by Thea Astley
“Should we wait?” Keith asked, only an amateur at that. “The police . . .” His voice wobbled away. “Go on,” he said urgently. “Turn her over.”
It started as sweetly as forgotten childhood, and in half a minute Arch Mumberson had her backed out of the park, swung about, and was rocketing north.
Shrimps in a can, Iris and Bernard lay implacable in bed. Bernard’s parrot profile projected an enormous dadda parrot on to the wall, a shadow Iris tried to avoid seeing. But she was turned that way with her back to him. After this, she was thinking, I shall be able to cartoon him at parties, tear him out of newspaper, make masks, do anything at all that will involve me with him, and still we shall be as separate as paper dolls. There’s nothing now—husband, lover, son. A few tears of self-pity rolled down.
Ringing violently, the telephone throbbed like an important cardiac muscle in the heart of the house and made these two at last confront each other.
“I’ll take it this time,” Bernard said, and he struggled out with his ageing white legs and went, closing the bedroom door behind him so that she might not hear.
“Yes?” he asked the black cavern.
“Mr Leverson?”
“Yes.” Hearing the stranger voice identify itself with city police headquarters he felt his heart stop as if it too had been picked up by a listener. Had he a son? the voice demanded. Have I a son? Bernard pondered. He had indeed only just discovered his son, discovered with complete warmth and love the troubled eye, the sulking lip, the helplessness, emptiness and need that was his son.
“Yes,” he said heavily. “I have.”
Could he tell them where the lad was now? the voice went on. Bernard paused. No, he said at last, he couldn’t do that. The lad had been gone from home for some days. Had he sought police aid? the voice, censuring, inquired. No, Bernard was guiltily forced to admit, he hadn’t. He had his reasons. Need he explain now? No, the voice said then, more kindly. No. That could be gone into later. The voice went on for some time, making statements that spelled doom and from which he extracted only one thing.
“Where?” he asked heavily after a while. “Where did you say?”
“Just outside Brisbane on the main highway.”
“Anyone hurt?” Bernard asked, not wanting to know.
The barbaric simplicity of this question struck him as he said the words that had to be asked. Across the living-room there was one of Iris’s flower arrangements in a bowl of translucent green; three—three!—everlastings limped upwards against an ivy-entwined rib of polished driftwood. There was a great deal more leaf than flower, but the discs of copper glowed tawnily through a complication of tendril. He saw this. He saw his left hand tremble as it played with the tassel of his dressing-gown. He did not even hear the answer the first time and had to ask the voice to repeat it.
“I’m afraid so,” said the small far voice. “A youth was killed. The other lad is in hospital. I think he’ll be all right.”
“I see.” Bernard could not force himself to the next step of the game at once, but in a minute his voice came out high and dry. “Which lad was killed, can you tell me?” Keith, he thought, Keith. Pink, warm, wet, scabby, peeing, jumping, giggling, pop-eyed, grinning, yowling, whining, arrogating. The voice was like a far star of which some rays might reach him millions of years from now.
“That’s the trouble,” the slow voice was explaining. “We’re not sure. There were only a couple of things to go by. One of the boys must have been carrying a book. There was a name in it. Only a paperback, you know. But that’s how we got on to you. We’ve been a while tracking you down. You see, the lad’s still unconscious.”
“I see.” Bernard saw. He saw. Beneath his dressing-gown his body felt as if it were weightless, yet the curve of thigh and arm were part of the nervous entity that was he. It might not be his boy, the voice was saying stupidly, might not. But if he could help, identify. . . . Bernard thought he was going to vomit there and then with apprehension, but he leant against the wall and, holding to the acknowledged support of a room-divider he had always hated, agreed that whatever he could do he would.
Iris was paler than loss when he opened the bedroom door again and he told her what must be done. She did not answer but commenced dressing in silent frenzy, pulling on a skirt, dragging a jumper carelessly over her limp hair.
“Don’t come, he said. “Please don’t come. We are both guilty.”
Without a word she pulled on stockings and shoes and walked out of the house to wait in the driveway for him to back the car. She waited there in the dark of the hedge as he finished dressing and thought how like tears the city lights looked, wetly splashed upon the air in the fine tropical weather. Dusk powdered with neon and the long spatterings of yellow across the outgoing tide where boats waited patiently for men to pasture them at sea. She wished she were going out with them to an unknown landfall.
“Please pray,” she asked her husband when she slid in beside him, shivering on the cold leather. “Please pray.” Her trembling filled him with pity and a trace of the old love which made him pat her knee and take her hand. Moved by the same need, she gripped his fingers so harshly he exclaimed. Where will we be, Bernard found himself wondering, if it is Keith? Or if it is not? Are we reuniting? Is some catalytic process at work? When we stand before whomever we stand before, must we become a couple or will we proceed as separately as we have been? Appalled, he was aware that at this moment that should not be the core problem, yet it was the original ache, the one from which all others had stemmed. His guilt ate away at him and was still probing and piercing when a starched woman said, “This way”, and took them into an office that seemed crowded with men in blue or white uniforms.
The sense of unreality persisted. Once before, at an artists’ ball, surrounded by fleshy pierrettes, Cavalier bucks with the eyes of wine-merchants, he had this same sensation, as Iris and he had lived it up all night in borrowed costumes and personalities. Nothing of it was true. Yet now the voices addressed him, as then; eyes investigated, as then; but he could not focus and questions and eyes slid over and away into a mist through which Iris was saying yes and no and attempting to discipline her crumpling face.
“. . . was wearing a duffle-coat, he heard one voice say at last. “Did your son own such a coat?”
“No. No, certainly not. I never allowed him to get one,” Bernard said. The first denial after years of indulgence, he lamented. The first.
“Mr Leverson”—a big man with rimless glasses seemed to be questioning him and instructing at once—“it was in the pocket of this coat that we found the book.”
“The book?”
“The book with your son’s name in it.”
Iris cried out loud, gabbling sounds of protest and outrage. He lent many books, Bernard argued inwardly. Over and over he would lend them and I always had to reprimand and say, Who does the paying?
“Perhaps it is one of my son’s friends,” he said stupidly.
“I’m terribly sorry,” someone said inanely. “Terribly.”
“Would you care to identify him, Mr Leverson?” another gentle voice inquired.
Bernard could only nod. The muscles jerked. The brain willed it. He was hollowed out of time. Automaton feet followed authority. The hard polish of the corridor reflected the hard white of aseptic walls harder than marriage, than anything either had ever known. Someone propelled them on, on, through mazes of especial agony and at last into another door, into an area of whiteness.
At the sight of the silent form on the bed Iris began to cry out loud as if she were alone.
“Please,” Bernard said. “Please, Iris.” They were terrified to look as the nurse drew back the edge of the sheet from the still still face whose features were unlike any they had seen. And then Iris cried out once more and swayed and fell against her husband as she realized the red hair, the vulnerable ugly face upon the pillow were not those of her son.
Is relief always like this, sharp as knives? Without s
mile or word? People about them were apologizing for the unnecessary shock, sympathizing, but not congratulating, Bernard at last was aware, as they sat once more in a waiting-room and obediently swallowed sedatives.
When at last they could turn to each other, alone for the moment in the organized neglect that is part of hospitals, Bernard reached for the words each wanted. “The other boy?” he asked. “The one with him?” Poor Iris, he thought. Poor dear Iris. Her hair hung desolate over the collar of her coat; she had forgotten make-up and he almost loved her for that, for a positive display of otherness, of concern, that aged but endeared. It could only be, Bernard realized. Thank God, he said. Thank God. He is safe and I have my miracle. Tonight, or tomorrow perhaps, for I feel too tired tonight, I will write to Doug Lingard and offer proof and display my cure like a leper with a dried-out scar. Proud as a leper supporting the stumps of the disease, but moving still, living, absorbing God in great doses. Then he too—he too may tell how and why to the little nun. A panacea of wider and wider application.
“When you feel a little better,” a nurse was saying too brightly, “you’ll be able to go up and see your boy.”
“How is he?” Bernard asked. “How is he?”
“He’s quite comfortable,” she assured in hospital jargon. “Doctor’s settled him down nicely.”
The doctors had disappeared.
They waited and waited. After half an hour someone brought them cups of tea and plain biscuits. “Not long now,” said the nurse. She smiled brilliantly, a flash that came, that went. Bernard and Iris sat close together for the first few minutes and then he rose and stood apart near a window that stared desolately down the concrete drive and past the flashy cars in the section reserved for staff only. Inwardly his heart prayed over and over, Let him be all right let him be. After this, he thought. . . and made all sorts of promises.
“You can go up now. Doctor’s ready,” another Sister said, coming from a side room. The little nurse bustled them into a lift that rose and rose towards heaven, led them through a swinging door, and took them to another man in a white coat who was standing beside the screened bed. The eyes were those of not-enemy and not-friend. They met Bernard’s, that is all, with that impersonal curiosity that doctors perfect, giving nothing but waiting to extract.
“Just a few minutes,” he said gravely and held a wing of the screen aside for them.
They tiptoed forward, smiling foolishly and automatically upon this homunculus that had survived for them, had survived with closed eyes and withdrawn mouth turned inward towards the pillow that supported the bandaged head. His arms lay outside the coverlet, alive, but not moving now, no longer fighting. Someone had called “Time!” and he was back in his corner and his parents were in theirs. The fight was over really, Bernard knew, over for a long while at least—and he was the loser.
“Keith,” Iris whispered. But he did not move. His breathing went steadily; he was another person, they both saw now, for the first time perhaps since the umbilical cord had been cut! It is too late, Bernard thought, too late to give you the sort of discipline I now know you wanted more than anything in the world.
He bent his head down close to his son’s cheek and whispered, “I’m sorry, feller.”
“He’s not out of it yet,” the doctor explained. “Probably another fifteen minutes. He’s been heavily sedated.”
“Out of what?” Bernard asked, suddenly afraid.
The doctor held a finger to his lips. “Outside. I’ll explain outside.”
“It’s nearly a week since I’ve seen him,” Bernard said to the doctor. “It seems like five years.”
He moved forward and gently touched the blankets that mounded across the breathing chest The face remained aloof, the lips closed over the inner dream. The eyelids did not flicker, although they soon would. Bernard took in every detail of his face, his self-face, from the adolescent down above his upper lip, the curled lobe of the ear, the gentle pulsing of the artery within the neck. He absorbed all this and then looked down the length of him that seemed more than a week ago, down down to where he could see a cage supporting the bed-clothes above the feet. And he realized instantly what had happened.
“How bad?” he asked the doctor, who had been bracing himself for this.
“Only one,” he said. “Just below the knee. We couldn’t avoid it. It had to be done at once.”
Iris ran from the room. He could hear her struggling with the nurse in the corridor. But Bernard came back to the bed and bent down to touch his sleeping son’s cheek. He was in a fisher hat and staggering along with a slopping bucket of sea-water, had cut his foot on an oyster shell, had run madly across the lawn to impale his tender sole on a half-concealed rake, had fallen from park trees and cut his knees, had opened up a shin on gravel, shale, rock, had worn plaster, lint, iodine, ointment of all kinds. Was thankfully put into long’uns and transferred accident proclivity to fingers, and then became overnight the sullen sophisticate who had forgotten what it was like to take a fall, only to pretend superciliousness in order to say, “Hey bop a re bop, Bernard!”
Bernard’s love shook him with its surprise, beat down his shuddering, dawning blood so that he could apprehend nothing at all beyond his son restored. The four days were the five years of non-loving in which they had lost each other and now could only re-claim, re-assert by the tenderest mundanity. Understand? he begged the white-coated man beside him. Understand that beside my discovery this—this thing—is a bagatelle.
Bernard put his mouth to the discovered curve of his boy’s cheek and found the most fatuous smile of delight on his own lips. With a gentle finger he traced a line written about the sleeping mouth, and looking up, the taste of his son still upon his tongue, made his last gesture.
“That’s new,” he said.
__________
