He wrapped his arm about her shoulders and pressed his cheek against hers. She nuzzled into the familiar roughness, his familiar end-of-day smell, and the two of them entered the house together.
CHAPTER 7: Bondage
1.
It was ten o’clock in the morning and Jack was slumped across the couch in Helen’s lounge. Sun plastered the room, the white walls glared. The night had disappeared in a bottle and a half of shiraz, a few glasses of ancient cooking sherry and a couple of stale joints. Jack couldn’t remember walking to Helen’s, he couldn’t remember anything after finding the sherry.
His skull was tolling the seconds. A slab of meat was lodged in his throat. He lurched into the bathroom; vomiting made the pain worse.
He was cleaning himself up when Luke appeared in the doorway with aspirin.
‘You sure got hammered last night,’ he said.
The session had begun soon after he saw Ava with Fleur. Jack had returned to the office to collect his belongings and found Connie with time to fill. Minutes later, the two of them had headed across Princess Bridge to Young and Jackson’s pub. They found a vacant table in the upstairs lounge far removed from the famed portrait of naked Chloe and her admirers, and plunged into an alcohol-laced raging at life. Connie was fed up with TV executives who were either unable to make decisions or lacked the authority – successful pilot notwithstanding, his TV series was far from being a certainty – and Jack mourned the attack on authentic love in an age of impermanence. By the time the second bottle of wine arrived, Connie was lambasting twenty-five-year-olds who showed no need for sleep and a great need of maturity. When Jack reminded him of Linda’s maturity, Connie immediately switched to a sentimental riff on Sara’s charms.
They were halfway through the second bottle when Jack reported his sighting of Fleur.
‘She’s here, in Melbourne. With Ava.’
‘Whether Fleur or someone else, it doesn’t make much difference,’ Connie said. ‘With the exception of Harry, Ava’s never subscribed to fidelity.’
Jack found this ludicrous. ‘Ava’s been unfaithful to Harry numerous times.’
Connie stretched across the low table and gave Jack’s shoulder a kindly squeeze. ‘You never understood that of us all, all her lovers –’ and seeing Jack’s surprise, ‘oh yes, I had my time with her too. Of us all, only Harry was permanent.’
Although Fleur was looking suspiciously permanent too, Jack was thinking as he swallowed the aspirin Luke had given him. As for Ava and Connie, he had known of their affair even while it was happening, but preferring not to know had pushed it to the very back of consciousness where it had slipped into the black forgotten.
He took his miserable body to the kitchen. Luke looked up from his laptop as Jack entered. ‘Coffee’s made,’ he said, and jerked his head towards the cafetière.
Jack shot him a smile of gratitude and simultaneously Helen’s voice, raised in irritation, soared into the kitchen.
‘What’s bothering your mother?’ Jack asked.
‘She wants to book a flight to America, but first she’s trying to change the airline’s scheduling policy.’
Jack laughed and clasped his head. He poured the coffee and joined Luke at the table.
‘Working?’ he asked, indicating the laptop.
Luke was home on a study day, but he was not studying. ‘I’m learning self-hypnosis,’ he said. ‘To help my game.’ And seeing Jack’s incomprehension, ‘Football. Aussie Rules. Linda’s idea.’ And responding to Jack’s still-uncomprehending expression, ‘Linda the anaesthetist, married to Connie. Knows about the mind.’
When he was Luke’s age, Jack might have used hypnosis to crank up his memory or reduce his need for sleep; he would never have considered using it for sport. Perhaps if he had been more like Luke his life now would be more than a dusty pile of yesterdays. But with neither energy nor desire to deal with it, he pushed the thought aside.
Luke was prattling on about Linda, actually he was preaching Linda, so well did he think of her. She was honest and loyal, reliable and loving, and given what Connie was doing with Sara, far too good for him.
‘Sara is far from being Connie’s first indiscretion,’ Jack said.
‘Indiscretion? How pathetic is that, Jack? You mean Connie is cheating on Linda. You mean he’s doing her in. You mean he’s fucking her over.’
Fortunately Helen put an end to the conversation. She burst into the kitchen railing at airline scheduling that disregarded the schedules of working people. She had an important meeting near Atlanta at the end of the following week and she wanted to travel when she would normally be sleeping. ‘I don’t want to waste time,’ she said. ‘Is that so much to ask?’
‘And if you lost twenty-four hours would it be so catastrophic?’ Luke said.
Helen glared at her son. ‘Some of us find every wasted minute unconscionable.’
‘You need to get a life, Mom.’
Still muttering about the airline, Helen grabbed a packet of instant noodles and headed for the door.
Jack was horrified. ‘You don’t plan to eat that stuff. It’s all chemicals and preservatives.’
Luke looked across at his mother. ‘But very convenient.’
She smiled at her son. ‘Exactly.’ And then to Jack, ‘Would love to talk, so curious to know what put you in your cups. Can’t stop, got to run. We’ll catch up soon.’
She kissed Jack, she kissed her son, she dashed from the kitchen. She rattled around in her study, ran down the hall, swore loudly, returned to her study to collect something she had forgotten, ran down the hall again and out of the house, leaving the door to slam behind her.
2.
By mid-afternoon Jack was recovered sufficiently to go into work. Not his first preference but he felt disoriented, nothing to do with the hangover, something far less tangible, a browning at the edges of the familiar, a fraying of the fabric of his life. He had forbidden all thoughts of Ava.
Within moments of his arrival, Harry appeared in the doorway. ‘Great to see how busy you’ve been. And some very impressive engagements too.’
He proceeded to appraise Jack’s recent calendar. The consultations with the Department of Trade were a real coup; the interview on public radio was a waste of time; the address to the shadow cabinet was politically smart. Harry had attended none of these occasions, but the newly omnipotent Harry made it his business to know everything that might be relevant to NOGA.
Jack was becoming increasingly wary of the Network. The fact was, Harry knew too much. He had his minions in the office, contemporary versions of the courtiers of old who willingly did his bidding. They turned up at selected meetings and briefings – one had accompanied Jack to the feedback session at the Department of Trade – and lurked in the corridors of NOGA. But a couple of sycophants couldn’t account for the extent of Harry’s knowledge.
Harry had passed comments, some of a highly personal nature, about NOGA members whom Jack knew Harry had never met. NOGA existed largely online; electronic surveillance of its ever-expanding web of members was, from a technical point of view, not difficult.
Jack had become so concerned he had confided in Connie.
Connie dismissed his suspicions. ‘Harry’s done us all a favour with these fellowships,’ he said. ‘And besides everyone should, as a matter of course, follow sensible web practice. Just be careful what you say on NOGA.com.’ And with a kindly arm across Jack’s shoulder, he wondered whether it was time to drop his ‘personal vendetta against Harry’.
Harry was now checking through Jack’s upcoming engagements. He seemed so friendly, so interested, so benign, and perhaps he was. But at the moment what Jack most wanted was for Harry to leave him alone. Finally he was finished and Jack closed the door behind him, aware of a reluctant sympathy for the poor sod given what Ava was probably doing at that very moment.
Jack stood in the centre of the room, absolutely still. He felt tense and raddled, and not just because of Ava; Harry was righ
t, he had been busy. There had been consultations with lobbyists, bureaucrats and government advisers, and background briefings to business and export groups. Every few days the Department of Foreign Affairs contacted him, and he was the first port of call for a surprising number of foreign embassies and High Commissions. He had addressed think-tanks and university institutes, he had even been invited to speak at a literary festival. And every day brought a raft of phone calls and emails from the media requesting information, analysis, comment, preferably in a single quotable sentence. Sometimes he felt as if people hit on him instead of Google.
He tried to provide what everyone wanted – he would always feel obliged to give his best – but he was aware of a growing resistance from within. It could not be ascribed to his growing wariness of NOGA, nor the frustrating superficiality of the analysis required of him; rather it was the world events themselves which were increasingly repellent. The fact was he could hardly bring himself to study these events any more. It was not specifically terrorism and the never-ending Israeli–Palestinian quagmire, nor Iraq’s disintegration and Iran’s terrifying ego. It was men in a dozen different African countries displacing, starving, raping and butchering their own. It was communities reduced to rubble, fanatics waving guns, self-righteous politicians with blood on their Armanis, boys hurling stones in Gaza and wielding machetes in the Sudan, children across the globe whose lessons in hate were so masterful that the conflicts were assured for generations to come.
It surprised him how the Israeli–Palestinian horrors brought the Jew in him to the fore, although a different sort of Jewishness than he had previously known. Like a horsehair and silk undergarment, where the horsehair was contemporary Israeli policy and the silk was Judaism’s traditions of liberal humanism and learning. He abhorred the rocket attacks on Israel, a country less than a third the size of Tasmania. At the same time he was appalled when Israel acted the brute and the bully. If force were the answer then the conflict would have been settled aeons ago. Not force but reason, he wanted to say to both sides. But with hatred blowing at gale-force, reason did not stand a chance.
Horsehair and silk, and he simply couldn’t watch another Israeli incursion into Gaza, the tanks crushing the possibility of peace as they cracked open streets and mowed down houses, and in the dust so much hate fomented. And he couldn’t watch another Palestinian suicide bomber kill ordinary Israelis – babies, children, teenagers, mums, dads, lovers, grandparents gathered in a restaurant or travelling by bus or just walking vaguely along. He couldn’t bear the violence any more.
Everywhere he saw the ferocious inventiveness of injustice, and while he hated the simplicity of the media reports he found himself choking on the complexities. It was not simply a matter of disenfranchised Muslims having nothing to lose; these young people were being brainwashed to love death more than life. Goebbels was right: you can be taught to believe anything even if it destroys you. And it was not simply a matter of Islam’s failure to modernise, radical Islam was filling a leadership and a values’ vacuum in several parts of the world. Radical Islam was promising to restore to the Muslim people the power and confidence that used to be theirs.
So much of life was wonderful. Music, books, friendship, the natural world, the vast universe, the possibility of life elsewhere. Yet rather than these wonders, his own speciality was, increasingly, humanity’s gangrenous underbelly. Every day he spoke about events that were causing him to rupture, events that had him doubting the essential human goodness to which he had subscribed all his life. He felt a responsibility to continue working in this field but a diminishing desire. That he lived in safety far from these conflicts and had no right to suffer them merely made him feel worse.
He went to the kitchen for a fresh cup of coffee. Through the open doors of offices he saw people working hard and, he assumed, with satisfaction. He wanted what they had, he wanted it in much the same way as a different sort of person would covet a Rolex or a Mercedes Benz or their own lap pool. To work, to be absorbed in a new book, that’s what he wanted.
Back in his office he finished some briefing documents for the Department of Trade, then, with no particular plan, he wandered over to his bookshelves. Assuming a cool and distant curiosity – a less disinterested approach would have been too cruel given the prolonged sterility of his pen – he drew from the shelves a copy of his own first book, Literatures of the Semites. He wondered if Jacqueline du Pré ever listened to her own recordings after multiple sclerosis had swindled her of her gift. Not that he would put himself in her class, but still he wondered whether she ever visited her never-to-be-repeated joys and successes.
He turned to the title page, the dedication to his parents, scanned the contents – a great deal of ground had been covered for a first book – and then dipped into the body of the work. How unfamiliar it was, hardly recognisable as his own. He chose one of the shorter chapters and standing by the bookshelves read it in its entirety. It was good. He had been good.
Next he took down the original edition of The Reinvention of Islam and withdrew to his armchair. This was the book that had prompted his rehabilitation. He scanned every page from the dedication, For AB, to the end. By the time he finished, the city buildings were jutting brilliantly into the night sky, roads were glowing veins shooting into the suburbs. He closed the book and cradled it against his chest. He had been a good scholar: his analysis had been thorough, his approach original, and he had made creative and constructive use of his being Jewish.
What, he wondered, had happened to him?
There are Australian backblocks and American boondocks, but the back of beyond in New Zealand warrants its own category of end of the line, off the map, beyond consideration, beyond prospects, beyond hope. Whether it was lack of ambition or a self-defeating attachment to old-fashioned principles, the fact remained that if Jack had stretched the domain of comparative religion, if he had published a few papers or sought out some paying consultancies, he would never have had to resort to the New Zealand job. He had made one or two half-hearted attempts to offer his services on the open market, but in those days no one was interested in comparative religion, neither the non-religious, who saw all religious studies as anachronistic, nor the crowing packs of evangelicals and other fundamentalists who, already in possession of the truth, did not need Jack’s interpretations. As for politicians and business people, in the absence of any efforts from Jack to promote his relevance, they showed no interest. Selling himself did not appeal, and selling himself for questionable means appealed even less. Jack’s contract in Australia was not renewed and he took the New Zealand job.
Ava advised against it. With such a huge teaching load, there’ll be no time left for your own work, she had written. Your passions will starve.
At the time he had taken little notice of what she actually said, so thrilled was he at her concern. But now her reference to passions in the plural returned. Once it had been true, but the diverse passions of his youth had coalesced into the one consuming passion for her. And all those years of cramming his mind with her had prevented it from wandering off on junkets of its own. No unfettered thoughts, no new ideas. If he had never met her, if he had never come to love her, how different his life might have been. Or perhaps there would have been someone else. An Ava substitute. Perhaps he was condemned always to love exclusively and hopelessly. Jack Adelson: fundamentalist in love.
He found a clean sheet of paper and jotted the phrase down. FUNDAMENTALIST IN LOVE. His love for Ava – singular, confined, obdurate, immutable and efficiently cannibalistic in the way it sought out only what nourished it. An intriguing thought, but disturbing.
He regularly intimated in his letters to her that he was working on a new project and she regularly requested to see chapters. When he felt he could stall her no longer, The Reinvention of Islam had been fortuitously discovered in the massive warehouse of minor scholarship, dusted off and relaunched.
Pundits, interviewers, academics and commentators praised h
is prescience. ‘The world was such a different place when you wrote the book,’ they said.
Even among the more intelligent observers there was an attitude that Islamic extremism had sprung up fully formed just a few years ago. Jack would point out that the signs were visible much earlier but it required a creative imagination to notice them. It’s a quality of the future, he would say whenever he was given the chance, that no one can know it with any certainty, but one can and must imagine it.
Few interviewers would permit Jack to go beyond this point, and most had stopped him well before he reached it. But in lectures and symposia he could speak his mind, and he had plenty to say – about Western politicians in particular: that committed as they are to staying in power they have little need for creative imagination. That rather than inspired and visionary leadership, their ambitions are tethered to three-or four-year terms and played out in tangible temptations like tax rebates, affordable childcare and a plasma-screen television for every household. That if one were to listen only to politicians, one might conclude that the complex social, political, spiritual, ethical and intellectual fabric of human societies had been shrunk to a single economic dimension.
Islam, indeed any issue of complexity, simply could not compete.
Jack would speak his mind whenever he had the opportunity. And people were listening, for there had been offers of work when his NOGA fellowship finished. He was in demand, and all due to a book he had written years ago. As for anything new, the few ideas that came to him evaporated within days. Most did not survive beyond a page of notes.
How different it was for Ava. Nothing ever stopped her from working. She lived and worked with one hand grasped firmly to the safety rail of a speeding train. The risks were hair-raising, and when things went awry, as they often did, she was quick to shoulder the blame.
Reunion Page 18
