Gerald Murnane - A Lifetime on Clouds

He tossed it carelessly and with no deliberate effort to hit the brick marked X. When he heard the impact of the ball he opened his eyes and looked for the wet mark on the bricks. If this mark (or the greater part of it) lay within the perimeter of the brick marked X, then the conjugal act of the previous night between Mr and Mrs Sherd would have resulted in conception.

Adrian shook the dice each night until the honeymoon was over. On four of those nights a pair of even numbers came up, but in each case the mark of the tennis-ball was well wide of the lucky brick.

At the end of this time he was satisfied with the way the dice and the ball were working, except that things weren’t happening fast enough. He wanted to share with his wife as soon as possible the joys of Catholic parenthood, but at the rate he was going it might take years — so many years, perhaps, that it might be time to marry Denise before he had discovered what marriage was really like.

He decided to throw the dice seven times each night. This meant he would experience a week of marriage every day of his life in Accrington. At that rate a year of marriage would take less than two months of 1954. By the end of Form Five he would have been married for nearly four years and fathered as many children. At that stage he would probably have to speed things up a little more. He would have to be careful not to get too close to the time (he could hardly bear to think about it) when Denise would begin to show signs of ageing. According to the pictures in St Gerard’s Monthly she could produce at least a dozen children before this happened. But if he had a lucky run with the dice and ball they might have twelve children long before they were forty years old.

After the birth of each child beyond the fourth, he would have a special throw of three dice to decide his wife’s health. If the number thirteen came up, she would be showing signs of varicose veins in her legs. He would send her to a Catholic doctor for a thorough check-up. If nothing could be done for her, he could alter the rules of the game so that he abstained unselfishly from time to time to give her a sporting chance.

Living through seven nights of marriage each night was not as interesting as he had expected. The high point of each week came each morning at the chimney. Sometimes he had to toss the ball three or four times for a week when Denise had been unusually compliant.

At last, after eighteen weeks of marriage (eighteen days of Accrington time) he opened his eyes one morning at the chimney and saw a broad wet blotch in the middle of the brick that stood for conception. He had always thought he would be able to take such a thing calmly, but he found himself wanting to run and tell the news to someone — even his parents or brothers. All that day at school he wished he had a friend to share his secret.

Adrian went on throwing the dice for a few more nights. His wife couldn’t be sure she had conceived until she saw a doctor. They were entitled to perform the act a few more times until then. But as soon as the doctor had pronounced her pregnant, Adrian put away the dice and spent his nights at Accrington living through the weeks when he and his wife spent their time before sleep holding hands and talking about their first child.

Much as he loved Denise, he found he was bored. It wasn’t that he needed sexual gratification. He had always said, and he still maintained, that the touch of Denise’s hand or the sight of her bare white shoulders was enough to satisfy all his physical wants. And it wasn’t that he was running out of things to talk about. There were still hundreds of stories he wanted to tell her about his early years. The trouble was that he couldn’t endure the long months of her pregnancy without the fun of seeing the dice and ball do their work.

The next day was Saturday at Accrington. Adrian knew what he had to do to make his future more inviting. He took the dice out into the shed in his backyard. He had a sheaf of pages from an exercise book to use as a calendar. There was enough space for all the years he wanted. He threw a die once to decide the sex of their first child. It was a girl. They named it Maureen Denise.

In the first week after the mother and child came home from hospital, nothing happened. Then the dice started rolling again. Adrian threw them thirty times and scored five acts of sexual union. He went outside and tossed the tennis ball five times without success. Then he went back to his calendar in the shed and crossed a month off his married life and rolled the dice again.

Adrian worked all day with the dice and ball. (He told his brothers he was playing a game of Test cricket, with the dice to score runs and the ball to dismiss batsmen.) By evening he had been married nearly nine years and was the father of five daughters and one son.

As soon as he was home from mass on the Sunday morning, he went out to the shed again. He was looking forward to throwing the ball at the chimney again, but he couldn’t face another day with the dice. He decided on an easy solution. He would simply toss the ball ten times for each month. It seemed silly after so many years of marriage to be always asking his wife’s permission before the act. In future she would have to submit to it ten times a month whether she liked it or not.

By midday the best part of his life was over. He had been married fifteen years and fathered eleven children — eight daughters and three sons. Their names and birthdays were all entered in his calendar.

Now that he had worked out a future for himself he was exhausted and a little disappointed. He was almost sorry he had cheated by speeding up events instead of using the dice and ball patiently and enjoying each year as it came. He knew what people meant when they said their life was slipping away from them.

He sat beside the chimney wondering what he could think about in bed that night. A simple solution occurred to him. He multiplied fifteen by twelve to obtain the number of months of his active sexual life. Then he went back to the shed and cut up small squares of paper. He numbered them from one to one hundred and eighty and put them all into a tobacco tin. Each night he would shake the tin and draw out a number. He drew out a number for that very night. It was forty-three. From his calendar he learned that in Month forty-three he was trying to father his fourth child.

That night (Accrington time) Adrian went to bed eager to meet the Denise who was already the mother of three young children. And the next day at school he wondered which of all the possible Denises would share his bed that night after he had consulted the numbers in the tobacco tin. She might have been a radiant young mother, fresh from breast-feeding her first child, or a mature woman like the mothers in St Gerard’s Monthly with the curves of her body gently rounded by years of child-bearing and about her eyes the faintest shadows of weariness from caring for her eight or nine children all day.

On the last evening of their honeymoon, Sherd and his bride stood looking at the scene that had been called Triabunna With Distant View of Maria Island in the coloured booklet, Tasmania, A Visitor’s Guide , on the bottom shelf of the bookcase in Sherd’s boyhood home.

The newlyweds had to decide where to make their permanent home. Sherd wondered what was to stop them from settling among the low hills of Maria Island that were just then strangely bright in the last rays of the setting sun. If he could have been sure there was a Catholic church and school and a Catholic doctor on the island, he and his wife would have been happy for the rest of their lives on a small farm that looked across the water to Triabunna.

He only decided to return to Victoria for the sake of his wife. She was just a little homesick, and she said she preferred to live where she could visit her mother two or three times a year.