by Peter Carey
‘It is thanks to you,’ he wrote, ‘thanks exactly to what you planned for me, that I am now dying of Graves’ disease and will leave my family alone and penniless. When you stabbed me in the bum I almost felt sorry for you. How pitiful you seemed that day. But here you finally show your power. How you must hate my little girl to take her father from her. I hear you are an ad man still. I hope you enjoy your corruption and your wealth while you leave my child a starving orphan.’
But of course I did not mean the child to be abandoned. Never. Graves’ disease, Mem, had been a joke, a pun, the disease of Robert Graves and T. S. Eliot, all the mumbo-jumbo men. ‘Garlic and sapphires in the mud,’ what will that ever mean? But still I rushed to the dictionary: ‘Disease characterised by the enlarged thyroid, rapid pulse, and increased metabolism due to excessive thyroid secretion.’
I called my doctor. Friend is sick et cetera. He told me not to fret and that Graves’ disease was easily treated. But although he happily wrote me scrips for calmer-downers he could not write me one for this. Just the same, Sydney is a crooked town. I made enquiries.
Do you see what was happening, Mem? I was thinking, Will I go back to Malaysia? No harm to get a nice new passport with no sign of my deportation. Would they have my name on a list? A risk, of course. I finally met a greyhound trainer. Yes, mate, he could get me the medicine, no worries. From him I learned it could not be simply put in the post. Must be coddled, packed in dry ice. Hah, how perfect! I would have to take it myself.
My life in Sydney, so boring. I am sure you have not the least idea of how a life can pass like this, leaking away like a dripping tap. Monday–Friday, Saturday–Sunday, sleep and drink the only luxury. It is how my mother lived. Work, eat, sherry flagon, sleep.
But now I was alive at last. I burned my bridges, resigned my job, broke my Randwick lease. How could I be sorry? My daughter would see me save the bastard’s life. She could not hate me then.
Chubb paused here as if to appeal to me, and looking into those grey eyes I wondered what in his nature would permit him to shift from murder to nursing without so much as a change in breath. It was only here, so late in the story, that I considered the possibility of him being truly psychotic.
48
The minute my telegram had been delivered to Jalan Campbell both Tina and Mrs Lim were up and down the road. The hantu is coming. The hantu is coming. You have seen them together, Mem, so you can imagine the prance, the rage. Soon all the morons in the street were in a state about the ghost. Cheh! Peering out like aunties from behind their blinds.
The drug for Graves’ disease was propylthiouracil— which Chubb duly spelt out for me. Got it through customs, he said, without an eye being raised. Passport stamped. Free to go. Everything was first-rate until the taxi pulled up outside the shophouse and I jammed the bloody box inside its sliding door. Wah! Suddenly great clouds of carbon dioxide all around me—not a man but a walking factory, a brewery. A dramatic entrance, Mem, but very tame compared to what the neighbours claimed to see. A creature with no body. Entrails flashing blue.
I stepped inside and was greeted by my child. Five foot six at least and almost prettier than her mother. But she had those two tiny freckles on her upper lip and was alight with foolish love for the creature. Luminous, she stung me.
Of course she was frightened and not only of the steaming box. She thought I was the devil. I asked, Where is the patient?
Atas. So saying she set off up the stairs, her bare feet whispering against the polished teak. Is that not a sound a man will remember all his life—a woman’s feet brushing across a wooden floor?
I followed with my dry ice billowing in the dark. There were lamps upstairs, no electricity. The room was not like now, Mem. It was ruled by the living creature in his giant teak bed. I beheld the wretch—the miserable monster whom I had created. He held up the curtain of the bed; and his eyes— wah! what eyes—were fixed on me. In the lamplight he was a grub in its cocoon, swathed in mosquito net. All around me, on the floor, stacked against the walls, were the journals his slaves had made for him.
He lay in the darkness like a raja. Beside him I could make out his little Chinese soldier. You’ve seen her. Hard to look at all those scars-lah. Her flat face shivered when she saw me, but I was her master’s maker and she pulled back the mosquito net.
Tuan Bob, she announced.
And there he lay, the thing that I had brought to life, the brutish genius, glistening in the dark. His sweaty eyelids had retracted and the eyes were bulging from his shining face. He had become disgusting—gaunt, emaciated, the ribs nearly breaking through his wet and slippery skin. The old doctor in Randwick had prepared me for the jerky and spasmodic movements of the eyes, but not for the power of this disease to topple such a giant.
Seeing me, the tyrant made a choked-off phlegmy noise, presumably a laugh. What was the joke? That I had needed him? That he was my life? Yet the more damn vile he was, the better it suited me. ‘Lo though I were despised and spat upon.’ For now my daughter would finally see what sort of man I was.
I asked the name of his doctor so I could deliver him the drug.
No doctor, he said. It is the disease you invented for me. It has always been here waiting. Cure it if you can.
By this stage I did not doubt I had invented his disease. I set to work, Mem, straight away. Must unmake my joke, you see. There was a large bowl of soapy water on the floor and much of it was spilled. I placed my box where it was dry, and unpacked the bottle and pipette. The propylthiouracil was a tincture. My daughter brought the water so I might dilute it and, though frightened, she met my gaze. I could look directly through the iris and see her courage, as I named it. Silently she pleaded that I would not hurt him, and with more tenderness than she had shown when I was tripped and kicked into the mud.
I prepared the medicine and poured it into a little china cup as the females attempted to sit my genius up. They Bapa’d and Tuan’d and whispered in his ear but could not budge him. Finally he made it clear that I was the one he designated to touch his skin, to slip my hand beneath his sweating back and raise him so he might sip his tincture like a damned lover in my arms, a dying Jesus in a Roman church.
There was a strange metallic odour like copper about his skin. And his breath, Mem, dust and garlic. But what I felt most was his animus against me, the tremor of his hatred even as I ministered to him.
No sooner was the drug ingested than he vomited, and all the putrid contents of his stomach flooded down his chest and across his hairy stomach and my daughter began to weep convulsively.
You lift! Mrs Lim barked. Yes-Mem-no-Mem. I was her bloody coolie, so she thought. Lift now, she cried, and I carried her great Tuan and she was a little soldier beetle scurrying around the room, floating clean sheets into the air, fluffing pillows.
Tina watched, sniffling. God knows what she thought.
I held her bapa, all the while feeling his malevolent breath upon my cheek. To be so intimate with Bob McCorkle was disgusting, as unnatural and frightening as holding one’s own vital organs in one’s hands. His shaven head lolled back, and when I drew away he leered at me and sought my eyes. This behaviour I could put down to his disease. Nervousness, irritability, emotional lability, every symptom in the book. I held him for as long as it takes a two-gallon kettle to boil and only when his bath was ready could I be released.
To nurse a beloved friend is one thing, Mem, but a tapeworm who has tortured you so long? My daughter knew this. She must have known. I had made myself his nurse, his servant, his doctor. This was how the weeks passed for me. I slept on the hard floor beside him. I had no desire to lessen my pain.
Neither of the women would speak to me. They brought me soup and noodles but I always ate alone, squatting beside the great dark bed, one of them was always watching over me.
I was so confident about the treatment, said Chubb, so certain of the cure, so slow to notice that my patient now weighed even less. His mind was wandering also. And h
is eyes—wah! Jellyfish about to burst. The weaker he grew, the more polite he became. Twice he smiled. From time to time he thanked me. He was dying. He knew that well before I did, and he was fretting, you see, about the woman and the child. What he needed now he could not steal or extract with violent threats against my person. He wanted me to promise to care for his dependents, and to do that he must charm me or make me pity him.
As my wishes were almost exactly the same as his, you might think I would immediately put his mind to rest? But by now I had known him for fifteen years and had lost my life because of him. I had good reason to be wary of his cunning. So while my heart could not help but be torn by his agony I did not dare let myself soften.
Tell me yes, he cried, or tell me no.
But I would do neither, and finally he could bear my recalcitrance no more and had a kind of seizure, thrashing and twisting on the bed as if he could rip himself apart. He roared. His huge eyes were terrible to see. It seemed the skull could not contain them long. He fell from the bed and cracked his head against the floor. Even this I withstood, but his upset escalated and as it caused such distress to the women I finally allowed myself to offer the thing I craved the most.
I gave him my word that I would care for my daughter, the other one as well.
Hearing this, he collapsed back on his pillow. Everything in his hard, handsome face was sunken, everything except the eyes. Wah! So big now I could see my upside-down reflection when I spoke to him.
Come here, he said, patting the bed.
What was there to be afraid of? He took my hand and his own was soft and feeble, boneless as a ghost’s.
I am easy now, he said. We are one, you and I.
It was a lovely morning in the dry season, Mem. Now their patient had grown so calm, they left on separate errands, Mrs Lim for Chow Kit, Tina to fetch a bowl of hot tow too fah, which was all the creature could hold down.
We were alone. The early sun was streaming through the windows and the mynah birds were in the mulberry tree out the back. In the street a cracked voice called for people to bring out their old newspapers—paper lama, paper lama.
What a shitty thing it is, Christopher, to come to this.
I said death comes to all of us.
No, no. I labour all my bloody life to make a work of art. And now the end is here, there is only you to give it to. My old enemy.
He twisted away and when he turned back I saw the volume which you held last night. Not the least idea of what it was. It felt as feverish and slippery as his skin.
What is this?
Swear you won’t destroy it, he said.
There on the title page I read that fierce sarcastic title, My Life as a Fake.
Swear you will not burn it.
What is it?
The human soul, he said.
I thought he mocked himself. What did I expect? Certainly not art.
I swear, I told him, that I shall not damage this in any way.
I was being truthful. I would have protected it even if it was the ravings of a paranoid schizophrenic, which is exactly what I thought it was.
Give me, he said. You can read it when I’m gone. He was, finally, very gentle, touching my face so affectionately he might have been a doting uncle. Good man, he said. I know you will look after it.
I had thought his hatred of me all gone, but recently I have come to wonder if, even when he seemed so gentle, he was secretly relishing the notion of making me a bicycle mechanic. So like him. To trick me into living my own lie-ah? Lock myself in a pit of oil and gasoline. Did he wish his fate to be mine? If so, he hid his feelings until my daughter returned with the tow too fah.
He did not die until the following day but his demise, unlike his life, was peaceful, and he held the book against his chest until the very end.
49
You have seen it coming. I was treating the wrong disease, and he died not of Graves’ disease but of a rare leukemia, myeloproliferative disorder. The leucocytes had accumulated near the eyes, which is what turned them into jellyfish. He died of cancer.
The coroner was an Indian chap. Furious with me. I had impersonated a doctor. Smuggled drugs. I should be hanged, he said, except he could not see how that would benefit the family.
Leukemia was recorded on his death certificate but this had no meaning to the woman and the girl, who were soon telling the neighbours that the hantu had sucked the blood from Mr Bob.
It is hard to believe the monster had been so loved, Mem, but they wept for him on Jalan Campbell. They had seen the way he cooed and fawned around the little girl. They would never understand how he had fed off her, stolen her very life to fertilise his ego. It was not only Tina he devoured. Every child in that street was fuel for his forge. He was a user and a thief, yet tears were shed for him. My role was to be his cause of death.
But I had won as well, so I thought. I had my daughter. She did not love me then but I did not doubt that she would learn. And while she spurned me, my life was not a desert. I was sustained by his strange and fearsome book. My Life as a Fake. What an accusation! It was to me it spoke, and had been willed to me directly, but I knew the women would not like me touching it. So I read it in secret, taking little trips up the stairs when I was at home alone. I was at it like a hidden arak bottle, going back for more of the harsh, bitter taste. Satu lagi. Just one more sip.
Certainly, Mem, I was as cunning as a drunk and it was several months before they caught me at my studies. Wah! You never saw such rage. They scratched my hands with their fingernails but that was nothing. I must put the volume down at once. The little scarface threatened what would happen if I erred again: sharp knife in the night.
My daughter smirked.
After this time, my heart hardened against her.
She had been used and abused and it had made her cruel and ignorant. I should have felt great pity but suddenly I loathed her. As you loathe someone who has betrayed you, cheated, lied, used you like a toy, made profit from everything that is good in you. This was not her fault, but that did not stop me hating her.
In spite of this, you have seen, I continued to serve the creature’s interests, for even if I could have abandoned the family I would never leave that work of art alone and unprotected.
I was patient, Mem, and I waited, because I knew one day you would come, or someone like you. Such a bet to place-lah! What chance you would find me reading Rilke? My life was almost a waste, but now, Mem, I will fetch you the book.
He stood. He was quite shaky, I thought. I’ll come with you, I said.
No, no, you must not. At seven o’clock they will go together to the railway station. There are bicycle parts coming from Singapore. I must be there to mind the shop.
Very well, I said. So you will be back here by seven?
By seven-fifteen—he smiled—you will have the book.
I was distracted, I think, at that moment. Signing the bill. I did not pay particular attention to his departure.
50
Chubb left me with the dreadful problem of how to endure the three hours between now and his return. I packed and repacked my case—toothbrush, unwashed clothes, the free postcard of the ghastly Merlin. I ate the horrible hotel biscuit whose charms I had so far resisted and drank a glass of musty water. Then what? I was stuck ages away from the moment when I would finally hold that rough and slippery volume in my hands. From there it was another eternity until Charlotte Street, where I might feast contentedly on my treasure, its foreign stippled skin bathed in watery London light. In that far-off happy time I would copy every line by hand, not merely for safety—though that too was much on my agitated mind—but to learn it inside out. This is how I’d first read Milton, aged fifteen, and perceived what my dull lesbian headmistress would never see: that it was Satan for whom the poet felt sympathy. Back in London I would use my pencil as an instrument of worship, using it to plumb the logic of McCorkle’s ripped and rumpled map.
But how the time did drag in that drea
ry hotel room. And when night fell a full seventy-five minutes remained and I was irrationally frightened that the wet octopus of Kuala Lumpur would manage to suck my book into its fishy maw.
Downstairs, I sought the bar. No members present, as they say. I was reduced to ordering a curried-egg sandwich and a Tiger beer, and as the first wash of bubbles touched my throat Slater sat down opposite me. His brow was stern, shadowed, like deeply eroded rock.
Don’t, he ordered.
I thought he was forbidding me the beer, which would have been out of character, to say the least.
Keep away from those women, he said, whatever you do.
You know, John, that’s exactly what I was going to say to you. The young one particularly.
Micks, please. Get off it.
Oh, you weren’t seducing her?
He ignored that. What are you hatching? he said. I have been sitting over there watching you. You are in a complete bloody state, so please do tell me what you’re up to because I don’t think you understand exactly where you are.
Don’t be ridiculous.
Have you sent mad old Chubby off to steal that book again? Yes? I’m right?
I would have denied it but had no defence against his angry eyes.
You must call him off, he said. Those women are the dogs of hell.
Yes, but as it happens the dogs are at the railway station.
They’re on to you, Micks, believe me. You’ll never see that manuscript.
You know that?
I said they’re on to you.
How could he know? It was impossible. Yet he succeeded in making me believe that my treasure was about to be snatched away and I simply could not bear it. I stood and rushed out into the hot night. The bill, I imagined, would detain him for a moment, but as my cab pulled out of the congested drive I saw him entering the one behind, and now I supposed we would be like creatures in a bad movie. In order to confuse my pursuer I directed the driver to the Coliseum, which I recalled was a short walk from the shophouse, and there I jumped out and dashed into the throng. Assuming Slater was behind me in the traffic, I crossed the street and soon was in a very questionable lane. In the adjacent alleyways, illuminated by their own flashlights, were women in short dresses whom I knew to be men. Someone called out to me and I splashed off through the puddles. I emerged onto Batu Road disorientated, and although I pushed rather violently through the crowd I was not confident of my direction.
