The Simplest Words

A Storyteller's Journey

Alex Miller

• Publisher: Allen & Unwin
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781743313572
• eBook ISBN:
  9781925576306
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

From one of Australia's greatest novelists comes this fine collection, a storyteller's journey. These short stories and essays, written over the last forty years, comprise an insightful and intelligent meditation on the life of the novelist and the culture of contemporary Australia. Personal and intimate as many of these pieces are, this collection forms a kind of assured autobiography, of the sort that only Alex Miller could write. Alex Miller's stories are told with a rare level of wisdom and profundity, engaging the intellect and the emotions simultaneously. Stories are, after all, in his blood.

The Rule of the First Prelude

September of 1982 was an unusually brutal month for the unit. On the fifteenth, a Wednesday and the middle of what had been up until then a quiet week, a young client committed suicide at ten in the morning by slicing open her throat with a serrated Solingen bread knife (the policewoman said the detail was important). The young woman performed this gruesome operation on herself in the corridor between the waiting room and Marie’s office. The worst part about it for Marie Elder, who was first on the scene, was that the young woman died smiling, her lovely blue eyes gazing up at Marie for an eternity from the innocent linoleum of the hospital corridor.

A trauma counsellor was called in for a session of group therapy for the members of the team on the Thursday afternoon. Then the following Monday, just when everyone was more or less getting back to normal, a deranged male drunk—a boner at the abattoirs when he was not incapacitated by drink, and a man well known to Marie and the team—felled the security officer on the door with the bronze nozzle of the fire hose and put him in the ICU, where the security officer clung to life for three days before giving up the ghost. The security officer, whom Marie and the other members of the team knew as Nick, was married with three young children. His father and mother had migrated from Greece thirty years earlier to give their children a better chance at life in the land of opportunity. When the police arrived on the scene the boner was kneeling in Nick’s blood, weeping.

Marie felt the threat to herself deepened by these events. The threat, that was, to her ability to go on alone. She was sure that her colleagues in the unit, and even one or two of the more observant doctors, had noticed that she had taken these events personally. But she couldn’t help it. She felt knocked sideways by them. At least, she said to herself when she was alone in the canteen drinking a cappuccino and staring out the window at the car park, Nick had a family. At least he had been loved by his wife and children while he was alive. Nick had been a real man with a real wife and real children. A normal family man. One of them. Nick’s brutal death sickened her, but it also fired a shot into her heart that wounded her in a way that was deeply private. Supposing she were to be bludgeoned to death tomorrow by a crazy drunk, or to cut her own throat—who would be left to mourn her passing but one or two of those old friends with whom she had kept in contact over the years? Friends who themselves were married with families. She didn’t envy either Nick or her friends, but she did pity herself.

Marie’s pity for herself arose from a complicated source. She would never speak of it. To whom could she speak? All this brutality and sudden death focused her fragile emotions on her own fragility and failure. Not on her failure to get married and have children—she had never wanted marriage and children—but her failure at the age of thirty-seven to have found the friend and lover she dreamed of finding; her failure to establish the meaningful life for herself that she had determined on as a senior girl at school. She didn’t have it. Despite everything. The friend, the man, with whom she might share her anguish and her joy. Her ideal friend. She saw him. He was tall and modest, as she was herself. He was an artist of some kind. A man who, unlike the husbands of her friends, insisted on a meaningful life for himself too. A loner, just as she was. Perhaps he was a musician or a writer or a painter. It didn’t matter which. In company he sat quietly and listened and observed and never attempted to dominate the conversation with the events of his own life and his accomplishments. But he was intelligent and reflective and curious nevertheless. And he was effective. A cultivated man who did not need a wife and a mother and children but who was deeply self-reliant. She had never met such a man. Never. None of the men she had met had ever come near to it. Now she was nearing forty and had begun to fear she never would meet this friend but would become the solitary professional woman, like Ellen Alworth, the senior social worker in charge of the unit.

Did it have to be one or the other? Did she have to stake her happiness and her fulfilment in life either on love or on her work? Couldn’t there be this other choice? The friend and lover of her girlhood dreams? The intelligent sensitive man who was her friend? The amorous friendship, the French called it, with the emphasis on amorous. But it wasn’t that. Her emphasis was on friendship, not on love or sex. Marriage was easy. Everyone did it. Staying single and giving your all to your job like Ellen Alworth was evidently just as easy. Why must her own choice be so difficult? To wake up in the morning with something exciting to look forward to in her life, instead of another trip to the hospital on the tram. She didn’t want to go on doing it alone. She was tired of it. Sick to her heart with it. When she looked in the mirror she saw how suddenly aged her eyes had become. She knew she was closer to the edge than she had ever been.

She couldn’t help thinking of poor Nick. It was all so meaningless. So empty. So pointless. The voice within her cried out to her its despairing appeal, for which she had no answer: What about me?

At home in the kitchen on her own that weekend she abandoned her plans for a small roast chicken and she wept. She felt so desperate sitting there on her own in the kitchen that she decided to call one of her friends. But when she wiped her eyes and pulled herself together she realised she didn’t want to hear her friend’s voice, bright and cheerful and busy with her kids’ weekend sports and her own frenzy of activity.

Marie went back into the kitchen. There was nothing to be done. Nothing to be said. She stood at the back door looking out into the tiny yard with its single camellia bush. All she wanted was to come out of this lonely darkness into the sunlight with him and to laugh and be the woman she knew she was.

Marie is looking out the window of the tram at the passing street. The sun is low and is glaring off the dome of the great railway station. The crowd of humanity is going in one direction, making for hearth and home, or for a rendezvous in a bar. The novel in her lap is unopened, her left shoulder is pressed painfully against the hard lip of the window. The air-conditioning has failed and the tram is hot and sweaty and smelly.

The woman squeezed in next to Marie sneezes again. The convulsive thrust of the woman’s shoulder presses Marie’s tender upper arm against the jutting lip of the window and she winces. There is a rancid smell of rotten meat. It is the smell of wretched humanity. Marie feels the touch of a hot needle at the back of her throat and fears she will also begin to sneeze. Her past is rushing away behind her. The tram dings its bell rapidly several times, angrily, the driver stomping on the bell pedal, and the tram stops abruptly. The standing passengers lurch forward and recoil, like a wave hitting a sea wall. A man flings a curse into the ears of those pressed against him. He has borne enough and the curse escapes him. The tram dings its bell twice and moves on again. A young woman laughs and is answered by the laugh of another young woman. The press of them, swaying and sweating, tortured, the man’s curse falling through their minds. He might as well have wept. Perhaps someone would have been kind to him. Now he has irritated them. But they are stuck with him. The woman beside Marie sneezes again, then again. She murmurs a choked apology.

Marie closes her eyes then opens them. The world has shouted, has laughed, has sneezed and has moved on, churning the wild waters around her stillness. There had been men, plenty of them, when she was as young as those women who just laughed, men who would happily have married her. She had had her chances. They had not interested her.

The tram waits, ticking and creaking, its iron wheels gripped in the jaws of the brake dogs.

Marie’s face at the window looking out as the dogs release their grip and the tram glides on over the river. She is sweating. A long boat of tourists passing beneath the old bridge in stately isolation. The tram rocking, leaving the slow brown river behind, accelerating along the fine boulevard of trees and parks, soft green of elm leaves translucent in the last of the golden sunlight.

Marie’s hands tremble. Her fine fingers cling to the book in her lap. But the tremor is within. Something has given. Refused the solemn oath of calm. It leaps back, flashing again into her unshielded gaze, her blue eyes wide.

Marie stands a moment on the footpath and looks at the tram going away from her, locked to its rails, the sudden smell of the sea in the air, freshening towards her, seaweed and fish from the bay carried on the light southerly. Mrs Snee is leaning on the railings at the front of her house watching Marie approach. Marie greets her and stands with her to watch the frenzied Scotty frolicking with a silken greyhound in the triangle of park opposite. At her own gate Marie collects her mail from the box, the iron gate clacking against its broken hasp. A last faded cluster of blossoms on her rose. There is one more bud. Fragrance in the air at her door as she inserts her key into the lock and passes from the outer world into the stillness of her home.

Marie sets the novel and the mail beside her bag on the table in the hall and climbs the stairs to her bedroom. She stands at the window and watches as the Scotty and the greyhound leap around each other, a sharp bark of sudden fear from the Scotty that the game will go too far, will become violent. She stands looking out for a minute or two then takes off her clothes and crosses to the bathroom. She leaves the bathroom door open while she stands under the shower.

She dresses and goes down to the kitchen at the back of the house and turns the radio to the classical music program. She ties the strings of the blue and white apron she brought back from China last year and gets the chicken breast from the refrigerator. She takes her sharpest kitchen knife from the block and slices the yielding flesh of the chicken as easily as the young girl sliced open her tender throat. She thinks of the girl’s parents. Their lives destroyed. It is all so pointless. Her tears fall onto the bloodless meat.

There is a handwritten note from her boss on her desk when she gets back to her office after lunch the next day. Drop by and see me when you have a chance, Marie. The note, folded for discretion, is written in blue ink with a fountain pen and signed, E. Alworth.

From behind her desk she examines Marie over the rims of her glasses for a considerable time, a thin absent smile on her wooden lips (unpainted), as if her thoughts are elsewhere, entangled in the endless administrative problems and tasks that beset her in her position as leader of the Alcoholism and Drug Dependence Unit. Recollecting herself with a sudden awkward abruptness, Ms Alworth says, ‘Yes, I really think you should consider taking the first half of next year off on half-pay, Marie.’

Marie is not altogether surprised by the suggestion. She thanks Ms Alworth for her concern. ‘I’m okay. Honestly. I just need a long weekend.’

But Ms Alworth is done with smiling. ‘Consider the matter over the weekend, Marie, and see me first thing Monday morning with your decision.’ Ms Alworth resumes writing in the file on her desk, her old-fashioned fountain pen in her right hand, her head bent to the task before her.

Marie has seen Mrs Allen and the Black Cowboy sitting on the bench in the corridor outside her office, shivering and trembling, nursing their resentments at the delay she is making them bear, the world conspiring to defeat them, the high threatening whine of Mrs Allen’s pit-saw voice berating anyone incautious enough to catch her eye, the Black Cowboy studying his hands, shaking his head slowly from side to side, knowing what a man has to do but never being able to do it, his worn features lit suddenly by a thought, and there for an instant the bright jewel of a youthful smile, a glimpse of the lost boy inside him, before the shutters come down again. The way he shakes his head, his dreams of vengeance never enacted with those hands.

Instead of going back to her office and seeing these people of hers (Marie refuses to call them her clients), after she leaves Ms Alworth’s office she walks down the passage to the hospital canteen and joins the coffee queue. Is six months off on half-pay a prelude to dismissal? Everything, after all, is a prelude to something. Standing in the queue she says to herself, I once found satisfaction in my job and would find it again if I had my friend and lover.

But there was something else, something even deeper than this. Ms Alworth’s suggestion that she take time off has reduced the gap between where Marie stands and where she will fall. She is thinking of the nightmare of her father’s last days. She was seventeen and a boarder at Ascham School in Sydney, studying for her fifth-form exams, in love with her literature teacher, Miss Wendell, and secretly writing love poetry of her own. In the middle of a clear spring day, lying on the grass with her friend Betty Arnold, Marie was called to the headmistress’s office and informed with the keenest sorrow that her father had been taken seriously ill. She left for home at once. And suddenly she was at home with her father. He was fifty-seven. Within weeks this loving kindly man, her friend and confidant since childhood, was transformed into a grotesque stranger bound to his familiar old cedar bed by sickness, the carved bedhead with its row of koalas among the gum nuts mocking his disaster, his limbs and head swollen with oedema. Blind, paranoid, moaning and weeping, her loving father was a man abandoned by his failing body and swept by panic. The sanest of men had become mad, lost in a black whirl of horror—until that final terrible night when he emerged from his delirium in the early hours and clasped her hands in his own icy grip and with sobs confessed to her his unspeakable betrayal.

Everything, she thinks in her loneliness, everything is ineradicably connected. If you touch one thread of the web, the entire web trembles and then the black spider of despair is roused and it rushes out and clasps you to itself and sucks out your life and leaves you old and dry. She laughs. The whole delicate construction—of her life, that is—is tremulously interconnected. She carries her coffee to an unoccupied table by the window and sits down. She sips the hot sweet coffee and stares out the window at the rain falling steadily on the central compound, an open space originally intended by the architects as a treed recreation area for staff and ambulant patients, but commandeered by the hospital management for use as a temporary car park. She could do with something stronger than the cappuccino. She finishes the coffee and gets up. People whose lives are seriously out of control are waiting for her. People who believe themselves marked by fate for defeat, no matter what they do. People who believe the hospital owes them something because they have set out on a path of self-destruction. Marie does her best. It is not enough.

She loves them and she hates them. They repel her. They are everything that human beings are. She longs to help them and knows there is no help for them. Their defeat is her own defeat. They tell her not to worry. Don’t get upset, they say when they see she is moved to pity by their state. She will never be a real professional, a truly objective social worker like Ms Alworth. She despairs for them, her patients. They will not leave her at night when she is alone and sleepless in her bed. They are part of her problem. It has taken years for this to happen but it has happened. It is they who are her company. Her companions of the night.

Mrs Allen has seen her coming and she stands up, her mouth open, words tumbling out of the broken hole of it, gasping for breath to tell her latest tale of injury and injustice. To tell again of how unfair it all is. To ask again, Why do they all pick on me? What have I ever done to them? The neglected and abused child she has been, confused and lost still, and she nearing her fiftieth year. She looks like a skinny old woman of seventy. Marie sees a bare-kneed kid in a school yard with no big brothers and no mother to defend her, a kid who has by some strange influence of life’s process become this broken woman, Mrs Brenda Allen.

Mrs Allen is ready for her at the door but the Black Cowboy doesn’t look up as Marie approaches the bench but shakes his head slowly from side to side.

‘How are you, John?’ Marie greets him as she ushers Mrs Allen into her office.

He raises his head at the sound of his name and lifts his hand to touch the curled brim of his black cowboy hat. ‘Yeah, I’m good, Miss. How youse goin?’

‘I’m good too, John, thank you. I’m sorry to keep you.’

Everything is good. We are all good.

‘You’re right, Miss. No worries.’ This cowboy of the old West resting on a bench outside a bar on Main Street, watching the horsemen and the fancy girls go by, fancy boots crossed at the ankles, big Mexican spurs resting on the dusty boards. Is this not him? But the smile fades even before he turns away, the catatonic rove of his head binding him again, his gaze turning inward. For him, she knows, the story is over. There will be no miracle. Soon enough he will be dead. Finding death at night in one of the abandoned city buildings. His case notes closed and filed. He knows it too, but attends his appointments all the same, out of habit or from some faint residual hope, or because there is nothing else to do and he knows she will be there to listen to him. They are both captives of the same dream, after all. There is nothing to be done. Marie closes the door of her office. There is no way out for her either.

Mrs Allen is sitting across the desk from Marie telling her story. It is an old story retold again and again. It is the story of this beaten woman shuffling through the ashes of her landscape looking for something, some lost thing or memory overlooked before, some small thing here or there that might restore her to herself, some shining trinket among the blackened shards that might contain the power of redemption, revisiting the familiar scene of her apocalypse, the abandoned place of her tormented past in which something of her future was revealed but she doesn’t know what it was. It’s here somewhere. It must be. It has to be. There is nowhere else for it to be.

While Mrs Allen’s voice goes on and on, Marie’s thoughts spin out into her own story, following a wider parabola of consequence than the meagre span of her patient’s bitter lot, which she knows by heart. She nods in sympathy and murmurs encouragement. Beware of pity, Ms Alworth told her when she joined the unit.

Marie is thirty-seven. An only child. She was born in Chartres. Soon after her birth, Marie’s mother and father moved back to Paris, taking with them Marie’s nanny, Sophie. Then, on 4 July 1948, her father and Sophie set sail with her for Sydney from Marseilles.

Marie’s mother did not sail with them.

Marie never saw her mother again. There were relatives in England whom she wished to see. While there she had been killed in the Chillingworth rail disaster.

Marie’s father had loved his wife. There was never an outlet for his anguish.

One evening, when Marie was home from school for the holidays and they were sitting together on the verandah looking at the lights on the harbour and guessing what each light signified, she looked at her father and saw there were tears in his eyes. She got up from her chair, put her arms around him. She felt that she understood h...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• CONTENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• IN THE BLOOD
• ROSS AND THE GREEN ELFIN
• IN MY MOTHER’S KITCHEN
• LEARNING TO FLY
• BOYS WANTED FOR FARMS
• MY FIRST LOVE
• EXCERPT FROM THE TIVINGTON NOTT
• TRAVELS WITH MY GREEN MAN
• ONCE UPON A LIFE
• EXCERPT FROM WATCHING THE CLIMBERS ON THE MOUNTAIN
• HOW TO KILL WILD HORSES
• DESTINY’S CHILD
• LIVING AT ARALUEN
• EXCERPT FROM THE SITTERS
• IN THE END IT WAS TEACHING WRITING
• THE LAST SISTER OF CHARITY
• THE RULE OF THE FIRST PRELUDE
• ON WRITING LANDSCAPE OF FAREWELL
• EXCERPT FROM LANDSCAPE OF FAREWELL
• AUSTRALIA TODAY
• THE WRITER’S SECRET
• SPEAKING TERMS
• IMPRESSIONS OF CHINA
• EXCERPT FROM THE ANCESTOR GAME
• CHASING MY TALE
• THE WINE MERCHANT OF AARHUS
• THE MASK OF FICTION
• EXCERPT FROM CONDITIONS OF FAITH
• THE INSPIRATION BEHIND LOVESONG
• EXCERPT FROM LOVESONG
• HOW I CAME TO WRITE AUTUMN LAING
• EXCERPT FROM AUTUMN LAING
• MEANJIN
• COMRADE PAWEL
• THE STORY’S NOT OVER YET
• PROPHETS OF THE IMAGINATION
• EXCERPT FROM JOURNEY TO THE STONE COUNTRY
• SWEET WATER
• THE BLACK MIRROR
• EXCERPT FROM PROCHOWNIK’S DREAM
• A CIRCLE OF KINDRED SPIRITS
• SOPHIE’S CHOICE
• THE MOTHER OF COAL CREEK
• EXCERPT FROM COAL CREEK
• TEETERING
• SONG OF THE GOOD VISA
• PUBLICATION DETAILS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS