Fires dampened long ago

A morass of experience ago now, when the future glistered with promise, I read Raymond Carver and Andre Dubus dreaming of writing sublime fiction where everything seems normal but isn’t. One of my stories won a competition and was published in our local newspaper. A poet I knew well, who once served me four different kinds of drinks clustered around my dinner plate at her place, called around to congratulate me with her partner, a genial self-employed guy who knew nothing about literature, who she banned from talking football with me. Smiling, she alluded cryptically to my story and the modest prizemoney in ways that made little sense. Triumphant, I liked the rapport of sparring with witticisms so went along with this.

The story’s first-person narrator bears resemblance to the poet’s partner – his occupation, his relationship with a writer, a poet, Jude, a character I had used in several stories before I met them – and particularly in the raw opening scene when he arrives home from work to find his home emptied, wife and children gone, even the furniture. “I heard each vehicle pass by without stopping. I heard birds. I heard the wind. I heard a dog barking intermittently in the distance, the sound hanging with a faint echo in the still air.” This is broadly what happened to the poet’s partner they had told me, but also to another guy I knew slightly years before I met them, and I had survived lesser domestic carnage myself.

The story also contains an invented scene where the narrator meets Jude’s artistic friends in the city and feels uncomfortable: “(their) disapproval distracted me so much that I said, ‘OK. Yeah, that’ll do’ to everything they suggested when we ordered lunch, not realising I had agreed to two different main courses of pasta.” He then knocks over a tall glass of coffee and tries to sop it up with all their napkins while they continue to talk around him. I’ve known socially awkward men like this with myself at the head of the sorry queue.

Jude also resembles my poet friend in superficial ways involving a part-time occupation. Her experiences take up the heft of the story, some dramatic like the local pub burning down, and a remembered house fire she had caused on a miserable freezing day when home alone, unhappily married – unlike my poet friend – she tried to light a fire. “The fire kept fizzling out. No matter what I did, the fire died,” she said softly. “I know I wasn’t any good at lighting fires but his wet wood didn’t help.” This scene was based on a blaze I stupidly caused before crashing through a narrow window to escape. The scar on Jude’s arm puckers my arm. She recalls other episodes I lived, including returning to her (different) birth country, so if this character is specifically based on anyone it’s me.

Shortly after the story’s minor success we hosted a garden party for our three-yr.-old’s birthday, children first, then the adults, so we were drinking, but not drunk. There were further cryptic comments from the poet who endured the children’s games I helped organise, her eyes always glittering on me. She seemed to scorn my wife’s buddies, good-hearted toilers in the welfare sector, readers, not writers, yet quoted her father’s comments that suggested I had cashed in on my friends with the story, all of this in a wry, joking tone. A farmer turned subjective literary critic was all I needed. Rattled, but mindful of our guests, and the children’s presence, I deflected what was becoming obvious – her simmering displeasure.

When the poet left gracelessly, some unimpressed guests muttered about jealousy, but her own work was published. She had even dedicated a poem to me in a leading journal, and is well-credentialed in Wikipedia now. Somewhat in awe of her success, her reaction to my work that she described as ‘wooden’ before leaving, left me and my short-lived joy in disarray. We had often presented recent efforts at the same readings as well as sharing those convivial times. Unsure what to do about her veiled, then unmasked attack, I decided to wait until disappointment settled, see how I then felt. I realised that in rural areas like ours those who knew them and bothered to read my story might wonder about those two.

Eventually she wrote, claiming she had only wanted to ‘open a dialogue’ – a literary buzz phrase then – about my work, disappointing me again, this time due to her disingenuousness, but by then I didn’t miss her friendship that I now doubted. Much later her good-natured guy called gallantly on her behalf and I felt sorry that our friendship was now a train wreck. Before that garden party I had planned to give them a wittily signed copy of a journal that was to publish a larger version of the story called “Fires,” naively believing they would enjoy finding clever, not unkind, glimpses of themselves.

Jude says to her man: “My days will pass. Days pass. And I will then die…If you want me I’ll be good to you. I’ll be kind to your kids when they visit during the holidays.” Am I blameworthy? Have I whitewashed myself? Swept on by time and ego’s rush my recollections could be distorted scratchings of an itch to revisit those disturbing events. Around that four drinks surrounding my plate time I told my wife that despite all this attention, I felt a weird absence of true friendship. At one stage that story’s narrator says of Jude: “When I asked her what she was thinking she said she was concentrating on recapturing the past but trying to see people as they really had been.”

 

Ian C Smith’s work has been widely published. He writes in The Gippsland Lakes region of Victoria, and on Flinders Island.’