The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt Read Online Free PDF

label spell out BEATRIX . I trace it with my finger. Underneath, in smaller letters, is written © 1975 M. Patterson.
    I did not tell M. Patterson the truth. I’m not sure why. I do have a video cassette recorder. It is in a corner of my bedroom, underneath a small television, the two of them perched on a small, old wooden table, designed perhaps as a plant stand, or an occasional table. I rarely use either of the machines, but they are there, in that private room, just for me.
    She doesn’t need to know everything.
     
    I play the film on the machine in my bedroom. It is not a documentary, it’s – how best to describe it? – a portrait, or an improvisation; Beatrix jazz. It’s very beautiful. I see myself in it. Literally: there are images, parts of paintings, some of them paintings of me. It is full of colour and movement. Like Beatrix. There’s a bit I love, particularly, where the camera pans across a black-and-white photograph of her. The photograph has colours and lines washing across it; it’s alive with patterns drawn or painted or scratchedonto the film – that must be how it’s done; shapes jump and judder across her face, across the screen. I press the button on the remote control unit to pause the video as it pans across the photograph. Her face – partly obscured by the colours, and by cigarette smoke as it often was in life – is just as I remember her, from our time in Sydney, that glorious time. Perhaps I took this photograph, with Beatrix’s camera? I peer in closer at it, trying to recall, until I am so close to the screen that I can’t see it at all.
    I move back, sit on my bed, staring at the stilled image on the screen. The remote control is in my hand; I hold it at arms-length, and press the button with the symbol most likely to mean eject . The tape slides out of the machine, spine towards me. I see the words I read on the side of the tape repeated on the spine label: BEATRIX © 1975 M. Patterson.
    M. Patterson: sly bitch with a muckraking agenda, or genuinely interested? Either way, with this film she may have bewitched me. If I’m not careful I’ll find myself telling her the story of my life.

THE SOUND THAT BEES MAKE
    I f I were to write the story of my life it would begin, in a nutshell, like this: I am Helena Margaret Gaunt; I call myself Lena. I was born, the only child of Australian parents, in Singapore, where my father chased the riches of the booming rubber and export businesses after escaping the humdrum of work as a clerk in the bank in Tambellup, two hundred-odd miles – two days by train – south and east of Perth.
    I was a solitary child, lacking companions my own age, but I was not lonely. I was happy in my own company, dancing to my own drum. My earliest memories are of making music, patterning music. They linger, these memories, watery, hazy, in the back of my mind.
    I remember opening the door into Mother’s bedroom, the dark back bedroom in the little brick bungalow in Singapore. I pulled the rattan stool from the corner, dragged it across the floor until it was next to Mother’s dressing table. I clambered up onto the stool and reached across, past the dressing table set, the crystal tray, the dish with Mother’s rings, the perfume bottle with its bulbousting-ting lid. I reached across, and took the tortoiseshell comb.
    Someone must have taught me this: I took a piece of thin tissue paper, wrapped it around Mother’s comb. I held the papered comb to my lips and hummed. The paper vibrated; the air formed bubbles that moved as waves between the tissue of paper and the teeth of the comb.
    I hummed quietly at first. The comb made the humming strange, changed it. I hummed into the comb; then I pulled it away and repeated the refrain – the sound was softer, quieter.
    I could not have been more than four years old. But I remember the feeling of my lips, buzzing against the paper and the comb.
     
    One time in my life – only one time, long ago and far away – I