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were undated, but it was clear that they had all been written over a
very short period of time—, but there was a strange sense of necessity
about the obscure episodes that had and had not happened between
them, probably before his birth, since his mother was named, but there
was not the slightest reference to him.
He tried to read a book he had brought with him, on the everyday
life of early farmers in South Western New South Wales. No use, he could
not concentrate on horses, tucker boxes and Aboriginal farmhands. Historical
reality had grown as dull as a fairy tale for five year olds, when
confronted with the quasi-unreality of Matilda’s handwriting in brown
ink. Jacques had not appeared at eight thirty, Joël called his parents to
tell them that he was going to stay overnight in Coogee, they should not
wait for him. “Is there something wrong with you?” asked Dad. “No,
nothing, just that Jacques is not back home for dinner, you know what
he’s like. He must have forgotten everything about our projects and
tomorrow’s party. Nothing to worry about, I suppose. I’ll cook myself
a hamburger in the microwave and I’ll go to bed early.” This is exactly
what he did after watching a Saturday night Hitchcock movie on ABC
TV and calling Muriel for a long good night kiss without wet lips.
In bed in the fairly small backroom with grassy slope views (by
day) which had remained blue-carpeted since his mother’s pregnancy,
Joël wanted to think of Muriel, her vibrant voice, her willowy body,
the wide pale pink nipples, the pale gold of the pubic hair. He had an
erection all right, but the music was wrong, the picture blurry. Vivaldi
interrupted by hard rock outbursts, Duke Ellington fighting with Mahler.
Moving pictures of cattle drovers crossing the screen where Muriel had
vanished, replaced by a heap of illegible graffiti in brown ink. Then the
sheets where “love” was written all over in complicated metaphors began
to burn under the scorching sun aimed at them through a magnifying
glass. As the desert wind was blowing them away, he woke up at long last
to hear Jacques talking to himself in the kitchen, dropping something
that sounded like a pint bottle, and swearing : “Shit!” The red digits of
the electric alarm clock said 4.14 a.m. He’s at it again... Matilda could
be my mother, thought Joël. This shouldn’t be a tranquillizing idea, but
it was. The light in the kitchen that Joël could see under the door was
switched off, the clatter stopped, a door was banged. We were all better
off this way. Joël went back to sleep. Now Muriel was really close to him,
ready to fulfil unnamed desires he had not even expressed, desires which
dated back to a time when it wasn’t them or their parents, but the land,
perhaps. Fifty thousand years of myth in full colour.
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