Wish

by Peter Goldsworthy

  Excuses, excuses? So Jill liked to claim. She often held up examples, fat role models, that I would do well to emulate.

  ‘Gerry Swain is fat—he’s always the life of the party.’

  ‘Overcompensation,’ I diagnosed.

  ‘You use your size as an excuse, John. The simple truth is you don’t like people.’

  ‘I like people. I just don’t like some of your friends.’

  Of course there was a kernel of truth in what she said. Fat is a convenient substance to hide inside, a convenient wall to hide behind.

  I slept fitfully; around five I extracted myself from my tangled bedsheets and pulled on my wetsuit. I sneaked out through the back door, crossed the esplanade and waddled down the beach steps. The sea was smooth as glass, bone-cold, refreshing. Floating far out of my depth, suspended between the blackness of the night sky and the black deep of the Gulf, I decided to prepare properly for my meal with Clive and Stella. I decided to study for it.

  Around six the eastern sky was beginning to lighten, the racket of the early birds carried to me across the still water. I emerged from the sea as the first kitchen lights began to flick on up and down the esplanade, our own among them. My mother was fussing in the kitchen, preparing breakfast.

  ‘Up early,’ she signed as I entered.

  ‘Busy day.’

  ‘Wash feet,’ she added, sternly. ‘Outside.’

  After breakfast I followed her to the library, fending off her surprise with the answer ‘research’, a kind of scratching in the dirt, repeatedly—literally ‘search-again’.

  Another American loan-sign.

  A single copy of C. Francis Kinnear’s The Rights of Animal was listed in the catalogue, I claimed it from the Biology section. My mother stamped the book without comment; my reading had always ranged widely, even weirdly.

  I spent Saturday hiding in my small first-floor office at the Institute, studying. The severe look of the book—plain cover, hymnal black—matched its contents. A photograph of Clive stared out from the inside flyleaf, but it was a flattering photograph of a much younger Clive. The meditative eyes were the same, and the prim down-turned mouth, but he was wearing a full head of his own hair.

  A pipe poked from the breast pocket of his jacket.

  Beneath the photograph a biographical note offered further clues:

  Clive Francis Kinnear spent twenty years escaping from the educational care of the Jesuits, finally abandoning his theological studies on the brink of Holy Orders to take a degree in zoology at the University of Sydney. He continued his studies as a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford. He currently holds a Personal Chair in Zoology at the University of Adelaide. Together with his wife, the veterinarian and celebrated poet Stella Todd, he is regarded as one of the founders of the Animal Rights movement.

  ‘Escaped’ from the Jesuits? On the ‘brink’ of Holy Orders? Those light touches sounded more like Stella than her serious husband. It seemed a safe bet that she had written this brief biography, including, surely, that immodest self-description of ‘celebrated’.

  For Stella was printed on the dedication page.

  The book proper was clearly all Clive’s own work, a written version of his cool, compelling voice. His measured speaking tones could be clearly heard from the opening paragraph of the preface:

  In writing this book it would be all too easy to appeal to the emotions of readers; to describe the cruelties perpetrated by humans against animals in highly charged language. But emotional responses fade, they are rapidly replaced by new and different emotions. My intent here is to convince the reader with logic. I have attempted to describe, in precise and uncoloured language, the treatment of animals in various human industries: the meat industry, the medical research industry, the animal products industry, the pet industry, the fishing industry. I have also attempted to arrive at some sort of logical ethical basis which might underpin our future relations with animals. In each of my arguments I leave the reader to draw his or her own conclusions from the material provided—although I believe those conclusions to be inescapable.

  The preface was followed by a 300-page catalogue of horrors and cruelties—crimes—against animals. Vivisections, tortures, neglects, imprisonments, deprivations. Genocides. The low temperature of the language, the matter-of-fact descriptions only added to the horror. In retrospect it seems a brilliant trick, a debating trick: Clive having his cake and eating it, his cool words only fuelling the reader’s emotional heat.

  This reader, certainly. I swore off meat that day for life. And the use of leather products. Also drugs tested on animals. Gelatine. Lard. Whale perfumes. Bone, ivory. Dairy products. Wool.

  I even renounced silk—silkworms, St Francis claimed in chapter 7, were boiled alive in their cocoons.

  I arrived home that afternoon filled with zeal—exultant with zeal, high on zeal. No one was home, I had the house to myself. I began in my own room, among my own things. I emptied out my chest of drawers, and summarily judged and separated the items. My woollen socks and pullovers, and my single silk tie, I stashed in a garbage bag.

  I ripped open the lining of my parka, searching for duck-down. My pillow, likewise—it proved to be made of foam rubber. Vegetable, not animal. Or even mineral: polythene, or polyester. Having decontaminated my bedroom, I moved out into the rest of the house. Clive’s horror stories still filled my mind; I emptied out the larder cupboard, the tins of sardines and salmon and tuna, the canned pea-and-ham and chicken-noodle soups, the jars of my father’s favourite anchovy paste. His reactions were the least of my concerns: if anything, there was an added thrill in anticipating the later arguments and recriminations. For once I would have right on my side; I would be lecturing him from a higher pulpit. I cleansed all milk and butter and cheese and yoghurt from the fridge, and finally, lastly, I purged the freezer of frozen chicken. I could barely bring myself to look at the unspeakable substance, free-range or not.

  I lugged the full garbage bins to the front gate, ready for collection. I defrosted the fridge, and scalded the chopping boards on which so much animal flesh had been hacked into tiny pieces.

  I had purified the entire house. I had washed out its mouth with soap. But I still felt soiled. I stripped, stepped into the shower and scrubbed clean my entire surface area, then dressed myself in one hundred per cent cotton clothing, and scribbled a note of righteous explanation, or excuse, which I left on the kitchen table, paper-clipped to my library copy of The Rights of Animal.

  11

  The long drive into the Hills tranquillised me. The steady rush of air and the soothing hum of rubber on bitumen always has a calming effect. I drive a bubble-car, a tiny Fiat, one of the few possessions I salvaged from the wreckage of my marriage. Jill, tiny herself, a compact, no-nonsense shape, preferred small cars. (I seem surrounded by small, compact people.) Big cars, she persuaded me, were wasteful.

  Jill collects small objects of every kind. Our life together was spent amid a clutter of tiny ornaments, miniature pot-plants, bonsai trees. Our bed was too narrow; I was often forced out onto a mattress in the spare room. The clothes she bought for my birthdays or for Christmas were always several sizes too small. Our meals were frugal. Perhaps it was a sensible economy: eat less, wear less. After Rosie’s birth we had three mouths to feed, and half a job between us. I was teaching part-time at the Institute, she was tutoring at the University, there was never any money in the house.

  Were those small clothes also an expression of hope, or encouragement, that I might shrink to fit them? I shrank to fit the Fiat: a one-person car, a loner’s car, little more than an item of tight-fitting clothing itself. When I drive it—when I wear it—I feel I’ve slipped into something snug, and supportive, a wetsuit of beaten metal.

  Indignation faded as I drove; the usual objections to vegetarianism began to form in my mind. There was an obvious appeal to natural law: animals eat animals, why shouldn’t we? As for animal experiments: is or isn’t a single human life worth more t
han the lives of any number of animals? Answers to these questions were buried in Clive Kinnear’s book—convincing answers, answers spelt out step-by-step, with iron-clad Jesuit-trained logic—but I couldn’t seem to remember them. I remembered only the accusation in the last lines of his preface: A tour of the abattoirs might put a visitor off his or her dinner, but he or she will usually manage a hearty breakfast of sausages and bacon the next morning.

  I followed the fax-map up the long incline of Greenhill Road, struggled over the main ridge of hills, then coasted down into the Summertown valley beyond. Late summer, daylight saving—8 pm belonged more to late afternoon than evening. The eastern slopes of the valley, tessellated with vineyards and cherry groves, were still drenched in golden afternoon light, the western face was mostly in shadow. Stella had suggested I allow forty minutes driving time; it was nearer sixty before my Fiat turned into the last dirt track.

  Thick bush lined one side of the road, a fence and stubbled field the other. I turned a small bend and was confronted by a wooden gate in the fence. A miscellany of animals grazed beyond: several sway-backed horses, a small flock of goats and sluggish grey kangaroos, two ancient donkeys, and a single hobbling red deer that was missing an entire hind leg. None moved freely; none, certainly, could have possessed any commercial value as stock. The sense of a veterinary retirement home—of animals put out to pasture—reassured me that I had reached my destination, that Stella was close at hand.

  Beyond the gate, the dirt track crossed the field, skirted a small muddy-looking dam, then climbed a nearby hill, vanishing into a large stand of native pines and bush. The vegetation, rising abruptly from the shaved stubbled scalp of the hill, had a shorn-off mohawk appearance; the suggestion of a house could be glimpsed here and there through the trees.

  PLEASE CLOSE was inscribed on a metal plate wired to the gate—but first there was the problem of opening it. The latch was operated electrically; an intercom was embedded in the wooden gatepost. I pressed the buzzer; a scrambled version of Stella’s contralto shortly issued through the speaker:

  ‘Push the gate, J.J.—it’s open.’

  At the sound of her voice the head of every animal grazing in the paddock lifted, ears pricked, and turned towards me—then, as if disappointed, bent back to the stubble.

  The dirt track beyond the gate looked treacherous; I left my car outside and walked rapidly across the field, ignored by the animals. Another fence marked the boundary of field and trees; I opened a second gate and entered the mohawk stand. A car tyre was suspended by a thick hemp rope from a high branch; a child’s perma-pine tree-house crouched in the fork above: dangerously high, I would have thought.

  The house revealed itself, brick by brick, through the thinning trees: a two-storey bungalow, its upper level clearly a later addition. A jeep was parked to one side, a rust-bucket, mud-spattered, open-topped. Stella was sitting on the edge of a long verandah, a cigarette glowing in her mouth. She was clad in grimy overalls and muddy farm boots, this was a working farm, apparently. Two fat, rheumy-eyed dogs lay on the paving each side of her, as I approached their tails wagged minimally.

  ‘Welcome to Fort Knox, J.J.’

  I was panting a little, overexerted by the short climb: ‘You like privacy?’

  ‘We have the animals to think of.’

  The dogs lay low, watching me, flattened even further against the verandah floor by their own obesity. She rubbed the ears of one; the other growled and nipped her thigh, jealously.

  ‘And of course our work has bred enemies. We have to change our phone number daily: nuisance calls, even the odd death threat.’

  A third dog waddled from the house, as if drawn by the sound of her voice.

  ‘You’ve met Binky before,’ Stella said.

  ‘A former patient?’ I guessed.

  ‘Her family decided that Binky was past it—they asked me to put her down.’

  ‘And you couldn’t?’

  She bent and pressed her nose lovingly against the dog’s: ‘Could you?’

  The other two dogs staggered to their feet, and nudged at her, demanding equal attention.

  ‘Chester,’ she introduced them. ‘And George.’

  ‘More refugees?’

  She puffed at her cigarette, averting her head to exhale, as if concerned by the possible effect of passive smoking on the health of her pets.

  ‘George was a stray, some local kids found him and brought him here. Chester needed a little operation. I saved his life and his fucking family reneged on the bill.’

  She paused, looking up at me.

  ‘I kept him in lieu of payment,’ she finally said, a small smile playing on her lips.

  Just in case I might have some false notion that she was a soft touch, a sentimentalist. Or perhaps her words had a slightly different emphasis: she was a soft touch for dogs but no pushover for humans.

  She unlaced her work boots, pulled them off, and ushered me inside. A living-cum-dining room opened off the wide hall; at the far end a small kitchen sheltered behind a wide bench, as if in the crook of an elbow. The impression was of cluttered squalor; I picked my way carefully among a miscellany of dog bowls, stacks of newspaper, empty wine bottles, and half a dozen shoes, none of which apparently made a pair. Three walls of the room were lined with bookshelves, tight-packed, floor to ceiling; books and journals were also stacked on every horizontal surface—coffee table, speaker cabinets, chairs.

  Several children’s books were among them, plus various brightly coloured balls and soft toys, but there was no sign of the foster-child, Eliza.

  Clive, wearing an apron—A WOMAN’S PLACE IS IN THE HOUSE: AND IN THE SENATE—was chopping something white and slippery on the kitchen bench. The jokiness of the slogan seemed incongruous; it was not the kind of thing he would say. He waved his knife in welcome.

  ‘Smells delicious,’ I signed: two see-through hand-shapes.

  ‘Tastes delicious,’ Stella signed back, fluently. She had clearly been doing more homework. ‘Take a pew,’ she added, in English. ‘Make yourself comfortable.’

  The dogs had occupied the entire length of sofa; I sank into the nearest leather armchair, a little surprised to find such an unspeakable substance in that house.

  Stella read my mind, or my face: ‘Relax, J.J.—vinyl.’

  Clive carefully carried out a tray of drinks: a flute of foaming champagne for me, another for Stella; a glass of soda water and bitters for him.

  ‘Cheers.’

  ‘Cheers.’

  Stella, still sipping, took his place in the kitchen nook—one member of the tag-team relieving the other—and began fussing at the steaming, fragrant pots. Clive shook a white cloth across the table and set three places. His movements were unhurried and deliberate, due less to the handicaps of age, I now suspected, than to temperament.

  I said: ‘Eliza isn’t joining us?’

  ‘She’s asleep.’

  ‘I’m disappointed. I was looking forward to meeting her.’

  ‘Do you have any children, J.J.?’ he asked.

  I held up a single forefinger; he shaped, questioningly, the beard of boy, the long-hair of girl.

  ‘Girl,’ I answered.

  ‘Her name—what?’

  I held an imaginary flower to my nose, and sniffed.

  ‘Fleur?’ he guessed, aloud.

  I shook my head; waiting. In part I can’t help being a teacher; in part, Sign seemed my one chance to be an interesting, or at least different, dinner guest.

  ‘Primrose?’

  ‘Close,’ I signed: two forefingers closing a gap.

  ‘Violet?’

  The exchange was beginning to feel too much like a game of charades; Stella rescued us, planting a tureen of steaming soup in the centre of the table.

  I shaped a question: ‘Asparagus?’

  She laughed again at the green-penis shape, and finger-spelt: ‘B-O-R-S-C-H’.

  They waited, watching me; the word was a challenge I couldn’t meet. I rais
ed both hands, open palms: ‘I surrender’.

  Clive ladled out the soup, then passed around a basket of hot bread rolls. Stella took four—one for herself, and one each for her dogs. Flopped at her feet, chins flat against the floor, their fat jowls had spread about them like puddles. Their tails thumped gratefully against the carpet as she tossed down each scrap.

  We made small talk for a time between mouthfuls. I demonstrated a few more signs: spoon, bowl. Stella guessed a shape for ‘soup’: the ladle of Spoon Hand lifted towards a sipping mouth.

  ‘Close,’ I signed again, then added, in speech: ‘but the real thing is a little more stylised.’

  ‘A little less real,’ she joked.

  I set down my spoon and showed the sign for ‘bread’: a bread-slicing mime; one flat hand sawing the loaf of the other.

  Despite all these extraneous hand movements, the borsch-level in my bowl quickly sank. Stella replenished it, and her own, from the tureen; the level sank again. Clive sipped more fastidiously; the level in his bowl barely changed. Conversation flowed effortlessly—English and pidgin Sign—until Stella, increasingly fidgety, shook another cigarette from the pack at her elbow.

  ‘Can I have one too?’

  She smiled at my request. ‘I’m not corrupting you am I, J.J.?’

  ‘I hope so.’

  I tucked the offered cigarette between my lips, and bent my face to her lighter. She watched me inhale, amused.

  ‘For Christ’s sake suck the thing, J.J.’

  Clive cleared away the soup bowls; Stella distributed the leftover crusts to her friends beneath the table. Their mournful eyes seemed to have migrated to the tops of their heads, like the eyes of flounder, watching, waiting.