by Peter Carey
Starting that afternoon Noussette was extremely cool and no amount of detachment—always his strong suit with her— would rekindle her ardour. She acted rapidly. A week before the adoption was formally completed she was taking pills to dry her milk supply. She had hired a nanny and surely could have offered her help for a week or two, but she did not. She had blankets and clothes and books of helpful hints for new mothers, but none of these were given to Chubb, who three days after finding the adoption papers was alone with a fretful child in a house in Chatswood.
Nothing in his life had prepared him for this. He had been raised without brothers or sisters or even cousins, with never so much as a tadpole to care for, and now he was all alone with a wilful wailing new-born who could thrust her head back so violently as to almost throw herself onto the floor. She was a wild one, Mem, he told me. It is a horror to think what they must go through.
It was an odd choice of word, ‘horror.’ Doubtless he drew a great deal on his own feelings to explain the anguish that shaped that contorted little face, and yet it was her will, her need, her energy that touched his heart. When he held her in his arms it was as if he’d been given charge of Life itself, and in the draughty winter nights he would lie awake listening to her breathe. This breath, that breath, the next, the one after. When he should’ve been sleeping he was willing her to stay alive.
He was not expert, but what parent ever is? Fearful of her catching cold he baked her with blankets and electric radiators. She developed a heat rash, a nappy rash, a colic that arrived at four every afternoon and did not stop till nine.
Yet he coped, more or less, although how could he continue? He called in to the office sick every morning, exhausted from the excursions of the night, the continual feeding, burping, washing, the long walks through the dark streets while the colic ran its course. You can imagine this caused no small scandal in his little street, a strange, unshaven, crew-cut bachelor carrying a baby to the shops for powdered milk. Having no pram or even a bunny rug, he wrapped her in a double-bed blanket which trailed behind him on the footpath.
Mr Blackhall saw his red-eyed tenant and, even while he judged him, took pity He helped Chubb carry his shopping and so learned that he kept the bastard baby in a cardboard box, a little nest like you would set for a puppy or a kitten. Blackhall went home and returned with baby blankets.
So you have children, Mr Blackhall?
Grown up now. Grown up with families of their own.
I wonder you did not go mad, said Chubb.
Ha-ha, Mr Chubb, said Blackhall, but later he would have reason to remember this exchange, the bedraggled poet standing in his doorway saying, Quite honestly, Mr Blackhall, I don’t know how long I can keep this up.
29
Chubb was young and fit. He would have thought nothing of walking thirty miles through the bush to Govett’s Leap, half of it not even on a track, but this tiny, tiny girl with her mother’s huge eyes and her little clinging pink-nailed fingers had got the better of him. Even in her first week of life she was delectably pretty, very clearly defined lips and a fine bird-bone chin, and when she slept he would sometimes sit and marvel at her. But for the most part he was just plain knackered, sleeping like a soldier in the trenches, never long enough or deep enough, the slightest murmur from the box being sufficient to set him wide awake and back on his feet.
Yet his hearing was obviously selective, for when the back door was jimmied open, so brutally that the wooden frame was later found split along the length of both its verticals, he continued sleeping, and it was not until he was spoken to that he raised his head and stared into the dark.
Noussette? he said happily, for he had convinced himself that she would finally relent. Is that you?
You bastard, said the hard, accusing voice he’d first heard in the Melbourne court and had expected to never hear again. You unmitigated cunt, said the so-called Bob McCorkle, standing at the foot of the bed.
Get up, the intruder said, and then the light switch, an old Bakelite contrivance, clacked on. In the light of the bare hundred-watt bulb Chubb saw that the monster had captured his baby, and had it clutched to his chest with the yellow blanket spilling down below his knees.
Give me the baby, he said. I need to feed her. It was the best he could invent.
Then fetch her milk, the creature ordered. His appearance was again much altered, but no amount of drooping moustaches and old-fashioned starched collars could hide the cruel planes of his distinctive cheeks, the broad dark brow, the hugely modelled nose and chin. He now turned as Chubb rose naked from his bed and followed him into the kitchen.
Get the milk, the other said. Put it in the thing. He snapped his thick fingers. And that thing. There. Use that.
What thing?
The thing, damn you, the beast cried, pointing to a rubber teat floating in the steriliser. The tit.
The teat?
I am a poet who does not know the names of things, but whose fault is that? Tit, tight, teat, tote. What a great joke that is. Fee, fie, fo, fum.
Chubb would recall this odd conversation later, though at the time all of his considerable intelligence was focused on how he might rescue his baby. Excuse me, he said. He loped around the kitchen naked, making formula, pouring it into a bottle. Excuse me, he said as he lit the gas, boiled the water, heated the bottle in his single saucepan. All he could think of was saving her, yet his tormentor was almost seven feet in height and Chubb could not conceive of a way of injuring him sufficiently, not without risking damage to the baby who was sleeping peacefully against her kidnapper’s breast. Once the formula was warm Chubb felt he had no choice but to relinquish the bottle to him, and though the babe had been fed an hour earlier she now began to suck again.
The creature gazed down on her, fury in his eyes. You never gave me a childhood, he said.
Chubb quickly pulled on his trousers.
Can you imagine what it is to be born at twenty-four?
But Chubb had no interest in entering into what he felt to be an unwinnable argument with a large and angry lunatic.
Can you even begin to imagine the cruelty of that? Answer.
It would be very puzzling, Chubb said, I am sure.
You made my life as a joke.
It was not the last time Chubb would be brought trembling to the abyss, where he might consider the blasphemous possibility that he had, with his own pen, created blood and bone and a beating heart.
Mr McCorkle, he said, I swear to you I regret the first time I ever wrote your name.
But you will regret it more, much more. It is far too big a thing to just say sorry. There are consequences. There must be justice. I have been thinking of justice for so very long.
And where have you been thinking?
Where? You think I would tell you that?
As you like, it doesn’t matter.
You think I will tell you where I live? So you can send the coppers? Well I’m not frightened of police, as you must bloody well remember. But where I am, dear Father—and he spoke this last word so hatefully that Chubb felt the hairs rise on his neck—where I live I am not a joke at all, not a fake in any way. I am a Lord, in fact. You see, being a foreigner, no one thinks it strange that I do not know the names of things. Sometimes they themselves do not know. Where I am, if you must understand, I sleep with the snakes and the spiders and often I have named them too. Syzygium McCorklus, he said, and when Chubb, not understanding, questioned him about the spelling he was happy enough to provide it for him.
It is a tree, he said, and in the slight compression of his lips revealed a pride which his eyes challenged the other to undo.
At that moment Chubb had the sudden intuition that this dangerous fellow had invented himself as some Edwardian botanist. You are in Africa, he suggested.
Wherever I am, I have put myself outside your power. I have made myself a whole man, almost—except, when I hold this child, I feel the weight of everything you stole from me. This I had not expected, but
now I know exactly what I want from you.
What is that?
This is a childhood, he said.
A child, Chubb corrected. A baby. Just one week old.
But all the parts of its brain are already growing. When he touches my finger, he learns something.
She, said Chubb, watching in horrified silence as the baby’s white hand grasped the creature’s index finger.
You must give her back to me, Mr McCorkle.
Of course, the other said. Just permit me to show the stars to her.
I doubt she can see that well.
The creature was wrapping the fallen blanket more securely around the child. He was not without tenderness. Indeed, he fashioned from the folds a little hood for her head. Just the same, he said, I will tell her their names.
What was Chubb to do? Even with no child to concern him, it is unlikely he could have overpowered this giant alone. It is cold, he said.
No it isn’t, said the other.
Chubb held open the screen door and stepped out into the night behind him. He paused just a second to make sure the lock was snibbed open, but by the time he reached the front gate the creature was sprinting soundlessly up the middle of the road with the baby’s blanket streaming behind like a piece of ghastly skin. Chubb began to run. The kidnapper swung into the shadow of a jacaranda and was swallowed by the night.
30
Mr Blackhall was not yet late for work. He was in the hallway, standing on Chubb’s chair and—as the court record reveals— reading the electric meter, when his tenant unexpectedly dashed into the house and knocked him to the floor. Christopher Chubb had looked unwell for the past week but now, as he grasped the frightened landlord by his skinny shoulders, he appeared deranged.
Mr Blackhall, they have took my baby, or so Blackhall was quoted later. They have took my child.
Give me a shilling!
Chubb dug deep into his pockets and pulled out a fistful of pennies and threepences. Blackhall then hurried across the street to the phone box and called Chatswood police station. He was put through to Sergeant Bob Fennessey who ordered him to stay with the father, and so he did.
I never met Mr Blackhall but imagine him rather like some sort of mouse in a stationmaster’s uniform: the peaked cap, the blue serge trousers, the New South Wales Railways watch in his fob pocket, shadowing Chubb as he paced up the hallway and out into the street, along the verandah and down the side of the house by the blue hydrangeas. Five minutes later, a freshly washed black 1939 Chevrolet pulled in to the kerb and from it emerged a tall, sharp-nosed man with deep-set grey eyes and the build of a champion wood-chopper.
As Sgt Fennessey approached, Mr Blackhall drew to one side, as one does when trying not to obscure a work of art. They took his baby, he said.
The policeman noted the way Chubb shied away from him, shaking his head like a heifer that does not wish to get into the truck. He noted too that Chubb wore no shoes and his yellow socks were worn through on the soles.
Mr Blackhall then led Fennessey into the house, which the latter discovered to be in an alarmingly neglected state, causing him to experience what he later described as ‘a bad feeling.’
There was nowhere to sit in the kitchen, but the sergeant took out his notebook. Your missus left you, he suggested.
The father did not respond.
Who took the baby, Mr Chubb? Was it the mother?
Chubb opened his mouth but the reply was like a bird lost inside a house. It was a man, he said at last.
Was this man known to you?
Can I sit down?
Mr Blackhall consulted his watch and then fetched him the chair.
Chubb collapsed onto the seat. It’s a little girl, he said, just one week old.
You chased the mongrel, did you?
He tricked me.
And he was known to you?
Here the policeman noted another significant hesitation.
I had seen him before, Chubb finally admitted, but I do not know him.
Could you describe him for me?
This Chubb could do very well. He might have supplied even more detail had not Mr Blackhall, who’d quietly retreated into the front room, now interrupted from the doorway. A word, Sergeant, he said.
On entering the front room the policeman saw the landlord holding his left finger to his small moustached mouth while with his right hand he proffered a collection of yellowed newspapers. When Sgt Fennessey returned to the kitchen it was with an entirely new sense of purpose, all his natural sympathy now neatly packed away.
Have you ever been in trouble with the police before, Christopher?
Am I in trouble now?
Don’t be a smart-arse, Christopher.
No, I haven’t.
Not even in the state of Victoria?
No.
He produced The Argus of May 7, 1946. What about this, then?
Have you been going through my things? Chubb demanded, and then he saw his landlord in the doorway. You bloody dill, he cried. I was never in trouble with the police. It was Weiss they prosecuted.
Don’t you worry about him, Christopher. You worry about me, because I am someone who is worth worrying about. Did you ever make a hoax, Christopher? I think you should know what a hoax is.
I do, yes.
It is when you try to make a mug out of someone. Would that be a fair definition, Christopher? Did you ever hear of Bob McCorkle? That would be a hoax, I reckon.
Having taken the paper from the policeman, Chubb looked down at the collage he had made so light-heartedly, so long ago, and only then did he understand what trouble he was in. For the moment he claimed he had breathed life into this image, he would be declared a lunatic, and once he was a lunatic he was as good as guilty. And while they were wasting time in the kitchen, the creature had his child. At this moment, somewhere in Sydney, she would be crying for her bottle and her captor knew not even the names of the things he needed in order to care for her. If he did not tell this policeman the truth, there was no chance in hell she would be brought back alive.
He sat there, silent, unable to move or speak.
31
Australia is the country where a woman named Chamberlain was very recently convicted of murdering her baby on the basis of no evidence other than her refusal to cry on television. Her crime, it seems, was being unwomanly, and in looking at Christopher Chubb, one might detect a corresponding unmanliness. After all, what normal man would want to adopt a baby to raise alone? To the tabloid press, there seemed one reason a male would adopt a child: to murder it.
By the time Chubb was found not guilty, his life had been effectively destroyed. He had lost his child, his mistress, his job, his house, and the last of his friends. Yet he was not convicted, as Mrs Chamberlain would later be on just as little evidence. In this sense he was lucky. And if many people believed he had smuggled the child out of the country simply to spite its mother, this damaged only his personal reputation, not his civil liberty.
Still, he felt no joy in his acquittal, only the most colossal and unexpected emptiness. Having been so exhausted by the child in a single week, why did he now seek her face in every pram? The man whose romantic relations had been distinguished by his profound lack of need could now be devastated by something as saccharine and sentimental as a knitted bootie abandoned on the smeary floor of the Bondi tram. Every little sign of life, even a powdery bogong moth captured inside the cup of his hand, somehow felt exactly like the child, the desperate beating of a life whose needs must be obeyed.
One might have expected this agony at least to nourish his writing, but at this moment of crisis all art seemed worthless to him and there was nothing else he had ever believed in.
The public scandal meant that even copywriting was now closed to him, and after trying a number of poorly paying jobs he finally settled into the occupation he had once invented for McCorkle, selling insurance door-to-door. Even here, inside the sixth circle of his own prank, he toiled as a medioc
re salesman, always expecting that behind this door, in answer to that bell, he would discover his child. For the same reason there was not a bus he boarded or a railway platform he waited on where he was not looking for that great dark figure with its distinctive springy gait. He found himself hoping that the monster might not yet be satisfied with his revenge, so when forced to abandon his house for a flat, and that for a boarding-house, he left a forwarding address to ease his tormentor’s search.
Chubb’s slow slide towards the boarding-house took almost four years, during which, he told me, he was far too distressed to write or even read. Finally, in the spring of 1956, he received a forwarded parcel from the Australian painter Donald Defoe, once a casual acquaintance. Defoe now lived in Indonesia, which was presently most turbulent, and he seemed not to have heard of Chubb’s difficulties. The artist was a graceful, thoughtful man who apologised for intruding on his privacy, but hoped the poet ‘might like to hear of a wonderfully mad character who has just left my house today—a shadow of the hilarious avant-gardist you invented back in ’46….’
Defoe’s visitor had been travelling with a little girl about four years old, and they’d fled to Bali from Yogyakarta, where ‘the alleged McCorkle’ had been busy learning the local language, an ambition foiled by his ‘completely tragic inability to roll his r’s.’ The artist had found the pair of them wandering the streets during Ramadan and took them in so they would not be arrested by the religious police. That first night, he wrote, ‘McCorkle recited “The Darkening Ecliptic” to great dramatic effect.’
He and the little girl had stayed two weeks, at the end of which the visitor, having drunk too much arak, declared his host a mediocrity and himself a great genius, but in spite of this Defoe had enjoyed his company. Though ‘quite mad of course,’ he had great energy and a huge curiosity about everything he saw. The painter was sorry when he took the little girl off to live in the north of the island, at Singaraja. Accompanying the letter, Chubb told me, was a charcoal drawing Defoe had made of the man and child. It was only six inches by four inches, but very powerful: the great hulking, brooding figure with the delicate child snuggled into his lap.
