Introduction
Conservatory
Fact or Fiction: Who Knows, Who Cares
A Telephone Call for Genevieve Snow
Afterword
Copyright © Carmel Bird 1996. All rights reserved.
INTRODUCTION
IF ON THE STROKE OF MIDNIGHT you stand outside the bank in the High Street and feed some cash
to the hole in the wall, then press your ear to the automatic
teller, you will hear a story. The teller knows all the stories
of all the people hereabouts, and many other stories besides.
Forget the fact that midnight cannot be said to strike in these
parts, these days or nights. And the bells in the convent have
been silent since the nuns left and the Soil Conservation people
moved in. (Church bells were melted down in Russia to be used
for making guns.) The clock on the Town Hall is a huge digital
affair, the old Swiss mechanism and face having been sold to a
museum somewhere in Texas. So when I write and you read 'stroke
of midnight' you take it as a figure of speech with a grain of
salt, and you press your ear to the Automatic Teller and you get a story.
This book Automatic Teller is a collection of short pieces of prose, many of which have
been published before. They have been fashioned from my observations,
my imagination and my heart, and I see the stories and essays
as something like parts of a whole body. To build this body for
people who read the book, I have interleaved the parts with connective
tissue called 'context'. I am writing this part of the book on
a sunny autumn day in Melbourne. Beside me on the table is a white
jug of irises; the perfume of some ginger lilies fills the air;
Glenn Gould is playing 'The Moonlight Sonata'. I am writing with
the same fountain pen I have used for thirty years; the ink is
blue and I'm writing in a large notebook with a black and scarlet
cover. I'm curled up on a heap of cushions on the sofa beside
the table, and on the table, beside the irises, is a red plastic
basket containing copies of all the stories in Automatic Teller.
A teller, broadly speaking, is someone who tells tales or who
counts things out, and the word comes from a mighty old Old English
word. There is great beauty in the notion of telling beads while
saying prayers. The Automatic Teller machine outside the bank is one of those very useful modern things
that I use with pleasure, but that also give me pause for thought
because they are kind of spooky in a clunky, mechanical way. An
amusing television commercial showing people lurking inside the
Automatic Teller eating chocolate bars underlines the fact that there is nobody in there. It's nice to be able to get some cash in the middle
of the night, but I think it's also a lonely, cold and weird thing
to do. Once I met a dog called Taurus (people have met worse things)
at the teller in the early hours of the morning, and he followed
me home and wouldn't go away. So I called his owner who turned
out to be an astrologer who offered to tell my fortune.
You believe me, don't you? And clearly that is only the beginning
of the story. My point here is that when a reader opens a book
and begins to read, that reader enters into a contract with the
writer or the teller, a contract to go along with the story. The
reader is prepared to believe what is being told. The writer,
on the other hand, must be prepared to be convincing; even if
the story is one of wild fantasy it must contain within itself
the structure of its own credibility. This is a much more complex
question than a simple one of truth or falsehood. I suppose the
writer is a kind of confidence trickster whose job it is to get
the reader in. The more I write, the more interested I become
in the position of the teller, in the nature of the narrator.
Who is telling the story and why; and why should anybody listen.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez tells pretty wild stories, but such is
the confidence and depth of the narrative voice (and that in translation)
that I am hooked, convinced, delighted, transported. I would have
to say I love his sentences, his turn of phrase, his cast of mind.
I don't in fact care whether these things happened, or could happen
-- what I sense is that they are happening in his imagination,
and his words have the power to carry them to my imagination as
a matter of course. An intelligence, a voice is telling the story,
and the reader should pay attention because it is all very, very
interesting.
There's no shortage of stories that writers want to tell, no shortage
of plots and characters, but until the writer discovers or develops
the narrative voices in which to tell the stories, the stories
may never be heard or read.
In each of the pieces in this collection, I hope I have got the
voice that the story or the essay wants. Each piece is preceded
by a reflection on some aspect of the writing, and the reflections
make up the connective tissue. Stories don't just get written
out of the blue, they have a context in the life and mind of the
writer. Many of these pieces were commissioned for anthologies
or newspapers. Somebody rings up and asks for a certain number
of words -- sometimes fiction, sometimes non-fiction -- on some
topic or other, and away you go. Sometimes this call to write
something is a good opportunity to tell some tale I have been
wanting to tell. I heard someone in a gardening programme say
that you can put bulbs in the fridge for a while and then when
you take them out 'they imagine it's spring' and start sprouting.
Sometimes my ideas are on ice until an editor opens the fridge
and out they come, imagining it's spring. Sometimes the ideas
are released by a small ordinary event -- a friend sends me a
postcard and suddenly I know how to fashion the story that appears
in this collection as 'Major Butler's Kidneys'.
The narrative voice in 'Conservatory' comes from the Automatic Teller itself, although you may well ask whose is the voice that explains
how it is that you are listening to the voice of the Automatic Teller. I imagine that the first voice is perhaps just mine, but is
that ever possible? Some of the other stories - such as 'Reptile
Girl' and 'A Telephone Call for Genevieve Snow' -- are probably
coming from the Automatic Teller, although in the Genevieve Snow story there is a kind of monstrous
element called 'the voice'. But more of that later. I like to
think of the reader not as somebody looking at the pages of a
book, but as somebody who has their ear pressed at midnight to
the Automatic Teller in the High Street. (And bear in mind the fact that if you keep
your plastic cards in a wallet made from the skin of an eel, your
cards won't work in the teller machine.) Here goes:
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