The Point
T
HE
P
OINT
T
HE
P
OINT
MARION HALLIGAN
A Sue Hines Book
Allen & Unwin
First published in 2003
Copyright © Marion Halligan 2003
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
The Australian Copyright Act 1968
(the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10% of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.
A Sue Hines Book
Allen & Unwin
83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218
Email: [email protected]
Web:
www.allenandunwin.com
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Halligan, Marion
The Point.
ISBN 1 74114 007 2.
1. Restaurants – Australian Capital Territory – Canberra –
Fiction. 2. Restaurateurs – Fiction. 3. Homeless persons –
Fiction. I. Title.
A823.3
Text design by Cheryl Collins Design
Typeset by Pauline Haas
Printed by Griffin Press, South Australia
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Nancy
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
T.S. Eliot:
Choruses from the Rock
Contents
People familiar with the received geography of Canberra will be aware that there is no such promontory in the lake as The Point is situated on, and certainly no such graceful structure. The city has been invented a number of times, sometimes in the landscape, sometimes on paper. I imagine this is one of those other inventions. The characters have no connections with actual living characters; neither need the topography be real. The Point could be on the lake that Marion Mahony and Walter Burley Griffin devised. Or perhaps, the whole city could be a parallel Canberra of each reader’s imagination.
Imagine – or you could try going and looking, if the place and the time were right, if the light fell in a certain way and you had eyes to see – otherwise, imagine a small loop of land pushing out into the lake, a little blunt promontory, not pointed, but called The Point. It has water almost all around it, pewter-coloured water, never blue. Fish-scale water, rasping, rough, cold. Sometimes smoothing out and limpid, but the reflections it makes always fragmented.
On this promontory, this almost-island, is a building, a restaurant. It is the shape of an octagon, and seven of its walls are glass. At night they reflect the round globes of lamps and more darkly the diners. Who see the dim shapes of themselves, the tables, the servers, the lights hanging, but nothing of the world beyond. Nothing of the dark lake, or the hills, or the people outside who can see them, perfectly, brightly lit. The lake may reflect the restaurant, occasionally quivering in imperfect replica, more likely as cobbled panes of light.
The restaurant is a mirror. It is a glass darkly. It is an octagon. From outside it looks like a lantern. Which lights itself, but how far beyond its own space does it illuminate?
Inside are those who possess, and are perhaps themselves possessed. Outside are the dispossessed. The dispossessed see themselves, and the others, the insiders. The others see only themselves.
If you stand outside the restaurant and look to the right, you will see the National Library. To the left is the High Court and the National Gallery. Grandiose buildings all. Directly above The Point, on a small hill, is the Parliament House. It is lit like a performance on a stage.
Every year, in the spring, since beyond even the memory of time, the Bogong moths fly south. Once they were a feast that flew in, and the locals grew fat on them. Not just the locals; tribes came from considerable distances and a truce was called while they gorged themselves. They could live for a long time on the fat they grew from the Bogong moths, it was gift they had, being able to store fat from times of plenty to live on in lean times. The black skins of the feasters shone plump and polished from the moths’ oily proteins. But the feasts were not just pig-outs, they were a time for ceremonies, for the arrangement of marriages, for corroborees and initiations and the bartering of goods.
The moths fly hundreds of kilometres from their breeding grounds on the inland plains to spend the summers estivating on the mountain summits. They seek out cool dark dry crevices and perch on the walls, head tucked under the wings of the one above. They fit closely together, as many as seventeen thousand to the square metre.
The moths are brown and fat as a finger. They were thrown on a stone hotplate to burn the wings off, cooked for a crisp and crunchy minute. They taste like roast chestnuts. They taste like burnt almonds. So people say. Sometimes the moth hunters would grind the roasted moths into a paste with moth pestles, round smooth river cobbles, and make them into moth cakes to carry back to the valleys.
In their southerly migrations the moths may be blown off course and not reach the granite tors of their destination, or be blown out to sea and washed up on Sydney beaches. In 1988 there was a new diversion. The moths flew south, on course, into the Parliament House. It is an enormous light on the hill that calls to them and millions of Bogong moths fly into it. A nuisance. A plague. Politicians and their entourages said, We cannot work here, in a house full of moths.
The Point doesn’t serve Bogong moths, but you can eat witchetty grubs. Those brave enough to try say they are a bit like a land prawn, if you can envisage such a thing, plump and juicy.
The Point is the best restaurant in the city. The food is an idea, carefully thought out, before it becomes flesh on a plate. Not all its customers care about this. Some do. But the person for whom it matters is the person who thinks it, strictly, patiently, trusting her imagination, and having thought it cooks it. Food, she will tell you, is about desire. As is all art. In the river of our being it is the confluence of the streams of the intellect and of the senses. When I eat, she says, I want to exercise my imagination, not my stomach muscles.
Elinor Spenser fell in love with Flora Mount when she saw her against the turning postcard stand in a newsagent’s shop in a French village. She fell in love with her smooth brown skin, her youth, her self-containedness, her unencumberedness. She thought she was beautiful as an egg is beautiful, perfect and secret. Elinor had run away from her unfaithful husband and was about to begin an affair with an old friend so she didn’t do much with this falling in love, besides treasuring the egg-idea of Flora in its own safe nest in her mind. Though she did invite her to come and have a cup of tea, and they gave one another addresses, and made a plan to write a book one day about the lives of the women who’d lived in the now-ruined castle of the village. While they ate solid village cakes and before Flora picked up the backpack compact as herself and walked down the hill to catch the train. Elinor would have liked her to stay a day or two but Flora had her holiday timetable, a lot of France to see before getting back to her job with a publisher in England.
When people fall in love they want to possess the other. Elinor wanted to be Flora. Not in the sense of stopping being Elinor, what she wanted was to possess the possibility of all those things she loved in her. She knew that youth she’d never achieve again, not that she was old, just that she didn’t wear youth shining upon her. But the strong shapely egg-smooth secrecy, the perfect containment of Flora’s self-possession, the coolness, the selfishness: those she desired. Not a cruel selfishness, not meanness or unkindness, but putting herself at the centre of her life.
Later, in Canberra, when Elinor had gone home and back to being her more usual self, nothing at all like Flora, sometimes she remembered her unencumberedness, and being a dictionary maker thought about the word
encumber
, and looked it up, and found it was a horrible word, meaning to block up or burden, entangle, impede, harass, and it could go as far as molestation and even Satanic temptation, which made it a deeply sinister word and no wonder she admired its absence in Flora. She kept in touch with her, sending postcards that were more about wit than information, though that crept in. Flora got married and had a baby. A large dark-haired boy called Adrian, a noisy aggressive Roman of a baby, with a head like the bust of an emperor, wrote Flora, maybe his name is to blame.
Elinor sent her a fax to say that she and Ivan were going to London and would be staying in Bloomsbury for a week while Ivan worked at the British Museum, and could they get together for a coffee. We need to talk about that book, she said, in the way that people offer a mild little joke secretly hoping that it might be taken seriously and made to come about.