Astonished Dice

by Geoff Cochrane

  Vasile roused himself. ‘Rrok the market gardener is bringing cabbages. Beetroot too, if I’m not mistaken. Would you like to join me in prayer for just a minute?’

  He drank a cup of coffee at the kiosk on the platform, then caught the train for K__. Young and slender-hipped, the guard stalked up the carriage like a circus performer on a tightrope, then punched the cleric’s green-and-orange ticket without a word. How much like a child’s anticipation of the plenteous novelties of Christmas were one’s own sexual longings! If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. But Father Lipatti mastered himself with an inner exertion as practised as harsh.

  It had been snowing in K__. Outside the station, a cab was waiting with its headlights shining; the priest avoided it and set out for the village on foot. He hadn’t gone far when the taxi caught up with him and slowed to a crawl. With an old grey Mercedes inching along beside him, Vasile decided to speak. ‘I prefer to walk,’ he called.

  ‘Get in, Father.’

  His blood an icy sludge, he craved sugar, fire, certainty. He was sick of responsibility, of having to be brave. He’d had it to the teeth with having to be principled, courageously alert while remaining unconvinced and tepid. In this bleak Wonderland, conviction was stupid and bravery gutless. That zincy-looking canister of film riding in the pocket of his shirt was making a target of his heart. A gambler to whom it had all become too much, he did as he’d been told and got into the cab.

  Vasile had never seen the driver before. ‘Should I know you from somewhere?’

  ‘The barber’s disappeared. I’m to drive you to the lake.’

  ‘Take me to the border. I’ll make the run myself.’

  ‘Is that what Colonel Stok would want?’

  Rule One: Never deny merely knowing an agent. Rule Umpteenth: Silence is always an option.

  ‘The lake is nice in summer,’ said the driver. ‘In winter by night is not so good maybe.’

  They were met by a man equipped with an Astra machine-pistol. ‘Get out of the car with your hands above your head, priest.’

  A Wonderland indeed. The rusting tin signs and obsolete bowsers of an abandoned petrol station. To one side of the garage, a copse of birches the recent snow had prettified, black and white and tan in the lights of the Mercedes. Holding his Mass kit in his left hand, Father Lipatti emerged from the vehicle.

  The man with the gun advanced. ‘What’s this you’re showing me?’

  ‘I wasn’t meaning to draw attention to it.’

  The officer in charge seemed simply to materialise. Looking every inch the secret policeman (an obdurate presence completing the ambush), he wore a leather overcoat like Stok’s. ‘Show us what you have in the wallet, padre.’

  The gunman gave Vasile quite a shove. ‘Do as the major says!’

  This was how it began, then. In unpleasantness and pushing. ‘An ordination present from my uncle. Tools of the trade, as it were. Just the few things needed if and when …’

  The gunman brought his Astra down with force, knocking the wallet and its contents out of the priest’s hands. Miniature cruets and plinthed crucifix, paten and chalice and stole—they spilled like so much loot across the snow. And Father Lipatti imagined himself kneeling, gathering the consecrated vessels to himself. In fact, lamentably, he moved not a muscle.

  ‘Film,’ said the major. ‘I don’t see any film.’

  A coward’s piquant shame. And yet one did one’s best, even finding nerve enough to say, ‘And what film might that be?’

  The Boiler House

  It’s the Age of Aquarius. The longer your hair, the sexier. Sandals and flared jeans, that’s me.

  ‘Please Respect the Privacy of Patients.’ I register the place in terms of roses and tennis courts, asphalt paths and beamed ceilings. From a window at the back of Rutherford, one can see a little mortuary.

  ‘Do you dream about drinking?’ Sir Charles Burns asked. I did and do and now there’s something wrong with my heart. A drink would fix my heart; a drink is not exactly contraindicated.

  I’m learning to polish floors with a machine. Tilting the handles gets you traction and momentum. Calm, surcease, belonging. The rocking swing and shush of the polisher. I’m nonetheless the thirstiest man in Australasia.

  As my father and I approached Rutherford, a man came out to meet us. ‘I’m the Ward Host.’ He shook my father’s hand. ‘Welcome to Queen Mary, Mister Cochrane.’

  ‘You’ve got the wrong bloke,’ my father said.

  A diffuse rain fell, wafting down like steam. On my first night in Hanmer, scents sulphurous and piney. From the tables in the hall came a clacking of balls. The light in the boiler house suggested a course of action: when my treatment was over, I’d get a job shovelling coal. Faulkner had had his post office, I’d have my boiler house.

  Dr Maling is as leggy as a flamingo. ‘Has it ever occurred to you that drinking is a sort of petulance?’

  ‘?’

  ‘A way of saying I want it all?’

  It has and does but now there’s something wrong with my heart. I put away my polisher and go to breakfast. Sunlight fills the dining room. The surly Belfast man offers to trim my hair. I follow him to his room and he seats me in a chair. Snips away for a while before announcing, ‘I’ve given you a choice of styles, now tell me which you prefer.’

  One side of my head retains its brown curls, the other has been almost completely denuded.

  It’s a glorious day in February. I feel big-eared and stark. Warmth and clarity, the odour of mown grass—and now I look like everyone else. I sport travesty: my shorn condition seems to represent compromise and moral slippage. A man in his sixties tells me, ‘An ignorant sort of a prick, that Belfast sod.’

  The lunch bell rings. One’s place at table is dictated by a seating plan. A bag of toffees and a telegram have been left beside my knife. ‘BEST WISHES ON YOUR TWENTY-FIRST LOVE MUM AND DAD.’ The telegram read and internalised, there remains the mystery of the sweets, the provocation of the toffees.

  Wonders

  I once worked for an Indian fruiterer, washing carrots and parsnips in a concrete tub full of icy water. Those were the days of coal, gas, Yorkshire pudding, rosaries, saveloys, scapulae, buttery toast and Marmitey mushrooms.

  The city boasted then a floral clock. Our mother cut up old sheets, hemming them on the Singer to make us handkerchieves. Every now and then, the piano sidled into the middle of the living room.

  Times change, of course. Stukkas plunge, a mustang bolts. Hundreds of snakes with their mouths sewn shut are confiscated by officials. My Goldair heater begins to self-destruct, the filament combusting with a dazzling white light. My dropsheets resembling Jackson Pollocks, I do out Stella’s flat in mint and aubergine. She lights a candle here, a cone of incense there. She drinks and drinks (Chianti) and gets incredibly pissed. She sticks her chin out like Gregory Peck and slugs me.

  Whence comes the myth that the bully is a coward?

  I retreat to my own crummy pad. When a bus stops outside, my few knives and forks shiver in their drawer. Sympathetic resonance. And I fall to thinking of all the lesser women, the ladies who never became a fixture, the chicks I bedded for a night or two in winter, when the world and I were young. There was Rosalind, for instance. To whom I tried to get married late one evening, whisking her up to the monastery in a cab. The hip Redemptorist we roused from his cell declined to officiate.

  And then there was the redhead with the bulging eyes. Hyperthyroidism? Hypothyroidism? What was her name, for God’s sake?

  And what of Audrey?

  And what of Isabel?

  And what of the first photograph I ever took, with my uncle’s Kodak, a box camera with a focal range of 3ft to infinity, of a bison, of a bison at the zoo, a single hapless bison?

  Sprats rain down on the fishing port of Great Yarmouth. Air Rarotonga takes delivery of a Saab 340. My eye comes up nicely, adopting all the opalescent hues of a paua shell.

  A night an
d a morning pass before Stella drops in. She’s wearing her slinky leather strides. She flushes the toilet twice, noisily. She opens the fridge and glares at the bare shelves. ‘They’re not exactly groaning with provender, Smith.’

  ‘It’s just as well you’ve brought a little something.’

  She drags from her Just Jute bag olives, salami and Gorgonzola. Also, a bottle of Chianti. ‘Do you fancy anything?’

  I tell her I’ll have a cup of tea.

  Stella completely fills the electric jug. ‘Have you found that stencil you promised me?’

  ‘The fleur-de-lis? I’ll have to have a bit of a rummage.’

  ‘And when are you coming back? To do the stencilling?’

  ‘When I’m good and ready, girl.’

  ‘Ah. So now the worm is on the other foot. I get it.’

  ‘I wish you hadn’t come here in those slinky leather pants.’

  ‘Don’t point that eye at me.’

  ‘I’m totally drooling, woman. I’m utterly captive to your yummy liquorice legs.’

  ‘Cool it, Smith,’ says Stella.

  My brother has me to dinner at the Duxton. Miles is a geologist. He’s in town to deliver a paper on drilling protocols, rules of his own formulation. The quiet tie and plain white shirt belie his breadth of mind. The trim dark beard detracts not a whit from the warmth of his smile.

  We dine on lamb cutlets and bread-and-butter pudding. Our repast concluded, Miles shows me his room. There’s a fine view of the harbour below (intriguing lights slide across the black water) and a screen on which to watch the in-house porn. I’d be perfectly willing to live in this room for the rest of my life.

  Though he fails to recall my snapshot of that single, hapless bison, Miles and I enjoy a convivial chat.

  Taking stencil and gold paint, I return to Stella’s pad. Frank Sinatra is singing, When somebody loves you / It’s no good unless he loves you / All the way.

  Stella has been reading Growing Up in New Guinea. ‘We’re strangers to ourselves, you and I.’

  ‘I never doubted it.’

  Stella has been visiting a medium in Doctors Common. For twenty lousy bucks, she gets to converse with an ancient Persian magus. ‘He says he can sense that I’m understimulated.’

  ‘It sounds as if he knows his onions, then.’

  Have I mentioned the fact that spring is upon us? For she of the leather trousers and skirts, I run little errands in the bright forenoons. Putting stencilling behind me, I replace all the washers in her taps. Refreshed and empowered by a course of aromatherapy, Stella is now partaking of nothing stronger than seltzer and hock.

  Sparrows scuffle on the roof of her sunporch. She gives me instruction in how to caress her, how to stroke her vulva in such a way as to ready her for sexual intercourse.

  She says, ‘I hope one day to teach at an ivy-clad college.’

  ‘You’ll make a fine teacher.’

  ‘I somehow know I shall.’

  ‘You guide my hand in all I do.’

  ‘Quite so, you rigid hunk.’

  The cherry trees are putting forth crinkly pink blossoms. A letter written by Jesus turns up in a motel room in Boise, Idaho. And Stella no longer addresses me as ‘Smith’.

  Blue Lady

  One day in July, stepping off the bus at Courtenay Place, his legs almost buckled under him. He was weak-kneed and shaky, his insides felt all dithery and flummoxed, but he drew the line at sitting down on the pavement. Rigidly determined to buy his grog and return to his flat, he moved forward unsteadily. The gloomy bottlestore had mock-Spanish arches; he filled his flagon from a ‘barrel’ of sweet sherry. His starveling’s metabolism could only deal with the sweet stuff. He needed the food of sugar, sugar in frequent liquid doses.

  1989, the weather vile. His flat faced Wakefield Park, affording him a view of pines, drainage ditches, rugby posts like gallows. On the boggy, puddled fields, throngs of gulls huddled like routed troops; perhaps they mirrored his own inconsequential defeat. His probation officer had found him the flat, extracted him from the rooming-house in which he’d lived for the past crepuscular decade. ‘A fresh start,’ the officer had said, ‘—but now we’ve got to work on drying you out, Ashley.’

  He hadn’t seen the busy probie since. Rain came off the strait in icy, parcelled whumps. At his window above the park, Ashley sometimes heard the voices of groundsmen and golfers, the tramp of sprigged shoes on the gravel below. Beyond the line of pines at the western edge of the park, bits of the Home of Compassion were visible. And Ashley himself had once been put in there—for yet another detox, of course. He remembered the pretty nun in charge of his Hemineurin and generous with it. He remembered the whiteness, the clean sheets, the plaster saints on pedestals, the numinous and healing atmosphere. There’d been no one else in his quiet little ward, and he’d felt like a character in one of Hemingway’s stories.

  Could he do it all again, for the umpteenth time? He doubted it and dreaded having to try. He was too far gone to find the nerve to quit, too sick to marshal the necessary forces. And yet he could conceive of being sober, project his thoughts toward an idyll of sobriety, however remote and unlikely.

  The flat remained shadowy and bare, furnished with only a pot, a chair, a bed. His portable typewriter stayed in its zippered grey cover. Nor did Ashley want the clutter of superfluous objects, the burden of ownership. He was in his fortieth year; if this new pad of his meant quiet and privacy at last, it had come too late, too late. In his booze-softened bones, he knew that he knew it: he wouldn’t be staying long.

  It was as if a sort of countdown had begun. In some elusive sense, these were the last days. Yes, this was the beginning of the end; there was something apocalyptic in the light; the dull, dirty sky looked moronic. In spite of all of which, Ashley must endure. Every afternoon, he took the bus as far as Courtenay Place in order to fill a bottle or a flagon. Returning to the flat one particular afternoon, he saw that his typewriter had been set up on the kitchen bench. Typed on a page torn from an exercise book, a note had been left in the machine. ‘Dear Ash, I let in some blokes with some furniture for you. Regards, Fred.’

  Fred was the block’s ‘custodian’, a glorified caretaker with keys to every padlock and door. But just who’d sent this load of ugly junk (a couple of fat armchairs, a hulking great wardrobe and a daintily useless escritoire) remained a mystery until that evening, when Fred dropped by. Young and lean and brown, the caretaker was wearing a tool belt and holding a can of beer. ‘The guy who drove the truck said his name was Garth. Told me you’d be grateful for a chair or two.’

  ‘I wish you’d kept him out.’

  ‘I thought he was a mate of yours.’

  ‘He is.’

  ‘But you’d sooner do without this crap he’s dragged up here?’

  ‘How am I supposed to get rid of it?’

  Fred hadn’t shaved in a while. ‘This place smells like a dental clinic.’

  ‘That’ll be the methylated spirits. I’ve been doing some cleaning.’

  Dense with pliers and screwdrivers, Fred’s tool belt sagged like some overelaborate codpiece. ‘Cool. No worries. I stick to the ale myself.’

  The following morning, Ashley woke to find that he’d drunk all the sherry in the place. He’d long been adept at getting and staying drunk. Where drinking was concerned, there was no room for sloppiness or error, for less than scrupulous practice; now, his failure to anticipate his own egregious needs was forcing him to breakfast on meths and tap water. He couldn’t drink water at the best of times, but the taste of meths unlaced by sherry or soft drink … was nothing short of emetic. He sat on his straight-backed chair and sweated and retched. He sat with his only pot between his knees … and spewed into the pot. This is nowhere, he thought, this is the fucking pits.

  His nose ran. His eyes streamed. At about ten that morning, someone knocked gently at his door. How dire a sound those polite knuckles made! Ashley didn’t want a further dose of Fred; he didn’t want more
jumbo furniture. And sat tight until the knocker went away.

  The pub on The Parade would soon be opening. It beckoned like a hospital. But Ashley hadn’t been in Island Bay since leaving it for good some twenty years ago. He’d return as a fit and moneyed adult, a chap wafted in off an oilrig. No. In a soft ancient parka smelling like tar, he’d return as the insect he was—a mutilate and twitching stick insect.

  He wiped his eyes and tidied himself. He pocketed what remained of his cash. As he climbed the scabby drive to the road, his legs felt rickety and unsafe. Walking down the long hill toward Antarctica, he could think of nothing but alcohol’s beneficence, its horrible absence from his system. With the firemen’s training school in sight, however, he passed a spot reminding him of something: the tram crash in which he’d been slightly injured as a boy. His cocky penchant for riding on trams had been smashed out of him. Thirty years later, I live on cigarettes and fusel oil; I dream of cafeteria meals of sausages and mashed potatoes and gravy; the ghost of an old neuropathy buzzes in my calves.

  By the time he reached the tavern, Ashley was cold and wet. He felt like an ill-rehearsed actor. He’d comb his sopping hair and make his entrance—but would he be served? Tremulous and pale and stupefied by need, he was scared of bumping into anyone he knew—some cobber of his dad’s from way back when, for instance.

  Tiffany lamps. A carpet of purple and gold. This was a lounge on a ‘neighbourhood’ scale, its patrons numbering fewer than a dozen. Repairing to the men’s, Ashley dried his face on the roller towel, tried to warm his hands under the blower. He’d emerged from the toilet and was making his way to the bar when someone addressed him. ‘I’d know you anywhere, Venus.’

  Seated at a table with a pint in front of him, Toby McRae was dressed in civvies. Perhaps the fish-eye lens of Ashley’s vision magnified the breadth of the policeman’s knees. ‘Just my luck,’ said Ashley, ‘I crawl in here for a quiet bloody gin …’