Turn Left at Venus Read online

  Ada felt a strange disturbance. On no evidence she did not believe Susan. For the world must contain everything that is possible, she felt, and it must be possible that somewhere at some time men and women did not separate everything.

  Ada watched, and Susan watched and wrote notes.

  ‘Ostensibly,’ Susan Steel said to Ada then and to all of them later, ‘the purpose of these time-consuming tasks is to keep the gods happy and so keep the society protected. In fact however their function is to protect society by the cohesion the work creates, the sense of mutual dependency, common purpose.’

  ‘Ostensibly,’ Leyla said to Ada, ‘we dance and have fun to keep the gods happy.’

  ‘Ostensibly,’ Ada said, ‘no one knows what their task is for until an anthropologist tells them.’

  Susan Steel said there is no individual self in Bali, the collective self is the primary identity; one is not in control of one’s self, the collective controls it all – families, ancestors, the supernatural.

  The function, suppose you thought about customs as social functions, was to keep women doing women’s work.

  Suppose a girl said, I’d rather not do that, I’d rather build thatch roofs, what then, had any girl ever rebelled? Susan never seemed to ask this, and once Ada formed her questions Susan had gone.

  It took Ada a while to understand such thoughts, which came to her first as inarticulate wondering, a sense in her body like one when thunder is approaching or you know you’ve lost something before you realise what it was. Her ideas emerged first as indistinct feeling, made more distinct as she paid it attention, listened for words.

  Kevin said, ‘Women do women’s work.’ He meant, the women here do the work women are meant to do. He might have implied, unlike you. But in a good way; he loved how boldly they had come to visit him.

  Kevin said, ‘Another generation and the girls will follow the boys down to Denpasar and Sanur looking for jobs where they might meet tourists.’

  Kevin said, ‘Bali is being spoiled.’

  ‘It’s paradise here,’ Kevin said, ‘it’s how the whole world should be.’

  But women’s work is women’s work. What if a girl wanted to do otherwise?

  Ada has always tried to imagine a perfect world.

  Was this it?

  ‘It’s paradise,’ Kevin would say. ‘But,’ he wanted Ada to know, ‘I have my bad days even here. I mean bad.’ Things not being done as they should be, frustrations, delays, misunderstandings. These people had a different sense of time. These people had a different sense of responsibility. These people didn’t always communicate necessary information. A little cut could get badly infected.

  ‘Is it still Paradise?’

  ‘Oh yes, these hellish moments are the price we must pay.’

  There were boys who went away to be girls. To wear female dress, perform female dances.

  ‘Are they considered a third sex?’ someone asked.

  Kevin wasn’t sure but thought their dress and their dances were theirs only.

  Maybe in the perfect world you didn’t have to be either a girl or a boy.

  When she was little, at school someone told Ada she could never go for a walk alone because girls can’t.

  Their new blouses arrived just in time: kebaya, closely fitted and flaring out at the waist. Women and little girls came over to help Ada and Leyla get dressed, graciously showing them how to pleat the sarong into a skirt, and they wound the fabric sashes around their waists. Everyone was smiling and feeling the sense of festivity, the blessings of dressing up, the enchantment of ceremony. These clothes bestowed a touch of the women’s loveliness and gracefulness.

  ‘Absolutely not,’ said Susan Steel when the women, with gestures and laughs and their own words, asked if she wouldn’t like to be similarly attired. Susan looked at Ada and Leyla with stern admonishment, certain of the correctitude of her position. ‘It would be bad practice,’ Susan said to them. The implication was clear that even if Leyla and Ada were not anthropologists as she was, still they were involved in bad practice, and, now they had been told, they had the responsibility to forgo it.

  ‘But if it feels lovely!’ said Leyla, making some Balinese dance gestures, her elbows and wrists nimbly turning in new movements. The Balinese women laughed, evidently in surprise and approval.

  ‘It is inauthentic,’ said Susan with a note of finality and went off with her notebook and camera to take her place in the audience.

  ‘How can she understand people if she never puts on their clothes?’ Leyla remarked. Ada burst into laughter and then Leyla joined her, delighted, and their laughter would grow, and the phrase never put on their clothes was one they would always understand.

  Some other foreigners who lived around here, there were a few of them, artists, musicians, also came to the full moon night. One couple came in local costume, the rest in the same clothes they always wore, loose linen shirts over loose linen trousers.

  The sun set and the sky was aglow with the immense full moon. The temple festival would last for three days, beginning with this all-night concert, with shadow puppets, dance performances, Balinese opera, calmly excited kids staying up all night, the older siblings flirting in the shadows. Young women sold clove cigarettes and leaf cones of peanuts.

  The performers had been transformed into supernatural mythical creatures covering the stage with their huge ornate masks, huge stylised steps and gestures, trilling or bellowing, expansive with noble heroism or irresistibly frightful and fearsome.

  The Barong in spectacular finery would emerge victorious but only after much wailing and rapid clashing of cymbals.

  ‘What it all depicts,’ Kevin told them, ‘is the eternal struggle between good and evil, which is never won. There has to be balance in the world.’

  ‘What it depicts,’ said Susan Steel of the fearsome creature called Rangda, who made all the children cry out in joyous alarm, ‘is the evil mother, a figure that is found in stories around the globe. An archetype.’

  ‘It’s the shadow,’ said Kevin, ‘Rangda is the shadow of the good mother, the good woman.’

  The shadow, people agreed, the splendour and drama and thrillingness of all this.

  The shadow. Every place, every person, has its shadow side. It’s because everything is duality, though it all becomes one in the end.

  A woman should be tender and dainty, while Rangda is huge, fearsome, menacing: as bad as a female could be imagined.

  ‘There cannot be good if there is no evil,’ says someone with a certainty that struck Ada: how do they know? ‘The evil ones are as necessary as night and darkness and the dogs.’ Does everyone think that?

  12

  NOMAD AT HOME

  I keep thinking of that line from the Ligeti book – near the end, The Stranger, about to decide he is going to stay, says to the people on the planet Lueshira, sharing a new and important realisation: ‘You are not temporary substitutes for friends, you are friends.’

  My own temporary substitutes have become real friends but I’m leaving them. I have to look at everything I have in this apartment and make a decision about it. No, most of it I can’t take so no decision, it’s just a matter of will someone I know want to take it or do I just leave it behind. It’s absurd to look upon the couch and tables and chairs with such tenderness. I suppose they’re replaceable if it ever comes to replacing.

  There is a large box set into the blood-red shelf unit. It’s full of paper, paper is heavy, what am I going to take with me when I don’t know where I’m going, have only more short stays in the foreseeable future. And weight limits on planes.

  A large plastic envelope full of cards. Postcards and letter cards, from museums mostly. These days they are so rarely sent. Friends used to send cards to each other all the time, even friends in the same city, someone that you’d see soon, to invite you or thank you or wish you luck or remind you of an insight or just with some kind of greeting because they think you’d like this card. You’d always
have some stamps in your wallet and you’d always be going past the post office to empty out your rented box.

  And there are postcards from places, because of the habit of buying postcards, though you buy fewer and fewer until the idea of buying postcards does not exist, but these ones you thought you might send, tell someone you were thinking of them, ask if they’re going to be back in wherever around the time you expect to be there. Now they are sentimental souvenirs and there’s the effect of when something has been in your possession for so long it seems wrong to let it go.

  There are letter cards you’ve never written in, there are pretty sealing labels from India you’ve barely used in years, there are a couple of postcard-size watercolours you painted yourself, it was now over twenty-five years ago. Water, sky, someone leaning on a balcony rail, the little red dinghy out on the water.

  Never took photos in those days, never had a camera.

  Here I’m trying to more frequently take snaps on my phone camera, trying to advance my visual literacy.

  My photographs from long ago are in boxes kept in a garage in Melbourne. I hope to be reunited with them, digitise them all, donate them.

  A paper folder from that hotel in Miami, also around twenty-five years ago. There must come that precise day when if you don’t use up or throw out a thing it gains a new status, it’s part of your personal archive; it has survived so long it has gained a will to survive longer.

  A little notepad from another swell hotel, had this one so long I started using it to scribble my reminders and doodles and shopping lists. It will get used up. But it should. But what also has gone when this has gone?

  I have hundreds of my cards with space for lists and reminders on the reverse side: my ‘business card’ designed for me by Barry in Miami in whenever I was there last. 2008? And there was a special on at the printing place so I was encouraged to have five thousand printed or whatever it was, not one hundred. I never could have lugged them along with me, but here now I have boxes and boxes of these cards: Julie mailed a big package of them to me here when she cleared out all her stuff in Miami. Boxes too heavy to take with me now. Cards no use to anyone.

  Who gives out a card anymore? People tap their number into your phone and you send a missed call. On TV shows, lawyers and cops hand over a card: ‘If you think of anything …’ A one-page handwritten letter written by me to myself at a Buddhist retreat April 2015. The letter was mailed to us a month later. It’s rare to get any handwritten letter in the mail. I didn’t recognise my own handwriting on the envelope. ‘That often happens,’ said Vajracaksu when I saw him again. In a cafe in Istanbul. With some other Buddhists. From England.

  Cards printed on both sides about my editing service that was going to bring me a comfortable way of life in Istanbul. Designed by Sennur; these are no use anymore, keep just one, just scan it.

  A sim card from the Netherlands.

  Other sim cards. Mixed up. Useable again?

  Probably not. Throw these out.

  It’s as if times spent in a place are for the purpose of creating nostalgia for it in the future. I’m looking out onto the play of the end-of-day silver light on the water out there, on the opposite shore, on the boats that pass, on the sky and its clouds. There’s a trick of the mind: you tend to think if you like it where you are, to any extent, you will not like anywhere else.

  There is much I love about this place and still I’m making plans to leave. The political situation in this country; the isolation; the plummeting value of the already low pay … And yet, there is value in simply bearing witness to the changes brought about by the increasing authoritarianism, corruption, repression, imposed religiosity; there is value in all the time I have to myself; and where else in the world can I live on low pay with a marvellous view of water and the ghosts of Homer’s heroes passing by …

  There is a line some friends often quote to me. It comes from a Robert Frost poem, the one about what home is, somewhere they have to let you in whenever you turn up.

  In this sense I have no home.

  My country has to take me in, I suppose.

  What is home? I say, language is my home.

  I belong to the English language. I’ve lived outside of English language culture for some years now – yet participate endlessly in English language culture; and I don’t in all ways – most ways? – live inside the culture I’m surrounded by.

  Need some new words, and a new idea about travelling in time. For example, I was thinking again about Turn Left At Venus, about where it’s set, you don’t think of either time or space as we know it.

  13

  IF YOU READ ONLY ONE THING

  ‘“I read A.L. Ligeti to remind myself that we cannot stop imagining better worlds, and maybe that is actually the function of art.”’

  Jay is reading aloud for Ada’s benefit, and not only that. It benefits Jay, someone who knows how to be their own good company, also someone who’s alert to situations that can be used so should practise knowing how to present them.

  ‘“Utopian desire never dies and rises phoenix-like after each defeat.”’

  That avian cackle again. Cut off abruptly. Jay speaks. ‘I’m on my shift now. Ten hours … Yes. They are … We don’t know … Haven’t reached that part.’ Jay’s tone becomes one of giving in, being directed. ‘Yeah, I’m seeing that. Cool, I hear you … Space Traveler Reports. All right, I’m going to read it now … Cool.’

  End of call.

  ‘“If you read only one thing …”’ Jay quotes from her screen. ‘“Going Out: Space Traveler reports”. Oh Em Gee, everyone’s saying, “Read this one.” Do you want me to read it out to you? Or I can activate my text-to-speech app. What voice should I choose?’

  14

  MUSIC ON LUESHIRA

  It was an early morning of soft green mist on Lueshira. The Stranger was continuing his exploration of the city’s southwest when he came across an assembly of Lueshirans. They seemed to be gathered purposefully, standing and sitting quite still. At first he could not make out what they were doing. Then he became aware that they were listening, all of them actively listening, and that there were sounds to be heard if he stopped and listened too.

  The sounds at first came and went as if their strangeness made them at times inaudible but The Stranger stayed with the gathering of people and listened along with them and began to recognize that the sounds were in patterns, this was music, even if at first to him not what he has known as music, but it was music, sounds given meaning by the patterns and relation of notes, or of some such discrete units, arranged to arouse pleasure, recognition, wonder and other complicated emotions. The Stranger, at first simply puzzled, began to relax as he recognized that he was witnessing a kind of cultural ritual or event akin to attending a concert or recital. There was a texture to this sound, a controlled tempo, and its harmonies, such as they were, became apparent.

  The Stranger became aware of a feeling, one confirmed much later when he was able to discuss this experience with his Lueshiran informants or research subjects: that his presence, his active listening, in some measure altered the music and that meant the music was to some extent created by the presence of each listener and the expression of their collective self. He hoped his attendance did not bring disharmony to the whole. After some time he stopped his interior questioning and mental note-making; he relaxed and gave himself to the experience of listening, and found himself transported, deeply involved in the sounds, for a while aware of nothing else, pleased to have discovered there was music in this world, pleased to have recognized it, and after a while finding himself affected, a wave of feeling rising in him, something both sad and sweet, a mix of longing and satisfaction, a feeling of never having heard anything like it combined with a sense that this music touched in him something he was almost remembering.

  He was about to remember it but then –

  “Stranger!” his Lueshiran companion called from beyond the crowd. “We’ve been searching for you. They are s
aying your vehicle from Dunya has sent a message.”

  15

  WRITING TURN LEFT AT VENUS IN KINGS CROSS

  Ada’s desk was a card table; she sat on the edge of her bed on her folded coat for the right height and the table had space for the typewriter and one neat pile of paper. Sheets of paper covered her bed, and when she needed to lie down she gathered them up, placing them carefully on the floor under the table, and when she got up she laid the bits of paper out again, typescript with handwritten edits all over it, and envelopes she had written on during the day. She started out writing with a pen on paper at that table and one day somehow she had a typewriter.

  Ada liked going back to her room to write, liked very much that feeling as she entered her little room, fully entered her real world.

  She went out to her jobs, serving the counter lunches at the Rex Hotel weekdays noon to one-thirty and collecting glasses in the Salon Bar late afternoon shifts, chatting gaily enough to the customers as if she were a girl to whom chatting came easily, and she deliberately kept busy for if left to herself she was apt to lapse into a trance, that one time she did so they kept mentioning for a while. She had to make sure to remain visible at all times while at the job. It was good to be back in Kings Cross.

  It was her part of the world.

  It was a little world.

  It was good to be in her room and write, without a care in the world – no, she had her cares but there were none while she was writing, all her care was that, the pages, the realisation that when she was faced with decisions and decisions, she simply had to decide. She learned what a good decision felt like. What if, what if, what if, and then consider anything at all. Was it any good? No one could know. Hardly anyone knew she was writing. The landlady did, the two old showgirls sharing at the top wouldn’t care, that boy who worked at the newspaper knew, he mentioned the sound of her typewriter. Ada felt she was good while she was in the spell of writing, and for weeks on end she was never not in the spell.