Free Mug Shots by Barry Oakley Page B

we endured another at our local church in Caulfield. Father Gleeson was an Irish priest of the old and thankfully declining school, built like a bull with a roar to match, regularly inveighing against the modern world and predicting its eventual collapse. The birthrate would decline because of antisocial methods of contraception, and we’d be overwhelmed by more fecund races—including, presciently enough, those of Muslim faith. At one performance he was fulminating about contraception’s evil when he was interrupted by a crying child. He stopped and waited, and the infant howled on. ‘Either I go or that child goes,’ he roared. The child went, enabling Gleeson to continue about the blessings of large families. And then we went, and didn’t come back.

Birth and afterbirth
    At about this time of exhausting class warfare, Bill Hannan and Desmond O’Grady, newly sophisticated, returned from Paris and Rome respectively. They wore sharp jackets and pointed shoes, and had bad news. Australia was not a good place for would-be novelists. Cultural thinness. Fiction couldn’t grow in it. Bill went further. Not only did Australia have no soul, it wouldn’t matter if it had. He’d converted to the French New Realists—Michel Butor and Alain Robbe Grillet, who maintained that fiction didn’t need story or character, merely neutral descriptions of the external world: all that could be known was the surface of things.
    Since I at the time was having a Ned Kelly period, and writing a story of his final hours which Southerly , moving at its own marmoreal pace, would eventually accept, I riposted by saying that Australia mightn’t yet have a civilisation but it did have myths, and until cultivation and Left Bank berets came along they would do. All this was tossed back and forth as we wandered the suburban streets with the unavailability of a bar or coffee shop proving their point.
    If Desmond was critical of Australian society he was surpassed by his Italian wife Gegi, whom he’d married in St Peter’s in Rome. Both Gegi and Carmel were pregnant, and Carmel became a complaints sounding board. They ranged from the poverty of the cuisine to the lack of central heating. We had a party in our flat to welcome the visitors back to the land they weren’t happy with, and the two pregnant wives found they were wearing identical coat-dresses from exclusive Georges. Though Carmel’s was lilac and Gegi’s light brown, she and Desmond left immediately.
    By now the baby was imminent, and kicked at night as if impatient to get out. It made its escape early on the eighth of November, but seemed to have second thoughts beforehand, forcing Carmel to endure a thirty-six-hour labour. Her husband was not on hand to help. At our arrival at the hospital, we were confronted by a fierce nun, who told me to leave at once. The patient was briskly instructed to ‘go and empty your bladder’.
    Carmel was then taken into a cramped and primitive labour ward, with two beds separated only by a plastic sheet. As she endured her own labour, she had to listen to the cries of the woman on the other side as she gave birth, and then witness the doctor emptying the afterbirth into a basin. The hospital was called Bethlehem, and the name was apt.
    When, after a day and a half, the baby arrived, she was blue, and taken away immediately. Her mother had to lie there uncleaned for hours, while others waited their turn on trolleys in the corridor. We called her Madeleine, and she had perfect features. ‘When your father saw you after you were born,’ my mother said helpfully, ‘he went out and vomited.’ We marvelled at this being that had begun life no bigger than a full stop at the end of a sentence. To hold that evolutionary accident was the sole cause of this miracle requires a leap of faith greater than that required for Christian belief. Madeleine was not the blind product of the forces