Yellow Notebook by Helen Garner

Author:Helen Garner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2019-09-19T16:00:00+00:00

1985

‘Have you been in my room?’

‘No. Downstairs.

‘Listening to us fighting?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where were you?’

‘Under the stairs, near the telephone.’

‘Did you hear everything?’

‘Yes.’

(Hand over mouth) ‘Was I awful?’

She laughs slyly.

——

The two bodies found in the tray of a ute. Decomposing corpses. The girl. I knew her. I can grasp this fact intellectually but in no other way.

——

‘People who’ve had something dreadful happen to their children seem to have a glass wall around them,’ said U. ‘Ordinary people can never really contact them again.’

——

I sat down and made a list of people I knew, of my age or younger, who had died. There were fifteen. And I’m only forty-two.

——

Sergei Bondarchuk’s War and Peace on SBS. How Tolstoy does those moments where a character for a split second gets everything wrong: Prince Andrei, waiting outside the bedroom while his wife is in labour, hears a baby cry and says, ‘Why on earth have they brought a baby in here?’ And when he’s lying wounded after the battle of Borodino and sees the man next to him having his leg amputated, hears him sobbing, then recognises him as Kuragin, the man he hates who tried to elope with Natasha: ‘Oh, why does he have to turn up here?’ Crying over all this I kept thinking of the two kids in the ute, the bludgeoning and shooting. Their funeral tomorrow.

——

‘Usually,’ said the priest beside the two flower-loaded coffins, ‘I wear white vestments at a funeral, when the person who’s died was old. Today I almost decided not to vest at all.’ His voice was trembling. ‘But then I decided to wear red. Red is a vibrant colour. And it’s the colour of martyrdom.’

——

How the men carried the coffins: each locked his free arm round the next one’s waist—a gesture of tender, manly comradeliness.

——

At the wake the murdered girl’s stepfather stood with his friends. We were telling old stories, making each other laugh. Once he put his hand over his face and wept silently; tears poured down his cheeks. I kept my arm around him. After a moment he took his hand away and resumed his part in the conversation.

——

I read through the first draft of my story and saw immediately the point at which it goes off the rails. It gave me great satisfaction to know that my critical apparatus is in working order.

——

When I’ve written something strong that’s on the right track I have an urge to get up from the table. I leave the room, walk to the shop, have a coffee. And when I come back, confident that I’ve got something solid to build on, I reread the last phrase and find it better than I had remembered.

——

I called P in Paris, and heard $29.30 worth of information about her vaginal infection.

——

I read a short piece in French by Roland Barthes, about how he guessed Proust had changed his thinking and his behaviour in order to write À la Recherche. Now I understand why people love Barthes. His tone is friendly, he is quite

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