Forster - Grant & I: inside and outside the Go-Betweens

I found out that when someone dies the conversation with them doesnt necessarily end there. How can you listen and talk to a close friend, exchange songs with them, for almost three decades, for their voice to vanish in a moment? Theres an echo. For four days I had Grant in my head. It was as if an earpiece were plugged in, with him intermittently on the line.

I woke the morning after his death with him telling me two things. The first was that I must put to paper everything that had happened to us, write our adventures down, which was the moment this book was born. The second was more abstract: Go to the biggest place of worship you know and think of me. The impracticality of this, the morning after his passing and with a fresh infusion of hep C medication raging through my body, certainly lent credence to the notion that these words werent coming from me.

I got out of bed. Shock and utter sadness upon us in the house. Guilty about leaving a grieving Karin, I had to follow Grant to the end. I told her of my need to get to a church. She suggested asking Tony to drive me.

We were travelling towards the city when the directive seemed to pop out of my mouth. St Johns Cathedral, I said. He dropped me off at the stairs.

A service was ending; worshippers were rising slowly and dispersing from the pews. I moved down an outside aisle to the altar and lit a candle, arching my neck to view the vaulted ceilings and breathe the air that hangs around old sandstone churches, inspiring serenity and peace. I wasnt undergoing a religious experience, it was simply the awareness of Grants presence, and the presence was happy. Here I am, he said.

Monday was when reality set in, beginning with the funeral arrangements. Bernard Galbally, who was magnificent throughout the following week, organising Grants funeral with as much care and commitment as hed given his career, was already in contact with Grants family, whod chosen a site for the service near the Gold Coast. This didnt feel right to Bernard and me, and we thought that although the family realised the importance of Brisbane in Grants life the funeral could have been held in Cairns the venue suggested they may have underestimated the number of people he had touched with his music and person.

Leave it to me, said Bernard.

He called a few hours later. Theres been a change of venue.

Good, where to?

Do you know St Johns Cathedral?

*

Due to a lack of available accommodation, Grants family were staying in a low-set motor inn off a busy road in Woolloongabba, near the Story Bridge. When I visited them on Wednesday, any concerns I had about the standard of the rooms and the location were brushed off with a smile. Theres a good steakhouse around the corner.

They were like that, practical, adaptable people, and standing among them I could imagine Grant in their company, and I couldnt there was a side of him that would have been on display at the Oak Park Races and Christmas in Cairns that I never saw. His mother Wendy was in a wheelchair now, diminished by ill health, time, and the death of a son. Id met her only once before, in the late seventies, when shed come down to visit Grant and her brother, who was a minister at the Toowong Anglican Church. Shed risen to greet me from the settee in the rectory, and I remember the surprise of being welcomed by this stocky, strong woman, a cigarette in hand (Grant didnt smoke then) and a raspy voice. Her cinema-loving son was almost dainty beside her.

I knelt down and passed on my condolences. She grasped my hand. I was a trusted if not familiar face, Grants working partner and lifelong friend in a town of strangers.

There was a group of us drinking and chatting on a terrace outside the motor inn rooms. Grants brother Lauchie and cousin Bram were there, beers in hand; they were still joking and warm, but this was tinged now with brittleness. Between them was Sal, who was closest in temperament and personality to Grant. She lived in Sydney, and had made an album of her own songs with Grant playing and producing. She had the swagger of her mother, handy in dealing with unruly country men, but dosed with a vulnerability and a streak of melancholia in common with her elder brother.

A new face amidst them, broad of shoulder and with long black corkscrewed hair, was Nathan Wallace, Grants son. In the all-consuming rush of The Go-Betweens eighties career, a whisper had it that Grant had fathered a child with a woman in Brisbane during Dahrl Court days. Nathan entered Grants life gradually, in the mid- to late nineties. The first time I saw him was backstage at a festival in Brisbane where Grant was performing. I shot a photo of them grinning arm in arm to take back to Karin. Over time Nathan had been drawn into the family, culminating in an Oak Park Races stay; he was a quiet and observant young man, still familiarising himself with his new relatives when the passing of his dad threw him further into their embrace.