by Kim Kelly
He says: ‘I asked, what is it you do, for a living.’
I’m a professional orthopaedic experiment, I’m thinking, but I say: ‘Not a lot at the minute.’ Or nothing, to be honest. Ask him: ‘What did you do just then?’
‘Moved the edges of the bone by the smallest fraction, to straighten the shaft; I’ll do this every other day for a few weeks until it is correctly positioned.’
He’s put his spanner down and now he’s dabbing wet cotton wool around the bottom of the pins.
‘What’s that you’re putting on it?’ I sound like Charlie.
‘Boiled, salted water. Revolutionary antiseptic, this one. And you are free now for another day of not a lot.’
And off he goes to amaze someone else.
Off I go on my first slow trip out to the balcony, wishing I had my boots on so I wouldn’t lean that extra half inch to the right. There’s a couple of other blokes out here, or young gentlemen I should say: silk dressing gowns and slippers, one’s smoking a pipe and the other’s wearing a couldn’t-miss-it-at- midnight dark pink cravat, or should I say cerise. I can’t be missed either: they’ve seen me, in my best Francine-made-to-measure pyjama duds and nothing else but my cement and metal.
‘Hullo. Here, that’s impressive,’ says Cerise.
Pipe waves.
I could probably do with some more practice at being civilised and polite; at least try not to be so quick to judge others. See how we go: smile: ‘G’day.’
When I’ve lowered myself into a chair, chat in Universal Bloke follows: comparison of ailments. I win: not hard. Cerise has twisted a knee coming off a horse in a game of polo. Polo? And Pipe’s knocked a couple of ribs coming a cropper while motoring. I’d like to ask them what they are doing hanging about in a hospital, even if this particular one appears to double as a gents’ holiday resort, but think better of it: they’re doing their duty for Adinov’s public service, possibly while avoiding military service.
Pipe says to me: ‘So, you must have a tale to tell about this arm of yours?’
No: ‘It’s a very long one.’
‘We’ve got all day,’ Cerise chuckles.
Fuck off: ‘I buggered it at Pozieres for the AIF.’ Stratho’s rolling around pissing himself at that.
Conversation stopper: they don’t want to know now. But they are patriots nonetheless.
Cerise says: ‘Only one thing the damned war’s good for — Blighty’s still pushing up the price of our wheat and wool. I’d put some money in the golden fleece if you haven’t already.’
Thanks for the advice, and the note I’ve just added to my manifesto: Cerise is the Idiot that is produced when Selfish Bastards breed.
‘So, what is it you do with yourself when you’re not being tortured?’ Pipe asks me; it’s clearly the question of the day.
‘Fuck all,’ I say, and they think that’s hilarious.
‘Here’s to fuck all,’ says Cerise, chuckle, chuckle, chuckle.
Pipe says: ‘What’s your business then?’
‘Coal,’ I say. That’s what it is, and a big fat penny’s suddenly spinning on the floor between my feet. I can hear it but I can’t see it. Fact: Francine and I own half a coal mine. I can hear Evan saying: if you were any slower on this, I’d say you were backward. Francine and I have to buy out Drummond, and then … not sure. It’ll come. And I won’t be looking to Messrs Marx and Engels for advice on how to overthrow myself. I might not be much chop as a bourgeois Kraut intellectual, but neither of them ever hewed coal, did they. Neither has Lenin, or Hughes for that matter. They can all go to buggery, along with the miners’ federation. I’m going to do something very radical: talk to my wife, when we get home, after I’ve had more of a think about it.
‘You’d be doing well then,’ says Pipe.
‘I suppose so.’ But I really don’t know what’s in the capital kitty. Francine looks after our accounts.
‘Oh, there you are.’ And here she is now, my saviour, in a thousand different ways: ‘Should you be out of bed?’
Yes, but: ‘Not for long. Better get back in it.’
Cerise and Pipe are looking at me for an introduction. I say: ‘My wife.’
France gives me that look: exceptionally rude, Daniel.
I give her one back: So what. But I have a simple engineering problem as regards escape: I’m stuck in this bloody chair, trapped by curved, sloping armrests that were not made with me in mind: I’ll topple it as soon as I push up. ‘You could do me a favour.’
‘Yes?’ she says.
I say, quietly: ‘Just stand there and don’t move, will you.’
I put my hand on her shoulder and haul. I’m up and she cracks a beauty of a smile. ‘Well, this is dancing, isn’t it.’
And it is.
‘I was somewhat distracted this morning. So, it’s fortunate I did such a good job on it, hmm?’ Adinov says when I come to, and this, I think, is Russian humour, which I might appreciate another day. He’s just told me I’ll be like this till the tenth of April, that’s fifty-three days away, no metal, except for my permanent, most important, funny-bone pin, but no moving shoulder either: cement stays, it’s fixed my hand on my heart, or near enough; here’s cheers for remembrance, King George. And it must be a hundred and five degrees in the shade and a hundred and four and a half here indoors. Bastard. I am seriously impatient, seriously beyond this. You’d think I’d have learned something about compliance, acceptance of time as my bones know it. No. Think about the other poor blokes worse off? No. At least it means I can leave prison, though: France can take me home tomorrow: lucky, lucky, lucky girl.
But now spade face says: ‘Fortunate it survived the whole journey, I thought, when I realised who you are.’
‘Who am I?’ Apart from not keen for a game of Guess Who.
‘The artist responsible for three paintings I saw yesterday evening.’
Good thing I’m horizontal and weighted down. Thought I might have been beyond surprise. ‘Am I.’
‘Yes. Don’t worry about it: Edward Duncan has only shown them to me. No one else. Your wife made it very clear to him that you do not want to acknowledge them, and I can see why. But you should know that if you don’t continue with it I would want to amputate my good job for the waste of it.’
‘And who are you?’ I’m somewhere between not here at all and knocked for six.
‘Someone who perhaps understands something about waste, loss.’
Go on.
He sits on the bed as if he owns it and I’m sure he does. ‘Well, if losing my country can be considered a loss. I left St Petersburg, or Petrograd, or whatever you want to call it, almost two years ago, after taking my leave of the carcasses on the Eastern Front. Easy for me to do, but lacking in foresight. I no longer have a home there, it is now the possession of the state. Whatever the state of Russia is now. It has been expropriated from me, I was fortunate to get most of my money out in time. I do not care that peasants have probably brought their pigs to winter inside my home — I wish them every happiness together — but I do care that inside my home, on the ceiling of the main bedroom, is a fresco painted by my grandfather for my grandmother. It is not masterly, a brilliant mess of angels and doves and too many flowers, but it is a priceless expression, and my inheritance, or was. You understand?’
‘Yes.’ That I must be due another riddle, but I can see Dad’s kitchen cupboards, and the bedhead he carved for Mum and I think I know what he means. At least I know that I would be ropeable if it was expropriated from her.
He goes on: ‘As irreplaceable as any treasure — my collection of artworks, from all over Europe, all those years picking up this and that. It’s all gone. It would be interesting to know what the Soviet has made of them. My taste runs a little to the innovative, shall we say. Taste in art as well as transfixion apparatus — not always appreciated by those who know so much better. Like your work, yes? Unlike any other work I’ve seen here.’
Work? Jesus. And, slow off the mark as I a
m, I realise this must be that collector France mentioned; it wasn’t bullshit, even if that’s the main word going through my mind at the minute. Stumble into it: ‘They’re just pictures, flukes. I’m not really …’ Anything, and I’ll never do anything like that again, be that mad again; I don’t ever want to be.
‘Flukes?’ he says. ‘They appear deliberate to me. Your opinion is not at issue, just as my opinion of what you do with your arm is not. I can only tell you what I think, and hope that you take my advice. I am aware that you do not wish to discuss it, so that, shall we say, is that, Mr Ackerman.’
Is it? Doubt it; at the very least: ‘Can you not call me Mr Ackerman?’
‘What would you prefer?’ he laughs, having a go like he was born here.
‘Daniel’ll do.’
‘All right, Daniel. And I’ll let you call me Anton in exchange for another of your flukes. You’ve got fifty-three days to think about it.’
‘Fair enough.’ I’ll think about it, once I’ve come round to believing it. But for now I have to ask, mostly just to check we have actually had this chat: ‘What made you set up business out here?’
He says, standing up and glancing out the window at three hundred different shades of green and blue: ‘If you had the choice between London and Sydney for your exile, where would you go?’
No contest, even if I am melting inside my cement straightjacket. He doesn’t wait for an answer; gone off to be amazing and decent to someone else, and on a Sunday. I’m not supposed to get up today: bugger that. I’ll spend some time frigging around to see what I can and can’t do in this thing while I wait for France; practise not being a pain in the arse. Even if she is late, or maybe already come and gone, probably taking a ferry ride or swimming with the kids or what have you. Even when it takes me ten years to get my trousers on, or mostly, apart from the bottom two fly buttons, five seconds to work out the rest is fairly much impossible and I’m going to be a pain in the arse anyway. So practise being a pleasant pain in the arse, Daniel. Poor France. Must be well past midday now, and a hundred and ten degrees: where is she?
FRANCINE
I most definitely had not intended for this to happen today. Two harbingers of immense debacle should have told me to be suspicious of my promise to the children that our final day in Babel would be the best: beginning with an excursion to the Domain to hear the nuts in the park on a sunny Sunday morn. And here I am, in Phillip Street Police Station, contemplating all that brought us here.
First ill omen occurred after an innocent decision to tootle round to Rose Bay first, to have a look at the old house where I grew up. I wouldn’t have thought to go there at all, except that Kathryn asked me at breakfast where I used to live. We pulled up outside the gigantic monument to excess, all sprawling sandstone down the incline towards the sea, box hedge and banks of agapanthus and clivia still framing frangipanis in full heady bloom out the front, and I was just thinking how odd it was that I could no longer see myself in this place, and yet it seemed I could still hear Father thumping away on the piano, being gorgeously vulgar, as if he were there inside, when Harry said behind me: ‘You left this for Uncle Daniel?’
Too incredulous, and too curtly said for my liking, young man, especially since you haven’t once shown an interest in Uncle this entire holiday. I think I know why this is: because he still feels responsible, and because he’s probably not looking forward to seeing Uncle tomorrow, Uncle who will need some looking after for a while yet. If we’re released by the metropolitan constabulary so that we can see Uncle, let alone look after him.
Anyway, I was going to try to explain to Harry that it wasn’t so simple as me leaving a house for a man when Kathryn said: ‘Why wouldn’t Aunty France have done that?’
And I was going to try to explain that Aunty France was actually once a stuck-up little so-and-so who thought Uncle Daniel too far beneath her for acknowledgement as fellow human, when Harry muttered under his breath: ‘Bet they’re not even properly married.’
Oh? Never had a desire to scold a child as I did at that moment: despite the fact that he’s only about three inches shorter than me, and towers over his elder sister, he’s too young and too fuddled to know anything about it, but if we’d been anywhere near a washing facility I’d have rammed a cake of soap into his mouth. Just as well we were standing on the footpath in a genteel neighbourhood. Very short walk to Our Lady, though, and I almost, almost thought to drag him over there for a quick cheerio: hello, it’s me, Francine, come to have the devil frightened from this child by Sister Simon-Peter. Couldn’t do that to an enemy; besides, they’d all have been at Mass. So instead, I steadied myself and said: ‘Perhaps we should go to church this morning, Catholic church, where your uncle and I were properly married.’ You sour little Presbo.
And I was only going to try to give him a sense of the ludicrous with a stop-off tour of the Gothic catastrophe that is St Mary’s Cathedral, just across the road from the Domain. But we got a bit more than I’d bargained for.
Second ill omen. Pre-Mass parade: clutches of women gossiping around the forecourt, their men looking over their shoulders for their bookmakers, wanting tips before the performance, when I took the children up the steps, their wide eyes all fixed skyward at the edifice. Then it happened. Galloping horses. A cry of: ‘Filthy Micks!’ And a small plague of eggs. One of which hit the masonry at the side of the entrance, splattering back a good deal of its contents across my face, but mostly in my ear. Where are the Commonwealth Police when you need them, hmn?
Don’t know if it was my discombobulation or inherent lack of reverence, but I stepped straight through the vestibule and lunged at the font with my handkerchief. Dipped it in archbishop-blessed water and scrubbed at the sticky muck. Just egg. As if I thought it might have been something worse. And then I was a horror-struck Mick for a second, awaiting thunderbolt for my gross sacrilege. But none came. Course not: it was saving itself for later. I said to Harry, not hiding my contempt: ‘Well, there’s religion for you. Now would you like ice cream and ginger beer?’ Meaning at the Domain.
He said, nine-year-old boy but standing at me like a man, in the middle of the aisle: ‘Do you even believe in God?’
Dear God, does Uncle Daniel have to sort you and your rude little mouth out. Catch that thought: your rudeness is quite possibly — what’s that new science of inheritance called? Genetics.
I said, dabbing yolk from the brim of my hat: ‘No. Not really. Not this sort of thing at least.’
‘Why?’ Truly asking and needing to know.
My attempt: ‘Because I doubt that even God would approve. Perhaps it would be more responsible for us all to fear the power of us, without the convolution of the hand of God.’ Ten points for clarity under duress, Francy; a hundred points for prophecy as it turns out.
‘What’s convolution?’ said Charlie.
Second attempt for seven-year-old: ‘Making things seem more complicated than they are, so that it’s harder to work out what’s true and what’s not, for yourself.’ If only you knew the half of it, kids.
Harry said, unrelenting: ‘How do you know what’s true and what’s not without God?’
And Kathryn replied, her small voice clarion bright in the massive vault: ‘That’s what your conscience is for.’ Indeed. Touche. Not quite twelve-year-old who’s had her world turned upside down and yet she knows what’s what. But then she whispered, or rather hissed, loudly: ‘Heinrich.’
Oh dear. Low blow, Kathryn. Harry’s christened Henry Hubert McKinnon, after his grandfathers and in that order because, as Miriam has said, you wouldn’t call a child Hubert for any reason. No: neither is he Heinrich. But his sister’s swipe shut him up, and I could have cuddled him, except for the threat of violence in his glower at her.
We’d got through just over three weeks together without so much as a hint of squabble, and I wasn’t about to allow one to break out now as an encore prelude to the Mass, so I marched them up to Mary, lit a candle and told the three of
them to kneel and pray to her for peace. And they did, before I whipped them out the side door and onto the street to save them from the main show.
But Our Lady is overburdened presently, isn’t she. Or she has a sharp sense of the comedic, reserved especially for Presbo kiddos and lapsed Micks.
No sooner had our truce been ratified with sweet treats in the park than it was Aunty France’s turn to lose her head when we ambled through the throng. Perhaps it was the rising mercury; perhaps it was the residue of egg in my ear; perhaps it was a surge of maternal derangement, and I am straining against the seams of my skirt already, as the heartstrings are straining after these weeks without my rascally Danny; perhaps it was even a bit of disappointment at the absence of a more entertaining soapboxer in this our last bastion of free speech; but undoubtedly it was the attendant conscriptionist that provoked it.
‘It is a duty,’ I heard him say with quivering ardour, ‘as a child to its mother, that we serve her, as she has nourished us. A man who would not fight for his mother’s honour against the Hun is not only a coward, but should be deemed, by all morality, a felon, and by God damned to hell.’
Or perhaps it was the devil that made me shout into his dramatic pause: ‘And what does all morality call a mother who murders and maims her own children? Is there a place in hell for her?’
Wave of ‘Oooohaaa’ swelled from sweltering crowd: might as well have burned the Union Jack. And self-induced flabbergast might have put an end to my outburst had the speaker not replied: ‘Where is your husband cowering, woman, while his countrymen suffer his spineless betrayal?’
I know where the expression ‘to see red’ comes from now: too much blood too fast in the brain. I sort of had a vague notion that his question was rhetorical, and even that the crowd was enjoying this preacher for his inadvertent parody of himself, but I could not prevent my action. Could not find words with which to vent the whorl of outrage, or the dignity to walk away. Instead I hurled my peppermint ice cream at him. And it didn’t miss. His face.