Leaf

Leaf

Alan Hancock 2025   2, 695 wds

I am ready for the storm which will surely break on all of us, she said. I have my safe place and my rainbow and my coat of many colours and everyone is going to wish they'd thought about these things when they were busy watching reruns of The Cosby Show or moaning about the price of fuel. Everything and everyone is in this together she said, and not once did she look up over my shoulder at the sky or mention the fact that the wind was pushing coke cans round in circles down there in the street.

It's high up this place where she lives and you can watch everything that happens down there in the world. You can watch the earthlings in their tin can motorcars and their little houses, you can see the tvs flicker and the computer screens save themselves with screen savers of many lands, but you can't hear a thing. That's the beauty of it.

There are so many people, she said, and if you want my opinion it might just be too many. Too many for what I wanted to ask, but it seemed like a stupid question and I didn't reckon she was the sort of person you'd ask something like that.

It's high up this place and with high-power binoculars you could pick out brand names and cigarette butts and the exact ingredients of the piles of trash that no one seems to notice, down there on the surface of things. But most of all you could see a very large very dark grey cloud banking itself up above the rooftops, way out beyond the trees and the sand dunes and far out over a midnight ocean where all the ships look suddenly very small and lost. She said that certain spirits that live in the weather will come to us very soon, and her eyes were clear and her gaze was serene and I couldn't honestly say that she looked crazy not one little bit. And her look was more the look of someone who knew exactly where she stood and I'd have laughed but she just wasn't a person you laughed at.

I said, Do you believe in angels and divine retribution and do you think there's something big happening out there? And she smiled and I couldn't tell if she thought I was stupid or asking the right things at last. Then she said, You should go now. And I knew exactly what she meant.

When I checked things out I found that my car had been stolen and my credit card numbers illegally used, many times. I noticed that it felt a lot colder, but still kinda warm, that the wind had only just started with that pile of trash. And all the screen savers in the world were saying save me, please save me, and phone connections were at the best intermittent as the tv faded and the radio went blank. I thought, I've heard about this kind of thing, and wouldn't it make a great movie if ever we get the chance. Those clouds certainly looked bigger, or closer, or bigger and closer, and if there were spirits up there they were doing rather well.

*                        *                              *     

If there were spirits. Well, that’s one way of putting it. Us writers, I sometimes wonder just what we’re on about. Take everyday life and what have you got – a mess. So you turn it into something else, you write it into a story. You make the characters more characterful, sharpen up the contrasts, get rid of the fuzzy edges. You edit out the boring bits and the things that don’t fit in. Because you want something interesting, something worth telling. You want drama, mystery, action. You want all the things that you sense are lacking in your everyday life: a clear through line, clarity of purpose, a proper ending.

And magic. Perhaps that most of all. We say we want real, but we don’t, not really. Too much real just spoils things. It gets in the way. What about truth? you might ask, isn’t that what we all want, isn’t that why we write? Truth – now that is a tricky one. I’m not so sure these days about truth. But let me try again. Let me show you another version then you can choose for yourself. Take two.

*                        *                               *     

The lift creaks and clunks its way up to the ninth floor. The walls are coated in that crinkly metal that the graffiti cleans off easily. It also reflects the neon light in a way that makes your eyes feel weird when you try to focus on it. The lift has a bright light and interesting stains on the floor. It is slow and very small, so it’s a relief when the doors finally shudder open. Then I’m out in the chill air on a drafty concrete walkway. There’s a sharp breeze whistling through the iron railings and a view all the way down to the car park and a busy street. Over the rooftops I can see the funnels and masts of ships in the harbour, and beyond them the open sea. It’s a damp August wind with the promise of rain. From the look of the western sky – charcoal grey clouds over a smudged horizon – we won’t have to wait too long either. I don’t linger to admire the view.

When I knock on the door it sounds and feels insubstantial. One good kick and it’d be gone, I think, then wish I hadn’t thought it. A chain rattles and the door cracks open a few centimetres.

It’s me.

Hang on.

More rattling and Leaf opens up to let me in. Leaf – an odd name but it suits her. Leaf is what you might call alternative. She is dressed in one of her Good Sammy outfits, topped off with something large and colourful from the Nepalese stall in the market. Her hair has little pink highlights amongst the grey, and when she puts her arms round my shoulders for a hug there is a jangling of many bangles.

How’s it going?

Good.

And the book.

Really good.

Leaf is a writer, like me. Except she isn’t playing at it. She isn’t hedging her bets by hanging on to the day job and the weekly pay slip. She isn’t talking about writing and how everything else in her life conspires to keep her from actually doing it. She is writing – full on. Here she is holed up on the ninth floor with one mission only – to write her book. A large desk is jammed up against the window, dominating the shoe-box living room. Loaded onto it are layers of paper: exercise books, A5 jotters, scrapbooks bulging with scraps, yellow stickers, a drift of loose sheets held down by two paperweights, one a chunk of South West granite, the other a model of the Great Pyramid. There is a serious-looking dictionary, a thesaurus, an atlas or two, a beer glass stuffed with pens and pencils. Nothing digital here – the computer has its own space in her bedroom. Her life, her dollhouse home: everything serves the book.

Leaf brings up in me a whole psychological profile of feelings, mostly anxiety. As I tell our friends, I admire her. The single-minded vision, the determination, five hours a day all alone with the words, bridges and boats burned and nowhere to go except onward. I admire her. And I think she’s going nuts. I feel deeply anxious that she may be losing the plot, all alone here in her tiny flat with her paper and her antique computer, her tatty notebooks with the strange diagrams and multiple layers of crossing out, her binoculars on the window ledge so she can watch the groundlings far below. I’m afraid that she’s losing it, losing touch, with us down on the ground. Not enough contact. Too many ideas and words.

Leaf’s work is writing. Full stop. Which sounds like the kind of thing half the population might dream of. It sounds like freedom, and self-fulfilment. I’m not so sure. For some time now I have moved in circles where a significant number of people simply don’t go to work, ever. And I have come to the conclusion that the prime function of paid employment is not to control the flow of cash but to keep us in the reality loop, and stop us from going loopy. After a visit to see Leaf this insight is especially clear. If you have to negotiate each day a bunch of people who aren’t your close friends, who represent some random sample of human life in this city and whose voices cannot be ignored, it kind of anchors you to the consensus reality. Let go of it, and you can drift free. This may be just fine for some individuals, those strong-minded artists knocking out their masterpieces for the next generation, the poets, painters and composers in their garrets and attics. But for those of us whose grip on reality is a little less than firm, it is not always a good idea.

This is what I want to say to Leaf, and never do. Try telling her she might be better off doing a couple of hours paid work each day, try suggesting that maybe it isn’t a formula for success and happiness to spend her days in an apartment the size of my mum’s kitchen, writing the book. The book that will unveil to the world Leaf’s insights into the fate of the species, that will tell her very own, very special story in all its magic and significance. The book that will hint at deep and mysterious order beneath the melee of current events, that will give us mortals a glimpse of the true nature of human knowledge. I’m struggling here, I’m overstating my case and trying to summarise what cannot be summed up in a few words. But isn’t that what us writers do anyway, on a slightly bigger scale? It’s just that Leaf has no doubts she is up to the task, and I do.

I’ve brought her a new printer cartridge, a hefty sourdough loaf and a packet of chai. Another hug. Leaf gets by. The Centrelink pension is never quite enough to last out the fortnight, but she struggles along, for a while, and so it goes. For what, I find myself asking after every trip to the ninth floor, for what? Because the book sounds like it might be more than just a little crazy. There are the usual suspects: revelations of a spiritual nature, instances of clairvoyance, an urgent message on the need for us to evolve to a new level of consciousness. Information is pouring into her from a mysterious and undefinable source: she has access to wisdom which must be shared. It is the truth. There is a voice that tells her so. She tells me, her eyes intense with the sheer excitement of it, how this voice will not her off the hook. She has to write. It’s her mission.

At such moments I am lost for words. And yet, I think, what about all the others? All those people channelling stories from spirit guides and Pleiadeans, the prophecy or revelation that will change our lives. These books get published. Every time I check out the New Age and Popular Conspiracy sections of my local late-night bookshop I am stunned by the sheer number of titles. Maybe Leaf is in good company, well on the way to becoming the next big thing in the publishing of celestial wisdom. Maybe. But that’s the trouble isn’t it – you never know. It’s a thin line between bestsellerdom and self-delusion. The only way to find out which side of it your book will fall is to go ahead and spend a couple of years writing it.

Which leaves me here with my doubts and fears for my friend, which, of course, are really for me. Like a good writer, I try to turn her into a piece of story-telling, into magic realism. Me – the all seeing author. As if my life is any more sorted out than hers. Here I am, struggling to hold on to the sessional contract at TAFE, teach an evening class at the local library, run the kids’ writing workshops, co-parent two teenagers, and still find time to write the great Australian screenplay. I’m feeling the stretch all right, as the middle-class arty intellectual types like me get squeezed out of their comfortable lives into something rather less creative. The new rich money dealers go pulling one way, the local house-breakers and dope dealers the other. I’m hanging on by my fingernails to a little duplex in a suburb I can’t really afford. Doing deals with the woman at the insurance company call centre, because I can’t risk leaving the laptop, the car and the iPad uncovered. By the time I’ve finished juggling payments and hanging on to things there is not a lot of quality time left over for writing. And the voice of doubt wants to know how all of that is better than retreating to the top of a dodgy downtown tower block and walking the talk that most of us try-hard writers oh so carefully avoid. I don’t have an answer.

That’s the trouble with my visits to Leaf. They are troubling. She stands for the things I fear most in the little world where I have chosen to place my energies. Which will it be – the dotty old codger all alone in his den, a hopeless amateur living under the delusion he is writing a masterpiece? Or the bitter and frustrated wannabe who never dared give his dream a chance to fly? Each time I get out of the smelly lift I have a strong suspicion that an awful lot of us are wasting our time, messing around with words and stories as if we were really doing something artistically and humanly worthwhile, wasting our lives when we could be doing something useful like voluntary work with the homeless, or the old and frail. The little voice in my head tells me I’m a fake. Hers urges her on, and demands total blind faith. I’m not sure which is more dangerous.

Leaf has gone for broke. All those things she has shed, which those around her are desperately trying to cling on to. The marriage, the lover, the career in journalism, the house by the beach, the car, the health insurance, the holidays in Europe, the fashionable clothes, the credit cards. The ease. All gone, for good. No regrets, or so she says, it’s all just clearing the decks for action. Everything is honed down to the bare minimum now – no clutter, no excess baggage to slow her down. Two cups, plates, knives, and spoons. Fifty-one dollars in the bank account to last till next Thursday. No distractions, no unwelcome responsibilities to people and things. And the certainty that she has so much to tell us.

I say I have to go. I think she’s pleased: now she can get back to her task. The lift shakes and rattles. It’s got very dark and I wonder who might be waiting at the door when it opens. There’s nobody, just the wet concrete and the first volley of rain driving in hard on the southwester.

*                        *                    *     

She reads from her manuscript at the monthly poetry evening, the one she used to organise before writing took over everything. The coffee machine hisses and coughs, a truck goes grinding through the gears outside the big windows, but everyone is intent on Leaf and her story. She reads with an intensity that draws us in, that won’t let us say a thing. She speaks in a clear strong voice, sometimes hurrying over the words as if there isn’t enough time for everything she has to say. I am ready for the storm which will surely break on all of us, she said.

And I know she’s telling the truth.

The end