The man has almost reached me. I still can’t see his face. Please, please. The moon swings out, triumphant. He steps towards me. Now the light hits his face. A voice says, ‘You have to come. They want the book. You have to come.’
I see his face and I scream and scream and scream.
THREE YEARS EARLIER
‘So this is the diary entry,’ I say to the psychiatrist, ‘for August the tenth: I am standing in a field with ninety bodies. Incredibly, the sun is still shining. The grass is very green and the nectar from the honeysuckle almost covers the smell from the corpses.
‘The Corporal says, These are the lucky ones.
‘I shake my head. Yes, lucky, he says. He holds his bayonet tight to him, knuckles white in red, leaning on it. Lucky to have a doctor. His eyes are white pebbles. Lucky to have you. There is a fly crawling on my boot. Its wings are dipped in blood. Tiny, red, stained-glass windows moving on my boot. Soon it will fly away and I will be left behind. In a field with ninety dead bodies. I will be left. I will – ’
‘Yes, yes,’ says the psychiatrist, snapping his fingers, exuding busyness, control. ‘You see? Key dream words: behind, fly away, left.’
‘But the bodies – ’
He waves a hand. The bodies are just window-dressing. Signifiers to what really matters.
I think ninety bodies matter. I want to tell him that this is not a quick pan over artfully arranged dummies. I see every face. I smell the honeysuckle, I am in the field. Back in the field. I do not want to tell him that I see all this when I am awake.
I smile cautiously. Big smiles are not good signifiers – I’ve learned that the hard way.
He smiles at me. Would I like to read something else?
I pretend to consider. There is no fine line between disclosure and appropriation in a psychiatrist’s office. If I don’t read, he will take.
In the early days, I read my own poetry. But that is a long time ago now.
‘You know the arrangement,’ he says, moderating his tone, proportional to the huge fees we are paying him. They are paying him.
I untie the long red ribbon around my diary, flick through it, my left hand gripping the cover, fingers digging in. In such a rubbery spongy world, sometimes only the pale marbled cover feels real.
‘Here is a little something I wrote when I was sad.’ More sad, I almost say.
I read a poem about the beauty of a rose garden, a piece I have constructed using key phrases from Eliot with a few clouds from Wordsworth and some Swinburne to soup it up. My need is greater than yours, TS.
I am halfway through when the psychiatrist begins tapping his gold-plated pen.
‘It is a bit twee,’ I say.
‘I think you should start writing more realistic pieces. Daily doings. How you feel.’
‘My family is really not going to like that.’
I see the concerns scurrying under his skin: back and forth, to and fro, money, duty, money, duty. His face settles.
‘I’m in charge here,’ he says.
I rise, slowly, from the red couch they brought in specially for me after I complained about the black one. Absence is a doorway, like caves, like mouths to hell, I had shouted, while the receptionist giggled. But I heard that she had shouted too, when she was fired.
The silky cover of the couch, as lush as moss, is brushed against the nap. The shadow I leave looks like a butterfly. But butterflies only live for a day. Maybe I should not say that. I don’t care enough not to say it.
‘Butterfly.’ He looks pleased. ‘Chrysalis. Emerging. Maybe it is a sign that you are mending.’
Not for the first time, I wonder whether he is qualified.
As I go out, I see the framed photo of his wife. The heavy silver square is angled conspicuously on the desk to reassure his unruly female patients, like me. I met her once in the waiting room. She had a short skirt which rode up as she uncrossed her legs. I saw the cuts on her inner thigh. Cuts I recognised. Her shiny brown eye rolls up at me.
‘So I said to him that I feel like a plucked flower on red moss,’ I say to my best friend Anna. She is sitting in a plastic chair in the corner of the hospital terrace. The light breeze lifts the hairs in the wispy rug over her knee, making the long strands of wool rise and vibrate like exhaust smoke from idling cars. The rug seems amazingly thin.
Anna is shading with black biro under the eyes of faces in a fashion magazine. Occasionally, her own eyes fill with tears, they run down her face. I yearn to comfort her but big sentences confuse her. She seems to prefer sounds. Or small words.
She shades eye sockets intently.
‘Actually, I said to him, I feel like a fucked plougher on a bed of snots. That’s Freudian, what do you think of that? Seeds and furrows and whatnot.’
She nods, her lips move. Almost a smile.
She is more doped up than usual, because of the last incident. I am tired, too. Winter grinds me down. It is time for my afternoon nap but I have agreed to keep Anna company while they search her room.
Everything sharp must go, the nurse says.
That seems to be my doctor’s motto too, I say. But the nurse won’t comment. They never will criticise the doctors.
The breeze lifts the fine hair on Anna’s blue-veined forehead. For a moment I see her, all those years ago: the foreign girl, my new friend, daughter of my father’s new partner, lying beside me counting dragon shapes in the clouds.
‘Anna, you know I am – ’
She nods.
‘If there is anything – ’
She shakes her head. The tears run down her face.
She takes a drink of water from the plastic cup.
The sadness is shit in my mouth.
It is August 15 and I am writing in my diary, like I have been told to, like a good girl.
This is what I write:
AUGUST 15: Here is a real thing to write down, doc. My parents disappeared for several days. The chauffeur, the new one, tells me they went to the island casino off WA. To get away from it all. At first I think that means me but it turns out the nurses found a picture of my brother hidden under Anna’s mattress. It’s a photo my mother hadn’t seen before and it set her off. So now I am alone in the Manse.
The one thing my brother left me, the one intact thing, was a bonsai tree. At first I barely looked at it, certainly did not water it. Then I realised it was still alive, despite me. It was an entire little world: a minute pond with a Japanese-styled bridge in shiny bamboo and a tree. Under the branches, the ground was dark in its own shadow. The tiny veined leaves curled like living scrolls and around the trunk was neon-green needle-grass which I trimmed with nail scissors. One day, I discover a small black beetle has taken up residence under the bridge. When I pour water over the tree, the drops catch in the little parallel branches, teeter on the needle tips, making a jewelled casket. The beetle comes out and stands in the shower. His? her? its? feelers wave gently. The water trembles in the angles of the jointed legs: onetwothree fourfivesix. The beetle holds the droplets like a water carrier, retreating carefully. The black shiny round body becomes a hood. I peer into the little darkness. Maybe there is a face in there.
AUGUST 19: The hospital entrance looks like a hotel foyer, all softly rounded couches and very, very large pastel prints. Sizes are always extreme in rich places. Can Anna get something woollier than that thin rug? I say to the nurse behind the three silver computer screens.
The nurse looks at me with an odd crumpled expression. ‘It’s pashmina,’ she says. It is contempt scrunching her face.
I give up on asking her about the pills the shrink makes me take. If wrong questions get you contempt, what does hanging yourself or slicing your inner thigh with the bread knife get?
The chauffeur takes me home to the Manse. The mansion. Or as my brother called it, the Mausoleum. Neither of us liked it. It didn’t like us: if you tried to rest on the big stone blocks of the high estate wall or the low wall on the terrace, the cold ate into you, pushed at you,
made you move away. My mother said the black wrought-iron draped around the house was black lace. But my brother called it iron spider webs. They cast odd shadows, not just on the verandas but right through the house, smudging the white marble floors and making the white walls look as though water was running down them. It didn’t matter how much art my mother bought, the paintings never looked as good as in the showroom: the rooms were overcast, the colours dimmed, the vitality leached out.
When we first moved there, when my father became suddenly rich, I was too young to understand why we couldn’t play castles with cardboard boxes in the living room or drape blankets over the furniture the way I used to with my brother. The marble floors struck back at us, just like the walls. When we tried to play chasing games, we slipped and fell. We weren’t held and cushioned like we had been with our old scuffed and curling linoleum. We bruised right from the start.
AUGUST 21: Usually I make allowances for my mother, for all she has been through, for duty’s sake, for the sake that I really don’t care. But today is different. I overhear the nurse saying, We found the blood in Anna’s room.
I come home for my afternoon nap. My mother is in the hallway. She has a tan and new blonde hair. The hair is literally new: it is someone else’s, sewn in to lengthen hers, to give it body. Someone else’s body.
‘No lipstick,’ she says, looking me up and down. She never calls me by my name any more. ‘I expect you to come in and be social.’
I go in. A pall of boredom has made the room almost warm. I say hello to a circle of shiny nodding foreheads. Shiny chins go up and down. Someone says, accidentally too loudly, That must be her real nose.
‘Now that you’ve had a little rest, what are you thinking of doing, dear?’ someone else asks kindly.
‘I’d like to buy a lamp so I can walk through Sydney looking for an honest person,’ I say.
Silence soaks up the goodwill like blotting paper on a cat’s mess.
My mother laughs, grips me above the elbow, saying over her shoulder, ‘She’s still a little stressed.’
Outside, she digs to the bone and hisses, ‘Do you want people to think you are mad?’
I know she is suffering. Misery is making her sag, despite all the plastic surgery. Everything sharp must go. Even my shapelessness pierces her. But I can’t help myself.
Won’t two of us missing be hard to explain, at tennis?
I’m sick of you kids, she says.
Kid, I say. There’s only one of us left now.
For my brother and me, our favourite spot was a grass-covered ledge which jutted over the bay. We loved to lie there, our feet dangling over nothingness, the warm earth hard all along the spine until the sudden drop off and the silky feel of bare air between the toes. The welcoming sky was laid out, a cloak of blue with a lion’s face clasp. My brother, who had just started going to Europe for my father’s business, would tell me that in Poland, the clouds were so low you could reach up and touch them. Not like the far-off gauzy smears here. The clouds were the best things about Koloshnovar, he said.
From our ledge, we looked across to the bridge webbed against the sky. At dusk, the cars pass in wet clay-coloured streaks, only their headlights distinct. You can’t see the people inside clearly, our house is not that close, but you can see the lights as the cars go forward. It looks as though the darkness is devouring them from behind. Winning, says my brother.
Back at the Manse, the car stops exactly parallel to the wide steps. I thank the new chauffeur and tell him not to get out. He smiles shyly at me, his face pale in the gloom.
My father is crossing the marble hall. I hadn’t realised he was home. I would be glad to see him, if he was glad to see me. The chill from the floor makes my soles curl. I wish summer would come.
My father looks at me warily. He has the same shadows under his eyes as Anna’s magazine models.
‘Dad.’ I go to hug him but he catches me by the elbows.
‘For God’s sake, you’re too old to call me Daddy. And the doctor says you’ve been faking your diary entries again.’
He opens the study door. Sometimes I think you’re sending me bad waves to make my business go wrong, he says, and slams the carved oak door.
The last few times my brother was home he didn’t come to the ledge even when he said he would. Finally I figured out that he had gone back to his old high school, the first one, the one he liked. I find him sitting near the statue by the football field. It is chilly. The stadium lights throw halos in the winter night. The wind wrestles the branches, sending shadows across the statue so the roughened stone seems to breathe. The statue is a man, wearing a loincloth and holding a dagger. He stares straight ahead, his right arm clamped by his side. His left is folded, pinned across his chest – this is a figure of right angles and straight lines – and across the throat of the small leopard writhing there. The leopard is almost finished, the feline body hanging limply, the tail kinking down his hip. Man and leopard, caught in an instant of time, frozen in a moment of extreme anguish.
I stare at my brother. Why strangle a leopard in the moonlight, opposite a football field where even now the swelling shouts of the players, creased by the light wind, graze the grey stone?
AUGUST 28: I know you want reality, doc, but how accurate is it going to be if I am doped up on pills? Already I feel only what I see, and I am seeing almost in black and white. I have a new dream: children in black caves are drawing butterflies on the wet walls. I go closer: white wings, white heads, white eyes. But I know when I turn my head, the wings will be red.
SEPTEMBER 5: Another week: nap, hospital, nap, a nightclub filled with starbursts of white light. The beetle seems to be building a nest under the little bridge. I watch it with interest. I ask the shrink to let me off the tablets but he says no. Dinners are long silences and the void of the empty plate which my father insists on setting. My mother does not eat. Of course, the anniversary is coming up.
SEPTEMBER 10: Anna gets thinner, if that is possible. She has tried to kill herself again, stealing another patient’s tablets and crawling behind the boiler in the basement. She had a vial of blood, like the one they found in her room. Anna says the blood is my brother’s. But I know that cannot be true.
I read in the back of the car about a homeless man who was living in a tree on a riverbank outside a large country town. A large town, not some rural enclave. The tree had been set alight by five teenage boys. The tree burned and the man died.
He was Polish, says the chauffeur, whose name is Tadeusz. He is Polish, too, and he heard about the case from his chauffeur friends who know all the gossip because they drive judges and police chiefs. The boys had been from rich families. I stare at the newspaper. The story is twelve lines long. No photo. The man was sixty years old. He had a name. He was younger than my father.
But why? I say, helpless.
Tadeusz shrugs. ‘For kicks maybe. To feel.’
No comfort, not even in a big tree.
When I arrive home, the police are there and an ambulance, and two of my mother’s friends in tennis dresses, cheeping. She has smashed up the place again, all the mirrors are broken and she has scrawled obscenities all over my brother’s room. The words are in red paint, which looks black in the late afternoon light. My father has taken her away and the maids are already washing down the walls. The room was painted in white gloss after the last time so it is easy to clean off.
Why wasn’t it you? one of my mother’s friends says when she thinks I am out of earshot. I go upstairs. I know as soon as I open my bedroom door that I should have hidden the bonsai. It is lying dismembered in splots of earth, little flesh sculptures, the roots already drying out. The beetle of course had been stamped flat.
I sit in the dark for a long time. When I look down at the dirt spilled on the thick white carpet, there are little black dots. Ants have come from nowhere to clean up my beetle, take it away. The spilled dirt makes crevasses in the squares of moonlight. The ivy in the wooden lattice on
the wall outside scratches at the breeze.
Far away, a phone begins to ring.
I go downstairs slowly, certain it will stop by the time I get there, or someone else will answer it. But the maids have finished and gone. No-one answers and the phone keeps ringing. I go into the dark study. I have never felt so tired. The curtains are half parted, the room is awash with black milk, I am swimming through it, moving backwards. I sit down behind the desk. I pick up the phone.
‘Come now,’ says a voice with an accent. ‘We are waiting for you in Koloshnovar.’
‘No – what? It is too cold.’ I reach out, fumbling for the switch on the desk lamp.
Static flares at a great distance. There is a click.
A new voice, faint but unbearably recognisable. ‘You have to come. They want the book.’ His voice is cracked by static, or pain. He says, ‘Bring the book. You have to come now.’ It is my brother.
Another click. The line goes dead.
Light blazes on. On the desk are two identical bottles. One has my prescription on the label, the other has a name – a woman’s name – I don’t recognise. The pills inside the bottles are almost exactly the same size and colour. My father leans against the door.
She didn’t know what she was doing, he says.
I know.
After a minute, he asks who the phone call was for.
It was for me, I say. He straightens but the shadows stay, under his eyes and around his mouth. The next day I booked a plane to Poland.
SUNDAY
‘The next day I booked a plane to Poland,’ I say.
‘Stop it,’ says Devlin. He grasps my shoulders. The dark presses in around us.
‘What did you say?’ I shout at him. There is water, wet and cold, on my cheeks, there is salt in my mouth. It can’t be tears.
He says, confused, ‘I brought your diary.’
‘I thought you were my brother.’ I twist. He doesn’t let me go. The trees scratch the dark bowl of sky.
There is just the two of us. I know I’ll never see my brother again, probably never even find his body.
Notorious Page 24
