—Are you willing to film the part where the woman tells Lucy about Dannie and you?
—That’s not germane to the question, mate. We’ll edit that out because it’s not exactly of public interest.
—I suppose you would edit it out.
—Go easy. Dannie and I aren’t news. Lucy and I aren’t news. I’m not keeping anyone in a bloody dungeon.
There was an angry silence in which I thought, To hell with you, Jacko! Until at last he could trust himself to look at me.
—Lucy’s not the right woman for me. I need a dangerous, bossy little sheila like Dannie. I realize these things too late, like every other dumb bugger.
I said, If you talk Lucy into doing it, it could be the end of things, Jacko.
He conducted an invisible chorus with his left hand, a chorus whose voices were an echo of my voice. Conducted it in one sense; dismissed it in another.
—I know what everyone says. I give more of a bugger about a girl whose picture is all I’ve seen than I do about dear Lucy, the prize cellist of James Ruse High, whom I’ve got at home and everybody loves. Guilty, cobber. Guilty, guilty, guilty. But we still come back to the main question. I just hope Lucy does it. That’s all.
There were further visits by Lucy to my wife. Jacko was still pressing her, but the dungeon master’s wife had not rung back. Lucy hoped she wouldn’t, that the question of a meeting would now pass. But both Jacko and Dannie, who had a nose for these things, knew that the pause was brief and that Lucy should hold herself ready to meet the woman and speak persuasively.
In the interval, without telling Jacko she was doing it, Dannie herself went to visit and reason with Lucy about a meeting with the woman.
Judging by what Lucy told my wife, the conversation hadn’t been a happy or even friendly one. Though it was no surprise to me, Lucy thought it an outrage that Dannie could begin so strongly, taking the moral advantage, speaking of Lucy’s obligation to Sunny Sondquist. It was of course clear that Jacko had been complaining to Dannie about Lucy’s reluctance.
Dannie proposed it to Lucy in these flat terms: any mistrust Lucy felt shouldn’t be an excuse for her failing her duty to the lost girl and to Live Wire. Let’s all be professional and responsible about this whole thing, said Dannie.
I could see, just by watching Lucy’s face when she came in our door, that Dannie had succeeded in turning her into a new kind of woman, the sort of aggrieved territorial woman you saw wearing an embittered mouth on any Manhattan bus.
For the second time in a few days I went to the Odeon, to hear from Jacko – again as if it were fresh news – that he and Lucy were quarrelling. The trouble was, he argued, she was using marriage, as well as her uncertain American visa situation which didn’t let her get a job, as an excuse for sinking all she had into him, Jacko. Also, she deliberately avoided answering the phone. He found it hard to understand or overlook this evasion. Okay, it was all right to be ambiguous about tabloid television … but Jesus, Sunny was a real girl, really vanished …
He told me he was losing his respect for his wife.
Firmly, I put her case as I knew it at second hand from my wife. I argued that first he took away her self-respect, and now blamed her for having none. A pretty low trick, I told him.
Jacko weighed this and again dismissed it.
—No, he said, unreally certain. We’ve all got to keep self-respect no matter what other buggers do to us.
—Come on, Jacko, I said. This is Manhattan, not Burren Waters. Lucy hasn’t fallen off a horse. Or if she has, Dannie pushed her.
But Jacko had the magisterial sadness of a man who has found both his professional and personal justification.
—For God’s sake, I appealed to him. It’s not like you to be so bloody pompous. You’re talking like one of those CBS anchormen you say you despise. It isn’t right to make Lucy feel that refusing to be televised makes her an accomplice to kidnapping and enslavement. She didn’t kidnap her. And before that it’s good Bob Sondquist who set a pattern of enslavement, and the kidnapper brought it to fullness. But it sounds as if you’d rather blame Lucy for the whole bloody mess.
He looked away, as he did frequently now, and punched the zinc top of the bar.
—What’s bloody got into you tonight? Listen, I admit it’ll be a circus when we find her. What do you think it would be if the cops found her eh? And anyhow, it isn’t a question of a circus. It’s a matter of cosmic bloody forces …
And he began to distract me by speaking of his old theory of zonal cockpits of evil.
At this stage, when Jacko and Lucy and Dannie were arguing over the pit-digger’s wife, I was distracted from the question by a call from upstate New York. An institute in Albany, who had money from the MacArthur Foundation, asked if I could get in contact with Michael Bickham for them. The man who made the call, a celebrated American novelist in his own right, said the institute was willing to fly Bickham and a companion first class from Australia and pay him $10,000 for a lecture and a reading. They realized he was a reclusive man, the novelist told me, but Bickham had always felt he got better reviews in the United States than in Australia, and his visit would be highly publicized and put him back in contact with his American readership.
I advised the man that there was very little chance that Bickham would come. There was first his emphysema, but perhaps more important than that, his temperament, his terror of and contempt for audiences.
—That’s why we thought we should contact him through a fellow Australian, the novelist told me. Through someone he trusted.
To refuse would have required me to spend a long time explaining myself to a man whose intentions were full of kindness and regard. It struck me halfway through that perhaps I could take a middle course and sound out his confidante, Chloe Emptor, first.
Early evening in New York is morning in Australia, and so, after the evening edition of Live Wire, I called the number I had for Frank Emptor’s terrace house in Woollahra.
The phone rang a long time, and I could feel the emptiness which surrounded the pealing. Frank was in jail, but where was Chloe?
At last the phone was picked up and I heard a thin voice say hello.
—Oh, I said, I must have a wrong number. Is that the Emptors’?
—Chloe here, said the voice, and I could hear now that it was a thinned-down version of Chloe.
—It’s me, I yelled at her with forced joy.
—Good to hear, she said.
I asked the normal questions and told her I’d seen plenty of Jacko and Lucy. Then I asked her how Frank was.
—Plump as a bloody fart, she said. He’s in medium security already, the little bugger, and he runs a class in music appreciation. He’s all set up eh. I’m the one in bloody disarray. On my way back to Burren Waters. The mongrel bastard’s playing up, as you’d expect, and that’s nothing compared to my bloody daughter and her boyfriend.
I seemed to remember the daughter’s name was Helen, and that she had left the Emptors in Burren Waters and was now living with an anthropologist in Perth. The sublime to the ridiculous, if you ever heard of it!
—Some of the bloody Wodjiris have a land excision claim on part of Burren Waters. And you know who the counsel for the Wodjiris is? My bloody useless daughter’s bloody paramour, the anthropologist. So I’m going back to whip the old bastard into shape, and then make sure the excision thing doesn’t go anywhere. But honest, I’m so bloody tired of the whole pack of them. All I’d need now for total bloody disaster would be for useless bloody Jacko to dump the only decent thing on our useless bloody horizon eh. That Lucy.
I deceived and consoled her on that score, and then asked her about approaching Bickham with the offer.
—No use talking to me. He bloody sacked me as a friend and spaghetti cooker.
—Sacked you?
—I didn’t say the right things about the bloody Wodjiris. His bloody loss. And mine. I wouldn’t mind taking this present mess to him and asking him about it. Mind
you, the longer you spend with a writer like that, even a supposed bloody genius, the sooner you find they know sweet bloody nothing about humans eh.
—But you still talk to him don’t you Chloe?
—It’s him that’s not talking. The miserable old bugger. Won’t let me in the door. And Khalil says, I can’t disturb him Chloe. That’s Khalil’s version of bugger off eh.
This was no help to me at all, though I had a sudden sense that Chloe was about to be liberated. Her voice and her body would expand again in Burren Waters. As she had confessed to me at Place de l’Opéra, she wasn’t up to the weight of urban conspiracies.
We said goodbye fondly, and I wished her well and hung up. I now was faced with calling Bickham direct.
I would not call him that day. I waited until well into the following evening.
I dialled in dread and to my horror it was Bickham himself who picked up the phone. I heard his sepulchral Yes?
—Oh Michael I didn’t expect to get you, I said.
—Khalil is out doing some shopping.
—Well, I hope I’m not intruding on your writing.
—I’ve just finished. I start at four in the morning these days. Are you calling from New York?
As always, I felt absurdly flattered that he knew any details of my life. I passed on the invitation to him, reddening as I did so, feeling foolish, knowing that I sounded over-anxious. Now I felt passionately aggrieved at the institute and the smooth novelist in upstate New York for landing me with this job. I told Bickham I’d tried to contact Chloe Emptor to arrange that the message be passed on casually through a friend at some convenient time.
He said, Mrs Emptor. She’s not my friend, I’m afraid.
—No. She told me that.
—The woman is a throwback to the age of Paterson and Lawson. She’s a monster.
—Well, I can’t make any judgement on that, Michael. But I did think this proposal was of sufficient weight to pass on to you.
—Since I wouldn’t go to Stockholm to receive fifteen times as much, did you think I’d really come to New York?
But I was pleased to hear that he sounded more amused than chagrined.
—What can they do, for example, about the climatic variation? he asked. Because that always puts me in hospital.
—Of course. I’m sorry I didn’t think of that.
—No one does. I get misjudged for it. People think I’m being anti-social, don’t they? Whereas, I just want to keep on breathing.
—I think it’s of paramount importance that you do.
—Thank you, he said. Perhaps after my death you could remind people that my respiratory ailments played a large part in my behaviour.
—I will do that on every occasion I can, I promised. Always assuming I don’t go first.
—Thank you. Tell the New York people that I decline with regrets.
He hung up at once. I stood pole-axed by my telephone. I had been given a mission. I had become his champion. How many people had he similarly recruited? I found myself hard-headedly and fondly asking myself.
No one would be more faithful a defender than I.
And then the worst thing happened for Lucy. The woman, the dungeon master’s wife, called again.
She told Lucy that she was recklessly using a telephone credit card. Her husband would be angry when the bill came in.
How that must have horrified Lucy. The burden of information to be passed to Dannie.
16
Through an electrical accident, I found myself taking a demented part in the argument, a part which would prove to be something very close to the part Michael Bickham had taken in the question as to whether Francis should be taken to Tijuana for saguaro juice serum or not.
I had never had a very accurate understanding of the American electrical system. I had never understood why some plugs were marked Shavers Only, and why power points in American bathrooms had little yellow and red reset buttons. If pushed for time I would use any power point for my shaver and shaver power points for other appliances, since in Australia all power points were equal, and equally accommodating to the electric shaver.
I had now become more careful with the act of shaving itself. Age is the condition in which your bristles begin to look not like the product of testosterone, but like a curtain of ashes on the jaws. Nature was casting me forth, kindly supplying me with the first of the dramatic props I would need – if I were lucky – for my ultimate nursing home role. My stubble, which had once been reasonable and even a little too masculine to take out to dinner, now stood on the jowls like dust on a church pew. Hence, my late afternoon trim-ups.
One afternoon, whether in the wrong power point or for whatever reason, my electric razor turned into a brilliant yellow ball in my hand. My brain instantly turned to stone. I felt myself dragged backwards across the room by the shoulders and tipped brutally against the step which led up to the spa pool which served us instead of an old-fashioned bath. The air felt full of what I thought of as sizzled ions, and I could smell the metal stench of the razor’s demise. The flesh of three of my fingers and the pads of my hand were burned, and some of the skin was already sloughing away. I ran cold water over it all, and with my left hand safely jerked the shaver plug out of its socket.
I felt angry and insanely wary. The electrical systems of Manhattan had taught me too harsh a lesson. The power surge had carried into my hand a sharp little measure of paranoia.
My wife came back with some jackets from the Korean dry cleaner and was immediately competent, making soothing noises and applying burn cream gently to my scalding hand. Then she led me downstairs, as I carried my hand in front of me, and we got a cab in Lafayette Street to take us over to St Vincent’s Hospital in the West Village.
Until now I had thought of St Vincent’s in terms of its distinguished reputation and literary repute. Everyone knew it had served such figures as Dylan Thomas, Brendan Behan and Delmore Schwartz in extremis. Now I brought it my humbler talent and small but screaming injury.
A young Chinese doctor injected my hand with anaesthetic, cut away the dead flesh, and had me put to bed in a pleasant enough public ward. It was too early to dress the wound, and a burn specialist would need to look at it to decide on treatment and the necessity of a skin graft. The hand worried me barely at all, but the feeling of constriction and panic in my head was harder to negotiate with.
It was, in the spirit of the city, a loud but not very sociable ward. Though there was certainly space for me amidst the other patients and the trays and tables and bed pans, I felt somehow enclosed. I put my earphones on and listened to PBS, but even that gave me a sense of being confined. In the middle of some engrossing view on Mozambique or Azerbaijan, I would tear the phones off and reach my mouth upwards for free air I did not, objectively, need.
When I slept it was feverish. In some of my dreams I found myself to be a woman. I did not like the transmogrification – not because the change itself worried me, but more because of the relentless way the idea of being a woman frantically weevilled into my brain. It was a misrepresentation; that was what upset me. It was, I have to confess, associated in my jangled mind with being flung across the bathroom, with being a token of electric savagery.
I knew I would not rest properly, or get over the wild electricity of it all, until I fretted that all out, until my dreams became random again.
My recurrent dream was that I was a young woman, even a girl. I was afraid, but anxious to please. I stood by what you could call a rural freeway in clearly perceived country, not New England or New York, somewhere of lower rainfall, alfalfa and onions and orange trees. Perceived down to the last branch, this place. The average rainfall in the dream was perhaps eight to twelve inches. Traffic I was anxious to appease raged past me, indifferent to my good intentions.
From the direction of a carpark, a young man walked up the verge of the freeway. He carried a very large book in his hands, and, as he approached, opened it to one of the middle pages. His manner
of carrying it was a little like an altar server with missal: the spine of the book and its clapboards held against his chest, its open pages faced towards me, his fellow ritualist. If it is not too melodramatic to say, the glare of this landscape had no impact on the face of the pages. The pages were darkness itself. He raised the dark book to my lips. Confused, but on the basis of a childhood church-going memory, I kissed it. It tasted of fur, like a pelt. Before I could withdraw, he – as I knew he would – closed the dark book on my head. I became an iota in the darkness. I was damned in the hairy black world of that book.
So I would wake gagging, and my little yelps, my cries for the compassion of passing motorists on that busy Californian-style highway, were lost in the rowdiness of the ward and the echoing joviality of nurses about to go off duty in New York.
Having suffered that dream three times one afternoon, before Jeopardy had even come on the ward TV, I found a quarter and went down the hallway, carrying my hand like a separate and delicate artefact in front of me. I dialled one-handed and found that both Emptors were out.
But it turned out that they were on their way to visit me. Before Final Jeopardy, they appeared in the ward, hulking Jacko and the sylph Lucy. They both wore conjugal kinds of faces which would have better fitted people whose marriage was older and more static.
When they arrived my burned hand was resting in a supportive mitt of cotton wool, the injury itself bared to the ceiling.
I tried to behave myself, but the book of darkness was too close to the surface of my brain. The confinement could easily be tasted, again like cat hair on the tongue.
I said straight away, I’m sorry Lucy, but I’ve got something important to tell you. Saving the Sondquist girl is more important than your dignity. I’m sorry.
My lips were bubbling with the words and I was weeping. Only later would I think that this had given me more authority.
—This girl is in darkness, Lucy. The woman who called you knows where in the darkness Sunny is …
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