The White Body of Evening

by A L McCann

  Gradually these thoughts lost their clarity and tapered off into a playful but treacherous forgetfulness on the edge of sleep. Paul saw his sister taking her marriage vows and the branding iron, bearing the name of the husband, glowing with the heat of the fire. There were hints of gold in the air as if they were all standing in a great cathedral of glittering light. He felt his penis growing into an erection as the branding ceremony neared. In the distance, the powers of the law, Truth and Justice, looked on benevolently, with pity for the sinner led into the clammy arms of Judgement. The tentacles of the monster wrapped themselves around Paul’s naked torso and drew him to its cold, slimy surface, where one inky eye looked blankly into his. “Thus you are judged,” said a voice and Paul, desperately struggling against the huge octopus, twisted himself out of sleep to find the bedroom light still waiting to blind him.

  Meanwhile, Winton had retired to his bedroom where he watched his wife sleeping. His eyes were fixed on Anna, but all he could see was the girl – Maisie was her name – who’d bled to death in a filthy sty off Little Lonsdale Street. The colour ran out of her cheeks and she turned cold while the soiled bedsheets soaked up her life. Later, after Winton had left, Madame Bruges ordered some lackeys to disfigure her body and dump it in the Yarra. When the corpse snagged under a landing and a couple of rowers almost tripped over it climbing out of their scull, the case became the focus of public outrage and horror. Barely a week later, the police uncovered a suitcase with a dismembered body stored inside it and, soon after, a decapitated cadaver in Brunswick. The whole city seemed full of bodies. People soon forgot about the girl in the river.

  Winton told himself that one day society would realise the social benefits of abortion and would reform its archaic laws. With a cultivated objectivity he recounted the chain of events that had led not just to the girl’s death, but to the discovery of her mutilated body, convincing himself that his part in the tragedy had been that of a man of medicine, trying to act in accordance with the demands of science and social hygiene. It was only after the scandal had dropped well away from the public consciousness, and he realised that he’d be safe from prosecution, that he relaxed his efforts at self-justification and found that his role in the girl’s death was even harder to specify than he remembered. But now the memory of the incident had been rudely disinterred. Les Collins was perhaps the one person left in Melbourne who still had an inkling of his role in the death. He began to fear its implications with renewed intensity, amplified by the sight of his sleeping wife, who was completely ignorant of his misdeeds.

  In the early 1880s, Christopher Leslie Collins was still somebody in the city of Melbourne. His Life of Charles Whitehead was a moderate success, admired by influential critics in Melbourne and Sydney, and he had begun work on an epic recounting the destruction of the Kulin nation by white settlement. Winton had met him in the Yorick Club, where writers, lawyers and doctors frequently assembled to fortify themselves against the boredom of colonial life. Collins already had a problem with drink and was struggling to meet deadlines. When his wife died of consumption and publishers baulked at the bleak, caustic tone of his book on the Kulin, he let himself drop more directly into the mud of the city and sought forgetfulness in the back streets off Little Lon. Until Paul had mentioned him, Winton was not even sure that the man was still alive. In the 1890s one still heard rumours about Collins sleeping around the Eastern Market, under Princes Bridge, or in a drain near Spencer Street Station. By the turn of the century the man was already a ghost, an obscure memory of old Melbourne to be dug out of the archives a hundred years hence.

  Now the thought of this ghost walking the streets filled Winton with horror. He looked at his wife, oblivious to the dark possibilities perhaps already closing in on them. He didn’t care how he’d be judged by posterity or in the hereafter, but he couldn’t live with the shame of thinking himself a criminal in his wife’s eyes.

  As if troubled by her husband’s anxiety, Anna stirred and opened her eyes. “What did Paul want?” she asked sleepily. It was a question that seemed to spring directly from the depths of sleep, as if she had been dreaming her son’s future and her husband’s past and sensed the atmosphere of unease that now hung over both. For a moment Winton felt accused by her question.

  “Your son sees himself in Vienna,” Winton said. “The Academy of Visual Arts.”

  “Vienna,” she murmured. “I’d like to go to Vienna.” She propped herself up on her elbow and thought about this.”My poor boy,” she said. “Paul will be a wanderer, like the Flying Dutchman.”

  “He is determined to succeed, despite his setback.”

  “That determination is also a curse,” Anna said ruefully. “It’ll keep him sailing forever.”

  As she reached out and took her husband’s hand, seeking reassurance, he was mortified to imagine the loathsome tendrils of his past now reaching up through the ground, searching him out, embracing him and pulling him back into their murky depths. He would make sure that Paul left them. He could buy his silence. But for Collins himself, there was no accounting.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The weeks preceding Paul’s departure slowly turned into months. At first the time ran away in single grains of sand, each needing to fall before the next seemed ready to move. But by the spring of 1911, time had spilt out around him with such a wasteful extravagance that he felt his future being sucked away and wondered if he would ever leave at all. With the news of his imminent departure, Ondine’s resistance to him had softened. She humoured him with her caresses, kissed him with her old affection, and coddled him like a child, anticipating that his leaving would bring a decisive close to their troubled relationship. At his mother’s insistence, he agreed to stay for the wedding and see his sister married to Ralph Matthews. He toasted the couple with the knowledge that he’d soon be spared the indignity of their happiness.

  On a cold day in early October, Paul finally took possession of a cabin on board the Abendstern. His mother and sister surveyed it warily, but nevertheless were impressed at its size and took this as a sign of the ship’s seaworthiness. The next morning, as sheets of rain battered the bay and wind rattled the corrugated iron roofs of the houses along the shore, the ship pulled out of Port Melbourne. Paul stood on the deck. He had already lost his mother and sister in the sparse crowd along the pier and wondered if they could still see him. He hung over the railing and waved on the off-chance that they could. It was the last courtesy of a son not to turn his back on his mother until the ship was out of her sight. But it was only obligation that held him there. He had no desire to watch the shoreline of his birth and upbringing fade behind him nor to reminisce as his past slipped away. On the contrary, he was already thinking of the future with an excitement that completely obliterated his feeling for the city he was leaving.

  As the pier receded behind a mist of drizzle, Melbourne had already become unreal. It was like a vision of Edwardian torpor from which he had just awoken. What he carried with him as its most palpable moments were the ones that had seemed most ethereal. It was only where the imagination had struggled to overcome the monotony of the city that Melbourne left him something tangible to hold onto. In the arcades he had walked through since he was a child, in gruesome wax images and the desperate yearnings of fetid alleys and lanes, he found a passage back to himself. But in the grid-like uniformity of the city, in the emptiness of its streets and the crushing conservatism of its terracotta-tiled villas spreading out into a vast suburban wilderness, the imagination, if it wasn’t beaten flat with national sentiment and the spirit of the land, could only turn in on itself and devour its host like a parasite. The future of Australia lay in either individual sickness or collective subservience to the blandest and most brutal invention of modern times: the nation.

  Paul had already glanced at the notebooks containing his father’s writings. Hamish had given them to him at the Montague the night before, along with a battered, second-hand copy of The Life of Charles Whitehead. Hi
s skin prickled and his heart thudded as he looked into his father’s inspired madness and pictured his mind ruptured by sphinxes, apparitions and dancing shadows. Looking over his father’s writing was like gazing into a mass of particles slowly forming a shape that he could see clearly only by squinting or averting his eyes. It was there, and yet it wasn’t – a huge, dark form on the periphery of perception. His father had stumbled over the drunken song of midnight, where the poet, the lunatic and the criminal are one, and had rewritten it in a hundred variations, each a futile quest for finality, an end to desire itself.

  Paul wondered what his mother had really known about his father and what she really knew about Winton. Both men moved through the netherworld of the city, following a map sketched out by their imaginations until they found themselves confronting their own shadows. As he scanned the grey coastline that now stretched itself around the bay, these shadows were the substance of the place he was leaving. He could make out nothing except the varying shades of grey that distinguished the water from the sand, the sand from the buildings along the foreshore, and the buildings from the sky overhead.

  Anna took Ondine’s arm and allowed her daughter to lead her reluctantly away from the sombre vision of the Abendstern shrinking into a turbulent horizon. She didn’t feel that she had the resolve simply to walk away from her son on her own, even though the two women were getting wet, and the rain seemed a suitable pretext for their departure.

  “I envy him,” Ondine said, thinking that she’d like to forestall her mother’s sadness. They took shelter in a rotunda overlooking the beach and waited for the rain to pass.

  “Do you really?”Anna asked.

  “Of course. Haven’t we always wanted to travel?”

  “But he’s not travelling, at least not in the usual sense.”

  Ondine didn’t need this explained to her. She pictured her brother on a vain quest that would see him lost in a distant land, never to return to them. Her esteem for him grew with the thought of his misguided grandeur.

  “We may have to go and find him,” she said absently. “When Ralph and I travel to the Continent we will check on him.”

  But she knew that she and Ralph were not about to sail for Europe, that all that senseless motion was in fact futile and unproductive. They’d honeymooned in Queenscliff and moved into a house the size of Winton’s in South Yarra, next to the Domain, but Ralph was already making noises about returning to New South Wales. His instinct was not to flee the familiar, but to gravitate towards it. The thought of travelling to Europe was merely a distraction for him. He wasn’t one of those Australians who refer to England as “home”. On the contrary, he saw himself as a native of the land, an inhabitant of the Monaro existing in a state of exile. He knew that if Ondine saw his home, then she too would be overwhelmed by the ambition that had created it. When he told her this she feared that she might not care for the ambition of his forefathers.

  “What did you dream of doing when you were a girl?” she asked her mother as they walked along the beachfront after the rain had stopped.

  Anna’s eyes were searching for the ship, fading away from them in the distance.

  “I don’t know,” she answered. “I think I’ve only ever wanted to have time, time simply to be.”

  “To be?”

  “Yes, to be.”

  “Have you found it?”

  “Yes, I have.”

  “So you have been happy?” Ondine knitted her eyebrows as she asked this, trying to round out her mother’s uninspired responses.

  “Yes.” Anna took her daughter’s hand. “Yes, I’ve been happy, as you will be with Ralph.”

  Anna could honestly say that she had been content with Winton, but she also knew that she was being disingenuous with her daughter, discounting so much that Ondine must be aware of, even though they had never explicitly talked about Albert or discussed his drowning. As the grey sky cleared and a few jaundiced rays of sunlight caught the edge of a dark rain cloud drifting out over the heads, both women overlooked the emptiness of Anna’s assertion, and found momentary comfort in its naïvety.

  PART FOUR

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  October 9, 1911

  Dear Hamish,

  I have read the family archive from start to finish. I don’t know how you managed to part with it, but I must thank you again for doing so. There is much to be frightened of here, though of course it is difficult to know where to draw the line between fact and fiction. I doubt that my father was a pervert, at least not a real one, though the manner of his death might tell us something on that account. Anyway, I’m not about to indict someone for his fantasies. We all live in various degrees of evasion, desperately (or maybe just lazily) clutching at the surface of things, which stops us from going to “the other side”. I suppose spewing it all out like that is one way of being with oneself. I mean living with oneself, of getting beyond the illusion. Maybe there are people who already embrace their own horror as a matter of course, like criminals or the insane. Short of that, art is the language in which the self unfolds and I suppose it’s the best we can do to have some inkling of ourselves.

  Being at sea leads one to think in this vein. There’s nothing else to do. Travel is a kind of blankness, between the place one is escaping from and the place one is fleeing to. Put like that it seems a waste of time really, and bound to end in disappointment. I don’t know what it would have taken for me to stay in Melbourne. A good old-fashioned plague perhaps. I often think that I’d be happy in a plague town (perhaps that’s what I think I’m going to find over there). It’s the kind of thing that occurs to me late at night, when I’m having trouble sleeping. Wet cobblestones, dead rats underfoot, the stench of something rank, bodies torn open by pustules and thrown into the street. There wouldn’t be much point in going through with the formalities then, would there? It would be “come as you are”. But then I suppose the disappointment would be that nothing much would change, that people have been coming as they are all along, and there’s simply not much there.

  Paul broke off from his letter, thinking of something he had read in his father’s writing. Is the child on the beach – the child and the “filthy streets of her sex” – Ondine? He remembered a day when they were all on the sand and his father was looking around, distracted. Ondine was mucking about in the seaweed and then he was staring at her, talking about how he could smell sewage leaking somewhere. Paul recognised the smell. It was the smell of the bay: seaweed and shellfish, the ocean mingling with the corruption of a port town. He saw his father look at his sister as if he were smelling her. Perhaps he’d write that poem out and send it to her, Paul thought. God knows what she’d make of it now. He imagined his sister had changed, but maybe it was simply that he never knew her. At the pier as they had said their farewells, all he could see when he looked at Ondine were the traces of his incursions – Matthews’s – imprinted on her body. Afterwards, when the port had receded from view, he lay awake listening to the waves, imagining her in her husband’s arms, wondering whether she still looked chaste.

  He dismissed the thought and returned to the letter.

  The Whitehead book has also been a revelation to me. The whole thing is thick with the atmosphere of hallucination. The streets, the ghost of the wife, the nightmare of alcohol, poverty and failure. Of course Whitehead, though I suppose he really lived like that, is Collins himself. The two are doubles of each other. Perhaps you could write The Tragedy of Christopher Leslie Collins and make it an epic of modern Melbourne. God knows, that is what the city is short on — its own myth-makers.

  But what can you expect from a place that seems to be ending before it has even really begun? That’s the true tragedy of Australia — a country arrives at the moment in world history when the very concept of the nation has almost run out of steam. What is left to it but clichés and jingoism? Perhaps the odd blood sacrifice. National identity in Australia is already a layer of dead tissue. You probably don’t quite agree and I may b
e exaggerating. If I ever come back I suppose I’ll have to swallow my words. Will post from Fremantle.

  Yours, Paul

  October 20,1911

  Dear Hamish,

  If you get a chance, look in on my sister and tell me what you find. I’m curious. I suppose I would like to know whether she is in good hands or about to let her rootlessness get the better of her and jump on a ship as well. I have visions of Matthews abusing her, taking his coveted riding whip to her and breaking her indomitable spirit as if she were one of his colts. He seems the type to me — an old-style sadist or a military man in uniform strolling brashly through a public garden with the smooth, clean look of a wife-beater. But I’m probably underestimating my sister. She is no doubt his equal in pride, strength and imperiousness. Perhaps it is she who has taken the riding whip to him.

  My father seems to have had a fanciful sense of geography. He writes about South Melbourne Beach and St Kilda as if they were in North Africa, the Yarra River as if it were a Venetian canal, and the Block Arcade as if it were in Paris. He reconstructed virtually the entire city as a phantasmagoria of exotic possibilities, as if he were constantly in flight from it and living in his imagination.

  Melbourne is a place given over to fantasy anyway. The streets are lined with oaks, elms and plane trees, and native plants have been carefully removed, creating the atmosphere of a northern city, or at least one that is not specifically Australian. Of course, when the last shadows of winter dry up and the place is drenched in sunlight, choking on dust and infested with blowflies, where else could it be but the south (and not the south that Keats imagined)? Even the most intense fantasies wither in such heat. The place is unwilling to confront its natural habitat, its antipodean reality, and would go to any lengths not to have to look inland at the grey, hacked-up earth. It seems futile really, and a bit infantile.