The Godfather: Peter Corris on chance encounters
It’s a cliché that lives can be changed by chance encounters. Many people meet their life partners through chance encounters it is said. I didn’t; apparently we were set up. But I’ve never ceased to be thankful.
I owe my survival beyond, say, the age of 50, to a chance encounter with Fred Hollows. I’d had laser surgery, which saved my eyesight, damaged by years of neglect of diabetes. At a party I was introduced to Fred by a friend, who mentioned the lasering. Fred poked me in my soft belly and sneered at the drink I was carrying.
‘You’ve had all this expensive treatment and you’re just throwing it away, you silly bugger,’ he growled. ‘You’ll be blind in five years and dead in ten.’
I cut down on my drinking, took up jogging and over time achieved a level of fitness that helped me to preserve my eyesight and sustain me when I developed heart problems.
I sense that I may have had another significant chance encounter recently.
I was in the Newtown Hotel, quietly reading my Kindle (a biography of George Orwell) and enjoying a drink when I became aware of someone squatting down near my chair.
‘I have a question for you.’
It was a young, slight Asian man, tattooed and pierced – nothing unusual in Newtown – and with a soft, harmonious voice.
‘Yes,’ I said, a little annoyed at being interrupted.
‘Is it ever possible to trust anyone?’
A nutter, I thought. ‘Do I know you? Do you know me?’
Again the pleasant voice. ‘You’re the writer, aren’t you?’
I admitted to being a writer and made some half-arsed response about the question being too deep and philosophical for me.
He stood, obviously disappointed. ‘I thought that’s what your books were all about.’
I was nonplussed and mumbled something inane about writers not being in control of what the work was about, that it was for others to judge. He nodded, unimpressed, and drifted away.
I put down the Kindle and picked up my drink in a kind of daze. I was reminded of when a child Jean and I knew, a playmate of our daughters, visited us after seeing ET and Jean asked him what it had been about.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘there was this alien and his spaceship crashed, and these kids found him and …’
He proceeded to tell the story scene by scene – what happened, not what the film was about. In all these years I’d never been asked what my books, as a whole, were about. In interviews that had touched obliquely on the question I’d spoken about my love of Sydney and my nostalgia for some of the civilities of past times and mores and my aversion to organised religion and conservative politics, but these now seemed like superficial responses, side issues.
I know I’ve written vastly more than I’ll ever write again, and the question now nags at me since the chance encounter. What are my books about? More than half of my 70 or so fiction titles have concerned the detective Cliff Hardy, but the others are not dissimilar – adventure stories with heroic or anti-heroic protagonists. Are they about trusting these characters and not others? Or about something else entirely? I’d like to meet my unsettling questioner again to discuss the matter.
