The White Body of Evening

by A L McCann

  “You mean the Howard thing?”

  “Of course.”

  Anna remembered the awful day she’d been followed by the doctor and ended up watching the crowd prepare to rip the murderer apart. Throughout the week of Edmund Howard’s trial it was impossible not to feel the horror of the crime, as one tumid euphemism after another cloaked the image of the violated corpse. Because the man had once performed a hypnotist’s act at the Polytechnic, people said he must have mesmerised the girl – Edith Joyce was her name – and then killed her when the trance was broken. Stories about the “Jew’s eye” did the rounds (so much so that the Australian Israelite published an angry rebuttal) and books on mesmerism were briefly in demand at the Coles Book Arcade. But the interest died out as quickly as it had started. By the time Howard was executed, fact and fiction were so thoroughly confused that one wondered whether the whole thing had been some fleeting, common hallucination, as ephemeral as a daydream. The execution had a profoundly purgative effect on the press and the public alike. The murder was soon a sombre memory and the city quickly found other atrocities and scandals on which to sate its hunger for sensation.

  “I don’t like hearing about that man,” Anna said calmly. “I was glad when the whole thing died down.”

  “Why is that? Do you find it frightening?” asked Albert.

  Anna looked at him, as if the question were obtuse.

  “Who wouldn’t be frightened?” said Robert.

  Anna recalled the impression she’d had on the ferry, when she’d felt as if the waking world were animated by a sinister logic that was only truly accessible in dreams.

  “It’s not simply the facts of the case that are frightening,” she said. “It’s the sense that something dreadful, just out of sight, is living side by side with commonplace things. I read in the paper that the girl was due to meet her sister and her brother-in-law at the Follies the day she went missing. In ordinary details like that there is something unspeakable that terrifies me more than the thought of the murder itself.”

  What she said touched Albert directly, yet in a way that she could not have anticipated. He was keenly aware of his own ordinariness, the banal fact of his body, perched on a chair in the kitchen of a cheap worker’s cottage. His stomach had begun to sag a bit. He had become sedentary. At night he stretched out on the couch and read the paper or a journal and drank a glass of beer before dozing off. On the surface he was a fairly typical bloke. It was somewhere else, in nightmares and in waking dreams, that he met his double, the dim presentiment of all his possible crimes.

  “Tell her about the forgery,” Albert urged, eager to keep the conversation moving.

  “Well, it’s not much of a story. But I suppose it is indicative. A few weeks after the execution, a man turned up at the office with a manuscript. It was a collection of poems, about twenty in all, made out to look as if they’d been written by Howard. Awful stuff. Smatterings of Poe, dank, subterranean prisons, lascivious sexual details, necrophilia, the voices of the dying ringing out like suffocating muses from beneath the ground. Awful, obscene stuff.”

  “But you don’t think they’re authentic?” Anna asked, concealing a shudder of revulsion.

  “Well, we’ve tracked down Howard’s sister, who’s adamant that her brother could barely even pen a letter.”

  “Are you going to publish them?” asked Albert.

  “God no,” said Robert. “Completely unsuited for public consumption. Even as oddities. With writers like Maupassant, Daudet and Zola banned by the Customs Act, we’d be certain to end up in court.”

  “The whole thing is so mysterious,” Albert said. “Where did the poems come from in the first place? I mean, who is the bloke who brought them in? Did he write them himself?”

  “He’s a man called Dacre, a crooked little fellow with a broken accent. He claims to have known Howard. Some murky connection. Something to do with spiritualists in Bendigo. Sounds like nonsense to me. He keeps possession of the poems, of course, and is evidently thinking of publication for profit. When he brought them into the office he wouldn’t let them out of his sight. Hovered around like an old fart and made sure that we only got a look at the first few. You’d think he had the deed to the Midas mine itself.”

  “But surely whoever publishes these is going to make a mint,”Albert said, his eyes lighting up at the thought of such a lucrative little sham.

  “I dare say these poems will find their way to the public, but it will have to be through some disreputable, back-room publisher or one of those nasty little dives, hidden away in your arcades, that sell those French novels.”

  Anna blushed. She remembered the pudgy man sitting like a bloated toad in the corner of the parlour reading Zola and the withered, jaundiced face of the woman highlighted against the black curtain.

  “I’d like to read those poems,” said Albert absentmindedly, in between mouthfuls of potato salad.

  “I think they’d be quite out of place here, Bert,” Robert said, smiling. “Howard was sick and so was the mania around him. The sooner we get him out of our systems the better, lest the infection spread into decent homes and families.”

  Albert listened calmly, impressed at how well his brother spoke and in a way loving him for the rectitude and certainty of what he said. Anna also found a certain comfort in his words. They would both have liked to believe in this vision of the home he conjured, but they knew, in their own very private ways, that it was a lie. They had both fallen away from this myth of righteousness, and if they could have spoken about this directly, they might have been able to fall away together. As it was each had stumbled off alone and the further they went along their own dark paths, the less, it seemed, they knew about themselves or each other.

  A few nights later, after Robert’s calming influence had subsided, Albert propped himself up on a pillow watching his wife prepare to turn in. Anna tried not to look at him and hurried under the counterpane, as if to avoid his gaze. Albert resented the thought of her untouchability. Decent homes and families, he thought sardonically. When he put out the lamp next to him, he leant into her and kissed her on the neck. Anna started, almost as if he’d bitten her. The baby was already screaming in the next room. She wriggled away from Albert and got out of bed.

  “I’m sorry,” she said impatiently, hugging a shawl around herself and hurrying out of the room.

  He folded his hands on his stomach and lay as still as a corpse. She didn’t seem to care about him, didn’t see how his life was ebbing away, he thought. It surprised him to think that he was even really married to her. He listened to the creaking floorboards. He could hear her through the darkness, whispering to the baby.

  When she came back half an hour later, he touched her nervously, moved his hand over her thigh and rested it on her hip, waiting for her to respond. But she lay still and he began to imagine the puritanical deadness of her acquiescence, her passive obedience to a sense of marital duty, the hollowness of her physical pleasure. Like Winton’s diagnosis, the thought of it filled him with guilt. His penis went flaccid and the anxiety gathered in the pit of his stomach, twisting through him as he dropped away from her. He felt as if he’d swallowed a bag of nails.

  “Albert,” she said, sleepily. She sounded relieved to be left alone.

  As he lay there his eyes began to ache. He wondered if he were slowly going blind or developing a tumour behind his sockets.

  He suddenly wanted to sob. The urge came from nowhere. He felt the cruel distance opening up between himself and the body that he dragged through this impersonal domestic routine. It seized him and wouldn’t let go. He yearned for his own resurrection while he imagined the sound of dirt falling on the lid of his coffin. He longed to feel his body come alive again, but knew the magic charm that animated the flesh had been snatched from his mouth. He trembled as he looked back at himself, heavy and stolid, barely alive.

  How much longer could he bear it? In the kitchen, clutching the knife in his hand, he seemed to see eve
rything clearly again. It was a sluggish afternoon. The light coming in through the back was sepia-tinged, like an old photograph, and he was hypnotised by the crisscross patterns on the dirty linoleum. He closed his hand around the handle, and touched the sharp blade with his thumb. He saw the way forward, and the certainty of a victory over his misery was so complete that no trace of doubt clouded his resolve. He shuddered with the conviction of his vision. She would scream, “What have you done?” and he’d reply, like the voice of judgement, “What have you?”

  For a while he watched Anna cooing in German to their son. The child’s eyes sparkled with delight. “Holdes Kind,” he heard her say with love in her voice. Albert’s loneliness stabbed at him. His hand hesitated for only a moment. He willed the rage into his heart until he thought it would burst. Fist white around the handle, he dug the knife into his skin, just above the hip, and felt himself flooding back into his body through the dull pain of the wound.

  “Sieh doch selbst!” Anna said to Paul, pointing to a picture book on her lap.

  Albert stumbled towards her, clutching his side. She heard the knife fall to the ground as she looked up at his white face and at his shirt wet with blood. For a moment she saw nothing and then, almost choking on her own breath, caught him as he fell into her.

  “Was hast du gemacht? Was hast du gemacht?” she screamed, looking at his blood on her bare arms, as he sunk onto the floor beside the child.

  A moment later she pulled herself together and ran next door, telling herself to say it calmly in English so that they’d understand that her husband had tried to kill himself. For the second time in his life Jack McDermott ran the two blocks to Dr Winton’s, returning in a hansom, while a distraught Anna knelt over her husband and Sarah hurried Paul into his bedroom.

  When Albert saw Dr Winton appear above him he almost laughed out loud. He was bleeding steadily, but of course he’d never meant to kill himself. He still saw everything as lucidly as he had at the moment of his decision, but now feared that somehow the sinister presence of the doctor would bring him undone. He began to weaken and feared that he really might bleed to death. The doctor was ready to usher him away. His teeth glistened like fangs under his fine, auburn moustache, reminding Albert of a cat or a rodent or some dreadful hybrid of the two – a hairy, carnivorous scavenger. Finally he shut his eyes.

  Anna’s fears, for a moment, reflected those of her husband. As Jack and the doctor carried Albert into the carriage, Anna watched Dr Winton uneasily. If Albert should die, she thought, that man will come for me. She dared herself to think it, only to smother the thought the instant it had formed. She left Sarah looking after the baby and got into the cab.

  “I don’t think you need fear, Anna,” the doctor said as the carriage jolted into motion. “Your husband is bleeding very slowly and the wound is not a deep one. When he gets to the hospital he’ll be fine.”

  He patted her arm. She was too exhausted to refuse his sympathy, concentrating her attention on her husband, feeling herself go blank with the shock of his pale face, the blood, the horrible implications of his act.

  She held Albert’s hand as she watched the houses flash by. The carriage was moving rapidly. Its chaotic motion made her feel ill. If he dies, she thought, she’d be to blame. She had forced him to marry her, she told herself. Her distance, the unconscious wish to be free – but she stopped herself. It was too horrible. She wanted to love him. She knew that she wanted to love him.

  Albert was convalescing on the couch within a few days. The wound, as Dr Winton had said, was not a serious one. Albert’s mental fragility, however, was another matter. A doctor at the Homoeopathic Hospital recommended that he see someone at Yarra Bend, someone with experience in the treatment of hysterics and neurasthenics. Anna and Robert, both harbouring an instinctive fear of mental illness, insisted that he’d be all right at home for the time being, but nevertheless agreed they should consult an expert.

  Anna, deep down, doubted Robert’s private insistence that he’d be fine under their supervision, but she was also sufficiently convinced that, because she was partly to blame for what had happened, she could also restore her husband to health simply by being more willing to meet the demands of their marriage. She knew now that she had entertained a kind of distance from the whole thing. She was barely aware of it until the sight of her husband bleeding on the floor tore the scales from her eyes and she stared into the giddy emptiness of their relationship.

  “What have I done, Albert?” she asked him as they sat on the couch together.

  “Nothing, Anna,” he said in an apathetic manner that, far from consoling her, suggested that he didn’t have the energy to implicate her in his breakdown.

  She clutched his hand as tears ran down her cheeks. “I’ll be better, Albert,” she said. “I’ll be a better wife, a better lover. I promise.”

  “It’s not your fault. Don’t blame yourself.” He stood up and walked gingerly into the kitchen, careful not to disturb the stitches. A moment later he came back with a recent issue of the Bulletin, which he began reading while Anna dried her eyes with a handkerchief. His easy assurances merely reinforced her sense of guilt and she felt heavy with remorse. He could see her unease and knew that she was becoming the penitent he had intended her to be.

  But she was also getting paler and thinner. She was no longer so peacefully and blithely absorbed in the welfare of her child. Her hands shook as she washed dishes, dusted the sideboard or cut up vegetables. She needed Albert to accept her, either to punish her or finally to convince her that she had nothing for which to atone. Her guilt consumed her, as if it were a poison that she carried in her veins and couldn’t purge. She was wasting away under its steadily corrosive influence. Her breast milk dried up, her ribs began to press through her chest and her cheekbones slowly became more prominent.

  “You’re not really eating much these days,” Albert said to her coldly. It was twilight, about a month after his stitches had been removed.

  She looked at him, almost at her wit’s end. “I’m too bloody nervous to eat.”

  She was standing in the fading light of the front bedroom window, her silhouette hanging in front of him. He walked up to her and held her thin hands. She turned to him, her eyes red but expressionless, and kissed him on the lips, tasting faint traces of beer and tobacco as she pushed her mouth into his. He could feel her shivering as he took her arms.

  “I’m sorry, Albert,” she said to him.

  He kissed her harder. He could still sense her subtle resistance to him, the distance opening up between them as he drew her closer. He looked at her in the half-light of the approaching evening, noticing how tired she looked and how worn.

  “I love you,” she said, and began to unbutton her blouse, looking at him steadily.

  But something in him didn’t trust her. He took a small step away.

  She stood in front of him, and now the indifference in her vanished. Her eyes were almost pleading and he felt himself change too, as if something horrible in him were making its way to the surface. He knew she had given in to him. For a second he imagined that he had put her into a trance.

  “Do …” she said, and swallowed, “… do what you want to me.”

  She looked away from him as he stepped towards her, tore off her blouse and pushed her onto the unmade bed. He furiously pulled her skirt down over her thighs and then, when she was naked, held her beneath him, looking into her frightened eyes.

  Neither of them heard the baby crying, or the front door creak open. As Hamish McDermott wandered into the narrow hallway he heard strange rutting noises that seemed oblivious to the distressed sobbing of the child in the next room. He followed the noises into the front bedroom. The door was open and he could see Albert’s white backside jerking itself into a chaotically splayed mass of limbs that looked to the child like pieces of a disassembled shop mannequin. The place stank. Like a toilet, he thought. Soiled pieces of clothing littered the floor. Then he saw Anna’s face, turn
ed to one side. Her eyes were closed and she was panting with exhaustion. The smoothness of her skin, the high cheekbones and the blankness of her expression, all made him think that she was wearing a mask, and that underneath it wasn’t really her, but a stranger. And when the eyes of the stranger opened and looked at him, he knew that they were not her eyes. They were dead, like hollow, burnt-out sockets.

  Frightened, Hamish ran out into the street. It was grey outside, the very edge of nightfall. He could still hear Albert’s animal groans, the shrill squeaking of the mattress and the cries of the baby filling the stifling atmosphere of the bedroom with a desperate breathlessness. But when he stopped, everything was calm. He breathed deeply, measuring the silence around him until he regained his composure.

  “If little boys don’t go to bed on time, they have their eyes plucked out,” he remembered his mother saying to him.

  He went back to his own house, with the vague fear of punishment for having looked in the dead eyes of the stranger. Later, in his bedroom, with all the lights out, it was as if a queer absence lay in wait for him. The darkness trembled and he longed for the fresh, clear light of morning.

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER FOUR

  On the last night of the nineteenth century crowds gathered around the clock towers of the Melbourne Town Hall and the central post office. Flags had been stretched across the main streets. Banners attached to the light posts bore the names of the federated Australian states, and handmade posters, draped from upper–storey windows, prophesised the moment of national becoming that was just hours away: “One Flag, One Hope, One Destiny”.

  As night settled, the city was aglow. Caverns of white light shone from shopfronts through the densely packed footpaths, illuminating a tangled mass of black silhouettes. Some of the revellers blew toy trumpets and banged drums, such that when people forgot themselves or drifted absentmindedly in the throng, the sounds of these rude instruments returned them to their sense of a shared purpose. As midnight approached a calm descended on the streets. Gradually eyes everywhere turned to one of the two clock towers as the minute hands slowly approached their zeniths.