The Doubleman

by Christopher Koch

  From the time of that first meeting with Brady and Burr, University had ceased to be real to me; I began to skip lectures, and to call around to Harrigan Street during the day. Lovejoy’s second-hand shop was becoming the only place that was real to me, the one place where I was truly content. I would help Darcy and Brian sort through purchases of junk, or load Sandy’s van with deliveries of furniture. Often they’d be practising their guitars out the back when I came, and threading my way through the mazes of wardrobes and dressing-tables I would feel my spirits lift at the throb and twang of the two guitars.

  They wouldn’t stop when I appeared, but would grin at me and go on playing, perched on kitchen stools, cocked heads nodding in concentration. And this was the heart of my contentment: simply to be accepted here; to listen; to be touched by the force and vigour of their drive towards Darcy Burr’s dream. They sensed this, and were pleased by it. Lectures on Jurisprudence or Ethics had now become ridiculous and irrelevant.

  I often went around in the evenings, as well. One night, after a rehearsal of The Importance of Being Earnest, I came very late, at about eleven-thirty.

  I knocked on one of the glass panes of the street door, and peered in. The winter night was rainless but freezing; an icy wind was coming up from the Channel. After a time the shape of Darcy Burr appeared, making his way between the wardrobes.

  ‘G’day,’ he said, and waved me in. His eyes glinted with secret amusement; he always used this greeting, whether it was day or night — the droll emphasis on ‘day’ like a suggestive joke known only to the two of us.

  The area at the back of the shop had been made cosier than usual. A log fire had been lit in a fireplace opposite Sandy’s glass office, and a soft light came from a table-lamp set on a sideboard. I was shown to a chair at a polished dining-room table of Tasmanian blackwood, one of Sandy’s most expensive items.

  Sandy himself had gone to bed, and I found myself with Burr, Brady, and a twelve-year-old girl in a long white nylon nightdress and red slippers: a sad-looking child I’d never seen before, with cropped hair like dry grass, worn in a fringe, and a short upper lip that made her vaguely rabbit-like. Her name was Denise; I gathered she was some sort of cousin of Darcy’s and a niece of Sandy’s, who had come here to stay for reasons that were not made clear. She was painfully shy; her head was constantly bowed, and she rarely spoke. I wondered why she wasn’t in bed.

  But she was clearly included. As I sat down, she moved about the table laying out pieces of cardboard that were pencilled with the letters of the alphabet, and with numbers. Two others bore the words Yes and No. The table was otherwise empty, except for an upturned wineglass standing in its own reflection. Denise hurried importantly, like a child chosen to be monitor in class, darting quick glances at us, her small, furtive face bent, never meeting our eyes. I had the impression that she was afraid of something; or perhaps of everything. But my attention was mainly on the cards.

  ‘What’s this?’ I asked. ‘A game?’

  Darcy and Brian were quiet, leaning back in their chairs. Now Burr smiled at me with an air of great significance. ‘No game, mate,’ he said quietly. ‘This is a seance. Ever been in a seance?’

  I hadn’t, and felt partly contemptuous, partly curious. It was Broderick, I learned, who had introduced them to seances, and they appeared to take it seriously; Darcy with enthusiasm, Brian with an embarrassed air. The idea that spirits of the dead could be contacted in this way wasn’t one I was prepared to entertain seriously; nevertheless, I did as I was asked, and put my outstretched finger with the others on the base of the upturned wineglass in the centre of the table.

  For a moment there was silence, while we sat with our arms extended like the spokes of a wheel. The little smiles of people who expected the impossible touched all our lips. Denise smiled too, her tiny upper lip disappearing, her mouth like a hurt (even smiling was some sort of penalty), her cloudy, greenish eyes looking at Burr from under the fringe of hair. He caught her glance and winked. She looked down again quickly, wriggling with pleasure, her thin, bare arm obediently outstretched. Skinny as a boy except for the hinted swellings of her breasts, she hitched with her free hand at the strap of the nightdress, which kept slipping from one bony shoulder. When her smile had gone, sadness resumed in her face. And there was something abnormal about her, I decided. Trying to sum her up, I described her to myself as schizoid — being given to the glib use of clinical categories, as most of us were at University.

  Burr now tilted his head back, closing his eyes as though in prayer. ‘We’re all waiting,’ he said to the ceiling. ‘Is there anybody there?’

  For a few moments, nothing happened. No one spoke or moved; a log collapsed in the fire, whose flames caused large shadows to leap on the walls, and to lurch like creatures among the junk. Then the glass began to move: slowly at first, then faster, so that we all had to lean to keep up with it. It slid across the polished surface, coming to a halt finally in front of the card marked Yes.

  An ancient sensation of cold crept up my back, overflowing like water on to my neck. ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Who’s pushing the glass?’

  ‘No one pushed it, mate,’ Darcy said.

  I looked at Brian, who shook his head seriously.

  Denise spoke for the first time, her voice so soft it seemed to come from the shadows of the furniture behind her. ‘No one’s pushing it,’ she said. ‘It’s the spirits.’ She peered half-defiantly from under her fringe, her small upper lip setting into place again.

  Darcy looked at her with a fondness I’d not seen him show before. ‘Denise knows,’ he said. ‘She knows all about the spirits. She’s our medium. They come for her.’

  As the glass travelled about the table, spelling out its messages — seeking the letters with little halts and hesitations and sometimes with impulsive rushes, like a blind man feeling his way — a strange assortment of people arrived in answer to our questions; the shadows who always turn up in seances and who end by being tedious. But that night it was all novel to me, and I had some difficulty in maintaining my scepticism, even though I couldn’t share the enthusiasm of the others. These strangers from the dead who spelled out answers and warnings seemed worrying souls, with little to say that was helpful or cheering: a drunkard called Ray who had died in 1942; a Rumanian who spelled out endless obscenities; a woman called Jean who had committed suicide in Sydney.

  One of them however I did find interesting, in spite of my reluctance to believe in him. This was Michael Brady, born in County Clare, who said he had come to Van Diemen’s Land as a prisoner in 1848.

  ‘It’s our great-great-grandfather,’ Brian exclaimed. ‘Yours and mine.’ He stared at me, his eyes bright in the half-light.

  ‘You’re pushing the glass,’ I said; but he protested that he wasn’t.

  Burr raised his head to the ceiling. ‘What did you want to say to us, Michael?’

  The glass then moved about the letters to spell out evil.

  I felt the wave of cold again, at this. ‘Who’s evil?’ I asked.

  But now the glass behaved strangely. Moving into the centre of the table, it began to describe circles, so fast that we all had to lean and lunge to keep up with it.

  ‘Jesus,’ Brian said. ‘What’s this?’ We all stared at each other over the glass’s vortex; even Denise’s gaze remained fixed.

  ‘He doesn’t want to answer,’ Burr said excitedly. ‘You’ve upset him.’ He frowned as though I’d transgressed in some way.

  The glass stopped.

  ‘Is there anyone else there?’ Burr asked.

  ‘I think we should stop, Darcy,’ Brian said. But the glass had already begun to move, and spell out a name. For a few moments, I stared at it without recognition.

  HAZEL

  ‘Right, that’s it, Darcy,’ Brian said loudly. ‘She’s back! I told you if she came back I’d be out.’ He stood up, towering over the table, his face reflecting the fire.

  Darcy was expressionless; Denise sat with her
head bent. ‘Hazel Pearce?’ I asked. ‘But she’s not dead.’

  ‘Yes,’ Darcy said softly. ‘Dead.’

  Brian bent over to peer into Burr’s face. ‘No more of this shit with spirits, Darcy! You and Brod both — you can count me out of it. I’m going to bed.’

  He made off quickly down the room, disappearing through the door by Sandy’s office. For a moment, there was silence. Then Burr spoke softly to Denise. ‘I think you’d better get off to bed too, kid.’ He leaned and kissed her quickly on the cheek, one large hand about her waist, and I saw her flush. Then she shuffled away in her red slippers, grassy head bent, to follow Brian out the door. As she passed the fire, the gown became transparent, disclosing the pathetic thinness of her legs.

  ‘You’d better stay the night, Dick,’ Darcy said. He spoke as though nothing had happened. ‘It’s late, and bloody cold.’

  ‘How did she die?’ I had wanted the glass to answer more questions, and now felt ashamed of my gullibility.

  ‘Hazel?’ Darcy asked. ‘She died having an abortion, about a year ago. A back-alley job in Launceston. She bled to death without telling anyone.’

  I could say nothing for a moment. Then I said: ‘It was Brian’s kid, wasn’t it?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Darcy said, and nodded brightly. ‘When she got pregnant, the Bradys sent her back to her people. Then she wrote a letter to Brian. She wanted to come to Hobart and see him — but she didn’t say she was pregnant. I don’t think Brian answered the letter. He only found out what had happened later. He won’t talk about it much.’

  ‘And now she comes in the seances,’ I said.

  ‘She wants to talk to him,’ Darcy murmured. ‘It’s natural.’

  I made a sound of disgust. ‘I don’t really believe in this stuff, Darcy.’ I used my Psychology tutorial manner, and expounded. Brian felt guilty, I said; so when they played their games, he unconsciously selected the letters. ‘You both do,’ I concluded.

  But Darcy merely smiled, leaning back in his chair. It was the sort of smile I had seen on the faces of fundamentalist believers: Salvationists or Plymouth Brethren. ‘The spirits were here, mate,’ he said. ‘Just above your head — and you know it.’

  I had actually had this illusion when Darcy looked towards the ceiling, but I shook my head. ‘Sorry. I don’t believe it. And if Broderick believes in this stuff, he’s a nut.’

  Burr stared at me without answering for a moment, and I wondered if he was about to take offence. There was something vaguely threatening about him at times, even though he wasn’t openly aggressive. But when he spoke, his tone was restrained.

  ‘Yes, Brod taught us about the spirits,’ he said, ‘and a lot of other things besides the guitar. We went to a different university from you, Dick.’

  There was nothing I could say to this that wasn’t rude, and we both fell silent, staring at the fire, towards which we had turned our chairs. Something seemed to be moving in a dim corner of the shop; glancing from the corner of my eye, I saw that it was one of the large shadow-creatures created by the firelight. It was very quiet, now; in all the piles of junk, not a sound or a creak. Finally, I asked, ‘What sort of things did he teach you?’ Something made me hostile to the idea of Broderick’s wisdom, and I adopted the languid and sceptical tone of one of my lecturers. ‘What sort of special knowledge does he claim to have? He’s just an accountant in a bookshop, isn’t he?’

  Darcy grinned, legs extended towards the fire, hands in his pockets. ‘You blokes who go to university think you’ve got a monopoly on learning,’ he said. ‘Don’t you?’ Before I could answer, he said: ‘The best thing about working for Brod in the bookshop was that I learned to read.’ He grinned slyly. ‘I got an education there. I’m not saying a university education isn’t worthwhile: no knowledge is useless; knowledge is power, as they say. But how much power is there in that knowledge they give you at university?’

  I said nothing, and waited.

  ‘Broderick could have been a great guitarist,’ Burr said. ‘Or a scholar. Anything. He knows more than all your university professors put together. But instead he picked the path of obscurity — he went for secret knowledge.’

  He’d said nothing, really; he was absurd. And yet I was reluctantly impressed in some way. I reminded myself that Burr was half-educated, and therefore an easy mark for odd ideas. But he had a confidence that troubled my complacency; the raw intensity of the untutored, the self-taught, beside which the respectable certainties of the expert can suddenly seem feeble.

  The fact that his dramatic delivery was plainly calculated didn’t lessen its effectiveness; it was helped by his cold, beer-coloured eyes, which were constantly fixed on mine, as well as by the shop’s ancient gloom, where the years were congealed like drain water. I edged my chair nearer the fire.

  ‘He taught us about the road to the invisible,’ Darcy was saying. ‘He taught us about the Demiurge.’

  ‘The what?’

  Suddenly, from somewhere among the groves of junk, a clock began to chime, and I jumped. It struck two, and while it did so, wheezing between each strike, Burr and I were silent. It was growing colder in the shop, and the fire seemed to do little to warm it; I got up and threw another log on.

  ‘I’ll put just one thing to you,’ Darcy said. ‘Is there an unseen world?’

  ‘Of course.’ I was standing with my back to the fire.

  ‘And how do you get in touch with it?’

  ‘Not through seances. Through prayer.’

  Darcy laughed sneeringly, as though I knew this to be foolish; and now I grew irritated.

  ‘Where do these spirits of yours come from?’ I asked. ‘The souls of the good aren’t hanging around, are they? They’re united with God.’ My irritation had drawn this from me in spite of myself; I was fast becoming agnostic, at university.

  ‘Don’t tell me you still believe in that Catholic bullshit? Brian doesn’t,’ Darcy said. ‘He’s grown out of those fairy tales. So should you.’

  ‘But you believe in spirits that talk to you through a glass. Isn’t that a fairy tale?’

  Darcy stood up. ‘Time to put you to bed,’ he said. ‘Brod’ll make you understand, when you go to work for him. Have you made up your mind about that yet?’

  Yes, I said; and I suddenly found I had.

  He didn’t ask me what my decision was; he seemed to know, and his grin grew broad. ‘Terrific,’ he said. ‘I knew you had more guts than to stay a respectable middle-class shit. You have to jump, Dick, if you want anything worthwhile. You’ll be in Sydney within six months. We’ll all go together.’

  He began to move away into the dimness beyond the fire; but on reaching the door he paused, and looked over his shoulder. ‘I hope you don’t have bad dreams, mate.’

  I did dream that night, under Sandy’s worn grey blankets. But it wasn’t a dream I thought of as bad; in fact, it was like no other in my life.

  I still found it hard to get warm; and as well, I was oppressed by the musty old shop which had always troubled me, its tall shapes of furniture all around, the fire creatures leaping on the wall. They leaped in my sleep; and I dreamed. It was one of those dreams that don’t seem like dreams at all, but a reality more intense than waking life. It seemed to have come from somewhere else.

  I was in a crowded place; a large, cave-like room filled with people I didn’t recognise. They were discussing somebody who had died. I became confused, and walked into a smaller room which was empty and featureless, with a floor of bare, dusty boards.

  The room was filled with wind, coming through a window somewhere. And I heard a voice say: ‘She’s in the West Wind.’

  The wind became stronger, and ineffably thrilling. I wanted to go back and tell the others what was happening, but I couldn’t move. The wind increased to an almost unbearable pitch; it touched my nerves with needles of ice, yet still I thrilled to it.

  And now, as I stood stock-still in the room, facing the source of the wind, a set of icy lights app
eared in the air just above me. ‘It’s no dream,’ I said; my body knew in sleep that this was happening. The lights moved and glowed like fireflies, and then they congealed and took form and changed into the lost girl, the beloved, whose small face was ordinary yet beautiful, whose wide mouth tenderly smiled, and whose brown hair was blown sideways. She was the lights, and the lights were she. They pierced me; they were returning, as the wind rose and rose; and the girl was fading. The lights danced and shifted, and her image became uncertain.

  She was gone, and I was filled with unbearable grief, unbearable joy, the needles of ice all through me. ‘Yes,’ I said, and woke up saying it, to find myself in the cold of the shop, with its dark and jumbled shapes, its dying embers. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It was her. She’s in the West Wind.’

  The district of Second-hand claimed all three of us, in our youth: Burr, Brady and myself. But since Brian wasn’t a thinker, I believe it affected him less than Burr and me. Despite my condescension about Darcy’s lack of education, he and I proved to have much in common. Both of us had lived a good deal in territories of paper.

  Darcy’s, I found, was in the basement of Varley’s Bookshop, that territory which was presided over by the man called Broderick. Mine was at Trent Street; and at least one wall of my paper prison was composed of Deirdre Dillon’s letters.

  My ambition to go to drama school in Sydney and to survive there as an actor was genuine enough. But I have to admit that my longing had a double edge to it — since to reach Sydney, I thought, would reunite me with Deirdre.

  Her memory, now over eighteen months old, was constantly tended. She was now only partly real, and yet more important than reality; she drained reality of its savour. I told myself again and again that I had no business dwelling on an adulterous love; before I began to lose my faith, I had even disclosed it in Confession, listening humbly and hypocritically in the dark box to the priest’s reproaches. I knew, even as I listened, that I’d made a bad confession, since I wasn’t truly repentant, and since my longing would continue the moment I left the box.