Small Acts of Disappearance by Fiona Wright

Author:Fiona Wright
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Giramondo Publishing
Published: 2015-11-11T16:00:00+00:00

That year I read, for the first time, Christina Stead’s For Love Alone. I was nineteen, and it was a set text. I remember that I disliked the male protagonist Jonathan Crowe for his selfobsession and coldness, a coldness that I thought extended to the book as a whole. I found the novel old-fashioned and too rigidly structured, the dialogue too ornate and stagey to feel poignant, to feel real. But even then, there was one section that stopped me dead, and that remained for years as my overriding memory of the book. Teresa, the intelligent and passionate heroine – she who suffers for love alone – is working in a factory in Redfern and relentlessly saving all of her money in order to buy a passage to London. Rather than pay for trams between the ferry terminal and the factory, Teresa walks. From Circular Quay to Redfern, and back, every day. She saves money; she goes hungry rather than pay for lunch, and she walks, both ways, each day. Stead’s description of Teresa’s physical exhaustion, of the ravages of hunger on her body, cut me to my ever-more prominent bones.

Early on, when Teresa begins to feel ‘the resistance of the body’ that she’s pushing to its limits, just as I was mine, she divides her route into defined stretches. From the ferry to the Law School to the courts to a primary school to Hyde Park, to Tooth’s Brewery, Mark Foy’s, a barber, a park, a station, a street in Surry Hills, a war museum, another park, a chapel, a bridge. This is something I too had been doing, on those late and suddenly biting-cold autumn afternoons, when the walk from the lecture hall in the university’s Woolley Building to the steep concrete steps at Redfern station, where an upswept draught was always and inexplicably howling, seemed unimaginably long, the idea of it alone exhausting. I found I could will myself through small stages, landmark to landmark, until I reached the dirty peach tiles of the station and sat down, propped against a pillar.

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