by Adib Khan
‘That’s lovely! Who came?’
She blinked, as if it were a remarkably silly question. ‘Friends, of course!’ she said crossly. ‘Sue and…Peter! Margot and…and Bob! Others.’
‘Bob and Sue,’ he corrected her gently. ‘Margot and Peter.’ As far as he knew, both couples were now living in Sydney.
‘And others!’ she repeated energetically.
‘Have something to eat,’ he cajoled.
‘I want some of that.’ She pointed to the box of chocolates.
‘After you’ve had your tea,’ he insisted.
‘It’s yuk!’ Nora stuck out her tongue at him.
‘The meat looks all right.’ He remained unperturbed. ‘Some mashed potatoes and peas?’
‘Yuk!’ she exclaimed stubbornly. She turned her head to look outside again. Shadows had begun to creep across the flowerbeds.
Martin picked up the fork and knife. He had to exert pressure on a rubbery piece of meat. ‘Nora, please!’ He slid the fork over the brown slush of packet gravy.
‘Do you know there are fairies in the garden?’ She pivoted slowly to stare at him. Her voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. ‘There are males. They visit me at night.’ She giggled.
‘Really? Here, have some of these.’
Nora pressed her lips together tightly and shook her head.
He resorted to the cliche he had used when Frank was a child. ‘You won’t be strong if you don’t eat. You won’t be able to stay awake to meet your…ah, friends.’
Reluctantly she accepted the piece of steak and chewed slowly. Then a sly look spread across her face. Martin tensed. She closed her eyes, leaned towards him and spat out the food. ‘Yuk!’ She banged on the armrests of her chair. ‘Yuk!’
Martin grabbed a handful of tissues from the table beside her bed. He was careful not to demonstrate any sign of agitation. Calmly he began to clean up the mess. The partly masticated food was like splattered shit. It mottled the carpet, the tray and the lapel of his jacket. She watched him hawkishly
He controlled the urge to walk out of the room, more as a gesture of weary capitulation than anger. Unload a burden and never come back again.
Perhaps the fairies were much better companions, more tolerant and patient. Whatever lived in the mind could be more accommodating than humans.
‘Martin?’ She sounded like a forlorn child.
Am I using her to punish myself? he wondered. He thought about the word ‘atonement’. The reconciliation of God and man through Christ. Did reconciliation also embrace mandatory suffering? He dabbed at the spat food and pondered the coordinates for locating God. And Christ. Were they the pages of texts? Within the confines of a church? On top of mountains? Perhaps in the imagination, living alongside fairies. In some ways Nora’s world was infinitely more secure. Creative chaos was all that mattered to her.
‘Martin, will you punish me?’
He reached out and stroked her hands. They were cold and limp. ‘Of course not. It wasn’t really your fault.’ He threw the wad of tissues in the wastepaper basket. It had been much easier to walk away from difficult situations in his younger days. ‘Would you like some caramel custard?’ He heard a resigned note in his voice—a recognition of the liability that he could not possibly evade ever again.
Nora nodded, eager to please.
He picked up the dessert spoon from the tray and plunged it into the plastic bowl. The custard was runny. She ate several spoonfuls, her eyes on his face. He dabbed the corners of her mouth with a paper serviette.
‘There’s one very handsome fairy in the garden.’ Nora looked at him coyly.
‘What’s his name?’
‘He wants to marry me. Take me away.’
‘Congratulations.’
She refused the next spoonful. ‘You never loved me!’
Martin did not respond. Twilight slid across the room. He felt unsettled and empty.
If Nora’s accusation encapsulated romantic love in all its blinding passion and impermanence, then it could not be refuted.
‘Sebastian loves me.’
‘Is that his name? You are fortunate to have such a good friend.’
Nora smiled tolerantly as if she were sympathetic towards his struggle to understand her.
‘Not a soul
But felt a fever of the mad, and played
Some tricks of desperation.’
‘What?’
She looked out of the window and stifled a giggle.
Martin offered her a drink of water. He sat quietly on the edge of her bed.
It was impossible for him to judge if there was still a strong bond between them. He sensed his own dependence on her. An element of concern did intensify the pity that motivated his visits. But he didn’t search for any strands of feeling that might run through the ruin of what had been. He was unable now to distinguish between affection and love. So he skirted around the unavoidable questions. How long could a relationship operate on gratitude alone? Or stagger along on guilt?
There was nothing more that he wanted to say. A night attendant knocked and entered the room. He switched on the overhead light and greeted Martin. Nora began to hum Greensleeves.
‘We are in a good mood today!’ The man laughed.
She turned to the attendant. ‘Do you love me?’
‘With all my heart!’ The attendant winked at Martin. ‘Nearly time for the cartoons.’
Nora laughed and clapped her hands. She pointed the remote control at Martin and pressed the power button several times. ‘It’s no good trying to turn you on!’ she said, frowning.
‘TV is in the corner, love. That’s the way,’ the attendant called encouragingly.
Nora’s basic needs were met. She was fed, helped to wash, and clothed. And now there were fairies in the garden. Martin smiled ruefully. Would she care if he did not turn up again? He bent down gingerly to kiss her forehead. His lips could have been touching a statue on a winter’s evening.
ANDREW HAS BEEN scribbling notes, as he normally does when Martin visits him. The psychiatrist pauses to read what he has written.
How can there be love, Martin wonders, when I am so reluctant to visit Nora? Perhaps he feels servitude to the memories of companionship, to the unwavering strength and consolation Nora had offered him when it mattered most? ‘You are a strange man, Martin,’ she had said to him once. ‘Kind and gentle, but I can never really reach you. It is as if you are a comforting voice on a telephone. You hide behind such large shadows.’
‘You haven’t opened up either,’ he had reminded her. ‘There are times when you retreat within yourself. I try not to follow you. Is it asking too much for you to do the same for me?’ Evasiveness. In a way they were similar.
Andrew closes his notepad with a grunt. ‘I would like to think that you will be honest with me, tell me everything, even though it may be painful. Otherwise progress will be very difficult.’ It’s a repetition, almost word for word, from their very first session. Martin wonders about the intervening years in this room, about what Andrew’s experiences with his clients have taught him.
There is an endearing honesty and earnestness about Andrew. He has helped me, Martin admits readily to himself. But he also derives a peculiar satisfaction from misleading a cleverer man: it frees him from the image of himself as a prey being pursued deep into the dimness of a forest.
The deceit of omission preserves his own right to privacy.
Ever since his first visit to the psychiatrist, Martin has left out part of an afternoon from the Vietnam days. There are times when he feels that he ought to have regurgitated it all and coped with the release of guilt. After all, in the days after Martin’s marriage had ended, Andrew had selflessly given extra time and negotiated him through an unsettled period. And had Martin been more forthcoming with Moira too about his days in Vietnam, she might have been less bewildered.
The strain on her must have been unbearable. There were nightmares. Yelling and incoherent mumbling. Lengthy
showers in the middle of the night coupled with the frenetic scrubbing of his body, as though in an act of ritualistic cleansing. Imitative noise of guns and exploding grenades. When he was unable to bear it any longer, Martin buried his head under a pillow. He was cowed by the accusing looks of imagined faces. Mangled bodies and the warmth of spurting blood. The noise of flies on corpses and the faint rustling of leaves like a serrated knife scraping the nerves.
But Nora—he cannot betray Nora. The truth about her mental state is a mystery anyway. To what extent might she be faking the seriousness of her condition? He recalls her saying once, when they swapped stories about their school days, ‘I loved drama. I lived for the school plays. I would take any part as long as I could play the role convincingly. Acting is so close to what we are and how we behave in life. My favourite was Puck. Once I gave up the part of Prospero to play Ariel. I was determined to go to NIDA.’
Andrew turns the long pause to good use. ‘You are a deceptively complex person.’ A professional evaluation without any trace of exasperation, malice or flattery. It pleases Martin. This is an affirmation of the secret labyrinth within him.
At last he meets the psychiatrist’s look. ‘I think of myself as an ordinary bloke who scratches a living by doing odd jobs. Someone with no ambitions. No desire to do anything else. I will probably go, in the end, wondering: what was that all about?’
‘And?’
There was nothing to add. Nothing further that he could reveal.
Andrew looks at him thoughtfully. ‘Have the new tablets made a difference?’
‘I don’t know,’ Martin replies truthfully. ‘I still tend to turn away from things that don’t have a direct bearing on me. I don’t mean to. But change panics me. I hate making decisions. I resent feeling unsettled…isolated. There are no fences any more to mark one’s territory. I would like to wake up every day knowing that nothing is different. I want to get out of this tunnel—find a windless landscape, where I can sleep without dreams for a hundred years.’
‘But there’s something else you want to say?’ Andrew murmurs.
‘It’s rather silly.’ Martin looks at the psychiatrist for reassurance. ‘I am having this dream about a huge ship.’
‘You’ve never mentioned anything like that before.’ A note of interest in Andrew’s voice. The notebook and pen reappear.
‘It’s only happened in the last few days. Several nights in a row. It began after a road incident with my ute.’ With clinical accuracy Martin describes what had happened. But he allows the two men who pursued him to slip to the periphery of his recollection. And sure enough, Andrew is curious about the attackers.
‘I barely saw them,’ Martin prevaricates. ‘Their faces were distorted against the windscreen. The lights weren’t bright enough. And then they were gone.’
‘Surely you remember some details. Brown hair? Colour of a jumper? Approximate height?’
‘Asians.’ The reluctant admission.
‘Aah…’ Andrew drums his fingers on the edge of the desk.
The sound irritates Martin. This ‘Aah’ communicates a certain logical conclusion that is inescapably simplistic. Its tone conveys the triumph of discovery—as though Andrew is congratulating himself on a shrewd piece of deductive thinking.
‘Can you recall your initial reaction when you realised that these men were Asians? What did you think of first?’
‘They were Vietnamese,’ Martin confesses finally. He clenches his fists in an attempt to control the trembling. ‘I was afraid.’
‘Why Vietnamese? Why not Thai, Korean or Singaporean?’
‘Past association, I guess. Vietnamese are the only Asians I have ever really known.’
‘Why were you afraid?’
‘Isn’t that obvious?’ Martin retorts.
Andrew stares at him. Expressionless. ‘Would you have been as fearful if they had been Caucasian?’
Martin shifts uncomfortably and crosses his legs. ‘I feared for my safety. People are often assaulted in such situations.’
Faint noises of the city filter into the room. Andrew’s pen glides smoothly over a page of the notebook. ‘Tell me about this ship,’ he says without looking up or pausing from writing notes.
‘It’s called HMAS Sydney! Martin is embarrassed by the revelation. It is the kind of unbelievable stuff that children might conjure up with conviction. Peter Pan, but without the wistful charm.
HIS HANDS FUMBLED in the medicine cabinet, making a mess of the rows of bottles and packets. He found the sleeping tablets and swallowed one, washing it down with a cupped handful of water. He closed his eyes and shook his head vigorously. He could have sworn that the girl had appeared momentarily in the mirror above the washbasin, winking and blowing him a kiss.
Martin lay in bed without switching off the bedside table lamp. That girl again. Flawless complexion, shoulder-length brown hair, wide hips and provocatively full breasts. A body that would continue to ripen for a few more years and taunt men. He wished that he could feel a ripple of desire. An urge to touch her. He thought about impulses and the nature of instinct. Beside him on the bedside table sat the bronze cast of Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker. Was thinking essentially an exercise in masochism? Martin regularly sought to justify the way he thought, but he did not allow himself the same liberty with his feelings. He cradled the statue in his hands. At some point after midnight he had fallen asleep, the Rodin figure lying next to him.
‘PEOPLE. THEY WERE all around me.’ He is aware of a significant pause and of Andrew’s stare.
‘What kind of people?’
‘Men in uniform, from what I could see. There was great excitement…and there was this man, on a raised platform with his back towards us. Every now and again his voice sounded over the noise of the waves and the people. He gave us information about distance and the likely time of arrival. I spoke to an old man in a tattered war uniform. I asked him where we were going. He was amazed and he touched my arm…as if to awaken me. “We are going home to the land of the banished.” “I haven’t done anything wrong,” I said. He looked at me seriously and pointed to a coffin. “Your crime.” I started to take off the lid—that’s when I woke up.’
‘And this dream has repeated itself?’
Martin nods. ‘It always ends at the same point. I don’t get to see who is in the coffin.’
FIVE
He is still brooding about his inability to find a precise reason for leaving the hospital in such haste. Martin was uncomfortable during the time he spent with Colin. It could have had something to do with his friend’s frailty; it is a prickly reminder of mortality. Or with the sparseness of the room which made him think how ephemeral life was. Maybe. Martin resolves to go back for a longer visit.
Today is…Wednesday. At least he is certain about the day. But the time…Did Frank say quarter past twelve? Or was it half past? Time is a personal concept relative to the observer who measures it. As he walks, Martin is thinking about the words of Stephen Hawking. When is experience transformed into a concept? Perhaps only if it occupies the safety of a distant past, and is filtered through the lens of memory. Then there’d be the inevitable distillation of all that may have happened—until an idea emerges.
But that idea, he decides, is more likely to be universal than personal.
He bumps into a pedestrian. ‘Sorry’ he mutters, avoiding a hostile stare. He is nervous about meeting Frank’s partner. Martin likes the name Maria—probably an Italian background—and he’s curious about the way she may have influenced Frank.
He remains undecided how to broach the subject of bearing children who may—he searches for a euphemism—have problems. But the matter need not be confronted immediately.
The newly varnished door responds noiselessly. Martin looks at his watch again. Twelve forty. No sign of Frank. A waiter approaches as he scans the tables. Not a cheap place. Linen serviettes and starched white tablecloths. A smattering of smartly dressed people.
‘Table for one,
sir?’ The waiter is dressed in black. His right earlobe is pierced with a gold stud.
‘Ah, I think there’s a booking under the name Godwin.’
The waiter leads Martin to a corner table where a woman is sipping mineral water and reading the business section of The Age.
‘The booking would probably be under Godwin! Martin enunciates the name slowly.
‘This is the table, sir,’ the waiter assures him cheerfully, pulling out a chair for Martin to be seated.
The woman looks up and then quickly folds the newspaper and drops it on the floor. She smiles expansively and extends her right hand across the table. ‘Hello! You must be Martin. I am Maria.’ She misinterprets his blank stare. ‘Frank’s partner.’
‘Yes, of course!’ Hastily he takes her small hand and holds it limply in his grasp. ‘Pleased to meet you.’ He thinks of Frank’s other girls. One was blonde and reserved, and the other had finely chiselled features and shy manners. And now Maria. Raven black hair, high cheekbones and flawless complexion. Pregnant.
The waiter addresses Martin. ‘Can I get you a drink?’
‘Some water, please.’
He is relieved by the diversion.
Maria looks at him, smiling gently. His surprise and discomfort must be plain. She grimaces and leans back, shifting to her left. Martin deliberately keeps his eyes above the table’s surface.
‘Frank has told me a lot about you.’ He hears his voice—clichéd and clumsy. When does an exaggeration become a blatant lie?
The waiter returns with a jug of water and a tumbler.
‘Where are you from?’ Instantly he regrets the question. It sounds aggressive and patronising. Why does it matter? She is his son’s partner, carrying Frank’s child. I must not make any assumptions, Martin warns himself.
‘Well, I was born on a boat.’ She pauses to allow the implications to sink in. Smiles again. Not on a luxury liner, then. ‘But I have lived most of my life in Springvale.’ Her tone suggests that the suburb could be a remote town in another country. He is silent, so she goes on. ‘We only moved twice, from one end of a street to another, and then to a house on the opposite side. I lived with my parents until I finished university.’ She watches his fingers twisting a corner of the serviette. ‘My parents came from a village near Ho Chi Minh city. They were among the first load of boat people to come to Australia.’
