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MEMOIR
Reckless
Marele Day
Ultimo, $39.99
As a romantic teenager Marele Day had been in love with an absurdly handsome actor called Gardner McKay. McKay played Adam Troy, skipper of a schooner, Tiki, in a TV series, Adventures in Paradise (paradise loosely being the South Pacific). The series was to have resonance as her memoir, Reckless reveals. Day, known for her crime thrillers and the televised Lambs of God, has not written a book for almost a decade, perhaps researching this unusual book. Reckless from the Anglo-Saxon reck, meaning without thought, or care, without regard of consequences. Few titles are as apt.
Marele Day’s memoir recounts a turbulent chapter of her life.Credit:
Here is Day in the early 1970s: “I had recently returned from my first trip overseas, got a part-time job teaching English as a second language to migrants and, in my mid-20s, enrolled as a ‘mature age’ student at Sydney University.”
She spies Tony, “long hair and flowy clothes”, and soon they are living together in a shared house in glorious, endlessly sunny Sydney. They bought a ramshackle house on the NSW Mid North Coast and settled into happiness. But Tony, not quite 29, was killed in a road accident and Day was pitched into unassuageable grief.
Grief un-selfs you. A capable, optimistic woman became someone else. Perhaps a woman who didn’t care what happened to her? Reckless. Day writes of herself as being a garden of Before and a wasteland of After. One year into After, she gets a New Writer’s grant, buys an ancient Mercedes-Benz and takes off to Queensland with a new friend, Kamile. In the Cairns Youth Hostel they meet a bloke who knows a yacht that needs a crew. Day has never worked on a yacht before, nor has Kamile.
Turns out the skipper is Captain Bligh, so they jump ship when they meet a more alluring bloke called Jean Kay. He’s French, Day speaks French. He’s heading for Sri Lanka. They think they know where Sri Lanka is, but who cares, they’re on board.
The French skipper is no Adam Troy, but Day writes that there was an “elemental attraction” between them. That attraction is the thread through this chaotic book. The young adventurer doesn’t know it yet, but the man who reminds her of being a teenager watching Adventures in Paradise is, in fact, an international criminal four years on the run for an insanely botched heist in a Paris bank. And another mad hijacking of a plane. Exactly the sort of French man you’d expect to find in a mangrove swamp somewhere in the Gulf of Carpentaria.
We are still on page 35 and the new, neat little yacht that sleeps six is about to start the voyage to (probably) Sri Lanka. The next page lands on Day, more than 30 years later, waiting in a restaurant in La Rochelle, France, to meet with Kay after all these years.
The wonders of the technological world have brought them together, and she wants to unravel their pasts. He still has the same voice, still calls her “little sister” and instantly she is back in the past, the rather unforgivable past when the yacht was shipwrecked. She thought she’d die. He doesn’t see it that way. He never believed they’d die. So he says. He invites her to his house to stay so she can hear his version of a complicated story.
As she follows his trail over the next decade or so she will find herself in Brazil as well as Europe and back in Sydney, intending to make sense of what she almost knows. The book reads like a travel diary.
Jean Kay was, in fact, not unique in the revolutionary years of the 1970s. They were the best years of a life if you happened to be an extreme narcissist. The moral line was: If it feels good, it’s OK. Rob a bank, hijack a plane and cry that it was all against capitalism, it was all for the wretched of the earth. But then, define money in a Swiss bank. Or life in Brazil. Or prison.
There could be much of interest in the details of Day’s account of Kay’s life, but it is exasperating to read because she cannot focus on whether she wants to tell her own story, or his (or write a travel book). She believes her life is interwoven with his. She is still filtering life through the stone of unresolved grief for her great love, Tony. Alas, the adventures are all so external and weirdly complicated that by the end, I have little sense or interest in who Jean Kay was, or Marele Day is.
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