to get checked out and Francis fools both of us by coming down the stairs. ‘Piaf, darling,’ he says. He hugs her with his wiry arms and pushes her away a little to look at her and then hugs her again. Then he shakes hands with me and gives me one of those half embraces with pat that we men do so well and then we’re all riding the elevator to the third floor and it’s a short walk along the corridor to #311 and we’re inside a big comfortable suite with four single beds and a kitchen and red velvet drapes and Piaf starts to sob, I guess that’s understandable, she can’t help it, maybe I’ll cry too. Then Francis sits on one of the beds with Piaf and me and then I decide to make some tea and soon we’re all laughing and we’re in New York City! And Piaf is trying to sort it out with her father, the one who sired her and me, her recently adopted protector, and she looks happy and safe and we all laugh at the thought of Arthur Clarke writing 2001 here and then we quieten down a bit and drink our tea and look at each other. Francis is actually looking handsome and sleek. His hair is parted and bouncy, like Robert Redford’s, and he’s wearing expensive-looking English brogues and chinos and a navy polo shirt under a silvery silk bomber jacket. His face is smooth, with fine lines around the eyes and his mouth is sadder than I remember. He has taken to wearing rimless spectacles, which make him look owlish. ‘How was the journey?’ he says. I take a shower in the strange bathroom, enjoying the blast of hot water. As I dry myself I notice the grimy

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windows which open onto the ventilator shaft, a black void which carries other people’s noise and smoke fumes into our space. Send for the Fremantle doctor! Francis tells us that Greenwich Village is a short walk down the road and that it might be fun to visit a speakeasy called the Bitter End. We follow his lead and have the sort of bleary night you imagine you would have in such a place: ninety-three different beers, live entertainment and a big headache. Piaf thinks I should be responding to the beer hall thing and I think I should be at home with Adele. At eleven-thirty we call it quits, catch a cab home and all crash out on our funny single beds amidst radiator sounds and comings and goings in the corridor and dope fumes drifting down through the bathroom ventilator. At one stage I wake up and Piaf is awake, watching a martial arts program on cable television. I curse her and turn over and sleep again, the weary traveller.

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2 In the morning it all seems better, my nerves, two Ansteys, New York. We breakfast at a diner and enjoy the cultural enclave we have formed, Australians in New York. Francis is reciting all the things he finds weird about the place and even though his accent is rounded and stretched to match the Yankee speech rhythms, he’s still an Oz boy at heart and pancakes and bacon and maple syrup will always seem like an exotic treat and the waitresses will always remind him of the short-order scene in Five Easy Pieces where Jack Nicholson subverts the sandwich menu. And Piaf thinks it’s cool because it’s just like the diner in ‘Seinfeld’ and we all have another cup of kawfee and laugh at the cosmopolitan anything-goes vibe of it all. Outside it’s spring and you wouldn’t know it. There’s not a tree to be seen, the wind’s still cutting and the grates

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are sending out steam signals to anyone who’ll stop to read them. Piaf wants more sleep. Francis has to talk to some people about a theatre he’s hiring for one of his Living Newspaper gigs, his first in Manhattan. We agree to convene for cocktails around 6.00. This is the new New York. The mayor has cleaned up the subways and there hasn’t been a murder in Central Park for two years. I take the subway uptown after studying my Streetwise Manhattan and surface at Columbus Circle, ready for a walk in the park and a visit to one of the art museums. I enter off Central Park West and head for a point called Strawberry Field, a memorial to John Lennon. From there I’ll traverse the park, destination Whitney Museum of American Art. Somehow, the Met seems a bit ambitious for day one. Rollerbladers abound, like Cottesloe on a Sunday, but there are sufficient sights specific to Manhattan to fill me with wonder: the limousine parked on the verge while the chauffeur takes the maxi-poodles out for a poo. Or the horse-drawn cabs doing business at a fast clip, framed against the abundant woodlands and ponds and behind that, like a modernist dream, the towers and apartments of Fifth Avenue. About halfway there I stop for a rest by The Lake, looking across to the boatshed. I feel hollow all of a sudden. What’s the point of all this? I’ve paid Piaf’s fare, they seem to be getting on again, do I really need to be here? Or am I just a gooseberry, with the emphasis on goose? Nagging away at me is the need to organise everything, yet Francis seems to be continuing on his merry way, doing his business. Why didn’t he take a few days off and allow himself to enjoy his daughter? Or are we an embarrassment, not really his issue? A mistake he’s tried to smooth over by heading us off in New York?

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He’s got his life together and I’m being a tourist and Piaf is sleeping alone in that poxy hotel, abandoned and feeling God knows what. Suddenly I’m replaying the conversation we had on the plane. Why have both Francis and I left Piaf alone on her first day here? I pick up a path that seems to be heading the right way. The path leads to a trail which becomes a track and by now I’m feeling uncomfortable, not exactly threatened, but there are a number of lone rangers, all men, and they don’t seem very purposeful in their movements, just hanging about and waiting for something to happen. A score? A gay liaison? A mugging, more likely. Feeling ridiculous, I start to jog, descend to a gully, up the other side, is that guy really wanking under a tree? Yep. Down another gully, sweating now, come on Wallymacher, this is the centre of the centre of Western Civilisation. I leap a brick fence and slide down a grassy incline to find I’m on West Park Drive, near 79th. All is well. Back in the grid, I hail a cab and bounce down Broadway into 7th Avenue. Orthodox Jews with dress racks are pushing their way through stalled traffic on the cross-streets. Vendors are selling hot dogs and drinks, business types are overtaking the dawdlers and all kinds of rappers and freaks are simply … hanging out. I race up three flights of Chelsea stairs to our room. No one there. Piaf has created a nest by strewing the contents of her backpack in a random pattern around her bed, but it doesn’t speak of desperation, merely insecurity. I go out again, find a deli, sort my way through seven-hundred and thirteen choice points (and that’s just the bread rolls), back upstairs to 311 and flop into one of Arthur’s chairs for the midday movie, High Noon, with Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly. The combination of the sandwich and the

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shimmering film-set streets has me up on my bed in no time and I drift off to the sound of the theme, sung a cappella by Frankie Lane and some studio boys with a bad case of the machos. Oh to be torn twixt love and duty Sposin’ I lose my fair-haired beauty Look at that big hand movin’ along Nearin’ high noon. He made a vow while in state prison Vowed it’s be my life or his’n I’m not afraid of death but oh! What would I do if you leave me? I sleep soundly for the rest of the day and am woken by Francis putting his key in the lock. For a while I enjoy fighting my way up into consciousness and hallucinating that he is Gary Cooper and I’m the bad guy, the one who made a vow while in state prison … ‘It’s my life or his’n,’ I say to him. ‘Excuse me?’ he says, turning off the TV. ‘Didn’t your father ever take you to see High Noon when you were a kid?’ ‘I don’t believe he did,’ says Francis. ‘Where’s Piaf?’ ‘Am I your daughter’s keeper?’ I say. ‘You’re weird, Wallymacher. Would you like a drink? I happened to pick up some Stolly’s. That’s what you like, isn’t it?’ ‘You’re talking my language, mate. Did you remember the tonic?’ He has and we settle in to wait for Piaf, as arranged. He talks about his day the way a monk might, someone who normally doesn’t deal with worldly matters.

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‘And when’s the big show happening?’ ‘In two weeks time. You two are invited, if you’re still around.’ I assure him we will be and that personally, I wouldn’t miss it. But I couldn’t speak for Piaf. ‘Well no, who could?’ he says, sounding peeved. ‘I mean she’s supposed to be here, isn’t she? Half an hour ago. She’s very flighty, that one.’ ‘She’s normal, Francis. Or does everyone in your world turn up on time? She’s probably out for a stroll and oblivious to time. I mean it’s a pretty amazing place, the old NYC, if you’ve never been here. You’re lucky you live so close.’ ‘I hardly ever come down here,’ he says. He reaches inside his jacket and pulls out his wallet. ‘This is Patricia, by the way.’ He shows me a head and shoulders portrait of a striking-looking blonde woman with high cheekbones and dark Indian eyes. Native American, I mean. A dark knitted top contrasts with fine white skin and the overall impression is of refinement, delicacy, a certain toughness. Possibly mercurial, like Piaf. In fact the picture reminds me of Piaf. ‘Indeed,’ I respond. ‘You must miss her a lot.’ At this, he starts to blubber. I’m sitting here in Arthur Clarke’s old bedroom with the formal drapes and floral bedspreads and artdeco light fittings and my childhood friend Francis, who could always get the better of me in the early stages of a wrestle, is blubbering. I try to pat him on the shoulder but that doesn’t work so I fill up his glass and go and take a leak. He’s still crying when I return. ‘Try and say what you’re crying about, mate.’ It’s a trick I learned from a counsellor when I was inside.

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‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘She seemed to protect me from the worst aspects of myself. I’m not sure how I’ll go …’ A big howl this time. I wonder if Arthur used to cry in his room? Probably. ‘How I’ll go without her. She was my lifeline to the world, you know. She believed in me.’ ‘So what changed?’ More howling, softer now. More like broken sighs. I’m trying to be kind and firm at the same time. Tough love, isn’t that what they call it? ‘She lost her father when she was young. He was murdered. She remembers getting a phone call at school. Her mother worked at the school as well. They both heard the phone ring, knew something was wrong. She ran out of class and down the corridor, beat her mother to it. It was the maid. She’d seen the guy gunned down in front of her. He was a bookmaker.’ ‘And what changed?’ ‘What changed was she decided to go on a quest to find out who did it. She’d read this book by James Ellroy called My Dark Places. We worked on all this stuff in the theatre, you know, we’ve got a group that does personal stuff. Actually, it was classic Living Newspaper stuff, now I think of it.’ His face looks softer. I pick up his spectacles, which he’s thrown on the bed, and hand them to him. ‘Couldn’t she have gone on the quest and stayed in the relationship?’ He nods, gathering himself together. ‘No.’ ‘How come?’ ‘Because I made her choose. Stay and work with me or go off on a wild goose chase in search of … what? I mean

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it sounded all right when Ellroy did it, but he’s a fiction writer. It’s his business to make things sound interesting.’ The either-or trap. I’ve heard that so many times. I tell him a little about Adele and me, about how we meet in the evenings and chat about the day, how I let her run the business so that she can get some experience. I edit out the dress-ripping episode and how abandoned she felt when I flew out with Piaf. ‘Is Patricia younger than you?’ ‘Fifteen years. But she’s very fiery. She likes to argue, she’s a warrior. A real little Amazon. I also have my moments, as you will remember. In the end, I’d developed this system that allowed me to bail out of the argument with some dignity, then come back when I’d recovered my equanimity.’ ‘How did you do that?’ ‘Simple. I had these cards with standard messages typed on them. Whenever I felt the temperature rising between us, I’d select the card that matched the situation and give it to her, thus avoiding verbal sparring which was always the forerunner to something worse.’ To me, this sounds like science fiction. I can’t believe anyone would want to conduct a relationship in that manner. ‘Give me an example,’ I say. ‘All right. Let’s say she’s setting up the group room, where the stage is, for a meeting. She’s put the chairs out in a certain pattern and I come in and want to change it. She says: Francis, you’re a pain in the ass, the way you want to do everything yourself. Then I feel very bad, the way I used to feel when my old man would pick at my perfectionism. See, I think perfectionism is a virtue, particularly in anything to do with performance.

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Anyhow, I would find the card that said: I’m sorry, I can’t hear what you’re saying without getting into a lot of stuff that belongs with my father. I’m going to take some time out, and when I come back I hope we can discuss it. Love, Francis. I’d give it to her, go for a walk and later that day we’d have a good debrief.’ ‘Fuck mate. Did you ever get anything done? It sounds pretty longwinded.’ Francis reaches in his pocket. Uh oh, he’s going to give me a card. Instead he pulls out another picture. It’s Patricia naked. ‘She was worth it. She was my goddess, my muse. Now she’s gone.’ This is getting very Russian, I think. Must be the vodka. Patricia is truly delectable, sitting bollocky on a wooden seat by a lake in the woods. The trees are bare, the lake is ruffled with wind and her nipples are standing out like beacons. She has black downy hair between her legs and her breasts seem too large for her tiny frame, matching the defiant look in her eyes. I can see why he’s upset. ‘Hey Francis! It’s seven o’clock. Let’s go look for something to eat and leave a note for Piaf. I think there’s a Spanish joint downstairs, why don’t we eat there?’ It’s 8.30 before we get back to the room. No Piaf. I dig a forgotten bottle out of my duty-free bag. Black Label Johnny Walker. Why not? We drink our way slowly into incoherence and back again. ‘You shouldn’t have come over, Wallymacher, you know that, don’t you?’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Because … it would have been tidier if you didn’t.’ ‘How do you mean, tidier?’ When we were mates on Buckland Hill, I remember

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making a mutual pledge with him. I guess we were fourteen or fifteen, emotional the way boys that age can be, and we each wanted to look out for the other one. It had been vaguely worded … I promise to come to your assistance if you are ever in trouble, something like that. ‘Think of me as coming to your assistance,’ I say. ‘How can I help?’ ‘It would have been more helpful for you to stay away. Then I could have got on with what I’ve been planning without being diverted by the presence of my daughter and my … and yourself.’ It sounds funny to me and it sounds selfish. I mean, he could be planning an elaborate suicide and the theatre thing is all a cover. I’m full of garlic prawns and Californian wine and Stolly’s and Scotch. To hell with him. ‘Listen you selfish bastard,’ I say standing up and pointing my finger. ‘Your daughter is here to see you and frankly, you’d be better off forgetting about all your miseries and your precious fucking project and paying attention to her. It’d be better for her and better for you!’ He looks at me curiously for a moment, takes off his glasses and stands in front of me with his arms out and a hand on each of my shoulders, our traditional way of beginning a wrestling match. Then he launches into his famous headlock, at the same time trying to push me backwards and trip me to the floor with his left leg. I block him, pick him up and throw him bodily against the padded wall behind the beds. He falls back on the middle bed, the wind knocked out of him and then stands up, using the bounce of the mattress to spring up and grab my head with surprising ferocity. This brings me down to the floor and there’s Francis, on top and going for a

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shoulder pin. He’s got no chance, not even for a count of one. I’m up and carrying him with his legs locked around my waist, wondering what to do with him. That’s when Piaf walks in. ‘Look, I know you two are fond of each other, but do you mind?’ I let him down gently and by now we’re both feeling a bit foolish. He sits on his own bed and I try to retrieve my ponytail, which has lost its tie. We both turn to Piaf. ‘What time is it?’ I say. ‘Half-a-bottle over your limit,’ she says. ‘I dunno, maybe midnight.’ ‘Aren’t you worried about being six hours late?’ says Francis. ‘For what?’ ‘For meeting here in the room, as we agreed.’ ‘Was that an agreement?’ says Piaf with a yawn. ‘I took it as a loose arrangement.’ ‘We were worried about you,’ says Francis, looking to me for support. ‘Come off it, Francis,’ says Piaf. ‘You haven’t been worried about me since you sent your last maintenance cheque in 1978.’ Ouch. I grab my shaving bag and head for the bathroom. Some things are best avoided. A long shower later, the atmosphere seems to have cleared and the two of them are chatting happily. I take advantage of my second wind and decide to head off for a stroll.

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3

Dear Adele,

Chelsea Hotel February 20

How are you darling? And how is Olive Oyl? I hope not too demanding. Have we got a full house? I’ve been leaving flyers all over the place, although I’m getting the idea that no one wants to leave Manhattan, in case they lose their apartment or they miss out on some mega happening thing in the world’s most exciting overrated burg. They even have an ad to that effect on the subways — sort of hey! Escape to Mystic, Connecticut and don’t get anxious about leaving town. We’re packing our bags and preparing to catch the Greyhound up to New Paltz, where Francis lives. He

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has a few holiday things in mind for us, as much to get us out of his hair as anything else. He and Piaf have been getting on okay but there’s always that edge when Piaf drops into being scathing and Francis goes all gloomy and hopeless. He’s a bit that way anyhow because of his lost love. March 6 is the night for Francis’ big show in NYC, so we’ll be coming back down and after that we’re not sure. Piaf wants to see Niagara Falls! I don’t think she has any idea what’s involved in getting there. She’s a bit of a space cadet sometimes, though a pleasant enough travelling companion. The other night she came home six hours late for a date with Francis and me. He was livid and I just let it ride. I met this unusual person when I was out the other night. I was wandering around with my Rough Guide and decided to ride the subway to TriBeCa, near SoHo. It was late at night, I was hungry, so I went to the TriBeCa Grill, owned by Robert De Niro. If I was hoping to spot a film star, I was out of luck. It was a little more upmarket than our Cappuccino Strip, but to tell the truth, not all that different. I mean you can imagine that every second person is in the film industry or whatever, but most of the people in reality seem ordinary enough. The one big difference was that there were so many out and about at 11.30 pm on a Monday night. Anyhow, I had to wait at the bar for a table and I got chatting to this woman. She was pleasant enough, green eyes, red hair drawn back in a bun, plucked eyebrows, pointy features and a bossy South African accent. She was dressed in black, head-to-toe,

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with zippers down her forearms and the zips attached to a silver bracelet around each wrist. We interviewed each other for a while, the way travellers do, and she said she was ‘a sort of a model’. I said I was in the hospitality business. That made her laugh for some reason. On the second drink, she fessed up to what she really does: she’s a dominatrix. You know, whips and spurs, fetishes, rubber. Shoe-licking, for Christ’s sake. Anyhow, when I got over my distaste, I decided she was worth listening to and we ended up sharing a table and having a good old rave, the way you do when you meet a stranger a long way from home. I started wishing I’d had Piaf’s tape-recorder with me. Dearest, I don’t want you to think I was looking for any street action. I was a bit bored with the scene at the Chelsea, to tell you the truth, and Azure — that’s what she called herself — promised to be an antidote to that. I know you trust me and even though things were strained when you and I parted, it’s that rock solid thing we have that allows me to relate this adventure, warts and all. And I could tell that she wasn’t just another worker with a good line of patter. In fact, she didn’t think of herself as a sex worker at all, more as the fulfilment of the new-age woman’s dream of domination. ‘It’s woman’s karma to dominate,’ she insisted, ‘and it’s men’s time to serve.’ After the meal, I decided to have a bit of fun. I told her I was interested in experiencing everything while I was in New York and asked if it was possible to have a ‘session’ with her. She said she didn’t see why

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not, it was her night off, but she was sure there’d be a suite available back at D-Basement where she works. As I say, sweetheart, keep reading because you have nothing to fear from me in the faithful department. Anyhow, we caught a cab to the East Village and stopped outside this typical NYC warehouse conversion. There’s a couple of heavy-looking black guys with chainsaw haircuts looking after the door, we walk in, she uses a security card, explains herself to the front desk and we’re in a gloomy room that seems to have a lot of hardware around the walls. She turns to me and says you’re obviously here because you want to find out what it’s like to be dominated. So I say — just kidding of course — I want to be dominated in style. Australian wives dominate their husbands non-stop, it’s part of the culture, but yes, go ahead, do it to me. And she turns on her routine, assures me of her professional approach to the work, she won’t treat me severely since I’m a beginner, so if I want to go ahead — give it a bash, so to speak — I can always come back and do the advanced course. So now you’ll know what it’s about if a $US150 charge comes through on our credit account. Although as things turned out, they owe me. Anyhow, I agree and she turns up the lights and I can’t believe all this stuff. It’s still dingy, with a red light bulb and some candles on tiny shelves on the wall, which she lights up. In the corner of the room is a huge throne, made of wood. Behind it is a floorto-ceiling curtain, made of rubber. In front, on a zebra skin rug, is a primitive mask. Azure leaves the room and tells me that when she

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returns, she will be dressed in her working clobber and that I should be naked and down on all fours facing the throne. I’m expecting her to be wearing something skimpy (like that corset I bought you, my sweet), but when she does appear she’s decked out in a full-length cat suit, with PVC gloves to the elbows. She’s put Handel’s Messiah on the CD and I’m looking up at her and wondering what’s next and she says in her best Kaffir-taming Boer voice what makes you think you can look at me in that way? Which is a shock for me to hear. I mean, men are always looking at women, aren’t they? To be called on it so early in the piece … I began to think that maybe I’m in the wrong place, maybe this is hell. I’m feeling pretty stupid, in the nick and kneeling at her feet, but I come back with the obvious answer: I’m looking at you because you’re beautiful. She says I’m the one who decides when you can look and when you can’t, all right? If at all! Then she picks up a hefty-looking collar and chain from a rack on the wall, puts it around my neck and starts trying to teach me how to crawl! You can imagine how I took to that. I hate being taught things I already know! And I hate to be tethered, as you would appreciate, my sweet. But you know, the strangest thing happened. I got a hard on. The more I hated her and her fascist voice, the more aroused I became. This seemed to piss her off even more — I know she was acting, but she was good at it — so for punishment, she puts me straight onto the cross, my arms and legs strapped so I couldn’t move. Then she comes in with her rubber gloves and

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sheaths my cock in this leather thing with spikes, which is anchored by a strap around my balls. The whole idea is that she’s so enraged (or pretending to be), she’ll do anything to make my erection go down. So of course it stays up. You always said it was a dumb one-eyed animal, Adele, and you were right. Then she gets out the whip. Obviously, she says in that colonial voice, you’re not going to make any effort to control your penis with your mind. And she walks up to the cross, flexing her whip, and prepares to apply the lash to the honorary member. Something snaps then and I’m not talking mind stuff. I must have been pulling very hard on the strap around my right arm. With one arm free, I start reaching down to try and undo my ankles. What are you doing, Ben? She says it in such a pathetic voice, she sounds like Hal in 2001 when the astronaut’s about to switch him off. I tell her I’ve changed my mind, I’ve had enough, game over. But we haven’t finished yet, she says. It’s a sad moment for her and it’s then I understand how there’s no spontaneity here at all, she’s locked into her lines and her routine. And I remember what Billington taught us, how the ability to role reverse with another person is a sign of mental health. Have you ever been dominated? I ask. She looks at me warily. Why would I want to? she says. I try to explain that it would actually enrich her work, that she could expand her own repertoire by being in the reciprocal role. What do you want me to do? she says sullenly. She unstraps the remaining ties and I come down off the cross, feeling fully resurrected.

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She’s trying to remain calm but I can see she’s scared. Why don’t we start by tying you up? I venture. My mind flashes back to a conversation I once had with Francis about his hero, Moreno, working with prostitutes in Vienna. I start believing that I’m actually going to teach her something, a gift from the heart in this big heartless city. There’s a nice length of leather rope handy, so I coax her into a kneeling position and ever so gently bind her arms together behind her back, using a couple of knots I used to find handy working with Ralph. Then I walk over and sit on her throne and take a couple of breaths and tell her she has to walk around on her knees in a way that pleases me. But of course I won’t disclose what that way is and I grab a battery-operated prodder from the rack and administer a few small shocks and by this time she’s looking pretty silly, her face red and her breasts wobbling as she tries to do what I want. I can tell she’s not really happy with the arrangement, but it’s her night off and what’s she got to lose? Back on the throne, I’m feeling relaxed and even starting to enjoy myself. I let my hands run along the underside of the armrests and arrive at a button, which I’m thinking will change the lights or the music or something. Why not? So I press it and two seconds later the goons from out front come crashing in through the dungeon door, take one look at Azure roped up on her knees and go for me like I’m an axe murderer. All I wanted was a little fun, I swear. Wait ’til Phillip hears about this. It’ll probably end up in his play! They ask her what she wants them to do with me.

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The fear these brothers carry with them is transmitted to both of us and she can no more stay out of her accustomed role, or argue against them, than fly. String him up, she shrieks. I can tell from the tone of her voice that I’ve rattled her. Perhaps she doesn’t often meet people as playful as me. The goons grab me and tie me upside down to another contraption. They’re not kidding around, by the feel of it. Mask him, she directs. When I’m completely blind and helpless, she approaches me again and ties my dick up with what feels like a leather thong, which she then stretches fairly tightly and secures to a hook somewhere above me. What is this, I’m thinking? Some kind of weird karmic punishment for deserting my wife and child? After that, it’s all a bit of a blur. She’s hissing things in my ear at the same time as she’s dripping hot candle-wax on my genitals. For God’s sake, I think, isn’t this a bit over the top? All I did was tie her up. You must learn to respect women, she says. You have offended the Goddess and you must be punished, not pleasured. Now I’m going to whip the living shit out of you. To tell you the truth, Adele, this was no longer my idea of fun. The whip whistles a few times close to my ears and then she lays into me, screaming at me like an avenging banshee. I can feel her rage descending on me like a hundred harried hornets, so I just tune out a bit and try to remember some old Jack Kornfield gems. ‘Just as a snake sheds its skin,

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we must shed our past over and over again.’ I remember hoping I’d retain some of my skin. When it was over, they untied me and put me on my feet, leaving the mask in place. Someone handed me my clothes. Then someone else started hitting me with a baseball bat, starting with the back of the legs, so that I buckled and sat down. I put my hands up to protect my face and whoever it was gave me a good one in the ribs. Then I was left alone to remove the mask and put my clothes on, which was very painful. I limped out past reception, no goons to be seen, and caught a cab back to the Chelsea. An all-night doctor across the road strapped my ribs and that was about all anyone could do for me that night. I crawled into bed feeling stupid and sorry and most of all wishing I’d never laid a hand on you and crying to myself that if God ever saw fit to deliver me home, that I would love and cherish you all my days and never again try anything as senseless as this caper. All my love, Ben.

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4 New Paltz means New Place and Francis tells us that when he arrived here in the late seventies after a few years of bumming around Europe and the Americas, it felt like his new place. It had winding European streets, history and real seasons, four distinct shifts in the weather as opposed to the balmy Mediterranean climate we’d grown up with in Perth where you can wear shorts all year except for a brief, wet winter. Here he’d experienced snow, followed by a thaw; golden changing trees followed by stark bare branches; a glad summer when every creature seemed to sing. ‘You’ve missed this year’s snow,’ he tells us, ‘but old man winter hasn’t quite said goodbye yet.’ When Patricia moved out, he’d forsaken their rented cottage out near the Mohonk Bluffs and moved into student lodgings in town. When the Greyhound pulled in

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last night, we’d walked straight there, a short jog down the hill to the old town centre, where we stopped for supper before bedding down like pilgrims in Francis’ sitting room overlooking Academy Street. Timber and brick buildings of two and three storeys rule in this part of town. The streets all fall away in the direction of the river flats and from there the eye is drawn magnetically to the grandeur of the Bluffs. This morning, we’re all breakfasting at the Mohonk Mountain House, which is where Piaf and I will be staying for a week before returning to Manhattan for more city sights and of course the big show. Francis is remaining mysterious about the event, simply promising us ‘something special’. I gather some maniac with an edifice complex originally built this place as a summer retreat. It’s now become a six-storey holiday castle on the edge of a still, cold mountain lake and we are presently enjoying the attentions of an army of chefs and wait-persons who are trying to stuff us full of the best American produce. The dining hall is a vast, wood panelled mausoleum dedicated to the memory of St Podgy, as far as I can tell. I haven’t really got my bearings yet, and I’m feeling very groggy after my run-in with the bouncers at DBasement. Neither Francis nor his daughter has commented on my limp and I’m trying to hide the broken ribs as best I can. By a miracle, my face is unmarked. ‘You should go on some of the walks,’ says Francis. ‘We’ll need to,’ says Piaf, who has refilled her plate with pancakes, bacon, blueberries, cream, hash browns, eggs, fruit salad and a shipload of syrup. We spend the day doing tourist things, including a visit to the shop where I buy matching moccasins for Adele

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and Olivia. At 5.00, Francis picks us up and takes us out to Highland, where the reconstructed Moreno Theatre stands on a two-acre block next to a farmhouse. This is the site of Francis’s long haul to put his own imprint on the craft that Harry Billington taught him. The building is nondescript from the outside. Inside it hints of struggle, emotional work, the soulful side of being human. The walls are soundproofed, there’s a stained wooden floor and at the business end of the room is the stage itself, originally commissioned by Jacob Moreno for his Beacon Sanatorium. ‘The plans were drawn up by the same architect who designed Radio City Music Hall,’ says Francis. ‘If that means anything to you.’ For Piaf, it clearly doesn’t. She’s mooching around the perimeter of the room, looking at posters. I decide to let her be. ‘There were three levels in the original stage. This one was modified to two. Moreno used a lighting auxiliary to operate the spotlights. He himself would sit on the middle level. People sitting down here on the floor needed to be warmed up before they were ready to stand and say ‘I have a problem’, especially in the culture of privacy that existed in the 1930s.’ ‘Claire Daniellson and others worked through the Town Council at New Paltz to get it moved here. It wasn’t an easy task. I helped put it together again.’ ‘Where were all the king’s horses and all the king’s men?’ says Piaf from the back of the room. ‘It costs a lot to run and we’ve had to resort to all sorts of stunts, like selling bits of the original stage for twentyfive dollars a pop. Here you go, like pieces of the cross.’ He shows me a small section of timber, tongue-and-

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grooved, with the words ‘Moreno Stage 1936-1986’ burnt into it. It makes me sad, reminding me of buildings that didn’t fulfil the plans of their owners. Francis and I have something in common there. Above us is a balcony, which follows the curve of the stage so as not to overshadow the central working area. Francis follows my eyes. ‘Would you like to see what it’s like up there?’ A door in the padded wall at the rear of the stage lets onto a steep flight of stairs. The balcony is perhaps four metres above the stage and once there, I have a powerful feeling of being elevated above the ruck. ‘Is there anything you’d like to say while you’re there, Ben?’ I look around the room and feel the inflation that comes with position. ‘I could do things here and I wouldn’t see the impact of my actions on my subjects.’ ‘Anything else?’ says Francis. For some reason, I begin to form some notes down in my throat. I start with my mouth closed until the strength of my song begins to rattle my jaw. I let it out, like the drone note of the tamboura, or Indian lute, then gradually open my mouth to allow the note to stretch and fill the space. Piaf turns around, startled and walks over next to her father. I fill my lungs with another breath and begin to range up the scale, not a western scale but some modal variety that lies buried in my bones. A door opens at the back of the theatre and a man with a black beard and a nose like a sickle enters. He takes a seat on the floor and looks up at me and I fight off selfconsciousness and continue to sing, gloriously free, until I reach a place where it ends, naturally. My audience

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applauds and I stand there and receive it. I feel like I’ve just honoured something bigger than me, the way I respect the ocean when I’m alone on my surf ski. ‘That was amazing, Ben,’ says Piaf, touching my arm. Francis is nodding warmly and smiling. The man at the back of the theatre walks up and joins us. ‘Hi Francis. This must be Piaf. We’ve heard a lot about you. Welcome. And you must be Ben. Hello. My name is Daniel Edison.’ Daniel is perhaps in his mid-forties, but he has the wandering prophet aura about him, assisted by his Indian-looking clothing and Nepalese slippers. Francis invites him to eat with us. ‘We’re going to the Mexican place downtown. Vegetarian enough for you, Dan?’ The four of us pile into Francis’ car and I ask Daniel how he met Francis. They laugh heartily, a long-standing bond of some sort. For a moment I feel a ridiculous sort of jealousy, a wish that I’d cut loose like Francis and could now be part of the same bond. ‘I met Francis the day that Dr Moreno died,’ he says more soberly. ‘It was a sad day and it was also a happy day, because I was newly arrived from Canada myself and I met this man Francis, with his big yellow backpack and his big blue aura! And we became pals, sort of cultural samurai, right mite?’ Francis is grinning, enjoying the affection. ‘What were you doing in Canada?’ asks Piaf. Quite unconsciously, she’s slipped into interview mode. ‘Dodging the draft. Things were getting rough in the States. An amazing number of well-educated Americans were turning up there, supported by an underground network of peaceniks. In Toronto, you’re literally

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underground. All the houses seem to have basements and that’s where people do their socialising. I didn’t see daylight for the first six months, I swear.’ He has a nice New York drawl, with a touch of New England I would guess. Piaf is sitting in the back, hypnotised by his conk. ‘So you met Moreno, the man who turned my dad into a psychonaut,’ she says. This is followed by a silence. ‘A psychonaut, eh? One who explores the outer regions of the psychological universe, taking small steps for himself but great steps for um …’ ‘His family?’ She throws the question in without thinking, playing the game and grabbing for the first word that comes to mind. I am half-turned in my seat and I can see Dan is looking at her and nodding, sizing her up. ‘I don’t know much about your father’s family life,’ he says. ‘We’re colleagues, we have some of the same concerns about the aesthetics of psychodrama, we belong to the same network. All I know about his family life is how important you are. He talks about you all the time, whenever he has news of your doings; he’s full of it, talks to anyone who’ll listen! Am I right, Francis?’ The restaurant is an upstairs affair, with round tables, pot plants and a busy vibe. Both Francis and Dan seem at home here, waving to friends and chatting to the waitpersons. Someone orders a large bottle of Gallo chablis and the whole thing slides into dinner party mode. After the mains, Piaf produces her tape-recorder and asks Dan if it’s all right to ask him some questions. ‘What sort of questions?’ ‘About your life. It’s just the way I remember things. No big deal. Some people take photographs. I record voices.’

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She gets set up and begins by asking him about his writing. He responds so readily, and interestingly, that Francis and I tune in as well. ‘When I surfaced from all those basements in Toronto, I became acutely aware of the need to express myself. I’d studied medicine at Harvard and had my budding career as an anaesthetist snuffed out by the Vietnam war. And suddenly I felt free and with all the arrogance of youth, imagined I was like Philip Roth, ready to pick up my pen and become a writer. And I imagined all the people that would be thirsty for the words of Daniel Edison.’ ‘What happened?’ says Piaf. ‘I wrote a lot of poetry, sort of warming up for the main event, my novel. It was going to be called Déjà vu, until Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young came out with a record album of that title. It went through various name changes after that. Finally, I settled on Dispatches from the Peace Zone. ‘Was it published?’ says Piaf. ‘Oh yes, it was published. I still get royalties from it. My last cheque was six dollars! For about a year I enjoyed minor celebrity status in Toronto. In the meantime, I’d discovered Moreno. I went to Beacon in 1971 and that’s where I met the father of psychodrama.’ ‘What was he like?’ says Piaf. ‘First I’ll tell you what it was like. The building was on an acre of forest. It had three houses on it. The Morenos lived in the Gatehouse, a renovated weatherboard cottage with a lovely ambience. Zerka still lives there. Down the driveway you came to this old house where the theatre was, the original hospital. There were numbers of bedrooms upstairs and a dining room downstairs. You were under the care of the housekeeper as soon as you

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got there. The house was grand, and a bit run down. Lots of trees. Further down the road was the President’s country home.’ ‘The first thing I did was to go to the theatre, to meet all the other people who had come for the workshop. The theatre was also built of weatherboard, an extension to the house. You always had the feeling at Beacon that lots of people had passed this way before, seeking whatever it was they were seeking: learning, healing, redemption. Moreno himself might come down there in the evenings, if he was well enough. Or the group would go up to the house and have a session with talking. A lot of the psychotherapists were Jewish, like me. But not all Americans. They came from Israel, Holland, all over.’ ‘What was the most striking idea you learned there?’ says Piaf. She has a rapt expression, like she’s been transported there herself. ‘The most striking idea? That the child is spontaneous from birth. The child is not born tabula rasa, to be imprinted with subsequent experiences. Infant research will confirm this within ten years. There was this coalescence of ideas at the time, very exciting, from Margaret Mead, Lindsay, Levine; they were all talking to Moreno and beginning to think systemically and contextually.’ ‘And what was it like to be in his presence?’ ‘He was extremely seductive with his body language. He was deeply intent on you and very smooth, working right up close to you on the stage. He had these big brown kind of baby eyes. He would look at you deeply and he would make contact. Sometimes he would hold your hand so that he would get the feeling of whether you were going to be responsive or not. He was very

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much connected to you through touch, as well as deeply talking to you; and then he might turn and make a general statement and relate more deeply then to someone else. He was always interested in what you brought here and what you wanted to work through, what was going on in your life.’ ‘Is this what he called the “encounter”?’ ‘Yes, but for me that has a personal meaning. Moreno had his birthday the week I arrived and Zerka took us all up to some tavern. I sat in the back of the car between Hal and Carolyn. It was Moreno’s car, Zerka was driving. When we got up there to the birthday party, people got into some fairly wild dancing, but Moreno and I just sat there all night in absolute stillness and silence. And then he gave me a certificate. On it he wrote: ‘To Dan, another God-player’. He recognised that role in me even then, unformed as it was. You see, we are pushing for expression through the roles that we have. And it’s a frustration if we either have a paucity of roles or insufficient roles or not enough of the kind of roles to express who we are.’ ‘Do you think he meant that by developing a lot of different roles, we approach godlike status?’ ‘No. I think there is an intelligence working you could say within the soul, that isn’t just a brain intelligence but I think he was referring to that as the shaping power, a much larger entity. That I think would probably be defined as the aura, of which the body is only a partial expression. That was my understanding of what he was trying to convey in the silence, and with his note.’ So here I am, I’m thinking, back on the outside of someone else’s quest. Piaf’s full of questions, Dan’s full of answers and my ribs are hurting. Then I remind myself

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that you can always learn something if you listen. It’s obvious that Piaf is happy to be with her father in the company of a charming outsider, Dan. And Dan is not uninterested in Piaf’s questions. Or Piaf, for that matter. ‘Is it okay to talk about the Society, Francis? I met Francis after I’d moved back to the Hudson Valley, which is where I’d grown up. And Francis and I both had the same burning interest in all things Morenian. By then the old man was dead, but Zerka was alive and kicking — she still is — and many of the fruits of his work were beginning to bloom. It was the late seventies, after all. Everything was blooming!’ ‘Yeah, but we didn’t like the smell of some of the blooms,’ says Francis. ‘That’s correct. In particular, we didn’t like the revisionism taking place in what was then called the Human Potential Movement. It seemed like a big mishmash of humanist ideas with no guiding philosophy and we both thought that Moreno had got it right when he declared himself a Ggod-player. So we formed the Green Cloak Society and we met in secret and dreamed up ways of subverting mainstream theatre and at the same time carrying out counterinsurgency actions to try and put a stop to the plethora of growth groups run by incompetent leaders with five minutes of training in psychodrama.’ ‘Right on, brother,’ says Francis and gives this weird two-handed salute. It comes out looking like a reclining wigwam. I realise it’s the same symbol that we saw earlier in the day on the Moreno Stage souvenir. ‘Did any of you read The Dice Man? The dice thrower, the narrator, who is really a kind of God-player himself, upsets a growth group by questioning the leader’s authority. That’s what we were into, questioning the

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authority of leaders who didn’t match up to the Morenian ideal. We were like Mao’s Red Guards. People came to fear us.’ Again, I’m wishing that I’d followed my inclinations more, like Francis. And I’m comparing myself with him, unfavourably. How is it, I’m thinking, that when I bucked authority I paid for it but when Francis and Dan did it, they created myths? My sore ribs remind me that this happened again only a few nights ago. I tried to express myself and received an instant corrective. Do these two get away with it because they’re artier, more socially acceptable? I’m looking at Piaf making her tape and I’m wishing I was back in my pew in Hubble Street, making my own myths and not sidelined by someone else’s story. I try to imagine Adele and Olivia back in Fremantle. It’s early morning there, maybe too early to call. They’ll be curled up in our loft, enjoying the crisp pre-dawn air and whatever dreams they’ve spun around themselves. What would Adele say? She gave up trying to straighten me out a long time ago. But perhaps she would say something, if I left an opening for her. ‘Ben,’ she might say in her caressing voice, ‘you’ve got so much to say, you’re such a fine man. You don’t have to pretend to be inarticulate anymore. No one’s going to blame you for stepping out on life’s stage.’ Piaf looks up from the conversation and meets my eyes. She has a beautiful face, round, delicate features and those soulful eyes. Her hair is growing out and beginning to form a curly frame around her temples. We hold each other’s gaze and recognise each other, the quiet ones, the meek ones who probably won’t inherit the earth because it will already be parcelled out to the talkers, the self-

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presenters, the actors and the talk-show hosts, spruikers and buskers; all the performers who can command attention with their words. Or is there some other quality, this spontaneity thing these Morenians keep talking about. And if that’s the difference and if it’s such a great thing to have, where can I get some? I lean forward and look at Dan. ‘That sounds like a pretty impulsive thing to do. Didn’t Moreno have something to say about the difference between spontaneity and what did he call it? Disorderly conduct.’ I can see I’ve spoiled something. There’s a pause in which Francis seems embarrassed and Dan returns my gaze, ready to defend himself. Francis pitches in to save the moment. ‘Do you want me to answer that?’ Piaf shrugs. ‘Why not?’ ‘Ben’s right. You have to do things like that in a spirit of liberation, not out of spite or punishment. When Dan was talking about the Green Cloak days, I was reminded of that story about Jesus and the moneychangers, you know when he comes into the temple and tips their tables over. I think the world still needs people who are prepared to cast out the shonky operators.’ ‘Great Francis,’ says Piaf. ‘That story has been the cause of endless suffering caused by anti-Semitic maniacs who used the fallacy of composition to prove that all Jews were moneylenders. It was behind the crusades and it informed Nazism. Good one, father.’ She turns off the tape-recorder with a determined click and we divvy up the bill. Outside in the sharp night air, we stand under the lamplight, stamping our feet and establishing what happens next. Dan and Piaf are off for

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a drink. Francis has to see a mysterious someone. I elect to walk home alone. Piaf comes over and gives me a hug. ‘It’s all right,’ she whispers. ‘I wasn’t recording anything. I was just trying to latch onto Dan.’ ‘Looks like it worked,’ I whisper back. ‘See you in New York,’ says Dan loudly. He’s part of the Francis extravaganza. ‘See you mate,’ says Francis consolingly. I walk back to Academy Street musing about the evening. So Piaf was acting. Dan was mythmaking. Francis was trying to smooth things over and ended up patronising me and offending his daughter. And I tried to be intellectual and blew it. Hell of a night, I thought. It can only get better.

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5 The Living Newspaper! with Francis Anstey and friends Issues of the day discussed and enacted in a Public Performance. Based on the work of the late J L Moreno. 8pm sharp. Friday March 6, 1998 At the Bernie Kortum Auditorium Corner 8th Ave and West 36th. Admission: $20/12. COME ALONG AND BE SURPRISED!

It’s a quaint poster, out of place in the forest of concerts, gigs and spectaculars all pasted to the hoarding outside

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the subway. Piaf and I are mastering the subway system, following Blue Code, 8th Avenue Local signs. At the Chelsea end, we encounter free entertainment, a man singing love songs into the booming acoustic of the 23rd Street station. He pauses each time a train roars past, then continues with a barrage of inflections and riffs. ‘Good evening, and welcome to Club Twenty Three,’ he says to nobody. ‘I wrote this new one for you, just last week,’ he continues and begins patting his knees rhythmically with his cupped hands. He’s quite talented. I don’t know where to look but Piaf digs it, moving her strong neck in time and enjoying it. She comes from another big city. Maybe she’s used to it. We surface again close to Madison Square Garden, and walk uptown. The Bernie Kortum Auditorium is not a notable venue. There have been no prizefights here, Sinatra has never set foot in the place. A young woman with red frizzy hair and a pale face finds the tickets that Francis reserved for us and stamps our wrists. ‘Take a right at the top of the stairs, follow the corridor, you can’t miss it,’ she says, smiling. Inside the auditorium, what used to be the stage is filled with scaffolding. The function of the scaffold is hidden behind colourful silk drapes. A few people are sitting on tiered seats in the main body of the hall. Their focus is a semi-circular platform, directly in front of the original stage, and similar to the Moreno stage we saw at Boughton Place. This version is all on one level, raised up about a foot from the floor. A single chair sits there in the gloom. A separate set of tiered seats stands off to the right of the stage, facing the audience at a slight angle. Above our heads, a professional lighting grid and what looks like

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trapeze equipment sits in shadow. There’s two banks of speakers bracketing the draped scaffold and more leads on the floor than your average Pink Floyd concert. ‘Wow,’ says Piaf. ‘Dad really goes for it when he goes for it.’ That’s maybe the first time she’s called him ‘Dad’ in my hearing. The audience seats are filling fast. Our seats are off the centre aisle, about three rows back. A buzz is starting to rise as new arrivals speculate about the format. The space fills quickly and we enjoy the pre-show theatre of people finding their places. Sharp on 8.00, a spotlight hits the single chair and another spot is following Francis as he jogs down the tunnel into his amphitheatre, a spring in his step, wearing the trademark bomber jacket, chinos and a crisp white polo shirt. He steps up onto the stage and turns to the audience. Piaf seems to be crying and praying at the same time. ‘Good evening, friends.’ His accent is mid-Atlantic, his face is shining and his radio mike is tuned to perfection. ‘Welcome to this first Manhattan edition of the Living Newspaper. I’m very happy that you were able to join us.’ The applause is spotty. There are a lot of people here, maybe two hundred, and every one of them seems to be hanging on what he says next. If I had to guess what they wanted, I’d say they were looking for the answer to one simple question: is this therapy, or is it entertainment? ‘And now I’d like to introduce you to my auxiliaries. These are our actors …’ Three men and four women file onto the stage and stand in front of the second tier of seating, to Francis’ left. We know Dan, of course. Then there’s the woman who took our tickets. The others are strangers. Each of them looks fit

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and alert, reliable. They range in age from around twenty to mid-fifties, my vintage. Piaf nudges me in the ribs. ‘Isn’t he a spunk,’ she whispers. She’s talking about Dan. I shrug, mesmerised. ‘And this is our orchestra!’ says Francis. Behind him, set into the old stage, is an orchestra pit, illuminated to reveal a line of brass, some strings, woodwinds and a percussionist. Out in front is a short guy on keyboards and synthesiser. They hit a chord, play a couple of riffs and then recede into semi-darkness. Francis sits on his chair as if he’s about to sing solo. ‘Let me tell you briefly how the Living Newspaper is produced,’ he says. ‘Like any newspaper, we have a deadline. The show will finish at around 10.30 and there’ll be no interval. We rely on you for our stories since you’re both journalist and news source rolled into one. I will invite eyewitnesses, as we call them, to join me in the newsroom. My role will be to act as the subeditor. Instead of reading the newspaper, it will all be acted out for us.’ ‘One last point. Should you feel like stepping out and being an actor, no problem. The first little tinge of act hunger you feel, come on down and sit on the bench with the actors. The view of the action is just as good from here, and you get to experience stage fright, for free!’ This raises a great laugh of relief, as if the questions can now be dispensed with. Francis is doing what all good showmen do, he’s tickling our ribs so the serious stuff can be slipped in without pain. He’s like Garrison Keiller, down-home and sophisticated at the same time. Why did he want me to believe he was a crank? All that stuff about purity and the Viennese way! This promises to be state-ofthe-art entertainment, a combination of current affairs, game show and Oprah, all rolled up in the one matzo ball.

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I’m surprised the big networks aren’t here. Maybe they are. ‘So where do we start? The front-page? The sports section? The gossip column? Who’s going to be our first eyewitness?’ A slight figure dressed in Levis and a sports coat stands up. ‘Yeah, me. I’m your man. I got a story for you.’ Francis calls him up to the stage. As the orchestra trumpets him on, a second spot picks him out. Something’s coming down from above on invisible wires. It looks like a birdcage … ‘It’s a dome,’ whispers Piaf. ‘Check it out, Ben, it’s a dome.’ The cage comes to rest on the stage next to Francis. Piaf is right, it’s designed on the geodesic principle, made from fine metal struts, painted gold. It’s lit from within and contains a simple seat, a plank running between two of the five pentagons that form the ‘equator’. The cage door swings open and Francis invites his first volunteer to step in. The man in the sports coat climbs in and sits down. His legs won’t reach the footrest and he is content to let them swing, like a boy watching his first baseball game. ‘So … hi! We’re all miked up in here. Just relax, no need to shout. What’s your name?’ ‘Nick Petrakis.’ ‘Where will we locate this story in the Living Newspaper?’ says Francis. ‘What page?’ ‘Oh it’s definitely a front-pager,’ says the man. ‘A front-pager, eh? So what will the headline say?’ ‘It’ll say: CHILD SAYS NO TO JOINT CUSTODY ARRANGEMENT: DAD SPURNED.’ ‘I see,’ says Francis. ‘So it’s a pretty big story. With a lot of ramifications.’

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‘Oh yes,’ says the man. ‘I don’t expect Sadam Hussein will lose any sleep over it, but I think it has big ramifications. For me and society.’ Francis stands up and a bank of lights illuminates the audience. We all look around at each other, curious and shy. ‘How many of you agree that this is a front-page story for the Living Newspaper? How many of us have lost sleep at some time about access or custody arrangements for our children?’ He puts up his own hand and a forest of hands shoots up around Piaf and me. I don’t believe Francis has any way of registering the support he has, but right now it feels like every person there is rooting for him. He’s on our wavelength. I give Piaf a little squeeze to let her know I’m with her. ‘Begin with yourself, Nick. Can you choose one of the actors to be you?’ The actors are in spotlight. They all look willing to do the job. ‘The guy on the end will do nicely.’ Dan stands up and looks at the teller. ‘Good choice,’ breathes Piaf. ‘Give the actor one or two directions for how to play you. What are you like in this story?’ ‘Be heartbroken and angry at the same time. Feel like you’ve been tied-up good, including a gag. Be cut-off from your kid.’ ‘What’s the name of the child?’ ‘His name is Dmitri, he’s five. Do I …?’ ‘Yes, go ahead.’ ‘The short woman there.’ It’s the red-headed ticket collector. A couple of people have moved across to sit on the benches behind the actors.

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‘Do we need any other people in the story?’ ‘Yeah. The kid’s mother. Played by her, yeah, the tall one. And her lawyer. Maybe that guy up in the second row. Can I pick him? Yeah, you.’ ‘Help out the actors with some directions, as you did before.’ ‘Okay. Dmitri! You play it confused and scared. My exwife? You play it very queenly. Your motto is ‘rise above’. Use your nose, yeah, you got it. And the legal eagle. Play it tough and greedy. Greed is good, yeah?’ ‘All right,’ says Francis. ‘We need to clear some space for the actors. Just before we ascend, I want you to step outside the cage and make some connections with the audience. Do you have any friends here with you? No. You came alone. So step out and throw this paper streamer to someone you think will understand your story.’ He walks to the edge of the platform and throws the streamer up to an African woman with large gold earrings. She smiles back at him, nodding her head. ‘Now throw this one to someone you’re not sure of. Don’t let go of the first one now!’ He throws out another streamer to a white-haired man up the back. The man rises from his seat to field it and settles back next to his white-haired wife. ‘Now throw one to someone who gets as angry as you when they feel tied-up and gagged.’ He throws the streamer right at me. I feel happy to be seen. ‘Throw another to someone who understands the longterm implications of this story, the effect on society. All right. Take all those streamer ends and back we go into our capsule. Going up now!’ The cage is winched silently to Francis’ equivalent of the box seat at the opera. It hangs suspended in the lights,

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like the skeleton of a giant disco ball, the streamers connecting Nick to his chosen allies. All six actors plus the man chosen as the lawyer move onto the stage in readiness. ‘What happens in the story?’ says Francis. He’s like a cross between Carl Bernstein and your neighbour next door, a bloodhound with a friendly demeanour. ‘I’m in my apartment, watching a ball game. Expecting the first visit from my son since I negotiated a joint custody deal with my ex-wife. Her name is Helena. Helen of Troy, more like it. Anyway, the phone rings and it’s her. I’m to come down to her lawyer’s office right away. Dmitri is there and he has something to tell me.’ ‘How do you respond?’ ‘I go straight there! What else would I do?’ ‘What happens?’ ‘They sit me down across the table from my son. ‘He’s got something to tell you,’ says Queen Helen. This is my own son, right, my flesh and blood. He looks at me and says in this funny, rehearsed voice: Daddy, I don’t want to stay at your place every other week. I want to be with mummy all the time.’ ‘And then?’ ‘He looks embarrassed. They tell him to go and play in the next room. Then they hit me with a revised agreement which rescinds the joint custody deal and talks about Sunday visits with sleepovers a possibility in the distant future.’ ‘So what do you do?’ ‘I start yelling at them. I rented a two-room apartment specially. It cost a bomb. I am very angry and red in the face and shouting and banging my fists on the table. My son comes in. His mother points at me and says, see? This

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is your father, this is what he’s like. The lawyer tells me he’s recorded the conversation and that he’ll use it against me if I take it back to the court. So I have to sit there and swallow what they say and do nothing.’ ‘What happens then?’ ‘I kiss my son and go home and get drunk.’ ‘How does the story end?’ ‘It ends with me wrecking my own living room in a rage and being thrown out of the apartment as a result.’ ‘You said the story had ramifications for society. What are they, in a sentence or two?’ ‘The ramifications are that the father is being spurned and if society spurns fathers then it gets out of balance. The children grow up one-sided, stunted. And no one’s doing anything about it!’ ‘We’re going to see your story in dramatic form, Nick. I guess we’ll need two main sets, your living room and the lawyer’s office. Will these do?’ The scaffold on the old stage seems to pulsate as it lights up. The silk cover is raised and six separate sets are revealed, like an apartment building with the front wall removed. More intense lights focus us on the office set and the living room set, sparsely furnished but identifiable. ‘Magic,’ says Piaf, nodding. ‘They’ll do fine,’ says Nick. ‘Except that I smashed my favourite picture, a big one, you know. A sunrise in Bali. We went there when my son was two. There was glass everywhere.’ ‘Leave that to the actors,’ says Francis. ‘They’ll know what to do.’ The actors have already left the stage and moved behind the scaffold, which is in darkness again. The orchestra is playing something modern, could be a John

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McLaughlin track that I know, ‘Love and Understanding’. I’m amazed at the scale of the project and at Francis’ resourcefulness. It’s taking me back to those backyard gigs and I’m carrying the familiar tension in me about making a fool of myself, or about others making fools of themselves, which is equally embarrassing. Piaf leans over and adds to my anxiety. ‘Going to do any acting, Wallymacher?’ she says. ‘I’m not sure. Are you?’ ‘I doubt it. Maybe we’ll both have an attack of spontaneity. Let’s wait and see.’ We sit quietly in the gloom. The actors have all left the stage and though it’s a short pause, there’s time for the audience to breathe and settle. The woman behind me blows her nose with a honk like a Fremantle tugboat. On the scaffold, a light comes up in a man’s living room. The man is watching television, occasionally letting out a grunt of disapproval or an encouraging whoop. In front of the scaffold, three actors appear on stilts, wearing long white overalls and neutral masks. They are dancing in a way that places their heads just below the floor of the apartment where the man is and they seem to be keening softly, a name, a boy’s name, Dmitri, Dmitri is coming. Son, son, sonnnnn of mine. The set adjoining the living room lights up. It’s an office with two people sitting at a table and a third playing with something on the floor. The woman is speaking loudly into a telephone. ‘Come right away, Nick. We have to sort this out. Your son has something to tell you.’ The lights fade, the chorus stalk off into the wings and the office is lit again, more starkly it seems, with some sort of greenish wash this time. The man sits and listens

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while his son recites his lines. The lawyer thrusts a paper at him across the desk. The son disappears. The woman stands next to the lawyer and points. The father thumps the desk and gesticulates. The woman calls for the son and brings him back to witness his father’s grief and loss of cool. The lawyer trumpets his strategy. Soon it’s all over and the set darkens. The orchestra comes up with staccato gongs and thumps and a horrible cat-strangling violin solo. Then we’re back in Nick’s apartment and the chorus is back, Dmitri, my son, no longer to come, no longer, no sun … The man staggers back and forth, increasingly erratic. He picks up what we suppose is his favourite painting. We can only see the back of it, white and solid-looking. Sun is setting, son we love, sun is sinking, sunnnnnnnn … He smashes the painting over his knee at the same time as the chorus drops to the ground, their stilts seeming to collapse. There is a loud smashing sound and the lights fade around the scaffold. At the same time, the lights come up on the circular stage where it all started. It’s a clear space now, no chair, just the bare boards and the bright light. Dan, playing Nick, walks into the centre. Up in the dome, we can all see the effect of the performance on the teller. He is sobbing and Francis has a steadying hand on his shoulder. ‘I didn’t set out to be a man alone,’ says Dan. ‘I planned my family and I chose my wife carefully. I never wanted my son to grow up deprived of a father, condemned to spend his life searching for the other half of his birthright.’ I steal a glance at Piaf. She looks beautiful and fragile, her eyes shining. I try to squeeze her hand, but it’s balled into a fist. ‘Take this!’ I hiss at her, and hand her my

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streamer. I have no idea what I’m going to do, but I have to move. ‘I curse his mother for using him this way. I curse her family for standing by and letting her do this to our precious boy. And I promise the universe to honour the sacred role of father, at every opportunity.’ There is a long pause while his words sink in, followed by a collective sigh. As the sigh recedes, like water sinking into sand, I stand up and squeeze my way into the aisle. I walk down to the front and begin to make my way through the shadows below the stage. Outside the orchestra pit, I pick up the power of the applause, waves of it. People are on their feet, cheering. The dome descends like a feather and settles on the stage, the streamers with it. Francis steps out on the stage to help Nick find his feet and guide him back to his seat. The African woman is there, halfway up the aisle, to greet him. They embrace and people are still clapping, more quietly now, the sound of people celebrating something they don’t yet understand. I could walk up onto the stage and stand in the spotlight that is meant for Francis. I could stand there and wait for the applause to die down. And then what would I say? Without thinking, I move towards the seats immediately behind the stage. I’m fifty-four years old, my name is Wallymacher, which probably translates as ‘one who makes a wally of himself’; and once more I’m about to offer myself as an actor in one of Francis’ productions.

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6 Everything that happens for the next twenty minutes feels new. I’m sitting on the benches like a stringer, waiting for the coach to call me onto the field. Except the call has to come from the storyteller. Francis’ next subject is a petite woman in her early thirties, a waitress from New Jersey. Her ambition? To become an opera singer. Francis takes her into the dome with the same enthusiasm he had for the lone father. He seems to be able to make the teller feel like she’s the only person in the world. He’s full of concern for her, even though he’s fronting two hundred people in varying states of excitement, ranging from the mildly hysterical to coliseum crazy. ‘… and so I’ve taken the lessons, I have all the material down, but when I get to the eisteddfod, I seize up, I can barely sing a note. It’s very disturbing.’

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She pronounces the word as distoibing. I’m wondering how she would ever get her tongue around an Italian aria. But it’s not my problem. ‘Choose an actor who could play you,’ says Francis. She runs her eyes along the line-up of professionals. ‘Does it have to be a woman?’ ‘Not at all. Just follow your instincts. Choose anyone that feels right.’ There’s maybe twenty extras on the scaffold now, including a blonde woman next to me who’s jumping up and down, calling ‘choose me, choose me.’ The opera singer looks at the blonde and looks at me. I’m probably shrinking back a little, embarrassed for the blonde. ‘You,’ she says, pointing straight at me. ‘Would you play me?’ I stand up and walk down onto the stage. A roar of laughter in response to the physical disparity between us, the teller and the teller’s actor. I take my place with the other actors. Dan gives me a wink. A singing teacher is cast along with a domineering mother. Francis sets it up so that the singer, who is called Dallas, can experience the difference between her held-back self and her ideal expressive self. The dome takes off, the lights dim and the actors huddle in the shadows at the back of the stage. I’m expecting some serious tactics here. This must be the trick, I think. It’s all in the huddle. Except no one says a word. Dan is grinning in the half-light and Julie, the redhead, grins as well. Louise, the tall one, has been chosen as the mother and Brian, another pro, as the singing teacher. It dawns on me that the huddle is just a ritual, a group hug. There are no tactics. This is improvised. Go for it!

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At the last minute I say, ‘I’m going up as high as I can’. I mean the set, but then I realise it could be taken several ways. Whatever. As I climb up to the top of the scaffold, hidden from the audience by the draped fabrics, I hear the sound system pop, followed by the hissing noise I associate with tape-recorders. Before I reach the top, a male voice booms out of a nearby speaker. ‘… he was always dying to escape his background. That’s what the big fight with Dad was really about. He’s always had grand ideas, has our Francis.’ The voice was mine. For a minute, I couldn’t place it. Then I realised it was straight out of one of the tapes I’d made for Piaf. ‘… very young. Did he ever tell you about his King of the World game? Never mind king of the castle, this was a serious domination fantasy. He’d pile up all the toys he could find, when he was quite small, crawl up on top and try and get everyone else to look up and hail him as the …’ POP! The sound of a plug being pulled, then some running feet below. A male shout, a female yelp and a door being slammed. The orchestra lurches into what sounds like the overture from Bizet’s Carmen. The lights are still down, so I bump around at the top of the scaffold until I find the room I want. A stagehand sticks his head in. ‘You need anything here?’ I reply from instinct. ‘Remove everything. And give me a bright light to begin.’ He whispers something into a mike pinned onto his collar. The music changes, the lights come up in my space, and I begin by singing a scale, as timidly as possible. ‘La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la!’ Brian, as the singing teacher, comes in at my elbow and says, ‘Try that again.’ ‘La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la!’

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‘Remember, open the throat,’ says the teacher. ‘And relax your diaphragm.’ I agree, practise a few more times, leave the room. Out the back, away from the audience, is a catwalk that gets you from room to room. Like a sleepwalker, I move along it to the next room, which is furnished with a bed. I lie on the bed and the lights come up. I need to say something, soliloquise. I remember what Adele told me and I begin talking to myself, as Dallas, the would-be singer of opera. ‘You can just give up pretending that you’re inarticulate, girl. No one’s going to blame you for stepping out on life’s stage.’ I toss and turn on the bed, with no idea of where I’m going next. Below me, Dallas’ mother has begun her own monologue, a summary of all the messages she wants to pass onto her daughter. ‘You’re getting above yourself. We don’t sing opera in this family, we’re not that cultured. Who do you think you are, anyhow? Wouldn’t you be better off getting yourself an education? Or failing that, a husband? Opera, schmopera. You’ll never pay the rent that way.’ I rise up from my bed and walk slowly down the stairs at the back of the set. I hope I’m heading the right way, it feels good, like paddling ahead of a wave to get yourself in the right position to catch it. At the bottom of the steps I pause, then head out onto the stage as far forward as I can reach without toppling into the front row. It’s hard to see beyond the footlights, but I look at the spot where I reckon Piaf is and smile my biggest cheesy smile. Then I throw back my head and start singing, the way I did up at Highland when Francis was showing us the Moreno stage. My inner experience is that I’m singing opera, throwing in cadenzas and flourishes, puffing out my

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chest like Pavarotti and singing my heart out. I have no idea what it sounds like, but I can feel my chest vibrating and my eyes are moist with feeling. I can see someone else on stage, behind and to my right. It’s Dan, taking a counter-role to whatever it is I’m singing. We play like two swallows, first him, then my turn, weaving in and out. Every time I falter, I think of surfing, of turning back into the fall line of the wave, maintaining momentum, staying afloat. Surfing at Yallingup once I was dumped heavily, the ski overturned and before I had time to release my safety belt and swim clear, the whole thing righted itself, with me still attached and paddling. I caught the next wave all the way into shore. I can hear more voices. The rest of the actors have come on stage, singing in chorus. I can hear bass notes from the orchestra and lots of bells and gongs from the percussion guy. I’m half-turned around to keep up with what’s going on and I can see Dan beckoning all the audience actors down onto the stage. The orchestra’s winding us all up now, with blasts from the trumpet and the timpanist going berserk. I surrender, am submerged, right myself again and face out into the lights for the final blast. I’m holding my mouth open as wide as it will go and I’m heading up the scale, rather than down. As I said in the huddle, I’m going up as high as I can go. When I reach my note, I feel I’ve cracked myself open, like a nut. I spread my arms and simply hold the note for as long as I can. The chorus does the same, the orchestra crashes to a halt and there is silence, no sound but the buzz in my ears and some distant traffic noise. Then the whole auditorium erupts in acclaim for what we’ve done. I stand there bewildered, humble, elated, wanting to cry.

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After that, Dan takes me gently by the arm and pulls me back into the chorus, where we all take a bow. The audience actors return to their seats to thunderous applause. Dallas and Francis return to earth and Dallas hugs me with tears in her eyes. ‘That was supoilative,’ she says.

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7 Back at the Chelsea, I collapse on my narrow bed and stare at the art deco lightshade. Piaf is doing the same thing on her bed. I can feel a great fury building in me and I try to remember her size, her age, her fragility, our good relationship. ‘What the FUCK did you do that for?’ I enquire. ‘Because I’m sick of admiring my father.’ ‘You misused my work in the worst possible way.’ ‘I know Ben, but I just couldn’t resist it. It was my moment of spontaneity.’ ‘You obviously planned the whole thing, since the tape was set up exactly as you wanted it. You little WANKER!’ It’s a harsh judgement and I lie there in the gloom waiting for her reaction. It turns out to be very loud laughter, she’s hooting at the top of her lungs. ‘You’re calling ME a wanker, when we’ve just

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witnessed Francis doing storytime with a cast of thousands. Me?’ I sulk for a while, saying nothing, watching shadows moving against curtained windows in the apartments across the courtyard. ‘How’d you do it anyway?’ ‘Easy. I had some alligator clips and a cable with me and I just tapped into the appropriate lead on the sound console. The guy thought I was from lighting, didn’t twig until too late.’ ‘Yeah, very spontaneous Piaf. Alligator clips! Christ Almighty.’ ‘What happened after I left?’ she says. The night had recovered from the minor glitch of Piaf’s editing without effort. One after the other, Francis would pull someone up from the audience who could add to the evening’s ‘news’: a gay man who was tired of being ‘out’; an actor who couldn’t take the competition for parts; and the last story, a young woman Piaf’s age, trying to make it in the fashion world, who railed against the selfishness of her parents’ generation and what she called ‘grey fascism’. I described it as fully as possible. ‘That’s exactly how I think, you know? In Sydney, all the people with power are from the chardonnay set, redfaced, flabby bodies, ditto their minds. Most of them have taken so long to come through their bloody midlife crises, now that they’ve reached a position of some influence, they plan to stay there forever, try and make up for lost time and consolidate their superannuation.’ I look at her across the narrow aisle between the beds and see the pouting child. I also see the martial artist. I try to imagine a line-up of the three generations, my father’s, my own, Piaf’s. And after Piaf’s, Olivia’s, still to define itself. I feel immense fondness for her, I wish she could

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have all the power she wants. If I could sign it over on behalf of the boomers, I would. ‘Would you like a cuddle?’ She looks at me fiercely and then hops over onto my bed and burrows her face into my shoulder. She’s stretched tighter than a farm fence at first, but gradually she lets her breathing go and her muscles follow. I rest my hand lightly on the centre of her back and feel the rise and fall of her in the high-walled Gotham room. I’ve let her down, I think, and now I’m not sure where this venture is at or whether it’s made any difference to father or daughter. How could it? At one stage in the evening, I had a feeling she was going to put herself forward as a teller, which would have been impossibly difficult for Francis. Instead, she sat it out, a light buoy in a stormy sea. To my great surprise, she begins to sob, her rib cage pumping in a spasm of long-held grief and a wail of hopelessness, all muffled by my pullover. I murmur the way I do with Olivia, the way parents have forever, mmmh, oh love, there-there. She can’t do this with her father. For him she must always be together, clever, buoyant. And then peace, no need for words. I can feel her breathing lengthening out and mine too. Soon enough, we both nod off. I wake up alone in my bed. It must be some time in the early hours, judging by the traffic noise. The room is dark but in the corner by the windows is a man with a torch, muttering. ‘Fuck, oh no, fuck.’ It’s Francis. I turn a light on and discover there’s someone else in the room. It’s Louise, the tall actress who

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played the queenly ex-wife in Nick’s story. She’s occupying one of our armchairs as if it’s the most normal thing in the world. ‘What’s up?’ ‘Piaf’s flipped out,’ says Francis, mostly to himself. ‘She’s really done it this time.’ On the milky wallpaper of Arthur Clarke’s suite is a block of writing done with a black felt pen, mine actually. It appears to have run out of ink close to floor level. There’s a postscript on the mirror, in eyeliner. I move over next to Francis and begin reading. THE CULTURAL MANIFESTO OF PIAF SPIEGELMAN

To the respective muses of Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Arthur Miller, Sid Vicious, Arthur Clarke, Brendan Behan, Mickey Rourke, Kim Basinger, Madonna, Brett Whitely, Janis Joplin, Eugene O’Neill, Dylan Thomas, Jack Kerouac, Bill Clinton, Leonard Cohen and Francis Anstey: PISS OFF! I want you out of here. I am responsible for my own cultural development, but unfortunately, you are all in my way, clogging up the plumbing and the airwells, showing off in the foyer, taking up space on the street and in particular, talking very loudly in my head. I know you’re all very clever, but can’t you see you’re all about as relevant to me as steam-driven tractors or crimping irons or bathyspheres? In other words, IRRelevant, IRRetrievably boring, IRRitating.

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Personally, I am RRREvving up to be more RRRelevant, including feeling a RRResponsibility for the future of the world. Looking forward, not back. Since I came to New York, I’ve done nothing but hang out with old people in a hotel that seems to be filled with ghosts. So I’m off to get a life. Ben, thanks for the ticket. Francis, good luck. I think it’s a pity you discovered your metier so late in life, but hey! Who’s judging. Good karma on you both. Love from Piaf Spiegelman (formerly Anstey). PS Tell the management of the Chelsea that this is just as important as any other cultural artefact they may have preserved. One day, people may queue to read this.

The actress discovers a further note on the bathroom wall, in blue biro: No offence about the name, Francis. It’s just that I’ve always disliked yours and since coming to NYC have observed that it’s the Jews who make an impression here. So I’ve used the maternal name for my grand statement. As for ‘Piaf’: I’m working on it. Where were your heads at when you named me after a tragic French singer?

It seems too demanding to try and talk in the same room as a manifesto, so the three of us agree to walk uptown to an all-night diner. In the elevator, I formally

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meet the actress. ‘Ben, this is Louise Finchley, my new assistant. Louise, this is Ben Wallymacher, Piaf’s boss. He’s also my oldest friend.’ Louise is as beautiful as Patricia, taller, more of a wasp. I could say something scathing about the role of assistants in darkened bedrooms, but decide against it for fear of sounding conservative. This is Noo Yawk, after all. I suspect Louise is to blame for Francis’ mysterious absences while we were staying in New Paltz. We walk briskly through the windblown streets, which are still populated, but not busy. There’s some rain coming down and it appears to be frozen. We’re almost at Broadway before we find the right place, a diner where we can snuggle into an upholstered booth and order crepes and tea. ‘Congratulations on the show, mate. A tour de force. Or whatever theatre people say. It was top stuff.’ ‘I hope so,’ says Francis. ‘There were at least two critics there, one from the Village Voice and Norman Swain from the New York Times. Hopefully they weren’t too put off by Piaf’s little number.’ ‘She’s such a beautiful young woman,’ says Louise, who must be around the same age. She herself has an upstate accent, polished at Vassar I imagine. ‘Piaf seems so lithe and full of …’ ‘Aggression?’ says Francis. ‘Don’t take it that way, Francis,’ says Louise. ‘You’re her father. She needs to tell you things dramatically. Think of if as performance art.’ ‘I was actually thinking of the woman who shot Andy Warhol. What was her name?’ ‘Valerie someone,’ says Louise.

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‘That’s right. Valerie Solanas. Author of the SCUM Manifesto. What a genius she was.’ ‘Piaf in fact didn’t take the show badly,’ I point out. ‘I think she was touched by Nick’s story and then when I left my seat to join the action I suppose she found the perfect opportunity to intervene. Come to think of it, it was a very Green Cloak sort of thing to do.’ ‘I still don’t see why she has to be so aggressive about everything. And what WAS that tape, anyhow? It sounded like you, Ben.’ ‘That’s a long story, mate.’ ‘All right. Let’s say I forget about the theatre incident. But who’s going to clean up at the Chelsea? I bet it won’t be her. And would you say it’s normal to write on walls? I mean what’s wrong with paper?’ ‘She was very disturbed, Francis. I …’ ‘Hey, you guys,’ says Louise. ‘I just thought of something. Writing on walls. Francis, remember our class at Boughton Place? Who else wrote on walls?’ Francis has retained his look of distaste for his daughter’s action. He isn’t listening, he’s preening himself and staring moodily at his muffin. Louise ignores him and turns to me. ‘It was Moreno. In Vienna, before he migrated. He had this sort of religious experience and heard words in his head. He grabbed some red pencils and started writing on the walls of the house. He particularly noticed that he was hearing ‘I’. He took that to mean that it was his responsibility to bring into being his vision of a united and peaceful world. Not God’s, but his own.’ Francis is countering her animation with a look of utter boredom. ‘So you’ve studied Moreno’s work?’ I say politely. ‘I did

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a little psychodrama in the seventies, back in Australia.’ ‘You couldn’t live in the mid-Hudson and not study him if your interest is in theatre and social action. What’s up with you, Francis? Are you leaving us?’ ‘I think we need to go hunt up a newspaper. The early edition should be out by now.’ ‘Was that a royal plural or are you expecting me to walk around in the cold with you? I’d rather stay here and chat to Mr Wallymacher.’ ‘I’ll see you back here,’ says Francis and heads back out through the double doors into the sleet. Louise has an endearing American gregariousness about her that soon has me forgetting how bushed I feel. ‘How come I didn’t meet you when we were up in New Paltz?’ I want to know. ‘I guess Francis was keeping me under wraps. A lot of people are angry with us for taking up together. Some blame me for the break-up with Patricia. But in any case, I live out of town a ways and in consideration for Piaf it seemed better to keep my head down.’ And what a fine, intelligent, American head, I thought. She doesn’t seem to be wracked by Piaf’s self-doubt. Maybe she’s acting. ‘It’s all very new with me and Francis. He’s been running classes and doing stuff at Boughton Place with Daniel Edison for a long time now. Did you meet Dan?’ ‘Yeah, I think Piaf took a bit of a shine to him.’ ‘I can understand that. He’s a hunk. What about Jonathan Fox? Did you meet him?’ ‘Nope. We were pretty busy.’ ‘Oh, pity. He’s the founder of Playback Theatre. He and his wife, Jo Salas. They have a lot in common with Francis

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except they have to service a worldwide network of devotees. Devotees to the method, I should add. Jonathan hates gurus.’ ‘So what happened to Francis? How come he’s not plugged into the global village?’ ‘Francis just decided to hunker down in the Hudson, so to speak, and be the living reincarnation of Moreno. Jonathan and Jo are in Europe, so they couldn’t be there tonight. A great pity. That’s one review I would truly be anxious to read if I were wearing Francis’ shoes.’ I like the way Americans speak, they’re so emphatic. ‘How would you review it? Was it a success from your point of view?’ ‘Maybe. If you know the playback form that Jonathan developed, you’d have to say it followed that more closely than it followed anything Moreno ever did. Moreno started off working with actors, trying to get them to dig down underneath their set roles and discover something fresh. Then he developed psychodrama, and as you know, the focus is the protagonist, the teller. The teller isn’t removed from the action the way the tellers were last night. So it’s hard to know whether the experience will make any lasting difference to those brave souls. I guess we’re on the fine line between entertainment and therapy again.’ I look out of the window. Broadway seems bleak and unappealing at this early hour. ‘To tell you the truth, I think I’ve heard enough about Moreno and Francis and all their great works. I mean, has any of it made any difference to that guy out there?’ A black man with a leather cap and white, fluffy earmuffs is staring in the window, his eyes round and needy.

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‘No, I guess not,’ says Louise, thoughtfully. She looks at me the way people look at caged gorillas. Suddenly I feel weary and after that, a tiny bit afraid for Piaf. Francis returns with two newspapers under his arm. The first one, the Village Voice, is open at the review page. He tosses it over to me without a word while he scans the New York Times for its verdict. Louise is looking over my shoulder, making clicking noises with her tongue. ‘LIVING NEWSPAPER’ DEAD ON ARRIVAL by M J O’Connor Last night, in the Bernie Kortum Auditorium, expatriate Australian wannabe Francis Anstey tried to revive the tradition of the Living Newspaper, a theatrical device that enjoyed some currency in pre-World War I Vienna Using a great deal of hardware, an orchestra and a forgiving audience of friends and acolytes, Anstey attempted to present a kind of Theatre Sports of the emotions, using stories from the audience and a company of actors trained in improvisation. The result was like asking the Grateful Dead to play Mantovani. Every newspaper knows that the ‘stories’ they present would be mindnumbingly boring if they relied solely on the point of view of the subject/victim/participant. But that’s exactly what Anstey did, ploughing on relentlessly through the dross of everyday experience, then investing the resulting ‘story’ with great weight and portent, using a golden

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cage to suspend the unwitting ‘teller’ above the overblown spectacle which he had contrived for his fawning audience. The form is not original. Anstey may believe he has invented a brave new direction for Moreno-style group psychotherapy, but Jonathan Fox beat him to the punch by more than twenty years. Playback Theatre has enjoyed modest success around the world precisely because it has stuck to its original vision, to give voice to the voiceless. In a night filled with bathos, it’s sometimes difficult to pinpoint one defining moment, the point at which the critic closes his notebook and looks for the exit sign. For this reviewer, the moment came when an obviously rehearsed audience member came forward with a pathetic retake of Pygmalion, in this case the waitress who wants to be an opera singer. The part was taken up bravely by an audience member/actor with no knowledge of opera and even less of voice production. He appeared to have an Australian inflection to his vowels. An irritating glitch from the sound desk didn’t help. Hard to say who came off worst: the ‘tellers’, the audience or poor old Jacob Moreno, revolving in his grave. Zero stars. I laugh aloud at the spitefulness of the writer and make a mental note to write a rejoinder, although it would possibly be more effective to visit his office and put a

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chainsaw through his desk, like the sawmiller did to the union boss in Sometimes a Great Notion. ‘Found anything, Francis?’ says Louise. ‘Got it,’ says Francis. ‘Thank God for people like Norman Swain. Here, let me read it.’ We order more tea and snuggle in together. Actually, they snuggle in and I sit opposite, above the snuggle. Francis folds the paper to frame the article and begins. GOLD DISCOVERED OFF BROADWAY by Norman Swain At a time when Broadway means Disneyland and off-Broadway has come to mean sleaze, an Australian disciple of the late Jacob Moreno has come up with the most exciting innovation in theatre since the proscenium arch came down. In his ground-breaking ‘The Living Newspaper’, Francis Anstey ‘and friends’ have taken interactive theatre to new heights and demolished the notion that the genre must remain a poor relation to the puffed-up, overblown mainstream productions we’ve been sedated with in recent years. In one night, Anstey has demonstrated that theatre that gives the audience a voice does not have to be patronising, flabby or childish. Theatregoers don’t want to be confronted by angry, spitting actors who cross into their space and demand to know if they feel what the actor feels. Theatregoers may also have been imprisoned, tortured or otherwise oppressed, but

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this does not bestow an automatic entrée for the playwright or the director to produce in-yourface didactic drama in the name of realism or relevance. Anstey’s audience were allowed to be just that. An audience. Those who craved interaction were given clear opportunities to cross the sacred line between seating and stage. You could be a ‘teller’. Or you could go and sit in the bleachers behind the actors and wait until you were chosen to act in someone else’s story. The only thing Mr Anstey invaded was our hearts. He did it with no tap-dancing, no costumes, no soliloquies and not one live animal on stage. He did it with a fine balance of tact and daring, good judgement in choosing his storytellers, who wrote the Living Newspaper on stage. And he did it by assembling a fine ensemble of actors, a group of musicians who were prepared to improvise and some near miracles of staging within the funky confines of the Bernie Kortum Auditorium, corner of 8th Avenue and West 36th. As if that weren’t enough, Mr Anstey also managed to inject a little self-irony, using an apparent glitch in the sound mixing to make a comment about his own megalomania normalis. When I asked him the date of the next show, he claimed this as a one-off. Don’t let him get away with it. Demand an encore! ‘By George, I think you’ve done it!’ I reach across and shake Francis’ hand, which feels strangely lifeless. Maybe

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he’s cold. His smile looks a bit lopsided as well. ‘Are you all right, mate?’ He nods unconvincingly and reaches down under the table. ‘I’ve got pins and nails in my foot,’ he says. ‘You mean pins and needles, darling,’ says Louise. ‘You must be worn out.’ ‘Pins and bagels,’ says Francis.

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8 In between looking for Piaf and visiting Francis in hospital, I don’t have time to scratch myself all weekend. I am also disturbed to find both telephones at home unresponsive. Adele’s B&B gives me a ‘this number is no longer connected’ message and our personal answerphone seems to be unplugged, so all I get is interminable rings followed by a beep. We’re due to fly out of Kennedy at 6pm on Monday and my mate’s had a stroke, Piaf’s gone missing and something’s rotten in the port of Fremantle. On Monday morning, having done everything I can think of to put things right, or at least arrest any further decline in my fortunes, I take some time for myself and actually make it to the Whitney, where there’s an exhibition of photographs by Nan Golding. She’s good, I like the way she seems to have snapped whatever she

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could, putting intimacy and immediacy ahead of production values. I saw Mapplethorpe when his work came to Perth and it was far too glossy for me, as if he were trying to sell all those stiff cocks and puckered lips. Golding is more down-home, as if she’s invited you around to have a look at the family album. Of course, the family in this instance comprises the halt and lame of the Bowery, where she lives: transvestites, AIDS victims, starving artists and mere innocents, all caught up in a holocaust of ignorance and disappointment. But it rings true. I recall Francis’ training in photography and wish he was on his feet and here with me. I also see Piaf and the red-headed writer, Paula, the one we met on the Carey bus coming into Manhattan. They’re disappearing fast into a crowded elevator. I fly down the steps and catch up with them in the street. If this were a movie, they’d have eluded me in a cab and I’d have had to give chase in a dramatic scene involving squealing tyres and eighteen near misses. Instead, I arrest them undramatically on the sidewalk. ‘Hi Ben,’ says Piaf. ‘You remember Paula. I’ve been hanging out with her for a few days.’ They smile at each other coyly. Like father, like daughter, I think. Love is all around. ‘Francis has had a stroke. He’s in hospital, the Mater, midtown. Room 519.’ ‘Fuck!’ is all Piaf can manage. ‘So … I’m going to see him after lunch. And I don’t want to crowd you, but were you intending on travelling home with me?’ Piaf looks at Paula for help but draws a blank. ‘If I’m there, I’m there, all right? Paula thinks she can help me get work, so I might stay on, if that’s cool with

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you. That way I could look after Dad a bit, maybe.’ I give her the warmest hug I can find, write down Paula’s phone number and take a cab to the hospital. Francis is recovering from a carotid replacement and is off the air. Louise is there and tells me he may have lost some speech, but it’s a recoverable condition. He will need careful nursing and speech therapy. Only trouble is, she’s about to go on an Arts Council tour of the Caribbean. Is Piaf available? She also passes on a message from Francis, but fears it may be garbled due to his condition. ‘He said he was the one who burnt down the dome. Something about buried coals. A fuel stove? He said he forgives you. And he said to tell Piaf.’ From the airport, I phone Paula’s number. Piaf is staying on and has cancelled her flight. Yes, she will do what she can for Francis. Please send her love to Adele and Olivia. She doesn’t see herself returning to her old position. I decide she doesn’t need any information about burning coals at this stage. The American leg of the flight is almost a relief. It’s just me and the cabin service and a lot of strangers. I chat to a professor who tells me about the affair he has just ended with a high-profile American feminist. He drops names like small change: Kurt Vonnegut, Philip Roth, Bruce Springsteen. He worries about losing his entrée to her social set. I tell him that I’m a personal friend of Francis Anstey, recently written-up in two New York papers. The professor loses interest and disappears into the octopus of the San Francisco terminal without another word. As we head out across the Pacific on the all-night leg of the journey, I’m feeling a lot of fear. What if we all plunge into the ocean in a fiery ball of unexplained technical failure? I’ve been through so much and now I’m being

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lulled into a relaxed state, pampered and coddled by clean cut young stew-persons, my baggage riding neatly below me somewhere in the belly of the bird. I want to be sitting on the promenade at Cicerello’s. Adele is there and Olivia and maybe Merle, our Noongar friend. The sun is lower than the rooftop of the Kailis pavilion and the evening is still and warm. The fishing boat harbour is packed with all manner of working craft with names like Pearl Queen and Princess Emma. I’ve just done the manly thing, procured a huge package of grilled North-west snapper and chips. I’ve attended to Olivia’s request for ice cubes in a glass and I’ve found some vinegar for Merle and I’ve carried out a bottle of Amberley and three glasses for the drinkers and now we’re sitting there at the moment of digging in, the rich produce of our region before us, all the other tables filled with families enjoying their lives and I look at Adele’s lovely face and her skinny shoulders and feel rich. And just as we begin to eat, a pleasure boat wafts into the harbour for a stickybeak. It’s a comfortable-looking barque and the passengers are spread out all over the deck listening to a three-piece ensemble. The music miraculously dances around the little harbour without beating our ears and the selection of music they play is tasteful and beyond naming. We wipe the grease from our mouths and there is another glass available from the bottle and I lean across and kiss Adele’s lips and tell her I’m glad to be home. And then I tell them all about the dreaming I did while I was away, how I want to trade in the Merc and get a sensible car, one that we could pack up with stuff and drive off on the weekends and go camping. I tell Olivia that she will have her own tent that she can share with

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one of her little friends and Olivia frowns at me, a fierce frown and says ‘I didn’t WANT you to say that, Ben,’ and I reassure her and say that people often say things you don’t want them to say. Then Olivia looks at me with exaggerated mournfulness and throws her arms around my neck and says, ‘You’ve been to a long place, haven’t you Ben!’ and we finish our drinks and walk slowly around the deck to Bather’s Beach, where my small girl wants me to repeat the story we have for the sunset, that the sun must go to bed now and is kissing the ocean goodnight. For once I don’t feel like a silly bugger or a too-old father when I say it, just an ordinary man who loves his family. Another version occurs to me after taking off from Sydney. In this version, it’s raining, the first rain for six months. The soakwells are singing, the courtyard’s awash with swirling eddies of rainwater, washing away the tree droppings and the desert dust. Inside our loft, Olivia is dreaming. Adele has prepared a verdant green salad for me and is setting it our on our candlelit table. She is happy to see me, and I to see her. The rain on the roof is too loud for conversation, so we rely on looks and touching. It’s good to be home. In the morning of the dream I go bodysurfing at Swanbourne. It’s a classic autumn day, twenty-five degrees, sunny and still. There’s not much of a wave, so I let myself drift onto impossible dumpers and at the last moment, bail out with a somersault so that I end up on my feet and facing the shore. Underwater, the sunlight dapples down to icosa patterns on the sandy bottom.

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9 Perth International Airport, 8am. The contrast with other world airports is extreme. I can see the hills, a few trees, acres of grass and a couple of service vehicles. We could be landing on a sheep farm, for all the activity that’s visible. I automatically worry about the impression this will make on foreign visitors and make a mental note to check the car rental desks in the terminal for the Adele’s B&B flyer. I clear customs without any hassle and soon find a cabby to take me home. Again, I worry about impressions. This turkey drives his automatic with both feet and whenever he voices an opinion, which is frequently, he slows down. ‘Trouble on the wharves,’ he says, braking. ‘They reckon some of those bludgers are getting ninety thousand a year for about ten hours work.’

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I try to be non committal, to stay out of it. But if he brakes again, so help me, I’m going to jump over into the front seat and take over. We’re heading down the Leach Highway, six lanes and no hold-ups. In any other country a cab driver’s dream. But not this one. At the Canning River Bridge, he does it again and I lose my cool. I lean over behind him and whisper loudly into his ear. ‘Listen mate. The people you’re talking about, they’re skilled workers. Highly skilled. I know, because I used to be an importer and I would go and watch them sometimes, just to be sure they were doing the right thing.’ ‘O yeah,’ he says, braking. ‘I’m sure some of them are skilled …’ ‘That’s right. They’re skilled and they have to concentrate. And if they worked their cranes the way you drive a car, we’d have stuff spilled all over the wharf, from arsehole to breakfast table.’ ‘Sure, concentration is worth something.’ We’re down to about forty kilometres an hour. I whisper louder, more intensely. ‘See, I would like to get home sometime this morning. And I would like you to drive at the speed indicated on the signs. Seventy. Take your foot of that fucking brake and drive like a man. Get it?’ He nods and continues in a sulk. Outside Adele’s B&B , he springs the boot lock from inside the car and stares straight ahead of him. I retrieve my bag and walk back to his window. ‘How much would you like for the pleasure cruise?’ I ask him. ‘That’s thirty-two dollars and a dollar for the bag. Thirty-three all up.’

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I hand him thirty-two dollars Australian. Real dollars. Coin with character. ‘You can whistle for the bag money, speed,’ I tell him. ‘You’re a disgrace to your trade.’ He floors the accelerator and blows smoke in my face. So what, I’m home. I lug my bag around the back. No Toyota. No Adele or Olivia. I let myself in, a little anxious. The place is pristine, no sign of play, no blocks or jigsaws or colouring books. I call school. Olivia hasn’t been there for two weeks. Is she unwell? Could I call back and let them know? I call Hedda Thorp-Jones, her painter friend. Sorry, can’t help. How was New York? I can’t find her. She’s flown the coop. I don’t want to return to the script of a man alone. That would be too much, after all the hoops I’ve jumped through in this life. I back the Merc out of the garage, grab a can of beer, drive frantically, nowhere to go. On the way home from nowhere, I tune into ‘Arts Today’. A man with a Canadian accent is talking about a piece of art his friend made in a Bedouin camp, where he turned a whole lot of umbrellas upside down. ‘The pity was,’ says the Canadian, ‘there was no one but the Bedouin to witness it.’ I am furious. I shout at the radio, squash my beer can and throw it at the console. A few drops of Emu Bitter dribble down the walnut dash. A container truck overtakes me on the new bridge, then stops alongside me, air brakes screaming. ‘Maersk, Maersk!’ I scream back at it, but there is no one to hear. Not even the Bedouin. I drive into our main entrance and empty the mailbox. My letter from New York is unopened. So she left soon after me. I call all our friends, Kapo, Enzelia, Merle, Dieter, Phillip. No one stays

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home any more. I leave messages. Merle’s flatmate says Merle’s gone up the goldfields on business. A faint alarm bell sounds somewhere in my gut.

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10 ‘I didn’t want to stay here in an empty house.’ ‘So that means anytime I go away for a couple of days, everything shuts down.’ ‘It wasn’t a couple of days, Ben. It was three weeks, following an episode in which you tore my dress off.’ ‘So you just closed up shop. What happened to the guests?’ ‘I waited until the last ones checked out and I didn’t take any new bookings. What’s the point in trying to run a business from home when home’s turned into a violent place? That’s how I grew up. I’ve just been to see mum and you know, she’s still scared to do crafts at home because she thinks Harry might walk in and destroy her work. Harry’s dead, but she grew up like that. She expects it. I WON’T HAVE THAT IN MY LIFE! Have you got it Ben? I WON’T.’

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‘Where’s Olivia?’ ‘She’s staying with Mum until we sort things out.’ ‘Who put you up to all this?’ I say. ‘Merle?’ ‘No. Believe it or not, I have a will of my own. It just happened that Merle was going to Kal for her work and I wanted to see Mum. So she drove us up there in a govie car.’ ‘Why did you turn off the phones and the power?’ ‘Because I wasn’t sure I was ever coming back. When Enzelia phoned and told me you were upset, I relented. I decided to give you another chance. But there are conditions.’ ‘Jaysus begorrah. Conditions already.’ ‘Here, I’ve written them out.’ What is it with women and manifestos? It seems they all want to declare something, to show the world how strong they are, how self-determining, how in control. She gives me a handwritten list. What Adele wants: 1. That Ben makes an absolute commitment to nonviolence, which includes not breaking things and no rough handling. 2. That Ben gets more involved in the business, has breakfast with the guests, makes an active effort to understand people from other cultures. 3. That Ben is less distant with me and Olivia and more demonstrative. 4. That we go out on dates once a week. 5. That Ben treats me like an equal rather than like a little doll.

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We turn our chairs out and away from the table. We’re sitting on the upstairs balcony of the main house, looking out across the river, where the rain is cutting patterns on the oily surface all the way across to Northbank on the other side. The building project appears to have come to a halt and a river of mud is gouging out what used to be the front lawn of the sales office. I look sideways at Adele. Her jaw is clenched and I’m certain she has more to say. She is trying to cut off the river of mud that might flow from her mouth, were she to open the sluicegates, her white teeth. For myself, I could just as easily call a cab and fly out of her life forever. Back to New York, back to somewhere distant from this battlefield. I’d have to do it quickly and not think about Olivia even once. ‘You’re trying to imprison me. I won’t have it,’ I say to her. ‘I’ve spent enough time inside.’ ‘Then stop acting like a criminal,’ she says, unmoved by my confession. That hurts like a blade. Some people live their lives this way, talking through clenched teeth, like yapping farm dogs that have been chained together too long. I can feel the letter in my pocket and wonder how that would affect my sentence. ‘I thought about a lot of things while you were away,’ she says, her voice more tender. ‘I was wondering what your idea was for a life together.’ ‘How do you mean?’ ‘What did you have in mind? What sort of picture did you have for us?’ ‘A picture. You mean … two people sitting in a courtyard at sunset, the child asleep, the barbecue smoking, they touch … ?’

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‘I can see the problem. Picture doesn’t do it really, does it? We’re so accustomed to one picture fading into another.’ ‘Do you mean story? What story would I want told about our life together?’ ‘No. Story’s not it either. Stories are so endless. They pile up, one on top of the other, like Olivia’s drawings. You can’t hold someone to a story, unless you’re a copper. Or a lawyer. No, I mean beliefs. Beliefs-as-they-unfurl-inaction. How did you imagine your beliefs about family would look, you know, unfurled?’ On this part of the veranda, the guttering is warped. The rain pours off the steeply gabled roof and drops to the ground in noisy, uneven sheets. ‘I have to fix that. It’ll wash away the whole garden the way it’s going.’

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11 Olivia’s back. The first thing she does after saying goodbye to Merle is to rush into my arms and almost take my head off with a power hug. ‘Daddy, daddy,’ she shrieks. I lift her off the ground and smell her beautiful skin and the traces of Ribena around her mouth while I rock back and forth, holding her precious wriggling self. ‘Put me down!’ With that she stomps into our living space and picks up her box of Leggo and tips it all over the floor. Adele follows her and takes some greens out of the fridge, something for lunch. I pick up the broom and sweep the floor around the doorway, where the sand has blown in from the courtyard. ‘You know Phillip’s in hospital,’ says Adele. ‘He tangled with some goons in Leederville, outside the hotel. Taking notes, apparently.’

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‘Shit! What happened? Is he all right?’ ‘Broken ribs, cuts to the face. He’s all right. You should go and see him.’ Another seeker of truth cut down in the line of duty. There’s no way I’ll ever show the New York letter to Adele. ‘We’ve had postcards from Yoshiko and those Swiss girls. Oh yeah, guess who’s getting married? Airi and Piet.’ ‘No kidding.’ ‘Guess who’s splitting up?’ ‘Not us.’ She ignores this pathetic attempt to ingratiate myself. ‘Kapo and Annie. Amicably, she tells me. He’s off to Poona.’ We spend the day in this vein, pottering around, cleaning up, playing with Olivia. In the evening I bring home fish and chips from our local and we sit in the still summer twilight, staring up at our big empty house. ‘Let’s move in for a few weeks,’ says Adele. We turn it into a game and in no time we’ve made up the bed in the master bedroom and set up a bunk for Olivia next door and run a bath for her in the ensuite. ‘Can you wash me, Dad?’ she says. ‘Where did the “dad” thing come from?’ I call out to Adele. ‘School,’ she calls back. ‘All the kids have one, apparently. It’s the in thing.’ Something in her voice speaks of bedroom games. I take Olivia into her room, the same one Piaf used to occupy, and dress her for bed. ‘Pat me, Dad,’ she says, after a reading of Magic Beach. I pat her and listen as her breathing thickens. I sing gently in time with the pats.

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Well the fox and his wife without any strife, Cut up the goose with a fork and knife, They never had such a meal in their life And the little ones chewed on the bones-o, bones-o, bones-o, They never had such a meal in their life And the little ones chewed on the bones-o. I can hear Adele in the bath and I want to get back there, pronto. As I stand up, the bunk creaks and Olivia calls softly, ‘Dad. Ben. More patting.’

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Revelations

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1. The Faint Whiff of Burning Brakes The train arrives without steam or fuss, merely the faint whiff of burning brakes. He’s not here, predictably. He was always late on access weekends. Here he is now. He’s got that sheepish look that makes you feel like a … shepherd. You kiss him, guide him towards the ramp and away from the edge of the platform. He looks well, better than he looked in America. He’s been staying with friends at South Katoomba. For a treat, you’ve shouted him a weekend with his own room and his own bath at the Mountain Haemorrhage. Well that’s what he called it when you asked him to repeat it back to you. Whatever, it’s a nice place and there’s a view of the Grose Valley from the dining room window. They take you up to your rooms and you suggest he chill out until dinner, when you’ll meet him in the cocktail bar. He has no idea what you mean. Next morning you both take a walk down to Witches Leap Creek, named by one of the early explorers. You wonder what the explorer really did down there? We’ll never know. Whatever it was, he had to explain to Mrs Explorer why he was late home. ‘I found this creek, dear. I’ve named it Witches Leap Creek.’ This is how people used to insult each other in those days. Overhead the Skyway whirs along its cable, an ominous sound like the approach of a plague. At the Queen Victoria Lookout, you learn that in a few thousand years the claystone bands, which bind the three sisters to the sandstone, will have been sufficiently sapped as to cause the faultlines to weaken and drop their burden into the valley below.

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‘Why did you piss off on me when I was a kid, Francis?’ You’ve put this question to him in a range of situations and you’ve kept a record of his replies, on tape. Here’s what you’ve collected so far: 1.

I needed to find myself (Luna Park, Sydney).

2.

I had to sort myself out (lost in a cave at Chillagoe, Queensland).

3.

To find myself (Monkey temple, Ubud, Bali).

4.

I’ve never told you this before, but I was certifiably mad (Royal National Park, south of Sydney).

5.

Your mother and I were not getting along (Telephone call).

6.

I went off in search of the real me (Chippendale, Sydney).

This time, the question seems to have whizzed over his head. His face is blank. Do strokes erase memory? You’d like him to say, ‘The past is another country.’ 7.

The past is another country. (Katoomba, New South Wales).

You point out to him that the sort of relationship you both have now depends on how you feel about the past. If he can’t be honest about it, that’s going to get in the way, isn’t it? He stares down into the Kedumba Gorge.

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Another Francisism to add to the list. 8.

Blank stare, no comment (Clifftop Walk, Katoomba).

Why should you try to dig down through the layers of Francis? All you end up with is more Francis.

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2. The Bubble You Inherited At Hapkido, when you kick out at the chin of your imagined oppressor, you are breaking free of some web that’s been spun around you, the story you were born with, the bubble you inherited. You are bigger than most people feel comfortable with. This is your temple, the ancient Police Boys’ Club off Oxford Street, on a hill overlooking the city. From the open door facing north it’s possible to glimpse ferries cutting a trail through the blackness of the harbour. In the foreground are the busy workings of a dozen terrace houses, landings cluttered with forgotten furniture, a few clothes on drying racks, a barbecue stove, pot plants reaching for light and air. The clubroom has dark floorboards overlaid with canvas-covered mats. You’re leaping at a man twice your size, scissoring him firmly around the waist and bringing him to the ground with a tug of the collar and a loud grunt. The man tries the same with you, falls lamely to one side. The instructor shows him how, becomes the subject, falls heavily, hurts the man’s foot. There is a brief show of sympathy, the man limps off and gets changed. Francis should be here. He should have been here when you were small. You’re still small but you’re contained in a strong, wiry body and fine profile so that no one sees your smallness. You want people to level with you, treat you like an equal but your smallness gets in the way. Tonight you’re the senior belt apart from the instructor. You give advice and encouragement to the newcomers, lead the meditation, direct the re-alignment of the mats for the next phase.

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3. Piles of Zines Piles of zines on a plastic chair. A dressmaker’s dummy, bare. Last night’s clothes at the foot of the bed, spilling on to the floor. In the spare room, in amongst a lot of extenants’ junk, your fashion wardrobe, which you no longer wear. Your desk is filled with projects, photographic paper, creative-writing assignments, the instruction book for your mobile phone, old batteries, beads for a missing antique vest, letters, bills, more zines. Eduoard is upstairs watching ‘Rage’ on the giant screen. He hasn’t paid rent for a month, is wondering if he still wants to, like, occupy this style of habitat. You’re thinking of walking up the iron stairs, through the dining room, up the wooden stairs to the lounge level and slitting his, like, throat with your flick-knife. You shouldn’t have this knife, believing as you do in unarmed combat. You found it amongst the junk in your spare room one day when you were doing a virtual cleanup. You’re certain it’s a bad thing to have a flick-knife and probably invites violence from the universe. But it’s a very nice object, beautifully made of Wiltshire steel with bone handles and a reliable spring. It’s Saturday, too early to be up but the landlord is coming around for an inspection. Then you’ll go to counselling, to see your therapist. You like saying that: your therapist, your hairdresser, your mechanic. Useful tradespersons. Ruth is paying for the counselling. You’re not sure what that means.

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4. All those Dead Masters Since returning from New York, you’ve been stirred up in a way you haven’t had to manage for some time. Your manifesto was a showing of yourself, to yourself. You were throwing down the gauntlet, not so much to all those dead masters, but to your own sense of renewal and potential. You receive a vivid dream about power. Like a power breakfast, but this is a power last supper. Jacob Moreno is there. So is Francis. Buckminster Fuller, the architect. C Y O’Connor, the man who built Fremantle Harbour and then killed himself. God is there, with his son. Moses is there. Isaac. Salman Rushdie. Timothy Leary. The Bhagwan. You turn to Jesus and begin to speak: ‘You didn’t need to suffer so much, you know. With all due respect. You’re a bit like Salman here, the victim of persecution certainly, but tinged with that tiny bit of … hysteria. If you must know, you would both have done better to study one of the martial arts. It did me a lot of good. The reason I am living better than either of you is because I can fight, I can absorb blows and I can give them. I am a shock absorber. I’ve had to be …’ You look around the table until you come to Buckminster Fuller. ‘You must have enjoyed the seventies very much. All those slaves, following your design, believing in the purity of your calculations. But what good did you do? All those benighted hippies, most of them unable to execute the simplest of designs. And you adding to their confusion with your sermons about dropping out. Just like your mate Timothy. Most of the people in your

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audience needed to drop in, not out. You were pointing in the wrong direction. The effect was to spin people around, people like my father here. They became giddy and that made them confused.’ You turn to Moreno with a flash of fire in your gaze. ‘And you, old man. You with the eyes. Do you think it was all right to be such a womaniser? Do you have any idea how much that diluted your impact? You’re my favourite, not only because your death made room for me in the world, not only because we both have prophet’s eyes. But because of all the nutty things my father has done, following your path brought him sanity. Sanity as in clean. I’m talking clean living, following an idea that’s bigger than anything you could have conceived. Good karma on you, Jacob Moreno. But I wish you could have cleaned up your act a bit, so that your words had more staying power. Your message is being diluted in the valley you made your home.’ And on you go, sounding like a cross between Bob Dylan and Germaine Greer. You don’t engage Yahweh, there are too many strictures from your childhood concerning that conversation. But you’re enjoying yourself and wake up refreshed, ready to let the others carry some of their own water for a change. You have a photograph of Francis on your desk. Not Francis the psychodramatist or even Francis the domebuilder. It’s Francis the lover, aged six, circa 1949, in the backyard in Buckland Hill. He’s standing on a buffalo grass lawn next to Gail McColl, also six, and he’s wearing school shorts belted tight with a matching cotton belt. He has scuffed black lace-up shoes and white socks, an opennecked shirt and a mop of curly hair, cut short back and sides. His ears are uneven, as they still are, his cheeks are

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full, he is smiling. Unlike Gail, who has learned to keep her knees together and stand to attention, Francis is at ease, hands loose and ready for action, feet apart to match his smile. Around his head, like an aura, is the palm tree the Wallymachers will inherit when they move in next door. On the hardwood fence is a passionfruit vine. You’re lying on your side, your doona loosely covering your legs. Melissa has left for work and you have the flat to yourself. The crystal I gave you is picking up the morning sun, projecting patterns around the walls the way it once did in my room at Ascot. You feel you understand Francis the lover better than most. After all, he loved Gail McColl, with the ringlets and the frangipani above her ear. And he later loved your mother Ruth, a passionate love which came as a great gift to him, his first experience of mature concern for another adult. From that love you were conceived, their child and adored one. You consider his open smile and his ready shoulders and see the one who could turn his hand to anything, who built a dome and was hypnotised by therapy. You feel the beginning of forgiveness and the possibility of carrying it with you into the world that you are making for yourself.

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5. Filled with Ki Today you are going for an interview. It’s a top job in the world of real estate and you’ve revamped your cv to include the Fremantle experience. You’ll wear your new black suit and your grown-out hair and you’ll grab a coffee in Darlinghurst before you appear in their doorway, filled with ki and the knowledge that this time, the angels are on your side. The angels are on your side and that’s why they’ve saved you from the world of real estate. The earthly reason is your secretarial skills aren’t up to scratch. Since returning to Sydney you are aware of the distance between us. You and I. Secretly you despise the Swan River Colony, the red-necked arrogance that drove my forebears to have impossible dreams for a cluster of sand dunes located around a shallow, silted river draining into the Indian Ocean. Such arrogance that they drove out the true caretakers and in some cases, hunted them down and slaughtered them. Your memory of this place is haunted by flatness, a lack of relief, a coastline that runs to infinity without cove or indentation save for the miserable piles of rocks we dump every five hundred metres or so, groynes we call them, markers for dog beaches and surf ski areas and other white man constructs. You went to the finest school all right Miss Piaf, and that left you with no reference points when you were here. It was as if society had all been reduced to the consistency of Browne’s Custard. Even the nouveau riche seemed too nice, too reachable, like plump peaches you could grab with the help of a stepladder. Where were all

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the bastards, the dispossessed, the crims, the aristocrats, the fallen princes, the whores? Where was the urb, the epicentre, the hub? Where is the true centre of disturbance, Piaf? As you yourself recognised, it is in yourself. I am so proud that you have taken a new name, a name you can succeed with. Natasha. I like that. It sounds like detached. Attaché. It’s cool. Every child, no matter how stunted and disadvantaged, achieves a thousand tiny victories in her development. She masters speech and numbers and movement, gross and small. She learns to differentiate, to appreciate the sound of things, to smell, to explode with energy, to feel deeply, to play alone. She learns the quirky science of people. Francis witnessed none of your victories, except in sum. He saw you every so often and marvelled at your maturity and mastery. But he wasn’t there to apprehend the increments, to measure the small changes. The quarry of his understanding was excavated in one of two monster blasts. He doesn’t know you so well.

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7. Child of the Revolution The first time he invited you to America, you received the news like a bolt from the blue. Ruth helped you to prepare. You were sixteen years old and you were wearing a jacket embroidered with the words ‘Child of the Revolution’. When you arrived there and he took you on that walk and raved about his once-splendid dome, you thought he was holding on to something unhealthy, diseased. He was. You wondered, was that the way Francis tried to hold the marriage together? By means of woodwork, strapping the structure tight the way you fasten the struts of a dome onto the sixty-one hubs made ready for the job? He wasn’t. Your father is a passionate man. The road into Xanadu was soft and ferny and the family Renault would purr along the winding bush track like the French cat it was designed to be, holding the three of you on its clever suspension, stirring a body to roll down the window, smell the earth and see nature at eye level. Once on the way in your parents were overcome with hot lust, and you pretended to sleep while they pulled off the road and crawled into the back seat beside you, Francis pulling his wife’s skirts up and plunging into her while she held her breast to his mouth. Liebchen, mein Liebchen she whispered. He didn’t even bother to take off her knickers. Perhaps that’s how it was when you were conceived, rather than the non-event your embittered mother later described in answer to the usual where-do-I-come-from questions. A girl like you would have to have been a love child.

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8. Your Father ’s Temple The dome was his temple, you see, his pyramid and holy shrine, a deceptively simple-looking statement of architectural dissent. And I’m sure he believed that if he could only stand in the right place, on the right day, bare feet absorbing the energy of the oiled wooden floor, the winter sun in its place on the sun path he’d built into the skin of the thing … if he could get all the factors right, in his mathematically precise temple, ‘something in him would soar, he would be carried upwards into the heart of everything and the Secret would be acted out before him’. These are Robert Dessaix’s words, but they could have been written for Francis. To have the secret acted out. That would have been something. The dome was your father’s temple. By following strict geometric principles, he was unconsciously in tune with an age-old science of building, originating in Egypt, copied in Greece. The geometry was not an end in itself. It led one to the mysteries. And that’s what Francis was seeking, still is. Who were the priests? Who wore the vestments? Who had access to the scrolls and scriptures? Who were the ritual makers? Billington, you say. He was a warden, reliable, well trained. Perhaps Bucky, best-known American genius? He was like Moreno in some ways, jealous of his inventions, on a mission to buck the tide of history. Bucky, condemned by Theodore Roszak (author of Making of the Counterculture), as the Ultimate Technocrat. They dedicated the Whole Earth Catalogue to him, yet Ronald Reagan, right-wing warrior, awarded him a Medal of Freedom.

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Again, like Moreno, there was a difference between the Fuller you read and the Fuller you saw perform. Buckminster Fuller was a performer, a public philosopher. The alternatives loved him, they were dazzled by his vision and enthusiasm. Given the mumbled delivery and the esoterica, they understood not a word, but they were dazzled. I believe that Francis was seeking a new kind of priesthood, a holy man who could tell the truth about families, a person sufficiently skilled that truth-telling and God-playing become everyday things, no big deal. Had his work taken off in New York and his health held out, he might have become notable for the ease with which he encouraged people to express their truths. Now you have your father near you. It’s a turnaround. For all the years of your growing up, you yearned for him, secretly and not so secretly. You knew he had some magic, even when you were learning about dolphins and mourning your loss of him. When he sent for you, when he said come live with me in America, you tested him out and he failed. He was an ordinary man, with hang-ups and vanities. And again you were separated. Now you have him and he has you. You will teach him to speak again, to sort out his left from his right. Perhaps you will build a paper model of a dome together, occupational therapy. Perhaps he will take up photography again. He was quite good at it. And you yourself will become, will seek after spontaneity and wholeness, feel for it with your feet. That’s what my father Karl was doing in his clumsy way, when he went out on that rock and shouted at the Indian Ocean. It’s what I’m doing when I repair the guttering and teeter on my ladder, watching the boats come in. It’s what your

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mother is doing, in her way. It’s what you were doing when you wrote your manifesto on the walls of the Chelsea. You owe me $US635 for the cleaning bill. No hurry, take your time. Feel for it, Natasha Spiegelman. Keep seeking wholeness. What else can we do?

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Acknowledgements

When I first encountered psychodrama (the original group method) in my early thirties, I was struck most of all by its honesty and the way it seemed to hang together no matter what. My first acknowledgment is to all those half remembered souls who gathered with me in various unpromising venues around Sydney to work through our stuff. I hope I’ve done justice to our struggles in this work of fiction. To my early teachers in the rituals and devices of psychodrama: Michael Breen, Max Clayton, Joel Badaines, Jon Hegg, George Klein, Stephanie Hurst (Yatro), my thanks and admiration. Moreno would have smiled on your work. Much later in life I met the playbackers and again, I encountered teachers and mentors who breathed life into a beautiful form: Leah Young, Robyn Bett, Peter Hall, Anne Hale and the founder of Playback Theatre, Jonathan Fox. Moreno might have grimaced at my clumsiness as an actor, but what joy to step out in the service of other people’s stories! Many people agreed to talk into my tape recorder, lending their voices and stories and ideas to this project with unreserved generosity. Thanks to Zerka Moreno, Max Clayton, Lynette Clayton, Clare Daniellson, Geoff Etches, Mary Mildred Anderson, Veetrag and Scotta, Queen of the Dungeon.

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I was also blessed with an abundance of mentors and reactors, commentators and critics. Ray Coffey, Robyn Bett, Jenny Hetherington, Peter Bishop, Fred Guilhaus, Alena Russell and Chris McLeod all made significant contributions to the shape of the final work. Philip Salom helped with the title and Brenda Walker helped with marketing the manuscript. Some of the Rottnest material was enhanced by reference to the oral history collection at Fremantle Library, in particular the interview with Frederick Ingham by Dorothy Brooks. In Boston, the keepers of the Moreno archive at the Countway Library of Medicine put up with my unscholarly haste and kept the file boxes coming. At Rocking Horse Ranch in New York, Zerka Moreno provided me with a timely copy of Jonathan Moreno’s edition of his father’s autobiography. Both Rene Marineau’s biography of Jacob Moreno and Jonathan Fox’s The Essential Moreno were invaluable references when the time came to write about the man in the green cloak. ArtsWA and the Varuna foundation both provided me with time to begin the writing, and ArtsWA also funded my journey to visit Beacon, New York and experience some of Zerka’s magic as a person and as a psychodramatist. Robyn Bett, you listened to the outline drafts for versions one to twenty-eight and kept both feet firmly on the ground while I imagined my way through the lives of the characters. All my heart’s thanks. Finally to Vivien, let me contradict Walt Whitman: we were together. I haven’t forgotten the rest. Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following for permission to reprint song lyrics: ‘Big Yellow Taxi’, Joni Mitchell, Siquomb Publishing Company, 1970; ‘Our Town’,

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Iris Dement, Warner Music, 1990; ‘Dingo’, John Williamson, Emu Music Pty Ltd, 1987. The poem by Jacob Moreno quoted on page 115 first appeared in Einladung zu einer Begegnung (Invitation to an Encounter), 1915, and is reproduced in Jacob Levy Moreno 1889–1974 by Rene F Marineau, Travistock Routledge, 1989. The passage on page 92 is from Dome Book II, Random House, 1970. Every effort has been made to locate copyright owners and to obtain permission to reproduce quoted material included in this book. The publisher would appreciate advice of copyright ownership in cases where efforts have not been successful.

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