‘I’m going up to my room, now. I have to sleep,’ he said.
He walked up the four sandstone steps that took him to the level of the house, and I followed him. We entered by a glass door at the back and passed through a clean-smelling kitchen, unused. He took no more notice of me now, shuffling on into the hall with the overhead lamps and turning into a pleasant bedroom with blue-patterned wallpaper. An old teddy bear sat on a white chest of drawers.
He fell belly-down on the single bed, his face turned towards me in profile. But his eyes were open and glassy, and when I spoke his name he ignored me. There was nothing more to be done with him; I went back down the hall and out into the garden again.
I sat in the chair by the pool.
The effect of the mushroom was not so much to disorder thoughts as to disorder appearances, so that thoughts fled in panic. Trapped inside my bubble, sitting in the redwood chair, I found that nausea had gone; but the early morning light had changed to that of sunset. It came mustard-yellow and outrageous through the gums and palm trees on the hill that led to the road. The glow picked things out with a clarity that should have been delightful. Daisies by a border of stones leaped into life, each nodding and blazing white flower and each distinct shadow of each flower moving like marvellous music. A rubbery blue aloe at the top of the steps shone like a giant star, making me exclaim.
I saw them on the beach at Point Piper; saw them as though I were there; observed them with such distinctness that I made small noises, in my chair. There was nothing I could do to stop it.
The usual sandstone rocks at each end of the beach; not very clean sand. Deserted, at one o’clock in the morning. Lights of wealthy windows; lights on the water. They came hurrying towards me, Deirdre in front, he behind. He took her by the arm, pleading, meaning well, but alarming her; she struggled, her mouth an O. His hair had fallen down on his forehead; his face had grown red. She strained away from him, one arm foolishly reaching for freedom. She was flung; she flung herself; she flew.
Yes, it was an accident; her stepson stood helpless. She lay still among the stones of the beach, in her gaping, mosscoloured gown: a piece of Harbour flotsam.
‘Why not here, among these pagan rocks? ’
The rocks had always been waiting, these honey-coloured slabs, these wave-sculptured barriers and entrances of ancient New South Wales. Why not here, in moonlight or in daytime glare? The glare had invited it, making city and Harbour excessive; too much to look at, all the high-rise buildings stacked like white plates. The mind found no relief here; no end or order; meaning and mercy fled.
I found that I was weeping, unable to stop. It had all been an accident; an accident.
The sunset glow continued among the trees; and then I realised that someone was looking at me, standing by the aloe at the top of the sandstone steps. It was Clive Broderick.
He stood quietly, just as he used to stand, his left hand thrust elegantly into the pocket of his navy-blue overcoat — which must have been oppressive, in the Sydney sun. His head was cocked, and his winter-blue eyes held a quizzing expectancy. He would always wait; he would wait through eternity.
But now I found that it was Darcy Burr, whose dark blue sports shirt had deceived me, and who stood looking down at me, severe and accusing.
‘You’re too late,’ I said.
Whether I said it aloud or not I couldn’t be sure. Burr began to speak, but his words made no sense, seeming to come from a funnel. His accusations were irrelevant; he’d become merely tedious, and I turned my head away.
Out above the ocean, the white half-moon persisted; the crone, Eurybia. The cold name shone briefly from the bottom of memory: a forgotten toy; something from my boyhood at Trent Street, with no more glamour.
And I knew now that it was all gone — like Harrigan Street, and Broderick, and the district of Second-hand.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This final edition of The Doubleman contains an episode that was cut from the first edition. This is the opening sequence in section 7 of Chapter 7 in Book Two: the meeting with the talent scout Roy Slade.
I am indebted to Les Murray and Margaret Connolly Associates for permission to quote from his poem ‘Immigrant Voyage’.
The verses which appear at the beginning of each chapter in Book One are from the traditional Scottish ballads ‘Thomas Rymer’ and ‘Tam Lin’.
About the Author
Christopher Koch was born and educated in Tasmania. His paternal ancestors were part of the German Lutheran diaspora that arrived in South Australia in the 1840s. His Anglo-Irish maternal ancestors came to Tasmania in the same period. Most of his life has been spent in Sydney, where he worked for some years as a radio producer in the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. He has been a full-time writer since 1972, winning international praise and a number of awards for his novels. One of his novels, The Year of Living Dangerously, was made into a film by Peter Weir. Koch has twice won the Miles Franklin Award for fiction: for The Doubleman and Highways to a War. In 1995 he was made an Officer of the Order of Australia for his contribution to Australian literature.
Other Books by Christopher Koch
FICTION
The Boys in the Island
Across the Sea Wall
The Year of Living Dangerously
Highways to a War
Out of Ireland
The Memory Room
Lost Voices
NON FICTION
Crossing the Gap: A Novelist’s Essays
The Many-Coloured Land: A Return to Ireland
Highways to a War
Volume One of Beware of the Past Winner of the 1996 Miles Franklin Award
When Mike Langford, a war photographer with a reputation for unusual risk-taking, disappears inside Cambodia, he becomes a mythic figure in the minds of his friends. The search for him which is at the heart of this novel explores the personal highways that led him to war, and to his ultimate fate.
Praise for Highways to a War
‘A subtle unfolding of character and history camouflaged in battledress … an absorbing portrait of lives lived at the edges of terror and beauty. Koch is a powerful writer and this is a fine book.’
Erica Wagner, The Times
‘A gripping tale, a convincing, page-turning evocation of recent history full of compelling characters, tumultuous events and just plain excitement.’
Richard Bernstein, New York Times
‘Magnificent … in its humanity and honesty, and the maturity of its story-telling, it belongs with the finest products of that sad and wasteful history.’
Michael Hulse, Spectator
‘Langford is … a parfait gentil knight. A hauntingly powerful novel from a master myth-maker.’
Megan Gressor, Sydney Morning Herald
‘Touches the reader, captivates him, and finally transports him to the loveliest of all reader reactions — that of being unable to stop reading until the last line of the last page.’
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
‘Highways to a War is a moving, elegiac tribute to a doomed, romantic lover. It is also probably the best novel that has been written on the tragedy of Vietnam and Cambodia.’
Laurie Clancy, Melbourne Herald–Sun
Out of Ireland
Volume Two of Beware of the Past
The brilliant companion volume to Highways to a War
This masterful novel tells the story of a man who suffers exile through fighting for the future of his people.
A leader of the Young Ireland rebellion of 1848, Robert Devereux is an Irish gentleman who is prepared to hazard a life of privilege in the fight for his country’s freedom. Transported to Van Diemen’s Land as a political prisoner, he enters a life that greatly changes him, falling in love with a young Irish convict woman. Through Kathleen O’Rahilly he comes to know the people he’s long romanticised; but his cause, and the life he has lost, will not let him go.
Praise for Out of Ireland
‘The scenes
… of the starry nights and the highlands must be some of the finest writing in Australian fiction. Out of Ireland reverberates for the reader because of Koch’s method of structuring his tale, which is the suggestive method of poetry … It is for its mastery of a poetic mode of fiction that I have reserved my highest praise.’
Robert Gray, The Australian’s Review of Books
‘Koch is both painter and poet — an acute observer of detail with a language so distilled in its purity as to create the illusion that the reader is also the direct observer. I know of no contemporary novelist who has such a highly attuned ear for subtle changes of rhythm and pace.’
Leonie Kramer, Sydney Morning Herald
‘The narrative is entrappingly suspenseful. Koch’s dialogue richly evokes the late 1840s and early 1850s. He is at home in the demotic of various convict-era brothels and cubbies, the elegant courtesies of an officers’ dinner in a British warship’s stateroom, and the chaff of classically-educated gentleman revolutionaries in an Arcadian setting in Van Dieman’s Land … (the) novel has much in common with the revelations of the machinery of nightmare states portrayed by Kafka and Solzhenitsyn.’
Michael Sharkey, Brisbane Courier Mail and Sydney Daily Telegraph
‘That it succeeds so well is mainly because Koch is able to capture that voice — grave, measured, beautifully lucid — so well … An impressive and formidable achievement.’
Laurie Clancy, Melbourne Age
‘In writing about the Tasmanian landscape in which he grew up, Koch rises to lyrical heights that fulfil his long-held impulse towards poetry … A profound exploration of human idealism and an intensely literary experience that intentionally echoes the structure of Dante’s Inferno.’
Jamie Grant, Who Weekly
The Year of Living Dangerously
Jakarta, 1965. Waiting for explosions, the city smells of frangipani, kretek cigarettes, and fear. It is the Year of Living Dangerously.
The charismatic god-king Sukarno has brought Indonesia to the edge of chaos — to an abortive revolution that will leave half a million dead. For the Western correspondents here, this gathering apocalypse is their story and their drug, while the sufferings of the Indonesian people are scarcely real: a shadow play.
Working at the eye of the storm are television correspondent Guy Hamilton and his eccentric dwarf cameraman Billy Kwan. In Kwan’s secret fantasy life, both Sukarno and Hamilton are heroes. But his heroes betray him, and Billy is driven to desperate action. As the Indonesian shadow play erupts into terrible reality, a complex personal tragedy of love, obsession and betrayal comes to its climax.
Praise for The Year of Living Dangerously
‘Intelligent, compassionate, flavoursome, convincing … In Billy Kwan, Mr Koch has created one of the most memorable characters of recent fiction. This book is to be prized.’
Anthony Burgess, Times Literary Supplement
‘A rich and fully realized work of fiction … well conceived and beautifully executed.’
Larry McMurtry, Washington Star
‘It is a profound and beautiful book, symphonic in its structure and recurrences … instinct with deep feeling. The whole book is built, very unobtrusively, on the tripartite structure of the great Pandava cycle.’
Les Murray, Sydney Morning Herald
‘A book which moves with the pace of a top-notch thriller but which also has a grace and depth stamping it as art … Beautifully written and painstakingly researched.’
Laurie Oakes, Melbourne Age
‘Lifted from the ordinary into the completely extraordinary by the sure touch of Koch. Unfailingly conjures up the atmosphere of Indonesia … most of all the plight of its ordinary people, whom Sukarno called brothers but whom he forgot to feed in his quest for glory.’
Mike MacLachlan, Far Eastern Economic Review
Copyright
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
First published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus in 1985
First published in Australia by Minerva,
a part of Reed Books Australia, in 1996
This edition published in 2013
by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty Limited
ABN 36 009 913 517
harpercollins.com.au
Copyright © Christopher Koch 1985
The right of Christopher Koch to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.
This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
HarperCollinsPublishers
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National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Koch, C. J. (Christopher John), 1932–
The doubleman / Christopher J Koch.
978 0 7322 9653 7 (pbk)
978 1 7430 9846 2 (epub)
A823.3
Cover design by Natalie Winter
Cover images: Silhouette of person playing guitar by WIN-Initiative/Getty
Images; background profile by Frank Herholdt/Getty Images
The Doubleman Page 36
