Photographs. The real grainy stuff for a way-out group. Show up every pimple, blackhead, mean little hair in a guerrilla lady’s ginger moustache.
I am not much chop in the circumstances. If only they stopped to consider what I might have to offer. Here I am, the Empress Alexandra of Nicaea, Byzantium, the lot. My stomacher alone – cabuchon emeralds, pigeons’ blood rubies the size of pigeons’ eggs, with stones of lesser value but greater mystical significance. The black scarab from an Egyptian tomb. Over my head an agate circlet shimmering like a ring of grey water in some metaphysical dawn.
The photographers wander to and fro expressionlessly clicking a fortune away to celebrate this ephemeral event. If one of them dropped to my presence I’d make him Press Photographer of the Year with one click. Perhaps it is my mouth that puts them off. Its crimson has overflowed the bounds I set it with my eyebrow pencil. Too emotional a life leads to a shaky hand.
Click, click. It is over. They relax and share a joke, a cup of urn sludge with younger lips. Pale, but juicy slugs sleepily smiling a confidence they don’t possess this side of the sheets.
Pfui to all leotarded sluts! Trevor drags me back into the shadows. He is always dragging me in some direction, an additional crutch to those provided by my faithful supporters Dara and Lin. Is Trevor afraid I may let him down? Or does he perhaps have tickets on me? Try tying the love knots in the hairs of Trevor’s wrist. I look at him as closely as I can, to trap that moment of recognition. He is looking nowhere unless at the photographer with the blackest clone moustache.
Oh pfui oh fuck. Yawn yawn. My feet are aching. My empty stomach is regurgitating a ribbon of sour wind.
Everybody is arriving for opening night at the Sand Pit. When I say Everybody I don’t mean the lady who stays home baking sponges for the grandkiddies, or the bloke who simply stays at home because what has leaving it got to offer. When I say Everybody I mean all those who are contributing to life by being where the cameras are. It’s expected of us. What use would Emily Dickinson have been keeping to her room with her supraterrestrial preoccupations? The media wouldn’t have stood for that, they would have dragged her down to ground level amongst the plastic and adulteries, and bugger her grain of sand.
Nothing is honest that isn’t explicit. Shit is no longer a dirty word, it’s a realistic expletive. Now that the press has brought us together, now that we know one another intimately, in bed and out, at breakfast, dinner, and on the dunny, we have nothing more to expect, nothing to fear. So why are we afraid, particularly of one another?
I, who have no need of any media bounty, remain afraid. I have been everywhere. I know all. Am all, I am the Creator. Perhaps for that very reason I am afraid of what I have let loose, of what I have created.
So on opening night at the Sand Pit, when Everyone is here, I keep going apart, telling my beads, swinging my komboloyi, looking for advice which won’t be forthcoming. When I return inevitably to face the auditorium, I see the faces of those who will sit in judgment on the Pantocrator.
The lights dim. I catch sight of the S.M.H. perched at a safe enough distance from actual proceedings. His ears are unmistakable, those of an anaemic bat, its pallor fluorescent.
Who is with whom is the question in the ranks of regimented denim. Watch for the protective arm. She’s wanked her way to academic approval. She’s landed her part in his next play. Blobs of black here and there from Cabinet Ministers doing their duty by the Yartz. Luscious young women in expensively dowdy model clothes glance fleetingly at their own faces to see how much the glass reveals of their afternoon activities. Lovely faces, the blowsier for illicit love. Love-bitten necks and shoulders. Flesh boiling over. In other rows prim little nipples not above giving their all in the name of Aust. Lit. To thin-shanked hungry wife-ridden men – or voracious women. Forget the means in a mean world, it’s the end that matters.
The twittering slowly ceases as in a fowl shed or aviary at dusk. Are we beginning? Or have we begun? Most likely we never stopped running through this waking dream of my life. Have the three peasant women gone through their act sloshing their washing around on the stones in Asia Minor, China, Siberia, or anywhere else? The audience give no sign of having witnessed it. Too insignificant of course, for those whose smoked salmon and Veuve Clicquot still rumble in their stomachs. Or perhaps our Smaragda never existed except as a figment of my prolific mind.
In the bio-box a red sun has risen through the smoke of the unkindled fires of this non-revolutionary revolutionary play. What will move an audience? They laugh as the Urban Guerrillas parachute down from the girders. All these gingery liberated ladies might be no more than autumn leaves. A patron awakes in a midway row, far less important than her social importance demands. She explores her back hair. Farther down, a sigh from one who returns her hand between her escort’s bursting thighs, and snuggles up.
What can I do? I am waiting to perform some act expected of me in the context of a play, dream, my own life – whichever. I can see the Critic sidling on his intolerably uncomfortable Sand Pit seat, itching to fling a subtext into the arena. I reach a point where I believe the cue will never be forthcoming. I must act of my own free will.
I do. Suddenly a spot is aimed at the platform on which I shall perform. There is that smell of light dusting down boards for the Great Moment. I step forward. So many hands reach out to restrain me I might be surrounded by a whole mythology of Hindu gods and goddesses.
The audience is galvanised in row after row of denim chic, with here and there a drift of froth, caught on a reef of ministerial black.
I open the mouth which has overflowed the boundaries set by an eyebrow pencil. ‘This is Dolly Formosa speaking to the Happy Few.’ They are with me in a flash, because no one can ever resist belonging to the Happy Few even in these days when élitism has been voted out. My Happy Few are waiting moist-eyed for the message.
I don’t pander to them. I have assumed the form, mime the motions of a huge predatory bird threatening any bones they may have left unpicked in their hunger for fame, titles, and Orders. Oh, those Orders! Ladies protect the juicier parts of their anatomy.
What should have appeared menacing and tragic, suddenly becomes so farcical I let out a great quark of laughter, at the same time bringing from behind my back Hilary Gray’s service revolver, and without taking aim, firing at random into this covey of defenceless game which might have been put up by beaters for their Sovereign’s pleasure at a Royal shoot.
Hit by a blank, a victim falls in the third row. A fullthroated scream. His student doxy bends over him to assess the damage.
I fire here and there. I aim in the direction of the Critic, but already his bat’s wings are carrying him into the night as he heads for Neptune’s Cave.
A further sprinkling of blanks produces a heart attack, a crypto-corpse. Screams and sirens. Paddy-wagons and ambulances.
The lights go up on the general shambles. About the middle of the house a figure sits it out, her face the shape and colour of a white enamelled bedpan. Her laughter resounds so madly it suggests she may have grasped the reason for the exercise. In the centre of the pan-shaped face she has painted a crimson cupid’s bow to match my own overflowing mouth. I aim at the cupid’s bow and score a bull’s eye. It does not stop the woman’s maniacal laughter. It is louder than ever, only with a slight crackling at its enamelled edges. I fire and fire, till silence. My blanks are spent.
Some person of authority has been edging this way and that all this while, forwards and retreating, forwards and retreating. Now he springs and yanks me by an arm.
‘Steady on, Craig – no, Trevor – or is it Wayne? You could very easily break a bone.’
He runs me as far as the office.
I am not surprised to find Falkenberg waiting for me. I hold out my arms for our embrace, and am soon snugly encased in the familiar canvas sleeves.
‘A lifetime is never as long as it seems. Or would you say it is?’
I smile at him, and might
have put up a hand to arrange my hair if I had not been so neatly trussed.
I sit in my cell, seemingly part of a murmurous hive below ground level. Ancient, honey-coloured stone walls broken by strata of equally ancient grey cement, fragments of oyster shell embedded in it. There are no chains, but there is no need since I am wearing my jacket. I have my chair, a truckle bed, and a covered pail for my convenience.
I sit and wait. It is not so very different from the outside world because life in whatever surroundings or circumstances is a series of variations on the theme of waiting.
My gaoler is Nurse XYZ. I have heard her name, but have blotted it out of my mind for fear I might remember it in a more enlightened future. There is also her male counterpart, Swan, who so far has displayed a few of the more human qualities.
Nurse has a beautiful skin, bluish white at the nape of her neck where the black hair is gathered up and bundled with help of a comb under the cap. Her calves bulge in their black stockings above the sturdy shoes. The shoes should be cloven like a bull’s hooves. The face … I must not invoke it.
Her remarks, almost always offensive, are propelled from between those thick lips, bubbling with spite. ‘All you high-born ladies – if you are, outside of your imagination – think that because you’ve been spoilt at home you’re going to get the same treatment here. No, ma’am! as they say Princess Margaret expects. We’re all equals at Bonkers Hall.’
Her laughter is a rumbling contralto which agitates the full breasts inside her grey cotton uniform.
‘Costive are yer? Open wide. If I had the key to the dispensary I’d dose the lot of yez night and morning with a lovely tot of castor oil.’
When I fail to make the pail in time, and mess the seat, she grabs a handful of paper. ‘Know what it is? If you don’t you will,’ as she pastes my face, back and forth, ‘Shit! Shit!’
When her fury has subsided she calls in Swan with an enamel basin and washer, and leaves me to him. We hear her stamping up the stone stairs to a higher level.
‘What would we do without the males, eh?’ Swan has a strong arm above a limp wrist; and a somewhat leery smile under his Tartar moustache.
When he has finished cleaning me up, he lifts my skirt and sticks two fingers inside my vagina.
‘Can’t say I’m not a friend, love.’
His eyes grow round with malicious surprise as he removes the fingers and holds them up for our mutual inspection. ‘Waddayerknow – rust!’
I am left at last to the silence of my cell, cleansed of my last film of vanity, but with a stench which will probably never leave my nostrils.
I am visited by the Superintendent; a gentleman of marked military appearance.
‘Yes, Colonel. No. Colonel. Yes, Colonel Hackett, nobody can say as Mrs Gray isn’t doing nicely.’
‘Does she behave herself, Nurse?’
The hawkish expression, the pale blue eyes, the fine red veins, the grey moustache, only half believe in the questions it is his duty to ask.
Nurse simpers her way through a benevolent character role. ‘Oh yes, you can’t say milady isn’t a gentle old soul.’
What else? Trussed as I am in my canvas jacket.
‘Think she might do without this, Nurse?’ tweaking at my sleeve.
‘Well, Colonel. We might try. Yairs, we can only try.’
She comes back after the Colonel has returned to the tantalus he keeps in his quarters. The bull’s muzzle is snorting as she unties the tapes. My arms are freed from the blind sleeves. For what purpose? They are feeble as seedlings raised in a cellar.
‘Just you try to create, my girl, and you’ll be back in this before tea’s up!’
She leaves me. I remain seated on my chair. At one level of my consciousness I have flung myself at the nape of her blue-white neck. I have sunk my teeth in the milky skin. She can’t throw me off. Her screams call for help and vengeance, but she can’t be heard from the depths of a purgatory to which we are both condemned.
I don’t ask for Justice, only justice.
Swan brings the bowl of sedated slops we are served as an evening meal.
‘A free woman! That’s progress, isn’t it?’
XYZ must be losing her grip. The Colonel is showing more concern. On one occasion he brings my first visitor. Nurse stands by, breathing audibly. Her opinion is no longer sought.
‘What do you think?’ the Colonel asks the visitor in undertone.
He answers in an aged, dusty voice.
Is this my adversary grown old? The Falkenberg with whom in a former life I longed to grapple, beak to beak, breast to breast, wing-tip slashing wing-tip – in short, hatred matching hatred – or love. (An admission I would never make to Patrick or Hilda; they wouldn’t believe.)
Evidently he is this old, wrinkled, pockmarked creature who murmurs, ‘Yes, vee heff nossing to lose. It is a risk vee must tek.’
Is this caricature of a reffo the demon who cast a spell on Alex Gray, who wooed her in vibrant tones with lines from masters like Madács, Arany, and Goethe, and when he had won her over, passed sentence on her?
‘Wasn’t it called The Tragedy of Man?’
‘Faht?’ He looks so alarmed I want to hold him in my arms and soothe his fears.
Colonel Hackett clears his throat. He is here for professional reasons only. A wave of hysteria and sentimental recollection is rising round his colleague and this infernal woman. Well, the Superintendent has no intention of getting caught in the undertow.
‘On your recommendation, Professor, we’ll try it.’
XYZ is blowing like a whale.
I am reduced to snivelling self-pity: I must sound an imbecile, but the Colonel is used to idiocy. ‘All I ask for … a roomful of light … some writing-paper … and a pen.’
At mention of the pen, the Colonel sees a sharp object. A risk.
They leave me. Professor Falkenberg does not look back. At the end of his life, he may have acted imprudently.
So I am restored to the living. In the beginning I can scarcely keep my balance in this world of light. If I sit, I float horizontally like the moored boats I see through my window. The window is barred, but the bars do not prevent the interchange of sensation between myself, trees, the boats floating in this radiant backwater. If I try to wrest myself from the horizontal and attempt the vertical position normal to waking human beings, I am threatened with toppling unless I reach out and support myself on the nearest piece of furniture.
In this cube of expanding and contracting light (I no longer think of it as a cell) I have the standard truckle bed, a chair, and most important, the table on which are laid four piles of unblemished foolscap. And two ball-point pens, one black, one red.
Now that I am free to write, shall I ever dare begin to sort out my disordered thoughts? It is a frightening prospect. I sit with my hands back to back, held tightly between my knees. I reel if I look inside my churning abyss of a mind. But I must MUST remain in the vertical position. Reason’s posture is vertical, like Hilda’s spinal column. If Patrick were here he could guide me. No. I must do it myself. Patrick guide! Patrick cannot guide himself, that’s why he’s taken to carrying a walking stick.
I I I … that’s how I began, how I covered all those sheets of paper stashed away in the priest hole, overflowing drawers and suitcases in the house above Centennial Park.
I take up the black ball-point and start myself hobbling stumbling along the topmost line of this sheet of white foolscap in my hygienic room. Too hygienic perhaps. I am brought to a full Perhaps there was never anything there and I only imagined it. I throw down the sharp object of which Colonel Hackett had his doubts. He may have been right. I could have aborted my ego somewhere back along the line. I take up the horrid red ball-point and dig a deep, bloody trench from top to bottom of the innocent sheet. Through my own lack of skill I shall remain sterile for ever after.
Oh God, prevent me … Save me from the jacket …
Enter Mrs Sieveking. I seem to have met her i
n some other play. I forget which. She is wearing civilian clothes, a pattern of big cinnamon and fuchsia flowers, a choice which no doubt pleases her. She takes my hand and we sit together on the edge of the bed. She is a socio-something or other, to do with rehabilitation.
‘I am here to help you,’ she tells me. ‘We must all help each other mustn’t we? Then we may find our troubles not as bad as somebody else’s.’
The grains of beige powder tremble as the wrinkles round her mouth open and close. I accept her intentions as kindly.
‘Are you a mature woman, Mrs Sieveking?’
‘I hope so. Like yourself, Mrs Gray.’
‘How old are you?’
She hesitates. ‘Fifty-six,’ she says, ‘more or less.’
I can’t help noticing all those blank sheets of paper on the table.
‘At least at your age, Mrs Gray, you don’t have to worry. You’ve overcome it.’
‘But I worry more and more. How old do you think I am?’
‘I’d say at a guess seventy-five.’ She smiles her kindliest beige smile.
‘Sometimes I feel I’m marked down to seven or eleven.’ A wind is rising, jostling the boats tethered in their blue field. ‘If I’m not an aborted foetus in a bottle.’
‘We must have faith …’ a methodical or baptismal mumbling.
She has fetched a nurse, not XYZ, a long thin one with no chin. She gives me an injection.
When I wake, if you can call it that, there is a lesser confusion of voices and faces. I am wrapped, not in the customary jacket, but a blanket. I cannot see what I am wearing. Will they have forgotten my regalia? I detect the accents of Colonel Hackett fresh from the tantalus he keeps for distinguished visitors, but chiefly for himself in his coming and going amongst the committed insane. I believe I catch a glimpse of the wrinkly, pocked mask time has forced Falkenberg into wearing. He is watching through fearful slits to see if there is any value left in one of his most profitable meal tickets.
Memoirs of Many in One Page 15
