by JR Carroll
‘What man,’ the driver said. The car moved away.
‘The man who was with me a minute ago,’ Robert said.
The driver shook his head. Robert noticed he was a young black man, an Ethiopian or Kenyan, something like that. ‘Wasn’t no man there,’ he said. ‘Just you, mister.’
Robert sat back. The taxi purred on, whisking him through the dead heart of night. Except for one or two scavengers the streets were vacant. It all seemed stark, futuristic, devoid of humanity. Unreal city. He looked down and saw that his hands were clasped on his lap. He felt calm, composed, and, amazingly, stone cold sober. It occurred to him that although he had not given the driver directions, the man drove unhesitatingly, as if he knew exactly where to go. Gazing through the car’s glass he noticed that everything – every leaf and branch in every tree, every neon sign, every harsh slash of light – had the sharp-edged clarity of fine-cut crystal. The more intently he stared at objects, the more they seemed to come into focus, swaying and shimmering wave-like at first, then locking into place like subjects viewed through an automatic range-finder. A shivering drop of water was being forced slowly up the windscreen by the rushing air, and Robert followed its progress with intense interest. There were flashing red and blue lights ahead. The driver slowed and, as they passed the scene, Robert saw a lifeless, derelict figure being placed on a stretcher by ambulance officers. There were police cars partly blocking the road, although apart from Robert’s taxi there was no traffic. A policeman waved them by, directing them along the wrong side of a tram stop guardrail. The last image he had of the victim was of his shoeless foot dangling from the stretcher.
Without a word having to be said, the driver stopped outside Robert’s flat and switched off the meter. Robert fished for money. It had not even occurred to him that he might not have enough. When he leaned forward to pay the fare he saw the driver’s face: it was angular, ridged with bone, with flat planes of skin stretched tight between the ridges like facets on a gemstone. His eyes were large and dark; the car’s interior light gave his skin a washed-out, faintly purplish, translucent appearance, like a palimpsest through which you could see the tissue, the inner fabric, the delicate network of veins and the bone structure itself, all its joints and fine ridgings.
When his eyes opened in the morning he wondered at first if it had all been a crazy dream. That could easily occur during a serious bender: your brain ran away with the pixies, creating images and a narrative so vivid you would swear blind they were happening in the real world. More than that, you behaved as if they were real, actively playing your part in what was nothing more than a lurid alcoholic’s fantasy. But these images returned to him with such force and conviction he felt they had to have more than imagined significance: the black-coated, black-hatted stranger plying him with coffee, the gleaming yellow taxi, the shoeless foot dangling from the stretcher, the driver’s translucent face. He remembered undressing and getting into bed, which was unusual; also, he did not feel wretched or hung over in the slightest.
He sat on the edge of the bed, observing the shambles around him. Larry, or one of them, Thommo probably, had smashed a hole in the wardrobe door, and a power point had been ripped from a wall, exposing the wiring. Checking around, he saw that Florence’s things were gone. He went to the bathroom, then the living room. It felt like a sad and empty place without Florence – she had certainly made her mark in a short period of time. He was still fine, unbelievably so – even the internal bruising didn’t hurt much now. The habitual heroin user experiences agonising aches and pains everywhere in his body between hits, but Robert had none of that as he showered and shaved. He thought constantly about the mysterious stranger, the good Samaritan who had said his name was Robert. When Robert had said to him, ‘I don’t understand’, the man had replied: ‘You will.’ And then when Robert was in the taxi he felt brand new, like the car itself. He felt as if he had just been created. Yet he still did not understand: there was no blinding flash. Strange business.
It was the second weird thing to have happened to him recently, following that fierce wind that had rushed through his battered torso the morning after the run-through from Larry. The pain after that episode was remarkably diminished as well.
The first thing he did when he was dressed was throw his drug-taking paraphernalia into the wheelie bin downstairs. There were some stubbies in the fridge, and these he emptied down the sink. Then he scraped up what money he had left, about eight dollars, and went to a cafe for a cappuccino and pastry. The coffee was rich and flavoursome, stimulating taste buds he didn’t realise he still had.
Once in a while, every three or four months, Robert visited his mother Marguerite in the private nursing home where she had lived for years. ‘Lived’ was an exaggeration of her condition: ‘existed’, or ‘vegetated’ would have described it more accurately. Marguerite was so far gone everyone prayed for her to be mercifully ‘taken off’, but the body refused to give up even though the brain had stopped sending it meaningful signals. Marguerite was insensible to human contact, as cut off and staringly alone in her private, empty domain as it was possible for a living thing to be while still conscious and breathing.
Robert made these hour-long visits religiously, even though it meant a fifty-minute ride on the train to the outer suburb of Nunawading, a bus along Springvale Road to Vermont South and then a twenty-minute walk to the nursing home, which was a discreet little building tucked away behind a lush screen of flowering natives and pampas grass. It was called Whispering Gardens. The fact that his mother at no stage knew who Robert was or why this strange person was in her room did not deter him – on the contrary, it gave him a strange sort of solace. He could express himself to her with painful but unflinching honesty, undergoing something of an emotional and psychological detox in the safe knowledge that nothing he said could harm her. He could play word games with her – punning and quoting lines, magpie-like, from anywhere and everywhere – of the kind she used to play when he was her Little Prince. Or he could read passages from her favourite authors – Sir Walter Scott, Dickens, or the only ‘modern’ novelist she admired, Henry James, to whom she had always referred as ‘Mr James’. Of the poets, she loved Browning in particular. In the course of her many trips to Italy she had visited all his old haunts, and had spoken the language fluently. There was a very old copy of his collected poems in the room, and Robert took great pleasure in reading to her extracts from Fra Lippo Lippi, Andrea del Sarto or The Bishop Orders His Tomb At St Praxed’s Church. Nurses going in and out of the room must have thought he was as far gone as she was, conducting a one-sided, seemingly rational exchange, which often took the form of a Browning-style dramatic monologue – and even asking questions, soliciting advice or opinions – with this poor, vacant thing who just wasn’t there, but the way Robert looked at it, it was a form of therapy, the same as Catholics making regular confessions and having their slate cleaned by the faceless priest on the other side of the grille.
The only concern he had ever harboured about going to Whispering Gardens was the outside chance of running across his father, Atholl. That would be a meeting he would never relish, since his father was so unforgiving he had not spoken to Robert for five – or was it six, or seven – years, and the last time he did it was to savagely assail him, frail as the old man was, and blame him entirely for what had become of his precious, lost Marguerite. Robert was prepared to wear the hairshirt, but he thought that was stretching things a touch.
‘Well, Marguerite,’ he was saying, having kissed her forehead and sat down next to the bed. ‘You’re looking as splendid as ever. Quite regal. You’ve had your hair done, too. Must have known I was coming, sly creature.’
Tiny Marguerite, lying straight with her spindly arms by her sides, outside the blankets, stared at – or past, or perhaps through – him with flat, lifeless eyes. Occasionally there was the flicker of a frown in response to this voice, this presence, disturbing her perfect peace. Her hair, which had always been
unruly and black, as black as Bess’s in The Highwayman – a poem she had recited to him many times, never failing to infuse it with high melodrama and a sadness Robert had always found crushing – was now the colour of iron, and immaculately permed. In her prime Marguerite had been such a busy, frenetic person, always with a mountain of work to do, and no time. She had been an energetic little dynamo with eyes as glittering and quick as a bird’s, who rarely found ten minutes in the day to attend to her personal grooming. But there was always time to spend with her golden-haired Lochinvar, to caress his face with her richly bejewelled fingers and read him a piece from Wilde, Edward Lear or Kenneth Grahame.
‘Marguerite,’ he said. ‘You know that passage from Wordsworth’s poem, The Prelude, in which the little boy borrows a rowboat one night and makes his way towards the distant craggy ridge? Do you know it? Of course you do – you are not blind! How keen you are! Sorry – but I digress. Anyway, while he is paddling away, a huge, black mountain-top seems to loom up and come after him, so in panic he turns the boat around and takes it back to where he found it. It was an experience both frightening and exhilarating, and afterwards he mulls it over. How does it go? – ‘… my brain worked with a dim and undetermined sense/ Of unknown modes of being; o’er my thoughts/ There hung a darkness, call it solitude/ Or blank desertion./ No familiar shapes remained … Oh, I forget the rest. Used to know it all by heart once. Anyway the point of it is, as you realise, that he had a sort of mystical experience, one that made him appreciate the immensity and the grandeur of nature, the sheer scale of things when placed alongside a tiny, insignificant human being, a boy in a boat. He could never look at simple things like trees the same way any more.
‘Dear Marguerite, a similar thing happened to me last night, if you’ll forgive a slight pretension. I won’t burden you with details, but it was very puzzling, and on the way out here today, I believe I worked out what it means.’ He leaned closer. ‘Like that little boy, I cannot see things the same way now. Don’t laugh, but I believe, I am certain, I saw my guardian angel last night. When we think of angels we think of how they are represented by the masters – white, shimmering auras fluttering about on wings, blowing horns and so on. But this one was black, dressed all in black. He was an angel in human form, like the one in that Wenders film, Wings Of Desire. There was going to be a death, you see – my death. I was going to die last night, but I didn’t, because he intervened. One minute I was blind, stinking drunk, dead drunk, an utter, legless shambles. Then in the next I was perfectly awake and sober. Makes no sense, does it? And on the way home I saw a dead man being placed in a stretcher in the street. That man was me, Marguerite. It was a glimpse of my demise I was witnessing. That was clear: I felt it in my bones, in my very heart. But I was given a chance. I was spared. Why? God only knows. I don’t. But I do know this: I am changed forever. I am on the wagon, forever. I am off all the wicked substances, Marguerite. I am finished with them. I have taken the pledge.’ He rose, kissed his fingers and placed them on his mother’s bone-white forehead. ‘And that is that. End of lesson.’
23
As he was sitting in the Bridge Road tram heading for town, and lunch with Victor Wineglass, Robert was feeling distracted and not a little disturbed by a discovery he had made while getting himself ready – trying to find clean, presentable clothes – that morning. The pistol he had taken from Larry’s place was gone. It had been wrapped in an old towel and concealed in the top shelf of his wardrobe, and now there was no sign of it – just the unravelled towel. Clearly Florence had removed it, but why? She wouldn’t be able to sell it, so what earthly use could she have for a loaded handgun? He began to wonder if he had made a serious mistake in sending her away, but overriding that doubt was the feeling that a series of events had been set in motion, and all he could do was to follow it through to the end, whatever that was. It seemed to be out of his hands.
Soon the tram was moving swiftly along Wellington Parade, past Jolimont station and on towards the city centre. When Robert had phoned him, Victor had not sounded at all surprised that he had taken up Victor’s suggestion to call, and there was no lack of enthusiasm in his voice that Robert could detect. Victor had suggested they meet at an upmarket Italian brasserie, Lorenzo’s, at the western end of Little Collins Street, and had made it doubly clear that this was his treat. Robert did not argue. It was Victor’s style and it was also a debt he had owed for many a year. That was not at issue: what the lunch would bring with it was the matter that interested Robert.
Lorenzo’s was a newish establishment, all glass and tiles and gleaming chrome, built on the site of a famous traditional restaurant, a Melbourne landmark, at which Robert had lunched and dined more times than he could remember in the old days. A gorgeous young woman greeted him and showed him to Victor’s table. There he was in all his glory: white sports jacket with a pencil-thin grey stripe, red rose in the lapel, wonderfully garish tie and matching kerchief. On the empty seat beside him was a Panama hat.
Victor stood and extended his arm, and while they shook effusively Victor grasped Robert’s arm with his free hand. His tanned face beamed all over, and his flawed blue eyes sparkled exactly as Robert remembered them doing – he really was a good-looking man in his prime. Robert felt shabby as he sat down, but there was pleasure, too, in sharing air space and a table in a smart place with someone of his stamp.
‘I’m having a Glenlivet for openers,’ Victor said, swirling ice-cubes through the honey-coloured spirit. ‘Same for you?’ A hovering waiter caught his eye and approached, smiling.
‘Ah, no,’ Robert said. ‘Look, I’ll just have – water, thanks. A Bisleri.’
‘Water?’ Victor said. ‘Good God, man. If I’m splashing a lunch at Lorenzo’s I hope you’re going to drink more than water, old chap. That isn’t the Robert I remember.’
Robert felt himself colouring, as if the reason for his abstinence was spelt out on his face for Victor to read.
But Victor was grinning. He placed a hand on Robert’s shoulder and said, ‘No offence. Only joking, of course. I must say, however, that I would never have pegged you as a, what do they call it? – a New Age guy.’
‘I don’t think I’m that,’ Robert said. ‘To be honest, I’m recovering. All those years extracting their fee, Victor. The price is high.’
‘Sad, isn’t it,’ Victor said, and sipped the Glenlivet as Robert’s Bisleri arrived. He drank thirstily and topped up the glass. Although the day was warm he had on long sleeves to conceal the track marks on his arms. A frightening thought came to him: how was he going to survive a whole lunch with a career sybarite like Victor, without drinking? He hoped and prayed he would not start sweating and shaking. The brasserie was air-conditioned; it was cool and comfortable, and everyone in it was cool – except him.
He realised Victor was speaking, and began paying attention.
Conversation with Victor was easy, he found. It had always been easy, but he had forgotten. The thing about Victor was that he came from old money, so he had breeding in his blue blood. He knew how to conduct himself socially, in any company, and he knew how to put people at their ease. He was a genuinely charming person, a seducer of such natural guile and warmth that, were he to plunge a knife into your heart, you would feel moved to murmur ‘Thank you,’ with your dying breath. Whatever he said or did, he made you feel that you were included, that you were a part of something special: Svengali in modern dress.
They were reminiscing, of course, as friends who have not met for a long time must. Half an hour or so glided by on wings. Then Victor sketched what Robert thought was a deliberately vague and evasive outline of his life post-university, following the episode which he described as ‘delicate’. Somewhere amongst this chat first courses arrived: a magnificent spread of antipasto for Victor and a Caesar salad for Robert. A chilled bottle of Coonawarra riesling for Victor; more Bisleri for Robert. They ate, drank and talked, laughed a lot, went back over old ground, again and again – refurbishing stor
ies, fitting them out with greater significance than was warranted even at the time, repainting individuals, inventing sexual conquests, slandering reputations. Main courses came: stuffed guinea fowl for Victor, succulent roasted veal shank for Robert. A bottle of Petaluma cabernet for Victor; yet more Bisleri for Robert. So far, so good. Pouring some of the ruby claret Victor said, ‘If you change your mind and want some of this splendid vintage, just help yourself, old thing.’
Through it all, Victor talked and Robert listened. He began to feel a little anxious, as he had not yet revealed much about himself. Surely Victor was going to question him. Surely he was curious about what Robert had done since they had last met. Surely he was keen to know of his exploits, his travels and triumphs. His personal life. But no, Victor seemed content to wing it single-handed, amusing and at times mesmerising Robert with his tales from the racetrack and the casino, his artful self-deprecation, his droll observations on modern life and his archaic expressions and mannerisms, which became more fin de siecle than ever as he consumed more and more wine. Two and a half hours of this, and Robert was feeling intoxicated without having had a drop. He was, he realised, on a dry drunk. At the end, with the cheeses, Victor enjoyed a Hennessy’s five-star cognac in a huge balloon, while Robert had a double espresso. At least he could allow himself a caffeine hit.
Outside on the footpath they shook hands for a long time. Victor looked so much like a film star or a celebrity of some kind in his elegant threads that many heads, male and female, turned in admiration. The Panama was the fine make that can be crumpled to the size of a folded handkerchief, then spring back into shape. His pants were cream, like expensive cricket bags, and on his feet were light tan wingtips that to Robert’s eye were English, probably Bally. An Eton or Harrow tie used as a belt would have completed the effect. They were exactly the kind of garments that had once filled Robert’s wardrobe instead of the crumpled rags there now. Conscious of Victor’s animated spirits and the brightened corpuscles that made his face glow, Robert could not remember an occasion when he had seen a person so affected by drink when he himself wasn’t – it was a strange, unreal feeling.
