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Stella Jones
Beneath a full-length
seventies leather coat, Stella Jones' long legs thrust determinedly forward. Her knee high boots powered up Crown
Street from Woolloomooloo, onward and upward towards home.
I've seen young women try to emulate her style. The bad make-up, maverick spirit,
the way she use to touch herself in public, her intense creativity, plunging cleavage, intellectual vibrancy and
her mildewy odour: all together impossible to replicate.
On my desk are two books she loaned me: 'Elements of Semiology' and 'Writing
Degree Zero.' I am unable to return them.
Her writing appeared in various prestigious literary journals under her pen name Tantrum Jones; the pseudonym part
of the ever evolving mythology of herself.
I remember them trying to kick her out of law school. The head of faculty didn't
like being made a fool of in Stella's video. She edited his comments side by side with those of prominent women
from the legal profession. Their opinions undermined his position, but not nearly as much as the soundtrack of
David Bowie singing, 'when you're a boy.'
Stella made lousy bread and butter pudding. Rather than combining ingredients
to create a specific flavour or particular chemical reaction, she explored extremes and contradictions to create
something new and exciting. I will never forget her turkey and mullet curry: fish and game in the one pot.
The last time we saw one another we had coffee.
"I don't know what to do," she said, unusually indecisive. "The
only way to make sure a man doesn't stray is to live with him."
This craving for certainty seemed strange coming from Stella. Her possible vulnerability disturbed me.
"If you're not careful, you'll end up sipping chardonnay, wearing little
black dresses and practising law."
She changed the subject, running away from my judgement towards an idea that excited her.
"Last night, I watched this amazing Fellini film 'City of Women.' In the
entrance hall of this guy's house is a portrait of every women he's slept with. He has recordings of them all climaxing,
which individually or simultaneously can be activated. All the portraits start going off at once, a beautiful bleating
and wailing cacophony. A hall of orgasms! What a fantastic idea!"
The previous summer, I borrowed a car to collect her from a holiday she'd lost
interest in. Driving along the unmarked bends from the bay into the hills, I hit potholes in the yellow dirt.
"What have you been reading about?" she asked.
"Utopias."
"Have you developed an opinion?"
"I'm still chasing it. Everyone around here seems to be looking for it."
"Byron Bay, named after a romantic poet, it's the perfect setting for
a novel," her speech gained momentum. "You could write about it as a late twentieth century pastoral
Arcadia," she enthused. "A Garden of Eden teaming with pagan delights."
To demonstrate her last point Stella insisted I stop to pick-up a handsome
hitch-hiker. He swam naked with us in a water-hole and drank daiquiris beneath my mosquito net. Black berries fell
in the open window onto the bed. Rolling about we squished them, staining my sheets purple. We ate bacon, eggs
and spinach to maintain our stamina. Exhausted, five days later, he said farewell. Stella and I drove to Sydney.
Dreamily we watched the cow pastures and macadamia plantations dissolve into
bush; then suburbs and the vehicle approached the inner city with us still in a daze of pheromone reverie.
I stayed for a week in her squat, a damp sandstone settler's cottage, crammed
full of work in progress and completed projects. A ton of marble off cuts, bought for one hundred dollars, lay
under a tarpaulin in the backyard. Inside, the cottage smelt of charcoal and mould. Between the lounge chairs,
buckets collected drips from the leaking tin roof. Paintings leant against the walls next to empty frames, waiting
to be given new purposes. A couple of bags of cement mix were in a corner beside a pile of dog-eared manilla folders,
full of her scripts, essays, and prose. Books being read lay open on the coffee table. The espresso machine hissed
on the stove.
Stella rolled up the bit of carpet covering the floor.
"Will you help me move everything into one corner?"
"Sure. What are you planning? "
"I want to do the floor."
Stella rummaged about in the back room and returned carrying a mirror. She covered some clear space on the floor
with newspaper and retrieved a pair of gardening gloves and a hammer from her toolbox. One gloved hand held the
mirror over the paper. She shattered the glass and sorted the shards according to size on the newspaper.
"You mix up a bucket of cement," she instructed. "I'm going
to bring in some of the marble."
It took three days, Stella the artisan and me the apprentice. We knelt laying
slithers of mirror and pieces of marble in a grey, wet, gritty mix. With each bit of marble positioned, Stella
stood up and stomped it down with her boot-clad foot.
Stella
Jones'
Relentless Inspiration Persists
1967 -1998
Epilogue
Louise, my agent,
sits behind her steel desk in her minimalist office. She never smiles. When amused her magenta masked lips curl,
ever so slightly. I glimpse them move twice on page one and once on page two. I don't know precisely what amuses
her. At page four her expression of interest shifts to perplexity. She finishes reading and places the story on
the desk.
Leaning back in her ergonomic chair, she looks over her thick rimmed spectacles.
"It ends too suddenly," she says in a cold tone. The tone she uses
when pushing for a rewrite.
Sometimes I think Louise can be an extraordinarily lazy reader. I glare back
at her. Wearing my most uncompromising expression I snap, "so did Stella's life, but that's not what the story
is about."
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