The Point Read online

  THE POINT

  THE POINT

  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

  Note to readers

  The Point

  1

  2 Jerome

  3

  4

  5 Jerome

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10 Jerome

  11

  12 Jerome

  13

  14

  15

  16 Jerome

  17

  18 Jerome

  19

  20 Jerome

  21

  22

  23

  24 Jerome

  25

  26

  27 Jerome

  28

  29 Jerome

  30

  31 Jerome

  32

  33 Jerome

  34

  35 Jerome

  36

  37

  38 Jerome

  Acknowledgements

  Note to readers

  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.

  The Point

  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.

  1

  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 beau
tiful 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.

  Flora wrote back a postcard with a picture of a hunting scene of men and rabbits, except that the rabbits had hunted the men and were carrying them on their backs, trussed up. It was from an old manuscript, in the Bodleian. She really wanted to see Elinor, she wrote. Adrian had died. As babies do, said Flora. No reason. Perfectly healthy. But he died. A cot death.

  Elinor looked at the word died, written a number of times in Flora’s quick round hand. At the word death. Small plain words, and she imagined Flora’s pen forming them, over and over, as though repetition would make them bearable. As though these were now the baby’s verb, the baby’s noun, and now they had to be repeated, like a chant. Solemn and majestic words, which ought to be pronounced. And writing back, a letter not a card, Elinor spoke of the baby’s death, of the fact that Adrian had died, joining in the chant of grief.

  She dreamed about him.

  She dreams she is playing with him, this big strong dark-haired child. Playing as one does when changing a baby’s nappy, dressing him. Kissing his tummy, nibbling his toes, tickling, blowing on his fingers. The baby smiles and laughs and waves his arms, he makes deep excited gurgles in his chest. The energy in those arms, the beating of his little fists. He’s nearly dressed, with his nappy on, his tights pulled up, his jumper pulled down. He’s quiet. She sees that his face is covered with plastic film. Glad Wrap, as they call it, for keeping food fresh. Tightly across the baby’s face is wrapped this plastic film. His face like wax underneath, its folds and wrinkles. Ancient as baby’s faces can be. Cream-coloured, waxy. She unwraps the clinging plastic, but it’s too late, the baby is dead. Flaccid, his beating fists limp.

  The dream stays with her. As though it has happened to her. No dream, but truth. It’s intimate, and obscene, and part of her. She is despoiled by it. Because she has lived through this dream, lived with it, when she meets Flora she simply puts her arms around her. There’s nothing to be said, no sorrow, certainly not condolence. Elinor has lived the death.

  Flora, egg-smooth and secret. No more. Other people have smashed away at the smoothness, it’s wrinkled and cracked. The young woman whom Elinor envied is no more, gone the same way as Elinor herself. Now, to think of eggs in connection with Flora is to think of fragility.

  Between them is the baby, ancient, beautiful, waxen, and wrapped in plastic film.

  That night, in a hotel in Bloomsbury, filled with chintzy prints and the stale smell of air-freshener, she talks about it to Ivan. They are eating bread and cheese and drinking wine they have bought at an enormous nearby Sainsbury’s. Ivan’s large brown eyes are mournful as she speaks about it.

  You know, she says, innocence is something that belongs to adults and children destroy.

  His eyes gleam a little. A paradox? he says. These conversations are one of the reasons he didn’t finally go off with the girl he fell in love with, and Elinor went back to him.

  Maybe a paradox, but true, in the tricky way of paradoxes, says Elinor. The thing is, adults have children in innocence, though they don’t believe that is so, they think that they are quite knowing, that they know all about it, but they are wrong.

  She is swallowing the wine while she talks, and Ivan listens, letting her take her time.

  It’s devastating, she says, that destruction of innocence. It’s as though your skin is suddenly permeable. Osmosis isn’t in it. Your self leaks out. Okay, maybe it should, and maybe you need to know that. It’s still terrible. And the world floods in … blackness, and horrors, terrors. You aren’t safe any more. You never were, but having children has made you understand it.

  Later, in bed, lying in Ivan’s arms, not making love, just lying, with the covers up over her ears, she thinks, well, maybe you aren’t safe, but there are some illusions of it.

  The next time she meets Flora, porous permeable leaking Flora, Flora says that she is stopping being married to Vic, her husband, and when Elinor says, But isn’t this just when you need his comfort, she replies that he has none to give, nor she him. Flora says that she is going to stop working in publishing, she is sick of that too, she is going to be a cook in a friend’s restaurant. And some time after their return home, Elinor gets a fax that tells her Flora’s new career is bringing her to Australia, and won’t it be wonderful, she will be able to see lots more of her.

  And that was the beginning of Flora’s ending up at The Point.

  2

  Jerome

  There will be no children. There can be no children. That, I see, was part of the bargain. Doesn’t seem such a good bargain now, but what bargain does, some time after the event? Love, marriage, adultery, they all seem an excellent deal at the time, and then, deception, disappointment. Birth, even. Would you choose to be born, knowing it all in advance? As for job, career, vocation … no, the bargains are never what we are led to believe. The price is always too high, too long, too hard. The diamonds are always paste.

  Paste: it makes me think of glue, something viscous and sticky, and how can that look like diamond, so I look it up and it turns out it’s a heavy very clear flint glass for making imitation gems. Heavy and flint … they are my kind of word. My hand takes a morbid pleasure in forming them. Heavy. Flint. Good words for how I am, now. When once – did I ever believe I was diamond?

  This isn’t a beginning, it’s making a start, just start, they say, anywhere. Dear Diary I remember when I was a child and people in books began diaries like that. Dear Diary, they wrote. It always seemed odd to me. And if you started off like that shouldn’t you end up with, Love, Jerome or Yours sincerely or I beg to remain your most humble and obedient servant I was quite sure … nobody in real life ever wrote to their diary. Surely your diary is you? Wouldn’t i
t be better to begin, Dear Jerome? For a diary is so you can tell yourself something. It is you writing to yourself, and seeing where it gets you. And maybe this isn’t even a diary, so long after the event. Events: the series of them, and their … culmination. Inexorable, they seem, this series, but not when you’re living them.

  It’s Elinor’s idea. She even gave me the notebooks, with thick smooth paper so they would be a pleasure to use. Just write it down, she said. It? I asked. What’s happened to you is so full of pain, it is unbearable, she said, but try to get it on to paper and maybe it will change. You mean writing as therapy, I said. Well, she said, I would not use that term, I would rather say, making another thing of it, not a work of art, I don’t mean that really, I mean an artifice, a creation. The thing is, just write. Anything. Not thinking too hard.

  Of course this is therapy. She means a process to do me good, not a finished and possibly wonderful object.

  It’s all right for you, I said, you’re a wordsmith. She smiled: Only at second hand. I collect the meanings of words, I don’t make anything out of them. Do you think I will, I asked. She kissed me, she’s taken to doing that. Humankindness, I think it is. It might be wonderful, she said, and at least it should help.

  Help I do need.

  All I have desired I have lost … I look at those words. Had I not desired, desired with such passion, such love, then I would not have lost … all that I have lost. I would be safe. But can I wish not to have loved, so as to avoid loss … ? I try out that idea. And, overwhelming, Flora is there, emblem and embodiment and dearest being, and no, I can never wish her away, never undesire her … I am bereft, but not so much as that.

  People say to me, you will get over your grief. You will forget. I don’t want to. Grief is all I have and all I ever will have now. My love for Flora had such a short season, just winter into spring, but it was to time as a Tardis is to space. Inside itself it was enormous.