The Word Page 4

  Kenric became still, feeling his shoulders slump. After brushing down his shirt, he took a few steps towards the window, to join Maria in the reflection.

  Maria appeared larger in the glass, and he stood within her. Outside it had become night, and the darkness of the harbour was rising through the streets. Kenric could not tell what was in and what was out.

  ‘I liked what you said,’ said Maria, as she handed him a slip of paper. ‘This is my number. And when you feel ready, why don’t you call it, and visit me and my old friend, Robert. I suspect you and Robert might get on.’

  Arriving home late that night, Kenric discovered a letter in the mail from Janis, which was unexpected, as she had planned to be away only a week. Janis’s letter explained she had recently begun an affair with the manager of The Foundation, and she was leaving Kenric for her new love. She did apologise if he was surprised or hurt – it had all happened so quickly, and she simply had not been able to find the right moment to tell him earlier. She would soon advise him when she planned to collect her belongings. The house she would be happy to discuss at a later date.

  Kenric spent his first few days of unemployment and single life wandering about what, clearly, was no longer his home. Seeing Janis’s knitting needles stuck in a ball of wool, or her long line of cleaning products under the sink, or the last of her clothes still on the line, he encountered a curious scar-like dullness. Everything in the house had become alien to him; it could not touch or keep him, or he it. He was surprised, and he was hurt, by the turn of events, but over those days he became aware of having long grieved his marriage, bit by silent bit.

  Washing his old work clothes one day, he found a scrap of paper in a pocket with a telephone number written on it.

  In time, he did call Maria.

  2

  Maria lived with Robert at Pittwater, that body of water in Sydney’s northern hinterland that is partly ocean, partly river mouth. Robert’s large old house perched on Pittwater’s steepest slopes, facing a promontory of bushland a mile or so across the water. Robert occupied the sprawling upstairs, while Maria rented the equally expansive, if far gloomier, downstairs.

  On his visits Kenric usually found the old friends talking on the upstairs verandah, watching the water below in its various lights and tides. Kenric liked to observe Maria as she sat in the dark with Robert and talked of the past. Her features were large and open, her face round, her shoulders and arms chubby. Her dark hair, although usually held in place by a number of clips, was clearly defiant, and poked in different directions. As for Robert, Kenric could see he might once have been an imposing youth, yet something in him remained undecided – he had not yet settled on anything, or had missed the chance to settle on something. It lent him an incomplete, yearning air, which he concealed with a social brusqueness. Robert had not aged particularly well, and was heavy, balding and short of breath. He drank.

  Kenric learned Robert and Maria had met at primary school; they had an almost sibling-like understanding, it seemed to Kenric (although he could only surmise this, having no siblings himself). He also learned Robert, Maria and Maria’s then husband, Lionel, when in their early twenties, had formed a community called The Word. Although The Word had long been dissolved, Maria and Robert still often mentioned it. When in a certain mood, after a particular number of drinks, the old friends’ conversation inevitably returned to Lionel and The Word.

  As a youth, Lionel, an Indigenous man, had won a university scholarship and studied philosophy. He came to believe the external world was created by language, and thus an obligation existed to honour language. This had been the idea behind the community, a loose fellowship of like-minded people interested in how to live. Members had drifted in and out of The Word – for some years, at its height, its membership hovered around a dozen. But by the time most members reached their mid-twenties, they one by one fell out with the philosophy, or each other, or moved on to cultivate careers. Lionel became a bureaucrat, writing reports and submissions on Indigenous affairs. He had died suddenly from a stroke two years before.

  Kenric sometimes heard Maria and Robert speculate about whether they might not start another venture similar to The Word. Something about Lionel’s ideas and the community that had harbored them remained unfinished for the pair. Someone with special insight into language would be needed to lead such a project, Robert and Maria agreed.

  ‘I think about the way my husband used and spoke of words,’ Maria said one night as the three of them drank on the verandah, ‘and I compare it to that hard and unforgiving way Quick speaks of words at The Firm. When you said what you did, Kenric, about words not being intended to obscure but to illuminate – when you talked back to Quick – you sounded like my husband. And you sounded like him that time in the meeting when you said you loved words.’

  Kenric was much taken by this. Whenever he heard Maria and Robert discuss Lionel’s ideas, it invariably struck him the thoughts could well have been his own. He was also intrigued by the idea of living in a community of like-minded people; he had often felt lonely in his childless, petless and almost friendless marriage to Janis. Their house had always seemed too large to him. Janis could never countenance the idea of a lodger, however.

  Maria also told Kenric it was his last words to Quick that had prompted her, too, to leave The Firm. Things were not going well there, she reported, with Quick growing increasingly overbearing and unpredictable, and coming into conflict with the entire staff. More old-timers were threatening to move on. Once rusted-on clients had left.

  One night on the verandah, while Maria was inside, talking to a distressed family member on the phone, Robert confided to Kenric that he, Robert, should have asked Maria to marry him long ago, in the days before she met Lionel. Robert had never quite been able to find the words, however, or the moment to speak them.

  Despite professing this, Robert did not appear to mind when it became clear Maria and Kenric had become a couple. He even offered to rent Kenric a room, after Kenric put his home on the market (Janis had written to say they should). Robert was unemployed and in need of money, and was considering selling the Pittwater house, or at least moving somewhere cheaper, and renting out the house entirely.

  Kenric began to visit Maria daily. Often he preceded or ended his visits with a long walk along the slender beach below Pittwater’s precipitous slopes. Having grown up in the western suburbs of Sydney, Kenric had been unaware Pittwater even existed until he first visited Maria. Now he discovered something magical came and went on that shore’s mild-mannered tide – a transforming shore, he thought of it. Boat ramps and jetties ran out from the jumbled boulders at the slope’s base, to cross the rocks and intervening stretches of sand. Clusters of small boats were moored in the deeper water not far off shore. On still days, Kenric could hear the disjointed xylophone of the boat bells.

  On one particularly long shoreline walk, an idea came to Kenric, and came to him whole, as if it had been waiting for him to see or to remember it. He had just reached a woman sitting on a towel on the sand, where she knitted. As he turned from her sharply, the idea hit him: he would start a community, if only a household; the community would be held together by a common philosophy, the kernel of which he had already articulated on his last day at The Firm. The philosophy would be anti-Quick philosophy, anti-advertising-world philosophy, augmented by the ideas Lionel had espoused in the days of The Word.

  The idea made him almost ecstatic. Suddenly, his past – his advertising days – made sense, and could be justified, for there he had gleaned how not to use language, and that knowledge implied his future. Kenric found himself walking out along a jetty forming one side of a fenced-in seawater pool. For a long time he stood pressed against the rail, gazing at the sandy sea floor visible below the pylons. The salt water’s weight had sculpted the mustard-coloured sand in long scallops. Kenric suddenly discerned a small, isolated stingray shift along the sand, nosing down a current, and in that moment he felt his marriage dissolv
e. The ray merged with darker water, and Kenric was wedded to an idea.

  Returning to Robert’s house, Kenric shared with Maria and Robert his idea of a community. Their instant interest – almost as if they had only been waiting for him to say what he said – took him aback. Kenric then asked if they might retain the old name for the prospective community, and Maria and Robert immediately agreed they must.

  As Maria and Robert talked into the night about what The Word had been, and what it might have been, and what it could be again, Kenric felt a web form around him. He also felt his self – despite his initiative – strangely recede.

  Maria often visited family at Mount Druitt in Sydney’s west. While accompanying her there for the first time, Kenric found the suburbs could not quite conceal a dream landscape long dormant in his memory. This was where he had grown up. It had been built over, and he thought he had forgotten the old landscape. Yet on that trip with Maria, the paddocks, dams, orchards and stands of blue gum of his childhood – or at least, the remembrance of them – returned.

  By the end of that day in the west they had found a place to house The Word – an abandoned warehouse in an industrial estate by the Great Western Highway. Using money from the sale of his house, Kenric arranged to rent the warehouse, and moved there with Maria and Robert. The building was unprepossessing, and had last been used as a meat-packing factory. Maria and Robert had lived in many places, however, and within days they and Kenric had cleaned and adapted the large interior to a livable space. They never did succeed, however, in purging it of a lingering odor, the odor of the abattoir, which became noticeable at unexpected moments.

  There were no plants or trees or patches of earth in the industrial estate, and the sun beat upon its concrete aprons, roller doors and generic facades. The place existed against the backdrop of the highway, and only occasionally, for a few hours in the early morning, did the road become quiet. Then the nights in the west could be still as a pond.

  The warehouse stood alongside and across from others of its kind. During the day Kenric liked to watch the B-doubles pull up before the roller doors opposite. Drivers in blue singlets and shorts hopped out onto the concourse, to uncurl and light up a smoke, and pace with crimped gait the length of their vehicle. Most trucks served as mobile advertising hoardings – a striking image and perhaps a single enormous word wrapped their flanks (including some iconic brand names coined by Kenric in years past). The beer-bellied blokes chatted with mates, unheeding of their brilliantly emblazoned backdrop. Kenric watched through the window of the partitioned-off area near the front of the warehouse where he and Maria slept; adjacent was a similar space that served as an office.

  In the opposite row of buildings, two doors from the end, stood a brothel, blank-faced but for a billboard that read Amenities against the silhouette of a female figure. The building at the end of the line served as an evangelical ‘hall’. On certain evenings small groups of youths appeared from seemingly nowhere to gather outside the hall; on weekends, singing could be heard from inside. The congregation was also given to tongue-talking, Kenric had been intrigued and excited to discover.

  The Word’s focus was philosophical, not religious or theological – it often took newcomers and visitors some time to realise this. The group fostered a critical attitude to language, an awareness of the responsibilities inherent in the use of language. The manipulation and abuse of language – especially in public discourse, but also in everyday relations within the group – was to be deplored. No formal program had been written down, but various practices and rituals evolved, in which everyone was expected to participate: sessions of ‘truth telling’, for instance, which involved the communal airing of grievances, and ‘silent days’, when no words were to be spoken. In the early days, the members of The Word had been encouraged to read novels, plays, essays and poems; this impulse had fallen away, but all were still urged to read dictionaries, at least.

  Unlike Maria and Robert, Kenric had grown up in a bookless house in a more or less bookless street. Advertisements, store catalogues and cartoons in newspapers comprised the reading matter of his youth. He came late – very late – to reading. Yet Kenric always apprehended – and had recently grown to consciously understand and articulate – that the power of words resided in each word itself. He believed every word contained multiple inherent echoes, much as a shell contained the ocean’s roar. According to Kenric, a word’s power lay in releasing these echoes at the moment of its use.

  Members were expected, after they had spent six months or so in the community, to write a ‘testimonial’ to The Word, an account of how they had found their way to a deeper understanding of language, an account of their journey to a deeper awareness of ‘verbal consciousness’ – a phrase adopted from The Word’s previous incarnation. Kenric had written such a testimonial himself, and new members were encouraged to study his example.

  Some of those in The Word worked outside the community, but beyond work the members kept largely to the group living within the building, and spent their free time participating in common activities there. Family and friends rarely visited – no rule as such existed against visits, but members came to The Word in the spirit of starting afresh. People often changed their names upon joining.

  The community had few permanent neighbours, although occasionally workers from the brothel dropped in to borrow some milk or tea, or to retrieve their establishment’s cat, which was attracted by the rats infesting the warehouse (another hangover from its meat-packing days). Some of the women regarded the place with curiosity, especially the community’s habit of earnest reading; the habitual long periods of silence had caused some confusion and bemusement to anyone who happened to visit during those times. Outsiders felt and were intimidated by the sense of mission, of purpose, which prevailed in The Word’s early days. The community possessed a kind of corporate loyalty to a set of ideas and customs outsiders struggled to grasp. In short, The Word had created its own reality.

  Near the end of its second year, the community encountered its first real trouble when a former member lodged a complaint with the local police against The Word. An ex-member, Regina, claimed she had suffered emotional, psychological and verbal abuse during her time in the community. All the other members of The Word had long considered the claimant unhinged and vexatious, and were not surprised by this turn of events. The police took the matter seriously enough to interview Kenric and, separately, Maria. No charges were pressed.

  The issue reasserted itself some weeks later, in the form of a local newspaper article, brought to Kenric’s attention by Tess, one of The Word’s long-term members. Tess was Sylvie Parsons, who had assumed her childhood nickname after joining The Word in its early days. Tess was perhaps the most sensitive to the community’s relationship to the outside world.

  After reading the article, Kenric rang Maria, who happened to be attending a family funeral in another state.

  ‘So the paper has interviewed Regina?’ Maria asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Kenric. ‘She says The Word is a cult, and that it is “secretive, abusive and degrading to its members, especially its female members. It purports to be an advertising company. In fact, it makes its money by tricking members into making donations from their private bank accounts. This is the organisation’s sole source of income”.’

  Maria was not too worried, she said, although she suggested Kenric might do some activity to bring the members together; he would have to manage this on his own, as she was still unsure when she could return.

  Kenric had an idea for just such an activity, and after his call to Maria, he headed to Tess’s room to seek her advice. After Maria, Tess was the member of The Word whose judgement he most trusted.

  Or perhaps he should not go to Tess’s room, it suddenly occurred to Kenric; he was upset by the article, and might be careless with words. Then again, speech clarified and gave form to disordered thoughts … so Kenric continued across the open space of the warehouse’s ground floor
, towards the partly partitioned kitchen area at the rear.

  Robert sat in the kitchen in his usual spot, within arm’s reach of the bar fridge. Robert’s chin was contemplatively raised – he had a way of containing or limiting his presence – and he had opened a beer, despite the early hour. Further along the table sat Connie, The Word’s resident cook, also in her customary place near the sink. Connie, in her late twenties, in no way attempted to limit her presence; she was solidly curvaceous and tall. She sat absorbedly peeling potatoes. Connie had little hearing, and seemed oblivious to Robert and Kenric. Kenric’s eyes met Robert’s, but neither said anything.

  Kenric climbed the flight of stairs leading from the kitchen to the warehouse’s second storey, where bedrooms ran in a horseshoe around the building’s sides and back.

  He found Tess on the landing, as if waiting for him. ‘I can’t write with all this traffic noise,’ she complained. ‘I start a sentence, and a semitrailer starts backing up under my window – I can’t do it. I’m totally blocked.’ Slight and pale, Tess had a perpetually peeved and peckish look.

  ‘I thought we’d do the tongue-talking tomorrow,’ said Kenric, ‘that might free you up. That’s what I came to talk to you about.’

  Robert, sitting below, lifted his head, beginning to listen.

  ‘Why would that be any use to me?’ asked Tess. ‘Speaking gobbledygook won’t clear my mind and help me get on with my novel.’

  ‘But it’s a most liberated use of language, that’s why –’

  ‘Let me guess – Maria told you we had to do something to bring the group together after the newspaper article. And this is the best you can do? If it’s just a kneejerk reaction to the article, don’t do it – that’s not the way to do things.’