Five Bells by Gail Jones Read Free Book Online

writing their names; both understood the need for secrecy. They laid a blanket on the floor and hid out together, too happy to bother with the inlaid dirt or heart-enclosed initials, too far gone in their junior hunger to be merely boyfriend and girlfriend.
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    James thought of René Magritte’s painting called The Lovers . It was a portrait of two enshrouded heads, both swathed in grey cloth. The obliteration of detail was surely all the artist could bear. Adeline, a milliner, used to sew well into the night, and her son no doubt remembered her fingers in lamplight on a curved rim of felt, or pressing the dome of a head-shape onto a faceless wooden mould. He no doubt remembered the precise arc of the needle looping into wool and the angle of her back as she leant forward, to gather more light.
    There were many, many hats in Magritte’s paintings. And there were huge apples in living rooms, pipes that were not pipes, trains emerging from fireplaces, reflections not where they should be, day and night coexisting. His images were of displacement and his figures were all verging on erasure. Particularity would have killed him. Realism would have killed him. The buckle. The maternal ring. The circular stain of river mud, the thumbprint of death, that lay in the shallow dip just beneath Adeline’s bottom lip. It was because James understood this that he could contemplate seeing Ellie again. Forall that she was an intangible sequence of gestures and moves, it was specificity he yearned for, the tiny details he had known of her, the beloved face uncovered. In his case, he knew, the details would save him. The ideas were too large. The space a drowning might make, the milky-green water closing over a face, was a tremendous, vile and unassimilable thing.
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    In downtown George Street a car alarm sounded. There was the rumble of a plane in the far distance, slowly descending, and James noticed, all at once, the traffic’s strident roar. In the petrochemical haze he glanced upwards at the ugly mixture of geometric steel, the plate-glass of sparkling skyscrapers, the rude banners of retail. The whole of central Sydney seemed to be bearing down on him, the way slapstick buildings collapse – phoof! – around a smiling fool. James considered sliding into the aisle of a store or an alley. But instead, instinctively decisive, he turned and walked in the other direction.
    The train, he decided. He would catch the train to Circular Quay.
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    In his jumpy discomposure, the short walk uphill to Central Station was easier to negotiate. Magritte fell away. The River Sambre. The drowned mother. The shadows of what he had been. James was fixed upon Ellie as he recommenced his walk, heading westwards.
    He saw posters in Chinese and the large diagram of a foot, its pressure points outlined in fine script with a remarkable degree of complication, then a shop selling Buddhist artefacts in which most items appeared to be red. That a store for objects of religious devotion might exist in the inner city seemed hopeful, if anomalous. Peering in he saw altars, incense, a row of cross-legged Buddhas, all made of what appeared to be crimson plastic, and various dangling embroideries, the purposeof which he assumed to be prayer, released wavering into the spiritually receptive air. James would never have entered such a store, but found himself glancing in with interest. A shop assistant looked up and smiled at him; James blushed and turned away. Further along two men’s faces leered at him through the window of a pub; he found himself blushing once again. Then there was a string of cheap frock shops, all staffed by petite Asian women with swaying hair; and beyond were food stores – Thai, Chinese, Indian, Vietnamese – more than could possibly be sustained on a single street. Worlds were converging, he thought. Australia was Asian. He saw how various it all was, the zeal of many nations, the emporia of many