A Long the River Run, page 23
Somewhere, a long time ago, Angela remembers catching two buses to the university. The first, blue and crowded, eight thirty in the morning and the shop girls are full of gossip, and the office men, hot in their collared shirts and ties, are reading the newspaper and giving angry little frustrated looks when someone carrying a big bag of books sits on the narrow bench seat next to them and makes their newspapers rustle, and they sigh and when they do a sour tobacco smell comes from between their mean thin lips and it is late February and it is still hot and there were fires earlier in the summer, but not too bad, and it is still warm, unseasonably so, and the office men are beginning to perspire, dark spots emerging in the armpits of their polyester shirts and the office men don’t wear deodorant so, in Angela’s nose there is the musty smell of their sweat mingling with the overpowering perfume of their cheap aftershave, their Old Spice or their Brut33 that they would have received eight weeks earlier as a Christmas gift from their mothers, or grandmothers or wives or girlfriends or children and they hope that the bottle will last until Autumn when they will not perspire or smell so much and Angela smells her own smell, the Femfresh her mother insisted that she uses and has used for almost all of her high school years and which she will soon dispose of on the advice of the Women’s Collective which is one of the first groups she joins during O Week, along with the Drama Society and the Film Society and the Wilderness Society and the Amnesty Club and the Poetry Society and the Fencing Club even though she has never picked up a sword in her life but thought that it looked romantic and elegant and she might meet some nice people and maybe even find a lover who is athletic and intelligent and perhaps a little arrogant who might drive a little sports car, like the MG that one of her teachers used to drive and who all the girls thought might have been a poofter because he was well spoken and well dressed and never sleazed on to any of the Year 12 girls the way some of the other younger, and not so younger male teachers would. The first bus went all the way from Everton and Angela knew that when she got to town that she had to get off at Walton’s and cross the road and get the 100 bus to the university although one of her friends had suggested that she could have gotten off at Tudor Street and cross the road to the pizza shop, where she was later to go with Andy, and get the 225 but Angela didn’t know about the pizza shop that morning and she knew even less of Andy and his place in her dreams for the next thirty years.
The people outside of Walton’s waiting for the buses were mainly students like Angela who had come into town from the various suburbs to the south and were changing buses and there were a lot of them because it was the first day of the first term and Angela tried to look cool and was hoping people weren’t guessing that she was a first year and she thought she could tell the first years because some of them seemed to be still children in her eyes, particularly the gawky and gangly group of boys who were chasing each other and throwing balls and were carrying their books and pens in school ports and were only distinguished from the real school children who were also waiting for a bus because they weren’t wearing school uniforms. In the window of Walton’s there were displays of furniture that were ignored by the students, but later in the day the window shoppers would come to look and browse and go inside and prod and poke and scratch their chins and walk around a lounge suite or bedroom suite or entertainment unit from every angle and when they made up their mind would talk to the shop assistant and fill out some papers the way, for years, Angela’s Mum and Dad had whenever they replaced some second hand furniture with a new piece that would be paid for every fortnight to a man who came to the house on a motorbike with a big leather satchel and leather bound receipt book and Angela’s mother told her that she should buy something on hire purchase as soon as she could afford the repayments so she built up a good credit reputation with Walton’s and so, when she married, she could buy nice things for house from her husband’s wages. Keeping house, her mother called it, this thing that women did, that Angela would do one day and the only consolation her mother had about Angela going to university was that she might meet a better class of boy to marry, one with prospects, one with an emerging career, perhaps in accounting, who could get a steady job that had progression over time and promotions and pay rises that could coincide with the birth of children who would grow up in a nice house in the suburbs, maybe even down the lake but close enough to home for regular visits to their grandparents.
The steelworks were making clouds again as Angela waited for the 100 bus and they rose, big fluffy puffs like cotton wool against the clear blue summer sky. Later on Andy would tell her that it was steam caused by the water cooling the coal being baked into coke in the coke ovens and how nobody much liked to work in the coke ovens because it was always hot and steamy and the gas given off could make you sick or kill you and how the worst place to be was up on the lids and men died there from the fire and the gas and the falls and how it was all the wogs who liked to work there on a seven day roster with plenty of doublers and Andy knew these things because when he was a boy, before the university, he worked at the steelworks in one of the rolling mills where he dreamed of being a poet like the Professor and his circle of friends who had put out a book that Andy had read at night in the mill, and where he tried to find poetry in the steel but the steel was already in his heart, but Angela didn’t know Andy then and when she did know him, later on in second year at the university, she showed him off to her mother even though he wasn’t her boyfriend then and never really ever was and her mother was not impressed and thought that he was dirty but it was just that he was scruffy with his big bush of uncombed curly hair and his curly black beard that nestled on his chin and his jeans with the holes patched with red paisley fabric and combat boots from the disposal store because he couldn’t afford Doc Martens and his lack of manners when it came to food, and Angela’s mother said there must be nice boys at the university like Mrs Farrell’s son, Wayne, with his nicely pressed and spotless polyester shirt with short sleeves and his brown slacks and briefcase and neatly parted hair and his car that he washed and polished on the front nature strip every Saturday morning and how Wayne Farrell had no time for wasteful things like poetry and that poetry was alright for girls to enjoy but not for husbands and fathers who needed to know how to change the washer on a tap and adjust the spark plug on the Victa lawnmower and how, according to Angela’s mother, Andy probably knew none of these things, him with his head in his books and his fancy words and strange clothes and Angela did not know if Andy knew these things because she never talked about them but suspected that he might know some things from working in the steel mills that Wayne would never know like fear and danger and noise and smoke and light and fire and the rough words and rough hands and gentle hearts of men who work in places such as these.
The bus came that first morning and Angela counted out the thirty cents for the fare and handed it to the driver in his blue peaked cap and blue shirt with epaulets and pressed blue shorts who handed her the ticket and she made her way down the aisle to find a seat and smiled to the other university students because she was now one of them and had a library card with her name and number and a bus pass that said she was a student and a knapsack with prescribed texts for Drama and English that were to be taught that day with Classical Civilisations the next and Philosophy the day after that and so she didn’t have to carry all of her books, just the ones for the day so she had Hedda Gabler and Other Plays in the Methuen edition that she had read the weekend before and Beowulf in the Penguins Classics edition translated by Michael Alexander that she was half way through. Later on she would love Tristram Shandy and Tom Jones and then Ulysses and The Four Quartets until she fell back in love with Mick, who had never really left the pile of books beside her bed that she packed up in the first term of uni to take to her first student digs in a house with an unmown yard and cracked and faded weatherboards and a rusty tin roof that was prone to leaking, and ash and soot and coal dust everywhere and where, at night, she and her flatmates talked all night and drank flagon claret by candlelight and listened to scratchy lp’s by Joni Mitchell and Laura Nyro and Nico and how she became surprised that Andy liked these women singers too, when all the boys at Everton High only ever seemed to like songs by men like Ted Nugent or Cold Chisel and never heard the voices of women let alone listened, yet Andy seemed to listen, and this she liked.
She saw him that first day, in the Student Union, walking through the crowd, at ease with himself and his place in the world and seeming to say hello to every second person he passed in the crowded corridor that ran the length of the refectory to the coffee bar that overlooked the bushland with its little creek. It was her second year before they spoke, when Angela and Andy were in the same class being taught by the Professor and there was Lucretia there as well and Louis and Brendan who Angela dated once before he had dated Lucy, but it was all so long ago and there was the girl from the Trotskyite party who’d argue about class with the Professor and Andy would sit back in his chair and gaze out the window looking bored at all the politics because he was a poet, he said once, and the only people who bang on about the working class are the ones who’ve never lived that life and didn’t know that it was real and how he hated that the life he had tried so hard to escape could be reduced by earnest students to an abstraction and Angela thought that she might be falling in love with him a little bit but was never going to say that because he might think that love was an illusion an abstraction, or at least the way it is talked about and Angela had nothing to compare with how she felt except her books and knew that it wasn’t something mad, that she was no Cathy and he no Heathcliff and there was nothing in Mick to help her, or Eliot, or the classics, or the plays she studied in Drama, or in Shakespeare, and the films she watched were either silly and corny designed to entertain silly girls or were heavy and dark and brooding European films without happy endings and laden with sorrow, and that’s not how she felt when she sat with Andy in class or the bar or sharing the bus home or sharing a meal in the refectory or pizza at the little Italian place near the bus-stop in Tudor Street.
Angela remembered parties as if it was just one big huge party that seemed to go on every weekend for her first three years at uni and it was at these parties that couples would pair off and some of them even stayed together and some of them were even together thirty years later with their smart children and nice houses in the better suburbs of the capital cities and very few of them stayed in their home city and those that did never mingled very much with their old uni friends unless they had gone into similar professions and the mingling was mainly with other parents of similarly aged children and Angela had never found a partner at these parties, not one for life or even a part of life and had soon grown tired of the one night stands that never promised love or anything that even approached what she thought that love might have been, and she had been mindful to ask Andy what he thought love might have been, given he thought of himself as a poet and sometimes poets think that they’re experts on love, even if Angela could never find answers in any of the poetry that she had read.
And then Andy had met Sophie, one night in Harry’s Bar, after an English class on D.H. Lawrence, and mother love, and Oedipal subtext, and suffocation, and the brutality of coarse men. and Andy had said that he hated the way that Lawrence had portrayed the miners as brutal and coarse without making any suggestion as to the cause of their brutishness and coarseness and how it was their work that made them that way and that the father in the book had been dashing and handsome in his youth and there were signs that he had loved his wife when they were first married and the Trotskyite girl carried on with her rubbish about the Professor being a class traitor and Andy had told her that she was full of shit because she thought that working class people had to stay working in the pits and the steelworks and dying in these jobs because they were working class and yet it was alright for the Trotskyite girl to go to university and perhaps enter a profession because she was already middle class and would probably always be middle class and Angela wanted to tell him how inspiring he had been and how much she had agreed with him and she was going to tell him in the bar that night and maybe even invite him home for a drink when the bar closed and she had used the last of her savings to buy a bottle of whisky because she knew that he liked to drink good whisky but could rarely afford it and she hoped that it might serve to ease her planned seduction and then Sophie walked into the bar and flashed her whiter than white teeth smile and flashed her firm and toned whiter than white skinned thighs and laughed at his jokes and stroked his hand and cruelly dismissed the boy that she accompanied to the bar in the first place and then Andy was lost to Angela for good.
Something went wrong with Sophie, and Andy wouldn’t talk about it, but he disappeared inside himself for a very long time, lost with his words in his little notebook where he was always jotting down ideas for poems, or so he told Angela, and he stopped washing for a while so he always had that stale smell of urine and bong water and Angela later thoughted that the urine smell was not like the tang of Mr Blooms kidney breakfast but something earthier but also unpleasant and then Andy disappeared for good and Angela pretended that she didn’t care and didn’t notice and besides, by then she was totally engrossed in her thesis and exploring the world of the Caldwell Street Push but not knowing that the Gap was waiting over the horizon and Siobhan and her madness and obsessions that became Angela’s madness and obsessions and the voices in her head screamed at night and she didn’t sleep and the doctors gave Angela drugs to help but the voices compounded even with the help of the drugs, the laughing and taunts of Seamus Plunket and his acolyte and the despair of Siobhan who was not Molly because approached the world with passion and joy and lust and all the thing that Angela wished she had, whereas Siobhan approached the world with fear and apprehension and doubt and all of these were the things that Angela owned and carried with her until the mega crack up and silence and eventually calm.
Andy was out there all the time and Angela pretended not to notice his absence and pretended that she didn’t care and even once when someone at the university mentioned Andy, wondering what had become of him, Angela pretended that she didn’t know at first who this Andy was until the questioner reminded her that she had been in a couple of the Professor’s classes with Andy and expressed surprise that Angela could forget him and Angela said that he hadn’t made much of an impression and that night she went home and dug out an old photograph from the student newspaper of Andy reading some poetry one night in the bar and she cried and she remembered that the poetry wasn’t all that good but people applauded because they were kind and Sophie was there, so it must have been in that year when Andy had met her, but early on because as the year progressed, Andy disappeared more and more into the world of Sophie and Angela sometimes suspected may have been even madder than her own world just before the mega crack-up, and that was saying something.
In London, Angela had daydreams of bumping into Andy somewhere old and he would be surprised that she had finally left Newcastle to see a bit of the world and he would offer to take her around and show her all the sites, both the popular tourist sites and the obscure ones as well and they would drink in the pubs that famous poets had drunk in and Andy would tell her that he was successful in some job to do with the arts and that he had missed her all this time and how Sophie had been such a big mistake and how he had paid a dear price and, in her daydream, Angela would take his arm as they walked along the Thames Embankment, and it would be Autumn, and the light would be soft and there would be leaves at their feet and Angela would say that she too had paid a big price but it was alright now because they had found each other again and Angela would tell Andy that she was going to New Mexico and Andy would say that he would come because he had never been there and one of his friends had told him of a wise man, a Native American spirit man, who lived in a pueblo outside of Taos who makes your dreams come true and that Angela and he should go an visit and put their trust in the winds of the New Mexican desert and that this would be their world making pilgrimages to place where all of Angela’s favourite writers had lived and worked and she could immerse herself in more than just the words, but the smells and the tastes and the sounds and laughter of children and the crying of old people and sunrises and sunsets until there was no more need for words.
New Mexico, Angela dreams of New Mexico and Mick and David Herbert and Andy is unreachable as all of them. She thought that there was too much sky out there, blue, dazzling with barely a cloud, going on upwards forever and the earth, under her feet, the colour of straw also went on to far horizons where mesas shimmered in a heat haze and driving down from Denver, Cody Pommeray on her mind, the black top I25 disappeared in a shiny silver mirage drawing her deeper into the country, following dry rivers because the tears had all run out long ago, and later, back home, in the months and weeks before the fire, the river had also run dry and the world was turning brittle, just one spark, she thought, just one spark and thought she remembered a song from long ago that had that line, just one spark to light the fire and then she would know that it had all been an illusion, her shelter on the mountain because as Ingrid had said to her once ‘you can run as much as you want but you can’t run away from yourself’ and it was Ingrid who had seen Andy at the beach where he might have been looking for Sophie and if it was Angela who had seen him, she would have said, she imagined, she dreamed, that he had no need of Sophie because, in the end, Sophie only ever brought him sorrow and Sophie only ever bought Angela sorrow and Angela hoped that Sophie never knew the sorrow that she brought to others, that Sophie would never know that sorrow.
