True Stories Read Free Page B

the dot of nine each morning, and exchanging casual greetings with the technicians. ‘Hi, Helen!’ they’d say, glancing up from their corpses. ‘Hi, Jodie! Hi, Kevin!’ I’d answer. My sister regarded me for a moment with narrow eyes. ‘What you need,’ she said dryly, ‘is a job.
    â€™ A job! I haven’t had what you could call a job for over twenty years. I remember how enviously, in Paris in 1978, I witnessed one morning through the guichet the astonishing spectacle of bank employees arriving at work and doing a leisurely tour of the office to shake hands with every single one of their colleagues. I remember my first job, at Griffiths’ bookshop in Geelong in the early sixties, when Australians still had manners, how one greeted the two brothers who owned the shop: ‘Morning, Mr Jack, morning, Mr Bob’; and how at half past five when the working day was done we all said to each other, seriously, ‘Goodnight’. I remember a kind old bloke called Mr Winstanley who, if some scallywag neglected to return his formal greeting, would turn away murmuring ironically, ‘Silence was the stern reply.’
    Most poignantly of all, though, when I get fed up with working alone, I remember Victorian high school staffrooms of the sixties and seventies: the rigid hierarchy with its irritations, but also the chiacking, the squabbles, the timely advice from some old stager with a fag drooping off his lip. The awful decorated tea mugs, the solemnity of a new fiancée describing her ‘sheets and towels in autumn tonings’. The rough teasing, the flirting, the ping-pong games, the laboured jokes about longing for Friday and whether one was ‘happy in the service’. The sudden hush when the principal walked into the room. The groans at the sound of the bell, the quoting of what the kids had said, their howlers; the seething about the unfair timetable. And the line of silent, companionable admirers, along the top-floor windows, watching the Greek and Italian boys playing soccer, down in the rainy yard.
    I used to have a fantasy (if I ever thought of the future at all) that one day I would be able to live on fiction. It was only a matter of time, I thought. Meanwhile, journalism would feed me and my daughter, and fill the gaps—but then I found, and am still finding, how well journalism suits me. ‘Ideas’ for non-fiction come flapping over the horizon from editors, or seeping out of the ground right under my feet. One will always present itself to save me, just as I’m about to sit down before the abyss of thinking about a novel. There is always some public ritual I’d like to gape at, a place I long to loiter in (a crematorium, a hospital) to which the only passport is a reporter’s notebook—and where I might stumble on material whose meaning journalism will not exhaust.
    But there is also the other sort of notebook, the one where you scribble down the tiny things that sprout persistently in the cracks between non-fiction stories. I file them under ‘Notes: aimless’.
    the proximity of rivers
cicadas: columns of sound
a man called Terry Treasure
their feeble personalities can make no impression on the impassive house
she relishes obstructions
the cheerful orphan
‘black with sin as I am’—Chekhov
a man trying to stuff a huge, dun-coloured eiderdown into a locker at Spencer Street station
landscape of childhood: worn out from being looked at
champions practising
the gift of tears
‘sparkling jewels and opulent mantles’
the language of furniture
Melbourne girls with their great brown crinkly capes of hair
    I open the folder and see with a secret thrill these strange notations. Why did I keep them? What did I plan to do with these lost things? They have detached themselves long ago from their origins in ‘reality’, and floated free. But I recognise them—I know what they’re for.