A merciful conclusion
I recap what has been, by any measure, a real mother fucker of a year
Click here to listen to an audio version of this piece, read by the author.
It was July, somewhere in a brief interstice between lockdowns. A Sunday afternoon. There was nothing to do. It was windy and grey, the kind of solemn Melbourne Sunday which makes you think of mud and car accidents caused by wet tires. Looking out my window, watching the trams wobble by and thinking of all that our winter could have been, I felt an abrupt pang of melancholy. It held me firmly, scraped the edges of my heart, chafed against the lining of my stomach. For a few hours that early afternoon, I felt suffocated by a vague sorrow, and suddenly needed fresh air. So I ventured to my local park, and took the football with me. For the next two hours I lined up in front of the posts, and kicked, and missed, and lined up again. And in the discrete simplicity of that routine, I found something I could actually get my head around.
At one point, while I was about to kick for goal, a group of young girls wandered by, all primary school-age. A hacky sack flew around as they chatted about an upcoming school camp. The site which the school had booked was, according to this gossipy little cabal of the playground’s cognoscenti, a pretty shoddy arrangement, stitched together at the last minute after the preferred site was found to be already taken by a neighbouring school. I listened in on this pretty anodyne story with a kind of vested interest, though I didn’t know what my interest in it was exactly. Maybe I just wanted these kids not to be deprived of a camp that was rightfully theirs to enjoy, a desire exacerbated when one of the girls raised her voice to say, regarding the inferior campsite: “Oh well. At least it’s something.”
And my heart broke for her, broke for all of them. Broke when I heard that an 11-year-old girl had learned to limit her view of the possible, to accept pennies on the dollar. Broke when, as Melbourne re-entered another months-long lockdown only a few weeks later, I remembered her face and realised there would be no camp at all. And broke when I thought of that word – that word which she so precisely deployed and which has come to define our lives as they stand, here and now, 2021 dwindling to a sorry and spiteful close: something.
Yes, something, something, something. Our lives are something. Our relationships are something. Our jobs are something. Our choices are something. Our philosophies are something. Our food is something. Our health is something. 2021 was something. But what, exactly? It’s all nebulous, without true shape.
On New Year’s Eve 2020 I was holed up in a hotel in Ararat, dying of heat and boredom. So I decided to write a reflection on the past year, a year which seemed, in the moment, a sort of nadir in my life, an important low point, a meaningful bottoming out. “But one must admit,” I wrote, “as a kind of merciful conclusion, that 2021 can surely be no worse than the catastrophic tumult of 2020.”
Looking back, I think I was wrong. So does a friend of mine, to whom I put the golden question of whether 2021 was as desultory as my instinct told me it was. We were at Red Triangle, and upon hearing the question she put the cue down and looked off into the distance. “Yeah nah, this year has been worse than last year,” she said. “And last year was like, ‘oh, fuck.’”
To which I could only say: well put. We are, quite plausibly, in a worse position now than we were 12 months ago – although I will admit that the claim necessitates some defining of key terms. “Position” and “worse” come immediately to mind; so does “we.” So, for the sake of the exercise, let’s keep it local. Things in Melbourne, I think, have never been so dismal, and by dismal, I mean something intangible and almost unconscious. I’m referring here to a sense of cohesion with one’s surroundings. A normalcy, an instinct. Looking around you and seeing something you can make sense of. In other words, that strange feeling we call being home.
On this front, I’m afraid to say that Melbourne is increasingly unrecognisable to me. The city has never been less like itself than it is now. The CBD has turned into a hollow and uninspiring panoply of blasé, a playground under the exclusive purview of property developers and talentless buskers – two of the worst kinds of people. It has substituted its once-famed élan for an imitation of panache. It has replaced its wellspring of vitality and idiosyncrasy with filtered water. Plainly put, it’s a grift. You walk through the city and feel like either you’re being grifted, you’ve just been grifted, or your next grift is nigh around the corner.
Beyond the Hoddle Grid, things aren’t much better. A vibe of emptiness pervades, and our towering Morton Bay figs shelter huge patches of untrodden ground. The spring was cold and wet, and the summer has failed to deliver on its promise for a bit of sun-soaked relief. The traffic is just as unabideable as it was in the days of yore, only everyone’s just that little bit less interested in waiting around.
Life in Australia has never seemed more provincial. Derision and pity for other states abounds; the popular sentiment on the streets of Melbourne is that if Western Australia seceded from the federation tomorrow, it would probably be better for everyone. I was in Bairnsdale earlier this year, waiting around a bike shop while the assistant was scrounging the stockroom for some supplies I was after. In the back of the store, a group of old mountain bikers were sitting on stools by the cashier’s counter, sipping cups of tea. A small TV mounted on a nearby wall was running some sort of newscast. Four cases of Delta had sent Perth into a snap lockdown. Old mate by the bar put his mug down and began tutting. “When,” he asked exasperatedly, “will the people in WA say enough is enough? Fair dinkum…”
Fair dinkum, indeed. Lockdowns, fair dinkum. Getting doored while riding along Bridge Road, fair dinkum. Spending a night in hospital to get an abscess drained, on two separate occasions only four weeks apart – fair dinkum. 9 p.m. curfews, fair dinkum. Dustin Martin’s lacerated kidney, fair dinkum. Wasted romance, fair dinkum. My monstera dying, fair dinkum. Geoffrey Edelsten dying, fair dinkum.
I’m presenting 2021 as a collage of isolated events because that’s exactly what it was. That’s what any year is – at least, what they now feel like, although I remember Year 12 comprising a sustained vibe, a cohesive whole. Something with a divinely realised starting, middle and end-point, eventually forming a narrative arc so intricate and coherent that it’s become the gold-standard of years. Everything made sense within the grander narrative. Now, our years are slippery, shoddily built, the cladding stripped away in high winds.
Perhaps the most devastating realisation I’ve recently encountered was one provoked by the deaths, in what seemed like unbroken time, of three of my greatest literary inspirations. First, in June, the irrepressible and inimitable Janet Malcolm. Then, on December 17, Eve Babitz – queen of the louche and tawdry, the master of making high art from low-hanging fruit, and just the kind of affable, irreverent and seductive literary character every writer aspires to emulate. And then, six days later, Joan Didion, about whom I recently wrote and about whom I find it difficult to talk in terms anything less than idolatrous. I worshipped her; I still do; I still will.
In late 2020, when the dancer Ann Reinking died, I remember thinking to myself that the whole initial burst of fuss in performing arts circles was really for so little, and that nobody would know about Ann Reinking in 10 years, 20 years, 40, 80. Now, I’m stuck with that same feeling, threefold. Will we remember Joan Didion? Eve Babitz? Janet Malcolm? What about Stephen Sondheim? Lawrence Ferlinghetti? Carla Zampatti? Jean-Paul Belmondo? This is where I am at the moment. It’s the end of 2021, and I’m in mourning.
How did I get here? Things started so promisingly. At the end of January, I was at a meet-and-greet at my synagogue, seated at an outdoor table drinking a small bottle of mineral water, when a pair of women sat down across from me. My gaze zeroed in on one of them, my eyes unable to stray. She had long brown hair billowing down her shoulders in perfect curls, exquisite and heavy like something in a cartoon. Her eyeliner glowed in the twilight. She had full lips which seemed freshly filled, as if she’d raced from her cosmetic surgeon straight to the shul. Slung around her arm was a glitzy handbag, Prada or Versace or Mulberry or Bottega Veneta or Hermès or Balmain or one of any of a million luxury brands. But most of all, I was so transfixed because I recognised her. She was a star, a familiar character in one of the only TV shows I bother to keep up with. She was, yes, a Real Housewife of Melbourne.
For the whole rest of the year, I saw her not a solitary time at the shul. That was my one encounter, my brush with the upper echelons. Above all, it was yet another occurrence, a something, that came and went in 2021. The Olympics came and went. The disappearance and discovery of Cleo Smith came and went. And it’s not like I didn’t have plans for something bigger, schemes that would go the distance. In a later section of the same journal entry cited above, I wrote: “I would like to make some concrete plans for the upcoming year. Getting a publishing internship, arranging an Irish passport, moving to Richmond, perhaps even finding a girl, getting a major publication to work with a piece of mine; all of these may play a part.” Well, all of them may have played a part, but, um, not a single one of them did. My “concrete plans” never did become concrete after all. Instead they remained, like most of what I experience now, a vague and indefinite aspiration.
By the time December rolled around, my vague and indefinite aspiration had turned inwards: I wanted, with a nauseating and ceaseless pang of distant sorrow, to disappear. I wanted the year to end, I wanted to turn a new leaf, I wanted to be free of this pandemic and all the obfuscating tricks that it’s playing on us. In the week before Christmas, I was walking around Camberwell – a hub of ceaseless nausea in its own right – when I strolled past the front window of a Witchery store. SPARK JOY it proclaimed in a bone-white, ultra-modern font, and I suddenly remembered that, yes, this is the only means left to us to actually spark joy anymore: to shop it into existence. And fly those sparks did, all week long, while Joan Didion lay dead and while a new variant doubled its count every day.
Christmas, of course, didn’t feel like it should have. Nor did it feel like much in 2020 either. Just another event passing us by. And yet, there was a light amidst it all. Perhaps it’s because I am simply unable to absorb so much pessimism at once, so unwilling to let a sense of fatalism overwhelm me. But I noticed something one day while walking in the CBD, only a couple of days out from Christmas; an experience so intractably hopeful that to think of it now still fills my heart up to the brim.
It had been a wet morning and I was holed up at work, stuck in an unmovable longueur. On my break I decided I needed some fresh air. So I put my parka on and moseyed on down to Bourke Street Mall. On my way there I noticed the wind holding up, as if at the behest of a higher order. By the time I reached the Myer, the maudlin clouds of the morning had completely stepped aside, making way for a glorious sunlit interlude.
Indeed, I had stopped right outside the Myer, because a large crowd congregated there had caught my attention. They were all in a line snaking between a row of bollards – parents holding prams, little children at their side, grandparents adjusting their masks. The line suddenly funnelled out into a row along the front windows of the store. Yes, of course – the Myer Christmas windows.
That I’d forgotten all about this most humbling of Melbourne traditions expresses exactly how distant from everything I was feeling – from my city, from my time, even from myself. These were the windows I had visited on several occasions in my youth. Windows which I remember with great fondness, animating episodes from The Polar Express or Harry Potter or, this year, Peter Rabbit. Windows which I hope my kids will also enjoy, while they hold my hand and point at the moving figures arching to and fro before them.
Standing still against a wave of movement along the Mall, this flash of nostalgia hit me with the sudden force of an unexpected dream, and in no time I realised what exactly it was: pure joy, sparked at long last. In that brief period of sunshine in the days before Christmas, those windows contained something unshatterable. 2021, on the other hand, is shatterable. It’s only time, a memory, and luckily for us it’s all over now. The New Year is upon us, the pandemic is still here, Melbourne is altering beyond imagination, Joan Didion’s gone. That’s the landscape; it’s our move. We can let the last twelve months narrow our view of the possible, we can let it seep its toxic serum into our veins, or we can stop making excuses for ourselves. Because even if 2022 could be more of the same, shouldn’t we at least try to make it otherwise? Haven’t we learned anything from the past 20 months? Or maybe that’s not the point – I, for one, am opting for a familiar resolution: I refuse to believe that 2022 could be as bad as what’s just past. May all my conclusions forever remain so merciful.
Wonderful piece Elroy, your writing is so evocative. It made me cry. Don't despair! Live in the moment and look forward to all the great things that are going to come your way. And keep writing about them! It's all fodder.
excellent again