The Precipice

by Virginia Duigan

  I didn’t attempt to argue. There were hardly any available puppies anyway. We hurried away from the barking, the clamour and the distress.

  In the car park she began again, with a halting dignity, ‘It’s useless and pathetic of me, when you brought us all the way here just for me. I’m such a wuss. I’m totally sorry, Ms Farmer.’ She wiped her nose with the back of her hand, then belatedly remembered my handkerchief. ‘I forgot to bring any tissues.’ There was a renewed burst of tears.

  I said, ‘Don’t apologise about anything, because I share your feelings. And I’d rather you didn’t call me Ms Farmer anymore. From now on, you must call me Thea.’ It was all I could think of to say.

  But as soon as we pulled up back home after a largely silent drive, I remembered something else that had been nagging at me. ‘When I told you I didn’t like children, Kim, I didn’t mean all children.’

  She was getting out of the car, about to run inside. She took off the mirrored glasses and gave me a shaky smile.

  Sunday. Distracted all day. Haven’t set eyes on them, though someone’s been out and about – the car disappeared early. Ellice, I expect, going to work. Another vehicle was there, an old Holden. Frank’s movie collaborator, no doubt.

  I sound like one of those dreadful women in English detective stories. The cosy, old-fashioned sort that fly off Sandy’s shelves. One of those village nosy parkers who spy on everyone through net curtains. Tea cosies, scones and prurient gossip: a lifestyle I abhor, and have strenuously avoided. Although scones and tea cosies have their place; one should never throw out the baby with the bathwater. I’ve had a tendency to do that, I suspect all my life.

  I wanted to start on Oscar’s page of dialogue but the muse absented herself. More accurately, the muse did not come within spitting distance. Why is the muse always portrayed as female? I would much prefer a male muse. A composite, perhaps, of Sandy, Teddy and Matthew Rhode.

  That is, Mr Rhode as he was, or appeared to be, before he was unmasked. He appeared to be such a fresh-faced, inoffensive young man. He had a puppyish eagerness to please that was very appealing. It was an eagerness to please me; that was what made it so very easy to take. You wouldn’t have suspected him of anything untoward. Or I would not, and therein lay the trouble.

  I was on the verge of lifting the phone all day. But I thought she probably would not want me to do that. She wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of concern, especially in front of Frank and his friend. She wouldn’t want anything out of the ordinary. I could have dropped by with Teddy, of course – it would have been the most ordinary thing in the world – but something held me back.

  I think I may have an inkling of what that thing was. My innate ‘inhibitions’, if that is what they are. These constraints that, despite my best efforts, still exert an unhealthy influence on my life. They unleash themselves and I find myself boxed up. Imprisoned in a straitjacket of pride.

  Pride leads to a fall, one of my more ignorant teachers used to parrot to her classes. Ha – not a bit of it. It leads to something much worse. Pride leads to paralysis. A paralysis of the will.

  Wasn’t it the central factor in my refusal to believe what was being whispered behind the net curtains, or to be more pertinent in the prefects’ study and the staff room, about Matthew Rhode? Having always despised gossips, I refused to listen to unsubstantiated rumours.

  I trusted my own judgements. I was too proud to call in the evidence. And as I attempted to tell Kim yesterday, my judgement of one person in the drama, the pivotal player, was compromised.

  Frank said she seemed all right. He hardly saw her yesterday. She was as terminally unobtrusive as she was on any other day, according to him. He was working all day with the movie director, busier than a builder in Kabul, he said. The Wombat stayed in her den reading, as far as he knew.

  So how far would he know? Not very far, I would think. Distracted young men are not renowned for empathising with unusually sensitive twelve-year-old girls. Especially, I should imagine, composers of dissonant music.

  According to Frank she hardly mentioned the visit to the pound, didn’t say much at all on the subject. Which was a bit surprising, now he came to think of it. Only said that she and I hadn’t come to any decision. Hadn’t she found one she took a fancy to? Just shook her head glumly, Frank said. It was as I expected: she hadn’t said a word to them.

  I’d already decided I wouldn’t go into any details with Frank myself. I did not interrogate him. I kept my remarks deliberately vague. Casual, dropped in while he was making the coffee. I merely inquired if she’d been tired the next day, or had seemed at all disappointed.

  I deserved a medal for taking her, he said. She wasn’t too heavy-going, hopefully? Not in the least, I replied. I could see he didn’t entirely believe me. Oh well, better luck next time, he said. I did not tell him that I didn’t think there should be a next time.

  He asked if I’d listened to his show reel. Not the whole hog, I replied, but I was gearing myself up. It might take a while, I’d have to get in the mood. And how, I inquired, had the weekend’s project gone? That of the vulgar film music.

  Fairly shithouse, actually, he said. He doesn’t make any patronising attempt to modify his language in front of me. On balance I prefer that – it puts relationships on a more honest footing. He’d made a start, but it was a hell of a sweat for a hell of a little return. He’d never scored a full-length movie before, and this one was pretty demanding. It was go-go-go all the way: big ideas, low-budget, with no money left over for the score. The director had dropped him in the poo and said he wanted practically non-stop music from start to finish.

  This didn’t mean a whole lot to me, but the way he said it he might have been asked to create the world in a week. He said it was an ambitious take on a multi-genre movie. ‘Kind of, you know, like a comic strip take. But edgy, Thea. Cutting edgy.’

  No doubt I looked baffled.

  Well, it was ultra-violence meets maniacal comedy, with some R-rated material thrown in. It was full of car chases and crashes, lashings of blood, lashings of stunts, a token zombie and some speeded-up farce – intercut with graphic, cartoony bedroom action.

  He looked at me with an air of triumph. ‘That’s the short version. You know the kind of off-the-wall stuff. Fantasy for grown-ups.’

  It sounded more like fantasy for retarded adolescent males to me, I said. Not a highbrow film, in short? He laughed and said he wouldn’t go that far. Cult arthouse was what they were aiming for.

  And not an improving film, just possibly?

  He grinned. ‘No way, Thea, sorry. Cheap and nasty filth. But all done in a good spirit. In a spirit of good, depraved fun, if you can imagine that.’

  It might be cheap but it didn’t sound cheap to make, I commented.

  Frank said the director was a mate, recent film school graduate, and he’d roped in everyone he knew to act and crew for a shoestring.

  ‘The talent get peanuts. I get fuck-all,’ he grimaced, ‘and the director gets zilch. Unless the picture goes into orbit and then we stand to make zillions. But we all reckon he’s got a real shot at being a genius, this guy.’ He advised me to make a mental note of this genius guy’s name. It was a name of Croatian derivation I have forgotten already. Croatian or Bosnian. Or Polish. Marek something.

  ‘We looked at the initial rough cut over the weekend,’ Frank said. ‘That’s what I’ll be working with. It’s on DVD in the studio.’ He glanced at me, eyebrows raised invitingly.

  Was it suitable for general exhibition to old fogeys?

  To old fogeys, nope. No way. A grin, a hesitation. ‘But I could give you a taste, if you like.’ A faint, flattering emphasis. ‘But only if you promise to make allowances and don’t hold it against me. You know what these blokey movies are like.’

  I made no response to that but my curiosity was piqued, of course. What was a blokey movie like these days? I realised I hadn’t seen anything approximating such a beast since Matthew Rhode a
nd I used to watch videos in my flat on Sunday nights. Matthew liked sophisticated gangster and noir films – Humphrey Bogart, the Godfather trilogy, Chinatown. I developed quite a taste for them myself, although after his departure I never watched them again. I suppose I associated them too much with him. In my mind they were tarred with the same brush.

  In the studio Frank steered me to a swivel chair in front of a wide-screen desktop computer. I noted a new bottle of tequila and several empty beer cans. He riffled through a box. There was a sequence he thought might give me a general idea. It was not too in my face, he hoped. ‘Now, let’s see, is this it?’ He scrutinised two discs with scrawled labels. ‘I’m not sure. Hang on.’ He inserted one, brought up another chair and sat down beside me. ‘Aagh, shit! Cover your eyes!’

  Before he could eject the disc I had seen a male member viewed in extreme close-up. It was expanding, in a jerky, stop-start fashion, to epic proportions. The camera was closing in on it rapidly, with staccato movements. The image was on the point of filling the screen. It was probably an animation, but I couldn’t tell. It happened too fast to be certain.

  Frank said apologetically, ‘Ouch. Do you want to avert your eyes while I make sure – yeah, this is the one.’

  This, by contrast, was a fight scene at dusk. It took place high up on a skyscraper, on one of those long, suspended platforms used by window cleaners. It was filmed from dizzy angles and mainly in extreme close-up in the same jumpy style, made even more disconcerting for me by the lurching of the platform. Men who looked to be professional body builders lunged at each other, diving in and out of windows like human projectiles. A beautiful young woman darted recklessly between them.

  The fight was extremely violent and bloody, with much savage eye-gouging and ripping of clothes. I wouldn’t have wanted to watch, but it was filmed in a way that emphasised the artifice and made it less confronting. All the clothing was eventually torn off, floating away into the twilight in a succession of rather artistic and haunting images.

  It ended with a wrestling sequence. Nude, since by now none of the participants had anything left on. This was filmed in slow motion, and I’d have said it was almost balletic, were it not for the undiminished, exaggerated ferocity. The naked, grappling men, now covered in blood and sweat, swept ever closer to the edge of the wildly swinging platform. Eventually, with the exception of the young woman and one other heroic survivor (far more well-endowed than Michelangelo’s David, I observed), every one was shoved to his death, into the void.

  Frank removed the disc. I knew it was not in any sense realistic, but I found myself, against my will, quite affected. If I was reeling a little Frank seemed to be adrift in a parallel universe. He shook his head as if to disengage himself and looked at me expectantly. ‘Well, what do you think? Unbelievably well choreographed, isn’t it?’ He sounded intoxicated.

  I tried to gather my wits. ‘Rather breathtaking, yes. In its way. And quite arresting. Was that young man the male lead?’

  ‘That’s Marlon Grando. Not his real name. Marek had to force himself to watch a bunch of blue movies to find him. Tough job but someone had to do it, he said. Yeah, that guy Marlon’s been a bit of a porn star. You can maybe see why? I reckon he’s got a more mainstream future, though, if he wants one.’

  He replaced the disc in the box. Didn’t want to see any more right now, did I?

  I did not. At least he hadn’t asked if it was too much for me. I was keen to go home and make some notes. I might even be able to make use of it, I thought, for one of Oscar’s exercises. They mightn’t have taken Ted seriously, but this would give them something to chew over.

  Frank rapped me on the arm. What did I think of Marlon as a leading man? Was he an attractive guy, in my opinion? He wanted the woman’s view.

  Attractive, I mused. You mean, his facial appearance? Speaking purely as a woman I don’t recall. We laughed, freely. ‘I thought he was rather charismatic,’ I said.

  ‘That’s good. We reckon he’s got wide appeal. Marek’s counting on him becoming a big star. He’ll have to change his name back, I guess, for the movie.’

  ‘I don’t see why he should.’ I remembered Gilda-lily’s adoring essay on Cary Grant. ‘It was probably something like Archibald Leach.’ Frank laughed again. He is one of those people who always brings a sense of humour to the table. I suppose he and Ellice have that in common, although his laugh is more infectious and doesn’t provoke the same negative response in me.

  It was only then, as I was still sitting in the chair, that a thunderbolt hit me. ‘Frank, what about all this?’ I gestured at the screen and the box of jumbled discs. I saw he hadn’t the faintest clue what I was talking about. ‘Where are you going to keep this film?’

  He still seemed to have not the slightest idea what I meant.

  ‘This is adult material, Frank. You can’t just leave it lying around. Kim might stumble across it, and it’s not suitable for her to see. Not suitable at all.’

  Oh, he scoffed, not to worry, she never came in there. He patted my hand soothingly.

  I snatched it away and said, much more urgently, ‘No, it is a worry and children do come poking around, you’d be surprised. Look how you go into her room and think nothing of it. You must keep the film locked up. I absolutely insist on this, Frank.’

  I wasn’t sure where that came from. It was not my place, strictly speaking, to insist. But he could see how strongly I felt. There was no mistaking it; I heard a quiver in my own voice.

  ‘Okay, I give in.’ He held his hands out in a gesture of surrender. ‘I’ll put it under lock and key. I’ll sally forth this arvo and procure a strongbox. Only for you, Thea.’

  I felt he wasn’t taking this seriously. He must get hold of a lockable box, I insisted. And make sure everything was safely put away before Kim came home from school.

  Something else struck me. Schools finish in the mid-afternoon. Frank didn’t stop work then, did he, not that early? In fact, knowing what musicians are supposed to be like he probably worked into the night, more often than not. And to plan the music he must have to watch sections of the film over and over again. What if Kim came in?

  ‘You must keep your door shut when you’re working. You’ll have to tell her she must always knock. Then you’ll have time to turn it off,’ I said. I was quite agitated. ‘She’s at a very impressionable age, you know.’

  Instead of responding he stepped behind me and I felt his cool hands on my shoulders. I gave an involuntary start, but instead of removing his hands he exerted a firm downward pressure on my shoulder blades. Then I felt his strong, double-jointed thumbs kneading into the stiffness at the base of my neck.

  ‘Thea, please don’t get your knickers in a twist. I’ll keep my door firmly shut from now on. Cross my heart and hope to die.’

  The sensation of physical relief in my neck and shoulders was immediate. It was palpable. I felt the tight muscles relaxing under his hands, and a sense of wellbeing that overrode the concerns I’d just voiced. So much so, in fact, that I did not want him to stop.

  He did, of course, after what might have been several minutes. ‘You were very bunched up and knotted in there. How’s that now? Any better?’ I nodded. I think I was in a mild trancelike state. He stood back with a slight smile and let me precede him out of the room. He is well-mannered, something I find most important.

  I should have a regular neck and shoulder massage, he said, and a good back rub. It’s a great stress-buster. But I’m not stressed, I thought, generally speaking. Or not unduly. Teddy’s calm presence helps me unwind. I told Frank I’d never gone in for massages. Never liked the idea and I’d always resisted them.

  ‘Is that right?’ He sounded amazed. ‘Why would you do that? I thought everyone liked them.’

  ‘The idea of some stranger’s hands on my –’ I caught myself flinching. I regretted saying anything on the subject.

  ‘Well, I’m not exactly a stranger now, I hope.’ His hands were back, resting lightly on
my shoulders. ‘Doesn’t that break down your resistance, just a little?’

  I acknowledged there had been an inroad. Hey, that was progress then, he grinned. Not too torturous, was it? Not like being waterboarded? I shook my head. It was anything but torture, although I did not say that.

  Frank said, ‘We all need compensations for the hell of living, as Ellie’s old man says whenever he sees me.’ I made a mental note to ask about Ellice’s father another time. The old man sounds a lot more perceptive than the daughter.

  Is living a hell? I used to think so, quite often. There have been times in my life when I have thought so continuously and for a long time. These days the strength of the feeling seems to be in retreat, fractionally, in a stop-start way, rather in the style of Frank’s film. Perhaps I shouldn’t think this, or write it. I’m not superstitious; all the same I don’t want to release a jinx.

  After leaving Frank I did some writing. I finally saw my way clear to having a stab at Oscar’s dialogue. At my desk with Teddy at my feet I basked in a glow of relaxation for quite some time. A slightly perturbing experience. It was as if I’d never witnessed the scenes of mayhem from Frank’s film. It must have been the unfamiliar feeling of someone’s hands on me. The healing touch. The – ha! Yea, verily – the laying on of hands.

  All my life I have avoided such trendy, New Age things as massages, as I told Frank. They were very popular with female members of staff, especially the younger ones, who were always going to spas for mud wraps and pedicures. But the very idea of someone you don’t know touching your body has always struck me, I will say it here, as deeply repugnant. However professional and detached they may be. The difference is that I do know Frank. I feel as if I know him quite well. I might have stopped him, very easily, but I did not. This could only have been because I did not find him, or it, repugnant.

  The muscles of my upper back, shoulders and neck feel lighter, somehow. As if released from a tension I didn’t know I had. I’d never have imagined that a few minutes of manipulation could be so agreeable. The way Frank’s fingers worked, his ‘technique’, must be very skilled. He has obviously done it before, probably practises on Ellice. Well, lucky old her.