Soaring

By Ross Fitzgerald

This extraordinary novel moves between Melbourne and Brisbane, Australia, and Ireland, with its cast of flamboyant misfits playing out the eternal search for love and passion. Rodney (hang-glider and merchant of erotica); Rebekah (19 year old Alcoholic’s Anonymous member, father unknown) ; and Michael (maverick motorcycling priest) are the three voices which speak powerfully, nakedly to us in Soaring. Soaring is a winner of the Eros Foundation erotic Book of the Year Award.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ross Fitzgerald
• Release date: Jul 13, 2013
• ISBN: 9780987325310

Ross Fitzgerald

Ross Fitzgerald (born 1944) is an Australian academic, historian, novelist, secularist, and political commentator. Author of 36 books, in 2009 Professor Fitzgerald co-authored "Made in Queensland: A New History", published by University of Queensland Press and also "Under the Influence, a history of alcohol in Australia", published by ABC Books. In 2010 Professor Fitzgerald published "My Name is Ross:An Alcoholic's Journey" and "Alan ('The Red Fox') Reid", both published by New South Books. In 2011, he co-authored "Austen Tayshus:Merchant of Menace", published by Hale & Ironmonger, Sydney, and "Fools' Paradise: Life in an Altered State", published by Press On/Arcadia in Melbourne. Emeritus Professor of History and Politics at Brisbane's Griffith University, he was also the Queensland Chair of the Centenary of Federation. His books include five works of fiction: "Pushed from the Wings: An Entertainment"; "All About Anthrax"; "Busy in the Fog: Further Adventures of Grafton Everest"; "Fools' Paradise: Life in an Altered State" ; and "Soaring". Fitzgerald currently writes a regular column for The Weekend Australian and reviews for the Sydney Morning Herald, The Weekend Australian and The Canberra Times. He appears on ABC Radio, ABC Television, and Channel 7 in Australia.

Book preview

Soaring

Ross Fitzgerald

Illustrations by Davida Allen

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013

Introduction

Controversial historian, satirist and social and political commentator, Ross Fitzgerald is Emeritus Professor of History and Politics at Griffith University.

Ross Fitzgerald is the author of 36 books, including four Grafton Everest fictions - Pushed From The Wings : An Entertainment; All About Anthrax; Busy in the Fog : Further Adventures of Grafton Everest; and Fools' Paradise : Life in An Altered State.

Ross Fitzgerald's autobiography My Name is Ross: An Alcoholic's Journey also is available as an eBook.

Acknowledgments

© Ross Fitzgerald 2013

First published in Australia in 1994

eBook edition 2013

eBook produced and published by Chris Griffith

Published in print by Angus & Robertson, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, 25 Ryde Road, Pymble, Sydney, NSW, 2073, Australia

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

Illustrations: Davida Allen

National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Author: Fitzgerald, Ross, 1944–

Title: Soaring: eBook edition/Ross Fitzgerald.

ISBN: 978-0-9873253-1-0

Subjects: Fitzgerald, Ross, 1944–

Fiction. Romance. Fantasy. Australiana.

For more information about this eBook, or to provide feedback about the publication, please contact the author at [e-mail] or visit www.rossfitzgerald.com.

Each day death strikes and yet each day we live as though we were immortal.

THE MAHABHARATA

Literature is a kind of revenge.

MARIO VARGAS LLOSA

Prologue

Pandion, king of Athens, seeing that Tereus the foreign prince who had come to their aid with his troops was rich and powerful, gave him his daughter’s hand in marriage. But neither the Graces nor the angels, who bestow their blessings upon brides, were present at the wedding ceremony.

Furies, who lit the pair upon their way with torches stolen from a funeral procession, prepared the marriage bed, and the cursed screech-owl (in south-east Queensland, perhaps a tawny frogmouth) brooded over their house, perched on the roof above the marriage chamber. Such were the omens when Procne and Tereus married. Little knowing what impended, the people rejoiced with their prince and princess. As the royal pair themselves gave thanks to God, a proclamation was made. The day on which Pandion’s daughter had married was to be celebrated as a public holiday as was later the birthday of their son Itys. So blind are humans, regarding what is truly to their good.

Now five years had passed, as the sun rolled on its ordained course, when Procne spoke coaxingly to her husband: ‘If you love me at all, send me to see my sister Philomela, or else have her come here. You can promise my father that she will not be long away from home. A chance to see Philomela will be a magnificent gift to me.’ Tereus gave orders for ships to be launched and, with the help of sail and oars, came to the harbours of Pandion’s land, where he disembarked and greeted his father-in-law, the king. Explaining the reason for his coming, Tereus delivered his wife’s message, promising that if her sister were allowed to visit, she would not he kept away too long. Suddenly Philomela appeared, richly attired in gorgeous robes, but richer still in her own beauty. She was like descriptions one hears of the beautiful spirits who haunt the depths of the forest, if only they wore ornaments and garments such as hers. A flame of desire was kindled in Tereus’s heart, flaring up as quickly as the fire that burns dry leaves. Her beauty indeed was excuse enough, but he was further excited by his own passionate nature, for the people of his country are an emotional race. Burning with ardour, his impulse was to bribe the attendants who guarded her, to undermine her nurse’s loyalty, to tempt the girl herself with lavish gifts, or else to seize her and carry her off, and then to defend his prize by savage fighting. There was nothing his unbridled passion would not dare. His heart could not contain the fires that burned within. Impatient of delay, he eagerly delivered Procne’s message, and put forward his own plea under cover of hers. Ardent desire made him eloquent, and whenever his request seemed too pressing, he declared that Procne would have it so. He enforced his arguments with tears, as if his wife had entrusted him with those as well.

How blind we mortals are! The very acts which furthered his wicked scheme made people believe that Tereus was a devoted husband. Moreover, Philomela shared his eagerness. She coaxed her father to let her visit Procne, and begged him, as he hoped for her welfare, to agree to a plan, which was in fact entirely contrary to it. Tereus gazed at the princess and in anticipation held her in his arms already. As he watched her kissing Pandion, throwing her arms about his neck, the sight of all this goaded him to greater frenzy, and added food and fuel to his desire. When he saw her embrace the king, how he wished that he were her father! Yet even had he been so, his desires would have been equally wicked. The king yielded to the wishes of his two daughters; Philomela, overjoyed, thanked her father and supposed, poor girl, that his decision was a victory for herself and her sister, when in fact it was to be the ruin of them both.

A royal banquet was spread upon the tables, and golden glasses were filled with wine. After the feast, the guests returned to peaceful slumbers. But though he had gone to bed, Tereus, too restless to sleep, was in a fever of love for Philomela and lay, recalling her face, her movements, her hands, and imagining the parts he had not seen to be exactly as he would have them.

At dawn, when Tereus was on the point of departure, Pandion clasped his hand and with tears in his eyes said, 'My dear son, I beg you, by your honour, by God above, and by the relationship that binds us, to watch over her like a father, and to send back soon to me, this dear girl who is the comfort of my old age. The time will drag for me, all the while she is away. And you, Philomela, come back quickly. It is enough that your sister is so far away from home.’ With these injunctions, he kissed his daughter goodbye, crying as he did so. He asked them to give him their hands as a pledge that they would keep their promise and then, joining their hands together, begged them to remember to convey his greetings to his absent daughter and to his grandson Itys. Sobs choked him, so that he could scarcely manage to utter a last farewell: his mind was filled with anxious foreboding.

(Adapted from Ovid’s Metamorphosis, Book VI)

Part I

Rodney

Do you know when the vernacular is for a priest?

A sky pilot.

Drawing by Davida Allen

Chapter 1

The future is hidden, even from the men who made it.

ANATOLE FRANCE

There is nothing more peaceful than to float. To hang at rest.

Do you remember that as a kid I had a dream? I dreamt I could fly. I dreamt it so often and vividly I knew it really was possible to make that dream come true. I wanted to be as free as I could. Nobody wants to be in a cage.

When I had those vivid flying dreams, did I ever tell you, Amanda, I didn’t fly like Superman with my arms out in front of me? Nor did I flap my wings to fly. I wasn’t a bird. I was a boy with wings. I used to sit on the cliffs over Coogee Beach to watch the seagulls skimming by and marvel at the aerodynamics of their design. I still watch birds. Galahs do the most spectacular acrobatics. It’s their speciality. You watch them the next time you have a chance.

The closest thing to freedom is how I’d describe hang-gliding.

My half-sister — you met her once at Brighton Beach — married a sky diver. One of those blokes who fall out of airplanes and drop for thousands and thousands of feet just waiting for the umbrella to open. One day it didn’t. A Saturday, I recall.

In a way he was insane — not hampered by imagination or fear of consequences. That’s why he died I suppose.

I’m recording this in the car on the way to Southport — talking into my new pocket-size Lanier. It records twenty-five minutes at one go. I either hold it in my hand or leave it on the passenger seat. It’s ten-thirty on Thursday night. I’m doing about one hundred and ten kilometres on the highway. I’ll try and be as honest and frank as possible with all this, but it would be good to go over it again, I guess, maybe after I’ve sent it up to you and you’ve extracted what you can.

I think probably the best way to start is to go back to when the affair started. Now, that was at the time that Scurrilous was grinding to a halt under pressure from about a dozen writs and a failing bank account. I’d left Sandra at that stage. I’d left her about halfway through publishing Scurrilous. I guess, mainly, the pressure of the magazine was so great, I just couldn’t do it properly at home. We were at each other’s throats. So I moved out and moved into my office at Scurrilous and I was sleeping on top of my desk. I had a little bed roll I’d put down every night. In the morning I’d roll it up and put all the papers, the fax machine, and the Macintosh back on top and do Scurrilous.

At one stage there, I don’t know how it came about, but I used to see Philomena quite regularly, both at our house and at her parents’ place in Hill End where Sandra and I went with Wendy, our daughter, quite often. So it was kind of no big deal that at one stage there I said to Philly would she like to come up to our little farm at Maleny for the weekend. I was going up with Wendy on my own, a bit of an attempt by Sandy and me to put some distance between us for the weekend, to let her have a break and sort herself out. So she agreed to that and we went up there.

Of course, the first night we were together — it’s such a small little cottage that after Wendy had gone to sleep and everything, we bedded down on the floor, with a big mattress, with quite a space between us. She was Aunty Philomena, Aunt Philly. So she slept on the other side. It just sort of happened from there and of course we ended up making love on the floor of the cottage that night. It was really on from then. For the next three or four months, she would come over to Scurrilous a couple of nights a week and we’d make love on the desk that the next day I’d work at. It was difficult at that time because she was living with her parents, so I could never go down there and see her. All our meetings at the beginning were very clandestine. I never wanted anyone at Scurrilous to know what was going on, so she always had to come there when all the staff had gone home. It was furtive, but exciting for that very reason. We used to go away every second or third weekend, somewhere in the car and stay at a motel in the country — even as far as Rockhampton or Yeppoon.

After three or four months I was missing my daughter enormously. I can honestly say I still wasn’t all that upset about Sandra having gone, but in some strange way my sexual ardour for her had increased. Having an affair with her sister had more than a bit to do with that I guess, but I was still extremely wary of Sandra. Emotionally Sandy’s a strong woman, quite dominating and controlling at all times. Even though she plays the cello, which seems to me such a soft instrument, she’s quick to anger. Very quick. And I tend to duck that a lot. But I was really keen to be with Wendy again, and I’d found this new kind of rekindling of my sexual desire for Sandra. I thought, well, this is enough reason to get together again. And I could see Scurrilous was failing quite badly at this stage. In fact I knew that the next month was probably going to be the last, and so I thought, ‘I’ll move back home,’ which seemed like the natural thing.

I remember, then, telling Philomena one night that this was it: that I’d made a decision, and whilst I was still enormously attracted to her, and I really wanted to continue the relationship in some way, I was going to move back home. Naturally, she was a bit upset. ‘No’ always exasperated Philly. It made her like a child only the more determined to get what she wanted, but I think she felt that well, maybe if he does this for a while he’ll see that he doesn’t want to be with her in the end and he’ll come back to me. It was funny, because at this time Philomena went and got a flat. She moved out of home and got a little flat — right in Brisbane, overlooking the Botanical Gardens. This meant that it was very easy for me to duck out and to have the affair with her while living with Sandy at Spring Hill, something that would have been impossible before, while she was living at home — even though Hill End’s not very far away. Looking back on it now, I realise she was setting the flat up with that in mind. But I thought then, that it was something that she was going to do anyway, whether she was with me or not. She was going to move out of home. Because at this stage she would have been ... I suppose about twenty-five.

She moved into this flat without really getting that upset about us and I moved back home to Spring Hill. I saw her for quite a while, maybe a few months after that. I’d go over a couple of nights a week and we’d make the most incredibly passionate love. So there was this high pressure situation with all the attendant guilt of driving two or three kilometres to the sister’s little flat in the city, having this emotional outpouring for that concentrated two or three hours and then having to get back home before midnight.

This went on for two or three months. I don’t know what happened. Without having the intensity die one bit, I started to feel really strange at one stage from the pressure of having to lie to Sandra about what was going on. It was really starting to get to me. I found it more and more difficult to come home and tell Sandra that I’d been out at work. It was affecting me quite badly. Then I told Philomena one night that this was really hard for me. I said, ‘I think we should give it a break. We should just forget it for a while. I’ll spend a period of time at home with Sandy and we’ll just see what happens. You go out and be with someone else, you know. Have another boyfriend or whatever.’ And that night, that night she agreed. She cried a bit and I felt sad and upset. But we both agreed that’s what we’d do. We didn’t contact each other for about a week. And then I remember the phone rang. Sure enough, it was Philomena. It wasn’t just ‘I want us to get back together,’ or ‘What can we do?’ It was ‘If you’re not over here in ten minutes, I’m going to ring Sandra and tell her everything that’s happened.’ That’s the first time I’d had any negative feeling towards her. I felt quite angry that she was blackmailing me, even though the prospect of going over there for a few hours was — well, I felt ecstatic about it. I’d missed her like crazy during the last week. But at the same time, as I say, I felt . . . not bitter, but angry, just a bit angry at her. Something set itself up at just that point, which I never really forgave her for or came to terms with. She was blackmailing me. Even though it was a sweet sort of blackmail. So we ended up continuing. Except there was this other element to it, an element of coercion. Albeit very faintly. And I guess that was always in the back of my mind. Yet we continued, for the next two years I suppose, even a little bit longer than that, two-and-a-half years, carrying on this insane affair lived out in these short sharp bursts of exalted and heightened passion. The excitement of dodging Sandra, the close shaves. It really tore us about, but we both seemed to thrive on it. There were no guilt feelings even though Philomena kept saying she wanted to marry me and she wanted to have some children and all that stuff. And she wanted — she was in for the long haul, even though whilst I could see myself having a lifetime affair with her, I could never totally give myself to her.

She was working then for the local freebie rag that’s distributed in your letterbox twice a week, The City Mail. The Brisbane Progress Association had set it up in opposition to The Argus, a weekly. They were getting a lot of ads and they were doing pretty well. Philly had started off as a sort of shit-kicker and secretary with the Mail and in the end she was the lynch-pin of their organisation. When she died they wrote a couple of obituaries. Now, looking back, I think that she was actually having an affair with the sub-editor, a bloke called Bob Neal, a very strong Catholic with a tribe of kids. He was short and dumpy and not at all good-looking, a most unlikely man for her to have an affair with. He was something of a father figure for her, even though she didn’t need that — she was incredibly close to her parents, especially Harry, Harrabolos actually, the Greek father, and this was one of the big problems of her life, that she could never sever her ties from her parents properly. Harry and Moira, the mother — she’s Canadian — always treated her as the little girl who never grew up because she was the youngest of the six kids in the family. She always stayed tied to their apron strings, yet she had this odd thing with this bloke, Bob Neal. She showed me a couple of love poems that he wrote her. She maintained they were never having an affair, but even if it wasn’t actually sexual, they were obviously very close. He delivered the oration at her funeral. He was very, very close to her and she was close to him.

Anyway, she was working there. She was a dedicated worker, very thorough. She would carry out any job she was given effectively, execute it exactly. If she couldn’t do it properly, she would say so. She was absolutely reliable in a working situation. Never missed a day, always there on time, well organised. She always had her clothes ironed, ready to go in the morning. She’d do that the night before and have them hanging ready to get into. She’d have her breakfast waiting, put out the night before, so she could get up in the morning and just eat it. This two-bedroomed flat she’d bought was very close to the freeway that runs through Brisbane. Even though it overlooked the very leafy parts of the Botanical Gardens it was too close to the main drag. It was three storeys up and the main windows of her bedroom used to face onto the freeway so you got a lot of traffic noise. In the beginning, I tried to tell her not to buy it and to go for something that was a little bit more down-market, but in a nicer part of town, like a really quiet, treed area in Rosalie or Paddington, or in Fernberg Road close to Government House, but she wanted to be in the city; she bought it half and half with her parents, and she always listened to her parents’ advice on stuff like that, rather than me. Which was silly of her in a way, because I’ve always made much better financial and real estate decisions than her parents ever could.

So I was very critical of that little flat at first sight. But when she bought it, I turned around and said, ‘Oh yeah, it’s great.’ I used to buy her things, paintings to hang on the wall, little ornaments, stuff like that. She got this red Corolla — called Harry, after her Dad — about the same time. It was a little nineteen ninety-five one that she bought off her best friend’s boyfriend who was a used car fixer — a mechanic. I can remember saying to Philly not long after that that it was a silly car for her to have because she had money in the bank: she was a great saver, she was very stingy, she was a scrooge with money. She had about eight or nine grand in the bank and she drove around in this horrible little car! It was pretty reliable and a good buy in the sense that old Corollas are quite a good investment but I always used to say to her, ‘You’ve got no protection if you have a crash. And you really flog that machine.’ She did drive fast. Her whole family do: Sandra’s like that, and her brother Roger too. They all drive far too fast, except Moira who doesn’t drive at all and Harry, who owns a milkbar on Wickham Terrace. Even though he’d been a state government driver in Melbourne, I don’t think he taught them properly, or perhaps they wouldn’t learn. Actually, when they were growing up he was a chef. It was only later in life he became a driver. For years, Harry used to like me a lot, treated me almost like another son. Now, if ever he sees me, he pretends I don’t exist. Anyway, I always used to worry, because while Philomena was very sharp and always quick and attentive, I used to think she drove too fast and I had this strong feeling that she was a bit accident-prone. The opposite of her Dad who always drove slowly, painfully slow. So I was very critical of her car and tried to get her to sell it and buy an old Volvo like mine or at least a Holden — or an old English car, something really solid. But she wouldn’t, mainly because it meant she might have to spend a bit more money. I think that was her main objection that she was going to have to spend a little bit of extra money.

Getting back to our affair. We would steal weekends here and there and I would tell Sandra I was going to Sydney or Melbourne on work. Sandra never seemed to notice that we were both away at the same time (at least she never commented on it) and we would often go and visit people. I don’t know if we actually ever went to visit David Ford’s gallery. But I think I took her there once, when I was staying at David’s place, to look at his art collection. But I don’t know that David was there. I’m not sure if he actually ever met her. While we were in Sydney, we used to go up a bit to Carl Hughes’s place at Blackheath, in the Blue Mountains. When I was putting together Carlo’s TV show, ‘Radical Alternatives’, just after Scurrilous I was working in Sydney and I often used to fly back up to Brisbane on the weekend to see Sandra and Wendy. I would often come back a night earlier and spend the Friday night with Philly at her flat, and then duck onto Spring Hill the next day. But when we were in Sydney we would sometimes drive up to Carlo’s place in the Blue Mountains together. I think we went up there three or four times maybe. This was funny because Carlo and Jackie Hughes were quite critical of my affair. In the end Jackie said she didn’t want Philomena to come again. Otherwise she couldn’t look Sandra in the face in the future. We could never be really public about it, even away from Brisbane.

Two of the characteristics, the personality traits that Philomena had, along with all her family, were an incredibly sharp temper and a tendency to depression. She was never a big drinker or anything, but she and I used to really enjoy smoking grass together. It was an aphrodisiac for us: it used to work amazingly well. Most of the times I went round there we’d have a joint first of all. Then, soon as we’d finished the joint, we’d just look at each other, rip each other’s clothes off and start clawing.

With Philly it was the most sexual thing I can remember— I had feelings for her while making love that I’d never felt with anyone else before. It was like a transcendent, almost mystical, experience