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Saturday, 13 October 2007

MEMOIR...

An excursion into shared memory...

A house, a mystery package and the Red Phone

We’re a little surprised… well, that’s an understatement… we’re really quite stunned. What had been an old fuel drum of quietly burning stuff just a second or two ago had suddenly become something more explosive.

On a long road, long ago

The story begins on Glebe Point Road, that long, undulating strip of asphalt that starts on the shore of Whites Bay and ends abruptly where it collides with the constant traffic stream that is Parramatta Road. And the story starts at what now seems a long time ago, the early seventies, perhaps. Neither of us is sure of the year.

For reasons I don’t quite recall I was walking down Glebe Point Road with Yvette, who for just a short time in those days was a partner of mine. She was an outwardly vivacious girl with a deeply hidden vulnerability inside. She wasn’t short or dumpy but in no way could she be called tall… she was more compact and trim than anything else. Dark, chestnut colored hair fell to her shoulders and she parted it in the middle so that it flopped to either side, framing her face and green eyes.

Sartorial elegance was not her scene. Her wardrobe didn’t change much between a khaki, military style jacket over a T-shirt, or over a plain grey pullover in winter. And blue denim jeans all the time were finished with sandals or sneakers. Dresswise, Yvette was a child of the times.

A Saturday in summer

That warm, sunny day - I think it was a Saturday in summer - we were heading for a nondescript house of late Victorian era vintage, probably, somewhere on that long road, a building typical of those that line both sides of the thoroughfare.

This was before the time when so many of those old houses would be remade as cafes, coffee bars and pizzerias. Just where it was neither of us remember. I thought it was towards the Parramatta Road end but Yvette isn’t so sure and, now, neither am I. When I’m in the area I search for some clue, some sign of vague familiarity. But so far, nothing.

“I believe it was a double-story, shop-front building, with a small, untidy backyard”, Yvette recalled decades later.

A microcosm of femmes

Yvette takes up the story...

“The newly-formed Women’s Liberation movement was one of the groups that met there, in that old house. People lived upstairs.

"One of the organisers was an American woman, Martha Kaye, also called Martha Ansara… she had wild, black, curly hair and was also involved in a feminist filmmakers group.”.

Social microcosms like this could be found around the Inner West in those days. Inevitably political, they were coalesences of like minded young people. And being political, they were given to schism over usually minor doctrinal matters.

“There was a split, as commonly occurred in small leftist groups at the time”, Yvette wrote to me. “And one faction had barricaded themselves inside the building to prevent being evicted. At least, I think this is what happened.

“For some reason or other, you and I went back to the building late one afternoon after everyone had left it… but we weren’t alone, I do recall one or two other people being there at the time”.

I remember the house because Yvette woud sometimes attend meetings there. But on other things memory differs. I have no recollection of others being there that day.

But I do remember the package. It sat there on the floor in what passed, I guess, for the living room. In memory, the room was bare, devoid of furniture or anything else. Except for that package.

Yvette’s memory is clearer. “On the floor of one room of the now abandoned building was a strange object. Naturally, it attracted my attention and I went over to it.

“I crouched down in front of it and read the inscription scrawled on it - ‘THIS IS A BOMB'. Ha ha, funny joke.

“So you and I took the ‘bomb’ into the back yard and someone threw it into a bonfire that was going in a rusty 44-gallon drum.

“That’s when it went… BOOOOOM!… and blew up the drum! ".

Neither of us recall why we bothered to take the thing outside and cast it into the fire. Such are the vagaries of memory, and it was shared memory that led us to reconstruct that incident of the package in the bare room.

Shared remembrance and reconstructed memory

Yvette and I had resumed more frequent email contact following her return from Beijing. She had spent some years there, first teaching English, then doing journalism. Now that she was home in Tasmania, we indulged in late night emails. This is how we got around to our shared past and our theory that memory might be a collective reconstruction.

Our communications were made late at night. For Yvette, that is when she finishes work and makes her way home. Back in Tasmania, she had abandoned writing and reverted to her original profession of cooking. Now, she is chef at a small hotel near the city.

I find the late night hours conducive to writing. It is quiet then, when the day takes on that sense of enclosure that comes with the darkness. In the hours approaching midnight the distractions of the city are cloaked and this makes possible the focus needed to write.

So it was that we would sit in the pools of light cast by our desk lamps in our respective cities, bathed in the blue-white glow of our screens, clicking at our keyboards and sending messages all those kilometres to and fro across Bass Strait.

We had been discussing what had become of people we knew all those years ago and discovered that we had each completely forgotten about specific incidents.

When one reminded the other, it was as if separate pieces of memory slowly coalesced to create a picture of the past. Our discussion over those late night sessions was whether this reconstruction, as a collective effort, actually revived authentic personal memories that had long laid buried in mind or whether we were negotiating some collective reconstruction, a synthesis, a simulation of actuality.

So it was that, stimulated by Yvette’s remembering, those separate pieces of memory came together in my mind to create a sequence of images around that package in the bare room. It was a memory without dialogue; it was like watching ourselves going through the motions, as in a film without soundtrack.

I had forgotten about the incident although I did retain that image of the bare room with its scuffed, white painted walls, the one in which Yvette had crouched down to read the inscription scribbled on that package.

Curiously, it was Yvette who had forgotten about another incident but, just as her recollection revived my memory of the package in the room and the exploding fuel drum, this time it was my recollection that revived in her the incident of the Red Phone.

Not just with a splash but with a gurgle

Same day, same road, same building. It is a little later and, near the front door, stood one of those public telephones that were then common - a big, bright coloured plastic thing atop a square pedestal of white metal panels bearing the message - ‘Ring Here on the Red Phone’.

But none would be calling on that phone again. Its base had been prised open and someone had extracted the coins it once held.

I recall that there was someone there at the time and they asked us to get rid of the thing. Being obliging people, we complied.

Outside, the fire in the fuel drum was still burning, so what easier way to get rid of a Red Phone, we reasoned, that by melting it.

But why? After all, the building had been all but abandoned after the femmes had gone through their split and barricade tantrum, and whoever had broken into the phone and pilfered whatever miniscule riches it contained was long gone. What was the point of further injuring the device? Who knows? The decision was taken without thinking and into the fire it went.

The blaze succeeded in scorching the thing a little but it failed to do much else. Some other means of disposal was clearly called for. Here, Yvette starts to recall the incident…

“After some time, the charred remains of the phone were fished out of the fire and I took its identification number off.”

I can imagine how it looked, Yvette’s probably criminal prising off of the machine’s blackened identification number. There we were in the backyard and there was this diminutive but determined young woman, dark hair flopping in front of her face, screwdriver of whatever in hand, muttering imprecations while doggedly bashing and levering off a recalcitrant piece of metal for no good reason at all.

“I kept this small metal plate for a long time and I think if I look through my boxes of stored papers I may even find it again, now,” she said.

“Here were you and I, with the debris of a minor crime, so we did the only sensible thing possible, we decided to get rid of the evidence”, she recalled.

“Loading the phone stand into the boot of your Mini, we knocked one of the side panels in and put the charred phone into the metal box. Then we drove around a bit, waiting for dusk, when we stopped down at a wharf.”

Here our memories diverge. Yvette says we were at “the very end of Glebe Point Road…. where Jubilee Park stretches along the foreshore and the dank waters of Rozelle Bay promised to hide our burden.” But I recall us sitting in the Mini, waiting for darkness by the park at Balmain Wharf. Of that I am certain.

We sat quietly in the Mini in the gathering darkness. To our left a narrow path led along the waterfront, a stone wall separating the grey waters of the harbour from the small, grassy patch of park. Thankfully, trees obscured the view from the nearest houses. In front of us the Balmain ferry wharf was deserted and there was nobody on the street.

The park had taken on that grey, deserted aspect that sets in just on early evening. It was that time when lights go on and it was a good time for the disposal of evidence.

For a little time we sat, waiting for the right moment. We wouldn’t move until darkness had fully set in and we were sure that there was nobody about.

Now it was time. I open the boot and we haul out the blackened, charred device – Yvette at one end, me at the other. A last look around… ok, nobody about… let’s go… quickly now, over to the wharf… ready? Lift the thing onto the railing… now… shove…

SPLASH! Surprisingly loud, certainly loud enough to attract the attention of anyone we hadn’t seen.

But… oh, horror… it floats!

“Into the lapping waves we shoved the thing”, Yvette recalled, “… expecting a quiet splash and a quick disappearing act, but instead it sat high upon the water like a lopsided Titanic”.

We had thought that its weight would carry it quickly to the bottom. But here it was, gently bobbing on the surface. What to do?

But, just then, a gurgling noise… a tilting of the thing… and, in the darkness of early evening we watched it slide below the grey depths.

“The phone inside shifted”, explained Yvette, “and one end of the metal stand dipped sharply downwards. The last we saw of it were the words “Ring here on the Red Phone” slowly disappearing into the dark, oily waters.”

Our job done, we wandered nonchalantly back to the Mini, casually got in, started the motor, did a U-turn and drove up that long, steep hill that takes you to the Balmain shops.

Behind us, in the grey waters, the final bubbles rose unnoticed to the surface from a now-invisible and badly burned red phone.

One day, perhaps, a dredge will bring it to the surface, but until then it, like us, is undergoing its own sea change.