Caravan Story Read online

  On a night of driving rain, in the depths of a bitter winter, in the year 1851, a bullock dray stopped in a clearing in the outer east of Melbourne and a tall figure in a wide-brimmed hat was seen dismounting and hobbling his beasts before offering his hand to the figure still seated above him, wrapped head to toe in a grey blanket and looking for all the world like a monk. Over the course of the next hour or so the two figures worked slowly and methodically in the relentless rain, pitching a tent of basic design, its guy ropes lashed to the trees around. Under this shelter the tall figure then lit a smoky fire and a blackened tin was placed upon it.

  During the following days, as the rain eased and the clouds scudded high above, Ernest Fairweather and his wife May began to make of that clearing a small settlement, a settlement that eventually was to open up the entire eastern corridor and lay down the foundations of the modern-day suburb of Laburnum.

  Ernest Fairweather was a philologist who had been educated at Eton and Cambridge until the incident with the gardener

  Ernest Fairweather was a draper’s son and a draper himself who, until the downturn in the drapery market, seemed destined for a long and prosperous career. He met May shortly after his arrival through a mutual friend of his uncle’s. Quickly realising that it was either a struggling drapery business in the harsh world of the goldfields or a life lived more peacefully and at one with nature in a place more remote, he took the track east from Melbourne one day, declaring that wherever they were when the sun went down would be the place to settle.

  It was in the garden of May’s grandmother’s house in Cheltenham that she first saw laburnum, with its dark trunk and pendulous yellow flowers, and it always reminded her of those happy times when, waking in the morning and pulling aside the curtains, she would see the bees buzzing around the racemes and the geese waddling up the path to the gate. And though she was a long way now from Cheltenham and the vegetation here was of a wholly different character it gave her great comfort to know that, when her husband had asked her what they might call their little settlement, she had said ‘Laburnum’ and he had agreed.

  Can I come in? A young man is standing on the step, looking in through the flywire door. I’m Shannon, he whispers, I was opposite you, at the table. I push my papers aside. He’s a thick-set young man with greasy shoulder-length hair, a black t-shirt and beige cargo shorts that show off his puffy white calves. He is carrying the silver bladder from a wine cask and has blown it up like a football. To make it easier to pour, he says. He steps inside. I got it when they were cleaning up, he whispers, and he gives me a stupid grin. I gesture for him to sit then get two cups from the cupboard, one with circumnavigating brown stripes, the other with Garfield the cat on it. You asked that question, didn’t you, he says, about the cleaning things? He holds the bladder over my cup: I don’t know how you did that. I sit down opposite him. I said ‘young man’ but now I’m not so sure. He’s the one I called Georg Büchner. He has a fat, pasty, sickly-looking face and big brown bug-like eyes. So what’s your question? I ask.

  He’s talking then, very suddenly, very quickly, too quickly for my hazy head, still roaming as it is in the bush around my imagined Laburnum. He feels very strongly about what he’s saying, he says, he doesn’t want to get me into any trouble and obviously he realises that under the circumstances we have to be careful about how we voice our opinions, but, he reminds me, we have rights as much as the next person, we’re not just putty to be moulded this way or that, we can’t just accept the situation without any protest at all, as it seems the others are already doing. I give him a questioning look. In the first place, he says, the whole process was supposed to be based on choice, wasn’t it? You were actually asked to choose your topic, admittedly from the choices made available to you, but the element of choice was still inherent in the system. You have a problem with your choice of topic? I ask. I have chosen a topic, he says, but now I’ve found out there were at least three other topics that were, well, I won’t say similar—that were almost identical. Obviously this is designed to set up some kind of competitive environment, where one piece is somehow going to be judged up against another. I think this is very unfair. If not misguided. Surely if they are trying to find a way to deal with us it won’t be found by perpetuating this overly competitive environment, where we are forced to operate almost in competition with one another for—as they never tire of telling us—the very limited resources available. You think they’re trying to find a way to deal with us? I ask. There are too many of us, says Büchner: isn’t that obvious? I look at him curiously. It’s like the kangaroo (The kangaroo?): we clear the land, give them green pasture; they feed voraciously on it and breed like rabbits. There are just too many kangaroos. But we can’t kill them, can we? They’re too important—to the tourist industry, the national psyche, the way we are seen in the eyes of the world. So we protect them. But in the end there are just too many kangaroos and not enough grass left to go around. A solution has to be found. You see what I’m saying? We’ve eaten out the paddock, so they’ve moved us on, to ‘greener pastures’—hah! Well, they can’t cull us, can they?—much as I’m sure they’d like to. You think we’re here because we’re artists? I ask. Obviously, he says. There’s no question, he continues, that we’ve produced an excess of well-educated but ultimately disaffected individuals who with little or in some cases no talent at all set themselves up as artists and then as artists continually bleed a system which, in turn, perversely, has been set up to be bled by them—and the fact is, I don’t deny it, I’ve stood by that door too, my friend, cap in hand, asking for a handout; we all have, we’re all part of the same corrupt system, that’s why we’re here. We’ve all filled in their forms at some stage or other, we’ve all given them our details, told them what we’d like to do with their money. In my case I’ve done that—what? I don’t know—at least half a dozen times—I’m only twenty-six—and as many times they’ve knocked me back. So yes, they knew my address, they knew where to find me—and so, here I am. I’ve chosen my topic, I’ve started work on it—good work too, some of my best work—but all the time I can’t help thinking: This isn’t right, how can I feel like I’m doing original work when already there’s someone else dealing with exactly the same topic as me? It’s not that I object to being here, he is saying, far from it, the caravan I’ve got is better than the place I was in. But I still think it’s reasonable to ask questions without fear of retribution and suggest ways that things could be improved. For example, I like my caravan, it’s good, but I am used to having a bit of garden around me. In the share house where I lived I had a bungalow in the backyard and over the last couple of years I’d made a little garden around it—some vegetables, some herbs, a few flowers—and I suppose I’ve got used to that. I’d always potter around in there and I found it helped my work. Of course it’s not for me to judge how successful or otherwise this work has been but I do think it’s laughable, how you can read these articles in the weekend supplements about the parlous state of the fiction publishing industry and then have the very same editors and publishers who are in charge of this industry nod their heads in agreement but continue to ignore the most interesting work in favour of the most bland and boring. But I’m getting off the point—what I was wondering was if you got those cleaning things you asked for?

  There’s a pause. I look at him. Yes, I say. So the rules aren’t that strict after all, he says, almost to himself, stroking his chin-beard like an Oriental, a little twinkle in his eye. He wants to ask Polly if he can cultivate the area around his caravan to plant a garden—this is why he’s here, he’s wondering how he should approach this request: should he wait for a while first, he says, to see how the scheme is working, or should he put her on the spot now? I can’t answer. I feel sick, nauseous. I watch his mouth moving, the spit on his chin. I hear his torrent of words. Shut up, I want to say, just shut up can’t you? Just shut up and get out of my caravan! You’ll have to go, I say. I’m looking out the window. I see the actors�
�� Ford Transit van pull up next to the changing shed, see the driver slide the side door open and the actors start piling out. Polly is walking around the boundary fence to greet them. You’ll have to go, I say.

  The man is chopping the tree in the clearing and the sound of axe on wood rings out through the surrounding bush. The woman is seated under another tree a little way off, brushing away flies with a switch. A man rides up. He is sitting very high in the saddle and has a tall hat on his head. He stops beside the man who lets the axe fall beside him: a heavy, lifeless thing. From inside his jacket the tall-hatted man takes out a roll of paper and hands it down to the man who leans the axe-handle against his leg, wipes his hands on the front of his shirt and takes the paper from him.

  By the time I finish putting down these notes and sliding them back into my plastic pocket, evening has fallen. People are gathering for dinner, milling around the trestle tables in the centre of the oval: selecting their food, sitting down to eat. It looks like cold meats and salad. When I sit down beside her among the noise and clatter she throws an arm theatrically around me and pulls me to her and kisses me on the cheek. She’s telling her friends she loves me. She fills my plate with food like a mother and sets it down before me. She asks me how was my day? I say not good, I had trouble getting started—but softly, for her ears alone. I then ask her how was hers. She tells me, I listen, but it’s all very fast and full of too much detail. Then she’s lowering her voice too and speaking up close: I’ve been talking to some of the others, she is saying, and they agree, we think we can get you into our group.

  I’m not sure what she means by this but the feel of her warm breath in my ear, the smell on it of freshly chewed lettuce, the gentle stroke of a wisp of hair as she turns away again, it all makes me love her badly. This feeling comes up off me in a wave and she turns and smiles as if having felt it and kisses me on the cheek again. Am I really a writer? Or am I just killing time? A young woman across the table, one of the members of her group, is looking at me curiously, but I can’t return the gaze. I look down at my salad and think of Laburnum. Why shouldn’t it be a great work, something to be read and reread by generations of readers to come? And if this is not the great work, what is?

  She wants me to stay, she wants to tell me all about her day, but I want to go back to the van. I stand up. I need to work, I say. Everyone in her group is looking at me—she’s been talking about me, I know she has, and now they’re all looking at me as if trying to judge the actual me up against the things they’ve heard. I do my best to return their looks, or rather I glance and smile at each in turn: first one, then the next, then the one after that. Sorry, I say, I’m going back to the van, I need to do some work. I walk away—strange situation!—and am happy with the impression I’ve left.

  The air in the van still smells faintly of the wine Büchner and I had drunk. I squeeze the bladder but this time it really is empty and all I get is wine-smelling air. I sit down at the table. There is no light on inside, they will not see me, so I pull the curtains well apart and look back out onto the oval. Everyone’s out there. I see the Transit van being parked on the boundary fence, its headlights on, illuminating the oval. Someone runs a lead out from the changing shed, a Portaflood in their hand. They’re preparing for some entertainment. It’s all very relaxed, I think, you could even learn to like it. Yes, we needed a change, it’s not good to wake up every morning to the same living conditions, the same working conditions—day in, day out—we should always allow room for the unexpected in our lives. It’s strange, I never thought of it: I’m an artist and these are my people. We’ve all been gathered up, fished out of our nooks and crannies with a net whose weave would catch only us. Somewhere else there might be another oval with tradesmen on it. You delude yourself for so long into thinking you are part of the real world—the world that works, worries, procreates, watches television—and then one day you are reminded that you are not. We represent no-one but ourselves, we are small, hermetic, navel-gazing, self-congratulatory—in the end probably utterly useless. But then just when we have convinced ourselves that that’s precisely what we are, along comes someone like Polly. She puts us in a caravan, says we’re worth keeping, and brings us here. Small fish scattered in small schools across a vast ocean, netted up and dropped in a hold and made to rub their bodies across each other’s. We finally get to see who we really are. And who are we?

  I’ve been staring at the table—at a red wine stain on the laminex—and now I look up again. One of the writers—Fyodor Dostoevsky—is standing up on a chair holding a piece of paper in his hand; one of the actors—Andrew—has the Portaflood trained on him like a spotlight. I can barely make out the sound of Dostoevsky’s voice—it’s very faint, very far away—but then he stops, and there’s a round of applause. He gets down, and another writer gets up. They’re doing little performances. Perhaps of the work they wrote today. Each performance ends with a small round of applause.

  What are you doing? Polly is standing in the doorway, looking up through the flyscreen into the caravan. Though the light is off inside I am sitting at the table, lit by the Transit van’s headlights streaming in through the open curtains from outside. I don’t think it’s unreasonable, Wayne, she says, to expect people to participate. I’m not feeling well, I say. Polly looks at me. I’ve done well to answer like this. I think it’s something I ate, I say. This sets her back even further on her heels. I’m sorry, I say, I’ll participate tomorrow, I promise; the best I can do tonight is to watch from my window. I’ve surprised myself, Polly is disarmed, she nods her head in a series of short sharp movements up and down and, having no riposte, she is gone again. When I resume looking out the window I see her walking with quick steps back to the group where now another writer—Helen Garner—is up on a chair, speaking.

  It’s funny, but by telling Polly I’m not well, I feel it. With the curtains still open and with the headlights still streaming in from the outside I lie down on the bench seat and look up at the ceiling. Outside I can hear the sound of the writers reading, punctuated by applause. Is it too late to change, I think, can I be someone else, can I tell Polly I don’t want to do this any more? I feel tired, exhausted; a bit of work, a few glasses of wine, and I can barely keep my eyes open. The beginnings of sentences—new first sentences—for my Laburnum story come to me unbidden, unroll themselves out in my head for a way, then stop. One after another they come, and one after another they go. When she whispers and wakes me I have been asleep for an hour. In my dreams I felt her coming, the rise and fall of the van as she mounted the step in my dream was the rise and fall of a boat in the arm of a lake high up in the mountains where for some reason I was looking for gold. Don’t sleep there, she says, come to bed. I sit up. Extraordinary vision. The headlights are still on and out on the oval at least half the community is still watching the writers rise and fall. One gets up, then down, then another, up and down. It looks like it’s been going on for years. I think I can get you into our group, she says, closing the curtains: I’ve spoken to Polly. She turns on the light. It’s too sudden, too bright. I’ve told her we need a dramaturg. A what? I say. A dramaturg, she says, to help us with structure. You can come into town with us, watch us work, write things down, make suggestions.

  We lower the table. I make up a bed and we both get into it. The noises outside have stopped, the crowd has broken up—after a while the headlights go out. A gluey silence comes down. I watch her falling asleep. I can almost hear the clash and jangle of relived moments moving through her. She’s been making theatre, she’s been acting, she and her friends; they have in the few hours they’ve had together lived and played in a way that to me is unimaginable. I move closer and drape an arm over her and feel her chest rise and fall.

  three

  Polly is on the step, calling out. I can feel the van rocking and swaying. I’m still in bed—now I remember. I look beside me but she has gone. She got up early, told me she was getting ready and would come back for me later. I fell a
sleep. Now Polly is on the step. I have already made an exception for you, she is saying, the least you could do is make an effort. I sit up. Please now, she says, Wayne, I’ve agreed to let you go, but you must still follow some basic rules. Now I remember. I’m going into town with the actors. Yes, I say, I’m sorry, I’ll be there in a minute.

  She gets off the step and moves away. The van rocks again. I look out through the curtains—the breakfast tables are being cleared. I throw on yesterday’s clothes and splash my face with water. There’s a small overnight bag with a floral pattern on the floor near the door. I don’t know whose it is, but something very strong in me says I can’t worry about that now.

  Outside, the day’s activities have already begun. The writers are turning their chairs into a circle for their morning chat; over at the changing shed a group of painters are each pulling on a pair of white overalls while a woman I’ve not seen before, her hennaed hair done up in plaits, is opening the first in a row of four-litre paint tins; musicians with their instruments are sitting on chairs in a circle inside the players’ gate; and now, over near the scoreboard, against a backdrop of dry paddocks and fences, I can see her group of actors doing their morning exercises, all standing in a row, all moving in time.

  I’m halfway across the oval towards them when Büchner calls out. He asks where am I going. I gesture in the direction of the actors on the rise. The Transit van pulls up, driven by the actor introduced to me as Andrew. I turn away from Büchner and jump the fence onto the gravel track that encircles the oval; outside, on the paddocks—the ‘other world’—a herd of cows with heavy heads are grazing. The farmhouse I’d seen in the distance on the first day and which I can now see again seems somehow to have got smaller, to have shrunk back into the landscape, and now looks like a little toy house way over there on the horizon. Andrew slides the side door back and says good morning; he’s sorry he’s late, but the Transit van had been used last night to pick up the shopping and he’d only just finished unloading it. Once Andrew has finished talking—he talks very fast, I think: will I have to think this fast too?—she introduces me to everyone. This is our writer, Wayne, she says. I nod and smile. One by one she works her way around the group—there are eight in all. One by one she tells me their names and one by one I forget them. I look at the face, even sometimes for a moment look into its eyes, I listen to the name, I nod my head and smile, but when it’s over and I scan back through the faces I can’t remember what they are called. Wayne’s going to help us with story and structure, she says, and I smile and nod my assent.