30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account, Page 2

  Halfway down a row of cars headlights flashed and a horn hooted. Ha, cried Kelvin, there she blows.

  Jesus, Kelvin, that's a Jaguar.

  It's just a little one, he giggled.

  It was not a little one and it was ridiculous that Kelvin should own any size of Jaguar at all. When I first knew him he had spent three years on the dole, just catching waves at Nambucca Heads. He had worked for Mother Teresa in India. He had drawn a comic strip called 'The Bong Brothers' which was much loved by all my friends, but when he lived in my house he could not even pay the rent. Yet somehow, twenty-five years later, he was the publisher of fifteen suburban newspapers and five special-interest magazines. He was the CEO of a publicly listed company. He was also a member of a syndicate heavily invested in an IPO (an Initial Public Offering of shares). He was worth 24 mill or 30 mill which was, of course, impossible.

  I first met Kelvin after I moved from one side of Snails Bay to the other, to what the taxi drivers called Lousy Road because it was so narrow. Louisa Road was low-rent waterfront on Sydney Harbour with no real downside except the brutal westerly winds and the weeks when the rusting hulks which were sometimes moored across the bottom of our yards left their generators running through the night.

  On the corner of the entrance to the street there was a brothel with plentiful parking beneath. At the other end, just by the ferry wharf, was the house one of my neighbours rented to an outlaw motor-cycle gang, and in the middle was a shipyard, a boat builder, a mixture of tradespeople who worked at the naval dockyard on Cockatoo Island, a taxi driver, an art conservator, a plumber, a writer or two, a heroin addict with no regular occupation, some general bohemians, and people like myself and Kelvin who saw my red Jensen Healey and made enquiries.

  It would take years for Kelvin to begin to accept that I might be a writer.

  You're in advertising? he asked me that first night. Apart from the large manila envelope under his arm he looked like the surfie he had sometimes been. I'm wondering, mate, he said, if you could spare a moment of your time.

  The manila envelope contained the dummy of a weekly newspaper; the one thing he needed was, well, some advertising.

  They were different times. He did not begin by predicting circulation. This, he said, as he pulled the dummy copy from the envelope, is going to blow the power structure wide open.

  In April of the year 2000 I slid into the leather-rich world of his Jaguar. How's the stock market? I asked.

  He grinned. Down three per cent.

  You could sell, I suggested. You'd still be well ahead.

  Nah, can't do that, mate. Too many people depending on me. Who? Well silly bloody Sheridan for one.

  He bought into the IPO? You told me not to.

  I told him not to. But he thought I was being cagey, and he bought a lot.

  How many?

  Every zac he had. Eight thou.

  What are they worth now?

  Do me a favour - don't even talk about this.

  We drove in silence from the airport. I thought of Sheridan, who was a large ebullient man, so filled with energy and affection. It was terrible to think of him really unhinged, and I quietly resolved to get in contact with him that day.

  Just enjoy being back, said Kelvin. You're on a jet-lag high. This is the moment when everything looks perfect.

  The freeway has changed.

  It's the Olympics. Everything's changed.

  But look at all these flowering trees. They're just so beautiful. You know, I'd forgotten, but we do have the most astonishing plants.

  Jet-lag high.

  They're strange and prehistoric. That's a ha-kea, right? I'd forgotten I knew its name. That's a callistemon, that's a grevillea. It's just great to know the names of things again. I've been reading this book by Flannery. I'll lend it to you.

  Got no time to read, mate.

  OK, this is a fire landscape. These are the fire-loving plants. Fire is one of the things that make this town so different.

  Yes, tell me about it. I still miss that house at Taylors Bay. I never want to see a fire like that again.

  Maybe you could tell me about that fire, for the book.

  What? And be called Kelvinator? No thanks, mate. He pointed to the red bottle-brush flowers as we whizzed past. That's a callistemon if you're interested.

  Yes, and that's a Grevillea robusta.

  Leptospermum.

  It's odd we use the Latin names, I said, as he planted his foot and the V12 engine took us between the khaki scrub, the spidery flowers. We were flying at 120 kilometres an hour. We have so much flora, I said, so many species, but hardly any common names. We are an anti-intellectual people who speak in Latin. I wonder what they were really called.

  Kelvin was threading in and out of traffic and he did not look at me but I could feel him bristling. What do you mean, 'really'?

  Previously, I said, before 1788.

  The country was more real before 1788?

  Don't get so quarrelsome so fast. I meant, what did the Eora people name these plants?

  We were approaching the first traffic lights where the intense botanical show faded away and Moore Park Road stretched before us. Now, as he slowed, Kelvin looked across at me and rolled his eyes.

  Listen, he said, I am all for Aboriginal land rights.

  Good.

  And I wish this little turd of a prime minister could be big enough to apologise to the Aboriginals for all the dreadful shit they've suffered, but this is my country too. I know what I call grevillea. And I don't give a fuck what it was called before. I have no fucking interest, Pete. This is a big city. We've got four million people. We've got so much other more important shit to deal with.

  Well I guess the Eora don't give a fuck either. There was a war, that's what I told Sheridan. There was a war, mate. Our side won. All through history there have been wars for territory. I think that's been our big mistake, to never admit that there was a war, to pretend that we found this nice empty bit of land that no one happened to be using. We were raised on lies and it's a shock for people to recognise the truth. I don't mean the Aboriginals, they've known all along.

  After that we drove in silence, as we came down on to Moore Park Road beside which a great swathe of green stretched luxuriously to the horizon.

  What do you think this road was 'really' called? he grinned.

  Shut up, Kelvin.

  No, there was a road here, Pete, or at least it was a path at first.

  How would you know a thing like that?

  As a matter of fact, I learned it this morning, waiting for your plane.

  Sheridan?

  He says that tens of thousands of years ago, there was a cliff beneath Moore Park Road or Anzac Parade, he wasn't sure which one. Anyway the Kooris had a path along the edge of the cliff from Sydney Cove to Botany Bay. Then the sands blew in from the east and the land was flat but people are creatures of habit so the footpath continued to follow the line of the cliff. For tens of thousands of years this track was used and by the time Sheridan's great-great-grandfather was nabbed for forging contracts it had become a cart track. And now it is Moore Park Road.

  You think that's true?

  Sheridan is a fucking disaster, but yes, probably.

  Soon we had turned off Moore Park Road and I guess it was the jet-lag high for, as I passed through Centennial Park and into Woollahra, beneath huge Moreton Bay figs, along street after street of Victorian cast iron, I thought that I had never been in such a beautiful city in my life.

  Did you choose this route on purpose?

  But Kelvin did not even understand my question. He was in a hurry now. He had a meeting with his fellow syndicate members who were nervous about this falling market.

  What are you going to do today? he asked, as he pulled into the lane and yanked my case out of the boot.

  CHAPTER THREE

  HERE IS THE KEY to the house, said Kelvinator, and here is the key to the old Honda which is parked in the street. Use it as
if it was your own. Here is the burglar-alarm code, don't lose it, and will you be eating with us tonight, no, don't worry, call me at work when you make up your mind. Janet will be back from Melbourne around lunchtime. The kids will be home at four but they can let themselves in.

  He left to face his board. And I stood in the middle of his newly renovated kitchen worrying about Sheridan. Like most of my Sydney friends Sheridan drank too much red wine, was argumentative and opinionated. Yet he was unfailingly generous and he had been my friend for twenty years and I knew I should not have left him and his son at the airport and I felt guilty and, suddenly, emotionally discombobulated.

  My Filofax contained a mess of numbers for Sheridan, erasures, arrows leading down and up like Snakes and Ladders. I rang them all, but never got anything more encouraging than an answer machine with Clara's voice on it. I then tried Jack Ledoux but Jack's number was busy and I turned my attention to Kelvin's fancy new espresso. It was nine in the morning in Sydney and I was jet-lagged and fuddled, and wrongly estimated that it was midnight in Manhattan. I could see my wife and children sleeping, hear their breath like prayers whispering through the dark. By the time I had the coffee in its elegant white cup I was home and homesick all at once.

  I should have got on the phone and talked to the friends whose stories I wished to collect. I had already categorised them as Earth and Air and Fire and Water. All I had to do was call them but instead I wandered through Kelvinator's paint-perfumed house like a ghost, from light to dark, from dark to light, from late-Victorian front door to a café-modern kitchen whose steel-framed glass doors looked over a black swimming pool. It was hard not to be at least a little jealous. The house itself was only thirty feet wide, but after Manhattan the space seemed limitless. The hallway was generous, the ceilings high. The deep double front room had once been two rooms but now it was a big cold dining room - why did no one in Sydney ever heat their house? - and a library filled, mostly, with biographies and history books. I could find only one novel, The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien.

  This was a strange discovery in a house where no one read fiction, but when I opened the book Sheridan's handwriting appeared before me. Suddenly it was not strange at all. Sheridan always gave away novels, not only novels, but all sorts of writing, scraps of wisdom, useful facts, passages of beautiful prose. To Janet and Kel from Sheridan, I read, in memory of the silver wind. Silver like a knife. January 3 1996.

  Sheridan had no respect for books as objects, writing in their margins, dog-earing their pages, interleaving them with his candy wrappers and socks and other unlikely bookmarks. But I never knew a man who had such faith in words, for he was always trying to give his friends that piece of jigsaw which would fit the gap, ease that ache that ignorance must surely be making in our hearts.

  Page thirty-one of this first edition of The Third Policeman was dog-eared, and he had marked the following dialogue with a heavy ballpoint pen.

  'No doubt you are aware the winds have colours,' he said. I thought he settled himself more restfully in his chair and changed his face till it looked a little bit benign.

  'I never noticed it.'

  'A record of this belief will be found in the literature of the ancient peoples. There are four winds and eight subwinds, each with its own colour. The wind from the east is a deep purple, from the south a shining silver . . .'

  Why had Sherry marked this passage? It wasn't hard to figure out. He had signed his inscription on January 3, the high season of the southerly buster. My guess was that they had all just been crewing Meredith's boat on Pittwater. They had been hit by a deadly silver wind and something had broken or busted: they'd had some wild torquing adventure that popped the cabin furniture out of the floor. They were all cowboys, the women too. Kelvin's photo-editor wife was the wildest of them all.

  Jack Ledoux sailed with them sometimes although he once intimated that they were too reckless for his taste. Tell me, Jack demanded, after Kelvin and Sheridan had shredded one more spinnaker in a Force 6, why are they always getting into trouble, Peter? And raised those eyebrows so high they disappeared beneath his dense white hair.

  He's one to talk, said Sheridan. Christ, have you seen that little skiff of his? That's a man who wants to die.

  And it was Jack Ledoux who had had the wildest experience with a Sydney southerly. He was in my notebook under Air. I had already phoned him from New York and he had tentatively agreed to tell it to my tape machine.

  I tried his number again, and this time the phone was answered, so it seemed, by a screaming baby. It was a moment before I heard Jack's weary voice asking his caller to hold a mo.

  I pictured my old friend inside his famous open-sided house beneath the sandstone cliffs of Pittwater and while I listened to the baby crying I remembered a night before his oldest boy was born when Kelvin and I had tried to load Jack up with all the baby stuff Kelvin had no use for any more. But Jack was fifty-six years old and had spent a life living the Life of Few Possessions and although we helped him pack the detritus of Fisher-Price and Babycare into his mouldy Saab, he brought it back again next morning.

  Sorry, Kel, he said. I just can't do it.

  But he could now. And did. Now he was a grey-haired former aesthete walking back towards the phone, travelling through a minefield of nappies and cribs and plastic toys.

  I was just talking to Sheridan about you, he said. Just hung up.

  Where is he?

  Someplace very high, he laughed. He has some vital material for you to read. Jack laughed again. Actually, I'm pleased you called, because I've been thinking of that story of mine. I know I promised you . . .

  God damn, I thought. He's backing out.

  You know, Peter, I very nearly died. When something like that happens, when you've got off the hook, it's best to be very quiet, don't you reckon?

  Off the hook?

  Besides, he said a little sternly, there are those old privacy issues.

  He was referring to something I do wish he would forget. Once I had taken a beautiful house he had designed and carelessly given it to a certain fictitious character, a man deeply involved in Sydney's corrupt world of business and politics.

  I had intended nothing more than a tribute to a work of art, but I was thinking like a novelist not an architect and there is no doubt that Jack, a fastidious man, would never have built a house for this character of mine.

  When he read the book he wrote me a very angry letter. I had put his client's house, his private rooms, on public display. I had committed an utter breach of trust.

  But was not this 'house' now fiction, embedded in a work of fiction? Would it not be read as fiction by everyone except those very few people who knew that a similar house really existed? All this I argued in my reply to him. I also said I was sorry and I meant it. It is easier to build imaginary houses than real friendships.

  I have lived in more than one house Jack has designed and would be a happy man if I could wake up in one tomorrow morning and live in it all my life. Every time I walk into one of his constructions, it makes me happy. That being said, his notion of a house is a campsite. He likes it best when there are no walls at all, and his houses are made in the tension between his desire to be open to the elements and his clients' desire for protection from them. I remember leaping out of bed at three in the morning, manning the ropes, closing down the hatches as a storm lashed down out of the west. Jack Ledoux is a sailor, it shows in everything he does.

  He is a very physical man, a natural athlete, and yet his shoulders have begun to hunch, a change that has certainly been caused by hours spent, arms folded across chest, chin in hand, standing before a painting, or a piece of land, watching the pink Pacific light illuminate a sandstone cliff, or the water at the end of a mangrove creek turn copper as the sun drops and the tide recedes. It is not only his long body but his face that has been re-formed by the act of seeing. He has a strong jaw and nose but the face is creased and eroded like soft stone. The eyes themselves are pri
vate, contained behind clamped-down slitted lids, but every line in that weathered face, like a line of magnetic force, bends towards the twin poles of the eyes.

  He can see like no one else I know. If I could persuade him to make public the story of his fight with death, you would experience Sydney Air and Sydney Water. You would see the light on Broken Bay and the colour of the deadly wind.

  Well, he said, in a tone that did not make me optimistic, there's no need to decide just yet.

  He said he was coming down to the city, to visit a house he had recently completed for two clients, really wonderful people, Peter, the pair of them are just extraordinary. Perhaps he could pick me up. We would look at the house, and then we could come back up here to Pittwater. He could set me up a mosquito net and I could sleep out on the deck, 'on the possum trail'. We might catch a fish, hang out with him and Brigit and I could get reacquainted with his kids and meet the new baby. About the story I said nothing, but there was nothing that would take its place.

  All right, he said, there's a ferry to Church Point in ten minutes. I'll be on it.

  While Jack is catching his ferry from Taylors Bay, I should roughly lay out the topography of Sydney, which is distinguished not simply by its one famous harbour but three complicated invasions of Water into Earth. The harbour is the central and perhaps most spectacular of these, but Broken Bay, twenty miles to the north, and, to a lesser degree, Botany Bay, five miles to the south, share many of the topographical delights that Trollope extolled when he wrote of the harbour in 1872: I can say it is lovely but I cannot paint its loveliness. The sea runs up in various bay or coves, indenting the land all round the city so as to give a thousand different aspects to the water, - and not of water, broad unbroken and unrelieved, - but of water and then again of land. And you, the resident, - even though you be a lady not over strong, though you be a lady, if possible, not over young, - will find unless you choose your residence most unfortunately, that you have walks within your reach as deliciously beautiful as if you had packed all your things and travelled days and spent pounds to find them.