Everywhere I Look Read online

  EVERYWHERE I LOOK is a collection of essays, diary entries and true stories spanning more than fifteen years of the work of one of Australia’s greatest writers. Helen Garner takes us from backstage at the ballet to the trial of a woman for infanticide, from the significance of moving house to the pleasure of re-reading Pride and Prejudice. The collection includes her famous and controversial essay on the insults of age, her deeply moving tribute to her mother, and the story of her joy in discovering the ukulele. Everywhere I Look is a multifaceted, profound portrait of life. It glows with insight and wisdom.

  PRAISE FOR HELEN GARNER

  ‘Garner is one of those wonderful writers whose voice one hears and whose eyes one sees through. Her style, conversational but never slack, is natural, supple and exact, her way of seeing is acute and sympathetic, you receive an instant impression of being in the company of a congenial friend and it is impossible not to follow her as she brings to life the events and feelings she is exploring.’

  Diana Athill

  ‘A voice of great honesty and energy.’

  Anne Enright

  ‘Scrupulously objective and profoundly personal.’

  Kate Atkinson

  ‘Garner’s spare, clean style flowers into magnificent poetry.’

  Australian Book Review

  ‘She has a Jane Austen–like ability to whizz an arrow straight into the truest depths of human nature, including her own.’

  Life Sentence

  ‘Compassionate and dispassionate in equal measure…She writes with a profound understanding of human vulnerability, and of the subtle workings of love, memory and remorse.’

  Economist

  ‘Helen Garner’s greatest skill is to encourage the reader not to make judgment but to listen.’

  Australian

  ‘She watches, imagines, second-guesses, empathises, agonises. Her voice—intimate yet sharp, wry yet urgent—inspires trust.’

  Atlantic

  ‘Garner’s writing [is] so assured and compassionate that any reader will be enthralled and swept along.’

  Australian Bookseller & Publisher

  ‘The words almost dance off the page.’

  Launceston Examiner

  ‘Garner is a beautiful writer who winkles out difficult emotions from difficult hiding places.’

  Sunday Telegraph

  ‘Her use of language is sublime.’

  Scotsman

  ‘Garner writes with a fearsome, uplifting grace.’

  Metro UK

  ‘A combination of wit and lyricism that is immensely alluring.’

  Observer

  ‘Honest, unsparing and brave.’

  New York Times

  ‘There’s no denying the force of her storytelling.’

  Telegraph

  ALSO BY HELEN GARNER

  FICTION

  Monkey Grip

  Honour and Other People’s Children

  The Children’s Bach

  Postcards from Surfers

  Cosmo Cosmolino

  The Spare Room

  NON-FICTION

  The First Stone

  True Stories

  The Feel of Steel

  Joe Cinque’s Consolation

  This House of Grief

  SCREENPLAYS

  The Last Days of Chez Nous

  Two Friends

  Helen Garner was born in Geelong in 1942. Her books include novels, stories, screenplays and works of non-fiction.

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  textpublishing.com.au

  Copyright © Helen Garner 2016

  The moral right of Helen Garner to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published in Australia by The Text Publishing Company, 2016.

  Many of the stories in this collection have been previously published. See page 229 for details.

  Lines on p. 102 from An Experiment in Love, Viking, 1995, © Hilary Mantel 1995, reproduced with permission.

  Book & cover design by W. H. Chong

  Cover photograph by Darren James

  Typeset by J&M Typesetters

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication

  Creator: Garner, Helen, 1942– author.

  Title: Everywhere I look / by Helen Garner.

  ISBN: 9781925355369 (paperback)

  ISBN: 9781922253644 (ebook)

  Subjects: Garner, Helen, 1942–

  Garner, Helen, 1942—Criticism and interpretation.

  Garner, Helen, 1942—Diaries.

  Authorship.

  Life.

  Dewey Number: A823.3

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE: WHITE PAINT AND CALICO

  Whisper and Hum

  Some Furniture

  White Paint and Calico

  Suburbia

  PART TWO: NOTES FROM A BRIEF FRIENDSHIP

  Dear Mrs Dunkley

  Eight Views of Tim Winton

  Notes from a Brief Friendship

  From Frogmore, Victoria

  My Dear Lift-Rat

  PART THREE: DREAMS OF HER REAL SELF

  While Not Writing a Book: Diary 1

  Red Dog: A Mutiny

  Funk Paradise: Diary 2

  Dreams of Her Real Self

  Before Whatever Else Happens: Diary 3

  PART FOUR: ON DARKNESS

  Punishing Karen

  The Singular Rosie

  The City at Night

  The Man in the Dock

  On Darkness

  PART FIVE: THE JOURNEY OF THE STAMP ANIMALS

  The Journey of the Stamp Animals

  Worse Things than Writers Can Invent

  How to Marry Your Daughters

  X-ray of a Pianist at Work

  Gall and Barefaced Daring

  The Rules of Engagement

  The Rapture of Firsthand Encounters

  Hit Me

  PART SIX: IN THE WINGS

  My First Baby

  Big Brass Bed

  Dawn Service

  A Party

  The Insults of Age

  In the Wings

  PART ONE

  White Paint and Calico

  Whisper and Hum

  WHEN I was in my forties I went on holiday to Vanuatu with a kind and very musical man to whom I would not much longer be married, though I didn’t know it yet.

  He was at ease in the Pacific climate, but I hated the tropics with a passion: all that sweating and melting and shapelessness and blurring. And what I hated most was the sight of a certain parasitic creeper that flourished aggressively, bowing the treetops down and binding them to each other in a dense, undifferentiated mat of choking foliage. I longed to be transported at once to Scotland where the air was sharp and the nights brisk, and where plants were encouraged to grow separately and upright, with individual dignity.

  At nightfall the whole population of the island would walk into town, and so would my restless husband and his discontented wife. In velvety air and under a starry sky, a stream of people padded along a sandy track, quietly chattering and laughing.

  One evening a Melanesian man in torn and baggy clothes was walking on his own in front of us. He seemed to be cradling something small against his chest. Occasionally he lowered his face over it. We heard faint rhyth
mic music, and when we passed him we saw that he was playing a tiny stringed instrument, strumming it very softly as he swung along by himself in the cheerful crowd. He wasn’t performing, or wanting anyone else to hear what he was doing. He was playing just to keep himself company.

  I wanted one of those instruments. I wanted to hold it in my arms.

  I crushed this longing with my usual puritanical savagery. You’re too old. You couldn’t even learn the piano. You have no musical talent. You will make a fool of yourself and everyone will laugh at you. Pull yourself together, woman, and slog on.

  But when we got home to Melbourne I took down the Oxford Companion to Music and looked up the ukulele. ‘It has four strings and a very long fingerboard…It was patented in Honolulu in 1917, from which date it gradually became popular in the United States amongst people whose desire to perform was stronger than their willingness to acquire any difficult technique or their desire to make intimate acquaintance with any very elaborate music.’

  So. It was a cop-out for the lazy and talentless. I went straight downtown and bought the first one I saw that didn’t look trashy. It was made in Czechoslovakia and it cost $45. I also bought Mel Bay’s You Can Teach Yourself Uke. I put them in a cupboard under a pile of blankets and said nothing about them to anyone.

  Whenever I was home alone I would rush upstairs and take the uke out of its cardboard box. It was so intimate, so un-awe-inspiring, with its curvaceous waist and pretty metal frets and creamy tuning pegs. A faint perfume drifted out of its woody little body. And, unlike the hulking piano which years earlier had brought me to my knees, it was small. No one could possibly be afraid of this instrument. I fell in love with it. I spent secret afternoons sitting on the bed strumming my way through the beginner’s book. I learnt ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat’ and ‘Camptown Races’. It was easy. It was natural. Four strings, four fingers, not like a guitar, where you’re ganged up on every time you try to make a chord.

  I found I could learn a three-chord song in about thirty seconds. It dawned on me that there are several million three-chord songs in the world, many of which I had effortlessly, long ago, stored in the mud at the very bottom of my memory. Up they came from the depths, dripping and sparkling—so fresh, shining with common human feeling. And I saw that the ukulele, despite the snotty entry in the Oxford Companion, has in fact a simple and benevolent purpose: to create a gentle bed of sound for the human voice; to enrich the single line of melody that a human voice is capable of.

  Somewhere in the background of all this, my marriage crashed and my daughter grew up and left home. Next time I looked around I was living in Sydney with a severe modernist to whom the presence of a ukulele in the house would have been an outrage. With him it was Wagner or nothing. Even a string quartet or a solo piano was too minor. I had to put headphones on to listen to my funk tapes. It wasn’t a dancing kind of marriage. How it flew past! Ejected, I scrambled to my feet in Bondi Junction Mall, dusted myself off, and got talking to a woman who was busking on a chunky little thing with a round body. She said it was called a pineapple uke and that her brother imported them from Hawaii. She gave me his phone number.

  Oh, my Kamaka. It was so beautiful that I hated to put it away in its case. Even the wind wanted to play it. One day when I’d left it lying on the back of the couch and gone into the next room, the faintest, airiest twangling sound reached me. I ran back and found that a breeze coming up the hill from Bondi was puffing over the windowsill and drawing the hem of the calico curtain back and forth over the open strings.

  Fast forward. I’m a grandmother, back in Melbourne where I belong. I’ve owned a ukulele for thirty years and I’m still a beginner. A uke is humble. It inspires in me no ambition, no duty or guilt. It’s so low in the hierarchy of things that the bullying superego can’t touch it. I play it only when I feel like it. After a particularly introverted winter, I got to the point where I could play ‘All of Me’, and ‘I Will’ (very slowly). But everything I learn I soon forget. I have to keep starting again. I can’t pick, I can only strum, and I don’t care. Sometimes I hold the uke on my knee while I’m reading the paper or waiting for the kettle to boil. I love it as I would any harmless little creature. I love to hear it whisper and hum.

  Once in a while the money-making musicians in my family kindly call me when they’re playing in the kitchen after tea, or at somebody’s birthday party, or in the back shed that my sister calls her ‘adobe hacienda’. There might be three or four ukes, a harmonica, a mandolin, a guitar. The chords aren’t ones I know. The changes are too fast. Someone pushes the chart to me. I take a breath and throw myself into the river. No one can hear me, so it doesn’t matter if I flounder. But if I don’t panic, if I keep calmly swimming, sometimes I hit the current, and it carries me to the end of the song.

  2015

  Some Furniture

  AT the turn of the millennium I reached the end of my masochism, and came home from Sydney with my tail between my legs. Single again. Tenants were still living in my Fitzroy house, and the one I rented for myself in Ascot Vale was too narrow for the table I’d had trucked down the Hume. I offered it to my niece. She turned up with a bloke in a ute and away they went. I stood in the bare room.

  What can happen at the kitchen table when you haven’t even got one?

  A woman on her own can easily get into the habit of standing at the open fridge door and dining on a cold boiled potato. I was determined to be elegant in my solitude. But for lack of a table I had to eat off my knee, on the couch. The available space in the kitchen would take only a round table, and every round one I saw, in the crap shops I drifted through at Highpoint, had a hole drilled in the centre for an umbrella.

  It chanced that a schoolfriend of my daughter’s was married to a woodworker. He came over, measured the spot, and returned in a couple of weeks with a perfect little creation in pale timber. It was so beautiful and so expensive that in my demoralised state I felt unworthy to sit at it. But I forced myself. I learnt to eat dainty salads off it, to nibble at fillets of fish steamed in ginger. This would be my single life.

  A year later I took back my old house from the tenants. The kitchen was a large room. The little round table floated on its expanse of floor like an autumn leaf on a lake. How could something so lovely look so silly, so out of place? I rolled it into one of the bedrooms and drove down to the fashionable recycled timber shops on Johnston Street.

  There I found a rectangular dining table of a suitable size. Until I bought my tiny round one, now superseded, I wouldn’t have paid four figures for a table in a fit. But the sign said it was made of jarrah that had been salvaged from a demolished warehouse. Its dimensions were pleasing. It had slightly tapered legs and a glossy top, on which I could imagine setting out white crockery, cloth napkins, perhaps a vase of flowers if anything pretty ever blossomed again in my garden. For a moment I was puzzled by certain dark nail punctures that randomly pitted its surface. All the furniture in the shop seemed to have them. Maybe this was how recycled timber was supposed to look. Was the very purpose of this noble endeavour to preserve the traces of proletarian toil? Who was I, a self-pitying bohemian, to question this?

  It looked all right in the kitchen. Its top gave off a warm, dark glow. One day, when I trudged in from work and dumped my red backpack on it, the two colours united in a fiery moment that made my mouth water. I looked out into the grassy yard. Perhaps a bird might alight, and emit a musical phrase. Something moved behind the lemon tree. I stepped over to the window and a hawk beat up into the air with a bald corpse hanging from its beak. I rushed outside. The grass behind the tree was thickly strewn with feathers.

  I knew that I was in despair. The house was empty, too big for me to fill. All I could bring to it was an enormous, slow, bleak loneliness.

  In a junk shop I found a shabby but surprisingly comfortable old sofa covered in gold brocade that was bleached almost to silver. When it was delivered I saw only its dated gentility; but then I tossed an equally a
ncient pink silk cushion on to it, and the pink and the faded gold sang to each other in quiet, tired voices. I saw that, living alone, one must play out one’s domestic dramas through inanimate objects. Suddenly this did not seem so terrible.

  But the man who had made me the little round table called in one afternoon. He stopped at the kitchen door and contemplated the recycled jarrah table without expression. Then he clicked his tongue and said, in a tone of reproachful pity, ‘Oh, Helen.’

  I supposed it was the nail holes. He refrained from a detailed critique and I brazened it out. After he left I got down on my haunches and had a look at the table’s underside. I couldn’t believe what I saw. The thing was cobbled together in the most shamelessly bodgie way. Random offcuts of raw pine, still sprouting ragged splinters, had been crudely jammed into its corners and stapled to brace it. No attempt had been made to hide the gross construction. It was blatant, insulting.

  I tore off the jagged spikes with my bare hands, then pulled up a chair and sat at the table till the back garden got dark.

  A married friend, whose house was notable for its quiet sophistication, came that week to visit me, bringing a bunch of flowers. She admired the table.

  I said, ‘Have a look underneath.’

  She crawled under it, crouched there for a moment, then scrambled out and took her seat.

  ‘Got vodka?’

  I took the Absolut out of the freezer and found the shot glasses.

  ‘Let’s drink to your table,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t tease me. I’ve been ripped off. I want revenge. I want a refund.’

  ‘Look at it this way,’ she said. ‘It’s stable, isn’t it?’

  It was.

  ‘Is it the size you wanted?’

  Perfect size.

  ‘Fits the room?’

  It did.

  ‘Think about it,’ she said. ‘It’s an image. Of you. Of all of us. It stands steady. It doesn’t wobble. It’s extremely serviceable. Okay, it’s got those nail holes all over the top. But they’re marks of experience. And when you look underneath, you see it’s been pulled together out of whatever was to hand.’