The Doubleman

by Christopher Koch

  Greystones was a last little pocket of the nineteenth century, a mixed farm where kerosene lamps were still the only form of lighting. These were maintained because Brian’s father, my Uncle Mick, refused to pay the Government’s electrical bills. Short, stocky and powerful, with greying, brutally cropped dark hair, Mick Brady had the snubby face of an Irish boxer: upturned nose, jaw jutting, dark eyes watching for an opening, harbouring a bitter resentment.

  A good deal of this resentment had to do with the fact that his wife took in paying guests for the summer. It wasn’t a prosperous property; the thin, sandy soil would never provide rich crops, and a significant part of the farm’s income came from its role as Dora Brady’s unofficial guest house. This rankled with Mick; he despised the prosperous guests, whose bags he must carry from the bus when they arrived. But his only revenge was to sneer behind their backs at their talk of Greystones being ‘quaint’; a relic of the colonial past. ‘Like to see those snooty bastards milkin’ cows in winter,’ he said. ‘They wouldn’t find that too quaint.’ He repeated the word with loathing, making it a mincing parody of all refinement. ‘Quaint! Jesus!’ He smiled savagely, like a dog.

  The guests, for their part, tolerated the farm’s simplicity because they valued its seclusion, its deserted beach, and all its simple rituals, like Dora’s morning tea on the verandah.

  I had the pleasant status of a guest; but Brian, now officially expelled from St Augustine’s, had become Mick’s farmhand: a servant of the property. His father had told him he could work for his keep, or else leave home; so Brian now laboured a six-day week and a ten-hour day for which he was paid thirty shillings, while I went swimming or walking, or studied for my exams on the verandah.

  Uncle Mick was awed by my ability at such arcane subjects as Latin and History. Gesturing with his fork over lunch in the kitchen, where he continued to wear his grey felt hat, he held me up as an example.

  ‘This boy here,’ he said to Brian, ‘he’s a scholar. Dick knows that learning’ll get you anywhere. You’ll be digging ditches, or in jail — that’s how you’ll bloody well end up.’ He had set his heart on Brian’s matriculating; now he brooded over his son with angry disappointment, and he sneered at the guitar as the cause of Brian’s disgrace. The instrument affronted Mick; it was a frivolous object he saw no sense in.

  ‘Playing the gee-tar,’ he said to me one evening. Leering, inviting me to leer too, he jerked his thumb at Brian, who sat practising on the back verandah. ‘Look at him,’ Mick said. ‘Serious as a pig pissin’.’ He burst out laughing, while Brian stared coldly into his laughter. ‘Serious as a pig pissin’,’ Mick repeated. The phrase pleased him.

  Sometimes I would help them both with such jobs as rounding up the few sheep, or hosing out dung from the bails in the cowsheds; but the surly presence of Mick made me uncomfortable.

  My uncle wasn’t a man who loved the land; the land had betrayed him, and the animals enslaved him. He kicked the reluctant cows into the bails with a personal animosity, menacing in his hat, his stubby figure electric with rage.

  The house had two verandahs running front and back, connected by the central hall; and these verandahs, with their green-painted posts of knotted gum-boughs, had always marked out the two natures of Greystones.

  The front verandah, with its easy chairs overlooking the sea and its tarpaper underfoot, was the guests’ territory; the territory of holiday. It looked east, to where the sun rose each morning above granite mountains called the Hazards, across the bay; lavender peaks which always suggested the remote South Sea islands, beyond the sun’s glittering track. Each morning, as I walked up the dim hall, these peaks and the dark blue bar of ocean waited, framed in the open front door; and stepping into the sun on the verandah, I was greeted by the scents of hot tarpaper, melting butter, and the roses and honeysuckle in Dora Brady’s garden.

  The back verandah, looking towards the dark green inland hills and the bush, smelling of sheepdogs and cream from the separating room, was farm territory; Mick’s territory. Every evening, he still lit the kerosene lamps there which he gathered from every room in the house, setting them up on the rail in a row. And seeing him, squat and solemn, carrying out his ceremony while big shadows sprang around him, I would recall how Brian and I watched when we were small; when the lamps had been like signals in the vastness of country night.

  ‘Stupid old bastard,’ Brian said. ‘He spends as much on kero now as he would on electric power, if he got connected. He’s mad.’

  In my room at night, where we sat and smoked, Brian confided his plans. When he was ready, and when he’d saved a little money, he would go away. What he really wanted to do was to go on studying with Broderick; to master the guitar. Then, eventually, he’d escape to the mainland, and get into the country music circuit. For now, he practised his guitar in every spare moment.

  Meanwhile, I worked at my books. I was only there for a fortnight, at the end of that November, before I had to go back to take my exams. But the odd thing is that in retrospect it seems much longer, that period at Greystones; or else it seems to be outside time altogether, a place where time became suspended. Perhaps this is because of all that eventually happened; but I suppose too it was the nature of the place itself.

  Before things began to happen, I was already in a curious state of mind. I found myself thinking of demons, as I moved about the property; and this was partly because I had demons of my own to resist. I had always seen the countryside as sexless; but now I saw that the land was not innocent, any more than the island itself was innocent. Half-seen shapes of lust and fear lurked in the sulking green bush, where I wandered about alone; and at times I caught the land looking at me out of the corner of its eye. Or perhaps something else did, while the bush seemed to sulk, its viscous gum-leaves gleaming like metal, the grey hair of its she-oaks trailing to the ground in what looked like sorrow.

  Then I would remember that we were in Van Diemen’s Land, where crimes and monotonous misery had made their indelible traces a hundred years ago; where transported pickpockets from the rookeries and thieves’ kitchens of St Giles and Camden Town had yearned for a London they would never see again; where the sealers and shepherds and convicts, out of reach of the Government in Hobart, had made slaves and victims of the doomed Aborigines, hanging the heads of the husbands about the necks of the wives, using the amputated fingers to tamp their pipes. And I wondered at times if the spirits that vanished race had believed in, as well as their own reproachful spirits, still lingered here in the gullies or among the dunes.

  The Aborigines had been bound in fear by a demon called Rowra, who had to be appeased, together with other evil spirits. Towards the end, when the colonists had hunted them to the edge of extinction, the women began to go off at night and perform ‘devil dances’; frenzied moon-rites for Rowra, who now required blood: the sacrifice of their infants. The last of her race, ‘Queen’ Trucanini, had died in Hobart with his name on her lips, calling out in terror for her white mistress to come to her bedside.

  ‘Oh missus, Rowra catch me — Rowra catch me —!’ These were her last words, poor Trucanini; she had seen him coming, at the end.

  Was Rowra still here?

  Sometimes, in the bush that began beyond the top pasture, or on the empty beach at mid-morning where middens of shells from the Aboriginal camps could still be found, I imagined that Rowra was watching me, in the simmering silence. Alone in such places, with warm smells of salt and seaweed rising from the ground, I would unexpectedly find my groin hollowing, and images of naked girls would arrive. But no live bodies were here; only the giant, warm body of the land, above which crows were calling, with a sound like ugly infants. I would think then of Hazel Pearce.

  Hazel was Dora Brady’s hired help. She lived in, working in the kitchen and cleaning the guests’ rooms. About the same age as Brian and myself, and shy to the point of being mute, she was simply referred to by the Bradys as ‘the girl’. She was never included in conversations; she spo
ke only in monosyllables, and ate her meals alone. St Augustine’s had given me little experience of talking to girls; but once I’d opened the kitchen door for her, and she had smiled sideways, quickly. She was one of the Pearces: a large family who lived on a small farm out in the hills, where the soil was poor and a few families went on scratching out a bare subsistence — milking small herds of cows, keeping pigs, drinking and feuding, cousins marrying cousins. Grotesques were said to be produced out there among the hillbillies; and Mick told the story that a certain Cooper family had a boy who barked like a dog, and was kept chained up at night. Once, on a Show day, Mick said, the boy was taken in to Hobart and led through the streets on his chain. The dog-boy was one of the few things that made Mick amused.

  But Hazel was not grotesque; she was small and pretty, with a trim figure, a cloud of heavy brown hair, a delicate, pointed chin, and green eyes that I thought beautiful. She moved always in the background, in her cheap print dress and fawn cardigan, shoulders bent; curiously neutral, here and yet not here, sweeping in dim corners of the house, picking up sticks for the fire, or filling a jug at the water-tank.

  3

  Thousands more stars stream across the sky here than in town, white and big on glass-thin blackness, brighter by far, in the island’s thin atmosphere, than the glimmer of the township up the coast. Head back, I grow giddy staring at Orion’s belt, and the Milky Way; I stride among tussocks, in the empty midnight moorland of Greystones, where plover pipe their old, wild loneliness.

  Coming back to the house, I catch sight of the couple in the shadows of the back verandah.

  They are standing against the water-tank, outlined against the silver gleam of the corrugated iron; and they don’t see me because they are kissing. Brian is so much taller than she that her head is craned back as far as mine was to look at the stars; and in the moment that I see them, their faces separate, and they stare at each other as though trying to fathom some question.

  I step on to the verandah and cross to the open back door without their seeing me. But not before I’ve heard their whispers — trite and unforgettable.

  ‘You’re beautiful.’

  ‘An’ you’re handsome. An’ that’s no lie.’

  I lie sleepless in my room, whose window opens on to the front verandah. The night stays unusually warm. Through the window, the sounds of Greystones come: the sighing roar of breakers, and a far-off crying heard nowhere else: two long notes, high and then low. Its source baffled me, once; now I know it to be fairy penguins, down on the rocks. But their crying tonight has a tragic urgency, not like birds’ voices at all: a drawn-out plaint like wind on rock, immensely far, summoning me out of the room.

  I climb through the window in my pyjamas, cross the front verandah, and limp down the three steps into Dora’s front garden. The bright new moon is high. Below the pale sacking of the paddocks and the dry-stone wall of the garden, the sea can be sensed, rather than seen: a dark, giddy opening in the wall of the world. The booming of the waves is imperative and crisp out here, and the crying of the penguins more distinct. Without thought, I wander round to the southern side of the house, where the kitchen and bathroom are, above a small gully.

  An old wooden gutter carries water from the bathroom and the kitchen down into the gully’s depths, and there’s the rank smell of the drainwater here. It’s not a place to linger in. The bathroom light is on, even though it’s so late, laying a yellow rectangle across the ragged grass. I begin to skirt this, glancing briefly and with little curiosity at the window, whose blind I expect to be drawn. But it isn’t drawn: it’s up, and the window as well.

  A narrow stage-set alight in the dark, the green-walled chamber at first appears empty. The deep old country bath with its wood-chip heater can’t be seen from where I stand; but faint steam is drifting from it. On the marble wash-stand is a wicker bassinet, and I can see an infant’s kicking feet and one reaching hand. I hear it chatter, and can hear too the splashing of the occupant of the bath. Then there is the sound of released water gurgling and the faint thud of feet on the floor. I know I should move on but don’t; and the first naked woman of my life runs lightly into the frame. My heart leaps as though in terror.

  Golden, beautiful, her pale hair drawn up in a bun, she shines in the light of Mick’s kerosene pressure lamp above her head, her body white as its flare, white as the breakers on the beach, whose sound comes muffled here. She is real and yet not; she may vanish; and her reality is made more unlikely by the fact that she’s a stranger.

  I’ve never seen her before: not about the house, nor on the front verandah where the guests gather in the mornings. She must have just arrived, on the evening bus. Shining with water, veiled in her own steam, her flushed, exquisite face bare of makeup, gracefully trailing a green towel in one hand, she comes to a gingerly halt on the balls of her feet, fully presented to the window, and smiles with her face in profile to the unseen baby. Her face is young, her waist frail and tender; but her breasts, which jolted and lunged as she came, are not tipped by the pale, demure pink buds of the women in paintings, but by big magenta circles: maternal fruits whose ripeness is both noble and appalling. Slow as a dream, in her frame, she is otherwise the twin of one of the nude divinities in the books on my grandfather’s shelves: those sombre volumes dealing with Greek sculpture and Renaissance painting. It’s only when she bends over the bassinet and murmurs to the infant that I finally admit that I’m not spying on a vision: that I’m not intended to see her.

  I back away towards the edge of the gully; and as I do so, she stands erect and looks out the window directly to where I am, her light eyes narrowing.

  My nerves shrill their alarm. Has she seen me? Panic making me stumble, I limp away fast into the dark.

  4

  The sun stood high above the Hazards.

  Mrs Dillon sat reading a book on the verandah of the guests, silky blonde hair spilling forward, her baby sleeping at her feet in its wicker bassinet. I took a chair nearby, not too close, and pretended to study my History textbook. It was the second morning I had done this.

  Questioning my aunt with sly casualness, I had discovered all I could about Deirdre Dillon. She came from Sydney; her husband was a wealthy businessman who had not accompanied her. She had been coming to Greystones, although I hadn’t met her before, from girlhood; and she had grown up in Hobart, where her father Robert Brennan owned Brennan’s Sporting Goods, the biggest store of its kind in the city. And there seemed little connection between this well-turned-out matron and my vision in the bathroom window. Her hair, instead of being piled up on her head, was now centre-parted and worn shoulder-length, in two correct, smooth wings that rolled under at the ends. Even her face was different: she used eye-shadow and bright lipstick, like a model; and like many mainlanders, she wore clothes that were subtly smarter than those of most Tasmanian women. Even in the casual dress suitable to holiday, she had the formal look of a woman born to money.

  Today there was no one else on the verandah; the other guests hadn’t yet come up from the beach for their tea and scones. She and I read in silence.

  Then the impossible happened; Mrs Dillon spoke to me.

  ‘How is your leg these days?’

  It was a low, well-spoken, authoritative voice, and I looked up in startlement. It seemed that our acquaintance was beginning in the middle.

  ‘It’s getting better,’ I said. My tone was abrupt; I hardly used the walking-stick at all, and felt entitled to have my limp ignored. A breaker fell distinctly on the beach; then it could be heard sucking back. There were crickets beyond the walls of the garden.

  ‘I know all about you, from your Aunt Dora,’ said Mrs Dillon. ‘I’m glad you’re getting better. You must have had to be brave, when you were small.’

  I was embarrassed by this, but the smell of hot tarpaper was incense now. Did she know about the window? Unthinkable. Yet her light blue eyes were studying me with odd intentness. They were well-spaced eyes, with clear whites; and the wa
y she had widened them gave her the look of a solemn, surprised, small girl, or of one of those expensive dolls small girls carried about: a Dutch doll, I decided. It was suggested by her fair skin, which looked as though it was never in hot sun, and by her features: the short nose; the mouth of exactly the right fullness, and the firm, round chin that I found perfect; and it was emphasised by her skilfully darkened brows and lashes, and the smooth, flax-blonde hair falling to her shoulders.

  We began now to talk more easily. She looked at my books, and asked about my final exams, and St Augustine’s. She was a Catholic too, she said, and had gone to the nuns for Sunday School as a girl. But her schooling had been at an Anglican Ladies’ College; her father had thought they turned out a better product. She looked sly at this, prepared to joke at herself. Finally, at something I said about the Brothers, she threw her head back and laughed. It was a clever, pleasant laugh, and seemed to me very sophisticated. She was amused by my description of Brother Kinsella; I had compared him to the Beadle in Oliver Twist, and now did an imitation of his voice.

  ‘You should be an actor,’ she said.

  Carried away, I almost considered bringing in my belch; but I thought better of it.

  ‘Would you like to be an actor?’ she asked. ‘Wonderful, if you were. I love the theatre, don’t you?’

  I told her of my ambitions. I wanted to act, I said, but I wanted most to be a producer; I believed this was where my real talent lay. She didn’t laugh at me; she nodded shrewdly, and looked impressed, as though these dreams were possible. Then she said: ‘Why don’t you come over here? It’s such a strain, shouting like this.’ As I lurched to the chair next to her, we both laughed at the drolly deep, exaggerated intonation she had used on the word ‘shouting’. We had the same sense of humour, I thought, and grew absurdly elated.