The White Body of Evening

by A L McCann

  “I think it’s touching something too raw,” Laura said gently.

  “Nonsense. It’s merely topical.”

  “Won’t it be construed as bad taste? What about the relatives of that poor girl?”

  “What do we care if we stir up a bit of controversy? It’s all good publicity.”

  “You’ve turned into quite a pragmatist, haven’t you?”

  “That sounds like my sister talking. Since when have you worried about that?”

  Laura looked back into her lap, trying to avoid eye contact. “I don’t think it’s decent, Paul,” she said without looking up. “A little girl being murdered like that is a terrible, terrible thing.”

  “My sister has hypnotised you with all her high moral seriousness,” he accused.

  “I am capable of thinking for myself, you know.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since always. Since now. Since you’ve hit upon the idea of turning your silly theatre into a source of such callous disregard. It’s awful.”

  “Oh, please.” Paul stood up.”If you’re not interested I’ll do it alone. I’ll find my own Alma Tirtschke to strangle and we’ll be the talk of the town.” He laughed to himself.

  “Where will you find your Alma Tirtschke? They’ll all keep clear of you after the last debacle.”

  “Oh, I know my way around Melbourne pretty well.”

  Paul threw himself down on the couch opposite her, looking like a limp rag doll.

  “My sister is a devil in her own right, you know. Where do you think she is going to lead you?”

  “Oh, shut up, Paul. You’re being moronic.”

  Laura took her book, stood up abruptly and left him alone in the room. She walked upstairs to Ondine’s room. The door was ajar. She pushed it open and entered without knocking.

  Ondine was sitting at one end of her canopy bed reading. She looked up from her book and met Laura’s eyes as the latter calmly sat down at the other end of the bed and opened her book as well. The two women were cross-legged, backs against opposite ends of the bedstead, necks craned over Balzac like a couple of bookends turned around the wrong way.

  “I wonder if Paul will finish up mad as well,” Ondine said without raising her eyes.”Like our father, I mean.”

  “It would be awkward, wouldn’t it?” Laura replied.

  Ondine smiled to herself. She loved her sister-in-law’s capacity for such miscalculated remarks.

  Laura lowered her eyes again and resumed her reading. Ondine raised hers, ever so slightly, fixing on the waves of jet–black hair tumbling over Laura’s white shoulders, and her mouth narrowing into a pout of concentration which seemed to be speaking the words she read as if she were trying to memorise a part in a play.

  Neither Ondine nor Laura attended the opening of The Gun Alley Atrocity. That afternoon the two of them had played tennis on the courts at the far end of St Vincent Place. When they returned to the house they were both pleasantly flushed from their exertions as the cool, dark air of the old stone house greeted them. Paul was waiting for them in the downstairs sitting room. He had been frantic for the last few weeks writing, casting and refurbishing the set of The Cabinet of Anatomical Curiosities. He hadn’t grown thinner in that time, as one might expect with all that nervous exertion. On the contrary, his stomach had become softer and rounder and his face had begun to sag. He seemed more anxious than he had ever been and looked tired and haggard. He knew Ondine wouldn’t go to the premiere, but still imagined that his wife would be loyal to him even though she, too, clearly disapproved of the play.

  “Laura, darling,” he said, taking her arm as he emerged from the sitting room. “You will be coming tonight, won’t you? Hamish will take you if you like.”

  “Paul, you know I’m not going to come. I don’t think it’s right, this play.”

  He gripped her arm tighter. “Laura, darling, you must come. It would mean so much to me.”

  He spoke with a staged irony that she found repugnant. She could smell the back rooms of the theatre on his tattered suit. She imagined old posters of chorus girls peeling off the walls and traces of cat piss stained into the floorboards.

  “Don’t,” she said angrily, wriggling out of his sweaty grip. “I’m going to shower.”

  Ondine had already mounted the stairs. Paul cast a glance at her. She had turned and was watching the scene below with what seemed to him a smile curled into the wrinkle of a lip.

  “You’re in love with my sister, aren’t you?” he said under his breath.

  “Don’t be silly.” Laura blushed as she spoke. She abruptly followed Ondine up the stairs, hoping that she hadn’t heard Paul’s accusation.

  Paul followed a few paces behind, the feeling of betrayal mounting in him. When he and Laura were in their own room he seized her arm again and shook her.

  “What?” she implored.

  The smell of her perspiration aroused him and he sniffed her neck like an animal. For a moment she stood there in the middle of the room, motionless, listening to his heavy breathing, imagining his nostrils dilating.

  “Have you kissed her?” he hissed.

  She turned away from him.

  Suddenly enraged, he twisted her slender wrists behind her back and pushed her onto the bed. He pulled her tennis skirt up over her back, yanked her drawers down around her knees and pushed his fingers in between her buttocks, touching the edge of her anus. The stunned terror in her silence as she clung to the counterpane returned him to himself. He stood back. She pulled her skirt down, staring at him in horror as she pushed past him through the hallway into Ondine’s room. Paul choked back his anger, rearranged himself, and followed her out. He listened at his sister’s door for a moment before going back downstairs. A few minutes later he was out in the street, driving towards the city, cursing the two women with such vehemence that his body shook.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  It was late February and Melbourne felt as if a sirocco had been blowing its hot breath along the city’s dusty streets for the best part of a week. The place was parched, withering in the heat of the country’s vast, interior deserts. The police had arrested the bartender at the Australian Wine Shop for the murder of Alma Tirtschke. Within a week of the trial beginning a cast of prostitutes and spiritualists from the arcade had come out in force to testify against Colin Ross, who gaped at the court with his glistening gold teeth and pleaded his innocence with a sad, hang-dog look on his rough, unshaven face. Paul didn’t need to wait for the verdict to finish his play. He could already divine its end and envisioned Ross going to the gallows haunted by his satanic prompter, Wedelkind, whom he imagined rubbing his hands with glee at the fulfilment of his prognostication.

  As evening fell, the play looked as if it would be well attended despite the soaring temperature. Still angry at his wife, Paul stood in the vestibule of the Bijou under the whirling blades of a ceiling fan as patrons, befuddled by the heat, stumbled in from the brutal clamour of Bourke Street.

  “I think that man will certainly hang,” one woman said shrilly.

  “But who would trust the likes of a Madam Gurkha?” said another.

  “What about the father? Shot in a hunting accident just the other week. Doesn’t that make you suspicious?”

  Paul hadn’t noticed Hamish standing beside him.

  “Truth of it is,” Hamish said,”that poor fool from the wine bar is probably innocent.”

  “How do you know that?” asked Paul. “In this play he’s as guilty as hell. I’ll stake my reputation on it.”

  “Besides the most dubious of testimonies nothing connects him to the girl.”

  As they watched the crowd file into the theatre Paul thought about Wedelkind and wondered what role he had played in the affair.

  “And they all know that tonight they’ll see Alma Tirtschke die a second time,” said Hamish. “Why do they need to see that?”

  “Because the good burghers of Melbourne like a bit of sadism. Always have. If we were allowed
to throw Christians to the lions they’d be showing up in droves.”

  As eight o’clock approached Paul retreated to the wings and Hamish took his seat near the front of the stage.

  A large man with a double chin and a few tufts of black hair on his onion-shaped head leant over towards him.

  “Can bet on a bit of strife tonight. You’re from the press, ain’t ya?”

  “Yes,” said Hamish. “The Melburnian.”

  “Well ya can bet there’ll be a bit of trouble. Look over there.”

  He pointed to the end of the aisle at a thin, bespectacled man neatly attired, despite the heat, in a dark suit concealing a vicar’s collar.

  “That’s Percy Gambell. Any Saturday night you can hear him preaching on Little Bourke and Little Lon at the whores and Chinks. A right one he is. A real fanatic for good Christian virtue.”

  The curtain went up, revealing one side of the Eastern Arcade, which ran on a diagonal from the top of the slanting stage down into a darkened space at the very front.

  A balding old man, wearing a monocle and a dark cloak, escorted a large, oafish chap with ugly metal teeth down the length of the arcade, past a fancy dress shop, a photographer’s studio, a tattoo parlour and a peepshow.

  “Now listen here, my good man,” the old man said, by way of offering advice. “If I had your charms I wouldn’t be hiding them away. You’re an ex-Digger after all, and the women respect that.”

  A woman, evidently a prostitute, exited a door into the centre of the arcade. The oafish man looked her up and down. At the urging of the old man in the cloak he moved closer, blubbering something inaudible to himself.

  “Get away from me, you beast!” the woman shouted, giving him a good kick, which sent him scampering back towards the front of the stage.

  “This is what our fighting men get,” the old man told the audience. “They’ve seen their mates killed in the mud of France and on the cliffs of Gallipoli. They’ve fought for their country and the empire. They’ve witnessed their mates blown to pieces.”

  A few members of the audience laughed. The vicar at the end of the aisle coughed loudly.

  “Cut the palaver and let’s have some blood,” someone said impatiently.

  “Shut up,” said another voice.

  A crowd of ragged-looking figures appeared at the top of the arcade and made its way through to the end, finally clearing to reveal a solitary figure. The audience fell silent at the sight of the little girl carrying a gas balloon. She had long auburn hair that shone under the stage lights, and wore a white cambric blouse with blue spots, a navy-blue tunic and a panama hat with a red band, just like the real Alma Tirtschke had worn on the day of her murder.

  “Oh, yes,” said the old man as the oaf eyed her eagerly. “She is Innocence itself.”

  The girl looked into the shop windows, oblivious to the two men in the foreground.

  Hamish squirmed uncomfortably in his seat.

  “Will they do her in onstage?” the man next to him whispered with evident relish.

  Hamish wondered what Paul was capable of. He imagined the girl stripped naked in a filthy back room and then, a moment later, her body draped theatrically over the cobblestones.

  “I can’t watch this,” a woman behind him said as the actress strolled down the arcade, pausing in front of a window to look at herself. She posed coquettishly, pushing her auburn hair over her shoulder, and then turned back the way she had come.

  “Oh yes,” said the old man as the girl vanished at the top of the stage.”A real little jewel.”

  Percy Gambell stood up, as if on cue, and shouted at the audience. “It’s an outrage! They’ve made that innocent little girl into the whore of Babylon. It’s despicable. A sin against decency, an insult to us all!”

  The audience’s attention was now diverted just as the lights were dimmed further and the oaf scampered off after the girl.

  “An outrage!” the man shouted again.

  There was a deafening shriek from the stage. The girl was being dragged into the foreground by the man with the glistening metal teeth, who fumbled at her tunic.

  “Stop it!” someone shouted.

  “I can’t watch!”

  Someone from the audience leapt up onto the stage and kicked the would-be murderer away, pulling the girl clear of him.

  Gambell waved his clenched fist in the air as if it were a hammer, and in response a group of young men climbed up onto the stage and began demolishing the set. Cardboard walls and frames tumbled like gigantic playing cards revealing the confused innards of the theatre – props, costumes and ropes dangling backstage – as actors and stagehands fled into the wings. The stunned audience was now on its feet. Some people stood transfixed, reeling with the shock of it all, while others made for the exit.

  At first Paul thought the commotion was merely the audience’s predictable response to the theatre of terror. But when he saw the sets falling apart and the actors fleeing backstage he too took a few quick steps towards a rear exit. He feared the turmoil of the mob and the possibility of his public humiliation more than the indignity of slinking away like the cowardly captain of a sinking ship. He was on the threshold of the exit when a few burly ushers reasserted control of the theatre, kicking the small band of rioters offstage in a flurry of fists and flailing boots.

  To Hamish, still in his seat, this finale looked like a marvellously directed piece of onstage violence. Bodies moved in the half-light and faces were blank with the effort of concentrated savagery. One of the rioters clutched his broken nose as blood gushed over his chin, only to be knocked to the ground before he’d made it back into the aisles. The young woman playing Alma Tirtschke gave him a kick in the balls as she confidently resumed control of the stage, strutting about with a look of brazen defiance.

  “Fuck youse all!” she screamed.

  I can always go back to Europe, Paul said to himself, feeling the utter hopelessness of the situation. He assumed a manful air of proprietorial authority and approached the actress with his hand outstretched in a gesture of consolation.

  “Fuck you too!” she screamed at him. Make-up ran down her face and her dishevelled auburn wig slid off to one side.

  “That’s telling him, love,” someone in the crowd called out.

  Egged on by this the would-be Alma Tirtschke seized the last remnant of her professional dignity and launched into Paul, pounding his chest with her fists and kicking him in the shins.

  “Fuck you! I shoulda known better. Pervert! They all said you was a fucking pervert!”

  “Bravo,” the crowd yelled. “Good for you, love. Let him have it!”

  Hamish was still stuck to his seat. As he wiped the moisture from his upper lip he could again smell something, his own stale skin perhaps, or traces of dry semen. He looked at the little brown freckles on the backs of his hands as the lights came up. He had the hands of a savage, made for working the land or digging coal from the earth. He remembered how, years ago, they had made him self-conscious in front of Ondine. He felt dirty, unfit for human society, a creature stitched together out of other people’s nightmares, a patchwork of desires that bled at the seams.

  He watched Paul fend off the enraged actress and finally crawl away defeated to the wings as the crowd continued to jeer him. His friend looked worse than simply shaken.

  Finally Hamish dragged himself through the stifling air of the Bijou out onto the street. A crowd had leaked out of the building and was assembled on the pavement, angry and still harbouring the potential for further mayhem. Someone had kicked in a glass panel advertising the play, but the heat was quickly sapping the mob’s energy. By the time the police arrived there was only a handful of patrons remaining. The rapturous tones of their outrage amply indicated that, all up, the ruin of Paul Walters had supplied them with a highly satisfying night out.

  Later Hamish tried to write a review, but the words refused to come. He lingered at his desk, distracted by the humidity. Finally, in the small hours of the m
orning, watching fluttering moths throw shadows on the wall, he put a piece of paper into his old typewriter and lethargically began to tap away at the keys, conscious of the thickness of his fingers, barely aware of what he was writing.

  It was hours later when Paul eventually left the Bijoux. He had been sitting in the bowels of the building drinking Scotch from a bottle until he was confident that the cast members and stagehands had left. He couldn’t bear the thought of confronting them again. The would-be Alma Tirtschke had quit and now there would be interminable arguments about contracts, terms and payments. The theatre alone had been booked until the end of March.

  Sitting under an old stage light, he caught a glimpse of himself in a dust-covered mirror opposite him. He was pale and bloated. His black hair, plastered to his scalp with sweat, was thinning, and his skin had turned pasty. For the first time he noticed that his jowls had become fleshy and swollen and that his stomach had turned into a round gut. He took another swig of Scotch, stood up, unsteady on his feet, and walked out through the wreckage of The Gun Alley Atrocity.

  Outside, Bourke Street was stifling, but quiet, as if the city had been drugged into a deep, torpid sleep by the asphyxiating darkness. There were sounds of music and debauchery somewhere in the distance, but these were remote and mysterious, merely serving to highlight the eerie stillness of the night. Paul clutched the Scotch, which he poured down his throat every few steps, and staggered in the direction of the Arcadia Club, the last refuge of the ruined. He had been brought low a third time by the cursed colony and was now ready either to leave for good or to sink lower still into the ranks of the destitute and forgotten, the casualties of the city who drink themselves into oblivion after it has hacked away all hope.

  When he got to where the Arcadia had been a decade earlier he found the headquarters of a theosophical society selling cheap pamphlets about the way to God. But he was drunk and doubted that he had come along the right part of Little Lon. He tottered back up the alley and tried to reorient himself.