‘But understandably his agent would not hear of it, so Les it was.’
Our waitress was collecting the plates, and after we had finished complimenting the food and choosing dessert, my friends turned the conversation to my British background. They always loved asking about that, loved hearing about my cockney father and my bookish mother and the red double-decker I would ride to and from school (where I began to learn my French). My other school, I liked to say, was the London council house that I called home in those days, buzzing and full of play and chat with eight sisters and brothers.
Here I stopped and waited, for people usually exclaimed in surprise at the number of my siblings. Instead, Michelle said, ‘Nine children? You’re the eldest? Well, how about that, I’m also the eldest of nine.’ And then she asked out of the blue, ‘What’s your birthday?’
‘January,’ I said, ‘January thirty-first.’
A look of astonishment spread across her face. ‘Me too.’
The odds of our crossing paths had to be extravagant. If I had read the scene in a book, I wouldn’t have believed it. I felt dazed and yet curiously revitalised by the idea that life is full of accidents.
And there was another reason for my feeling as I did. Another coincidence that only enlarged my sense of wonder. Not very long before my chance meeting with Michelle in Paris, I received a message all the way from Sydney. The sender had reached me through my author website: ‘My name is Amanda Tink, and I am finishing a PhD thesis on the influence of autism on Les Murray’s writing. My argument, from the position of a blind autistic Australian, is that its influence was profound and that Murray’s identifying as autistic, even though most critics refused to engage with it, makes him our earliest-known autistic published author.’
She invited me to read a draft of her thesis. I emailed back enthusiastically. Several exchanges later, Amanda (as she signed off by then) sent it over in an attachment, and when I clicked it open and went from one page to the next, I met thoughts and insights on Murray’s work that I had never found elsewhere. I underlined many passages and told her as much. One email led to another and we were soon in regular contact. Sometimes, we wrote, other times we called. With time our conversation expanded to include more personal topics. She told me how windows emit a particular sound and so did doors and tables, lamps and bookshelves. Even half a bottle of wine, whose sound was distinct from a full bottle’s. She explained it like this: for sighted people, a room is filled with light. Every item, feature, piece of furniture is a different reflection of this light. A white door looks different to a long desk or a thick wall because each reflects the light in its own way. Now, for her, a room is filled not with light but sound. Sound, bouncing constantly back and forth, much as sighted people’s light, is a reflection of everything that surrounds her.
She told me also how, growing up, she often confounded people, blind and sighted alike – they never knew quite what to make of her. The sensation was always mutual. She talked of schooldays, of learning to read by touch, of loving the rub of certain words as she pressed her fingers to the Braille letters. Her years working in disability awareness. The smells and sounds of Sydney. The return to uni on a scholarship. Her brain injury. Her own special encounter with the poet.
In this way, I began to picture every scene just as Amanda described it to me, using research and my imagination to fill in any gaps.
✲
Beneath the date, Tuesday, 23 May 2017, the poster had said 5 p.m. But people were already coming through the door shortly after four o’clock, enquiring whether they were in the right place. ‘The Woolley Building,’ they said, ‘lecture theatre N395,’ they said, as though it were some sort of a riddle.
‘Just here,’ the event organiser said, pointing at a door crowned by a red-brick arch. ‘But you’ll have to come back in a bit. We’re not open yet.’ Maybe watches running fast, he thought as he showed them back out. If any students still wear watches. Or perhaps they were regulars come to claim the best seats. He hadn’t been with the University of Sydney long enough to recognise them if they were.
While he was wondering about this, another person had arrived. A blind student with short-cropped hair who followed his cane towards the brick arch. ‘We’re not open yet,’ the organiser called out hastily. G’day, he was about to say to him then, to offset the sharpness, before checking himself. It wasn’t a him. The hair, he thought. That would be the hair’s doing. Then he almost said to the student, You right there?, imagining her lost. But of course she was not lost. Not at all.
‘Les Murray,’ she said. ‘I’m here for the reading.’ He led her along the white-painted corridor and deposited her on a bench. The same bench to which, some minutes later, he escorted the poet. The old knees playing him up, apparently. All the way down from Bunyah. But at least he had got down here in one piece and that was the main thing. The student and the poet started talking and he left them to their discussion.
More people wanted to enter now, angling to break in on the conversation with the student. Staff from the English and Lit departments, going by their shoes and jackets. Their classes, too, with the poet’s books, quite a few of them read ragged.
Not a bad turnout for a poet. Not shabby at all.
At ten to the organiser opened the door.
The blind student got up and the poet gave her an arm into the hall.
✲
‘So,’ said Bruce. His voice was smiling. ‘How was it?’
He and Amanda were sitting in the kitchen of his apartment, at coffee o’clock (late morning, to me or you). The mugs on the table warmed their hands, and she heard him push her favourite chocolate biscuits towards her.
Bruce wasn’t just her partner, he was her, well, most other things. He had become her memory for appointments, and class deadlines too, occasionally her alarm call on the mornings she overslept, always her assignments’ first reader (after the computer program which read aloud every word as she typed). He read her work in Braille, sometimes putting an apologetic finger on a typo – the fault of the word processor far more often than Amanda.
They had met on an Internet mailing list for the blind, back when Internet mailing lists were a thing.
‘Yummy,’ she said. ‘The biscuit, I mean.’
She was still pinching herself. Murray’s reading had very nearly passed her by. She had learned about it by chance thanks to a last-minute email. Afterwards she had returned to her flat quite a lot later than planned. It had taken her half this morning – like every morning since the concussion – simply to collect her thoughts – to piece together who she was, where she had been, what she had been doing, and with whom. Half-hour by half-hour, with mounting excitement and disbelief, it had all come back to her. The sheer luck and joy and delight of it.
She was getting round now to telling him what, not an hour earlier, she had told herself, ‘I met Les! Oh, you should have been there, Bruce, you should have heard him.’
When she was dropped at the place – it was on the campus of the poet’s alma mater – someone had directed her to a bench, and whom had she found waiting to go inside but Murray himself. No, hang on, he had joined her on the bench. That was it. She had heard his voice nearing as it spoke to the same someone. Felt the bench absorb a second weight. The two of them, Amanda and the poet, side by side.
She was speaking more rapidly than usual. Excitement had that effect on her. Perhaps, as well, because she had plenty to recount.
‘One second,’ said Bruce. ‘You found yourself side by side with the subject of your thesis?’
‘Glad I’m making sense,’ said Amanda.
‘And what did you say to him?’
‘Well, hi, for starters.’
She hadn’t felt tongue-tied in his presence. She’d been so forward as to introduce herself. Listened to herself telling him about the thesis, not as straightforwardly as she might have hoped – that had been the adrenaline talking. Aspects of autistic thought are especially conducive to creativity, she’d said, notably literary creation. Inventing and playing with words; speaking – or writing – at length on a favoured topic; revelling in rhyme and the repetition of sounds; listing, arranging, classifying.
A thing she’d always loved about Murray’s poetry was the layers, the rich delineation of his characters’ worlds slowing the pace of each text, inviting the neurotypical reader to experience all the fine detail and resulting sparks of idea and memory that autistic perception provides. She had in mind his emu poem, as she called it, the poet’s ode to an emu. In this work, which she’d spend many pages of her thesis analysing, the curious, omnivorous, remarkable bird becomes autism’s defiant emblem.
Early days, she’d said, though her project already had a title: ‘Never Towing a Line: Les Murray, Autism and Australian Literature’.
When she’d finished speaking, he’d made a low guttural sound in his throat. The sound had been warm, encouraging, conspiratorial. This young woman’s going to get a lot of academics’ backs up, the sound had said, and good for her. He’d said nothing else just then. He hadn’t needed to.
Bruce was about to ask if he had been the same in person as he was on the page. But he did not get the sentence out before she said definitely, he was, is.
‘Call it an autistic energy,’ she said. The same watchfulness that she found in his poems; the same restraint. Wanting to reach out, but doubting it’ll be worth his effort, since his effort would need to be so much greater than most other people’s. She knew the feeling only too well.
How long had she had the poet to herself? A quarter of an hour, it would have been. An opening exchange between them and then … She tried to remember precisely. And then. And then, something like a crackle. A faint crackle around Murray, like static, telling her he required a moment to himself, the peace of this little corridor. Not that she had minded. Amanda, who was versed in sharing silences, leaned back and obliged.
