Drift

by Brian Castro

  I can’t even conceive of sprinting now. It’s become just another word, when once it signalled inspiration. A muse, a sprite. Blythe once, it now hobbles in a walking frame and I take advantage, pummelling it for ideas. Memory cannot recuperate the feeling of love. No one wants to recall murder either. There would be a moment when I tried to push the muse over a cliff. But more of that later…

  Ainslie wore a short, black silk skirt and a black sweater. It was the fashion then. She tottered and swooned when she opened the door and I had to catch her to stop her from hitting the floor, then she staggered to a hammock in the middle of the room tied to two Tasmanian Blackbutt trunks set between floor and ceiling, and she lay down, mildly swinging, the back of a hand on her forehead. I had forgotten how beautiful her legs were, awkwardly straddling the webbing, trapped in this childish and obscene pose like a tiny nymph in a wicked spindle.

  Finally. You’ve finally come.

  Ainslie loved drama.

  Not yet. I still had the box in my arms. That was the moment when I wanted to sprint, all the way to the window, toss out the box and my sacred duty and fall upon the hammock in awkward compromise. But I made her a drink and we talked instead about the good times in Tasmania and about how I took my stepmother’s money and we lived it up in swank hotels and how she’d never really want to sleep with me even though we made love in cars, lifts, cinemas, at the back of a coach. No, Ainslie always slept alone. Come to think of it, I can’t even imagine the hammock now. It was impossible for two, I was thinking as I stood in her flat, thinking how desperate she was to be alone. Later, of course, she told me.

  So as she swung there grieving, she told me that her ex-husband Byron Johnson, the writer, was in the next apartment and that if I opened the door a little it would enthral him… do you see that little peephole, the spyhole with the bird’s eye view? You’ll see a shadow fall across it now.

  She sipped her drink.

  I left the door slightly ajar.

  It helps his writing, she said wistfully, stirring her brandy with her little finger and sucking it, not particularly daintily.

  There was a cold breeze coming through the open window carrying smells of the city: car fumes, sewer and fish-shop exhaust. This high up and the air was still bad. It was trying to snow, but the clouds were choking.

  It is almost the late twentieth century, Ainslie said, and he is still thinking he may be becoming someone else in writing. He fears overturning his faith in integrity, virtue, honesty and all that workingman nonsense. He fears voices. He fears words which can be manipulated, deconstructed. You know what he told me the other day? He said suicide was the ultimate imagination. Did this mean he believed in it or not?

  She sighed and sucked.

  Really, she continued with her hand between her legs, bunching up her silk skirt so that it flowered over her other hand which was holding the glass, he’s afraid of becoming unhinged from his central self. Messy isn’t it? All men are the same, she said, no multiple utterances, only the lonely gasp of the heady Central Committee.

  I didn’t know what to think. Did she dress up like this and invite men in so Byron could write, or was it so she could mock him? Perform some sort of matinée, a porno peepshow to satisfy an ancient sadistic passion of her own? I went into one of the other rooms, placed the box on a solid teak cabinet and sat down on a chair. I rattled the box. Nothing shook. Removed the flag. I was going to open the box when Ainslie came in. She undressed. She took the flag. Draped it around herself. I suppose it was that gesture more than anything which sowed the seed of doubt. Her grand movement, replete with sex and death… yes, I imagined Ainslie would die in a plane crash over a South American jungle and they would bring her body out draped in the same way, perhaps in different colours… so much was possible… her swirling set my mind ablaze with equivocation. The flag was my toga and I felt like Nero, who didn’t start the fire that destroyed Rome, but who picked up on the cheap real-estate afterwards. There were abundant analogies and I grew tired of the commonality, for it was a decisive, naked and lonely moment and I hung onto it like the last man on an island, my sensitivities bared, though there was no one to see. What did I stand for? Was it for mankind which had invented itself through the defects of a positive classification and which would soon disappear into other, more refined systems? I longed for the unwritten, for the impossibility to write… I longed for the last gasp of a death which would release me from the constant extinction of myself. Perhaps I longed for Jimmy’s death, knowing I was not big enough, knowing my heart didn’t have the capacity to understand the unity of death, to understand the tightening form, or formalism of a freedom in retreat from the systems trying to rescue it. Yes, progress was an eternal spiral down or up… it had no direction.

  My anguish was a soft fall into the quiet recesses of the heart. There I found truth could be entrancing and treacherous. I noticed that the peephole was dark.

  Anyway, all this took up much energy, so it was little wonder I didn’t know at the time that Ainslie had a hidden agenda. I should have suspected it, when later her friends arrived. They were mainly women, though there was a Lord _____, who wore a monocle which he fiddled with a lot, so I suspected it was a prop, and later suspected even more when he returned from the bathroom with his jacket undone and I glimpsed a slim waist, and what’s more, an impressive Pectoralis Major. I asked if he lifted weights. Gosh no, s/he said. I should have suspected. It was the way they kissed each other, the way they wanted to build houses in rainforests, to strike out into the wilderness, to establish Amazonian sovereignty where felons had feared to tread. I should have realised this was where Ainslie was retreating. But for the moment she was also equivocal, so we struck an accord.

  She said she was Sapphic, maybe not quite; not entirely.

  It’s okay, I replied. Your verse is fine. I’m black, but maybe not quite; not entirely… and that’s much worse.

  6

  No matter how bad, the Overseas Trip is always a good memory. I remember with happiness London’s stink, the slush in the streets, the uncollected garbage, musty hotels and the pheromones of certain women. Otherwise, it had been a devastating winter.

  Back in Tasmania there was nothing but fresh air, health, nature, beauty writ large. It was painful for a while in Hobart. Then one day I heard the wind come. An icy rain followed and suddenly the season had changed. The streets were littered with leaves, piled thickly and stickily along the paths. I watched the boats tie up smugly beside each other, saw the water crease and then whip as the wind changed and when I looked up, Mount Wellington was covered in snow.

  I abandoned my studies and took groups of Americans up the West Coast in a bus, (read B.S. Johnson while driving) and unloaded them in Queenstown at my stepmother’s motel. George, her partner, owned it now. He didn’t mention giving me a cut. He watched every move I made, counted the cutlery in the dining-room twice. Sometimes my sister came for rides in the coach, sitting up the back writing things on tiny slips of paper. I took the Americans to the coast, to the wilderness, to the rainforests. Some of them were so old I expected them to die. They carried very heavy packs. They panted and puffed, but they kept going on pills and nerves. They took the beautiful emptiness with them back to the subways of New York, to the slaughterhouses of Chicago, to the freeways of L.A.. They unpacked it for their friends and found it curiously… debilitating. After a while they will say it didn’t do much for them. Next year they’ll go to the Grand Canyon and get drunk instead.

  Back in Tasmania my people buried WORÉ's head in a sacred site. Nobody thought to unwrap it or to get it X-rayed. There was a scuffle when we banned TV cameras and the press said we were wrong-headed.

  Back in Tasmania Ainslie and I rented a run-down house at Sisters’ Beach with a bay-frontage, a view of a small island and children shitting in the shallows. And had our first row. Coincidentally a storm blew up. It seemed to take the force out of the quarrel, but something lingered; a hardness impossible to soak t
hrough; the impermeable nature of the day-to-day. It was a deferred existence and so hardened were we that it would have surprised us to see how worm-eaten we were already, porous with grief.

  You are, Ainslie screamed, exhibiting the same bloody deplorable characteristics!

  She let this accusation hang. She had got rid of other men in the same way. She meant, of course, my ambivalence; my lack of will to act. She meant my ancestry. Even Wally Arthur, who was the first to send petitions to the British Government, whom she’d dug up and traced as one of my great great grand-uncles, was nothing but a drunken paranoid fence-sitter infected with Christianity. So she said. Maybe her research was going badly. She went on shouting. Her eyes were furious. She must’ve had a P.A. system implanted in her throat. Her voice carried across the water and circled the island. People gathered by the front fence. They heard her from as far away as the corner shop. The next day they gave me suspicious looks as I carried the bread home under my crippled arm.

  We moved further up the coast. Ainslie wanted to build a house in the bush. It was a sign of her insecurity, perhaps of the raw chip she carried on her shoulder about not having had a formal education, (though I said this never really helped anyone), her fury at not having had the time, flying around to polo matches instead of putting in a couple of good, solid years on Jane Austen. Her friends, who came to visit and help were women with PhD’s who spoke in strange accents, went to conferences in Cuba and rode motorcycles. I was attracted to more than a few, but they kept out of my way. They were handy with building materials.

  Ainslie and I quarrelled more often and whenever that happened, I always went for an extended walk alone. Sometimes I lit fires and watched the grass burn and the weeds redden like melting wire and thought how they used to fire the grasses, the flames inducing a trance, the animals on the move and then the wild and terrible excitement of the hunt. You could smell it still, in the air. Sometimes the fire got away.

  When I read in the papers that Byron Johnson had been washed up nearby, I rang my sister Emma and told her that her letters had finally been answered. Because Ainslie never read the papers, because Ainslie never read anything much, I didn’t bother to tell her.

  7

  I used to be in the motel business. Only thing is, it was such a long time ago… the damp walls, the squeaky beds, the porridge in the mornings. Gaol’s like a motel for you, they said.

  So full of rage it’s difficult to talk.

  Yes, in and out of institutions. One, I remember, on a hill surrounded by pines. The daily decisions: whether to self-mutilate or not. See these scars. People used to think they were tribal markings when I demonstrated, bare-chested on the barricades. Each day an inscription, or else a generous dose of mind-numbing drugs. Each day a litany of afflictions, the groans, the mental sluicing, the unwillingness to love, to live, the tears which will not come, and then suddenly, the mysterious appearance of hurt and anger which went too deep. My emotions were manufactured for war. But in the homes they numbed them; made a space for silent observation. They taught me to be clinical. Yes, the silence killed, and I wrote about it, about the boring progression of alcoholism, dementia, paranoia, attachment to the House Mother, weaning, alienation, signing myself out by holding a knife to her throat on staff payday. Went to live with my stepmother in a motel and then shacked up with an English woman who nursed me back to health. That last a bit of a fairy-tale. But Ainslie Cracklewood did have connections and money, and I had a book written and the rest is pretty much as I have detailed it.

  Well, I took the long walk back.

  In memory, I mean, when in reality I was walking along the beach and saw the building on the hill which once housed me, turned ironically into a hotel. I walked up onto the road. There was a Four Square Store making the most of its Coke sign. This was the boondocks; logging trucks careering down the hill; a few shacks and ringbarked stands of blackwood; cows stringing out, coming for hay unfurled from an old Texas police car, its star painted on haphazardly; the hotel looking like a blockhouse presiding over middens of shells, unmarked aboriginal sites, piles of quarried rock filling a lunar landscape studded with teatree and silver banksia dwarfed by wind; there were warm salt pools and beyond that the wild and roaring sea driving driftwood dense and dark as nightwrecks up onto the foundations of a demolished lighthouse. The thistles have gone; the spoors are dead; the rye grass grows yellow and pale and waves in the cold wind. On the horizon busy forklifts shuttled to an fro in a timberyard whose sign said: Safety Record: 12 days.

  The Bass Strait Jacques was the rather grand title of a run-down guesthouse… in keeping with exotic French names around this coast and the low-brow tourists who didn’t mind crud. It was billed as a family hotel, which meant kids could go into the beer-garden. The kids looked pretty nasty. I walked in. The Star-Wars Bar. Neon spangles shooting up into the ceiling. Shotguns on the wall and a big sticker that said Army Brings Out The Best In You, next to an old cat skin under which someone had written: Pat pussy, but no free drinks. Didn’t think I could drink there anyway. But then drinking’s my problem and that’s another story. The locals called it the B.S. Jakes, though that sounded like a urinal on a leaky boat and that’s what it really was. The spa water was suspiciously yellow. I noticed they hadn’t fixed the gutters and the wind was still causing the downpipes to bang like demented windchimes. I knew that sound like others knew tunes they couldn’t erase. It used to do bad things to me.

  I went out the back. Once a gas bottle exploded near the kitchens and the remains of two dogs carpeted the lawns for a considerable distance. I walked past the other wing, loosening memories… of an orphan amongst others, of the drizzling sky and tensed bladders held against draconian discipline, of crude intercourse with laundry maids, of herpes and fights and old cicatrices like mystic inscriptions on the skin of the dead. It was a kind of pride by which you could live. My arm was an added distinction. Curious dogs came to be stroked by it, wedging up beside me for the exceptional finger behind the ear.

  Here it is. Used to be the old shower-block. Steam and shit-encrusted windows, broken louvres we once used for weapons, slinging them like boomerangs standing only thirty feet apart, nicked with splintering glass if we were lucky, bleeding into toilet bowls after frenzied punch-ups, an inferno of sound and smell and pain.

  They’ve turned it into a gymnasium. Fat men trying to lift weights now, toning up for the summer season. The spa spews steam. The naked and hairy waddle and flap in awkward thongs, in and out of the pool like giant turtles. Against the fogged-up glass, children are giggling.

  Boong! Coon! They yell.

  A black man dismounts from the stationary cycle, limps slowly to the spa.

  Go back to Africa!

  I walk up to the kids. Fuck off. I hit one over the ear.

  They stroll away. Don’t worry about him, one says to another.

  They can’t find an insult for one so white. Kids are always a great comfort to each other.

  I look through the glass. He looks very like the writer Salman Rushdie. I go in. At the desk, which nobody is tending, I slide my finger down the register. I’m wrong. No such name. Of course, I say to myself, he’s incognito.

  I strip to my shorts. Step into the spa with him. He shifts to make room. His thinning hair and hooded eyes are unmistakable. We nod to each other.

  A really good idea, I say.

  What? he asks.

  Tasmania.

  Yes.

  We splash around a little. He is observing me suspiciously. I change tack.

  Are you on holidays? On a tour? I run charters.

  Shipwrecked.

  Oh. I knew the answer. I’d been shipwrecked many times before. I hold out a friendly hand. He had a nervous tic, an over-expressive face in a silent movie.

  The name’s McGann.

  He knew.

  You’ve heard of me?

  Everyone’s a McGann around here, he says.

  There aren’t that many. I do a ball-park
estimate of maybe a couple of hundred, including all the cousins that aren’t cousins, related through co-habitation and proximity and fellow feeling and ancient kinships, tribal loyalties, re-inventions, deep-song structures. I register a complaint. This was a sweeping statement.

  The truth, he says… submerging and then surfacing after a full five minutes during which I’ve ordered a couple of double daiquiris from the Star-Wars Bar… is only anxiety over a belief in truth.

  I was hoping the drink would make him less enigmatic, expecting a world-famous author to be almost prolix.

  When we speak, we are all McGanns, he says.

  He lifts his forearm from the water and places it side by side against my stump.

  We’re not related are we? I ask. You never know.

  Amnesia, he says… collective amnesia makes us all guilty, each to each… guilty relations.

  Some others joined us in the spa and since this wasn’t ancient Greece, the philosophy was embarrassing, so I suggested we towel down and drink some more in the beer garden.

  He came here to die, he said after his second whisky for which I had paid an above average price. And then he detailed my family history. To my astonishment, he mentioned the name.