The Doubleman

by Christopher Koch

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Book I: The False Knight Upon the Road

  1. The Mask of Paralysis

  2. The Guitar

  3. Mrs Dillon

  4. The Basement

  Book II: The Abyss

  5. On the Arcade

  6. Thomas and the Rymers

  7. And Pleasant is the Fairy Land

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Other Books by Christopher Koch

  Highways to a War

  Out of Ireland

  The Year of Living Dangerously

  Copyright

  BOOK ONE

  The False Knight Upon the Road

  Some men of that exalted sight (whither by Art or Nature) have told me they have seen … a Doubleman, or the Shape of some Man in two places … They call this Reflex-man a Co-Walker, every way like the Man, as a Twin-brother and Companion, haunting him as his shadow … both before and after the Originall is dead.

  ROBERT KIRK, The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies (1691)

  For she could d’on so manie shapes in sight,

  As ever could Cameleon colours new;

  So could she forge all colours, save the trew.

  EDMUND SPENSER, The Faerie Queene, Book IV, Canto I

  1. The Mask of Paralysis

  O see not ye yon narrow road,

  So thick beset wi thorns and briers?

  That is the path of righteousness,

  Tho after it but few enquires.

  And see not ye that braid braid road

  That lies across yon lillie leven?

  That is the path of wickedness,

  Tho some call it the road to heaven.

  And see not ye that bonny road,

  Which winds about the ferny brae?

  That is the road to fair Elfland,

  Where you and I this night maun gae.

  1

  The bruise-coloured steeple of St Augustine’s was visible for miles around on the hill of South Hobart: a watch-tower over a camp of fear. When I go back to my native town and look up Harrigan Street to that tower, I still feel the old nausea, the old dread. My case is scarcely unique; as all too many others have testified, a Christian Brothers’ education in the 1950s had a fine pitch of dread, unlikely to be matched again.

  Fear’s height was in the early mornings, when I climbed towards the steeple and its cross up the asphalt hill of Harrigan Street, the steepest in hilly Hobart. The cars of those days would stall on Harrigan Street and then turn back; but I heaved myself upwards with rhythmic jerks, helped by my single crutch, my thin left leg aching and trembling. My thoughts were small and beast-like with effort, and I was glad of this; it kept my mind from Brother Kinsella. Today was bright and frosty, and I was twelve years old.

  Upwards: jerk and heave. I counted the landmarks that brought me nearer to the end of my small ordeal, and so to the beginning of the day’s larger one. I knew by heart every mean colonial cottage of ochre brick; every ribbon of weedy garden; every holystoned front step; every picket on every fence. Left below as I climbed was one of the town’s few small slums; a place of mean, two-storey tenements, shabby shops and small factories: Hobart’s miniature Gorbals. A tall factory chimney there was lettered with a vertical message, repeating itself to my misery as I climbed, winter and summer: UP TO DATE.

  The last section of hill brought me to the walls and cypresses of the Archbishop’s Palace: the zone of the Church, high above slumdom and the town. Where these walls and Harrigan Street ended Byrne Street would be reached, running across the hill’s brow. Here, opposite the Palace, stood St Augustine’s; and the reward for my climb was Brother Kinsella, waiting at the top. Just inside the red brick gateposts grew a bare, crooked little thorn tree. I never knew its species; but each morning as I passed it, the notion came to me that this was the tree on which Judas hanged himself.

  On some mornings, just before reaching the walls of the Palace, I made a detour. It wasn’t a short cut but the reverse — its attraction being that it delayed my arrival. This was a narrow pedestrian footway called Fiddler’s Lane, running off Harrigan Street between backyard fences to reach the foot of a flight of concrete steps. These climbed to Byrne Street and the school. Dawdling here was a small, enjoyable act of delinquency; and there was also a sense of trespass, since the lane was usually empty. But sometimes I encountered a man here: always the same man, coming down the steps as I climbed up.

  He was seen nowhere else, so that I thought of him as the Man in the Lane. Tall and thin in his long dark overcoat, he studied me for the whole way as he approached, his face absolutely serious. This made me uncomfortable and I began to wish not to have to pass him. To some extent, my caution was reasonable, I suppose: the ancestral readiness for attack when approaching a stranger in a deserted place. But in daylight, it ought not to have had the intensity it did. The man made me uneasy to a degree for which there seemed no explanation.

  He was just a man going to work, I told myself — a man who was stupidly interested, like so many people, by the sight of my cripple’s crutch and my thin left leg, left bare by my grey school shorts. But I didn’t convince myself with this; I was troubled by the notion that he was no ordinary man going to work at all: that he was not like other people, and that his interest couldn’t be explained so simply. He was always in the dark, belted overcoat, its collar turned up at the back; and it seemed to me that I only encountered him in winter. His age was hard to tell; he was perhaps in his late thirties. He had a curious walk, slightly bent over to the left, the side on which one hand was usually in his pocket — as though he had a secret wound, which he held to ease the pain.

  This morning, seeing the lean, dark-clad figure coming down the steps, my heart gave a little jolt. Today was to be different: I had decided to stare him out.

  I covered the whole distance to the steps with his eyes on me all the way; and I told myself, my mouth gone dry, that he had a bloody cheek. But the enigma of his intentions somehow made this bravado feeble. There were men who were over-friendly to boys; they offered sweets, and their voices and smiles were caressing and somewhat sickly. But the Man in the Lane was plainly not one of these: his face and stare were extraordinarily cold, serious and hard, and he never attempted a greeting. We came nearer, and I found my heart thumping in a way that made me giddy. But I kept my eyes on his face; and instead of using my crutch on the slope, something made me decide to carry it, as I did on the flat. The man’s straight, short-cut hair was mostly black, streaked with white around the temples and neatly parted on the left. His face was handsome in a cold way, with vertical lines in the cheeks and a long, sad upper lip; and his eyes, instead of being dark like his hair and brows, were of a strong, weird blue that acted like a warning.

  As we came level he stopped. I had somehow known he would do this.

  ‘You’re not using your crutch today,’ he said.

  He had a deep, hollow voice, which went with his sad upper lip. It was well-spoken yet ordinary enough, like that of other men.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Not today.’

  The man held his head on one side — also to the left. The effect was distinguished; somewhat scholarly. He was neither friendly nor unfriendly; he waited, arched eyebrows raised, apparently expecting an explanation.

  But I said nothing; and I found a wave of intense cold crawling up my back, reaching my neck and tingling there like ice. I had experienced this before only rarely, in situations of threat or danger.

  ‘You should use the crutch,’ the man said, ‘shouldn’t you?’

  ‘No I shouldn’t,’ I said.

  This voice had spoken from inside me. It seemed not quite my own. It said the thing
s it now did without thought on my part, as though repeating a lesson: and it flatly contradicted the man, who raised his eyebrows higher at this rudeness.

  ‘You ought to,’ he said, ‘or you’ll strain your leg. It’s crippled, isn’t it?’

  ‘No. It’s not.’ I felt myself growing red; the flush crept in a wave above my collar. But I stood my ground. It seemed to me that the man wanted me to be crippled and that it was very important to contradict him. ‘It’s getting better,’ I said, ‘and soon I won’t need the crutch at all.’

  ‘That’s good. Are you sure of it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The man’s eyes left mine and looked away down the lane. I felt a surge of triumph; I was winning.

  Then he looked back at me. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘To school.’

  ‘To the Brothers?’

  ‘Yes, the Brothers.’

  ‘You should change your school,’ he said softly. ‘The Brothers are hard men.’

  ‘No they’re not,’ I said. ‘They’re men of God.’ But then, wanting to be honest, and thinking of Brother Kinsella, I said: ‘Most of them are good.’

  A little light flared in his weary-lidded eyes; he had seen his advantage. ‘Most of them, eh?’ he said. ‘But not all of them. Not the one who teaches you.’ He smiled for the first time. His smile too was crooked, travelling up one side of his face; but it seemed confiding and surprisingly attractive. It made me want to grin back, to encourage him to smile more. Why should he be sad? He was handsome as certain saturnine gunmen in the Western films I went to on Saturday afternoons.

  ‘They’re all good men,’ I said.

  The man’s smile went, and he stared, his eyes cold again. No eyes like them had ever searched mine before: hooded by drooping lids, they were entirely without sympathy yet nevertheless interested, and formidably intelligent. They didn’t see me in the normal way; their pupils tiny, they seemed like unnatural lenses, distorting me. ‘You’re easily satisfied,’ he said; and he spoke as though I were an adult. Then with a last, insistent look, he turned and went on down the lane, his sideways tilt somehow elegant, like the affectation of a dandy from another age.

  I began to limp up the steps, holding my crutch; and I found myself trembling as though at a narrow escape. As I reached the seventh step I turned to look after him. But the lane was empty.

  I still don’t know what to make of this, looking back on it. No doubt my imagination played me a trick; but I remember that the lane hummed with unnatural warning, its grey timber fences and sheets of corrugated iron hiding something. What had happened was impossible, I said; the man couldn’t have reached the exit into Harrigan Street in such a few moments. Yet it seemed he had; and I would always wonder how he did it.

  I wasn’t to meet him again for some years; and I concluded that he’d gone away.

  2

  I had known I would catch Paralysis long before it happened. When it finally struck, I felt almost foolish for having hoped to be spared.

  For a long time, even into adolescence, I continued to think of Paralysis as a creature — a being who belonged to childhood like my clockwork train; like chilblains. This entity had come to me in the days before Salk vaccine, when whole populations of children faced it without any talisman. Its full title then was not poliomyelitis but ‘infantile paralysis’; and I would never be able to think of it by any other name. It took its time about coming: it waited until I was nine years old. This was at the end of World War Two, in 1946, when the worst of the epidemics were over, and even my mother thought I was safely among the spared. But Paralysis came, after all; it had merely been toying with its lists.

  Its most thorough recruiting campaigns on the island of my birth had been carried out in the 1930s, and during the War years. Poor Van Diemen’s Land! The leg-irons and the lash of a hundred years before still hung near, like bad dreams; now, suburban and respectable under your new name, you found your children in irons once more, tormented by pains more searching than the lash. Through the streets of Hobart in the 1940s, the children claimed by the epidemic were wheeled by in chairs, or lurched on their crutches. They horrified and fascinated me before I became one of their number, in those years of the War. Shopping in Hobart with my mother, I would study the crippled children with fascination; a fascination that was only rivalled by my interest in the American troops on leave.

  The Yanks swaggered and rioted through our staid little city in the world’s utmost south, where we knew the War couldn’t come; and nothing like them had been seen in Hobart before. Elephant-grey shapes of Liberty ships loomed in the Derwent estuary, dwarfing the wharf sheds below the Post Office; troopships filled with GIs who had fought in New Guinea with the Australians — among whom was my father. The AIF and the Americans were engaging the Imperial Japanese invasion force at Lae; Japan was in retreat, but Australians were still dying in that hot green underworld, from tropical illnesses and exhaustion as well as from Japanese machine-gun fire. All this I understood only vaguely, at five, and when I imagined my father, Eddy Miller, whose censored blue air-letters cut about with scissors were waited for every week, I saw him healthy and heroic among bright palm leaves, yellow hair spilling from under his Digger hat, firing his rifle from the hip and grinning carelessly. I thought that my father would never be killed: only the others.

  Meanwhile, GIs in well-cut uniforms and white-capped sailors called gobs passed on the narrow footpath in shoals; laughing strange laughs, shouting, whistling at girls, drinking from beer bottles and vomiting into the gutter in unbelievable fountains. But the Yanks were helping to save us from the Japanese, and there was only a small resentment in the town. My mother’s cheerful, fleshy face was blank and disapproving under her brown felt hat and her stare was fixed; she kept close to the windows of familiar department stores, one white-gloved hand firmly gripping mine. And from time to time, we were passed by the crippled children who were no longer ordinary children.

  Their parents pushed them in chairs or in crude, specially constructed prams like huge trays which interested me horribly. Pasty-faced, monstrous babies of nine or ten years old, wrapped in tartan rugs, they stared sadly at me; or sometimes, inexplicably, they smiled, their legs stuck out stiffly in front of them like those of dolls, imprisoned in the paralysis irons.

  ‘Will I get Paralysis?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course not,’ my mother said. ‘Don’t talk like that.’

  But no use: Paralysis would come for me in three years’ time, at six o’clock in the evening, just before dinner.

  3

  I was playing with my Hornby clockwork train when the intruder arrived. A toy for which I had a special affection, it ran perfectly, and never broke down: British and reliable.

  I had been ill yesterday and today: nothing serious, just a sore throat and a temperature which had kept me home from school. I felt weak and somewhat dreamy and there were dull pains in my back and legs — all the symptoms of flu, which was what my mother had decided I’d caught. No one was concerned; least of all me.

  There was a fire in the dining-room of my grandfather’s house, and I had come out here in my dressing-gown to set up my train on the hearth-rug. I had developed a curious restlessness which I couldn’t account for. I was unable to read or to fix my attention on anything for long without a feeling of pointless irritability, mixed with drowsiness. My head ached and there was a stiffness in my neck now, as well as in my back. This ominous symptom, which would have been of great interest to my mother, I supposed to be another feature of the flu, and I took no notice of it. But my restlessness increased; I wanted something; some reassurance perhaps.

  About what? I couldn’t really tell. The little red locomotive with its coal truck and two carriages whirred round and round on its silver tracks, recalling happy evenings with my father, before he was killed near Lae. I was safe with my reliable Hornby; and yet I was somehow not reassured. It ran busily through the wooden tunnel my lost father had made for it long ago, and
then it began to slow down.

  I wanted to reach for the key on the carpet to wind it up again, but I found I was suddenly too heavy and weak to bother doing so. Legs curled under me, I watched the train stupidly as it began another circuit. It laboured down the line towards me, slower and slower, the tension in its clockwork spring almost exhausted. Would it get to me? This somehow seemed very important, and I told myself I would pick it up when it reached me.

  It came almost to a stop, but then gave a lurch which brought it forward a few more inches. I badly wanted it to reach me; then things would be all right. But I couldn’t move. It stopped just out of reach, and stood there with a distinctness which was no longer friendly.

  It was surrounded by an evil emptiness; a speckled vacuum; and I was seized with terror. The world had become reduced to the static red train, the fireplace with its arch of green ceramic tiles containing leaping flames, and the hearth-rug’s pattern of brown autumn leaves. This pattern, which I had always been fond of, now became entirely unpleasant, and of no help. I wanted to call for my mother, but there was nothing to call out for. I made a great effort and leaned forward to reach for the locomotive.

  Pain struck me in the back like a great silver club. I knew immediately that this was no ordinary pain: it had a mighty authority which said that my whole life had been changed; that I had been chosen. I tried to get up, pressing the palm of my right hand flat on the floor.

  And now I did cry out — an amazed howl, as the silver club fell again with unbelievable violence, with a force which was obviously intended to punish me for daring to move. Terror established itself absolutely; the speckles in the air increased; the pain entered my bones, so that I understood where each one was. Things were turning off inside me one by one, like lightbulbs. A nasty limpness had arrived, and would stay. I heard my mother’s feet running in the hall outside; I fell sideways on the hearth-rug, and entered darkness.