Black Diamonds

by Kim Kelly

  Will I? This bloke’s got some serious tickets on himself but I’m more than happy to believe him. Might take some time to believe there’s a permanent piece of metal in there, though. What if I rust? Don’t ask.

  Can’t now anyway: he’s off, busy man, and I’m alone again. Completely. Except for a tall potted plant by the window, some sort of palm. Can’t even hear anyone about, it’s that quiet. Of course I have to have a go at getting up straightaway. Can’t. Stratho has a good long laugh. Go back to staring out the window at the sea beyond Bondi and the sky that’s so clear it looks flat enough to walk on, and I’m feeling envy for the plant that’s swaying a bit in the breeze: got more freedom of movement than me. Have another go. Nearly roll off the bed. Just leave it. Wait.

  Wait for France; she’s come in twice a day for the last few days but I’ve either been asleep or in the land of Best Brew Ever. Wonder what the time is now; wouldn’t know, beyond morning. I’ve had my breakfast, been shaved, and Nurse even asked me if I wanted to clean my teeth. Yes please, and the service here is amazing, thank you. So it should be for the cost. I should track down Sister Pam Taylor one day and tell her about this for a laugh. I even got a copy of the Herald with the slice of lemon for my cup of tea with breakie. Haven’t read it, though: apart from news from the Western Front, front page is news of a cyclone wrecking several towns on the Queensland coast. I haven’t had a nightmare or a daymare for more than two months and I’m not going to give myself one by reading the details.

  Got to do something, though. Probably only been ten minutes and I’m bored already. There is something wrong with me in that respect, I’m sure of it. A bloke should be able to be still, and not fidget. But I am so bored I’m scrunching the end of the sheet in my toes and my left hand is twisting the end of the cord in my pyjama duds. I do these things without thinking: I can stop doing them, but as soon as I don’t think about it, I’ll start doing them again. What else is there to do? Resist the temptation to touch the external transfixion; just because it’s right there and I can’t work out how it is it doesn’t hurt. My elbow does, a bit, but not the fat pins going through my skin and into my bone. How can that be? Doesn’t matter: all the fingers on my hand work, that’s all that matters. Make a fist to prove it, sort of. Awch: that does hurt.

  But now here’s footsteps, at bloody last, save me from disappearing up my own arse.

  It’s France. ‘Hello,’ she says. ‘You’re with us,’ and she’s glowing, little bit sunburned, brought the sun in her hair; her eyes are so blue against the sky behind her and blinking: no cranky nonsense, Daniel. I’m not about to give her any, unless she doesn’t hurry up and kiss me. Reliable as ever, there she is. She tastes of peppermint and Francine taste. ‘Poor darlingest,’ she says. ‘Is it too awful?’

  Wonder what she’s referring to for a second; laugh: ‘No.’

  ‘Sure,’ she says, and there’s a trace of my mother in that sure. She thinks I’m having her on.

  I say: ‘Really, it looks a lot worse than it feels.’

  She’s not convinced; can’t blame her: it does look revolting. ‘Well, that’s almost as credible as my mischief-making,’ she says.

  Here we go, this’ll be entertaining. ‘You’ve done it, then, have you?’ Not that Francine can’t do anything she puts her mind to, but I didn’t think she’d have a hope of getting in the door of any gallery with my rubbish, let alone the state one. Still don’t expect she has. I’m waiting to hear all about the debacle, and she says: ‘Not exactly …’But then looks a bit guilty about it.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I ran into a certain Mr Duncan, father of your Dunc …’

  ‘Ran into him?’

  ‘Not exactly …’ And she tells me all about it. Then: ‘I hope you’re not cross.’

  ‘Cross?’ Jesus, I’m still taking in the tale, but I’m thrilled she’s off-loaded them; wouldn’t care if she exchanged them for a chook under the counter at a pub. If Dunc’s father wants the mad, ugly things, he can have them.

  Then she says, ‘Um …’ and she never says um. ‘He was quite impressed, you know, quite very impressed actually. He mentioned a collector he knows, whom he thinks would be even more impressed, suggested this fellow would be keen to meet you.’

  Keen to meet me? What for? A laugh? ‘I’m sure he was just being polite, France,’ I tell her.

  ‘No. I don’t think so,’ she says, staring at me. Blink, blink. Waiting.

  ‘Well, I do think so.’ Think about it: if this Mr Duncan is really interested himself, then it’s probably only because he’s lost his son and I knew him; and if France believes it’s anything more than that, it’s only because she wants to believe it, or maybe needs to; and Mr Duncan would have seen that plain in her big blue eyes, as anyone would, so he’d have said something extra nice to her about them: I know a fellow who knows a fellow, et cetera … and if you ever mention it again, I can say oh what a shame, he’s just left town.

  Now she looks cross. ‘Mr Duncan knows what he’s talking about. He wanted to buy them, first thing: name your price, he said. I told him they weren’t for sale, but neglected to add that the artist is averse to anything which might suggest he is of value. I don’t know why I bothered with the caper’

  I do: because you love me. But I don’t say that; can’t anyway, she’s not finished.

  ‘Anyone would think you were afraid of praise, though Mr Duncan also knows very well that you’re not a coward. And so do I. He knows all about your record. Record of abandoning.’

  Whoa. ‘What would you know about it? What did he tell you?’ And I am a bit more than cross now myself: whoever he is, he’s got no business having an opinion of me, let alone having chats about it with my wife.

  She grabs my hand. ‘He didn’t tell me anything, I promise. Just that his son told him about you. Please, can you pretend I didn’t say any of that. I don’t know what I’m talking about and I don’t want to know.’

  No, you don’t, and I’m never going to tell you; very good thing you can’t read my mind right now. I tell her: ‘But you know enough to work out why I’m not interested in the Holy Fucking Monsters, don’t you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you be off somewhere with the kids now?’

  ‘Yes.’

  And I’ve made her cry. She leaves me like I’ve kicked her.

  And I’ll spend the rest of the day thinking about how I’m going to apologise for that.

  FRANCINE

  Bravo, Francy. You fucking cretin. That was not a ruthless act of devotion; it was … schedule ten minutes for immersion in boiling oil for that misguided salvo, then arrange to have tongue cut out. But in the meantime, stick a smile on your face: ‘All right kiddos, let’s head for Taronga Park Zoo. Who’s up for an elephant ride?’

  Kathryn asks: ‘Is Uncle Daniel feeling better?’

  ‘Oh yes, much better,’ I tell her. Nothing like a visit from his dutiful wife to make him feel just grand. ‘He could do with a present, though. How about you help me choose something for him later on?’ See if you can help me get that half right.

  DANIEL

  Longest hours ever: me, the pot plant, lunch at one and then slow destruction of the cord in my pyjamas; feels like days before she’s back. And when she comes in she says straight off: ‘I’m not going to say sorry, Daniel, because I don’t expect forgiveness for that depth of error.’

  I tell her: ‘It’s not you that needs forgiveness, France.’ Can’t get past that for a second; tell her what she wants to hear and what’s true: ‘You can tell Dunc’s father that I would like him to have the paintings and he can do whatever he wants with them, so long as I don’t have to talk about it, to anyone. All right?’

  She nods.

  Then just to make it clear: ‘And soon as I can, I’ll paint something else: you. You can lock me in my room if I misbehave.’

  And when she smiles, I feel twice as ashamed of myself for having shouted at her, sworn at her. She kiss
es it away, and her tear hits my cheek, slides into the pillow with mine and my promise to myself never to do that to her again, for any reason.

  ‘Well,’ she says, sitting down on the edge of the bed, and there’s a breath of wicked in that well: ‘It remains that blokes should beware of wives bearing gifts. Got you this.’

  She pulls a small, battered, leather-bound book from her bag and hands it to me. It’s a copy of, of all things, The Manifesto of the Communist Party, by Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels.

  I just look at her; she blinks, as if to say: don’t you like it? And she’s having more than a bit of fun with me.

  I say: ‘I’m sure the Russian’ll be pleased to see me with this.’ Whenever he turns up again to show me how to get out of bed.

  There’s the bell, and she lets me in on the lark: ‘Look at the inscription.’

  Flip open the cover with my thumb; it reads, in writing that’s bad enough to be mine: Mr Hughes, Is Australia a model of bloodless political Evolution? Only History will tell. A signature scribble, then: Lenin, 1913.

  ‘Where did you get this?’ And I’m still reading over it, as if it’s double-dutch.

  She says: ‘On the two for a penny secondhand shelf at a thrift shop round the corner at the Junction, just now. Only went in there to buy some puzzlers for the children. How’s that for a puzzler. And incendiary. Fancy Mr Hughes is our little Troll? I’m rather tinny for it at the moment, aren’t I?’

  ‘You’re not wrong there.’ Though I reckon she’s whipped it out of her magic hat. ‘But Hughes is common as muck; have to be a goose to turf something like this, though.’ Real or otherwise. I know that Comrade Lenin gave his two bobs’ on this place, and I know it was in 1913 because I’d just turned nineteen; I remember thinking who the fuck is he, and what’s a Bolshevik; it was something in some rag quoting him, saying Australian socialism was a bourgeois European fantasy, that our parliament was full of workers’ reps that could shut down the Cook government but that had the hands of the plutocracy so firmly up their arses communism couldn’t happen here. I remember being shitted-off at this Russian nobody calling Australia a young British colony that didn’t have any socialists worth anything in it. Fair call, as it turns out. And Hughes would have been one of them at the time: not likely to have sent off abroad for Lenin’s autograph; and even if he did, he wouldn’t leave it lying around in a personal copy of the Manifesto: more likely to have burned it since Russia’s signed a truce with Germany and left Britannia in the lurch for its Workers’ Revolution. But then again, he did once run a Socialist League bookshop in Balmain or something, didn’t he? Maybe he was an under-the-counter communist-autograph collector in his spare time. Who knows. Maybe it’s someone’s idea of a joke. Pretty funny one as it turns out. Or pretty sad.

  She raises her eyebrow, giggles at me. ‘Yes, common as muck. Have to be a goose to sell Mr Lenin’s signature for half a penny. What’s the world coming to? Anyway, knowing how much you love to read, darlingest, thought you’d appreciate such a slim volume.’ And it is tiny; seems too slim to be anything much at all. Then she adds: ‘I’ve had a quick look and I can recommend chapter three for hypnotic bombast if you’re having any trouble sleeping.’

  ‘Thanks, dear. ‘Who is this woman?

  ‘Try to do my best for you,’ she says, reaching in her bag again and handing me a parcel. ‘But this is your proper present. Kathryn chose it.’

  I look at the knot in the string round the wrapping and hand it back. ‘You could do me a favour.’

  ‘Oh?’ she says; then: ‘Oh, of course.’ Dippiest girl in the world, my girl.

  ‘Your niece knows something about gentle treachery,’ she says, picking it undone. ‘For adored ascetic uncle it must be luxurious, currently extremely expensive, and outrageously delicious.’

  It’s chocolate. What else do you have with your communism? ‘Tell her I love it: just what I wanted.’

  She says: ‘I should do that now, get back to the kiddos and stop bothering you.’ Don’t stop; but then she kisses me again, properly, and I think it wouldn’t be a bad idea if she left immediately.

  ‘Is there anything you need for the morning?’

  Get my head out of right now for long enough to manage: ‘You could run a new cord through for my pyjamas.’

  She looks at the damage. ‘How’d that happen?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  But she smiles like she’s made a fairly good guess.

  Dinner and half the box of chocolates later, sun’s going down, no sign of anyone coming to turn on a light for me, so I skip to the end of the Manifesto, like it’ll have a wind-up; but it does: Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!

  And then do what? For this country’s proletariat the answer might be: bog into the good stuff left behind by the ruling classes, then complain about headache and indigestion for a while before whingeing come Saturday: Where’s the fucking boss pissed off to, I want me fucking pay. Not really, but there’d need to be a few changes to the Manifesto for Australia: with confiscation of all property of all emigrants and rebels, there’d be very few left with anything, and with an equitable distribution of the population throughout the country, we’d all be starved for each other’s company; hand’s up for not living in the desert too. And I have a more fundamental question for the Communist Party of the World: in your forcible overthrow, unless you execute all the mean arsewipes, across all classes, then where’s your advantage? There’s always going to be thickheads, across all classes, that have no idea, and I should know; so how do you educate, protect and make equal that which can never be the equal of an arsewipe intent on taking his own advantage? Manifesto of Ackerman: the world is divided into two main groups: a large group called Idiots, and a small one called Selfish Bastards. The Selfish Bastard, like most parasites, can only be exterminated by means of something which will probably take half your skin off while you’re at it. This is why I am not a philosopher, or a politician. I am, regardless, a member of the ruling class, however uncomfortable that fact still is. I’m not trembling, though, except maybe from too much chocolate, which I would have shared if there was anyone about.

  Footsteps: please, whoever you are, come and have a hazelnut thingo before I make myself sick.

  ‘Apologies for the delay, Mr Ackerman.’

  Of course it’s the Russian; it would be, wouldn’t it, while I’m holding The Red Rag. He’s come to get me up and about, no doubt, and I forgot to ask the nurse to change my pyjamas so they don’t fall down when Frankenstein’s monster stands; embarrassing enough to have to ring a little brass bell to ask her for anything. Strange day, very: why not end it with an extra dose of embarrassment.

  I say: ‘Don’t worry about it.’

  ‘I was not worried,’ spade face smiles; it is a smile: ‘But I do enjoy Australian idiom.’

  Idiom? Close enough to idiot for me. He’s rigging up a length of rope, over the bar above the bed, for his monkey right now.

  But goose says: ‘You’ve had a busy day then?’ Couldn’t Nurse have done the job? Jesus: he could’ve just given the rope to me and I could’ve thrown it over, worked it out for myself, maybe.

  ‘Yes,’ he says, as in aren’t I generally very bloody busy. ‘I treat public patients at Sydney Hospital when necessary and this afternoon I was necessary, and busy.’

  ‘Why’s that?’ Half for want of chat, half for wonder.

  ‘Little boy fell off the roof of his house, two storeys. Did a good job on himself, as you might say.’

  Awch. ‘Is he all right?’

  ‘He will be.’ He snorts and shakes his head. ‘But I thought we might have to admit his mother: distressed for her child and terrified she could not afford a bill.’

  Out before I’ve thought it: ‘Well, I could pay for it.’

  He laughs. ‘You already have. I bill you as much as I can get
away with so that she does not have to pay, for me at least.’

  Fair enough.

  Then he says: ‘What are you reading?’

  ‘Just a bit of rubbish,’ I tell him, and shove it in the drawer of the bedside table. Expand my manifesto to include a third, probably even smaller group called The Decent. ‘You want a chocolate?’

  ‘No, thank you. But I’m sure you would like to be out of bed.’

  ‘Not till I’ve changed my pyjamas.’

  He looks concerned. ‘What’s wrong with your pyjamas?’

  Could’ve said that a bit more clearly, couldn’t I. ‘I’ve wrecked the cord.’

  Spade face nods like he’s sure I must have had a very dull one; but I haven’t, not by any stretch. And not now I’ve got a specialist surgeon changing my duds.

  ‘So,’ he says when I’m ready, ‘pull yourself upright, swing your legs over the side of the bed and stand up, slowly.’

  Is that right? Have to say: ‘I hope you didn’t make a special trip back here for this.’ Then I nearly keel over against him.

  ‘Yes,’ he says, righting me; and I’m sure he’s come for the entertainment. ‘Now sit back down and then do it again.’

  I do: ‘Well, there you go, thanks.’

  ‘Good,’ he says. ‘But bear in mind, Mr Ackerman, that I charge double for further repairs.’

  He’s got a laugh out of me. I suppose I could end the day by falling over and causing myself another injury, Doctor Adinov, but that’s one event I think I might try very hard to avoid.

  ‘So what is it you do, Mr Ackerman?’ Adinov asks me the next morning, and he’s holding a little spanner as he’s looking at my external transfixion. And yes, he’s going to use it on me. I’m getting ready to bite down the scream, and the only thing stopping me from closing my eyes is disbelief. But when he gives a short turn to the nut that holds the two bars at the tops of the pins, it doesn’t feel like anything, except what it looks like. I can’t make head or tail of that.

  I say: ‘What?’