The Life You Choose and That Chose You Read online

  ‘Is the fridge on?’ I whispered.

  He rolled over, edged his arm across me and nodded into the pillow.

  ‘What was wrong?’ I asked.

  ‘Circuit on the verandah.’

  ‘The rain?’

  ‘Maybe.’ He was still half asleep.

  The verandah was a tacked-on structure of vertical wooden cladding, worn floorboards and tin roofing, left empty by the previous tenants. It was penetrated by choko vines and year-round draughts and when the rain was heavy, it spilt down the inside of the back door. But it had a wide sliding window which took in the garden and the length of the back lane as it stretched away from our house. There was no view from the spare room so I had set up my office out there: a plywood door on trestles and an old process rack for my computer, my pencils, paints and books. Each day, I sat drawing and watched the meanderings of the lane, the uninhibited moments of people taking a break from the main road.

  I looked at Lenny, his eyes closed and bruised with fatigue. ‘How's the album?’ I asked.

  ‘Getting there.’

  ‘Will you get it done by Friday?’

  ‘We better.’

  Annie peered into the room. She climbed in between us, wrapping her arms around my neck. ‘Did the light come back, Mama?’

  I nodded.

  She rolled to tickle Lenny's stubble. ‘We had no lights last night, Dada.’

  ‘Hello, Annie Frangipani.’ He reached for her.

  ‘I'm a limpet, Daddy,’ she said and gripped to his side, and they lay there in silence.

  I took out the first load of washing before either of them got up. The morning sky was pale blue, promising. Three days of rain had left a mountain of clothes. I dragged one of Lenny's singlets from the basket, flecked by torn tissue, shook it fiercely until drifts of paper snow fell on what was left of the lawn. I stretched its body into shape and pegged it on the line. The spotted doves pecked, contentedly terrestrial, every day crisscrossing the same patch of lawn in their loyal pairs. And now they were buoyed by crumbs of tissue. I launched the line at them.

  We had moved here for Lenny, mostly. He wanted space and a job. The manager of a local youth centre on the fringe of the city had seen him play and offered him a permanent course doing ‘spoken word’ with the kids from the area. After ten years of freelancing he jumped at it. He could write and work the course, while still recording his own songs in a mate's garage studio three streets away.

  So we left our city apartment and moved to the suburbs, where the streets were wide enough to slope towards their gutters, to a house with a long hall and three bedrooms and a north-facing garden. Annie was four. On the first morning in the new house, she had gone to the back door, looked out on the lawn and the lane and said, ‘Can we go home now?’

  Lenny started going to the centre every day, rhyming the kids’ lives into shape. Annie started school. Lenny would pick her up each afternoon, and she'd ride her bike around the cracked basketball court beside the hall until it was time to come home. We dissolved into roles we'd never marked out. I worked at home, hung the washing, cooked dinner in the daytime and fended off the neighbours: Mrs Murani bleating about her plantar fasciitis or her daughter's wedding, or the Leytons over the road offering play dates with their girls and Friday dinners in their yard. At home Lenny succumbed to the comfort of not needing to speak. From my desk, I watched him and Annie drawing in chalk on the pavement or plucking wild strawberries from beneath their leaves, or blowing dandelion clocks on the grass.

  That's when I began watching him, too.

  ‘Look what I caught!’ Lenny appeared at the back door with a giggling Annie, dressed for school and slung over his shoulder. ‘Toast or toast?’

  ‘Toast,’ cried Annie.

  He swung her into the kitchen and I followed.

  ‘Will you be at the studio all day?’ I asked.

  Lenny sat Annie on the bench and faced me. ‘I'll make it up to you, Lou. I promise. Next week. Okay, Frangipani?’ She nodded. ‘We'll look after Mummy next week, huh?’

  ‘Can you take her this morning?’ I asked.

  He put bread in the toaster. ‘Sure. What's up?’

  ‘Got a deadline. Picture for an article on tartan.’

  ‘What's tartan?’ asked Annie.

  We had become like every family. We walked our kid to and from school, shopped where there were car parks, grew our vegies and traded them over the fences. There were not so many of us here that we could pretend not to see each other, the way it had been in the city. We shared swimming lessons and birthday parties and local library books, their jackets covered in the grime of accumulated fingerprints. I felt myself tramping the grid of our habits, repeating and deepening the tracks until they ran deep.

  ‘You guys should get going.’ I handed Annie her bag.

  ‘We are,’ said Lenny. ‘I'll call Alex to look at the power point out the back.’

  The man in the lane was different. In two years, I hadn't seen or heard him speak, not even to the tenants of his block. I wondered what his voice sounded like when he ordered his coffee. He undertook his daily movements in a kind of stupor, unencumbered by what was around him. At first I'd thought it pathological, but my sightings of him became the punctuation marks which made sense of the endless repetition of daily life. He resisted it. I felt close to him.

  Our laundry bucket held soaking whites. I tipped them out and filled it with scourers, a scrubbing brush, baking soda and the old rags I used at home. I wedged the back gate open and carried the bucket to his door, returning for the vacuum and wheeling it down the bitumen.

  In the daylight his flat was unremarkable. Brown carpet, walls without even a hook, a single living space, an adjoining bedroom and bath.

  I began in the kitchen, wiping the phantoms of foodstuff from the fridge and cupboard shelves: rings of yoghurt, oil and jams. The stovetop looked unused. It was hard to imagine him completing the small tasks of life—cooking a piece of meat or a sauce, or tying the top of a rubbish bag.

  I wiped every surface. I polished a single mirror, cleaned door handles, dusted down cupboard doors and tabletops and rubbed pale scuffs from the skirting boards. When it was done, I began to look around.

  Under every piece of furniture, in drawers and cupboards, I hunted for something that would reveal him: a book of poetry in a foreign language, receipts for something out of the ordinary, an odd collection or a membership of some sort—a keepsake, a baton from him to me. But I found nothing apart from a few pens and matches and some fallen coins and tissues at the bottom of the wardrobe. The place began to feel lonely. In the living room, I moved all the furniture to one wall. The clearest remains of him were the spots of flattened pile where he had placed his three chairs. I vacuumed over the top of them but the tufts would not revive.

  I pulled the furniture back in place and felt something between the cushion and the base of one of the chairs. It was a single paperback adorned with tall, white, serifed letters and a rocket blasting off into a jacaranda blue sky. Alistair MacLean, The Dark Crusader, the price in rupees on the back. A cheap thriller. The pages fanned evenly between my thumbs.

  I pressed them apart at the prologue: A small dusty man in a small dusty room. That's how I always thought of him, just a small dusty man in a small dusty room. No cleaning woman was ever… I forced it shut. I went to the window and checked the street. But there was nothing. Only the filigree of the polyester curtains. I re-opened the book: No cleaning woman was ever allowed to enter that office with its sootstained heavily curtained windows overlooking Birdcage Walk. These curtains were light. I parted them with the backs of my fingers. The lane was empty.

  In his window I thought I saw my face, just the faintest outline of flesh looking back at me briefly, before being bleached out by daylight. And there, through the new growth of the grevillea, was my house, our house, the brown Colorbond fence, the cladding of the back room, the window in front of my desk, the back steps, the apex of the clotheslin
e, all of it unadorned and still. From here, it looked as empty as his.

  Back home, I flung the bucket into the laundry, emptied the rags straight into the machine, stuffing the abandoned whites in with them, and set them on the hottest wash.

  I wiped my face, pinned back my hair and took a pot of tea to my desk. The ruler was aligned for the next stroke. Without looking up, I resumed the lines of my drawing, repeating belts of green, black, white and red, first drawn vertically then crossed with horizontal strips of the same pattern, ruling without stopping, determined to fill a whole page. The more lines I drew, the more I noticed the squares completing themselves, variations emerging from the mix: deeper greens and maroon and the odd island of pure white preserved in between. When I had finished I cut and collaged a set of three tartan-covered chairs into an empty room and signed the bottom right corner.

  The spotted doves sat high on the power lines that night. Annie wore her robot pyjamas and manoeuvred her way through the house, arms outstretched, reciting, ‘We have power, we have power,’ in a low-pitched mechanical voice. She illuminated the rooms of the house, like light bulbs on a circuit of Christmas trim, awakening the walls, her toys, our shoes, the fish in their tank. She reached the back verandah.

  ‘Alert, alert!’ she called and then stopped at the light switch, her arms dropping to her side. ‘Mama, this one still doesn't work.’

  ‘I know, bubs. That's where the problem is. Alex will fix it.’

  ‘Then how will you work?’

  ‘I don't need to work tonight. I finished my picture.’

  ‘Can I see it?’

  I took it from the desk and gave it to her. ‘Remember you were asking? Well, that's tartan.’

  ‘Look, Mama. Three chairs. One for each of us.’

  ‘I know.’ I returned it to my desk and closed the door between the verandah and the kitchen.

  ‘Can we leave all the lights on tonight, Mama?’

  ‘No, darling. We don't need them all.’

  ‘But I'm scared.’

  I scooped her up and carried her to the bathroom, put the paste on her toothbrush and waited by the basin while she brushed. She stood on the tops of my feet and we walked to her bedside, stilt-like, but with no distance to fall, flicking the switches as we went.

  The sky was cloudless outside our window when Lenny came in at dawn. I waited for his breathing to soften. I padded down the hall, careful not to wake Annie. I fitted Nick's keys into an envelope with a note, an apology for needing to be somewhere else. Then I walked it barefoot to his door and edged the envelope under the sweep.

  Just before ten a car pulled up at the end of the back fence, a bronze four-wheel drive. I unknotted the sari from above my desk and straightened it across the window. A man climbed out of the driver's side—it was Nick—and then another guy from the other side. They walked up the front path towards his door. Five minutes later a small hatchback parked in front of them. A woman in a stiff white shirt and pencil skirt approached the building. It must have been fifteen minutes before they all walked out together, the lady shaking Nick's hand, then the other man's, and returning to the flat as the two men drove away.

  I took the washing basket from the laundry and placed it at the foot of the line. The sun edged around the brickwork, warming my fingers as I filled two sides with white school T-shirts and cleaning rags. I hadn't noticed Lenny appear on the back steps.

  ‘We finished,’ he said.

  ‘Before schedule?’

  ‘I know. And I'm actually happy with it.’ He rubbed his eyes against the sun. ‘Tea?’

  I nodded.

  The concrete of the back steps was warm for the first time since last summer. Weeds were emerging from the cracks. I dug at the fishbone ferns with my toes, as the two of us squeezed ourselves between the back door's frame. Lenny handed me my cup.

  ‘Alex said he'd come after midday.’

  From the poplar tree over the lane came a loud call, strong and repeated. I looked at the tree and then at Lenny.

  ‘Fig bird, I reckon. Or a dollar bird,’ he said.

  It called again, a pulsing, descending sound, like the whistle-pop lollies I'd played as a kid. Lenny shaded his eyes from the sun.

  ‘Yeah. A fig bird.’ He pointed to the highest branches, ‘Got the red round the eyes. See it?’

  I could, exposed in the branches of the poplar tree. ‘I've never heard it before. Are they local?’

  ‘They pass through.’

  We sunned our feet, Lenny picking at the paint on the railing, peeled by the days of rain. He flaked it into the drain below. The woman in the pencil skirt came down the front path next door, holding a folder and a phone, trying to work the alarm on her car keys.

  ‘Hey, did you finish with that tartan thing?’

  ‘Yep,’ I said. ‘All done.’

  He may write profiles of other people for a living, but journalist David Leser is reluctant when it comes to subjecting himself to the same scrutiny he applies to some of the biggest names around the world.

  ‘At the end of the day,’ he once said in an interview with Deborah Bogle, ‘someone else renders you in a permanent form on the page, and you live with that for the rest of your life. And I don't know too many people who are good enough to do that. I mean, who's good enough to do that for anyone?’ The reason Leser does it for others is because, he has said, ‘[P]eople say yes to me.’

  That was eleven years ago, and it was to market his book, The Whites of Their Eyes, a collection of razor-sharp profiles of 23 public figures, from John Howard to Pauline Hanson, Peter Garrett to Mary Fairfax, Helen Garner to Rose Porteous. Not all of these profiles were exactly pleasant depictions of their subjects. Some even sparked outrage for the particularly unflattering (and some would say, unnecessary) way Leser portrayed people who probably had little idea what they were getting themselves into when they said yes to him.

  At the time Leser was living in Sydney, working for the Sydney Morning Herald's Good Weekend, suffering from insomnia and losing hair at an alarming rate. He had just been diagnosed with RSI (repetitive strain injury), and on top of that broadcaster Alan Jones had commenced legal proceedings against him for defamation.

  These days Leser lives a quieter life in the serene surroundings of Byron Bay. He is in good health and regularly jokes about his baldness—he tells me the hair loss actually started about the same time Bruce Willis appeared in Die Hard with a Vengeance. And thank goodness for Bruce. Leser is currently the ‘star’ profiler for the Australian Women's Weekly, for which he is contracted to write only one article a month. These days, not surprisingly, he almost never stirs up controversy with his articles.

  My first impression of Leser is that of a warm, confident man with squinty, charismatic eyes. Someone man enough to wear a V-neck that exhibits greying chest hair—not unlike Bruce Willis!

  That said, for a guy who has likely engaged in more than 1000 interviews (he interviewed almost 100 people for his Alan Jones profile alone) and is, by all accounts, extremely talkative, Leser is surprisingly reserved at the beginning of our interview. There are moments of long silence as he contemplates his responses, as if he is only too aware how easily hasty words can be misconstrued and twisted. Maybe he's sizing me up, trying to figure out what angle I might take on him. Or perhaps he just isn't used to being asked the questions instead of asking them.

  In many ways, Leser was destined to become one of Australia's pre-eminent profile writers. He was born in Montreal in 1956, just around the corner from Jewish-Canadian writer, poet and musician Leonard Cohen, who became one of his first heroes. Three years later, he arrived in Sydney. His father, Bernard Leser, had been asked by Conde Nast (Vogue magazine's parent company) to start up Vogue in Australia. Consequently Leser's childhood was filled with dinner parties and extraordinary people.

  ‘I would come home from school and my mother would be playing the piano and a soprano friend of hers would be singing an aria in the living room,’ Leser says. ‘The m
ost famous ballet dancer in the world, Margot Fonteyn and her paraplegic husband who'd been shot in a coup in Panama…they came to dinner and my mother served them herring.’

  As the son of Vogue Australia's founder, young Leser was regularly exposed to editors, fashion experts and designers, photographers and musicians. He conversed easily with all of them, except Veruschka, the famous German model.

  ‘She was the most beautiful woman I had seen in my life and I couldn't talk to her,’ he recalls. ‘I was too traumatised. I was immobilised. I was too bewitched. I sat with my mouth open the whole dinner, wondering, imagining marrying her or something.’

  Leser's background may have sparked his interest in people, but it was his parents who gave him the innate qualities and drive of a good journalist.

  ‘My mother, she has a deep empathy,’ he says. ‘A very good listener. I got that from her. And I got my father's kind of questioning tone, ambition to succeed, to prove myself, all that sort of thing.’

  Leser and his two siblings (an older sister and younger brother) all ended up working in the arts. ‘If you want to be Freudian about it,’ he says, ‘we were all trying to get my father's attention. We all ended up doing an aspect of his work. Vogue magazine was fashion, so that's my sister [a fabric designer and art therapist]. It was photography, so that's my brother [a photographer]. And it was journalism—that's me.’

  Leser grew up primarily in Sydney's affluent eastern suburbs and lower north shore, but he claims his father was never particularly wealthy. Even though as a child he was ‘very loved, very fortunate’, Leser did have a rebellious streak in his teenage years.

  ‘I was at a stage of smouldering rebellion until it was almost too late,’ he admits. ‘I was almost expelled for insubordination. Cadets was compulsory at Sydney Grammar and I missed 23 weeks in a row.’

  Leser left home at eighteen and studied for a Bachelor of Arts at Macquarie University. By that time he was already a deep thinker, a hopeless romantic and a socially-conscious realist. Award-winning children's writer Anna Fienberg recalls the conversations of their student days with fondness.