You'll Be Sorry When I'm Dead (28 page)

The editor of the
Adelaide Review
, Christopher Pearson, was even less kind.

‘Ellis' behaviour is often infantile . . . he has got into the habit of believing that he'll be endlessly indulged and forgiven because he's a wordsmith and because he's a larger-than-life, larger-than-lunch character.'

Bob Ellis was slovenly, to put it mildly. He was overweight, his pants slouched moodily below his belly. His thinning hair was painstakingly combed to one side. He was famously covered in stains and gave off a curious aroma of caffeine and sweat and anxiety. ‘He used to be quite the ladies' man,' I was told on several occasions, usually by women who would punctuate the articulation with a dainty little shudder, to indicate that those days were well and truly over and they would have no trouble saying no were Ellis to ever come knocking at their door.

Yet photographs existed of him in his university years, a rake with mischievous eyes and sensual lips and there were even now moments, during a pointed wink or a glance upwards from a tightly gripped lectern, when that roué could be glimpsed again.

His writing was a sermon from the mount, delivered in a perfumed envelope flecked with spittle. Just take this 80th birthday message to Rupert Murdoch for a moment:

His pink-cheeked lapdog (David) Cameron has already lost 2014 by tripling university fees. And then he will be 83, with nowhere to go. And his mother will be 108 and still think him a shallow, bumptious disappointment to the memory of his father Keith, exposer of Gallipoli . . . He deserves no less. The Iraq adventure, which was to a great extent his project, has killed tens of thousands of children and driven into miserable exile millions of useful middle-class people including almost all of Iraq's dentists, levelled Babylon and looted or burned its glorious museums and libraries, irreplaceable now and ended the education of its women . . .

And he has done much to hobble the English language, making all political statement a corseted, evasive half-truth and most politicians (like Gillard) blitherers of cliché.

He deserves, at 80, his fate. Happy birthday, Rupert. May you sleep uneasily, my dread dark lord, tonight.

Parry, thrust, STAB STAB STAB MAIM, delicate skip, sob: that was the inestimably devastating prose of Ellis.

Given the venom in that brilliant pen of his there were bound to be detractors, and there were, there still are, hundreds of them, thousands. Ellis never failed to give them new fodder with which to undermine him. He slandered at will, found himself in a farcical legal stoush with conservative bullyboys Tony Abbott and Peter Costello (for daring to suggest that Costello's god-fearing wife, Tanya, had ever behaved in a fashion that was less than saintly), and inspired the loyal readers of the women's glossies into a chorus of condemnation and distasteful nose-wrinkling when he knocked up a screenwriter, apparently behind some flapping canvas marquee at a writers' festival. Matters were hardly improved when, in a misguided sense of defence, he claimed to be incapable of an erection. ‘Penetration was briefly achieved . . . before a not unprecedented bout of impotence . . . concluded by oral sex,' he read in a statement on radio station 2BL, causing a nation to as one murmur ‘TMI' and attempt gamely to swallow the rising vomit in their throats.

And yet there was something in his writing that knocked me down like a prizefighter. There were certain passages in
Goodbye Jerusalem
that made me weep, or gulp frantically for air as though drowning. His words would seethe and spark, burning across the page like scrub fire. Sometimes I would have to close his books and rest my head on their covers, overwhelmed. I feared that if I read further the pages would come alive like
The Neverending Story
and I would find myself riding a luckdragon named Falkor through the skies of Canberra.

Bob Ellis was punk, a simmering pot of vitriol who couldn't give a fuck about the opinions of others and felt so violently revolted by the state of Australian politics that he simply shoved aside convention and manners to say what desperately needed to be said. He cared not for the delicacies of libel laws, nor correct legal procedure. In mixed gatherings he would have no hesitation in referring to unsubstantiated rumour about the sexual predilections of certain Liberal politicians as though it was plain fact, as though he'd personally walked into a hotel room and found them in the act of having sex with a sheep or meddling with a child, and hurried out again with pardons and gasps. Occasionally he spoke the truth. Often he just said the first thing that came into his head, and backed it up with a great wash of feeling. Those who knew him well took his venting diatribes with a grain of salt. I devoured every word. He was a necessary raw wound on an otherwise sanitised Australian political landscape.

My obsession knew no bounds. In 2000 I became the owner of a perfect Staffordshire Bull-Terrier, six weeks old and caramel with a white neckerchief patch on her chest. I was instantly besotted, following her around the house with the devotion of a new parent.

I named her Bob Ellis.

‘To hell with gender rules!' I said, to anybody who would listen. ‘She is a she, and Bob Ellis the man is a he, and they exist in separate realms. Allow me my starry-eyed folly.'

When I told my usually very open-minded and leftwing friend Ben I had named my dog Bob Ellis, his face had twisted into a mask of venom.

‘Why?' he sneered. ‘Is your dog a cunt?'

This sort of thing would happen regularly when I took Bob Ellis to the park, or out walking. Strangers would approach with smiles, squatting down and murmuring hellos and asking requisite dog-owner questions about how old she was and wasn't she lovely and how did I get her darling little coat so soft. Some of them, after asking her name, would look up at me sharply with no small amount of horror and disgust.

‘Bob
Ellis
?' asked one very dear older lady.

I nodded.

‘Why would you . . . how could you do such a terrible thing to this sweet, sweet dog?'

She was backing off now, shaking her head, as though even being in our immediate vicinity would taint her with the bacteria of evil and cause her to burst into sudden flame. ‘Bob Ellis?? That's just . . . that's just cruel, that's nothing short of
cruel
.'

She was in tears when she finally walked away.

Sometimes I would try to cut this sort of confrontation off at the pass, to avoid the conflict, run the words together as though I had invented an eccentric little faerie name for my dog.

‘What's she called?' a smiling man would ask.

‘Bobellis,' I would reply. The intonation would change, favouring incomprehension.
Bah
bells. Bobbles. Boppellesse. It was a safe name to use around children as they didn't know any better and hadn't yet formed an opinion on Bob's writing or politics.

‘I love Bob Ellis!' I would hear a friend's three-year-old say to his mother and I would feel immense satisfaction. This is how we work on the left side of politics. We indoctrinate children and brainwash them with music and puppies.

In 2004 the devotion was taken a step further, and I had inked on my right arm a combined homage to Ellis and Kurt Vonnegut.‘And so on, and so it goes' it reads, winding around a pair of oriental lilies, a walking billboard for the impetuousness of the young and the passion of one particularly besotted twenty-eight-year-old girl. In heated discussions I made excuses for Bob's at times archaic statements regarding women and abortion.

‘He grew up in a religious fundamentalist family,' I would say shrilly to naysayers. ‘It's not as if he has a
choice
.'

My grandfather had died in 1994, suffering an almighty lightning strike of a heart attack whilst reading the form guide. He had been a left-wing author, brilliant, cantankerous, womanising, tortured, and so admired for his storytelling skills he would sit in pubs for hours, preferring to regale a room full of strangers with anecdotes than go home to some long-suffering and temporary girlfriend.

‘Did I ever tell you the yarn about the gunslinger from Gunnedah?' he would start, packing tobacco into his pipe, and feeling in his brimming coat pocket for notes of his story.

Frank's life was chaotic and acerbic. He was once arrested for a swathe of unpaid parking fines, and ran for parliament twice, unsuccessfully. He despised authority and even after leaving the Communist Party carried the acidity of a rebel. When his daughter married a policeman he would make it a habit to call the house at two in the morning, drunk, railing at the piss-disgraceful corruption in the force. My aunt and uncle learned that in such a frame of mind Frank was not to be argued with, and would simply put the phone receiver under the bed until he shouted himself out. Some nights they could just hear him still, a tinny little enflamed warble under the doona, an impassioned plea for sanity no bigger than a pea beneath the mattress of a princess.

Ellis and Frank shared many similar qualities and with no grandparents remaining alive I found myself subconsciously gravitating towards Bob at Writers Guild events or screen conferences. I met him for the first time at Sydney Wharf, an auspicious occasion I am almost certain he doesn't remember, and approached with heart and cheeks aflame.

‘Mr Ellis—I'm Frank's granddaughter,' I began, hoping that the inroad of family would assuage any fears he may have when he later discovered I had a dog at home sharing his name and a huge spray of ink on my right shoulder in part inspired by his work.

‘Your grandfather was a brilliant man,' Bob opined sweepingly. ‘Brilliant. We spent a great deal of time together. We were going to stage a play chronicling the life of Ben Chifley . . .'

It kept going, a stream of important pontifications and meanderings. He would talk as though delivering a lecture at a state dinner. I ended the afternoon curled at his feet, transfixed, like a particularly attentive pouffe he might have absentmindedly stretched out and rested his feet on at any moment. After a time he seemed to forget I was there and just kept telling stories into mid-air, holding court to an empty foyer. Ellis didn't need an audience, and I was too awestruck to interrupt or ask questions. We fit together very well.

Ellis and I skirted around each other for some years after that. I would spot him from afar at opening nights, or pacing the foyer of the ABC looking furious about some perceived slight on behalf of the national broadcaster. A boyfriend and I went to see him launch a book at Readings and stood out the front like teenagers waiting to meet Roxette. When Bob approached we fell apart with mortified giggles and stammers.

‘We have a dog . . . my dog . . . she's in the car,' I gestured with annoyingly trembling fingers.

‘I love dogs,' replied Ellis shortly, apparently not knowing or caring who we were, nor wishing to wait around and get to know two blushing fuckwits pointing inanely out onto the street. He nodded politely and ambled away. My boyfriend and I looked at each other and, after a pause, squealed delightedly. I was hopping up and down on the spot. Bob Ellis was my Justin Bieber.

We met again at the 2020 summit and this time he seemed to remember me. We exchanged numbers—I apparently had some legitimacy now, working as an opinion writer—and in time began occasionally texting, on election nights or during some political scandal I had worked myself into a froth over. In time he invited my partner and I to come and stay with him and his family for the weekend.

‘Ellis is my hero,' I fretted to Tim beforehand. ‘Should you really spend the weekend with your hero? Shouldn't you just stalk them at the AFI awards and leave creepy anonymous messages on their website instead?'

Heroes are just that because they are elusive, mute, flawless. We admire them from a distance and Blu-Tak their pictures to our wall without ever having to see them stumble down drunk or, in the case of stumbling down drunks, sober and doing yoga. We don't humanise them because they are not, in our eyes, human. We certainly shouldn't go and stay with them for a weekend.

But we did accept the offer.

Bob had given us messy, complicated instructions to get to his house and told us to call or text when we were close so he could meet us on the road.

‘Our driveway is very easy to miss,' he said with sighs, as though the degenerate council had deliberately planned it thus.

We drove out of inner Sydney and up to Palm Beach. It was a warm day and we had the windows of our van rolled down. Tim played bootleg copies of the Bob Dylan Theme Time Radio Hour, loud. We were up to ‘Coffee'. Dylan's voice flatlined through the car.

‘Imagine we were going to spend the night at Dylan's house,' Tim said.

‘He's a grumpy old cow too, apparently.'

‘Or Tom Waits! We could go and stay in his junkyard palace.'

Palm Beach was as idyllic as Ellis had described, strolling couples with very white teeth laughing in a carefree fashion as they passed by sprawling cafes. Everything seemed clean and rich.

We rounded a sharp corner and saw him standing there, shirt untucked, belly protruding, a hulking figure, one of Satan's lollipop ladies. He pointed to a scooped-out section of cliffside and told us to park there, in front of his ancient Volvo. It was difficult to negotiate, particularly on a hairpin bend with oncoming traffic tooting with irritation, and almost immediately Tim started to panic.

‘I can't reverse park while Bob Ellis is watching me!' he whispered.

We could see Bob pointing and directing and flapping his arms around and saying something loud we couldn't quite figure out, or at least not until we heard our van hit Bob's car with a sickening crack.

‘Oh,' said Tim. ‘I guess he meant for us to stop.'

Bob looked disgusted when we emerged from the car full of apologies, and waved an angry hand in our direction as though he didn't want to hear it.

‘It's just a fucking scratch,' he said, with a face like thunder.