The Doubleman

by Christopher Koch

  In the hospital, where I was delirious, there were banging noises. When I slept, these noises continued, together with echoing clangs and yells of pain from high corridors of torment outside. My face burned, and the aching in my bones from the blows of the club was still there; I woke into semi-darkness with blue lights and called for my mother, whose face appeared in the uncertainty above me; I begged her to save me from what was happening in the corridors. Then I slept again, and the Mask of Paralysis appeared, just above my head, looking down on me.

  It was without sex, which was part of its horror, and appeared to be made of crumpled white paper. It had a parrot nose, like Mr Punch in my puppet box, and nodded and smiled at me; and the smile wished me nothing but ill.

  The next day, the delirium and much of the pain had gone, but my legs were quite dead, and felt cold, and would not move when I wanted them to. There were special pillows under them, and also under my back.

  Paralytic polio so resembled influenza in its early stages that it was sometimes wrongly diagnosed, and no immediate action was taken. But for me, diagnosis had been quick. Among those who were visited, the penalties ranged from a passing weakness of the limbs to death in an iron lung; or else paralysis of all four limbs that was total and final, the motor nerve cells in the spinal cord having been destroyed. In my case, only a few of these cells had been fatally injured. At first, my arms and legs were tested constantly, in the hospital. Then for a time I was put into splints, to prevent the development of deformities through the pull of gravity, and the drag of the unparalysed muscles. Within two weeks, the first phase of recovery having begun, I was drilled in the more active exercises which would become my tedious duty for many years to come. As it turned out, Paralysis would spare everything but my left leg.

  Here, it would leave its mark; the leg would remain permanently damaged, and grow thinner than the other, and for a year I would be forced to go on crutches. Later, these would be replaced by a single crutch, used only when I was tired, and finally, by a walking-stick.

  But there would be other consequences of crippledom: consequences less obvious than the damaged leg. It was now that my interest in the Otherworld began.

  To make things easier with my wheelchair, they had put me in a room on the ground floor of my grandfather’s house: a room once occupied by one of my aunts, long gone away and married in Melbourne. The walls were deep pink, and I privately called it the Red Room.

  Here at Trent Street, Newtown, I was safe. I took stock of things with a new, secret craftiness, lying in bed. My useless legs lay limp, like tubes of rubber; I tested them and felt nothing, but I wasn’t dismayed. Being essentially an optimist, I believed they’d get better; meanwhile, I was prepared to enjoy my status as a bed-bound princeling, whom people approached with anxious smiles. And the shameful pleasure I felt in the situation was one of its compensations, as well as being one of my new secrets. I would grow addicted to secrets from now on, and I saw that for the temporary price of my legs, I had entered a world without penalties. In fact, I had re-entered infancy, here in the Red Room, and the price had been a parody of my original birth; but that I didn’t see.

  Noises came to me from outside, from the day I couldn’t join: the shout of an unknown child, across Newtown’s big back gardens; someone hammering nails, the good, clean reports carried across a river of air. And I listened for a particular sound to which I became addicted: voices which murmured something about a cook.

  Monotonous, stupefying, mysterious, the repeated phrase went on and on beyond filmy, blowing curtains, in the mild, magic heat of late summer. Eventually I would discover that it was the sound of pigeons; but here in the Red Room it was a seductive and maddening code I couldn’t decipher, the phrase’s last, unctuous cook being the confirmation of an extraordinary meaning. It summoned up a slumbrous, sunlit region far as Europe: a country dusted with the pollen of marvel, and of Time.

  So began my addiction to a life at one remove.

  Symptoms of this were a fanatical devotion to radio sessions, comic strips and books, into which I could escape from the bed and the wheelchair. My affection for the small mantel radio that sat by the bed became profoundly personal: listening to the serials (‘Fu Manchu’; ‘The Shadow’), and to the children’s club on ABS, where the cultivated voices of Aunt Susan and Uncle Charles assured me that the world was quite free of harm, I inhaled the smell of the smooth black Bakelite as though it were a mystical fragrance; I peered closely into the yellow-glowing dial, with its cryptic letters and figures, and found a laneway there whose receding perspectives took me to a marvellous ether beyond the island: the source of these voices from the vast, outside world. My love of books, too, became almost physical. I was soon to explore the many shelves of books in my grandfather’s sitting-room, inhaling with greedy delight the differing, faded scents of their pages. And a certain air of the forbidden hovered about these shelves, giving the sitting-room books extra savour, since many were considered unsuitable by my mother. As well as The Gorilla Hunters, The Jungle Book, King Solomon’s Mines, and an ancient boy’s paper of my father’s called Chums, there were big volumes on painting, with shiny reproductions, and ancient thrillers and romantic novels for adults, lurking beside Dickens and Scott. My mother suspected such books; she had, in fact, an Irish Catholic suspicion of most books, since sexual passion and terrible nudities were liable to be sidling about in them. When these were discovered, she pushed her lips out as though she had been personally assaulted, and her far-sighted eyes sadly accused me, as though I had written such books myself. The books she approved of were devoted to fairies, and figures of legend. But had she only known it, these posed a greater threat to my well-being than any of the romantic novels she feared, or the books on art with their voluptuous Renaissance nudes.

  There was a particular set of Danish fairy tales that I read again and again. These concerned the Elle-people, who lived on the Elle-moors. Elle-women were very beautiful, it seemed; they played on stringed instruments, and danced in high grass. But they were dangerous to young men; they brought nothing but sorrow, as Sir Olaf found, who was slain when he refused to dance with them, and as a certain farmer’s boy found, who was enticed away to the Elle-moors by a beautiful young Ellemaid, who gave him fairy milk to drink from her breast, and thus enchanted him. The boy stayed in Elfland for three days; when he came home he refused all meat and drink; he pined for the milk of Fairyland. His father grew angry, and forced him to eat; but when the boy woke, he had lost his wits.

  As I grew stronger, I became absorbed as well by a toy theatre that my grandfather Miller had brought me from town.

  It was made in England, and was called Pollock’s Toy Theatre. Constructed of flat cardboard sheets, it had directions for assembly, and my grandfather and I followed these together. Soon, a three-dimensional theatre had been erected. Its characters were also flat, cut from cardboard; but when they were pushed on stage on their wires (‘Ben Pollock’s special wire slides’), and wobbled about, they came to life. There were texts with the kit (Blackbeard the Buccaneer; The Sleeping Beauty), and my grandfather and I put on these plays for visitors, doing all the voices, with the theatre set up on a low table at the double doors of the sitting-room. I found his acting loud and hammy; but he was all I had.

  When he first saw how enchanted I was by this toy, Karl Miller was pleased. But when it became an obsession, resulting in long plays I wrote myself at the cost of the schoolwork that was set for me at home, the old man declared himself sorry that he had ever bought the thing. Too late; much too late.

  The artist, the amateur of the arts and the convalescent all pass through the same door. Those, that is, who have been truly broken — but who have afterwards been able to mend. People whose illnesses have only been minor don’t understand this birth, which is a birth into the life of dream; nor can they approve a life where dream seeps into things: where things keep shifting, and creatures change their shape. This disapproval, the self-protective instinct
of the healthy, is one of which permanent convalescents are aware, and I was aware of it already; it was one of my new secrets.

  On the pink walls opposite my bed hung an old sepia photograph of a naked child, holding a bow and arrow behind its head, and smiling roguishly from under its brows, its eyes meeting mine. I would discover one day that this was a popular, sentimental print, found in many houses of the Edwardian era; but in my first bed-bound days back from the hospital, it puzzled me. Was it a relative, or an ancestor? What was its sex? Was it an actual photograph of a fairy? And what did its smiling, intimate gaze convey?

  In the second stage of convalescence, I was taken out into the quiet, tree-lined streets of Newtown, pushed in my ugly, gleaming chair by my mother or my grandfather, just as I had once dreaded.

  But my strange rebirth made this enjoyable instead of shameful. My servants conveyed me smoothly past high walls and fences and prosperous Edwardian roofs of terracotta tiles: scenes I didn’t have to join, but need only look at, as though through glass; a passing prince, my good tartan rug over my knees. A cluster of schoolboys of my own age edged around my chair with looks of awed pity; but I smiled on them proudly. They knew nothing of the Red Room, or my marvellous toy theatre: that life which was more important than their crude, ordinary world.

  At other times, though, I would fear that I might never join such boys again, or roam free of adult attendants, and that my certainty of doing so was a lie, a fiction. Then a terrible fear would clutch at me and I would sicken of my princely part. But such times quickly passed.

  Most of my day now was spent in the sitting-room with Pollock’s Theatre, or else in the wheelchair on the front verandah with my books, watching occasional passers-by over the low front fence. A pallid, delicate-looking blonde girl of about twelve, whose name I never knew, passed each day at four on her way home from school; she would look up and smile at me, from under her brown felt hat. Her face was wistful, perhaps tragic, and I waited for her every afternoon, telling myself that I loved her.

  My grandfather, arriving home at six every evening to stump along the verandah with his stick, would call in his loud, blustering voice: ‘Soon be out of that chair, boy!’ In robust health in his late sixties, Karl Miller was a widower, and a successful architect; he had designed this house for himself before World War One, and his brass nameplate flashed on the wall of the verandah where I sat. The walking-stick was always in his hand when he went out, his felt hat on his head, a rose from the garden in the buttonhole of his three-piece suit. He was now my surrogate father; my mother and I had moved permanently into his house when my father was killed, occupying the upper storey. My bedroom had its own small balcony overlooking the front garden, level with the top branches of a big blue Himalayan pine that spread above the lawn, its clean, resinous scent coming always into the room.

  On Sunday mornings before breakfast, old Karl would unfailingly play military band music or Strauss waltzes on the gramophone, and march about the house downstairs calling incomprehensible commands through his pipe, clad in a cord-trailing dressing-gown and the hat he rarely took off his bald head. He was a big, coarse-grained, ebullient old man with a short-clipped moustache and shovel chin, given to over-loud laughter and obvious jokes. My mother, who found him noisy, would softly moan: ‘I do wish he’d stop. How can an important man be such a fool?’

  Sighting me on these musical Sundays, he would remove his pipe ceremoniously, hold it high, stare through his glasses, and declaim: ‘“Into the valley of death rode the six hundred.” Eh, boy?’ He was fond of such simple poetry; he liked to recite ‘The Man from Snowy River’, and had hung Kipling’s ‘If’ above my bed.

  My mother regarded her father-in-law with a mixture of respect and resentment. Born Nora Brady, she came from a struggling farm on the East Coast, while the Millers were prosperous Protestants — making me a typical case of the Orange and the Green. If there was an establishment in Hobart, Karl Miller belonged to it. He was an alderman, and president of the Institute of Architects; he had designed a number of public buildings, and the town had many rock-solid monuments to his success, his name being carved in some of their foundation stones: Karl Miller. He had wanted me brought up a Protestant, but my mother had insisted I should be Catholic. This was the only struggle she had ever won with the old man, so that I now went to the Christian Brothers, instead of to the Anglican school where my father had gone.

  My mother’s deference towards the man she always called ‘your grandfather’, and on whom she now depended, was also tinged with dubiousness about his origins. She regarded it as a dark secret — although Karl Miller didn’t — that he was not truly an English Miller, but a German Müller, the name having prudently been changed, like so many others, during the First World War. Grandfather Miller’s father had been an immigrant to South Australia, one of the Lutheran Germans who had settled the Barossa Valley in the 1840s. Karl Miller was unapologetic about this fact; but my mother, in a low, earnest voice, would tell me to say that the family was English; and I did. But I had lived in dread of being discovered at school.

  My grandfather, hearing of this, had come up to my room one evening, and sitting in an armchair had drawn me between his knees, staring at me with the watery, blue-grey eyes whose colour was also mine.

  ‘We’re Australian, boy,’ he said bluntly, ‘and we came here from Germany.’ He took the pipe from his mouth. ‘Don’t ever be ashamed of it. We’re not Nazis. We helped to build this country, and we didn’t start this bloody war, which your father died in.’ He blinked for a moment, and his voice went quiet. ‘No real man’s ever ashamed of what he is,’ he said. ‘Remember that.’

  But I still resented the old man’s being German, behind the solid and inoffensive name of Miller. Why must he be Karl? Why couldn’t he at least change that tell-tale K to a C?

  Because he was too stiff-necked, my mother said, and sighed.

  And so I became divided in myself; and this too, perhaps, made me seek refuge in the Otherworld.

  My mother and my grandfather had markedly different attitudes to my crippling.

  Since the arrival of my white-faced master, my mother had become subdued and despondent, a condition that no doubt had its origins in the time when my father was killed. Always inclined to feel sorry for herself, she now allowed this tendency to grow; and although I was fond of her, I resented her for sorrowing over me. I wanted to be a prince who was admired, not mourned, and I preferred my grandfather’s relentless cheerfulness. It was old Karl who first told me to put aside my crutches, one afternoon on the verandah.

  My mother protested that this was too soon; but Grandfather Miller ignored her. Instead, he ordered me to walk the full length of the verandah without the crutches; and he watched me struggle to do it without saying a word, until my legs gave way under me.

  While I lay there, sadly inhaling the dusty smell of the summer-hot boards, and the birds called heartlessly in the Himalayan pine, I heard my mother’s tragic voice say: ‘You see, Mr Miller? He can’t do it, it’s too much!’

  The next sound was Karl Miller’s big lace-up boots, creaking up to where I lay. They stopped, and I heard him say: ‘Get up, boy.’ His voice was not sorry, yet not cruel either.

  I looked up: my grandfather towered over me like a crooked giant, in his navy-blue suit and waistcoat, watch-chain glinting on his lean belly. His broom-like moustache was twisted to one side, his chin jutted, and his Prussian-blue stare behind the round, gold-rimmed spectacles surprised and half-frightened me; it was not twinkling or indulgent, as it usually was, but absolutely cold. For a moment, I thought he might hit me with his stick.

  ‘If you want to go on being a bloody cripple,’ he said, ‘you can lie there. If not, you’ll walk it, boy, right to the end.’

  I struggled to my feet, hating the old man, and staggered, legs trembling and aching, to an old cane chair at the end of the verandah. As I fell into it, I heard Karl Miller laughing; a laugh that went into wheezy spasms, and end
ed in his pipe-smoke cough. ‘Good on you, I knew you’d do it,’ he said. ‘You’ll throw those blasted crutches away, soon.’

  And now I forgave him, knowing he was right to despise crippledom, and reject it, and that he loved me in the best way a father could: by ordering me to grow. Yet part of me still clung to these interests of crippledom, which I said that my grandfather was too crude and intolerant to understand.

  Once, sucking noisily on his pipe, Karl Miller peered at me from the sitting-room door as I sat on the carpet at work on my toy theatre, its little flat figures spread all around me.

  ‘Still working on that toy? You can’t play with those cardboard people for ever, boy.’ He disappeared, and I sat with burning cheeks among my scorned, beloved creatures. The old man had made them into silly pieces of card.

  The worst thing was that I knew in my heart that his suspicions were more well-founded than he knew, and that old Karl would have looked with great dubiousness on the theatre’s latest evolution: an evolution about which I felt both proud and obscurely guilty.

  I had begun to make up plays in which three figures dominated; figures not obtained from Ben Pollock’s cards, but which I cut from old fairy tale books and mounted on cardboard myself. These were a witch; a beautiful golden-haired Elf-Queen whom I called Titania; and a black-cloaked man of unknowable origins whom I had named the Weird One. As well, there was a handsome, fearless boy: myself. All these figures had appeared in dreams regularly since I was small; they came less often now, but in my theatre, I gave them new life. Like dreams, these figures were not to be shared; and now that I had moved out of the Red Room and back to my own bedroom upstairs, I put on plays simply for myself, watching the magic figures in the dark wardrobe mirror, using a reading lamp for stage lighting, while Tchaikovsky and Grieg played on my small portable gramophone. Once, I staged one of these performances for a boy down the street who was sent to play with me; a boy with quiet, dull eyes and a careful mouth, who seemed not to like or understand the performance; he grew restless, and didn’t come again.