God of Speed Read online

  PRAISE FOR LUKE DAVIES

  God of Speed

  ‘… an extraordinary novel that shudders with psychosis, drama and sex.’ Time Out Sydney

  ‘God of Speed is a vivid recreation of that extraordinary aviator, film mogul, womaniser, billionaire, political meddler, drug addict and recluse, Howard Hughes. Davies projects his impressive imagination into the mind of … Hughes and takes readers on a wild ride.’ The Australian

  ‘God of Speed is in fact a poet’s novel, full of intense local realisations and finely wrought patterns of language.’ The Age

  ‘… everyone should know about Luke Davies because he is, on the strength of God of Speed and his earlier novel, Candy, already a major figure among Australian novelists.’ Australian Review of Books

  Candy

  ‘One of the finest novels released in Australia for many years … it is profoundly moving.’ The Australian

  ‘A real bolt from the blue … brilliant and harrowing.’ Herald Sun

  Isabelle the Navigator

  ‘Isabelle Airly is a triumph of Davies’ poetic imagination … prose that tempts you to laugh and cry at the same time, but has you gasping with delight instead.’ The Age

  ‘… a stunningly beautiful narrative.’ The Bulletin

  Totem

  ‘Davies is unquestionably our greatest love poet ever; anyone who cares about verse cannot afford to ignore him.’ The Age

  ‘Terrific, sustained, ebullient and buoyant … I think “Totem Poem” will come to be recognised along with Slessor’s “Five Bells” as the great Australian long poem, and one of those rare poems that praise and celebrate …’ Judith Beveridge

  OTHER BOOKS BY LUKE DAVIES

  Four Plots For Magnets (poetry)

  Absolute Event Horizon (poetry)

  Candy (novel)

  Running With Light (poetry)

  Isabelle the Navigator (novel)

  The Entire History of Architecture … and other love poems

  (limited edition poetry chapbook)

  Totem (poetry)

  Luke Davies is the author of two novels, Isabelle the Navigator and the cult bestseller Candy, which was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and has been published in Britain and the United States and translated into German, Spanish, Hebrew, French and Greek. A film starring Heath Ledger was released in 2006 and won Davies Best Adapted Screenplay at the AFI Awards.

  Davies was awarded the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal for Poetry in 2004. He has published four books of poetry, including Running With Light which was the winner of the Judith Wright Poetry Prize, and Totem, which won the John Bray Poetry Prize and the Age Book of the Year Award.

  GOD

  OF

  SPEED

  GOD

  OF

  SPEED

  LUKE DAVIES

  This edition published in 2009

  First published in 2008

  Copyright © Luke Davies 2008

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 percent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Earlier versions of some chapters from this book appeared in Certifiable Truths: Stories of Love and Madness, Jane Messer (Ed.), 1998, The Penguin Century of Australian Stories, Carmen Bird (Ed.), 2000, and Best Australian Stories 2003, Peter Craven (Ed.), 2003.

  Extracts on pages 7 and 255 are from John Berryman’s The Dream Songs, Faber & Faber, 1993, and are reproduced with permission.

  Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders of non-original material reproduced in this text. In cases where these efforts were unsuccessful, the copyright holders are asked to contact the publisher directly.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  The Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available

  from the National Library of Australia

  www.librariesaustralia.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 74175 760 6

  Set in 11/16 pt Fournier MT by Midland Typesetters, Australia Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  INN ON THE PARK,

  LONDON, JUNE 9, 1973

  … EVENING …

  CONTENTS

  THE EMPIRE OF MY BED

  I

  ROUND-THE-WORLD RECORD , 1938

  VERY MANAGEABLE CONTROLS

  AIRPLANES IN HEAVEN

  I KNEW THE NAMES OF ALL THE BIRDS

  STATISTICS ARE VERY HELPFUL

  HOW EACH THING FITS

  Memo, 1958: No matter what

  THE FERROUS ORIGINS OF DESIRE

  A DIFFERENT SORT OF PRESSURE IN THE GROIN

  KATHARINE ON THE WING

  THE HORSE WHO LIVES ON IN THE STABLES OF THE INFINITE

  Memo, 1951: Coats

  VISTA DEL ARROYO , 1923

  VEINS

  THE ELLA-BONE IS CONNECTED TO THE BILLIE-BONE

  JEAN HARLOW HAD THE KNOWLEDGE

  THE TENDENCY OF GRAVITY

  THE LUXURY OF A COHERENT REALITY

  RICOCHET

  COOL ARE THE FAIRWAYS AT NIGHT

  THE BILLIE-BONE IS CONNECTED TO THE WORLD-BONE

  THE HANDSOME YOUNG MEN

  THE END OF HISTORY

  FLUSH RIVETING

  TRANSCONTINENTAL RECORD , JANUARY 14, 1936

  FUNDAMENTALS OF OXYGEN

  I HIT THE GROUND RUNNING

  II

  ROUND-THE-WORLD RECORD , 1938

  OASIS OF BLOSSOM AND LIGHT

  LESSENING THE RISK OF FAILURE

  GORGEOUS GIRLS LOOKING FOR SCREEN BREAKS

  THRUMMING

  FORTY FATHOMS DEEP

  FAITH HAD THE RANGE OF THE PALACE

  IN-FLIGHT ENTERTAINMENT

  IF I TELL YOU I HAD SUCKED ON JANE GREER ’ S DELICATE NIPPLE

  BAY OF PLENTY

  DEBS

  THE ANSWERING ECHO

  UNCROWDED HORIZONS

  Memo, 1958: Delivering film canisters to the bungalow

  THE EMPEROR OF EMPIRIN

  COUNT OLEG THE BRAVE

  SELF-MEDICATION

  BUT THERE WERE STILL MOMENTS

  ONE COULD IMAGINE HER WETNESS

  A DELICATE OPERATION

  MULBERRY BUSH

  AS IF FOREVER

  III

  ROUND-THE-WORLD RECORD , 1938

  WEDDING BELLS BURIED IN THE CALIFORNIA STATUTES

  THE STREAMING OF THE LIGHT

  Memo, 1961: Jean’s cat is missing

  HIGHER TRUTHS OF THE DESERT

  THE CLEAN MEN

  BRONZE BELL TRAVELING THROUGH SPACE

  Memo, 1967: Malarial with anxiety

  YOU GET THE THING YOU WANT , BUT …

  NAKED IN THE EPOCH OF THE CLOTHES

  Memo, 1959: On retrieving my hearing-aid cord from the cabinet

  THE SHEET BLEW ALL AROUND HER LIKE A SAIL

  NIXONBURGER

  Memo to Bob Maheu, June 6, 1968

  PLANETS FILLED WITH MEN

  THE EARLY BIRD

  THE NATURE OF ACCIDENTS

  BLUEPRINT FOR CHANG
E

  IV

  ROUND-THE-WORLD RECORD , 1938

  COULD I CUT THE ENGINES

  Memo, 1961: Summer

  PROCEDURAL PHILOSOPHY FOR THE LANGUAGE OF POWER

  Memo to Bob Maheu, 1966: Helicopters

  MALEVOLENCE OF MICROBES

  Memo, 1961: Backflow of germs

  STEAM RISING OFF ME

  THE FIRST AND THE LAST

  I COULD NOT WORK OUT THE SEQUENCE OF EVENTS

  THE PHYSICAL BODY

  NICARAGUA , DECEMBER 23, 1972

  Memo on memos, 1973

  V

  ROUND-THE-WORLD RECORD , 1938

  NO MORE SLEEPS

  POSTSCRIPT

  SOME BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THE EMPIRE OF MY BED

  FUCKING, AND FLYING, were the best, the most solid, of all the things I did.

  It’s been so many years. I have lost track of almost everything.

  But fucking and flying: I was like a god. There were sparks coming off me.

  I will fly again. And very soon. It is cleaner than fucking and involves less people.

  It is time to branch out, or else what would I say to myself: that in the end I did nothing?

  I’ve called Jack Real to London, a fighter ace, a Lockheed man. In the fifties we flew together, talked endlessly of airplanes. It is always good to find someone as obsessed with aviation as oneself. But my trusted servants, my clean, reliable men the Mormons, don’t care for him. They see him as an intrusion into our “situation”. He says, Howard, you can regain some control over your life. I believe him.

  He is sleeping one floor below. He is a little tired from the flight, Los Angeles to New York and across the Atlantic here to London, my new tax-exempt home. When he wakes there is so much I have to tell him. What I had. Where it all went; time, most of all. I have seen no one but the Mormons for more than a decade. But Jack Real was like a friend.

  I have been reading once again, and with great pleasure, all the aviation magazines. Airplanes are so extraordinarily improbable. I am enamored all over again, of horsepower and wingspan, pitch and roll and yaw rate, thrust and range and endurance and ceiling, maximum payload, manifold pressure, density altitude, glide-path angle. And so much circuitry holding it all together! There’s been so much advancement this decade and a half. What a glory of sleekness was this war in Vietnam, and how lovely, how exquisite is industry, from the simplest turning of the lathe to the most gargantuan of turbines.

  From a distance, from a great height, the whole damned country hums.

  What will I say to Jack when he wakes? I’ve been incommunicado for too long. I talk too much inside my head. Sometimes I forget whether I spoke it or thought it. It will be good to get the words out. It will be good to talk, long hours of talk, something a little more complex than the Mormon instructions, bark bark bark, solid men but we don’t, we don’t, we don’t … hit it off. At that level. Jack Real on the other hand.

  On the phone last week we were tossing up, Jack and I, between the Hawker Siddeley 748, a beautiful turboprop, and the new De Havilland 125. All the information at hand, spread before me on the empire of my bed. Color photography—now there’s something else, how lovely, how exquisite, what a glory of sleekness. Even the printing: even the smell of the brochures.

  On the phone I said, Jack, I’m excited.

  He said, Howard, it will be wonderful to see you again.

  We are old men now. This afternoon he sat by the bed and drank a scotch on the rocks. I broke with habit; instead of bottled water at room temperature, I ordered from the Mormons an iced lemonade. Lash out, I thought. It disturbed me, the way the droplets of condensation beaded and pooled on the bedside table as we sat and talked. But not so much that I did anything about it. His very presence was a liberation!

  The Mormons are very stiff with Jack. I winked at him: let them be. If they had it their way, I’d never move from this bed. A while back, we were in Vancouver, before the tax deadline ran out, and I tried to open the blinds. They thought I’d gone mad, but I just wanted to see the sky.

  We all ready for the morning then? he said, late this afternoon.

  You bet your bottom dollar we are, I said.

  The bottom dollar. What a funny concept!

  He drained the scotch and swirled the ice. I knew I would have to let him go to bed. He was almost nodding off in his chair.

  Any time you wake, I’ll be awake, I said. I’ve given the men instructions to let you in.

  I’ll keep it in mind, he said. And if not, I’ll see you in the morning.

  Bright and early. We’ve an awful lot of catching up to do.

  Of course we do. And I look forward to it.

  When he left I felt a bursting sensation, simply too much anticipation. I slid open the bedside drawer, took out my medicine tin—a bright red cross on its lid, always easy to recognize—and prepared an injection, to slow down the pressure, to separate the concepts.

  The ritual of it all. So bare, so methodical, so unadorned. The pulling back of the plunger, the spurt of blood into the liquid, the plunge forward, the meticulous control of the fingers, the withdrawal, the dabbing of the droplet, the flushing of the syringe in the glass of water. Once long ago, in the production hangar at the Culver City plant, I could pull apart a carburetor so effortlessly, in my business suit, with my sleeves rolled up, just one of the team. I could talk with the men. Some point or other I was trying to make. The noise of industry all around me, but my focus so pure, each task laid out. To be so absolutely present, so undistracted. So I slow down the pressure and separate the concepts, and find a vein.

  It is so very good to breathe.

  Eventually I drift to sleep. I call it sleep. My dreams are of the sky, a blinding blue, and the towering cumulus I could never locate for the aerial shots in Hell’s Angels. Without clouds the viewer has no sense of the movement of an aircraft: the shots remain static, the plane seems motionless.

  In dreams, too, a clear blue sky devoid of clouds can mean only death. Once I was obsessed with numbers and statistics. Once I knew the average weight of all the clouds around the world in all the skies at any given time. (Sixteen million tons.) Then for a long time I knew nothing.

  Technology. Now there’s another thing.

  It will be nice, with Jack, the number of times we will get to begin with, Remember. Remember when. Remember this. Because I don’t talk to the Mormons like that. Jack Real, on the other hand. Did I say that already?

  I

  “… as if everything in America had wings …”

  —Berryman, The Dream Songs

  ROUND-THE-WORLD RECORD, 1938

  I WAS NO Fred Astaire, but on July 9, 1938, the night before I took off to fly all the way around the globe, I danced with Katharine Hepburn at the Starlight Roof of the Waldorf-Astoria. So there’s seven or eight minutes of my life accounted for already. No Fred Astaire, and she no Ginger Rogers, but I loved nothing more than the feeling of my hand placed flat on the smooth skin between her shoulderblades as we ebbed and flowed among the other dancers. The utter simplicity of it, the peace I felt. I had the sense that my hand itself, rather than my mind, was soaking up a memory and storing it away for future use. That turns out in a way to be the case, for it is the coolness of her skin that I am remembering now. I have, of course, other memories of more intimate parts of her than that smooth cleft of back between two shoulder straps, but just at that moment, on that glamorous and distant night, the delicate pressure of my fingertips on her skin was what it meant to be a couple. It seemed that my future was contained there in my present.

  Now, thirty-five years later—and on the night before another significant flight, God bless us both, Jack—my mind goes back to that time when my limbs were more supple. It would do us not one whit of good to be able to predict the future, for nothing turned out the way I expected, and yet here I am, my bruises and scars intact.

  Kate would be an old woman now. I
was never one for old women, so I don’t imagine we would have gotten this far together, not with all the will in the world. That is irrelevant to the specifics of 1938, when it was entirely sufficient to believe in the eternal. Her perfume was like a promise of the oasis that lay ahead of us that night. We were out and about in the admiring crowd. The next day I’d be flying off to glory.

  Tomorrow, a more private kind of glory. No one here with whom to share it, no one but the unperfumed Mormons, or Jack Real, for whom I have much affection, but whose bare back I would not wish to touch. But I am dealing with my circumstances. And trying, at last, of course, to move beyond them.

  We spoke of so much, in bed the next morning, July 10, 1938, the sky so blue through the hotel window. How extraordinarily beautiful was Kate, even stripped of all make-up, even emerging bleary-eyed from her Howard-entangled sleep. I have never seen a greenness so transparent: it is as if the light reflecting off her irises illuminated the faint freckles on her nose. I thought she was in love with me. The very idea seems preposterous now.

  I’ll miss you, Kate, I said.

  She smiled and kissed me on the forehead. You be safe up there. I want you to be safe. And warm!