—So, said Chambers in the cavernous, aspirated voice with which he had once dominated debate in the House of Representatives. So each day in France Soir there was the accusation that UNESCO was wilfully impotent and that its officers lived off caviare and Moët – all at the price of the world’s poor and of those who lay in darkness. When I would get home in the evenings, I wouldn’t be able to face the paper until I had a solid Scotch, so used was I to abysmal UNESCO-bashing.
—You can read French, can you Norris? asked Mulcahy, winking at the rest of us. And, though it seemed to pain him, Francis Emptor managed a laugh, knowing Norris fancied himself as a Francophone.
Chambers persisted.
—I was so accustomed to the nightly trauma that I leave you to imagine my pleasure when I shook the paper out and found that one particular night the institution which had come in for attack was not UNESCO but the Church. It seemed that in a parish church in the Umbrian Hills there existed a shred of tissue – suitably displayed in a reliquary – which purported to be the foreskin of Jesus, the prepuce of the Saviour. The relic was, it seems, a centre of local pilgrimage and devotion. It had developed that not only had the Vatican refused to recognize this curious cult, but some blackguard had stolen the thing. Thus I had the pleasure of sending a cable to Foreign Affairs in Canberra, and informing my Minister that at last we’d been driven off the front page by a foreskin!
Laughter. People looking secretly to Francis to gauge the impact of the story on him.
In turn, lanky Evans and his wife told of a bungled drama prize giving they had attended in London a little after Evans had his first play bought by a West End theatre. Evans was full of the excitement of bringing his raw new voice to the dwindling but still estimable centre of empire. Their cab driver said to them, Come over here for a bit of culture, have we?
And then, at the reception, one of the Dames of the British theatre beat her way across the floor to say, I always wanted to know, why do you Australians (which, as Evans told us, the super-Brits always pronounced Awe-strel-yines) need an Oprah Hice?
Renate – it turned out – was a better social storyteller than her husband. He was fair enough at it but lacked the waspishness for it in ordinary life. And yet all the characters said scathing things in his plays. He was an example of the way art liberated people to be their Other. But Oscar’s dining table wasn’t art, so the anecdote depended on Renate for some of its better connecting lines.
Mulcahy told us how a massive Italian tenor in the Vienna Opera House, gesturing with a sword in Rigoletto had it fly from his hand into the orchestra pit, where it caused a wound among the string section. With scarcely a glimpse in the direction in which his sword had vanished, he had continued with the aria, but at its close he had stepped forward, laid a hand on his stomach, bent down over the orchestra and said, Scusi!
Francis Emptor touchingly spent more hilarity on that one than seemed medically wise.
Asked to follow, I told the story of a CIA man I’d met in Sichuan, and the trouble he had with pit toilets. Funny how at a feast, lavatorial jokes always work.
The democracy of this tale-telling had, at least in my mind, reduced Bickham to an ordinary citizen at the table. He seemed to be having an ordinary, not an Olympian, day out, and he confirmed it by telling, with an almost hectic relish, how he had met and become friends with Chloe.
—A cowgirl with whom I have learned to discuss my work, as I never have with any other woman. Especially not with any academic.
Chloe radiated a flush of good blood and a kind of watchful contentment. And she, who could have told us stories to curl our hair, told none.
Francis ate a fragment of one of Mulcahy’s magnificent spuds, one or two shreds of the beef, and a third of a forkful of peas. He chewed slowly, then after swallowing his fragments of food, took minute sips of his Cabernet Sauvignon. He refused the dessert and the cheese. Chloe watched him all the while, I noticed.
We were still eating dessert and Oscar Mulcahy had opened a second bottle of Château d’Yquem when Francis said, Would you all excuse me for a second?
Most of us half-stood. We looked at each other wondering what gallantry the moment required of us.
—Please, he said, putting out a hand to stop us.
He made hard progress out of the dining room and across the living room and disappeared into the back of the house.
Bickham said in a hushed, uncharacteristic voice, You should take great comfort, Chloe, from the fact that he has so much fight in him.
Francis was gone some time and we half forgot him. I was sitting at the wrong end of the table to see his return, but I heard his light, painful tread on the polished jarrah floor of the living room. I heard too the noise of a minor fall, as if a jacket had been taken off and dropped on a chair, and saw on the faces of those who were placed to see – including Hefty and Oscar and Khalil – a sudden appalled look. In the next instant we all heard something sharper, an awful thud, somehow metallic, somehow to do with glass, and Chloe and Hefty screamed together, at this pitch of distress indistinguishable from each other.
Everyone rose from the table and rushed into the living room. Francis had fallen against the glass corner of Hefty’s enormous coffee table. The glass had cut his forehead deeply. Blood had sprayed a coffee table book of Hefty’s on Magritte, and began to clot in the fibres of a Berber rug.
Former Prime Minister Chambers had a bad back, and of course, Bickham had emphysema, and this and horror caused those two men to pause. No-nonsense Maureen was already on her knees, trying to ease the fallen, bleeding boy onto his back.
With her own child gushing blood, Chloe seemed too stricken to apply the fireman’s carry which had saved Bickham’s life. Khalil, Oscar and I rushed in and helped turn Francis over and flinched at the damage he’d done to his eyebrow and forehead. We lifted him, Maureen telling us to be sure to support his spine, and carried him into Hefty’s bedroom. Blood poured down his face onto the light blue pillow, but Hefty did not complain and went to get a towel to mop it up. While she was gone, Francis opened his eyes.
—Did Chambers see it? he asked us.
Oscar and I blinked at each other, not knowing what he meant.
—Did Norris see it? Did Norris?
—I did, comrade, said Norris, massively frowning.
—Course he did darling, Chloe assured Francis.
—It’s delirium, Bickham pronounced.
12
It was during my last bright Australian December, the year before I went to New York, that I got a further urgent call from Chloe. The damage to Francis’s brow had long since healed, but his health had declined further. So I was pleased to hear Chloe sounding excited. Her son Jacko, she said, was coming home from America to see his brother, Francis. He only had a week. Could my wife and I come around to Francis’s terrace house in Woollahra for drinks with Jacko?
I asked her if Bickham and Khalil would be there, but she said in a chastizing voice that I must know that Tuesday and Thursday were her days at Bickham’s. That was the usual limit of what Bickham and Chloe saw of each other.
But even then, before I had my New York acquaintanceship with Jacko, I relished the idea that patrician Bickham might need to meet up with that video stockman, Jacko Emptor.
Maureen and I were surprised by the Chloe who answered the door of Francis’s terrace house. In caring for Francis and Bickham, and in bearing the pre-loss of both men, she had taken on a suburban pallor and had achieved a thinness which had come to her too late in life and left her not slim but pouchy.
The shock of seeing this reduced Chloe was followed by that of meeting Francis. At the Mulcahys’ he had seemed as pared down as a human could be, but, crouched in one corner of a large easy chair in the living room, he had achieved a new and terrible incorporeality. The bookshelf behind him featured a complete set of Bickham’s works. With that as his background, Francis squinted out at the sub-tropical colour of his little December garden. He was done with the
world of lushness. His hair, thin at the back of his scalp, had nearly disappeared from the front. His nose and cheekbones were sharp as gems behind the dry flesh. The acceptance in his eyes was of a kind I wasn’t used to seeing in Western faces. I had seen it however in the faces of Ethiopian women and children from minorities not usually favoured by the aid funnelled through the Ethiopian Government of Mengistu. And the way the teeth thrust forward, prognathous, but without expecting any nourishment! He had exactly reproduced it.
Maureen and I looked at each other, as if to work out the best way to commiserate with Francis over his condition.
He wore a crisp white shirt, in which – as in the chair – he seemed lost. White slacks, too, and his bony, pale feet lay bare on the Berber carpet like claims for mercy.
From the hallway big Jacko Emptor appeared and came towards me grimacing and with his hand out. It seemed as large as a small horse’s head.
—Gidday mate, he told me sepulchrally. You pulled it off eh? You got to Bickham. You made the old girl very happy. You know Francis, don’t you? Would you introduce me to your missus.
I did. I could tell Maureen wasn’t much impressed.
Francis flashed us a smile brief as a blink. Carrying a cup of jasmine tea which she put down beside Francis, who fluttered his eyes in appreciation, Chloe joined us.
—Jesus, said Jacko, let’s get into the Scotch eh.
He and Chloe went to fetch the whisky from the sideboard. We all drank hungrily, even my wife, a modest drinker. The sight of pitiable Francis drove us to anaesthetize ourselves.
Chloe said, Jacko wants to take Francis to America for treatment.
—To Mexico, amended Jacko.
—No, he isn’t going to, said Francis, in a voice thin but wiry.
Jacko closed one eye, ignoring this.
He said, They sent me down to Tijuana to do a story on a cancer clinic this bloke runs down there. Southern California is full of cancer-sufferers who swear by this feller. He injects some serum he makes up from the saguaro cactus. He reckons the saguaro cactus has an astounding immune system.
Francis said, It also doesn’t have a brain or a nervous system.
—Oh Jesus, Francis, said Jacko. Where’s your famous open bloody mind gone to?
He turned to Maureen and me.
—The results are astounding, he told us. I don’t care if they’re based on auto-suggestion or hypnosis or psychosomatic fakery. As far as I’m concerned, what works works. And this guy has absolutely amazing figures for remissions.
Maureen turned to Chloe.
—What do you think, Chloe?
She shook her head. In the bright afternoon light, her withered jowls hung like old fruit.
—Oh Jesus, I don’t know. But I wouldn’t mind it if Francis wanted to go. I wish to Christ he did. Nothing to lose eh.
—Listen, said Francis, panting and, I felt, using up a resource of strength he’d never get back. Listen! We know this is all bullshit! Witch doctory only works if you believe in witchery in the first place. Of course the Californians believe in cactus juice. They think John Wayne really fought the Apaches.
Pausing, he closed his eyes. He looked so spiritual, in a way uncharacteristic of our callow harbour city. Only the filament of his flesh separated him from the eternal.
—I don’t believe in any of that, and I won’t waste my last strength going to fucking Mexico.
—But your brother means the best, said Chloe. Bugger it all, Frank.
Clearly, there was no expedition she would fail to undertake herself, or even look to Francis to undertake, as long as Francis might be saved even by sleight of hand.
—I’ll tell you one thing for bloody free, said Jacko. Saguaro cactus live for nearly three hundred bloody years.
—Oh for God’s sake, so do our cells. Our individual cells. There are cells in mummies that are three thousand years old. If that’s life, the mummy knows fuck-all about it. Do you know what I think? I think you’d like to get me freeze-dried, and a recorded message put up my arse.
Chloe wailed and looked to Maureen and me. Sure enough, her children were killing her.
—I’m dying in the most beautiful city on earth, said Francis. The only one I want to die in. I’m dying in the city of the Bickhams and the Evans, the Chambers and the Mulcahys and the …
He had the generosity to include my wife and me in the distinguished roll-call.
—They’ve all seen me, he said. They aren’t fooled. They know how sick I am. The Chambers know. Ask them. They saw me bloody fall!
Jacko began to mutter about what that had to do with any bloody thing. Chloe seemed awfully appeasing, though somehow I could imagine her carrying Francis onto the plane to Los Angeles, Bickham style, over the shoulder.
—I’m not going to Tijuana to suffer among strangers. I’m going out next Monday. To lunch with my favourite women, other than Chloe. I mean Hefty Mulcahy and Irma Lauber. I’m going to do that every Monday until it’s impossible to continue to go. I’m not going to Tijuana to be injected with cactus juice.
Absorbing this, Jacko looked away across the room. He could not show anger in the normal way of course. Maureen and I began to move the conversation on. Jacko’s answers when we asked him about New York and the show were clipped, a mere token of the volumes I would later learn from him at the Odeon. He would have liked to have gone on shouting it out with his brother, but you can’t scream insults at the dying.
When we were leaving, it was Jacko who followed us down the hallway and out to our car.
—Listen, he told me, I always really admired you …
It looked to me like an unlikely claim.
—You don’t have to, I’m just a friend of Chloe’s.
—No, I mean as a writer. You’re bloody readable, mate. Give me you any day over bloody Bickham eh. And you did that good job there. Fixing that meeting for Chloe.
—I was just a witness to that adventure. Chloe made her own way.
—Yeah, she does that. Listen, would you give Francis a call at some stage? Try to talk him round?
My wife said, Those Mexican clinics were all discredited, Jacko.
—But in his condition, what does it bloody matter eh? Ask him to do it for Chloe’s sake.
The plea had some force with me. I suppose I had expected Francis to look something like a ghost. I’d prepared myself for that. But I didn’t expect the old Chloe to be reduced down like that. She needed something done for her.
—You know, I told Jacko, smiling. You operate on me exactly the same way your mother does.
—Well, said Jacko, I’m her darling little bugger, aren’t I eh? I inherited all her moves.
My wife shook her head at me. She was a trained nurse. Broadminded – she had once studied acupuncture – but she didn’t believe in cactus serum.
—Well, you ought to think about it, he said, seeing that he couldn’t get past Maureen.
My wife and I argued about the question for three days. She had worked with the dying, the terminally ill as they are known now. She had seen all the false death-bed hopes and understood how cruel they were. Everyone knew there was indeed no salvation in cactus juice.
On the third day I had a call from Bickham himself. I was just back from a swim in the surf, and brine stuck to my bare legs in that gluey, itchy way peculiar to humid days when you’ve been swimming. This was a banal condition to be in for a significant call like this, one that I might want some day to put into an autobiography – always allowing a publisher could be found. Bickham’s voice on the line creaked with breathlessness. I could tell he was suffering another bad day.
—I’m lying here waiting for the doctor, he told me. I may need to go to hospital … And I’ve been thinking about the poor Emptor boy. You probably know the ill don’t have much strength. Strength is the relevant dimension for them … Not time … In fact the ill don’t think of time at all … Only, as I said, of strength. They think of wasting strength … They don’t want to.
—I began gasping as a child on that damn spacious great sheep station my family owned. I’ve tried everything … Asthma papers as a child, and asthma fucking cigarettes as a young man. I’ve been to herbalists and naturopaths … acupuncturists and shamans. And if someone came in here now … and told me there was a village in Anatolia where an old man possessed a substance … which would make it easy for me to breathe on a long term basis … then I’d have to say I’d want to go and get it. Even though I’d know in my water there was little chance of recovery. But at the same time as wanting to go, I would beg not to be taken … Because my mind would quake for lack of strength …
—You think Francis should be persuaded to go?
There was a silence as Bickham re-gathered that very strength he’d been extolling and regretting the loss of.
—For his own sake and his mother’s, Bickham answered at last. I wanted to say that he’s right to mistrust his strength … Because that’s his business. Whereas, let the well worry about time … And about travel arrangements too.
I scratched my leg and said, This question’s been with me for days, Michael.
It felt very strange to call him Michael. I had heard of him that he destroyed friends at the dinner table. No one had the Nobelist’s gift for vituperation. Khalil was cast back upon Arab stoicism. Men gagged and women fled weeping, savaged despite their sisterly warmth. Against that background, against such a reputation, Bickham’s kind advice regarding Francis took on a perverse poignancy.
—What do you suggest I do?
—Chloe has certain plans, he gasped. Mind you, it’s a pity she’s got to work with that other son … Such an oaf.
Jacko represented everything which Bickham had most actively and brilliantly despised at six hundred pages a time in his sundry, grand books.
—I think you … should do what you can for Chloe, the great modernist croaked, and then said goodbye and hung up.
I hadn’t had a chance to wash the crystallizing brine off when our door bell rang. Jacko was there, very New York pallid in a sport shirt and slacks.
Jacko Page 15
