The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt Read online

  Terence is arranging to have my gear – he calls it this, your gear, my musical equipment, the theremin, its speaker – packed securely and returned to me, so I do not have that to deal with. I wonder distractedly if it will be secure, but the thought is fleeting; what will be, will be. It is tough old gear; it will survive, as it has done all these years.

  The boy Jasper, my minder from last night, knocks on the door of the van. He’s looking the worse for wear: hair all over the place, up on one side, and he smells of something distasteful; he wears a t-shirt with a single word, Crass, written across it. His eyes are red and staring. Nonetheless he smiles at me as I open the door, and asks if I’m ready to go. I hand my bag down to him, step down onto the ground, and ease into the car’s passenger seat, relaxing into its shape. As we pass through the gate of the fence that surrounds the Transformer site, he pushes a cassette into the machine in the dashboard; Steroidalab, turned to a pleasant volume, dulls the burr and whine of the car’s engine. Jasper needs all his remaining faculties to concentrate on driving, so conversation isn’t required. Through the window of the car I watch trees give way to buildings, as we circle the outskirts of the city and motor down the hill to the ocean, to home.

  I direct him to my street, point to the path that leads to my cottage; politely refuse his offer to carry my bag; thank him for the lift, for his help, and wave him goodbye as he takes off towards the ocean at the end of the street. As the car accelerates away from me, the sound of Steroidalab gives way to Gristmonger, played loud.

  I walk down the path from the street, unlock the door of my cottage, and walk into darkness. I leave my overnight bag in the hallway, hang my keys on the hook behind the door, and go to the kitchen. The red eye of the machine under the telephone blinks at me. I push the button to play the message.

  ‘Dame Lena. Good morning. My name is Mo Patterson. I’m sorry to call you so early, but I was at Transformer last night and I saw your performance – can I thank you for it? Congratulate you on it? You were exceptional.’ The voice clears its throat, resumes. ‘Ah, I was wondering if I could come and meet with you about a proposal I have, for a film I’d like to make.’

  The voice rattles off a number. I let it run, neither saving the message nor deleting it, nor writing the number down. I wonder what her agenda is. I wonder where I have got the term ‘agenda’ from. I wonder if it is too early in the day for a gin. The sun is over the yardarm, I decide; I pour myself a short measure over ice, slice a lemon and drop two juicy slices onto the surface of the oily liquor. Salut, I say to myself. You weren’t bad, for an old girl. The gin is clean in my mouth, the lemon tart, awakening.

  I take my gin outside, sit in the sun filtering through the vines into the courtyard outside my kitchen door, and listen to the surf crash, a block away; to seagulls wheeling; to the cars luggering down the road, looking for somewhere to park to disgorge their occupants who tomorrow will be at school or university or work but today are heading for the cool and salt of the sea.

  I sit in the noisy, humming sunlight, sipping my gin and thinking about last night. It has been so long since I’ve played at a festival, at anything of that size. It felt – extraordinary. Wonderful. I realise I have missed it, and this surprises me. There was a heat that I felt from playing; I’d almost forgotten that rush. I surfed on its wave, last night, and it felt good, very good. Still feels good; it is lingering, in my extremities and in my core.

  The phone rings. I hear the same woman’s voice faintly across the room as she leaves another message. I hear its timbre, recognise it, but cannot hear the detail of what she says. Her name seems familiar, as if I have heard it or read it before. But not familiar enough to make me go to the phone. For now, I will enjoy the sun, the lemony oil of the gin, and the memory of last night, the residue of the rush of performance, the tingling in my fingers and my ears and my heart.

  On Monday morning I wake to the sound of houses emptying into cars, cars escaping to their weekday destinations. Only the old and the aimless, and mothers and their young, are left behind to populate the suburbs. And builders; the men working on the house next door arrive early to recommence their banging, smoking, and tuneless singing to the radio. I raise my hand at them as I pass them on my way to the shop on the corner to buy the newspaper, and milk for my coffee. They wave back, nod, mutter assorted ‘morning’s and ‘gidday’s at me; It’s gunna be a hot one.

  At home, I don’t get to the newspaper until I’ve made coffee, savouring the burbling burnt smell of it. Hissing on the stove, it’s almost musical in counterpoint, in syncopation with the tang of the builders next door, their percussive metal on metal, the whump of nailguns. I settle at the table, my hands warming around the coffee in its glass, stare out the window through the foliage that surrounds me and listen to their noise, try writing it in my head on a musical staff, annotate it pianissimo, forte, da capo al fine. But the builders’ noise reveals itself as what it is: noise, not music; the common variety of noise, mundane, unplanned.

  I drain my coffee and unfold the paper, spread it on the table in front of me. I love reading this parochial tabloid, full of blustering politicians, vain, potatoey men with too much money and expensive suits, huge ads for cheap furniture, chicken drumsticks, and bulk packages of toilet paper. I love the lists of drunk drivers and loan defaulters, bankrupts and divorcees, school children raising funds and painting murals, ads for cheap rental cars and skimpy bars. But today, it is me. I am there, large as life, in black and white, all the clichés in the world; I am in the news as I once was so often and have not been for so long.

  There is a photograph, which is what I see first. It is of a thin figure on a stage, dwarfed by the girders and scaffolding that form the stage’s shape and hold the lights that shine upon it. I realise that the thin figure is me.

  THE RETURN OF THE THIN WHITE DAME

  The Transformer Festival was, as promised by organiser Terry Meelinck, a celebration of the best and the most eclectic electronica this country has yet seen. The sold-out show held in the Hills this weekend saw local and international acts come together to entertain the more than four thousand-strong crowd that camped overnight at the site.

  Though much anticipated, Dame Lena Gaunt’s performance – her first in nearly twenty years – is hard to characterise and harder to review. The audience applauded earnestly after each shrill piece, but this reviewer found it laboured, dated, irrelevant. Like The KLF’s recent offering with Tammy Wynette and the Justified Ancients, there was a definite whiff of novelty act in the air. Ancient, yes. Justified: not really. Her famous Aetherwave Suite sounded all of its fifty-plus years of age.

  So it was none too soon when Gristmonger hit the stage. The crowd resurrected itself to mosh and grind to favourites like ‘Monkey Tiger Christ’, ‘Wedding Schmedding’, and the evergreen classic ‘Crass (As You Like It)’. The Gristers never sound better than when they perform live. The bpms were solid, frontperson Delly Watts was in fine voice, with an edge that’s not always immediately apparent on their recordings.

  I can’t read any more. Good Lord, they think it was a piss-take. They think I was a piss-take.

  The phone rings. I pick it up without thinking; it’s the voice, the woman who called before.

  ‘Dame Lena? My name’s Mo Patterson, I’m a filmmaker.’

  ‘Yes. You’ve left messages for me.’ I am curt, though not, I hope, impolite.

  ‘I was at Transformer on the weekend, I saw you perform.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘You were extraordinary. I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed your performance.’

  I say nothing. She talks on into the silence.

  ‘I’m calling really to introduce myself, because I’m in the early stages of making a film about electronic music, and women musicians. I’d love to talk to you about it, because I want you to be involved in the film.’

  I can almost hear her holding her breath. I give my response quickly, cleanly.

  ‘I’m afraid
not. I’m a musician. I’m not interested in making films.’

  ‘But I think you could—’

  ‘No, I’m sorry, Miss – Patterson, is it? I’m quite certain. Make your film about other people. I wish you luck. Goodbye.’ I hang up before she can say any more.

  Why would I want to tell my story now? Why open up my quiet life by the sea to scrutiny, to piss-takers and filmmakers?

  THE PATTERSON WOMAN

  Norfolk Island pines line the streets where I live. They cast tall conical shadows on the houses, making them dark. They’re far enough from my little cottage not to cast their shadows on me. My shadows are cast by the jacaranda tree that drops its purple carpet to drift onto my verandah all the late spring. A path leads from the street down between the high wall of the front house and the fence that separates this block from that of the house next door, then down past the jacaranda, up a step and onto my verandah. The path is almost always dark, except when the sun is directly overhead, like the slit in an ancient tomb designed to catch the sun at midsummer and point to treasure.

  A lemon tree blocks in my garden at the back, glossy green and yellow. Productive. I like that in a tree. The garden’s other end is enclosed by a grapevine that climbs and gnarls up and around and over, clutching at the back wall of my cottage. When I sit in that courtyard I can smell the sea, salting the air.

  The cottage was built as servants’ quarters, as the gardener’s house, perhaps as stables – no one remains to remember any more. It is my house now. I’ve lived here for twenty years, and I will die here, if I’m lucky.

  My theremin usually stands in the dark of the front room, with the speaker behind it. The diamond-shaped speaker cabinet – a metre across at its widest, and nearly three metres high – only just fits into the room; thank God for high ceilings. The theremin and speaker have not yet been returned from Transformer. The room misses them. There are marks on the floor, on the carpet, where they normally sit.

  My feet nestle into the indentations on the faded silk. Father bought this rug, long ago, from the pasar. It covered the floor in Mother’s bedroom in Singapore. There are shapes within shapes, where sunlight has fallen or been forever excluded. The shapes overlap, touch at corners. They have formed over months or years, but sometimes generations apart. The faintest outlines still exist of Mother’s bed and her dressing table. The outline of my theremin just touches the edge of the ghost note of Mother’s dressing table; just lightly kisses its edge.

  *

  Dear Dame Lena,

  I hope you’ll forgive me writing to you, when you were so clear about your decision not to be involved in my film when we spoke on the phone today. I couldn’t let go without making a final attempt to entice or persuade you; to convince you of my excitement about the project, and my respect for your work, your music, and above all, your right to privacy. I suspect the latter is at the heart of your reluctance to be involved. I’d like to assure you that it would be paramount for me, in working with you, to ensure that your privacy is maintained, and that the material that forms and informs the film is sensitive to that.

  If you would agree to meet with me, just briefly, I’d be so very grateful for the opportunity to speak with you directly, openly, and honestly about my ideas and aesthetic for the film I’m planning. If you are interested, I could also show you the footage I shot at Transformer – with the permission and assistance of Terry Meelinck – as well as a short film I made some years ago which has as its subject the artist Beatrix Carmichael, to whom I know you were very close.

  I enclose some information as a background to my work: a brief biography and list of my films, and the transcript of a talk I gave at the Film and Television Institute in Fremantle late last year, where I mentioned the music project I was then just beginning to formulate.

  Respectfully and hopefully yours,

  Maureen (Mo) Patterson

  Enc.

  I shuffle through the pages she has sent me. My own name leaps from the page. Carmichael’s portrait of Gaunt, Electrical by Nature, was the first I knew of Lena Gaunt. That painting inspired me to make my short film, Beatrix. Words, then phrases and whole sentences come into focus. She talks about art, and art school – I didn’t finish my diploma, but my training as a painter has influenced my approach to composition, to lighting – and about film as painting, as representation – Making a documentary is like painting a portrait and, for me, the best portrait tells you as much about the artist as it does about the subject. Holding her pages in my hands, I’m struck by memories – the smells of paint and canvas, cigarettes and oranges, smoky tea and long, late nights – as vivid as if I’ve only just lived them.

  There is paper in the drawer of my desk. I take a blank page, a pen, and place them in front of me, set the filmmaker’s papers aside. I turn my head, just slightly, and glance at the two paintings over my mantelpiece: Beatrix’s self-portrait, and the other, her portrait of me. I keep the paintings shaded, in the dark of my bedroom, keep them out of the sunshine, out of the light. I pick up the pen. It feels heavy in my hand. I roll it back and forth between my hands, my palms, until it’s taken up all of my warmth, and matches me; now, I can barely feel it. I hold it against my face, rest it horizontally in the hollow below my mouth, my lips, and press it there, roll it to my chin, then into my hand. Dear Ms Patterson, I write. Your letter and other material received, and read with— Read with what? Sadness? Nostalgia, tinged – perhaps – with a little fear? She doesn’t need to know that.

  I turn and look again at the paintings that I see every night, every day, that keep me company, and that I keep in the dark. I wonder if what she’s written – the best portrait tells you as much about the artist as it does about the subject – is true. I wonder what portrait she could make of me now.

  *

  Dear Ms Patterson,

  Your letter and other material received, and read with interest.

  Would you come for coffee on Tuesday next, at 10 am? You have my address.

  Cordially,

  Lena Gaunt

  *

  It’s a warm morning on what will be a hot day. I wake early, in a tangle of sweated bedsheets. The thought of the beach is soothing. I’ve not swum since the morning before I played Transformer, and I have missed it. The Patterson woman is due at ten o’clock, so I have time. I unpeg my beach towel from the clothes line outside my kitchen door. It is stiff with salt, bone dry. I crack it to fold it, fit it into my straw bag, take my hat and keys from their hooks and, locking the door behind me, walk to the footpath that heads straight to the ocean.

  The light’s only just showing in the sky over the rooftops and spikes of pine trees behind me. The houses I walk past are still dark. There are straw-coloured whips on the footpath, dropped from the Norfolk pines. I stop to pick one up and run its overlapping scales through my fingers, scales that are dry but silken smooth, as I imagine the skin of a snake to be.

  At the bottom of the street, a path descends from the roadway to the beach, between limestone walls that contain the sand dunes, retain the water, let grass grow for picnickers and sunbathers and cricket players. As I pass under the arch that forms the base of the old bathing pavilion, I touch the pale stone lightly, as a million other fingers have, feel its cool roughness, its runnels and imperfections.

  I kick off my sandals. My feet sink into the sand, squeaking fine and sharp with a clear tone and high pitch. I drop my bag, my sandals and hat; strip off my long cotton shirt and let it fall; and I walk towards the water, feeling the sun higher, warmer on my back now even than it was when I left the cottage. It’s gunna be a hot one.

  It’s an easy walk up the slight incline from the beach towards home. The sun is up now, though low, and my eyes squint against it. The street is busier; cars move in the low light, windows and curtains are flung open to admit the morning’s cool air.

  I shower, dress in light, loose cotton trousers and shirt. I leave my feet bare. I’m filling the pot with coffee grounds when the tele
phone rings.

  ‘Dame Lena!’ Terence’s voice is as animated as ever; I can hear the exclamation marks in his speech. ‘I’m so sorry I haven’t managed to catch you before now. It’s been crazy, this past week!’

  I hear him draw breath, perhaps inhale on a cigarette, before he goes on.

  ‘Anyway, I’m just calling to thank you, congratulate you, for the festival. You were wonderful! As I knew you would be. Absolutely wonderful! I hope you enjoyed yourself as much as we enjoyed your performance.’

  I wipe each hand in turn on the tea towel hanging from the hook by the stove, then sit down on a kitchen chair. I don’t know how I want to answer Terence. I hear in his voice the enthusiasm that I’ve always heard from him, the lack of a piss-take. But after the newspaper review, I’m no longer sure.

  ‘I enjoyed myself immensely. And from your point of view: was it successful? I mean, of course, did you make money?’

  He makes a noise like a cough, a half laugh tacked onto the end of it. ‘If I was in it for the money I’d be a constant disappointment to myself. We covered our expenses though, and that’s saying something.’ He pauses. ‘I’ve personally supervised the packing up of your gear – I can assure you it’s in good hands, safe and secure. I’m having trouble getting hold of a truck before the weekend, though. Could we deliver it to you next week? Say Tuesday? Will you be at home?’