A trip to Melbourne is taken under sufferance these days.
The thought of traffic queues, roadworks, driver madness and potholes is enough to make me enjoy cleaning out the roof gutters instead.
But when a favourite author is in town, there’s no escape. The journey and the ensuing crush of humanity must be endured.
This is why, on Mother’s Day, we booked seats on the 7.01am Sunday train to Melbourne. Reserved seating and a $3.60 return fare for pensioners would soften the journey into the heart of madness. Or so I thought.
American fiction writer Lauren Groff was appearing as a guest at the Melbourne Writer’s Festival at the State Library. I discovered her virtuoso words after picking up her short story collection Florida from a seat where the Chief Gardener had left it while undertaking another bout of vicious weeding.
Florida is a collection of stories about people living on the edge. It could be the physical edge of a shanty town or a raging storm, the psychological edge of a disintegrating relationship or the edge of homelessness. The stories are set in a fetid, snake-infested town full of sinkholes, swamps and monsters in her home state of Florida.
Groff’s prose style is dreamlike and often breaks the rules. If you’re a grammarian, you won’t get past page one of a Groff book.
In Groff’s stories, Florida is a wild and exotic setting for her human dramas; each one is different but shared.
At the State Library, she did not disappoint. She read passages from her books; she was warm, intense and unpredictable and seemed to exist on the imagined edge of chaos, just like her stories.
She reminded us Florida is the world capital of book-banning, with more than 4000 books now taken out of libraries and schools, including dictionaries, because of references to sex and gender. Such are the mental cages some people force themselves and their children to inhabit.
Afterwards, we re-entered the chaotic edge of the real world. A pro-Palestine demonstration on the library steps came as a slap. Chants were raised, flags waved and fists pumped as loud-hailer slogans ricocheted around Sir Redmond Barry’s statue and across the lawns of the old colonial building. All the while, shoppers meandered oblivious to the passion; cars and trams full of John Brack’s people passed by, and police stood watching with folded arms.
We then had a Mother’s Day lunch with our urbanised daughter in a restaurant fizzing with excited wine-fuelled families and clattering plates.
At last, we walked down Platform 7 at Southern Cross Station to our waiting return train and the hope of some space and peace.
We walked the entire length of the platform to find every carriage packed to the brim with people standing in the corridors. We held our breath and nudged our way into the crush to find ourselves standing in a space between the toilet door and a man on a double seat with two small children fidgeting on his knee. I stood face to face with another man holding a tray of takeaway curry. His eyes searched in vain for somewhere to sit and eat. Good luck, I thought.
Children and adults slurped sugar drinks and sat on the corridor floor along the length of the carriage. The Chief Gardener and I chose to stand because if we sat on the floor, we might never get up again.
We remained standing until Kilmore East when the man with two fidgety children squeezed his way off the train with an audible exhale.
At Seymour, we disembarked to get on an equally crowded bus. We arrived home in Shepparton to breathe in our own space again.
I’ve had enough of life on the edge. I’m staying firmly in the centre of things for a while.
John Lewis is a former journalist at The News.