Astonished Dice

by Geoff Cochrane

‘Mine’s black with two sugars. You’ll see some Mallowpuffs.’

  Clint fills the jug and switches it on. Changes the water in the rat’s cage. Humphrey seems well enough, but the room is lethal to flies. Flies venturing in from the garden and getting between the poles of Ho’s array … They pop like pods, the fuckers.

  It’s proving to be a satisfactory outing. Returning to the streets, Clint checks his mental shopping list. Yes, the business of the day is now at hand—and for that you need a certain cool, a certain quiet flair. You have to believe in your own legitimacy, your own shining probity and worth. So it’s straight up the aisle at Benchmark, willing yourself to feel a serene competence.

  He scores a pail of high-gloss acrylic in Harem Tangerine. The superette will be more difficult. Grabbing up the Huggies will not be such a breeze.

  He passes the spot where the other kid was topped, slippered till he bled from every orifice. He passes the brick shithouse, the magpies on the lawn of the war memorial—and knows he’s on the home straight at last.

  Kylie’s up and about. She takes the Huggies from him silently. Then, ‘Harem Tangerine? What sort of colour’s that for a baby’s digestion?’

  ‘Ho’s got buzzing in his hemispheres.’

  ‘A nice beige would have done. A cinnamon or mushroom.’

  ‘I’ll pop out this arvo. I’ll get us a food parcel from the Mission.’

  Kylie changes the baby on the kitchen table. The female infant likes the look of Clint, scritching at his face with her teeny weeny nails. He presses his mouth to her tummy, blowing a series of flubby raspberries.

  Nell Delaney

  The city was an art-deco jewel. There were palms and cabbage trees, their shadows big black asterisks at noon. It seemed that at the end of every street were the esplanade and the sea. The blue ocean sparkled, an outrageous new brand of soft drink.

  Nell was boarding with a Mrs Blades. Though her Holland blinds were fading, losing their stiffness to the glare without, the landlady kept a nice front room. A tall wireless hogged the floral carpet; Nell thought of it as looking pompous. Mrs Blades enjoyed the music of Eric Coates, the BBC’s Bandwagon. ‘Come and have a listen, dear,’ she’d say—and sometimes Nell would join her for an hour.

  It was only a five-minute walk to the Neptune. Nell liked the theatre’s artsy chic, its rounded edges and low ceilings. And where but in an auditorium, the light from the screen a succession of lurid hues, could a girl feel so close to romance, so safely remote from it?

  It was early in January. Jesse James would screen at eleven (it featured Henry Fonda and Tyrone Power). A canister of film under his arm, Sid the projectionist came through the foyer. ‘The latest newsreel. Straight off the train.’

  ‘You’d better get a move on,’ said Nell.

  ‘Did you hear him on the radio last night?’

  ‘All in a lather again, I expect.’

  ‘The German people labour under intolerable burdens. And Britain just keeps adding to them, according to Adolf.’

  It was hard to know what to think. Mrs Blades doubted there’d be another war. Nell stuck to her torch and saved her shillings. Quite why she needed to save she couldn’t have said, for she revelled in her work at the Neptune (in the ladies’ musky scents, the men’s cigarette smoke in buoyant layers) and felt she had a home with Mrs Blades. A wider view took in aquarium and skating rink, fronded avenue and balmy esplanade—and these things remained her very own discoveries, delights to which she lay a jealous claim.

  On a Monday, Nell’s day off, she liked to have her tea at the Waldorf Grill, then walk to the gardens and watch the sun go down. And when it got dark in the gardens, the lights came on. It was as if the theatrical lamps hidden in the shrubbery took over from nature, prolonging the slow pyrotechnics of the setting sun. She’d sit on a bench and light a cigarette, content to feel content.

  ‘It’s as warm as toast tonight, don’t you think?’

  She looked at the man with small interest. ‘I can’t think what it’s as warm as. We could do with a breath of wind, I suppose.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said the man. ‘A zephyr’s what we need.’

  The red boles and the purple. And where a hidden lamp was green, the leaves it lit took on a semblance of wetness, an extra and artificial greenness. Not really wanting to make conversation, Nell voiced a few inconsequential thoughts, talking of summer showers and steaming pavements.

  The man continued to stand. ‘I like to see a woman holding a cigarette. You’re an usherette at the Neptune, aren’t you? A bit of a waste, if you don’t mind my saying. The fact of the matter is, you’ve a lovely speaking voice. Have you ever thought about going in for dramatics?’

  His name was Cyril Cole. If he favoured cravats and cricketer’s trousers, he wasn’t as pretty as other sissies she’d known. His features were smooth and brown and slant—like those of a Mongol herdsman. Nell came to think of him as having been marred in the womb. He’d been tanned by a force beamed through his mother’s waters. Tinkered with and queered by polarising rays.

  They met for lunch the following Monday. The Carlton’s dining room was a place of many mirrors. ‘When you’ve finished your ice cream, I’d like to show you my studio,’ he said.

  ‘Let me guess. You photograph babies?’

  ‘I work in radio. I’m the man behind the serial Hal Burke, Detective.’

  Flat-roofed and coral pink, a building near the beach. The studio itself was lined with cork tiles. Nell looked at all the kindergarten gadgets for making sound effects. She felt affronted by the free-standing door—a door to nothing, a door leading nowhere. ‘Heavens,’ she said, dismayed.

  Cyril was holding a pistol. ‘This is where it all happens. I’ve brought you to the heart of the enterprise. Hal Burke stands right here at the key mike.’

  ‘“Grab your hat, Troy.”’

  ‘I’m what they call a producer. I sit in that booth over there. I twiddle knobs and cue the various effects—the sound of a motor boat or soda siphon.’

  ‘The crack of a gun going off?’

  ‘Whatever the script calls for.’

  Nothing stirred in her. Nor had she seen the last of him: he turned up at Mrs Blades’ that evening. The landlady had gone upstairs; the ‘Knightsbridge March’ was spilling from the pompous wireless. ‘Please forgive the lateness of the hour, but I had to see you again.’

  ‘Whatever for, Mister Cole?’

  ‘The writers feel that Hal needs a fiancée. I’m hoping to persuade you to audition for the part.’

  Nell had a weakness for motorcars. Cyril’s stood at the kerb, as shiny and black as pooled ink, its spare wheel seated in a slot in the running-board. He drove with a maidenly primness—out of town and along the coast to a spot above the sea. Nell remembered the door in the studio, the door that led nowhere. ‘I hadn’t thought you’d stop. Was stopping such a great idea?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s a good place for seeing shooting stars.’

  ‘Oh.’

  He turned in his seat and touched her fichu. ‘Forgive me. I seem to be forgetting myself. It’s just that my heart is full of the most tremendous regard for you.’

  She knew a cliché when she heard one. ‘Eyes forward, Cole.’

  ‘I’m in a state of awe. You’ve rocked me well and truly. I’m feeling as I’ve never felt before, for anyone.’

  His tanned face looked glossy and taut, as if made of plastic. Nell removed his hand from her knee. ‘Do you think Chamberlain’s kidding himself?’

  ‘I can’t wear khaki, I know that much.’

  ‘The air force might be more your cup of tea. You could grow a nice moustache.’

  ‘“So young and so untender?” Your prattle’s killing me.’

  She didn’t pity him. She couldn’t pity him. On still nights like this, the Nazis rallied at Nuremberg. She supposed the dewy grass wet Hitler’s boots. ‘Are you going to drive me home, or shall I get out and walk?’

  Red Shifts

  1r />
  Fluorescent mice have colonised the sewers. As robots tend their spectral dynamos, rain streams from the beaks of gryphons. A senior citizen walks in off the street and asks to see a detective. Dimple-chinned Brett Chandler conducts the whiffy gent to an office on Level 30. ‘What’s eating you, grandad?’

  ‘It was many years ago.’

  ‘You donned a Groucho mask and snatched a purse?’

  ‘I murdered an attractive meter maid.’

  ‘So take your time,’ says Brett, ‘and run it by me slowly.’

  Further assertions are made, tested guilefully, advanced afresh. It’s not long before the air is blue with cigarette smoke. ‘Any chance of a brew? I’m getting as parched as a mummy’s twat, sat here.’

  ‘A mummy’s twat, Tommy? Was there any call to sully the ambience?’

  ‘You’ve swished my lighter, Brett. That’s my BiC you’ve got, I think you’ll find.’

  ‘I do beg your pardon. I end up with pockets full of crap.’

  ‘It’s easily done. My word yes.’

  ‘I’m like an Electrolux. There’s not a Biro safe.’

  ‘We’ll say no more about it. It’s just that the green ones are hard to come by.’

  2

  Brett rents a room in a quiet rooming-house. Lives on instant noodles and bananas. Stirs slices of banana into his curried glop. Immerses himself in the fiddly task of building a Halifax bomber. (You need a range of paints is what you need. The tiny cans are floral in their variety.)

  Brett is sometimes visited by Claude. Claude works for Pacific Dent Service. The two men get drunk on tequila, cheat one another at cards, swap wrist-watches.

  Claude visits once too often. Surfacing the following morning, Brett is bent and mystified and craves demulcent fluids. Alone and of his own initiative, he drinks a little beer and smokes a little toot. Yes, he gets a little fucked and descends to a crypt beneath a dental clinic. The Twelve Steps scroll is central; glossy posters depict molars wearing pants, glasses of milk with eyelashes.

  ‘My name is Brett and I hate these meetings and all who sail in them.’

  On top of all of which, the job and its demands. Blue-eyed Brett Chandler and his partner, Stahr, raid a gallery down by the marina. The paintings feature pyramids, flying saucers and tumescent pricks. ‘The mayor wants you closed,’ Brett tells the curator. ‘Anything to offer by way of mitigation, Mister … ?’

  ‘Gysin. Brion Gysin.’

  ‘Are you by any chance the reclusive author of The Last Museum?’

  ‘He is,’ says Grace Jones, all clavicle and cleavage.

  ‘Forth from its nest,’ says Gysin, ‘the evening staggers. It seems we’re busted good, though our vices be imperfect.’

  Stahr is chewing gum. ‘What’s it like to be a genius?’

  3

  The nights continue wet. Downpipes rupture and awnings collapse.

  Out at Bamboo Airport, big silver pods atomise the rain. As our weary hero is grinding a perp’s face into the tarmac, the sucker’s ray gun discharges.

  The following Sunday, Brett gets a little fucked and goes to a meeting at Trades Hall. ‘He caught me in the foot. He made of my shoe a tattered, smoking thing.’

  ‘It’s simple,’ says the chairman. ‘Just don’t pick up a drink.’

  ‘That rotten perp,’ says one of the ladies present.

  Her name is Leilani (does a sweeter one exist?) and the brown globe of her shoulder has a certain shine to it. She knows what it is to have a bandaged foot. She plucks a speck of lint from the sleeve of Brett’s jacket; she walks him back to his rooming-house but two blocks distant.

  He’s obliged to her, is Brett. Would she like to see his flock of pretty warplanes?

  She thinks not.

  Could she go a banana milkshake?

  Another time, perhaps. But she kisses him on the cheek, does Leilani, her lips as cool as a sable brush, and Brett forgets for a moment the ticking of life’s meter, the pitiless drip drip drip of life’s accreting judgements.

  Brindle Embers

  The halls of the palace were deserted. Father Lipatti sought an unmarked door next to that of Treasury. The office he entered was absurdly narrow. Its single tall window admitted a glacial light. The chocolate-coloured linoleum had everywhere been blackly cicatrised by smouldering cigarette butts.

  To the side of the desk jammed in against the window sat Colonel Stok. His long leather coat buttoned at the throat, he pinged with his fingernail the pear-shaped bottle standing beside the lofty, ornate, chimerical typewriter. ‘A drop of slivovitz, my dear Vasile?’

  ‘Thank you,’ said the priest. ‘The streets are treacherous. There are slicks of black ice.’

  ‘You need new boots,’ said Stok, ‘—that much is obvious.’

  ‘And my funk and malleability—are they apparent also?’

  Before Stok could answer, the journalist whose office this was returned. Sepia-cheeked and wispy of moustache, this bibulous hack was known as the Tartar. ‘So much for trying to coax some heat out of the boiler.’

  ‘Please,’ said the Colonel. ‘No need to tell us where you’ve been. Being utterly corrupt, you’re perfectly trustworthy. If you have that film to hand, I’ll trouble you to pass it to Father Lipatti here.’

  ‘If I must,’ said the Tartar.

  ‘But of course you must,’ said Stok.

  The Tartar opened the nethermost drawer in his desk and brought forth a small, zincy-looking canister. ‘And much good may it do you,’ he said, handing the tube to the priest.

  ‘Father Lipatti dreams of an end to shortages. An end to dearth of bread and medicines and boots. Isn’t that so, Vasile?’ asked the Colonel.

  ‘I do more than dream. And when I’m caught you’ll throw me to the wolves.’

  Stok’s face remained unsmiling. As he filled three murky tumblers with plum brandy, his leather coat creaked like a pine tree, a burdened loft. ‘It will never come to that. I hope and pray it will never come to that.’

  The film secreted beneath his soutane, Father Lipatti walked toward the tram. This down-at-heel priest with his failed youth club, his sexual difficulties, his bag of cankered apples—was he being followed? Vasile thought not. In the weird gloom of four in the afternoon, the globes of the streetlamps seemed to house dim brindle embers. A not-unpleasant stink of burning tyres was added to the sugary miasma surrounding the boiled-sweet factory.

  Iron wheels and iron bells. A brute, compacting cold. Alighting from the tram outside Our Lady of the Rosary, Father Lipatti passed the sacristy, the wooden campanile, the cabbage patch with grubby scraps of ice littering its furrows, and let himself into the presbytery through a back door. Here was the room, formerly a sort of conservatory, in which Vasile had attempted to meet and entertain the kids of the parish. To the wall not made of glass there still adhered posters concerning acne and smoking, alcohol and heroin, condoms and STDs. But the place had thrice been burgled, the electric heater stolen, seismic Martian tags jaggedly indited …

  In the hall at the front of the house, he donned his overcoat. From the study he uplifted his Mass kit, a book-sized wallet. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. The habit of prayer died hard, but was it merely habit?

  With the kit in his coat pocket, he left the presbytery. A second tram conveyed him to an orphanage on the outskirts of the city. He hadn’t left behind the bag of apples Stok had given him; when Zelea had looked at the brown and wormy fruit, the stunned director tried to rise to the occasion. ‘Shall I take you to little Georges, Father?’

  ‘I don’t want to see him. I can’t bear to see him.’

  ‘He returns himself to a state of resignation—of blankness, if you will—and then his drunken aunt reappears, galvanising in the child memories that had almost been extinct.’

  ‘Hard as it is to watch, it’s not for you to prevent.’

  The men were standing in the doctor’s ill-equipped office. Where countless heads of greasy hair had brushed them,
the walls bore a sort of high-water mark. ‘Apples,’ said the haggard Zelea. ‘What am I to do with a few withered apples? At brave academies in better times, I was introduced to the words “kwashiorkor” and “marasmus”. They denote conditions sharing many features. They imply anaemia, diarrhoea, lethargy. They mean failure to grow and susceptibility to infection.’

  Give us this day our daily bread. Morning and eve, the same feeble mantra.

  ‘The orphanage is always in our prayers. In mine and those of my parishioners.’

  Night had long since fallen. Projected by the office window, a strawy light made visible the cloister and courtyard without. A female attendant was sloshing the contents of a bucket down a drain. Her massive bust was shapeless; her huge hips appeared to give her pain. She was wearing a babushka and a great long soiled apron. Now crumpled, less than elfin, her cherry-red booties had once had pointed toes. She looked to the priest like some doomed, squamous, insect-eating beast; he imagined her to be inadequate, surlily wilful, far from entirely kind. As she lumbered back toward the main block, Father Lipatti pictured little Georges, his shaven head and tiny shoulders, his round eyes like those of a loris. And Vasile pictured too (could almost smell) the capacious freezer that was the dormitory, the cots with their bars of enamelled dowelling, the urine-soaked mattresses so hard to dry, the nappied and ill-clad children of both sexes, just as mute and watchful as their battered cohorts elsewhere.

  Doctor Zelea spoke again. ‘Shall I list the things we need? Apart from drugs? We need linen and soap and disinfectant. We need clean water. We need onions and barley and potatoes, to say nothing of salt and flour. Anything you can give us, we already need.’

  But Father Lipatti was thinking of bears. Bears made psychotic by tether and cage. The white ones prevented from roaming snow and ice.

  Zelea sat down in his broken typist’s chair. His desk was innocent of charts and prescription forms. ‘I close my mind to the whole disgraceful mess. There were doctors in the SS, you know. Physicians who became mere instruments. And worse.’