I stopped in the middle of the Commonwealth Avenue Bridge. The Australian National Museum looked like a landed alien spaceship to my right and Telstra Tower like a dagger lodged in the gut of a passing cloud. I took in the view of the Parliamentary Triangle. The High Court and the National Gallery sat like discarded building blocks to the south. Parliament House rose like some obscene phallus into the mauve-grey sky.
It was too late for rowers, but I imagined I saw them, moving forward in teams on the glassy water of the lake. I imagined her rowing here, strong, determined, one-tracked minded to the detriment of all.
I saw the rowers and I saw the bodies. I saw Canberra’s sordid aquatic history. In 1974, Queanbeyan flooded, and it was said that coffins from Riverside Cemetery were washed down the Molonglo into the lake. I saw the corpses floating in the half-light there. Fifty uncanny figures, face-down, their features eroded and eaten by the carp, their rest so cruelly and unusually interrupted. I saw Irene Angley’s skeleton strapped into her Ford Cortina off Yarralumla on the day it was discovered in 1989, ten years after she had been reported missing. No one was charged over her disappearance or death. I saw the murder weapons floating in the shallows: the gun used to assassinate Police Chief Colin Winchester, the knives used to kill Lauren Barry and Nichole Collin. The girls had been raped before they had been stabbed. That was in 1997. How little Canberra had changed since then. How little Australia was changing. The Cullen in the garbage bag was not a portrait of anyone in particular. It was a portrait of all of us: the ugliness was the point. I saw the suicides—how many of them were there?—the bodies of those for whom Canberra and its lake had become the ultimate terminus. There was not enough room on the lake’s darkening surface as what lay beneath it arose to my eyes.
Despite the hour, I took my usual route home, looping the long way around State Circle in the twilight, passing the embassies, darting fitfully across the blacktop. I stopped outside St Paul’s on the corner of Canberra Avenue and Captain Cook Crescent. Across the road, at Manuka Oval, the last quarter of a football match was in progress. By the sound of it, the game was close. There were people going into the church even though it was much too late for Mass. I wandered over to see what was happening. They were coming for Evensong, a man told me.
Because of restrictions on public gatherings, one needed an Eventbrite booking to attend. I took out my phone—her face looked up at me from the lockscreen—booked myself in and entered.
I had always thought it an ugly building. Inter-War Gothic and Art Deco weren’t the easiest of architectural bedfellows. I had never been inside before, but wasn’t surprised by the utilitarianism of the place. I was the youngest person there by at least thirty years. I was beginning to have second thoughts about my presence. I always felt I was intruding in such places. It wasn’t that I respected religion or the religious, but I hated the idea of rubbernecking. But a kindly-looking woman—a kind of prototypical Anglican, it seemed to me, complete with cardigan and sensible shoes—asked to take a look at my phone and, having seen it, showed me to a pew. I couldn’t believe it. They had assigned seating.
The choir began a little haltingly, though I assumed they had done this a hundred times before. But they soon began to find their footing. I noticed the conductor smile and nod, relaxing into his role more fully, as their tone at once both deepened and rose, became warmer somehow in the bland chilly space. I, too, noticed the voices coming together. The light began to dim in the stained-glass window above the altar and the final siren sounded across the road at the oval. It must have been frustrating, wrangling amateurs, I thought, but also occasionally rewarding. There was something earnest and pure in their voices. A woman in a ghastly floral blouse stood up and began reading something from Jeremiah. For I will forgive their iniquity and I will remember their sin no more.
From French amateur, "one who loves" (16th Century, restored from the Old French ameour), from Latin amatorem (nominative amator) "lover, friend," agent noun from amatus, past participle of amare, "to love". Here endeth the lesson.
I was beginning to feel like a goddamned Greene character. To love. Was that really so much to ask? But then Bendrix had hated God where I was merely upset at the tertiary education system. There was so much in the music now, so much to marvel at in the human voice. There was melancholy and pain and woe in it, and wonder and joy and something approaching that which I had lost. I was, I knew, an amateur, too. I would always be an amateur. The man in the cassock was praying for wisdom. For wisdom, humility, and grace. Three strikes.
She would sometimes play the guitar in the evenings. She would sing Russian folk songs, Russian drinking songs, songs about love and loss and loneliness. She would play the Scorpions’ ‘Still Loving You’—how apt its lyrics, how fitting its theme, how devastating the memory now—and sometimes I would sing along until she told me to pick an octave and stick to it. There was much to marvel at in her voice, too. Her curious accent, with its deliberate hard r, which she had picked up studying literature in States. Her refusal to submit to the laziness of Australian English, except, ironically, when saying the word Australian. The pain in it, the sorrow, when she sang. Hers was the voice I would have in my head now. I hoped it would keep me on my toes.
The choir started up again. They were singing the Nunc dimittis now. I convinced myself I had something in my eye. I genuflected and made for the exit. It was dark and unreasonably cold outside. I could feel the cool sting of tears on my face. I learned only later that Anglicans don’t genuflect.
I crossed Canberra Avenue back into Kingston with the sound of the pipe organ following me across the street. I went upstairs to my room above the hotel. I was in a state. Or should that be a territory? The music had done a number on me.
I told you at the beginning of all this that I was writing it down because I couldn’t believe it had happened. I suppose you’ve been thinking I was talking about the body. I suppose I could have been clearer about that. No, what I can’t believe is what I had done. What I had done and had kept on doing. Every time I’d been given an opportunity—to fix things, to make things right, to wait—I had plunged the knife in deeper and twisted. This hasn’t been a murder mystery. It has been a mea culpa. I have been writing red-handed the whole time.
I took out my laptop and wrote her a letter. I told her I loved her and what she had meant to me. I told her what she meant to me still. I said she was wrong about the core of her character. She wasn’t difficult. She was overwhelmingly good: the best person I had ever met. Kind, loyal, protective, loving. Challenging and demanding in all the best ways. It had taken me thirty-five years to find her. I would not see her like again.
We had fallen in love on the basis of words and it was with words that I had pushed her away. I was aware of the irony—I couldn’t shut up even now—that I was apologising with more words still. I wanted to say: This last month doesn’t matter. I wanted to say: We have the rest of our lives. I wanted to say: I believe in our love. I wanted to say: I will do anything to save it. I didn’t, though, because that wasn’t what she needed. But then she didn’t need the letter, either.
Do not listen to a word this man says. He is an idiot.
I sat in the darkness and read what I had written. It took me a long time to decide what to do.
END