Astonished Dice

by Geoff Cochrane

  Problems. Always problems.

  A Deep Truth Concerning Our Subject’s Psyche: As a lapsed, recovering or alienated Mormon, Jeep has been trying, in and by his writing, to merit salvation and eternal life. Unconsciously, mark well.

  His father thought Jeep had the makings of a fine painter. Liked his son’s ability to render a perspective, hint at a distance, install a vague ‘beyond’ with just a quizzical tick of watery paint. ‘In life, we end up doing what we do second best.’ That from Marcel Proust.

  11:27 a.m. Jeep rings the Ministry of Commerce. ‘My picture’s all to hell,’ he tells the guy. ‘Forget the news and Coronation Street.’

  ‘Describe this interference.’

  ‘It’s sort of pinstripy. I get this horizontal, pinstripy pattern.’

  ‘Do you have an outside aerial?’

  ‘An inside aerial. Rabbit’s ears. But near a window.’ Jeep can hear the guy turning pages. Going through a manual, it sounds like. ‘I say pinstripy, but …’

  ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘Corduroy. It’s more like corduroy.’

  That manual. Those pages. Forms, maybe. ‘OK. Let’s see. Are your neighbours having similar problems?’

  ‘Oh deary me. Oh Lord.’ Jeep is running out of battery. His Motorola has always made him nervous. This is a device bent on closing itself down. This is a gadget setting telecommunications back a century or so. And now his television is being zapped. Crassly zapped is how it seems to Jeep. ‘It really gets gross at dinnertime. At dinnertime, the real derangement starts. I’m bidding you envisage icebergs in collision, titanic fracturings of alps and glaciers, with just a hint of amoeba and ciliates—a touch of washed-out Paisley, if you will.’

  ‘Floes. Protozoa. You can put them on the form.’

  ‘I wonder how I knew there was going to be a form.’

  Jeep’s sales are dismal. He has never caught on with the snooty reading public. Perhaps he should clear off, head for the USA.

  America has artists who specialise in deserts, camp at the edges of the deserts, paint the Mojave, Black Rock, Colorado, Gila and Great Salt Lake. Their pink-and-beige expanses, their fawn aridities. The daughter of Maxfield Parrish is one such painter. She sells her productions (acrylic on board) to boutiques in Albuquerque and Santa Fe.

  The Wakeful Lover

  Of Sven Tailor, this:

  Slapping a padlock on his door, he descended to the street. In a narrow Formica-and-fries café, he ordered a milkshake and a toasted sandwich. Before the food could be brought to his table, he nodded off abruptly, conked out for an instant—thus upsetting the sugar bowl.

  The Chinese proprietor was scandalised. ‘Why you may such a fucky mess?’

  ‘Forgive me. It’s just that I haven’t slept for seventy-five hours.’

  Broken glass littered the streets. Sven skirted a gutted tank. In the green light of a walled cemetery, he found an interment in progress. One of the mourners was a woman he’d never seen before; like a dog recalling a distant past, a remote kindness, Sven knew her at once.

  When the priest had concluded his obsequies, the woman drew Sven aside. ‘I’m the one you seek. My name is Natasha.’

  ‘Are we being watched?’

  ‘Even now.’ A beaded veil filtered her blondness. ‘They sit in their car with apparatus. We must comport ourselves like fish.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Like cold-blooded things indifferent to their spying.’ She made a face of haughty, childish distaste. ‘You have a weapon, no?’

  ‘Alas.’

  ‘Take heart, Monsieur. I will send a vehicle.’

  No sooner had all the mourners dispersed than a battered Citroën arrived. Its driver was smoking a pink cigarette. ‘I tike you to a plice of wurst and beer. Wurst and beer I cannot afford, myself.’

  The inn was full of drunks. Many were wearing cloth caps and scarves. There were drunks supine and drunks on their knees. There were choral drunks and drunks in tears. Save once in a police canteen, Sven had never before seen inebriation on such a comprehensive scale.

  His driver and guide had this to say: ‘The nation’s manhood? Pissed. Mike soldiers of these poltroons? Forget it.’

  Chugalug, thought Sven.

  Natasha received him in a room above the fray. Her black-veiled hat lay on the mounded bed beneath a simple wooden crucifix. ‘My father was a very wealthy man. I was raised on an estate having grottoes and thermal springs, peacocks and giraffes. Our chapel it was wrought by Balthasar Neumann. With its forest of columns, undulating balconies and painted surfaces, it possessed a sumptuous theatricality.’

  ‘Your confidences flatter me,’ said Sven.

  ‘Beloved of my father was his little cinema. In this he contrived to screen the films of Jean Cocteau and David Lean. Also, the James Bond pictures.’

  Her meagre shoulders seemed to generate a force field of probity. And Sven himself felt hollow, vacuous—avid for her gorgeous energies. ‘What must I do?’ he heard himself asking.

  ‘The regime merely teeters. It needs as many shoves as we have hands. I’m giving you this gun, an Hungarian copy of the Walther Polizei Pistole, in the sanguine hope that you will use it well.’

  ‘You have a target in mind?’

  ‘The Minister of Swine is a rancid little prick.’

  Sven and his driver descended to the bar. A honky-tonk pianist was hard at work, his skeletal instrument quaking. ‘Two brimming tankards,’ Sven told the barman, ‘and sausage and bread for my pal.’

  The driver ate with decorum. At length, he dabbed his lips with his napkin. ‘I could do with a shive,’ he averred.

  ‘Me too,’ said Sven. ‘Nor have I slept in seventy-nine hours.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘I’m taking medication. I’m on these strangely fortifying pills, subtle but tenacious of effect.’

  The driver lit a yellow cigarette. ‘Pills of any kind I can’t afford.’

  ‘The lovely Natasha looks just like my sister. I’m feeling as desolate as an empty wardrobe.’

  ‘Here’s my plan. I tike you aloft in the helicopter. We look for where is best to ambush the Minister of Pigs.’

  ‘You people have a chopper? What sort is it?’

  ‘The gear stick protrudes from the dashboard, that’s the sort it is.’

  ‘This pistol lies heavy in my pocket. I’m mournful and leaden of heart. What would we see, from above?’

  ‘The new spaghetti junction, already reviled and discredited.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘Certain wooded hills. The soft-drink plant. Small jade bodies of water.’

  ‘Small jade bodies of water?’

  ‘Assuredly.’

  ‘What the hell,’ said Sven. ‘Let’s chance our arms, Tonto.’

  Full Clearance

  With his nerves and splintered teeth and love of unbroken calm, Geoff has come to loathe the endless weeks of summer, when his neighbours go slightly nuts. The long hours of daylight seem to disinhibit them, lure them out of their flats and out of themselves. They become, to Geoff’s horror, all too visible, all too audible. The men descend to their many paupers’ cars, there to wrench and beat and play their ethnic tapes. The women grapple the hoses from the reels, sluicing their concrete landings and steps, wetting the abject lawn in the process. Iraqis and Turks, most of them. Mad to rid their thresholds of desiccated leaves, fragments of leaves.

  An item appears on the book page of the paper. It describes Geoffrey Cochrane as a ‘new’, ‘emerging’ writer.

  Ouch.

  The year is 2001 and Geoff is 50. Has been publishing since 1976.

  His heart has developed some weird electrical fault. In order to give it rhythmic employment, Geoff goes for long walks. He walks from Berhampore to Newtown, Courtenay Place, Thorndon. His aviator’s shades are green, his pants a pale khaki. The sun has tanned his arms; the potent light of summer has nourished and fluffed up the blond hairs on his forearms. He swings alon
g briskly, a thin man proud of his youthful figure, the grace with which he moves.

  But let’s not kid ourselves. His asymmetrical face is that of middle age. His mouth (how it shames him!) is a whited sepulchre. It sometimes strikes him too that his ponytail completes a picture of futility, redundancy, distance from the real. Of a Peter Pan-ish love of hovering, reluctance to touch down.

  With his teeth the way they are, he has to be careful how he smiles—and at whom. But he’s fond of babies and dogs; he’s moved by babies and dogs.

  Reports of cruelty to children preoccupy, appal me. Why are people who torture their children to death never charged with murder?

  Outside the Lunchbox in upper Molesworth Street, Geoff sits at a durable, silvery table. He shuts the Post and puts it from him—remembering of course last Friday’s glib review. A writer’s life is all ambition and anxiety. Ambition and anxiety, drudgery and disappointment. And oh how very slow are the frozen wheels to turn, how glacial the schedule! So that Geoff denies himself any expectation of success, of money or honours. He stands at the end of too long a queue, a queue formed long ago while he was still drinking.

  So be it. The modest dimensions of my own appointed niche are beginning to feel congenial enough.

  Total sales of his books in the second half of 2000?

  Zero.

  There nonetheless arrives a friendly note from his publisher. ‘Liked your director’s recut of Acetylene. Any ideas for the cover?’

  Geoff keeps the good news to himself until Saturday evening. Then he rings his cobber in Raumati. ‘I dropped the shortest poems and added new material.’

  ‘Way to go,’ says Lindsay.

  ‘Still, you know, I didn’t think he’d bite.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t he?’

  There’s nothing on the box. Geoff dons his headphones and listens to a Peter Skellern tape. His Hanimex lamp illuminates his diary, his pouch of Drum, his Zippo lighter, his silvery-grey ballpoints. He’s trying to ‘imagineer’, to think outside the square, to see the gorgeous cover of Acetylene.

  And what of Lindsay? He’s probably my best friend, but we seldom meet.

  On the Monday morning, Geoff pops into Fish Eye Discs, finds a CD of Neil Young’s Harvest and takes it to Seamus at the counter. ‘I won’t be buying this,’ he explains, ‘but I’d like to photocopy the artwork.’

  Seamus was once Famous Seamus, a deft and witty barman in a popular bar. ‘Photocopy the artwork? You’re all the same, you people. You come in here demanding …’ But he drops the old routine and asks instead, ‘You’re about to commit another book?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘A third salacious novel?’

  ‘A volume of verse.’

  ‘Good for you. I hear good things, believe me. And how did your mother like the Pope singing?’

  ‘Her ecclesiastical Christmas box? Not a hell of a lot, from what I can gather.’

  At the Starmart next door, Geoff is charged twenty-five cents for a photograph of Harvest. Its crisp design and exuberant calligraphy perpetuate the original record’s sleeve. And speaking to Seamus has taken me back to a time when music and alcohol were all the food I needed (were food and fire, both). A couple of speakers and a Garrard turntable sufficed to finish a room. For all our promiscuity (our sexual generosity), we paired like birds. A nest consisted of a mattress and a paua ashtray. And when the going got tough, Judith offered to sell her not-so-precious cello. We snuck it out of her parents’ house in Miramar, bringing it to the city on a bus. I remember its tine of a leg like the spike on a Prussian helmet … and Judith’s cape and blueblack Chinese hair, her brown-as-a-coolie’s legs, her firm lubricious tepid kneading grip. Judith was the one I should have secured, Judith the one I should have married, our nest a mattress and a paua ashtray.

  And did I screw her up? But did I screw her up and ruin her life, or was she only in it for the sex, for Cochrane’s angry cock?

  The Manners Mall Postshop is a place of carpeted hush. Geoff buys a franked envelope and avails himself of a desk and a tethered pen. On the blank lower third of the photocopy, he writes a note to his publisher. ‘Dear Fergus—Our design for Acetylene might well begin here. A further suggestion, posing as reminiscence: The old Black Sparrow bks were papery things WITH COLOURED FLYLEAVES.’

  A certain amber haze. It tints the air like a subtle eclipse. Floating whitish smuts are also visible. This inoffensive pall extends as far as Newtown. A gorse fire somewhere, red and yellow and lavish?

  ‘Makara,’ the dentist tells Geoff. ‘They’re having to bring trucks in from the Hutt.’

  ‘These blazes used to be an annual event.’

  The Dental Department of the hospital is in the oldest part of the old brick building. In spite of which circumstance, Geoff has just had his jaw X-rayed by the CAT scan of dentistry, the IMAX camera of orthodontia. ‘By crikey. I’ve been looking at your notes,’ says Darnel, ‘and I have to say it’s probably time we bit the bullet on this one.’

  By crikey. Who says ‘By crikey’ anymore? And Darnel is every inch a he, a bulky young man of average height. His eyes are black black black, as black as a vintage Brylcreem siphon. His eyes are wet and sensitive, both cordial and shy, the pupils quick to shrink to an inky stare. Spanish eyes so reactive and sexy are rare.

  ‘You think it’s time they all came out?’ asks Geoff.

  ‘Oh yeah. I’ll do this one extraction now, but you’re really a candidate for a full clearance.’

  Geoff glimpses the syringe. Darnel lifts lip away from gum. The dentist’s wrist is broad, covered in glossy black hairs, pleasantly scented. Geoff waits for the needle’s spiteful sting, the push and plunge of it … but merely smells the local going in.

  ‘Y’ good?’

  ‘I’m good. I didn’t feel a thing.’

  As soon as the novocaine has taken, Geoff’s ancient tooth is parted from his jaw with scarcely a graunch or creak.

  On the morning of the Tuesday, Gerry Melling rings. His Liverpudlian accent is not yet quite extinct. ‘I’ve found an excuse to visit that convent in Island Bay. Do you still want to come?’

  ‘It’s the chapel I’d like to see. I used to serve mass in the chapel.’

  ‘Far out. I’ll pick you up in ten minutes.’

  Gerry is an architect and poet. As the beatnik editor of a little magazine, he once published poems by a certain Charles Bukowski—but that was long ago, in Canada. With his jeans and leather jacket, his salt-and-pepper beard and round-lensed specs, he looks somewhat soulful and Russian. ‘The convent itself is home to an art school these days.’ (As a driver, he’s snappy, assured.) ‘Some of the pupils are camped in various rooms. Just try to look like some sort of contractor … and let me do the talking.’

  Erskine College is a landmark, of course—an elephant-grey and many-windowed pile at the top of a steep street. According to an article Gerry himself wrote for The Evening Post, its style is Neo-Tudor with a leavening of ‘inventive Gothic’. Corbelled chimneys are mentioned. Parapets, hood moulds and decorated gables are cited; the word ‘cruciform’ pops up once or twice. For Geoff, though, the convent is merely familiar, a simply coloured picture from the book of childhood. ‘It’s more or less as I remember it. I came up once to have a sniff about …’

  ‘But weren’t quite cheeky enough to go inside? Follow me,’ says Gerry.

  A few minutes later, the two men are moving along a nether corridor. Geoff spots the side door by which he used to enter. This is where the altar boys’ scarlet cassocks were hung, and that is one of the cells the visiting priests slept in. Geoff can see a sock-strewn floor, some fat tubes of paint, a chair on which is propped an artist’s portfolio. The lightbulb still hangs down on its long, inflexible flex, unaltered in its perpendicularity. At a quarter to seven of a winter morning, a priest in an army greatcoat once stood beneath that bulb reading his breviary.

  A narrow flight of stairs. The room to the left at the top is no longer the greenhouse it used to be. Geof
f recalls a swarthily handsome nun, a female Geronimo espoused to Jesus. And this was once a place of candles and lilies and ferns in brass pots, the odours of soil and molten wax and freshly extinguished matches. If most nuns were diabolical scolds (hysterics, in the Freudian sense), Mother Bernadine was softly spoken and kind. She dressed the altar with an enthusiast’s hand, but the room that was her depot smells of nothing now.

  Next comes the sacristy. The shallow drawers in which the priests’ vestments lay are empty now (presumably). With his indispensable key, Gerry opens the door giving into the chancel.

  The altar looks less grand than once it did—less tall, less white, less ornate. Almost forty years have passed since Geoff last saw it. The red-lensed lamp warning of Christ’s incarnate presence has been doused and removed. The tabernacle is void, deconsecrate. And where is the burnished gong I’d tap as the host was elevated? And when one loses one’s faith, what is lost and what replaces it? How much is lost—and what replaces it?

  ‘It’s all as you remember it?’ asks Gerry.

  ‘Pretty much. The whiteness seems a little abated. What sort of stone is this?’

  ‘I’ll check the specs when I get back to my office. The chapel as a whole is Alsacian Baptismal in form and layout. It’s marred by the adjunctive stuff, alas.’

  Geoff continues to stand before the altar. ‘Hard to credit, perhaps, but I stopped believing on this very spot.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘Tricky to explain. Various forces converged and collided. Puberty arrived, certain temptations started to beset me. The upshot was, I began to take Communion sacrilegiously.’

  ‘Sounds naughty.’

  ‘To receive the Eucharist in an unshriven state? The blackest sin in the book. Only a few years later, I read all about myself in James Joyce’s Portrait.’

  ‘I’ve read the book, of course.’

  ‘“Ever to be in hell, never to be in heaven …”’ Geoff turns to Gerry. ‘You were born in Liverpool. Does that mean you were brought up a Catholic?’