Praise

by Andrew McGahan

  Carla tracked me down.

  ‘Morris wants to fuck my daughter!’

  ‘He’s like that with kids ...’

  ‘I’m worried. She’s in love with him.’

  ‘Have you told him that?’

  ‘No. Should I? Would that stop him?’

  ‘No. That would be the worst thing you could do. That would make him really go for it.’

  ‘She’s only fourteen.’

  ‘He’s done it with fourteen-year-olds before. Fourteen-year-olds have asked him to do it with them.’

  ‘I’ll tear his balls off.’

  ‘No. Morris is a good person. If someone’s going to do it to her it might as well be him.’

  ‘Gordon!’

  ‘Don’t worry. He won’t do anything. He just likes to talk about it.’

  ‘What have you been doing with yourself?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘I hear you and Cynthia were living together.’

  ‘Yes. We were. She’s in Darwin now.’

  ‘Who left who?’

  ‘It was a mutual decision.’

  ‘Anyone else?’

  ‘Not really. I was in love, but there’s no point thinking about that ...’

  ‘You sound very sad.’

  ‘I am.’

  It was my turn at the nitrous. It was hard to suck much in. My lungs felt fine, they just couldn’t handle any volume. Then it was Carla’s turn. We lost it for a few minutes.

  Carla was thirty-five or thirty-six. Long black hair. Strong. I liked her. She had always been good to me, all those years at the hotel. I could never quite tell if she wanted anything to happen between us. I could never quite tell if I wanted anything to happen between us. Either way it never had.

  I asked, ‘Anyone special for you?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve got a boy, he keeps me going, but he’s in Sydney right now.’

  ‘The young ones are what you need.’

  ‘An old one is what you need.’

  ‘I think you’re right.’

  ‘Cheer up, for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘You’re right. I will.’

  I did, for a while. I left the nitrous and went back to drinking. It was going down seriously, round for round, on the back verandah. I joined in. Morris was there. I told him about Carla’s daughter. He said he was aware of the situation.

  ‘Are you going to try anything?’

  ‘Carla would kill me.’

  I descended into drunkenness. I smoked my way to the end of my pouch of tobacco. I started bumming cigarettes off the others. I could barely taste them. I hated ready-made cigarettes. Unless they were Winfield Blues. Cynthia’s brand. No one had any Winfield Blues. I smoked whatever I could get, one after the other.

  The cocktails went on. We got down to the bad stuff. They were mixing vodka and gin and creme de menthe. It was horrible. We forced it down. A rumour went round that someone was putting dishwashing liquid in the drinks. It could’ve been true.

  About one or two in the morning I wandered back into the living room. Things were getting blurred, bodies were staggering around. I had another go at a joint, sucked on the nitrous. It didn’t seem to have any effect. There was a stack of videos in the corner. I started going through them. Carla joined me.

  ‘We need some porn,’ I said. ‘Is there any here?’

  ‘I dunno if that’s what we really need, Gordon ...’

  But there it was, on the bottom of the pile. Every house has one somewhere.

  ‘I’m not gonna watch that,’ Carla told me.

  ‘Fair enough.’ I slid it in, turned it on.

  Carla left.

  The crowd in the living room didn’t take to it. They thought I was trying to get an orgy started. They picked it to pieces.

  This is gross.’

  ‘Look, it’s not even erect!’

  It’s fake, it’s fake!’

  ‘He’s not gonna make it, he’ll never come like that.’

  This is sick!’

  They demanded I turn it off. I didn’t. I was enjoying it. They were missing the point. This was good.

  I tried to explain. There was a right way and a wrong way to watch movies like this. The wrong way was to sit back and make comments about the inanity of it all. Any fool could do that. The purpose of porn was to accept it all and learn. To go beyond the terrible acting, the film quality, the editing, the plot, and get into the bodies themselves. The bodies were the important things. They were real. The people were real. They thrust and bounced and the raw flesh gurgled. You could see what humanity was all about.

  ‘Porn videos,’ I told them, ‘are a chronicle. They’re a testimony. Watching them, you get to the very essence of mankind’s age-long struggle with credibility.’

  And it was a struggle mankind was likely to lose. The reaction of the living room crowd made that clear to me. The fucking distracted them, enthralled them, disgusted them. Someone shouldered by me and turned it off.

  It was time to go.

  I found Carla and said goodbye. She asked me to call her one day. I said I would.

  I passed Morris in the doorway. He was leaning over Carla’s daughter. The daughter was beautiful. Her eyes were wide. She was what Carla had been, twenty years ago.

  Outside it was raining again.

  I walked out into the street, down to the main road, looking for a taxi. There weren’t any. I started walking home. I got there before I saw any cabs, two hours later, and fell into bed.

  FORTY-NINE

  I woke early next afternoon.

  I was dying.

  This was it, I’d gone too far, my lungs had had enough. I couldn’t breathe. The asthma had me. There was no air. Every time I tried to inhale all that came was pain. I sucked at the Ventolin. I coughed and shuddered. Nothing went in. I was over the edge, I was going.

  I sat on the bed for a long time, hoping it would pass. It didn’t. I needed a cigarette. There was no tobacco in the flat. I was thankful for that, otherwise I would’ve tried and it would’ve been the end.

  Instead I got up. My vision went red, faded. I swayed. There was no oxygen in my brain. I waited until it passed. I went and showered. I didn’t feel any better. I sat in the flat for another hour. Nothing improved. I became deeply annoyed. My body was letting me down. I wasn’t going to make it on my own. I was going to have to seek medical help.

  I dressed and drove up to the Royal Brisbane Hospital. There was nowhere to leave the car except a multi-level car park. Two dollars fifty an hour. I couldn’t afford this. Damn the lungs.

  I walked very slowly across to casualty, then up through the long waiting room to the nurse’s desk. She looked up.

  I said, ‘I’m having an asthma attack.’ It was barely a whisper. There was death in my throat.

  ‘Right,’ she said. She took me straight through to the consulting rooms. She left me in one and went off for the doctor. I felt gratified. I was a serious case, they were rushing me through.

  The doctor came in, a young woman, a resident. She looked at me. ‘How long have you been like this?’

  ‘A few hours.’

  She shook her head, started some tests. She listened to my lungs, took my blood pressure, got me to blow into a machine that registered my lung capacity. It hurt to blow into anything. The needle went up, went down.

  ‘How’s it look?’

  ‘Forty per cent,’ she said.

  ‘That’s bad?’

  ‘That’s terrible.’

  It felt about right.

  ‘I’m going to have to admit you,’ she went on. ‘I don’t think you can treat this at home.’

  ‘I’d prefer to, if I could ...’ I was thinking of the car. Two fifty an hour.

  ‘No.’ She took me into another room and asked me to undress. I did so and she gave me a robe. I put it on and lay down on the table. She put a mask over my face, pumped oxygen and Ventolin through it. Then she inserted a drip into my arm, injected several drugs through it, attached a saline ba
g. Then she took a blood sample and left me there.

  I still couldn’t breathe, but I wasn’t worried about that now. It was out of my hands. The system was taking over and for once I was glad.

  Another nurse came in and started taking my details down.

  ‘Do you smoke?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘With asthma like this?’

  ‘I know. I suppose I should stop.’

  ‘The doctors are gonna scream at you.’

  I was beginning to feel like a fool. Tobacco was necessary, but this would not be a noble way to die.

  She went away. The doctor came back.

  ‘You smoke.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Christ ...’

  She checked some things, left again. A man came in, a wardsman. He put me on a trolley, and wheeled me off to another room where I had my chest X-rayed. Then I was wheeled into the hall. He said I’d have to wait there until I was assigned to a ward.

  I was there for an hour or two. I was near the entry bay for the ambulance patients. I sat up and watched the casualties roll by. There were some sick people. Broken legs, blood, screaming, broken backs. What was I doing there? I didn’t even feel sick. I just couldn’t breath.

  Finally another wardsman came for me. He took me up to my ward. It was a long crowded room, about forty beds. One end male, the other end female. Everyone seemed to be very old and very sick. There were cries of pain. Hands writhed above sheets. A lot of the patients looked catatonic, lying on their backs, open-mouthed and vacant. It was my fourth time in hospital and I’d never seen anything like it.

  A nurse and the wardsman conferred, then he wheeled me down to a bed. I got off the trolley. I said, ‘What is this place?’

  This is ward 2D.’

  ‘Ward 2D?’

  ‘It’s the end of the world.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘It’s the worst ward in the hospital. It’s where they send all the old people. The ones who won’t ever get better but who aren’t quite ready to die either. The ones the nursing homes refuse to take.’

  ‘Why am I here?’

  ‘They couldn’t fit you anywhere else. The hospital is always packed on Friday nights.’

  He went off and I settled down. On my right there was a thin old man with huge ears. His feet had been cut off. He was rubbing his left ear and staring down at the bandaged stumps. On my left was another old man. He was asleep. A large clear tube ran out of his stomach. It went up to a bottle on the wall. The bottle was full of grey, bloody pus. I listened to the moans, the wailing, the terrible old voices. The wardsman was right. The place was the end of the world, it was purgatory. No one there was ever going to leave alive.

  I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t know what drugs they were dripping into me, but they were doing something. I was high. It was like acid. Around eleven they turned all the lights off and I sat there hallucinating. The beds were moving, the old people were getting up, tottering around, pus gurgling in the tubes.

  I dozed. I heard voices in my mind. The catatonics were talking to me. Their spirits were restless and trapped. The voices ranted about colours and brightness and pain. A female voice started yelling that she was not going to leave, she was not going to go. I woke up. There was a cluster of nurses down around one of the beds on the women’s section. She’s dead, I thought, she’s gone.

  I was right. The nurses drew all the curtains around our beds. Then I heard them wheel her out.

  ‘Why do you close all the curtains?’ I whispered to the nurse when she opened mine again.

  ‘We don’t want to upset anyone,’ she whispered back.

  But the ward was awake now, the old people knew.

  By the next morning I was feeling more coherent. The consultant came by on his rounds. He examined me, listened to my lungs, made me blow into the machine again. I hadn’t improved.

  He said, ‘I think you’ll be here for a few days.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘You’re a smoker aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, you’re a fool. Did anyone tell you the results of your blood test? It was appalling. If I’d been here last night you would’ve been in intensive care. You could’ve very easily died yesterday.’

  I looked guilty. I felt guilty.

  ‘I will tell you this only once,’ he said. ‘If you keep smoking, I wouldn’t give you fifteen more years. Stop!’

  I said, ‘I will.’

  Two days passed. It wasn’t too bad. After the first night it was even good. My breathing gradually relaxed. They brought me three decent enough meals a day. I was being looked after. It was what I’d always wanted. I stayed in bed. I slept, read newspapers, stared, thought. On the second day I got up and wandered around the ward. I watched the old people slipping away. Some of them could still talk. Their conversation was full of memories.

  My only worry was the car. It was clocking up all that money. A nurse had told me that they only charged a maximum of eight dollars a day, but still, I was going to have to ring someone, let them know, ask them to come and take it away. I didn’t want to have to do that. I thought about who it would be.

  I thought, Rachel?

  I thought, Maree, Frank, Leo, my family?

  But I dreaded talking to any of them. They cared. They’d come and visit, they’d abuse me about the smoking, they’d be nice to me. I was embarrassed enough as it was.

  On the third day I finally went out to the phones in the hall. They were both occupied. I sat down. I still wasn’t sure who I wanted to call. I thought it would be Rachel. I wanted to see her. I missed her. I missed her company. I hadn’t been expecting that.

  Some patients came out of the ward across the hall. A man and a woman, both young. I’d been told that the ward across the hall was the psych ward, the locked ward. So these were some of the crazies. They looked it. They were beautiful. They had thin faces and short cropped hair and dark eyes. And they were smoking, lounging up against the walls. The smoking confirmed it. Only the insane were allowed to smoke in hospitals. I watched them do it. Lifting the cigarettes, drawing it in, letting it go. It hurt. It was going to be hard. They saw me watching, looked me over with their distant, arrogant eyes. They were lords, they were gods, they had it all and they knew it.

  What was I?

  I was an asthma patient.

  I knew who it had to be. I got up to the phone, put the money in the slot and dialled STD to Darwin.

  Cynthia answered.

  I said, ‘I’m in hospital, Cynthia. The asthma finally got me.’

  ‘What?’ She started laughing. It was rich, loving laughter. ‘Oh my poor, poor baby,’ she said. ‘You’re sick? You’re really sick?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘You don’t know how good that makes me feel.’

  It was what I needed to hear.

  In the end they kept me there a week. I rang Frank. He came and took my car away. Rachel visited several times. She sat on my bed and we talked. It was good. The others dropped through. I got better.

  It was Friday afternoon again when they sent me back out. They gave me several bottle of pills, warnings and instructions, and I caught the lift down to the street. I stood on the footpath in front of casualty. I felt fit and strange. It was the real world again. I looked at the waiting line of taxis. Then I started walking home.

  FIFTY

  For the first time in several years, I was entirely healthy. Over the next few days I did not drink and I did not smoke. I woke up in the mornings and felt good. I could breathe. No coughing, no wheezing, no hangover. I could walk for hours ... and nothing happened. No pain, no attack.

  I was untouchable, uncorrupted, pure. I had conversations and I was aloof to everything anyone said, anything I said. My voice seemed to have deepened from some of the drugs. I was still on high doses. I spoke with wisdom, authority. I’d been close to death. I knew it all.

  But then I came off the drugs.

  I felt strange, restless, uncom
fortable. I longed for nicotine but that was gone forever. I couldn’t look anyone in the eye. Conversations alternately disgusted or frightened me. I was incapable of dealing with people.

  Then, after a few more days, that passed too.

  And it was just me again.

  Alone.

  It was time to go back to the STD clinic for the results of the AIDS test.

  The waiting room was a little more crowded this time. I sat and read the magazines. They were the same ones I’d read the last time. I moved around in my seat. I felt loose-limbed and aroused. I had an erection. It was the women in the underwear advertisements.

  A doctor, a man this time, called my name. I followed him into one of the rooms. He sat down, I sat down. He took out my file and read down through it.

  He looked at me. ‘Warts, huh?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Just the one, I see. Did it fall off?’

  ‘It did.’

  ‘Noticed any more?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, take off your pants and we’ll have a look.’

  I looked at him. ‘I’m here for results of an AIDS test.’

  ‘Oh.’

  He went back to the file.

  ‘Oh, yes. Here it is. Negative. Didn’t anyone tell you?’

  ‘No. They didn’t.’

  ‘Well, there you go. Negative. Positive news, huh?’

  He laughed.

  I stood up and lowered my jeans.

  After the clinic, I made my way to a barber.

  I looked at my long, lank hair in the mirror.

  ‘Cut it off,’ I said.

  A few days later I was sitting in the flat. It was a Friday, early afternoon, two weeks after I’d left hospital. I was watching television. The weekend was looming. I had some money. I didn’t know what to do with it. There didn’t seem any point in going out. There was no one I wanted to see. Nothing new was going to happen. We’d exhausted it all.

  The phone rang. It was my brother Stephen. He managed a section in the public service. I never had learned the name of it. He said, ‘I might be able to get you a job, if you want one.’

  ‘What doing?’

  ‘Well, just shit in the mailing room. It’d only be temporary. Three or four months. You interested?’