The Cockatoos
Page 15
And she began hitting this man with the back of her hand, with swinging blows, on his stubbly cheeks, so that his head flung to and fro on the pillow.
‘You!’
She knelt up and punched with her fists against his ribs; while the man whinged and writhed and groaned.
‘Have a heart! What’s yer game?’
‘None!’ She couldn’t have explained her behaviour, but muttered back, ‘No game!’
Then for an instant the flame rose in her: she fell on him, caressing his cheeks with hers, veiling his already anonymous face with her hair, and plunged her tongue into his mouth. His terror snored deafening around her before she left off: a nausea, brought on by rancid dripping and her loathing of limp potato chips, forced her back on her knees.
If he had been moved to kill her she couldn’t have cared at this point.
‘Is this the knife you slash them with?’
She pulled it from the sheath hanging from his belt, and presented the handle on the flat palms of her hands, the blade appropriately aimed.
‘Go on!’ he said. ‘You win!’
She didn’t want to confirm that the eyes flickering at her in the shaded light showed themselves to be small oily black piteous.
‘Nobody wins!’ She had to use all her strength not to answer piteousness out of her own frustration. ‘That’s the depressing part of it.’
Then when she had tossed back her hair, and drawn up the mucus sharply through her nostrils – a habit Mummy deplored in Daddy – she said, ‘Come on, you! We’re going to celebrate a failure!’
A short man was pattering childlike behind her as she dragged him by the wrist, the knife still held in her other hand; only sleep could have made their transit credible.
Together and apart they burst into the dining-room.
‘Never touch a drop meself,’ he insisted when she had poured out the half tumbler of ‘Daddy’s good brandy’.
‘But just a mouthful.’ She tried forcing the glass against his clenched teeth. ‘Normally it isn’t necessary, I know. This is an unusual situation.’
But the man was growing firmer, and she recovered her contempt: this time, unreasonably, for his reasonableness.
‘You don’t smoke either, I expect.’ She was choking on a throatful of brandy.
The man agreed that he didn’t smoke.
She lit one of the cigars, according to the way she had seen. The fumes of her rage had begun floating directionlessly inside her.
‘Then I can’t invite you to celebrate in any way?’
‘Eh?’
It didn’t matter.
As she drifted up and down, half fuming, half tearful, the man leant across the table, and asked, ‘What are you gunner do with me? If you’re gunner call them in, let’s get it over. I’d only like to say I’ve got a wife, and a coupler kids: we adopted ’em – two little girls.’
‘Not girls!’ she protested.
For a moment she was afraid he might begin to tell her the story of his ordinariness: she couldn’t have borne that while her half-strangled desire was still squirming around inside her.
‘I don’t expect you to tell me,’ she said. ‘I don’t expect anything of you – or anybody.’
She continued nurturing her half-lie after she had let him out. He had gone past her like the electrician or the plumber.
Only on returning to the dining-room, the slopped brandy and smouldering cigar emphasized her failed intention: to destroy perhaps in one violent burst the nothing she was, to live, to be, to know. Now she might have mortified her already over-mortified will by wounding herself physically, if she hadn’t heard another self bellowing like a deprived cow. Walking up and down she was tearing a nightdress she couldn’t very well ‘rend’ in circumstances so far removed from the tragi-classic.
Till Mummy came in with that look on her face.
‘Oh, Felicity! Oh, my darling! My baby! Do tell me!’
She let them tell her what to do, and obeyed them to the extent of giving the answers they expected: not all of those.
‘The knife? Why, he took it – didn’t he? Yes, he took the knife he threatened me with.’
It was important for her to keep this one memento, which she had slipped behind the sideboard for safety; just as she must conceal the heart of a moral predicament they couldn’t possibly understand.
She could have continued lying in the shambles of Harvey’s leather chair, luxuriating in a chaos reflected around her, if the pulse of the violated house hadn’t very slightly quickened: the slack silence was tautening; time had audibly recovered its steel. As she dragged her hands out of the hot bowels of the chair, she heard a key gnawing at a lock, and voices obsessed by trivialities: Daddy was trumping Mummy all over again, while Mummy resented being trumped.
It would have been almost too comforting to let them catch you.
Then the lights in other rooms were blaring out; the owners had begun stampeding amongst their possessions, the unsuspected ugliness of which made them adopt voices they probably hadn’t used for years. As they ran, so you ran. There wasn’t even time to exchange with Harvey that long love-look, half horror, half fulfilment.
She ducked beneath the clothes-lines and slid down, leather-slick, over the back wall. Speed and danger, and the wet night, lent her professional ease – or indifference. Running along the lane, she picked the thorns out of her hands, and rejoiced in the scent which had rubbed off on her from bruised lemons.
Perhaps remembering advice to others on sound minds, her father Humphrey Bannister mowed the lawn more regularly; he weeded the garden more assiduously than ever; he pricked out seedlings with an embroiderer’s precision, and when snails slavered them away, or cutworm got them, or cats pawed them up in covering excreta, he planted afresh, with a patience which would have been admirable if it hadn’t also been self-defence. She used to watch, while taking care not to approach, because to have done so might have involved them in an exchange of those least convincing subterfuges, words. Outwardly occupied as he knelt, his mind, she suspected, was making tentative advances, just as her mother, in the suede gloves she wore for dusting, would be standing at an upper window contemplating a void in which the three of them existed.
Once she went so far as to inquire of her father, with a coldness she had intended as warmth, ‘What are you putting this time?’
‘Portulaca.’
All her life she had watched him planting portulaca; she should have recognized these scraps of plant flesh.
‘Of course. Don’t you get tired of them?’
‘They’re reliable, Tchitchy.’
She bit her mouth for the chance implication.
As he continued transplanting the seedlings, her father remarked, ‘A cove I know – Harvey Makin – had his house burgled the other night. Though ‘burgle’ is hardly the right word. They don’t seem to have taken a thing. Anyway, whatever the motive, a gang of thugs broke in, and just about wrecked the place.’ His laugh sounded strangely thick, almost approving. ‘Well, good luck to ’em. I hope they got their thrill. Harvey was always a smooth, self-satisfied beggar, and his house the kind of mausoleum asking for rape.’
She could see him shrink on realizing his blunder, sweat gathering on the back of his neck, fingers blenching as they firmed the soil round a seedling.
‘As a matter of fact, that’s how the Sun referred to it.’ He badly needed somebody to share his callousness.
Lacking the courage to look up, he couldn’t have known that she was shocked. She was, though: not for his use of a word with unfortunate personal overtones, nor his casual mention of an incident for which she was responsible, but for his pleasure in what was a brutal act by his own standards.
‘I’m surprised you didn’t recognize the old portulaca,’ he said when he had recovered himself.
She kicked at a rejected seedling. ‘I wasn’t thinking. And they’re insignificant little things.’
‘They have their unexpected moments.’
However much she might regret an imperfection in her desirably straight father, she continued in her efforts to expend, by acts of violence, the passive self others had created for her; though this behaviour too, she suspected, was ending in conformity. Nor did she ever find fulfilment, or establish her supremacy, in the defenceless houses she entered and wrecked. There remained the possibility, finally the hope, that she might be caught. She never was. Over and over, she demonstrated the stupidity of those who were out to catch her: men, of course.
There was a night when her instinct for unattended houses failed her. As her torchlight picked out a sleeping figure, her breath rasped, not because she had slipped up, but because she might at last have found. Or was she about to debunk another of her illusions in the naked body of this young man, lightly sleeping in coils of sheet up to the shins? Her superior in physical strength, he could not disguise the defenceless pathos of a human being asleep: slightly open, suppliant lips; tender eyelids; innocent muscles; the male breast no longer an aggressive fraud under its hackles; the secret fruits exposed to theft by marauding hands. Was this perhaps too little of a man, too much the wax effigy of a god? Her hovering torchlight expressed doubts as well as longing wherever it touched the golden surface; till the sleeper awoke.
Recovering its strength too quickly, the body appeared agonisingly muscle-bound; lips gulped at elusive air; petrified eyes blindly glittered.
‘What are you after?’ asked the god in rather a high, directionless voice; and spread trembling leaves of hands to conceal a shrivelling.
‘What do you want?’ he repeated on an even higher note; then getting down to business, ‘If it’s money, there’s a couple of notes and some silver on the dressing-table.’
‘No.’ She lowered her chin. ‘It isn’t money.’
She switched off her light, floundered through the open window, and escaped from the ruins of a vision as quickly as she could.
From now on she would glut herself on whatever reality had to offer, however abysmal and degrading. She took to roaming the park by night (‘… never at night, Felicity … only drunkards, cut-throats, and perverts … nobody in their right mind, not even a trained athlete, would cross the park after sundown …’) preferably the blackest nights, branches of trees slashing at her cheeks, a network of grass alternating with sandy pitfalls, the lake reduced to a presence and the reedy cries of waterfowl.
She would edge herself between the railings in one of the many places where the iron had been torn from its stone sockets, and stride off beneath the holm-oaks and pines, often twisting an ankle on the empty bottles left behind by drunks. The park offered a variety of solutions: perhaps this explained why it was so well patronized at night. She could hear her heart bumping towards a fulfilment she had not yet experienced. As she plodded through the sand, her stature was increasing, it seemed; her boots had been reinforced with the soles of buskins; at any moment, she felt, she might call out in a heroic voice and be answered by her opposite from what was normally a red-brick suburb on the other side. She imagined how the voices would advance, calling to each other from time to time, for guidance, and to give each other the strength to face ugliness in any form.
So she went plodding and stumbling, collecting herself for the moment when she would need her courage; and sometimes the moon would freeze her by rising and catching her out in her thoughts, her intention: she could not immediately reconcile a world of beauty with the images of reality she wished to invoke.
By such a light she came across a man’s body floating gravely face down amongst the reeds: his back shone with waterproofing; the hair at the neck had been gathered into rats’ tails; if the hulk rolled just perceptibly inside the widening circles, it was only because it had been animated by some form of underwater life. She decided to respect the man’s secret death as if it had been a secret of her own.
On the other hand she would listen quietly and patiently to those who positively wished to tell: drunks, for instance, waving their bottles at her like flags, from under the paper-barks and figs. She would lie beside them, uncritical of the stench from rotten teeth, alcohol, and feet; she would put up with anything, provided it did not offend against her sense of scale, and promised some kind of revelation.
One old girl confided in her, ‘You’ve no idea how the nuns made me suffer – at our Lady of Mercy. Dear me, no mercy there! I would never of believed there’s bitches of nuns as well as women. It all began with a safety-pin I use to keep the cold out from the rear of my underwears. No, dear, it wasn’t – I think – it was because of the spotted dog – because spotted dog is my favourite pud. It was because of Sister Mary Perpetua. Sister Perpetual I called ’er. Didn’t I tell yer? Perhaps I didn’t. P’raps it wouldn’t be of interest – not to anyone oo ’asn’t experienced a bloody amateur from Cunnamulla Queensland.’
‘You didn’t tell me. Tell me, though – if it will be a comfort.’
But the old woman had already lost the key to her suffering in the mouth of her bottle: her story was never heard, except as a cryptic glug glug between blasts of metho.
Some of the drunks offered love, as if it were some old junk they could pull out of their pockets at will, from amongst the lengths of grey string, snotty handkerchiefs, and scraps of crumpled tote ticket. ‘Keep it till morning,’ she advised, ‘and look it over to see whether you were right.’ None of them ever cursed her, or tried to bash her up: they understood that someone of the same derelict condition could only respect their serious aspirations.
It was she who cursed when necessary. When she stumbled over some mesmerized girl stretched on top of her languid lover, she would put the boot into them, and shout, ‘You wouldn’t know if you were half dead – if you were already standing in the knacker’s yard! Well, take that – and drop to yourselves!’
As she shouted and booted, they would scramble up, worming their way into panties, jerking at zippers, to protect their offended parts from possible indignities, faces which had no more than guessed at love expressing a virtuosity of hate and fear.
One pursy bookmaker, or alderman of Irish extraction, spattered her with threats as the thin girl he was dandling bounced out from between his thighs, ‘I’ll give you in charge … the police … the ranger … Anyone of your sort is a menace to the community!’
‘Like hell I am! All of us in here at night are the wrong side of the railings. The difference is only in the purpose.’
But he didn’t appear to understand; none of them really understood, whichever language you chose to speak.
If she ran after a mob of leatherjackets, trumpeting, ‘Hold on, youse! P’raps we got somethun to say to each other,’ the whole push made a smart getaway; while she continued in pursuit, whirling in the air above her head a bicycle chain she had won during another such encounter.
As the chain savaged the air, she called, ‘We don’t know till we find out whether we don’t see eye to eye.’
More truthfully, she could see without looking into the straining eyeballs of any of these hoods, she could tell without pressing with her fingers to locate the pulses in a throbbing throat, that it was her own soul struggling to escape from their frantically catapulted bodies.
It was different with the singers: she was all gentleness as she approached the distance and their brooding voices. The young singers were sitting in the damp tussocks amongst the formations of stunted pine. At that hour, before morning, the trees on the farther outskirts of the park were at their blackest. Time did not seem to have exhausted the singers; though they
must have sung all night, and were picking the music languidly enough out of their guitars, the voices were still strung with passion, and the foreign words expressed their themes most lucidly.
‘Tell me what you are singing about?’ she asked with appropriately soft respect; in fact she knew by instinct, but hoped to encourage their confidence.
By that first watery light there was a shocked stillness in the young men’s washed-out faces. She might have cut into the first guitarist’s hairy wrist: as a result of her brutal interruption, his whole physical attitude seemed to express the despair which, till then, his song had been conveying.
A voice answered, ‘This is a song about one love.’
It was a valid enough answer, she realized.
‘About loneliness,’ another of the singers contributed.
That too.
When one who had been turning the words over in his mouth rid himself of them at last. ‘It is about a man who open up her corm – her body – and plant stones where her heart no be.’
She fell on her knees in the sand beside the group of singers. ‘That isn’t true! Nobody is born without. Those are just the silly words of a song. You’d recognise that if you were more than a bunch of milk-bar kids getting a kick out of false pathos. You’d know the heart was in anybody – only waiting to be torn into – by somebody big enough to perform the bloody act. See?’
She had never made such a reasoned appeal. She should have felt ashamed.
But it was the young milk-bar Greeks who were; they got to their feet, and trooped off, their leader trailing his guitar: it bumped against the dew-sodden tussocks, emphasizing its hollowness.
The white light increased. Because there was nobody left to accuse, she could only rage against that radiance which had begun to rise and overflow with the magnificence of perfect equanimity. Standing beneath the remnants of a moon she was thrashing with helpless, wooden arms, throwing back her pumpkin of a head, ejaculating, ‘I fuck you, God, for holding out on me!’
Spurred out of the convulsive stupor in which she found herself lying, she might have blamed her own will for her survival if she could have respected it enough. She was threatened besides, by a fit of nervous hiccups. So she dragged herself up from the wiry grass, and continued to function through some force of necessity. Strands of Japanese mist were still loosely strung above the lake, against a light which had resolved itself into a tingling of transparent, almost audible, gold leaf. Through this euphoric world she went stumbling, weighted with her load of stones.