The Doubleman

by Christopher Koch

  For all these things, I secretly idolised and envied him; for these, and for something else, not easy to analyse. It had to do with a remoteness that was always in Brady’s cheerful face, no matter how much he laughed and joked; it made him an unknown quantity at each new meeting: it gave him a mystery. I was too young yet to have grasped that this mystery is the property of very simple and self-contained people, and is often an illusion. In Brady’s case, I had partly created it myself; and yet my instinct wasn’t entirely wrong. I had sensed the mystery of talent as yet unborn — the sort of raw talent that would never be mine, but which I’d one day nurture and promote. Talent in the strong and inarticulate is always fascinating, since they don’t declare it. Not to be pinned down, keeping to themselves the area of their souls where talent is hidden, they tantalise, and then move on; the time they grant us is short.

  Our backgrounds were as different as our natures, Brady’s and mine. He was a boarder, and came from the East Coast, where his father ran a mixed farm near Swansea. Mick Brady was my mother’s brother; the farm called Greystones had been her home, and I had gone there on childhood holidays. Brian had been friendly then, but he had given me little attention: we had eyed each other like dogs, and he’d contemplated my crutches with healthy unease.

  When he had first appeared at St Augustine’s at the age of fourteen, I had gone up to him in the playground and had introduced myself, reminding him of our kinship.

  But my cousin had examined me with only slight interest. ‘Yair, I remember you,’ he said. ‘You had two crutches, then, not one. Are you getting better?’

  When I said I was, Brady said: ‘That’s fine. Good luck to you, kid.’ And he had walked away, leaving me flushing. He hadn’t really wanted to know me; his friends were blokes a year older; athletes, members of the football team.

  I wasn’t used to having my friendship rejected; I’d achieved considerable popularity by that time, through the traditional method available to a cripple: I had turned myself into a jester. One of my early juvenile accomplishments had been to perfect the loudest belch in the school. Released at will, it suggested the sound of a gargantuan toad, and I was cunning enough to ration it, so that it never wore out its appeal. There were theories that only a cripple could produce it. I was their mate-on-a-crutch; their lame-boy mascot — the blokes being as sentimental as they were cruel.

  Then I found another way to secure approval: I began to make drawings of them. I had a mediocre but facile talent for drawing, and specialised in depicting those who played Australian Rules football: the game I loved but might only watch. The members of the team (including noble Ashton Stuart, the Captain) accepted these portraits of themselves in action with the uneasy pleasure of simple men caught in a dilemma: they despised art, but were seduced by personal immortality. I had learned a form of aggression more subtle than theirs, and I now watched without fear their bloody playground fist-fights, which the Brothers happily refereed; I drew the winners. I knew just how vulgar my portraits of the gladiators were; I was a sort of prostitute really, but after all my options were limited.

  My portrait of Brian Brady at football was a little different; I had put great care into it, and he flew into the air like a dark dancer. Presented with this, he had studied it with suspicion as though it were a forgery; then he had thanked me quietly, and once again passed on. Nothing cut any ice with Brian until the day of Brother Kinsella’s assault, when St Augustine’s and boyhood were almost over.

  The weather had cleared, to produce sun and racing white clouds; the ice had melted in the puddles. It was past noon: the day’s dreaming summit. We had said the Angelus, and despite my concern at Brady’s strapping, a sort of peace had entered me.

  ‘And the word was made flesh.

  And dwelt amongst us.’

  The words had calmed my spirit as the small, golden notes of the Angelus bell had entered the calm air, drop by healing drop, drifting over the heedless, irreligious roofs of the town below, as they did every day. I found Brady in his usual smoking-spot, sitting on a stone behind the cypress trees that flanked the sandstone wall along Byrne Street. He was alone, a cigarette between his lips.

  When I greeted him, he looked at me without smiling. There was something about the blankness of his eyes that made me know he had changed; in some way, he had ceased to be a boy.

  ‘Hello Miller,’ he said. ‘What are you after? Can’t you see I’d rather be on me Pat?’

  I quailed inwardly; but I squatted down nevertheless. ‘Thought you might like a sandwich,’ I said, offering him one from my lunch tin. Brady raised his eyebrows and took one in silence, stubbing out his cigarette; boarders were always hungry.

  ‘That wasn’t right, that back-hander he gave you,’ I said.

  Brady looked at me, chewing. Then he said softly: ‘He’ll never make me crack though, the bloody pig.’

  He seldom spoke without a joke in his voice, and this intensity was new. Perhaps he felt he could show it to me: his crippled cousin. Silence fell, and extended; but he didn’t seem to mind my being here.

  From where we sat, hidden from the steeple and its cross, we looked down on the chirruping, ochre-and-grey town, and the funnels and derricks of the ships lying in port, past the stone tower of the GPO. The breeze had dropped, and it was warm and still; the chugging of a fishing-boat floated up on the miles of air. I could pick it out, moving down the glass of the estuary towards the D’Entrecasteaux Channel, leaving a V of wake. Beyond was the grey-blue eye of the Southern Ocean. Round hills, empty and golden-grassed, on the far side of the river, were in another land to which I might some day escape, and the dark green foreshores of the suburbs of Sandy Bay and Taroona, with their cypresses and red-and-white houses, didn’t look like part of Hobart at all, but like places in Europe: Italian hill towns perhaps.

  From the chapel, the sopranos of Brother Kinsella’s Junior choir could be heard, singing ‘Panis Angelicus’. The Navvy had a hunger in his soul, a lust for beauty, and this was fed by his choirs, which sang a mixture of Latin hymns and old-fashioned popular songs by composers like Stephen Foster. Every boy with a voice was dragooned into them; Brian, who had a remarkably true baritone now that his voice had broken, was in the Senior choir. Conducting, the Navvy displayed a second self, enunciating pedantically like a gross, middle-aged matron with pretensions to refinement. Waving his baton, lips protruding as though for a kiss, standing hugely on tiptoe, he only roared when some bloke sang flat.

  God allowed me to pity him, just now, and I said: ‘He does a good job with the choir.’

  And all of a sudden, sitting here with Brady, our familiar situation’s strangeness came to me. Down below, our native town, our small, gimcrack colonial city, on the edge of the Southern Ocean; up here, this magisterial, medieval world of cloisters, cypresses, Latin and the strap. We lived in two dimensions, I saw; and ‘Panis Angelicus’ woke a pleasure in me that hardly seemed my own. Like ‘Star of the Morning’, the hymn was anciently beautiful; the whole stern book of Europe was in it, of which I’d read hardly a page. But this mysterious joy was too intense to stay; almost, it didn’t belong to me, and certainly it wasn’t happiness.

  ‘I’m skipping Benediction tonight,’ Brady said suddenly. ‘I’m pissing off downtown to see that new John Wayne. You seen it?’

  I was saddened by this. I was fond of Benediction, to which day-boys went only occasionally; I liked the chapel in the evenings, with its red sanctuary-lamp burning in the dimness, the incense more sharp and significant than by day, the veiled air filled with mystery. I liked the sentimental statue of Our Lady, with her blue-and-white robes and serene, northern face; I often prayed for her to intercede for me. I remonstrated with Brian now, telling him he should go.

  ‘What the hell for? It’s all rubbish, Miller. There’s no God, or he’d never allow a shit-bag like Kinsella to be a Brother. D’you think the Navvy is a holy man?’

  I thought. ‘No,’ I said. ‘But I think he suffers.’

 
Brady broke into jeering laughter. ‘Suffers! I hope he does. Look what he does with his bloody suffering. Passes it on. Is that Christ-like?’

  ‘No. But there can be bad Brothers and bad priests — it doesn’t change the truth. And there are good ones. What about the Franciscan?’

  ‘The Franciscan?’ Brady frowned at me in puzzlement; and then I realised that he had never talked to the Franciscan. He must have been one of the very few blokes in the college who hadn’t.

  The Franciscan had come to us from Italy about a year ago, and he had been with us for only a few weeks. He had taught no classes, and we never really knew why he was living in the college. It was probably just a holiday for him.

  He had preached one sermon in the chapel, and I remembered little about it, now. It was not so much what he had said that had held our attention; it was his smile. It made the junior boys follow him like puppies whenever he appeared; and seniors gather round as well. I had been one of these; and he didn’t fail us, he appeared every day. Unlike the Brothers, he seemed to have all the time in the world, and was ready to give us endless attention. Every one of us received his smile, like a gift to take away for the rest of the day; I was to take it away for the rest of my life.

  Of course, the Franciscan was a foreigner, with a brown cassock instead of a black one, and that alone had made it worthwhile for the Juniors to follow him about. But this didn’t really explain our interest in the Senior School, or what happened as the weeks went by. Normally, we would have tired of such a novelty quite quickly. Instead, our devotion grew. We stood about in the lunch-hours, keeping our eyes open all the time for the tall, bulky figure in the brown habit to appear in the cloisters, with his sandals showing clean olive toes, and the cord about his waist like that of a dressing-gown. When he appeared, a cheer would go up, and we would move towards him. He would give a little wave of his hand, smile happily, and continue to walk, going nowhere in particular, while our procession followed him; and then he would begin to talk.

  I’ve forgotten his name, if I ever knew it. He spoke good English, but rarely said more than a few words at a time, and he spoke very softly. He was somewhere in late middle age; a big man, strongly built and comfortably fleshy, radiating health and well-being. He was bald on top, with a fringe of white hair contrasting pleasingly with his tan skull and smooth, tan face. His eyes were dark as sultanas, constantly narrowed as he smiled; and they gleamed always with a good humour that was not exactly sly but cheerfully confiding, as though there were one particular joke about the world we all shared, but about which he knew a little more than we did.

  We were always waiting for him to tell it; but I doubt now that he ever did. What he told, what he conveyed, was not done in words. He smoked a pipe, and we liked his pipe; it was comfortable, like everything about him. He was comfortable with the world. I see him standing against the sunlit red weatherboards of the old bicycle shed, in a corner of the yard, while we press in a semi-circle around him, waiting. For what? I no longer know. We devour his brown harmonies with our eyes: his gown the good colour of earth; his face like warm, baked clay. His pipe-smoke flies away on the summer air. When I try to bring back the voices, I find they are almost lost; but snatches of conversation do come back; some of it inconsequential.

  Stubby Pat Lynch’s voice: ‘Do they have big cities in Italy, Father? ’

  And the soft voice answering: ‘Some big cities. But many are small, like yours.’

  ‘Ours isn’t so small.’

  ‘Well perhaps not so small. But not too big either. Eh? You should be very happy, boys, that whichever way you look, you can see the hills and the country outside. That is how it is in Florence. And that is good for your souls, do you know that? It was good for men’s souls in Florence. They made beautiful things, because beautiful places were just across the roof-tops: the beauties that are God’s. That is how it is with you — so far from Europe, here in this beautiful island.’

  And now, my mouth going dry, I decide to ask this man things I have asked of no one.

  I have reached the age of private ecstasies. The visible world has taken on a whole new appearance, in the past year; and standing on my balcony at Trent Street, staring across the valley of Newtown in the late afternoons, I’m entranced for an hour at a time by Mount Direction: a mauve, double-humped hill lying to the east. No one, I believe, has ever loved a hill or a mountain as I do; Mount Direction is not just a mountain; it’s the sign of an amazing Beyond. Smaller and more domestic than Mount Wellington in the west — little more than a hill — it has a cool specialness, a musing air of marvel the other peak lacks. It lies sleeping at the gateway of light, and across its double top, where I pick out the tiny heads of gums on the eastern sky, there is another, distant dimension, signalled by a strange green tinge low in that sky at evening. There’s a membrane stretched across the air; if it split, would I see God’s face?

  This, in stumbling, inadequate words, is what I dare to ask the Franciscan, in front of my mates. It’s a measure of the respect he’s created among us that none of them laughs at me; they listen as though to a reasonable enquiry.

  The Franciscan looks at me, neither smiling nor unsmiling, seeing me in detail for the first time; he takes in the stick I still have to lean on, and his gaze doesn’t embarrass. But what he says is unexpected.

  ‘I think you have difficulty in praying.’

  I flush; it’s true.

  ‘You need never doubt that God is there,’ he says. ‘But remember what it says in the Book of Ecclesiastes: “The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.” And think about the things Thomas à Kempis said about that. He gave good advice to young men like yourself — young men who are full of wonder and curiosity at the world, as they should be.’ (Here a faintly ironical smile comes back, and he puffs on his pipe.) ‘He told you to try and withdraw your heart from the love of visible things, and to turn to the invisible. Sensuality, however full of innocent delight to you now, has its dangers. So, ragazzo mio, keep your mind fixed on the invisible. It is all around you, after all.’ He extends his palm briefly towards the nearby air, as though indicating a host of angels; then drops it. ‘And pray,’ he commands. ‘Don’t be concerned if god doesn’t seem to listen. He does; and in one moment, as à Kempis says, he may give you what he long denied you. Ecco.’

  This last, small Italian word, which he often uses, and whose meaning none of us knows, gives great peace; it’s like the closing of a small, well-fitted door, and I stand here with a serenity I’ve never known before: answered, absolved.

  Ginger Denis Fahey asks the next question: a prosaic one. ‘Would you like to live here, Father? ’

  ‘To live here? I? ’ He takes his pipe from his mouth, and his smile broadens. ‘That would be beautiful. But only for a time. We are like birds, we human beings: in the end we fly back to where we come from. And my nest is in the hills of Tuscany.’

  Tuscany. The strange name hangs in the air like his pipe-smoke, and we stare at him almost in awe, saying nothing for a moment. The Franciscan doesn’t belong here; he has told us this plainly, and we don’t resent it; but all of us have a musing regret in our faces now. Sadness clutches at us, and I’m not sure whether this is because the Franciscan will soon go, leaving us with nothing but Brother Kinsella, or because we want to follow him to unknown Tuscany, to that landscape of cypresses and dreaming bell-towers and mysterious little smokes we’ve seen in the paintings of Raphael and Fra Filippo Lippi, stretching behind the smiling Virgin and Child, out through arched windows.

  The Franciscan will go, and will not be seen again. For the first time in my life, I know what it is to cry out in my heart against a loss for which there is no remedy, and over which I have not even the right to cry. And his smile seems to understand this. His eyes meet mine, and his soft voice says to me, and to me alone: ‘But birds can fly very far: some of them over whole oceans. Some day you may do that, and come to Italy.’

  There the voices of
memory fade out for ever; and the Franciscan is gone.

  Four o’clock: light rain is falling. Brian Brady and I walk through the front gate of the school together, passing the little thorn tree without a glance. He’s offered to walk downtown with me mainly, I suspect, to escape his prison in the college for a time; but also to cement our friendship made at lunchtime.

  I’ve long ceased to need my crutch, but the steepness of Harrigan Street forces me to brace myself on the blackwood walking-stick I’ve inherited from Karl Miller, who is now three years dead. When we’ve nearly reached the bottom of the Harrigan Street hill Brady demands a turn with the stick, and spins it like a hoofer in a dance routine. Then he gives it back.

  ‘You’ll be able to give this away soon, won’t you?’

  ‘Pretty soon.’ I put an unctuous quaver into my voice. ‘The leg still gets shaky on a slope; then I need my stick. Need it badly, master.’ I go into my Quasimodo routine; mouth a-slobber, back hunched, I lurch along like Charles Laughton in the film, and Brady laughs. ‘You don’t give a stuff, do you?’

  ‘No, master.’ I see that he suddenly admires me.

  ‘But you look pretty fit, you know, Dick. No one’d know there was anything wrong, now,’ he says.

  One leg, hidden by my trousers, is still thinner than the other, and I’ll never run fast again; but I like the fact that Brady wants to dismiss this. He’s reduced my grandfather’s sad old stick to a trivial toy; and as well, he has taken the grimness out of Harrigan Street.

  Harrigan Street! Main street of slumdom; street of Secondhand! I’ve always thought it eternal; I believe it will run for ever, dripping in our souls. As it levels out to meet Elizabeth Street, where I’ll catch my tram, the district of Second-hand begins.