An extract from HEAT 24

Before sitting at my desk I walk outside. Almost full moon and the wild winds of the South Australian spring of the last few days have gone. I look up at the clouds this evening and long for my writing about love and desire to be like them; so effortlessly powerful, with perfect swerves and sweeps.

To have lost the ability to orgasm before it is time for such a disappearance seems inconceivable. Although in desperate prayers I have begged for this very outcome, for the price of an orgasm had become seven days of losing the ability to walk, the eerie absence now makes me cry. On the old Richter scale of pleasure would any charge register? Nothing, so far as I can tell. No neurologist has ever fully warned me that this was on the cards. At forty-six years old I’ve now had multiple sclerosis, this slow road to death, one third of my life.

The artist’s wife died much more swiftly. She was only twenty-four I think and even over a decade on, though we never met, I find myself thinking of her. The manner of her passing has haunted me ever since I was told the story by someone who also loved her. I imagine that she was as lovely as the Little Prince’s rose and as beloved.

I come from a family addicted to assessing its appearance. If no mirror is readily to hand we are all adept at making do. A pane of glass in a door is good for a full-length impression but smaller windows work well too, to check hair or the appearance of your nose in profile before that meeting with someone you haven’t seen for a long time. We pretend not to prance or preen in the presence of a camera but when it’s time for the shot to be shown, glance anxiously to see if we’ve come out well.

Once in Langley’s Cafe I saw my father find his face in my cup of tea and well pleased, smiling. For me this was as wonderful as a moment in the 1956 Albert Lamorisse classic Le Ballon Rouge. In the film the balloon seeks out its reflection in a large mirror in some pavement markets of Paris. The small boy hero examines a life-size portrait of a girl with a hoop but his red balloon friend is dancing up and down a little in delight at its own reflection.

The invitation from photographer Vincent Long arrived early in 2009. Would I be interested in taking part in his portrait series of Australian writers? Each participant would appear with a helium-filled red balloon, a kind of homage to the Lamorisse film, as well as symbolising in some sense the writer’s muse.

On Vincent’s web site I saw what seemed to be a strange young 21st century Madonna. The way he’d taken this photo was such that the surveillance mirror against shoplifters in a 7/11 served as her halo. If there was sadness in her expression, that she was seemingly without child, at least there were lots of chips and confectionery within easy arm’s reach as compensation.

For the red balloon writer series any location could be chosen. Think about a favourite childhood place Vincent suggested to me, or possibly a spot that had been significant in a previous book.

Although I tinkered with the thought of the Grafton footbridge, or my balloon in the presence of a horse or cat, straight away I knew that I wanted to be unclad in Decateur South, the sea cubby built by sculptor Marr Grounds some twenty years before on the south coast just two hours from the Victorian border. Where else had I ever been more beautiful? Where ever again could I appear so poised for pleasure?

There was no doubt in my mind. For me it had to be nude at Marr’s for my portrait or not at all…