The Doubleman

by Christopher Koch

  I had also taken to escaping into the sewing-room: an enclosed little chamber, dry as cloth, with frosted-glass windows looking on to nothing.

  Reached by going down three steps from the sitting-room through a door that was always kept closed, it felt as though it were underground. It was a place where I would seldom be disturbed; where no one even knew where I was. It was absolutely silent, without echo, and its air smelled like paper. Here I read the house’s aged books, more of which were in a set of shelves along one wall; and here began my first, innocent explorations of the territories of Faery.

  On a rainy afternoon down there, when everyone was out, I took down certain fairy tale books dating from early in the century or late in the last one; books that had been my father’s and my aunt’s. Opening them at certain illustrations, I propped them around the skirting, on the carpet. I was creating another theatre; a theatre I would actually move inside, here in the sewing-room. I would be in Elfland, its creatures all around me. I crawled about the red carpet from book to book; I smelled their pages in a rite of worship; and then I hauled myself on to my crutches and swung to and fro, fairy figures whirling about me, all round the room.

  Pointed, feral faces peer through leaves; half-naked, half-childish sprites with butterfly wings fly against the moon. They arch in delight through mauve, Otherworld twilights by Heath Robinson and Arthur Rackham; they soar above the star-soft night-lights of towns by Edmund Dulac. The perfect little faces and tiny, pointed breasts are those of half-grown girls; one looks like the blonde girl who passes at four o’clock, and for whom I yearn. The elves, in their pointed caps, are no older than myself; and certainly boylike — but other naked creatures are without age or gender, their smooth, perturbing groins innocent of sex. Only Titania, the Queen, her face tender as a mother’s, has the body of a woman. Watched by elves in a glade of night, she stands shining in her nudity, white as the moon, her adult breasts and thighs awful yet lovely, her long, upraised, dragonfly wings making her more than human, yet less than angel.

  And I’m called away by that Otherworld of mauve mists and round, enchanted hills: Elfland! Not to be able to join it, not to be able to fly! Why am I trapped instead in dull Trent Street, Newtown? Where is the actual land of half-lights? Under which hill? Dimly, I know that my yearning to go there is sickly, foolish: and yet I fiercely deny it. Nothing can be wrong with escaping the ordinary world; and nothing’s really wrong with these pictures. Fairies are pure, and allowed to be naked; and I tell myself cunningly that my mother would approve, since she likes me to read fairy tales.

  Why then do I tremble with exquisite unease, swinging to and fro on my crutches in the dead-quiet sewing-room, walled in by books? Perhaps because I’m made to long for something else; something maddeningly vague: some absolute escape, some icy ecstasy found in far, pure reaches of the air. I want to get outside and run and run; to fly on the icy winter wind. I don’t know what else to do with my longing.

  Then I hear my mother’s voice, calling my name from somewhere in the house. I begin to scrabble about my circle of books, slamming them shut, dropping my crutches, pulling myself about the carpet by the hands. And my haste and thudding heart give me away: Elfland is not entirely innocent.

  2. The Guitar

  But Thomas, ye maun hold your tongue,

  Whatever you may hear or see,

  For gin ae word you should chance to speak,

  You will neer get back to your ain countrie.

  1

  The whole of dry, Time-flattened Australia lies north of latitude forty, its climate Mediterranean and then sub-tropical. But small, mountainous Tasmania, filled with lakes and rivers, is south of latitude forty; and this makes it different. Politically, it is part of the Commonwealth of Australia; physically, it is not.

  The island lies in the track of the Roaring Forties, the westerly winds that blow from Cape Horn. In the upside-down frame of the Antipodes, it duplicates the Atlantic coast of Europe; and Brian Brady and I were children of a green, marine landscape: subjects of the stern winter cold. Our spirits were conditioned by the blood-thrilling Westerlies; snow fell in our mid-winters; we walked to school through London fogs.

  ‘Seven o’clock,’ said the morning radio announcer, ‘time for a Capstan, the Empire’s favourite cigarette.’ Our seasons were the seasons of English storybooks, and of the films we saw on Saturday nights, brought from the northern hemisphere. Our great-grandfathers had put together a lost, unknown home in landscapes that made it all perfectly natural: Georgian houses with classical porticoes; hop fields and orchards; chimney pots rising on gentle hillslopes, in the subtle, muted lights of East Anglia. Banners of cloud hung low across dark blue hills, straight from The Hound of the Baskervilles; Norman and Gothic churches had appeared; discreet brothels; banks; Salvation Army hostels. Repertory Societies were run by artistic men in tweeds; trams ran on wet tramlines; and in the midlands, the gentry mulled their claret and rode to hounds. Tasmanians, I suppose, were rather like the prisoners in Plato’s cave; to guess what the centre of the world was like — that centre we knew to be twelve thousand miles away — we must study shadows on the wall: Bitter Sweet at the Hobart Repertory; Kind Hearts and Coronets at the Avalon Cinema; the novels of A. J. Cronin and J. B. Priestley and Graham Greene; shadows, all shadows, clues to the other hemisphere we might someday discover. We were living, when I grew up, in the half-light of that Empire the ultimate end of whose bridge of boats was Hobart.

  And it was all strange. The island was unalterably strange in the end, hanging like a shield above Antarctica. Who were we, marooned at forty-two degrees south? Why were we here, and not there? South of Hobart, south of Port Davey’s last little lights of settlement, there was nothing; there was the ice. Past that Gothic southern coast, with its giant basalt needles and pillars of rock, Hebridean seas rose, grey and frightening as steel engravings, and fishing boats disappeared without trace. In the cold, virgin rain-forests of the south-west wilderness, where it rained and snowed eternally, where rivers ran underground, and where men had walked in and never walked out, wild flowers and exquisite little tarns continued unseen, as they had done throughout time. Settlement was in the island’s pastoral midlands, and the mild, kindly east.

  Dean Swift had located Lilliput somewhere near Tasmania — perhaps with poetic foresight. By the time I was born, the island had become an antipodean Dwarfland: a place of small, quiet people with quiet smiles, who wanted to forget that this had once been another island.

  The other island’s name had been Van Diemen’s Land. It was a name that had rung and chimed in Cockney and Irish songs of hate; the name of a British penal colony that had once been synonymous with fear throughout the Anglo Saxon world. At the place called Hell’s Gates, on the savage west coast, a penal settlement so terrible had been created that convicts had murdered each other to secure the release of hanging, or had fled without hope into the icy rain-forest to leave their bones there, and sometimes to turn cannibal. Van Diemen’s Land had also removed a whole race: the few aborigines the colonists had found when they came, and whose last remnants, deported to a smaller island in Bass Strait, had pined away, staring across the water to their lost home.

  All this was a hundred years gone; and that century was best forgotten. Gone, the sad aborigines, who had once lurked in the bush like dark, accusing wraiths, threatening lonely farms. Gone, the old convicts from London and Cork, in their mustard suits of shame; ancestors whom nobody wanted to own. When transportation ended, the native-born colonists changed the island’s name to obliterate the dread; to make it normal. As clean young Tasmania, it would start anew, the horrors forgotten.

  But were they? I would sometimes wonder about this, reading about Hell’s Gates and Port Arthur. How long ago was a hundred years?

  Sometimes it seemed to me that the fusty odour of fear, the stench of the prison ships, was still in Hobart; and a tragic, heavy air, an air of unbearable sorrow, even in sunshine, hung over the ruined, sandstone pe
nitentiary and the dark blue bay at Port Arthur, south of Hobart, where the tourists went. Was it possible that the spirits of the convicts were silently clustered in that air, weighting it like sacking? Were the floggings and the shackles still invisibly here, hanging above the dark green bush? Still somehow repeated, for eternity?

  A certain look of distaste came into Tasmanian faces when you mentioned the convicts; the look of respectability threatened. It was similar to fear, and even the jokes had fear in them. No one wanted to admit having a convict ancestor; because the truth was that long ago was not long ago: not long enough.

  Once, I had asked my mother whether the family had a convict in that past, and her face took on the look of threatened respectability I’d come to recognise; a prim yet evasive distaste.

  No, she said, of course not; how could I ask such a thing?

  But she was lying, as so many Tasmanians lied then; I found this out eventually. She was hiding Michael Brady, an Irish political prisoner transported in 1848; not only my ancestor, but Brian Brady’s too: our hidden great-great-grandfather.

  It was not our blood relationship, however, that was to draw us together, we incongruous first cousins. It was our penal servitude under Brother Kinsella, in our last year at St Augustine’s, on the edge of adulthood.

  2

  The Christian Brothers were simple men, Irish or Irish-descended, from the old, bare-knuckle, working-class suburbs of Dublin, Melbourne and Sydney: the poor boys of the Church, with little love for scholarship.

  They had planted Jansenist discipline in Tasmania’s penal soil, and learning was a pill to be forced down the throat with the aid of the eighteen-inch strap they called Doctor Black. They were happiest on the football field or the handball court — red-faced and panting, boys among boys. Many of them were more or less kindly and dedicated in their belief; in Scripture periods, their narrow souls would sometimes open up, and their devotion to Our Lord and Our Lady would engage and utterly convince us. Then, grey-suited and awed in our rows of desks, enclosed in belief as though in a sweet-smelling tent, we knew ourselves part of that Faith which sinners in the town below would never understand.

  But no such devotion was manifest in Brother Kinsella. His deepest passion seemed to be hatred; and in the last term of that final year, the main brunt of his hatred was borne by Brian Brady.

  It was only when a breaking-point was reached that Brady became my friend. Until then, he had been quite distant with me.

  Brother Kinsella faces the Matriculation class, pale, bully-boy’s hands joined over his paunch. Down-turned mouth drooping, he hoarsely intones the great litany to Mary, to which we chant our responses, as we’ve done for years.

  With brief respites, we’ve been taught by Brother Kinsella since Junior School; now, inescapable, he takes Algebra. Pale, bald and massively fat in his ballooning cassock, he is never seen on the handball court or the football field; but because of his violence, his rough Australian accent and his harsh, roaring voice, he is nicknamed Navvy.

  ‘Ark of the covenant.’

  ‘Pray for us.’

  ‘Gate of Heaven.’

  ‘Pray for us.’

  ‘Star of the Morning.’

  ‘Pray for us.’

  Star of the Morning! Delight suddenly distracts me from my morning foreboding. I’m often ambushed by delight, at seventeen. How has such an atom of beauty flown from these loose, hateful lips?

  The walls of Navvy Kinsella’s classroom are of cold, glazed brick; the windows frame steel-plated sky and bare trees. The cold numbs our feet; big Mick Paterson has farted, and it isn’t funny, no one dares laugh; it’s a wretched whiff from the pit, a reminder of the body’s foulness and the squalors of the flesh. Meanwhile, an Antarctic wind off the Southern Ocean is blowing straight up the Derwent Estuary below, and into the narrow streets of Hobart. Puddles are frozen over in Harrigan Street. The strap will hurt much more, on a morning like this, and the blokes blow secretly into their praying hands, while a coloured print of St Joseph eyes us with useless sympathy from next to the blackboard. I blow too, but only through fellow-feeling; because of my leg, I’m not strapped; I have the sad immunity of the marred.

  With the approach of the external Matriculation exam (administered, we are reminded, by Protestants), the strappings have increased. And this morning, as he reviews our homework, scribbling the equations violently on the blackboard, the Navvy’s bile seems worse than usual. His mighty rage rises; his shouts can be heard in the Archbishop’s Palace. He hits the blackboard with the side of his hand, the repeated thumps like the sound of some small animal being killed; then, his hoarse voice sinking a little lower, he takes up a litany of his own which we know by heart, and which I’ve become expert at imitating: I have often performed it at lunchtimes, surrounded by an applauding crowd.

  ‘Blimey, why do I come here?’ His grey eyes, the colour of garden slugs, search our faces, the life-weary lids slanting downwards in disgust, like the coarse, weary lines of his pallid cheeks. ‘I could be having a good time! I could be down at the pub! I could be anywhere, but instead I’m here teaching you bloody idiots!’

  No one laughs, even though my parody hangs in the air: even a smile can provoke retribution. The Navvy was perhaps meant to be a bookmaker or a publican; anything but a Christian Brother. It’s clear that he’s secretly rent with the strain of playing his part, in his cassock and Roman collar. Longing for the pleasures he sarcastically dwells on, craving to satisfy his big belly in the pub, and perhaps to indulge more mysterious appetites, he vents his rage instead on these rows of respectful, stiff-faced youths with their Irish names. And the highest pitch of it is reserved for Brian Brady.

  ‘Mr Brady. Out here, sir, for a little taste of Doctor Black.’

  The summons this morning is over Brady’s botched algebra homework; his homework is usually botched. Although Brother Kinsella is quite tall, Brady at eighteen has grown taller, and he stands at the front with a slight stoop, looking down on the Navvy in a way that’s comically enquiring, his full lower lip protruding. As usual, his suit looks as though he’s slept in it, and his brown, loosely curling hair is an uncombed tangle. He has been strapped by Kinsella every day for a month, without showing any sign of pain; and to extract such a sign is plainly the Navvy’s deepest desire. It has become a contest of wills, and has amused us at first. But now it’s gone too far; we all know that, and have grown uneasy.

  ‘Why are these equations not finished, Mr Brady?’

  ‘I got bored, sir.’

  There is a nervous titter; the Navvy blinks. Then he hits Brady hard across the face, and the class hisses softly. No one hits a bloke of Brady’s age on the face: the Navvy has hit a man.

  The strapping that follows is agreed to be the worst anyone has seen: a sixer; the maximum. The Navvy says it’s for insolence. His black form seems to rise from the floor as he brings the strap down: the reports are like gunshots. Gathering his strength for each cut, wet lower lip agape, his expression is that of a man on the verge of weeping. Brady’s arm begins to shudder; and as he comes back down the aisle, bent over, his crossed hands in his armpits, his face is blanched.

  The Navvy sinks into his chair, chest heaving. ‘Get out your Latin books.’

  He pants; his voice is wheezing and small; he no longer looks at us, and we all sit sober and thoughtful.

  I decide to search my cousin out at lunchtime, and talk to him.

  In furthering the careers of the Rymers, I am one day to accumulate a hoard of photographs of Brian Brady: glossy publicity shots, posters for concerts, newspaper pictures: the bulging archives of success. Put beside these, a picture kept from St Augustine’s days makes an odd and touching contrast. This is a football photograph in the school magazine: the St Augustine’s Firsts.

  Brady squats on the ground, third from the left in the front row in his striped football sweater with its spreading collar. He’s already bigger than most of his fellows, and the good looks that will be central to
his career are taking form, but not yet complete. His uncontrolled loops of Celtic hair are cut shorter than they will be later, but are defiantly free of the disciplined and oiled side-parting which was the required style of those days, and which all his mates have. His light blue eyes look unnatural in the picture; almost white, like those in pictures of silent screen stars, or nineteenth-century ancestors. His face is both tough and wistful, the broad Irish cheekbones high, the nose already broken from one of his tremendous fights in the gym, refereed by Brother Malone; an epic in which he knocked out Ginger Donnelly. And his face is luminous with expectancy. Not just that expectancy which gives beauty even to the plainest adolescent, but something else, it seems to me: the musing contemplation of a special future, into which he will escape.

  There’s little pain to be seen, although this was the period when Brady’s suffering under Navvy Kinsella was at its worst. Instead there’s something more complex: not sorrow, not pleading, but a swift, affronted surprise, which is combined with calculation. It’s the ancient expression of the warrior, of all men of spirit under tyranny’s attack. And the calculation is directed towards how and when he will strike back.

  I was to see this expression on Brady’s face many times; but I viewed it from a distance, as though he were a player on a stage, or a gladiator who went day after day into the same arena, against hopeless odds. The truth was that I scarcely knew my cousin, despite all the years of our sporadic acquaintance. This was the first time we’d been in the same form; Brady, who was a year older than I, was repeating Matriculation, having failed last year.

  He was unlikely to pass. He seemed not even to try with his work, and was cheerfully disorganised. With the exception of Navvy Kinsella, the Brothers were inclined to tolerate him, since he was good at the two things that made for the utmost popularity at St Augustine’s: Australian Rules football, and boxing. He had won every fight he had got into, both in and out of the gym.