Relatively Famous Read online

  Sinclair Hughes, Inside the Lion’s Den: The Literary Life of Gilbert Madigan, p. 28.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Remembered time is a shuffled deck. What is lived in sequence, as a line, is recalled as a jumble of colliding instances seemingly absolved from the laws of cause and effect, the everyday physics of existence. Only stories make sense of the mess, tracing or retracing meaning into the curlicues of our lives.

  It wasn’t until my own marriage went bad that I revisited what had happened between Mum and Gil, hoping to find in their drama some context or template for my own.

  Natalie and I met at the opening for a group exhibition I was a part of in the late eighties, something I mistook for an early step on a fated journey towards a career as a painter. It was, in fact, the last in a long series of missteps made in an increasingly desperate search for a creative outlet independent of my father’s distinguished career as a novelist. People might think I wanted to be famous like him. The truth is that beyond my childhood, or more probably because of it, I’ve never wanted fame. What I envied was my father’s talent. And the clear line of purpose his sense of vocation accorded him, which meant that, unlike me, he never had to wonder what it was he should be doing with his life.

  Between my uneventful exit from high school and my mature-aged entry into a Fine Arts degree, I spent three years as a would-be musician playing mediocre bass, first in a post-punk band called Learning Disorder, then in what we fantasised was a vehicle for sophisticated pop, a seven-piece outfit replete with horns called The Solo Project. My stage presence matched my musicianship: diligent and punctual. Qualities more suited to a shipping clerk than a rock star. The Project’s frontman, Barnaby Ellis, was the real deal, with his reptilian charisma and bruised, soulful voice, the tussock of carefully dishevelled hair, right down to his talent for self-destruction. After our EP Other Men Dreaming failed to attract airplay, we played a final gig at the Prince of Wales and called it quits. By that stage Barnaby was using smack and, without telling the rest of us, Marcus, the guitarist, had joined The Realms. Brett, our drummer, felt betrayed, but I was relieved. Deciding that keeping time was a boring way to pass it, I quickly moved on and immersed myself in my newfound passion for painting.

  I had more talent as a painter, though quickly discovered my range was limited, the subject matter derivative: post-realist cityscapes peopled by isolated Hopper-esque characters, the paint and anomie laid on a bit too thick. Even so, this and, I now realise, my father’s name, were enough to get me exhibited in a group show at Realities Gallery.

  Back then I was totally conflicted about my father’s fame. As a kid I’d been openly proud of it, though generally found myself in circles where being the son of a celebrated author carried little cachet – a league footballer, yes, but not an author. Later on, mixing with people who prized such connections, I was determined to keep my cards close to my chest, to play my own hand and not cash in my secret stash of cultural chips. Then at parties, after a few drinks, I would abruptly lay my cards on the table. As if I had cheated. Devaluing my father’s currency even as I spent his borrowed coin.

  When I met Natalie Farella she was doing her Articles at Blackburn & Gordon, a left-wing law firm that prided itself on representing the rights of workers. Her uncle had died in the Westgate Bridge collapse in 1970, when she was in Grade One. Her dad would have died too, with his brother in the flattened shed, had he not left his lunch in the car. As he walked to get it, annoyed with himself, the cracking, wrenching sound turned him in his tracks. He watched the steel and concrete plummet into the muddy river flats, saw the workers’ shed – knowing his brother was in it – obliterated. The impact knocked him backwards. The noise was geological, as if the earth itself had shattered. Then came the fires.

  Nat spent her childhood in the screech and shadow of that falling concrete. Though on the night of the exhibition’s opening, she was full of light and life, buoyed by the bubbles of celebratory champagne.

  I have never been comfortable at openings, launches, anything requiring small talk. I think that’s why I took up the bass as a teenager, so I had a role to play at parties, something to do, to hide behind. I had just extricated myself from an awkward exchange with the gallery owner’s sister and was bending down, pretending to study one of the sculptures, an enormous bowl of tangled, hyperrealist spaghetti covered in blood-like napoli sauce entitled ‘Mother’s Love’. The first thing I noticed was her legs. Toffee-coloured, athletic, they disappeared alluringly into a short, close-fitting skirt. Standing, I saw that the rest of her was a good match for her lower limbs: the curve of her breasts peeking above the neckline of her shirt, her large brown eyes strikingly intense, their gaze hard to return.

  ‘You’re Michael, yeah? Phoebe tells me you painted “Smoko”.’ Her hair was close-cut at the sides, a tumble of curls on top. Her eyes demanded an answer.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, unsure if I was about to be praised or pilloried.

  ‘It’s brilliant! It reminds me of my dad. The lethargy I used to see in him every night when he came home from work. It’s so lonesome.’

  ‘So lonesome I could cry,’ I said, regretting the words even before they had left my mouth.

  ‘Elvis, right?’

  ‘Sure. Elvis, Hank Williams. It was Hank’s song.’ I asked about her father and that’s when she told me about him and her uncle and the bridge collapse and how she had always wanted to work in industrial relations. We had talked freely to that point, but then I felt the usual unease rise through me like a blush. I sensed she was about to leave, to make some excuse about having to go to the bathroom or refill her glass. ‘My dad once wrote a book about an industrial accident,’ I blurted. ‘Well, that was part of it.’

  ‘A history?’

  ‘No, a novel.’ I paused. ‘It’s called The Falling Part.’

  ‘Get out of here! You’re kidding me!’ She was yelling. Everyone in the room turned and looked at us. ‘I read it in Year Twelve. It’s my favourite book of all time. No way!’ Placing her champagne flute on the floor, beside the sculpture, she scanned the exhibition catalogue. ‘Madigan … Madigan …’ Her index finger halted. ‘Michael Madigan … I can’t believe it.’ She looked at me in wonder. I thought she might cry. ‘So Gilbert Madigan’s your dad?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said sheepishly, accepting another beer from a passing waiter. ‘It’s complicated.’

  With the publication of The Falling Part, my father’s star rose as high as the small Australian literary firmament allowed; a firmament like the one I saw as a boy projected on the domed ceiling of the old planetarium, mimicking the vaster skies above. The book won the Australian Literature Society’s Gold Medal and was widely rumoured to have been runner-up for the inaugural Miles Franklin Award. Aged only twenty-four, Gil was considered a wunderkind, and his motivation for moving to England was as much to escape the pressure of that label as it was to realise its promise.

  As Mum tells it, she was keen for the adventure, though feared the effect it would have on her parents. They had never returned to the house in Carlton, but Marj faithfully visited them every week, even after they took offence at Gil’s portraits of them in The Falling Part. ‘He’s a bloody thief,’ Clem declared after seeing his pet phrases and mannerisms attributed to Harry Balfour. ‘Takes someone else’s words and passes them off as his own. How’s that writing? The secretaries at Hoffman’s call that dictation.’

  When Marj told them about the move to England, Ella burst into tears. ‘It won’t be forever, Mum, just a few years, just long enough for him to establish himself.’ Clem rose from the kitchen table and brushed a consoling hand across his wife’s shoulder as he walked to the back door. Through the flywire, Marj watched him fill a watering can and shower his tomato plants.

  Regaining her composure, Ella said, ‘You’re all we’ve got.’

  Marjorie didn’t know how to respond. She would have felt manipulated if she hadn’t known it to be true. Unable to physically comfort her mothe
r, rigid with guilt and anger about their inability to accept Gil or choose to be happy for her, all she could offer were false reassurances. ‘You’re not losing me. It’s not forever.’

  Clem was at work the day the SS Orontes set sail for England. Marj and Gil had visited the night before. Ella cooked them a farewell roast –- unheard of outside of Christmas and Sunday lunches — and so kept herself busy in the kitchen. Normally Clem only drank on weekends. Sometimes in the summer when the weather was cruel he would have a few at the Grandview after work, but most nights he came straight home and stuck to strong tea – tar black, two sugars. Knowing to steer clear of champagne, Gil brought a couple of bottles of Abbotsford Invalid Stout to mark the occasion. Clem took refuge in the dark brew, which initially matched, then accentuated, the blackness of his mood. Marj couldn’t stand seeing him so wounded, knowing she was the one inflicting the pain. She tried to talk with him about work, the footy … anything. ‘You’ll let me know how North’s going. And Brunswick, in the VFA.’

  ‘Mum will keep you posted.’

  As a kid I had asked Marj about her dad, and when she told me this story, she said that some people thought that Clem’s years of stoking the kilns had fired him hard. She insisted they were wrong, that underneath his rough crust he was as soft as uncooked clay. It was years later that she realised his distancing of himself before she left was his parting gift. By making himself the mean one, the traitor to their intimacy, he was freeing her to leave.

  When the moment came for them to say farewell and catch the tram back to Carlton, Clem didn’t reciprocate the warmth of his daughter’s hug. He simply kissed the crown of her head as he had done at bedtime each night of her childhood. ‘Safe travels,’ he said, his measured casualness allowing them the fiction that he was talking of the two-mile tram ride home, rather than the six-week voyage that would remove his daughter from what remained of his life.

  When Nat became pregnant with Noah we decided I would be the stay-at-home parent. I had always loved mucking round with kids, and despite the whole Italian mamma thing, or maybe because of it, Nat had never really seen herself in that role. Financially we didn’t have much choice anyway. She was on the brink of being made a partner and I was barely earning. I had sold some paintings, even a couple to state gallery collections, but it wasn’t anything we could rely on. Besides, it seemed my moment had already passed. I hadn’t progressed beyond my ‘urban alienation’ signature, which, of course, was borrowed even before it began, but by then had become a total cliché. Outside of Peter Booth, no one was doing figurative stuff anymore. The way I saw it, the art world was a bulimic cannibal that had eaten itself, thrown up and was now selling the vomit. There were exceptions, of course, most of them Indigenous – Emily Kngwarreye, Clifford Possum – but I had come to the conclusion that contemporary art was trapped in the paradox of predictable shock, something that evinced little more than a wry, ironic smile, a nod to its cleverness. When I’d dreamt of being an artist I wanted my work to move people the way Rembrandt’s and Van Gogh’s did: with empathy, pathos, the glory of time’s ruinous passing. Or to possess the unblinking beauty of a Rothko, the deep questioning implicit in those existential squares.

  I decided to roll the dice one last time and did a series of abstract cityscapes: all skies and sawtooth rooflines, phallic smokestacks full of veiled familial references. People who saw them said they were brilliant, mesmeric, but I knew they were crap. While my lines remained strong, the abstraction demanded a more arresting, imaginative palette; colour had always been my greatest weakness. I couldn’t tell Natalie because I had long suspected that my being an artist was the key to her attraction to me. I knew, though, that I was finished, and used the arrival of Noah to ease my way into a new identity.

  Nat’s parents, Nino and Maria, had never forgiven me for not being an Italian property developer. When they heard that my father was a famous novelist, Maria’s only comment was, ‘So why isn’t he rich?’ They blamed me, too, for their daughter getting married in a rotunda in the Edinburgh Gardens, even though it wasn’t my idea. And when we told them the ceremony wasn’t being conducted by a priest, they refused to attend.

  We thought the news of a grandchild might buy us some favour. Maria leapt from her chair and clapped her hands in front of her face. Keeping her palms together, she raised them to the ceiling and muttered a prayer to the Virgin Mary. Nino kissed his daughter on the cheeks and did the same to me, shaking my hand as he drew me to his barrel chest.

  Hugging Maria, peering past her shoulder, my eye was caught by the photo of Nat’s uncle, the one who died in the bridge collapse. Sitting atop the tellie in a thick gold frame, it was flanked by two electric tapers, their flickering yellow lights making his face shift and swim as if viewed through a veil of perpetual tears. Nino and Maria never spoke of him. Amid our joy, I thought of his children, the ones he was torn from, the grandchildren he would never hold.

  Once the excitement subsided, Nino gestured for me to follow him outside. It was late summer and the garden beds were bursting with produce: tomatoes, beans, onions, peppers, garlic, basil, squash, fennel, a range of lettuces. I marvelled at Nino and Maria’s industriousness and had often quizzed Nino on the best time to plant, when to harvest. He was generous with seedlings and advice, but disappointed by my less orderly approach to horticulture; utterly contemptuous of my resistance to pesticides and attempts at companion planting – ‘What do you think chemicals are for? You’re meant to kill the bloody insect, not find it a friend!’ Still, our best times were when we pottered about in his garden together, me playing the perpetual apprentice.

  Outside of winter, the patio was where he and Maria spent most of their time. Under the pergola they had an elaborate barbecue, a wood fired pizza oven, and an old sink rigged up above the gully trap. Increasingly, Maria cooked outside to save the house from fumes. The kitchen inside was for show, a gleaming trophy. Having disappeared into the brick garage where he stored their homemade tomato sauce and antipasto, Nino re-emerged carrying a flagon of clear liquid and two shot glasses. ‘A toast!’ he said, uncorking the large bottle, splashing the grappa into the glasses. ‘To the bambino!’

  I raised my glass, took a deep breath and tilted the fuel to my lips. Nino made the grappa with his friend and business partner, Bruno. Upon contact, it numbed my tongue and took out the tastebuds, then seared a trail of burning flesh from my gullet to my gut, where it exploded into an atomic plume and catalysed an instant swooning light-headedness.

  Nino poured another. ‘To my grandson!’

  ‘What if it’s a girl?’

  ‘Never mind,’ he said, tossing back the glass. After the fourth, my head was a hurdy-gurdy. I put my palm over the glass to stop him pouring a fifth. ‘So,’ Nino began, seemingly unaffected by the alcohol, ‘now you’ll be a father, how will you provide for them? Maybe work for Bruno and me?’ He smiled, his chalky teeth worn down to a uniform height. ‘No good you laying tiles – too far to bend!’

  He started shelling the broad beans piled up on the table between us, freeing the nubbly things from their velvety pods. My mind muddled, I noticed how strongly he resembled a broad bean, all muscle and protein. I was more of the string variety: sinewy, green.

  I tried appealing to his fatherly pride. ‘They’re going to offer Natalie a partnership soon. We don’t want to jeopardise that, so we thought I’d stay home with the baby, once her maternity leave finishes. At least for a while.’

  All the joy seeped from Nino’s face. He drank another shot; this one from despair. I had to give him something. Without thinking, I suggested I would make a career change, one I’d only vaguely considered and had never discussed with Nat. ‘I’m going to do a Dip. Ed., part-time – learn how to teach kids art.’

  Nino raised his eyebrows but kept his eyes down. ‘That’s good,’ he said unconvincingly. Standing, he grabbed the empty bean pods from the table, his broad hand cinching them in the middle before flinging them into the compost. ‘You
’ll make a good mother.’

  ‘Tea’s on the table.’

  I plonked the bowls of bolognaise on the placemats and returned to the kitchen for mine, the pepper and the parmesan.

  No one emerged.

  After Nat and I broke up I worried that our daughter, Sunday (then twelve, now fourteen), was trying too hard to please me. Back then when she stayed she wouldn’t let me out of her sight. Thankfully things had improved, though the pendulum had swung so far the other way that now she was almost as distant from me as her older brother. Not literally, of course – the flat was tiny.

  I found Sunday on the couch in the next room, staring at her phone, her finger swiping the screen like a windscreen wiper, images skittering from view. Ear buds in place, her head swayed to a muffled beat. Glancing up, she nodded when I told her dinner was served.

  Food and the toilet were the only things that lured Noah from his room. Hungry, he’d slump into the kitchen, eyes blinking from the light, pour himself a mixing bowl of cereal and take it back to his battle station. Doing VCE, he was meant to be studying. Mostly, though, he was answering the Call of Duty. Some nights he’d be up until four, flushing out the enemy, working with his mates to secure territory.

  Entering his room was like descending into a submarine: the manky smell of pent-up testosterone, the green glow of the monitor, the pressurised intensity of his focus. Flicking on the light to gain his attention, I mimed bringing a fork to my mouth. Momentarily, he took his eyes from the screen. ‘Shit!’ he said into the mouthpiece attached to his headphones. ‘My dad’s just come in. I’ve got to go eat. Be back in ten.’