True Stories (3 page)

Writing fiction is lonelier than doing journalism. Journalism feeds your extraversion, while a novel demands years on your own in a room with the door shut. When in 1992 I hung out for three days with notebook and pencil at the city morgue, I was strangely happy. I felt sociable, accepted, content. I never wanted to go home. I mentioned to one of my sisters how much I was enjoying turning up at the lab on 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.

' 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. They are the hints and tremors of fiction, and that is where, one day, I will make the place where they belong.

PROLOGUE
Mr Tiarapu

Mr Tiarapu

ONE SUMMER I
went to Sydney to visit my friend in hospital. He had just had a brain tumour removed and was lying, on a very blustery day, in a ward with flapping blinds and no air-conditioning. My friend was recovering well, considering. He was quite shaven, and half his head was bandaged.

When I arrived he was propped against his pillows, eating oysters out of a flat grey cardboard box. He offered me one and said, ‘Pity you didn't arrive ten minutes earlier. Because do you know who gave me these oysters? Patrick White. I was hoping you'd arrive before he left; but another friend of mine came instead, and when I introduced them she looked terribly excited and said, “Not
the
Patrick White?” and he said, “No.
A
Patrick White”.'

We ate the oysters. When we had finished them, my friend said, ‘But I would like to introduce you to the bloke in the next bed. Because he's from Tahiti, and lives in Noumea, and he can't speak English—perhaps you could talk French with him.' He sat up with his bandaged head and called to the man, who appeared to be asleep. ‘Eh, M'sieu.'

The man turned his body slowly towards us. He was a very tall man with a big head, perhaps forty-five years old, and evidently in pain: his brown islander skin was greyish and his cheeks were hollow. My friend, in his carefully enunciated fourth-form French, explained that I was someone who spoke French better than he did. The Tahitian put out his hand and took hold of mine.

‘
Enchanté
,
madame
,' he said.

We exchanged courtesies and platitudes about our experiences among the French.

‘
Les Français sont des racistes, des hypocrites,
' he said. ‘They speak to you politely, then they massacre you behind your back.'

He told me that he lived in Noumea, and that he had a wife and six children at home. He did not know what the matter was with him, except that he was unable to walk, and had not been able to for some months. He said that he had been taken to hospital in Noumea for this unexplained weakness of the legs, and that suddenly hospital officials had told him he was to be sent to Sydney ‘to have some tests done'. Since his arrival at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, he had not understood anything that had happened to him, nor anything that had been said to him, until he had been moved into the bed beside my friend with the opened head. ‘Your friend,' he said, looking earnestly at me, ‘is a very very nice person.'

I asked him if he would like me to stay till the doctors came, and try to interpret for him. He said he would like this very much, but that I was not to put myself out if I had something else to do. He said that he had not been given time, in Noumea, to see his wife and children before they had bundled him on to the plane. He said that he would like to write to his wife to tell her that he was all right and where he was and that he was waiting for tests to be done. He said he had not been able to write before, because he had not been able to ask for paper.

I asked a nurse for paper and a pad was procured, also an envelope and a biro. He sat up as far as he could and leaned on a magazine and wrote, in a large formal hand, a long letter. While he wrote, I talked with my friend. It was very hot indeed and, because there was a nurses' strike on, the nurses who wanted to strike but who did not wish to leave their seriously ill patients unattended were working dressed in ordinary street clothes instead of uniforms. This gave them a less brisk, less intimidating appearance, but it did not help the Tahitian man with his language problem. One of the nurses said to me, ‘They arrive at the hospital from Noumea in plane loads.'

I asked when the doctors would be coming round, and the nurse said they would be there any minute. The man, whose name was Mr Tiarapu, finished his letter and addressed the envelope and stuck it down and then lay there with it against his chest, as if not sure what to do next. He looked from side to side.

I said, ‘Would you like me to take it downstairs and post it for you?'

He said he would like that, if it were not too much trouble.

Two doctors entered the ward. They were very young men, younger than I was, and one of them was Australian and the other was Thai. They came to the end of Mr Tiarapu's bed shyly, as if they and not I were visiting. They looked at the chart attached to the foot of the bed.

I said, ‘I can speak French, and wondered if I could explain to Mr Tiarapu what is the matter with him, because he doesn't know.'

The doctors looked at each other like two schoolboys, each waiting for the other to speak. The Thai said, ‘Well, we are going to do some more tests.'

I said, ‘Can you perhaps tell him more than that, because he must be very anxious, not knowing what is the matter with him.'

The Australian said, ‘Does he want to ask us any questions in particular that you could translate?'

I translated this for Mr Tiarapu who was lying with his big head held up in a strained position, as if trying to understand by sheer effort of will.

He said, ‘I would like to know if I will be able to walk again. It is my legs, it is awful, not to be able to walk. Will you ask the doctors why I can't walk, and whether they can do anything about it?'

The doctors, speaking in duo, said that there was a blockage in the spine somewhere, and that the tests they would do were to determine the possibilities of a cure. ‘If it is only a blockage,' said one of them, looking slightly helpless, ‘tell him he will be able to walk again if he does the exercises we will give him. If he does the exercises, he can only improve, if all he has is a blockage.'

I translated this. Mr Tiarapu looked much less anxious. He did not seem to want to make further inquiries, and the doctors said they would come back at a certain time the next day and that they would appreciate it if I could be there to interpret again. I said I would be there.

Mr Tiarapu took my hand and thanked me. He looked at me in a way that made me feel very bad, and sad, as if I were a kind of lifeline. I would have liked to kiss his cheek, but I was afraid of overstepping some line of protocol that might exist between white and black, or well and ill.

I said goodbye to my friend, and to Mr Tiarapu, and picked up the cardboard box with the oyster shells in it and dropped it in the rubbish bin on my way out of the ward. I took Mr Tiarapu's letter across the road in the gritty wind and into the post office, and got them to put the right stamps on it, and posted it.

Next morning, I returned to the hospital. The weather had not broken. When I walked into the ward I saw that Mr Tiarapu's appearance had undergone a shocking change. His face was no longer brown at all; the colour had left it, his cheeks had sunk right in, and he seemed to find it difficult to open his eyes. But he saw me and took my hand and held it.

I said, ‘You look tired. Didn't you sleep well?' I did not know whether to call him
vous
or
tu
so I said
vous.

‘Not very,' he said. ‘I was thinking of my wife, and I was worried.'

Before the doctors came on their round, the door at the end of the ward burst open and two cheerful nurses entered. They approached Mr Tiarapu's bed and seized his chart. ‘Yes, this is the one,' said one of the nurses. She directed a powerful, jolly smile right into Mr Tiarapu's face. ‘We're moving you today!' she announced. ‘Different ward!' She grabbed a corner of Mr Tiarapu's blue cotton blanket.

Mr Tiarapu's face was grey now with fear.

I said, ‘He doesn't understand what you are saying. He doesn't understand any English at all.'

‘Oh,' said the nurse, stepping back.

At this moment the two doctors came into the ward. They said good morning to all concerned. Mr Tiarapu gazed from my face to theirs, waiting.

‘Can you explain to him why he is being moved?' I said. ‘Because he has only just got used to being here and talking to the bloke in the next bed.'

The doctors looked at each other. One of them said, after a short pause, ‘We have to move him to another ward to do tests.'

I translated to Mr Tiarapu that he was going to another ward in order to have more tests. This information did not cause the look on his face to alter.

‘Which ward?' I asked the doctors.

‘Oncology,' said one of them, and he looked me right in the eyes with an expression at once blank and challenging. He said oncology. He did not say cancer. And I was not absolutely certain, not one hundred percent certain, that oncology did mean cancer. And I couldn't ask because Mr Tiarapu was holding my hand and staring at me and the doctors with his grey face, and the French word for cancer is so similar to the English that it would have been impossible to disguise it.

‘Do you want me to explain what you mean?' I said to the doctors.

They looked embarrassed, moved their feet on the spongy lino, and glanced at each other. ‘If you like,' said one of them.

‘But do you think I
should
?' I said.

They both shrugged, not because they didn't care but because they were very young, and because they probably didn't know any more than I did whether he was going to live or die. The longer we talked and gestured like this, without my translating anything, the clearer it became to Mr Tiarapu that there was something someone didn't want him to know. The responsibility for the transmission of information had been shifted squarely on to me, and I was not adequate.

I said to Mr Tiarapu, ‘They are moving you to a different ward because they have to do the tests, and they're still not sure what is wrong with you, and they can't do the tests here.'