Astonished Dice

by Geoff Cochrane

  TWO

  Bede would recall it as having been in the evening of the day of his arrival that he was first interviewed by Dr Lardwrist. The doctor was a large man, a fat man who seemed to make a virtue of wearing very few clothes (shorts, jandals), but who set, nonetheless, a two-bar heater beaming the moment he had closed his surgery door. He smoked, too, with a relentless, a very oral fury.

  ‘I have some notes here forwarded me by your previous physician, Heron. He mentions pancreatitis, malnutrition, asthma and … “a depressive anxiety state”. In an ideal world, depression and anxiety would be mutually exclusive ills. Stand and open your mouth, please.’

  Bede complied. Lardwrist knocked about in Bede’s mouth with a spatula. When he had finished he resumed his seat.

  ‘You have an alcoholic’s denture, all neglect and ruin, though I’ll bet you haven’t had toothache in years. Any clap?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Excellent. You have confined yourself to bringing, and very creditably too, alone and unencumbered, yourself?’

  ‘Yes,’ replied Bede, catching on.

  ‘Right. Well, I am here to see how I can help you. And I have a clue or two. Tell me: are you, on the whole, a happy man?’

  ‘Yes. No. I try to be. I don’t know.’

  ‘Drink in the mornings?’

  ‘Increasingly, yes.’

  ‘Says here you half killed yourself.’

  ‘A mechanical fault in the steering.’

  ‘MOT gives you a phenomenal blood-alcohol reading.’

  ‘I couldn’t come right that day. And I remember the accident. If I’d been less jumpy I might …’

  Lardwrist did not make notes. ‘So what are you going to do?’ he asked with sadness. ‘With your tolerance still intact and your life all strewn behind you like so much jettisoned hope?’ He paused. ‘Tell me, what do you do for a living?’

  ‘I’m a motor mechanic.’

  ‘A good one?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And your age?’

  ‘Thirty-two.’

  ‘Married?’

  ‘I was.’

  ‘Buying your own home?’

  ‘She got that.’

  ‘I see. “She got that.”’

  ‘I’m not an alcoholic.’

  ‘No?’ Lardwrist paused again. He tapped his file at last and said, ‘Says here you are, in this. Your tissues say you are.’ He donned a pair of wide and gleaming bifocals. And looked at Bede like an owl, like an owl looking.

  Bede was in bed in the dormitory when Greg came to his cubicle.

  ‘I’ve just met the quack,’ said Bede. ‘Is he all there?’

  ‘Very intelligent man, our quack.’

  ‘Yes. I have to confess I thought so.’

  Greg walked away to his own bed. Bede could see him undressing.

  ‘Put it this way,’ said Greg. ‘He believes in this place, believes that it works. But not for the obvious reasons. He gives a little lecture. You’ll hear it. It’s all awash with aldehydes and endorphins and Christ knows what, and at the end he says, “But if all this was otherwise, you’d still be alcoholics.” Yeah.’ He stood folding his jeans, his long thighs white and amber in the gloom. ‘Cereal and toast at seven, Bede,’ he said. ‘You know where to go?’

  ‘Of course. Thanks.’

  ‘Goodnight, then.’

  Earlier, Bede had unpacked and stowed his clothes, his few effects. There was a little desk on which he had disposed his shampoo, yellow radio and photograph of his daughter. He’d brought a chess-set and pieces. Perhaps Greg played. Though not every nerve in his body craved a drink, sleep would be impossible. No; what he felt was a suspension of intent. He knew, or thought he knew, that at some future time he would drink again, not moderately, in the company of friends. He saw their faces. It was as vague as that, as fatal. He knew it to be cowardly, embarking on a programme in the present with any sort of snide, secret reservation as to his conduct in the future. He could hear that the rain had stopped. He missed it. He wished it would return, interposing itself between him and the reality of his situation. He was superfluous to this place. It had no need of him. His engagement in its workings would be sterile and duplicitous. A door, a window, opened in his mind on something fragrant. He forgot his inability to weep and was soon asleep.

  THREE

  Bede was having breakfast when he felt his heart stop. He stood abruptly. His head felt bloodless. There was something very wrong with him. He must get to the door; he must get from the door to the lawn beyond. A great, unvital turning of the world; a bleached, recessive tilting … The jamb of the door was like ice to his touch. His deflated, filtered consciousness made room for a feeling of panic. He had reached the lawn, but to have done so was not now enough. Like someone stunned or shot he turned. His hand encountered a face.

  ‘Sit down. There’s a bench behind you,’ said a woody, cigar-box voice. ‘Breathe shallowly,’ it said, ‘it’s all a part of withdrawal.’

  Through the fear and shame this fit was leaving behind, Bede became reluctantly aware of the shade in which he sat, the dewy bench beneath him and the cold, lime stripe of sunlight over which he seemed poised as if childishly constipated. There was, too, a hand on his shoulder, unpardonable but firm.

  In as much of her nurse’s uniform as she ever wore, Mrs Oliver came.

  ‘Off to your groups, boys and girls. Beryl! I’ll shoot you, my lady, cigarettes with your chest. Bede, dear, let’s have a look.’

  Like everything else belonging to this morning, Mrs Oliver’s fingertips felt cool and, because Bede had shut his eyes, felt monumental on his wrist. He saw their marble prints, huge, and was briefly a child again.

  ‘Well, my lad. I was expecting a myocardial infarction at the very least.’ Who had summoned her? ‘You’d best come to the surgery.’

  Bede opened his eyes. From a white, marsupial pocket in her front, Mrs Oliver turned out, like something animate, a seemingly comprehensive bunch of keys: she was a repository. Bede stood. A man Bede had seen in the lounge turned, with tact, away toward a little bed of flowers. He was wearing still, or again, a plain, green dressing gown of velvet, his back and his buttocks in shadow, a wedge. And was stooping now.

  ‘Have you thought of having roses, Mrs O?’ His fingers cut at the soil, his brown thumb erect.

  ‘They would be nice. I’d have time, I suppose. We had beauties in Christchurch, Mr Salmon, we had a lovely display.’

  She took Bede by the ear and led him inside to the warmer air. Made pale by an oblique sunlight, the corridor’s carpet had the pink, flat quality of something beneath water. Bede’s vision was bled of lustre. He counted his heartbeats. In these present, elastic seconds the gaps in his pulse were stark, a ratchet’s missing teeth magnified enormously. While Mrs O unlocked the surgery door with complacency, Bede craved swiftness.

  ‘Have you been smoking pot?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I should think not.’

  She seemed furious with his answer. With the pressure of her fingers on his sternum, she backed him into a chair. She moulded the sleeve of rubber to his biceps (goosey, diminished) with an action Bede connected with the shaping of pastry.

  ‘It’s just that if you’re feeling anxious,’ she said, and began to pump the spig’s pneumatic bulb with vigour, ‘any agent of that sort …’

  ‘Ouch.’

  ‘Sook. Well, that’s OK if a little low for your age. No. If you’re a little jumpy, pot is not the thing to be … My God, the time. Where’s that silly doctor?’

  As Bede’s thermometer cooked, Mrs O rattled away at the telephone keys with a look of professional cunning.

  ‘David?’

  ‘—.’

  ‘I thought I’d find you there, yes. Look. It’s the Ford boy. I don’t think he’s quite over the hill yet, an episode this morning … Cardiac neurosis … Sweating … Frenetic … What do you mean? David! I asked that man to drop it where it’s always dropped. Fool. Did she? How queer.
’

  Mrs O hung up with a chastened look.

  ‘We’re putting you on a sedative for a while. These things happen’—she took the thermometer from Bede’s mouth—‘when the system reminds itself of the presence of alcohol in the tissues. Its release from the marrow can take up to two years.’

  ‘So now I know.’

  ‘So now you know.’

  They stood and she hugged him. It was a measure, he supposed, of the very nether ebb at which the needle of his confidence seemed to be stuck that he should guess possible for an instant … But no: Mrs O was old enough to be his mother.

  FOUR

  Sometimes the lounge had its curtains drawn. Before Bede could finish his tea and return his cup to the servery, a fleshy motion-picture might animate the wall, its soundtrack booming, of brusque and limited people quarrelling or water-skiing or tossing drinks down sinks, in green or ochre fluxes of the light. Bede knew himself to be doped. Gatherings took place. Now in the lounge, now in a comfortable room in which someone absent seemed otherwise to live, groups of patients cohered with the apparent purpose of discussing travel. Bede seemed to himself to belong, obscurely, to one such group. It formed around him once, in a workshop he had discovered, while he cut from some colourful felt the components of a parrot he thought he might make for his daughter. In time, his medication was withdrawn. Bede at last discerned, between breakfast and bedtime, a ladder of more or less formal obligations.

  In truth, Quest Clinic followed a schedule, a programme of therapies sometimes extending into the evening. When Bede’s initial illness ended he found much of what went on in the place of interest. But group therapy he loathed. One morning a new arrival joined the group into which Bede was himself settling nervously.

  ‘We have,’ said the therapist, a Mr Snow, ‘a rule about Walkmans.’

  The newcomer, smiling, a Maori lad not yet twenty, was slow to take the point. An argument of some politeness ensued, protracted and episodic, between the youth and the therapist, about standards of dress. Bede looked to Mr Salmon, the man of the dressing gown, and found him in a puzzling disarray. In light of the present spat it was as well that he was wearing a sturdy tweed jacket with leather patches at the elbow. But the folds of his neck and jowls were white with stubble. His moustache had lost its neatness. Not so his hair its chiming, silver ripples. He was doing something with a match to a cigarette holder, or vice versa.

  ‘Even members of staff,’ Mr Snow was saying, ‘make efforts to look tidy in what for them is their second home. You can see that, Mr Salmon?’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘Yes? Do you have any comment, Mr Salmon?’

  Roused, there entered Mr Salmon’s blue, patrician eyes the twin imps of malice and malice.

  ‘Comment? Well, it occurs to me that at least one employee of this establishment gets around it as if in constant preparation for some sort of theatrical audition.’

  This was understood by Mr Snow to be a reference to a Mr Shilling, his senior.

  ‘Anything else, anyone, on the subject of dress?’ he asked in an earnest enough attempt to close the subject. There was silence. ‘In that case I will take the opportunity of confiding a suspicion I have. I am loath to do it. It is this. In my twenty years of work in this field, both here and in Canada, I have never before attempted to work with a group as lazy as this one. You take the cake. Internationally, too, at that. You have got to start taking your several recoveries seriously. I mean it. There’s got to be some work done. Mr Salmon, we haven’t heard much from you since your arrival.’

  Bede thought there to be something ovine, something startled and aggrieved about Salmon’s otherwise limpid glance at their leader.

  ‘You’ve heard plenty from me, but not about me, is that what you mean, Snow?’ Salmon’s voice had a timbery echo Bede enjoyed. His eyes had a downward, Oriental cast, the skin about them much rucked-up and starry. His watery gaze had thus the look of an innocence widely tested, blue and hurtful to him. He put his cigarette holder to his mouth and bit on it with a sort of challenge; he was capable of severity.

  ‘That’s more or less what I meant, yes,’ Snow admitted. ‘I wondered if you were not in danger of taking too intellectual, too distanced a view of the events that brought you here.’

  ‘Did you?’ Salmon rumbled, as if any curiosity life had left him with could only be extended outward, to the matter of Snow’s presence here himself, perhaps, come to that.

  ‘Yes. Again, yes. And what I’m asking is’—holding his ground nicely—‘don’t you think it time, high time, you gave us the benefit of some of your own experience, experiences, knocking around bars and dives and cut-rate doctors’ surgeries in Ponsonby and Willis Street and so on?’

  Provocative, thought Bede.

  ‘What do you mean, cut-rate? That was the point—some of my chaps got damned expensive.’ Salmon seemed to consider himself justly enough rebuked. He pocketed his cigarette holder and spread his fingers before him, his elbows on his knees. Look, kids. ‘It got very bad, I’ll say that much.’

  ‘How bad?’ Bede.

  Lunchtime was approaching. The rain had stopped. The wind had forgotten itself. They sat in a brown uniformity of shadow, listening. As in a snow-bound bunker, with the light dying and static crowding a last, vital message from the airwaves, Bede smelled bacon frying.

  ‘She’d stripped the house of liquor. Our place faces the beach. What she didn’t know was, in either direction along the high tide line I had plants. Out with the dog, that was the caper. North or south, it didn’t matter, there were bottles buried. Then I would say, “Jean, you’d better ring Amy.” Amy is her friend, she’d go and stay with Amy. And I’d play patience, for however long it took, order the grog from one of those big depots, home delivery. The last time I did this she sent a policeman. Time to pack it in he said, she wanted to come home, it had been a week. Now somehow or other—cravat, blazer—I got to see a quack in Hamilton. He was very interested. He took a cheque, it must have been a cheque. I came away with a script. The chemist gave me a jam jar full of footballs, hemis, Hemineurin, he was green with professional envy, I could have done with a handcart to get the stuff through the door and into the taxi. Well, that Hemineurin, in that quantity, was the end of me, on that occasion. I bought another bottle on the way back to the house, just to begin the cure with. Our cab had done a few miles by this stage, the Samoan and I were agreed on that. When I came to in Intensive Care with my blood changed, his was the first voice I heard, days later of course. He was having some sort of bother with my cheque.’

  FIVE

  If bacon had been cooked there was no sign of it at lunch, nor of the ducks which came to the dining-room window in the morning, nor of Greg, whom Bede sought in connection with a duty he had been given. A soup made by the boyish, crippled cook seemed wildly adulterate: an odour, sweet, not unpleasant in itself, and which Bede associated with hotel corridors, was present in it.

  As Bede was making tea for himself in the lounge, the sun came out. A man Bede had seen arriving in the van that morning joined him, minutes later, where he stood at the lounge windows.

  ‘Your view’s magic.’

  ‘Isn’t it. I see down there someone’s building a log cabin or house.’

  ‘I can see it too. Apple trees and some sort of old cart. He must be planning a tribe, he’s making it big enough. My name’s Michael Hart, by the way.’

  Hart proffered his hand, frankly. It was done with a sort of skill. Bede shook it.

  ‘No good skulking about friendless, place like this,’ said Bede, obscurely pleased with himself.

  Hart matched Bede in height. He was, too, of an average build. He was handsome in the long-lashed, dark-eyed way of the Black Irish. Perhaps to roughen his looks he wore his hair in an alarming, asymmetrical tangle.

  At one o’clock the cook (known as Popeye because of his callipers and extreme emaciation) rang on a tumbler with a spoon, calling inside those patients who were taking advantage
of the sunshine.

  ‘The manager’s away,’ he called, ‘and can’t be with us this afternoon. He’s left me with a list.’ He had a clipboard from which he read chore details and names. ‘Polly and Ann, no, Margaret: would you please round up all dessert plates. They seem to end up in the women’s dorm.’ Groans, laughter. ‘Then come and see me and we’ll have a look at the ovens now they’re cool. Smith and Carlisle—where are you, men? …’ and so on. Bede found him a bright enough character. At last he said, ‘Ford, you’ve been fixed with the chapel I believe. Might pay you to go and have a word with Greg about cleaning materials. He’s up with the pigs. Oh, and you can take Hart. Take heart and take … Never mind.’

  Adjacent to the loading bay was a room in which Michael and Bede found gumboots of a passable fit. They trudged, though buoyant, up the long track to the piggery. The air was thin and chill and the sun still shone. The earth was a broken crust from which odours rose, refrigerated and dank.

  The area in which Greg was working was cut into a knoll which kept it from the sun. Its concrete and wire construction seemed to cage a gloom. It was like a scene of sombre police discovery. This was a place of stoopings, of grim, forensic labellings. Bede imagined a string of cautionary bunting being hoisted (‘All lift at once, now’), to allow the passage of some muddy, rigid mystery.

  ‘You know anything about what needs doing in the chapel?’ asked Bede.

  Greg was laying dead rats in the bed of a wheelbarrow. He had a woolly, unsleek line of a dozen or so to transfer from a wall. They wore tiny, canine smiles.

  ‘The windows,’ said Greg. ‘Outside and in. Vacuum. Squirt some scent about. I keep some gear in a locker for the purpose.’

  ‘This,’ said Bede, ‘is Michael.’

  ‘Hi, Mike. I could do with a smoke. Let’s walk down through the pines.’

  Greg stopped his work, pulled off his Swanndri and laid it across the rats. He wheeled the barrow from the enclosure and shut a rickety door. Feeling at the pocket in which he kept his tobacco, he led them off down the hill through a copse of pine seedlings. Some female patients waved, wagged pruning saws from a distance. They climbed the other side of the shallow declivity in which the pines, feathery and uniform, were being nurtured. At the top was a track made by cattle, novel and quaint at this height, in this place.