by Helen Garner
Raymond’s legs were still hollow and shaky; but as the men marched him Indian-style along the pathway, not speaking, moving forward with apparent purpose, he began to relax. Maybe this wouldn’t be too bad. These men, like uncles, had taken him in hand. He turned to glance at the bald one, who winked at him and nodded. It was a public place, after all. What could go wrong? Maybe he could drop his guard and walk like this between them, single file. It was not so dangerous. He could slide from one thing to the next, and the next; nothing much would be expected of him, the rest of the day would roll by as even the longest of days do, and by the end of it he would have got a lift somewhere, would have walked somewhere, would find himself somewhere, under somebody’s roof, maybe with people, maybe on his own; yes, all this he could handle. The worst was over. He turned again to the bald man, and almost smiled at him.
The man in the blazer veered off the path and plunged into the dense strip of hedge that separated it from the building’s side. Between two bouncing bushes of blue flowers he rustled his way, spitting out his toothpick, and with key outstretched unlocked a little wooden door marked Private. He held the springy green branches apart for them with turning thrusts of his shoulders; they joined him, pinned against the wall by whippy shrubbery; he went ahead, and one by one they stooped and stepped through the little door, on to a narrow staircase that led them into the underworld.
The shock of it.
Raymond propped on the stair with one leg in mid-air. Above him the door slammed. The bald man coming close on his heels down the ladder would have cannoned into him, but took the strain with his thighs, and Raymond felt, instead of the weight of a heavy body landing against him, merely a dexterous, light brushing. He lurched down the last step.
Here they had not heard of blood or colour. It was a land made of dust, of chalk, of flour. The walls and floor and ceiling were grey, the air was grey, and as his gaze cleared and crept deeper, he saw that the receding alley of huge ovens was grey, that the workers who moved silently away between them were grey. The only sound was a low, steady roaring.
‘Like it?’ said the man in the blazer. ‘This is where we work.’
‘He runs the place,’ said the bald man. ‘He’s the one who gives the orders.’
The man in the blazer, flattered, gave a naughty shrug. His hand closed round Raymond’s aching upper arm, but gently, and urged him forward step by step until he stood, trembling and dumb, bracketed by the two men, in front of the closed door of the first furnace.
‘Where is she?’ said the bald man. ‘He won’t want to be kept hanging about.’
‘Look up there,’ said the man in the blazer, and pointed. ‘She’s next in line.’
‘Ah,’ said the bald man in his grating voice, with satisfaction. ‘Ah, yes.’
A slot opened high in the grey cement wall, thirty yards away, and out of it, strapped to an elevated conveyor belt, flew the coffin. It dashed down and round the tilted track, skimming fast and cornering suavely on its slender arrangement of rails.
‘Yep, here she comes,’ said the man in the blazer, giving Raymond’s elbow a little squeeze. ‘Here comes your girl.’
A single pink posy was still clinging, by an accidental twist of sticky-tape, to the coffin’s lid. As the box slid smartly into the last turn of the track and came to a stop beside them at the furnace door, the flowers lost their purchase and sailed in a brief, low arc to the floor. The man in the blazer bobbed down for the bunch. He took a sniff and tossed it over his shoulder into a barrow, while with his other hand, in a smooth movement, he checked a number on the coffin’s end and made a mark on a list behind him. He raised his arm in a signal.
The oven door opened.
First, a square of colour: a blossoming, the relief of orange flames. Then a colossal blast of heat which evaporated the moisture off Raymond’s eyeballs. He staggered, and the bald man caught him by the arm.
‘Steady on,’ he said. ‘You’ll be right.’
Behind them the man in the blazer was deftly unbuckling the straps that had secured the coffin to its sled.
‘Here,’ he said to Raymond. ‘Take an end.’
Raymond’s mind had abandoned his body. He obeyed. He turned front-on to the coffin and reached out both arms, but the man in the blazer winked at him and wagged one finger, tick tock, right in his face.
‘Uh-uh,’ he said. ‘Bad posture. Bend those knees, mate, or you’ll fuck your back.’
Raymond bent them. His muscles quivered. He slid his fingers under the narrow end of the coffin and got a grip. The bald man played no part in the operation, but stood close by, watching, with his arms folded mildly over his chest. The man in the blazer took hold of the broad end, and nodded to Raymond. They straightened their legs. So light! The box floated up to waist level.
‘Little scrap of a thing, was she?’ said the man in the blazer. ‘Weighs no more than a feather.’
The coffin hovered slant-wise across the open pop-hole in the furnace door. The heat was tremendous: their eyes squinted, their heads involuntarily turned away, their tongues dried in their mouths.
‘Back up,’ said the man in the blazer. ‘We’ll slip her in head-first.’
Raymond shuffled backwards and to one side. The man in the blazer screwed up his face against the blast and flexed his legs just enough to give him leverage. Then, in a series of manoeuvres so rapid, dainty and accurate that in three seconds it was done, he flipped his end of the load on to the lip of the furnace slot, darted back and, nudging Raymond out of the way with his hip, shot the coffin straight through the door and on to the shelf of flame. The door clanged shut. The heat faded. The man took a folded hanky out of his blazer sleeve and mopped his neck.
‘A bloke,’ he said, ‘would be a mug to wear a tie in this line of work.’
Something hard pressed against the backs of Raymond’s knees, which gave. It was a chair. The two men stood one on either side of him, each with a hand resting lightly on his shoulder. Like a monarch between courtiers, he sat facing the grey door of the grey oven. When he began to sag, to faint, they held him gently upright, keeping his spine against the chair back. The wrist watch of the man on his right ran madly in his ear.
‘Sorry about the delay,’ said the man in the blazer. ‘We have to squirt a bit of oil on to the head and torso, to get them going. But the feet only take a few minutes.’
‘The feet?’ whispered Raymond. His teeth, his lips were dry: they rubbed against each other wrongly, snagging and missing.
The bald man, whose shaven skull had flushed a delicate pink, looked down at Raymond with sudden interest.
‘You want to see?’ he said. ‘Open up that door.’
They raised Raymond from the chair and half-pressed, half-carried him forward to the furnace. The other man waved, and the door clanked open. Raymond’s cheeks clenched of their own accord, turning his eyes to slits. The heat inside the cavern was so intense, so intent that all he could see was a working and a wavering. The men supported him tenderly, pointing him towards the square of liquid orange.
‘I can’t—’ he said. ‘I can’t—’
‘Yes, you can,’ said the bald man urgently. ‘Look now.’
Something in there was wrinkling. The small end of the coffin, fragile as an eggshell, was crinkling into a network of tiny cracks. While Raymond stared, greedy in his swoon of shock, the panel collapsed; it gave way to the swarming orange argument, and where it had been he saw a dark-cored nimbus of flame, seething, closer to him than an arm’s reach. Its twin centres, their shod soles towards them, were her feet. In the passion of their transfiguration they loosened. They opened. They fell apart.
He could manage only his neck. The rest he let the two men deal with, and their tattooed hands went on holding him together. The long tube of the coffin now lost form. Pouf! It fell softly in upon itself, her last sh
elter gone. Deep in the fire he made out a humped, curved lump, and beyond that, rising, a denser clod, her head. He opened his mouth to cry out, but the wetness needed for speech was sucked off the surface of him by the oven’s impersonal breath.
The furnace door slammed. He tottered like a doll. They lifted him backwards and placed him on the chair. While his seared skin loosened and turned salty, he hung by the shoulders from the men’s restraining hands. He drooped there, sightless, beside himself, his own hallucination. Was there music? Someone was whistling, stacking the notes in jagged steps and executing a long and detailed flourish: a knot cleverly tied, Kim’s shoe, the brass eyelets in a double row, the impossible twirl of her fast fingers lacing; a man’s voice grew in song, then the fires roared uninterrupted, while near his ear the watch chattered, a tiny hysteria headlong, never arriving, never drawing breath.
‘And again,’ said the voice.
He half-raised his head, a dog ready for its next beating, and they bore him forward.
The grey door was open. Raymond looked in. The fire and the heat were barely a shimmer in the cavernous air. There was no colour anywhere, except for the maroon blazer cuff in the outermost corner of Raymond’s view. The furnace floor was covered with ordinary ash, and on this desert bed lay scattered in a free arrangement three or four long bones, pale, dry-looking, innocent.
‘There,’ said the man in the blazer. ‘All finished now. You can go home.’
They turned him and unhanded him and dropped him on to his own legs, side on to the cooling furnace.
‘Go on,’ said the bald man. ‘Show’s over. Buzz off.’ He stuck his hands in the back pockets of his jeans and jerked his rosy skull in the direction of the ladder.
‘I don’t know where I am,’ said Raymond. He shuffled his feet in the grey dust of the floor. ‘Which is the way?’ They would cast him aside: and there was no one left in the world but these two men.
‘Go on—get out,’ said the man in the blazer. He bent down and picked up a long piece of wood. Raymond flinched, but without even looking at him the man shoved the head of the rake through the furnace door and began to drag it harshly across the shelf where the bones and ashes lay. The bald man leaned his chin on his companion’s shoulder and plunged his eyes deep into the oven where the final disintegration was taking place: the ash tumbled down, as the teeth of the rake ground back and forth. It tumbled down through the grille and crumbled into the under chamber.
‘Where do I go?’ said Raymond. He felt the words cross his lips, but the voice was a child’s. ‘How do I get home from here?’
The bald man could not extricate his attention from the graceful behaviour of the ashes. He spoke absently, staring into the furnace where the other man’s rake was accomplishing its task. He sighed. Then, with the slow resoluteness of a dreamer waking, he lifted his chin and turned on Raymond eyes as inhuman, blank and depthless as those of a figure carved in granite.
‘Home,’ he said, ‘is the last place you need to go. Don’t bother. Don’t even go back for your things.’ He flexed his arms and shoulders, and let them drop. The ripple of it ran down his torso. His joints were oiled with wakefulness.
Raymond stared. He hung on his own breath. ‘Who are you?’ he whispered. ‘What’s your name?’
‘None of your business,’ said the man. ‘But you know where to find me, now. I’m always here. Always on duty.’
Raymond feasted his eyes on the man: his dark limbs, his worn boots, his shining ivory skull. He felt a terrible urge to approach. He longed to offer his forehead to the touch of the bald man’s tattooed hand. Appalled, he saw his own grubby foot move out into the narrow space between them; but without taking a step the man was suddenly beyond his reach, balancing easily on the ladder with one arm raised to the latch of the high trapdoor.
‘You’ll be right,’ said the bald man in his low, scraping voice. ‘Things’ll be different now. Just get out of here and start walking.’
He opened the trapdoor with a quick twist of his up-stretched hand, and leaned back from the ladder to make room, resting on Raymond his calm stone gaze.
Raymond stood in the dust and looked up.
An unbearable diamond of evening sky hovered over his head, scalloped and sprigged at its edges by dark foliage. Air gushed through it, smelling of cut grass; and out of the fresh leaf-masses, there poured down on him a light, nervous, persistent whirring, a multitudinous soft tapping and chewing, a vast and infinitesimal cacophony of insects living, living, living.
Raymond shut his mouth. He reached for the jamb with both hands, planted his feet—one, two—on the steep steps and, helped by a violent shove in the small of his back, hauled himself, flailing, through the shrubbery and out on to the staggering lawn.
Suppose there were a woman once, not long ago or far from here, whose husband came home one night and stood at the door to make a simple statement. Voices were raised. Kitchen utensils struck walls and spewed their contents. So quick! Janet lay on the sofa. What was the point of weeping? He was already gone.
The euphoria which followed lasted, oh, a month. All her senses had perfect pitch. Crowds parted at her approach, old men and boys and babies smiled at her in the street, waitresses spoke to her with a tender address. Milky clouds covered the sky. A warm dry wind blew all day, and the leaves changed colour.
This is not so hard, thought Janet. I can do this. Why do people make a fuss?
For years she had made herself so flexible that she hardly felt a thing. Forgetting was her greatest skill. But now she noticed that the passing of time began to hurt her. Wherever she looked she saw the fleetingness of things. Mend as she might, clothes wore out. Things broke. Paper came briefly into her possession, was scanned or scribbled on, then screwed up and thrown away. Even the black mist that her fingers left on a café counter evaporated before the cup could reach her lips. It was painful to watch an old woman—and Janet was only forty-five—stumble unshepherded down the back steps of a bus while an energetic young one, admired by all the passengers, bounded aboard through the front, holding out her money. To see a couple of any age lean towards each other across a restaurant table caused Janet’s stomach to fracture like an egg.
She looked at herself in a shop’s long mirror and saw that she had grown crooked. Her right hip was higher than her left, and the opposite side of her top lip had developed, as it were in compensation, a bitter upward twist. If she placed two fingers against the outer point of each cheekbone and gently raised the skin, her jaw-line smoothed out, her upper lip lost its tense and radiating lines, and she saw a version of the girl she had once been; but the only thing that could take the years out of her face now was surgery, and the vanity of that she scorned.
She scorned many things. All she believed in was the physical, the practical, the stoical. Bite the bullet, she said. Plug on, one foot in front of the other and keep going. She had no children. Her family was scattered. She was too proud to take advice or sympathy: to a woman like Janet, nothing is more enfeebling than pity: and so she fell out with all her friends.
It was already years since she had severed herself, with rough strokes, from the demanding work she had been trained for, and had arranged her life so that she could earn a living without needing to leave the house more than two or three times a week. She could turn her hand to most things an old-fashioned typewriter was used for. She could review, she could edit, she could sling words around grammatically into sharp little pieces for fashion magazines, weekend colour supplements, and the glossy publications found in the seat pockets of domestic airlines. She was known for keeping a deadline; and if anyone asked, she called herself a journalist.
So she lay on her bed and read. She sat at the table in her upstairs room and tapped the keys. At night she would open the blind and lean out when the pub on the corner of the avenue was closing, and watch the real people going home with gaiet
y, some singing as they slung their legs over saddles and pedalled away, their fitful dynamo lamps blossoming on the dark surface of the road. And sometimes, now, in the empty house, she heard her own footsteps hurry past on the other side of a wall, her own voice, more girlish, laughing in a closed room. Unwelcome memories of happiness rustled behind her or pounced from doorways. She remembered being the youngest person present, being a student with a job: how it was to tie on an apron and slap together sandwiches in a shop, taking orders, chiacking with the customers; to have sore feet from standing up all day to serve; and later, the surprised pride of being on a payroll and a promotions list, of belonging to a union and knowing where she fitted into her society. She remembered the pleasure of being driven to work on sunny mornings by a bunch of older colleagues from the staffroom, married men with shaven cheeks, viyella shirts, maroon ties: the tonic, laundered smell of the car when she climbed in with her newspaper at the pick-up point near the start of the freeway.
Janet was not a mother, but she was a natural aunt. Her friends’ children had loved her: she could not work out why, she was so brisk with them; she paid them so little attention that whenever she did speak the wildest of them sprang to obey her.
‘Ah no,’ she used to say, stroking the polish on to her toenails, ‘I was a feminist. What if I’d had a girl? I would have felt it my duty to dress her in overalls and force her to play with Lego. Lego is the reason why I never had children. I hate going into houses and seeing those little bits of plastic scattered all over the floor.’
The real reason, which nobody knew, was that at thirty, between lovers and contemptuous of her own romantic fantasies, she had presented herself so plausibly to a gynaecologist that he agreed without demur to perform on her a tubal ligation, and did so within forty-eight hours. Janet came to in a hospital bed with a parched mouth, a clamp in her scabbing abdomen, and a terrible sense of having been rushed, rushed past herself into a future with no outcome. Somebody should have argued with her, somebody should have stopped her: but who? She was beholden to nobody, and that was her proudest boast. An old woman in the next ward was laughing, deep unstoppable harsh spasms of it, not crazy laughter but a response to something genuinely funny. Beside Janet’s head lay a sandwich. Feeble with pain she peeled off its top layer and found inside it a tiny sliver of tomato which lay on her tongue, refreshing her, while she passed out.
