Astonished Dice

by Geoff Cochrane

  ‘I wanted to show you this.’ Greg grinned over his shoulder.

  Michael and Bede followed him down onto a grassy plateau. Below was the valley floor, level and fertile, and here a river had imposed its bright design. ‘Curly,’ said Michael. And so the water was, and tined, threads of its fabric parted by bleached, sheep-like stones in places.

  ‘Yes,’ said Greg. ‘It’s out of the way of things. I sometimes do a joint here. Haven’t got one at the moment. Anyway, it’s tricky during the week.’

  ‘Where I was working,’ said Hart, ‘we had a test for it. Sometimes with our paranoiacs it was useful.’

  ‘Where you were working?’ Greg scowled.

  ‘I’m training as a psychiatric nurse. I was in psychopedics.’

  ‘Heavy.’

  ‘It depends. I liked the old people, the relationships.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘Really. There’s a lot that’s hidden, that keeps surfacing wonderfully, Alzheimer’s or no.’

  They sat in fragrance and warmth. Michael offered them each a Camel. Greg accepted with a big man’s shyness.

  ‘We’d better wander back in a while,’ said Bede.

  ‘Here,’ said Greg, ‘is the key to that locker.’

  ‘And where’s the locker?’

  ‘Chapel itself.’

  Bede put the key in a pocket and lay back in the grass for a moment. He blinked at the clouds, at the dazzle at their edges. When he shut his eyes against their brightness, their vividity was reversed as in a photographic negative. Soon he felt the cool shadow of the sun’s exclusion move down the length of his body. At this he felt a simple, animal disappointment.

  Night. Letting his car gather speed, letting the car rattle, Bede is driving down a hill. Ahead is a corner, sharp. In time, soon, he must turn it. Let the car plunge, he can see where he must brake, he can see where he must turn. The camber of the road, meanwhile, is his sure, unerring track. His ride is pneumatic and quick. The wheel he holds vibrates minutely. He must turn it now. He brakes. There is a sudden change in the degree of things. The wheel vibrates for an instant with too little fineness. He feels through his thighs and buttocks the evacuation, the sudden expulsion from the car’s chassis of a bulk, of a shape, swiftly. His grip begins the motion of a turn. But out of the downward pitch of the car’s deceleration he can make no lateral curve. He holds, has hold of, impotence, of airy disengagement. He conceives of himself as a missile with infinite mass. Before he can brake further, even as he prepares a giant stab with his leg at the pedal, his thigh and calf enormous, a locking, a jamming, a sudden and concrete invalidation of his steering apparatus takes place with a bang. He has hit an invisible barrier, nether and immovable, and is being sucked skyward, upward, as if from behind.

  Emerging on the other side of a tunnel, a vacuity, a hole in time, Bede had realised he was unhurt. He had been thrown clear of the car. His knuckles stung, had been grazed somehow. In a frost of broken glass, inverted, lay his vehicle. Its doors were agape. In its tumble along the road, end over end, the car had also ejected a seat. Where he crouched against a garage Bede could see it, a token of safety and order, out in the street in the beery light of streetlamps, a seat, sitting.

  In the present again, Bede opened his eyes. The afternoon was cooling. Greg and Michael dozed. Here in the company of these good and quiet men it was sprung on him profoundly: that with all the white noise of personal disquiet hushed, made almost inaudible, there still buzzed in himself the desire to drink. A prompting to sex could not have been more frank. As to the accident, while it had everything to do with his being here in this treatment centre it had little to do with his drinking, its modes or degrees. And of his wife, his feelings for his wife? A seat sitting. He pictured her blank face. Its emotionless pallor was accusatory enough, enough for a dozen bitter marriages. To his burden of thirst, of craving, was added the nicety of guilt. He could only guess that she must regard him as being a very deficient, a very unpleasantly flawed sort of man.

  SIX

  The chapel’s design did little more than hint at its function. It had tall windows at one end and a lectern at the other. Chairs were assembled in rows, in imitation of pews. Each chair bore a Good News bible. Bede found the locker to which Greg had given him the key. If it contained Windowlene and chamois, squeegee and scrim, it also contained, like missals, an orderly pile of Penthouse and a dozen coloured pornographic booklets from which the covers were missing.

  ‘No wonder he keeps it locked,’ said Bede.

  ‘None. Afraid his Windowlene might walk.’ Hart thumbed through one of the oddly anonymous magazines. ‘Always intrigues me, the models in these kinds of things. I was in New York. They like the skinny junkie types because their cocks look bigger in the photos. You know, on the subject of the loss of self-respect, I’ve got a few thoughts. I feel more disgust and shame over a can of sardines I once shoplifted than I do about, oh, I don’t know, a lot of other things. And I have days, whole days, when all I can recollect of my alcoholic conduct are the faux pas, the petty borrowings, the sudden descents into sleep. Yet I’ve lost my self-respect as I might have lost a finger. It’s gone, there’s a gap, and I don’t know where it might be.’

  And this is the clinic which gives you back your finger? Bede instead asked something circumstantial.

  ‘Yes,’ continued Hart, ‘they’ve got me all trussed up legally. I want to keep my job and complete my training, I must take “treatment”.’ He drew horns in the air with his fingers. ‘And the Admissions Officer in town said they’d only treat me again, again, if I committed myself. The magistrate beamed and wished me luck. Not that he seemed to believe in all the spurious bullshit we went through, either.’

  Bede had met men whose sharp, otherwise handsome features had been made the instruments of cunning. This was not quite so in Michael’s case. Rather, Hart’s voice suggested the threat of reaction, the sort of disengagement in which there is something of menace.

  As clouds gathered beyond the chapel windows, Bede had time to clean all but the highest panes. A lecture would follow, then dinner. The light darkened bluely. Rain began to scratch its first, and audible, ticks and arrowheads on the other side of the glass.

  Michael sat with Bede at dinner that evening. There was a seating plan, not much amended, which said he should. They were joined without fuss by Powell, a man in his sixties wearing a red tracksuit.

  ‘You may smoke,’ he said, making what Bede guessed to be a maritime joke. He set his plate down between theirs. Bede knew Powell to be a member of the staff, a counsellor. He introduced Hart accordingly.

  ‘Not much of a night,’ said Powell. ‘Pity. I always go in on a Thursday, there’s an AA meeting in town I’ve been attending since Adam was a grasshopper.’

  ‘I’ve only just arrived,’ said Hart. He was kindled, amused. ‘But if you recommend it …’

  ‘You’d like to come? Splendid. Eat your Olives-Berf. With any luck our numbers will be down and we can leave the van and take my car.’ He peppered his food with vigour, not briefly. ‘Only a month ago I was in Japan. Where you never have to season anything, once it’s put before you. This looks nice, all the same.’

  ‘Where did you go?’ asked Hart.

  ‘Kyoto. Spring. It was lovely. I met my wife there in spring.’ Powell was wistful for a moment, blank. Then he remembered his knife and fork.

  ‘I know Kyoto,’ Michael said with care.

  ‘Do you? We must talk in the car. As to that van, if the boss finds out the girls and boys have been eating chips in it …’

  After coffee in the lounge with Michael and Greg, Bede went to the dormitory to change. It was empty. Only Greg’s reading lamp burned. The ceiling here was low. The many sounds of the rain burdened the roof, blanketing and soporific. Bede heard a tinkling sound, as if of experiment or distillation, the rain at work. It came to Bede that he was happy here at the clinic.

  He stood. He lifted his yellow transistor and clicked it
s tiny wheel.

  ‘… even now. First reports say …’ Bede heard, adjusting the tuner, ‘… is a local resident. Just repeating that: in the holiday town of Otaki not far from Wellington, a Ministry of Transport officer is dead after shots were fired in a motor camp. The shooting began an hour ago and reports say it continues. A police spokesman says Armed Offenders Squad members …’

  Bede switched off the radio. He changed his jeans for a dressier pair. He went to the lounge, a place he avoided at this hour in order not to be reminded that what was watched on the TV was, in theory, voted for. All the chairs were empty. A cartoon character boinged and spat. Bede sought the channel carrying news but a drama he sometimes watched was underway.

  ‘Ready?’ It was Hart. He wore a denim jacket lined with wool, his hands deep in the pockets.

  ‘Yes. I’m wondering where old Powell keeps his car.’

  ‘Search me.’

  But a moment later Powell himself appeared. He made an impression on Bede fresher than that he had made at dinner. He was a slight man with high, raw cheekbones. His neat moustache was pronged. He wore a grey canvas jacket with roomy sleeves.

  ‘Ah, here you are,’ he said. ‘I’ve brought our wheels to the front. If we set out now we should just about be there by midnight.’

  A curious tension, thought Bede, existed in Powell between frailty and its maintenance. His age showed in his cheeks, their broken veins. Bede knew Powell jogged, not cosmetically. If he dyed his moustache it would be because his war against age was covert and opportunistic.

  The car was an old Mercedes. Bede guessed it to be Powell’s hobby. It smelled of machine-oil and leather. They rolled in darkness down a long, featureless track. From where he sat in the back, Bede could see only rain, an illuminated cone of aquatic insects, swarming.

  When they had reached the main road, Powell driving in an unhurried, fluid style suggestive of training, perhaps military, Hart produced a bag of Minties.

  ‘So you’ve been in Japan, Mr Hart?’

  ‘I was there with my father, a diplomat, for my sixteenth birthday. We stayed in the Tawaraya Inn. It wasn’t the first time I’d slept on a floor, but I couldn’t get used to the absence of chairs.’

  ‘Quite. I’d seen it after the war, you understand, was there again when I met my wife. She was Russian, matter of fact, a doctor. We loved it all and married there. Who’d have thought it.’

  ‘Thought what?’

  ‘I’d been a prisoner, you see. Burma.’

  As Powell and Hart conversed, Bede remained silent. He took Powell, then, to be a widower. Rubbery, level, their ride was a ride through darkness, past lampposts lit by candles. As if selecting one of these as a cue, a flag of sanction, Powell spoke again.

  ‘Their Burma. As the war drew to a close our conviction was that the Japs would have to surrender, that if they did that they’d butcher all our poor sods.’

  He was an officer, thought Bede. Powell’s eyes here followed a passing feature, a goat tethered close to the road, so that Bede saw his profile. He hid his chin like a boxer.

  ‘A cop,’ Bede said, ‘has been shot. There’s been shooting in Otaki,’ as if, quite soberly, he had seen something stirring, someone gesturing, out in the blackness abreast of their car’s dim headlights.

  SEVEN

  This was not to be the first AA meeting Bede had attended. He had gone to one drunk once. His mood on that occasion had been of a high, psychical lurching between tearfulness and anger, more poorly satirical than exploratory, and he had been ashamed of it afterward.

  Some wet, yellow leaves stuck to a dampness—Bede stepped across them and was within a hall set up as if for some grim parish dance. The scents of Christmas lingered darkly, stalely, like those of unappealing cake. Indeed, a few paper streamers still remained in places, looped between rafters. Three men sat about a table set on trestles. There was a little scullery, too, where a well-dressed woman of middle age stacked sudsy cups and saucers beside a large, inverted teapot. She grinned at Powell in greeting; because someone at the table was speaking, she mouthed a silent welcome.

  Bede knew enough to find a place with an ashtray. When he had settled into his chair he noticed with interest that Dr Lardwrist was one of the group. Of the two men remaining, one was small and simian and the other large, with a wide forehead and a complicated jawline. His skin shone with the closeness of his shave. He had a look of intelligence and reserve and, as the meeting got going, seemed always a little surprised, further amused, by its changes of gear, its formal evolution. His biceps moved in his thin, sporty jacket with a massive, global ease.

  ‘We welcome our visitors,’ said the little man who looked like a rhesus monkey. He had visible tufts on his cheeks where his razor had not reached. Nature itself was making a display of his nose and cheeks. They glowed sexually. ‘My name is Brian and I’m an alcoholic. Each week, as you know, I visit the prison to carry the AA message. I’m always encouraged when prisoners have the heart to come out into the world, albeit briefly, to address with us their problems of alcoholism and drug dependence. Brendan here is with us tonight to listen, learn what he can, and perhaps share his own story with us. Meanwhile I’ll call on Dr Lardwrist, if I may, to make a start. Doctor?’

  At a rugby match, everything interested Bede but the game. In the present, however, he found the simple, human formulation of the meeting congenial. The high-coloured man who had spoken seemed to have chairmanship of a sort; his hand rested on a book as fat as a Bible. In a cheesy light redolent of dead festivity, Dr Lardwrist pulled himself into a semblance of polite posture. His spectacles were shillings of opacity for a second, then Bede glimpsed the watery intelligence behind them, blue, eyes in diffident search of something. They rested at last on Bede’s, smiling a kind of apology.

  ‘Well,’ said the doctor, ‘there’s at least one young man present tonight I didn’t expect to see here. Twenty years ago I would myself have laughed at the possibility of my ever venturing out on a night like this to attend an AA meeting. But there you are, stuff the weather, I’d go anywhere for a drink. Gin. That was my go. I bought it by the case, anywhere but here in town. Once I was signing, drafting a cheque with much artistic licence when the guy asked, you know, wasn’t one case a day enough? Pills to start, pills to stop, a bottle hidden here, another there. I thought in terms of the discipline of addiction. Wow. But with the best will in the world, with all the skill of a memory trained in a study of medicine, I really ended by having a very sketchy idea of what I had taken, was taking. My car was a chemist shop. With all the stuff I was using, I had to invent a patient. There are certain drugs … that helped my drinking seem orderly and moderate. My surgery glowed like a dynamo. One night, two gents arrived. In no hurry, nice manners. But they weren’t taking seats. You stop, they said. You clean this act right up. Because if you don’t we’ll take away your right to practise medicine.’

  Lardwrist closed his eyes. He settled back in his chair. The woman Bede had seen in the scullery joined them quietly. The man with the handsome jaw, the criminal, had parted lips. The slant of his body in his chair, diagonal but bulky, was that of a skilled listener. If this was Lardwrist’s party piece, Brendan, for one, had never before heard it.

  ‘Believe me or believe me not,’ said Lardwrist, ‘all I had ever wanted to be was a doctor. And what had I become? These men threatened my very identity.’ He opened his eyes. He looked at the ceiling. ‘You know, there is a sense in which it is our personalities themselves which are threatened by our addictions. Our characters too, of course. I was lucky. I turned myself over to my colleagues. The light in my surgery went out that night. It stayed out for a good many months, terrible months. In the first weeks, among other things, but forming a sort of dissonant climax to a crescendo of lesser horrors, I had a heart attack. I dropped like a celebrity on the Hanmer Springs golf course. Had it not been so painful it might have been funny. My return to any sort of physical well-being was slow. So too my climb back into th
e old mental cockpit. But in this latter I found AA indispensable. Today my attendance at its inconvenient little meetings is an essential part of my sobriety. I don’t know why. AA, it seems, is more than the sum of its parts. There’s a mechanism at work here we don’t, we can’t understand. Like men with sloping brows crowded about a bonfire in some Neanderthal winter of the spirit, we’re here because we have to be. Let me just add that I am very grateful to be here tonight. I yield the floor, Mr Chairman. Thank you.’

  Dr Lardwrist closed his eyes again. He straightened himself in his chair with his hands on his belly and sniffed, once, fastidiously. Bede saw that Brendan had enjoyed the performance, was not now sure he would like what might follow. The chairman spoke again.

  ‘It’s always refreshing to hear from you, Doctor. Perhaps at this point I might ask one of our visitors from Quest Clinic to say a few words. Perhaps the gentleman with the … ?’

  Bede saw that the chairman was inviting him to speak. He had determined not to, of course. This decision, however, became suddenly irrelevant. In the present, newly engendered circumstances, only a second or two old, Bede felt a swift dissipation of his nervousness, his feeling of being a stranger to this group. It was moved aside like a screen to reveal a competence or skill Bede had forgotten himself to possess, an older thing than diffidence or pride. Composing his features into a smile of shrewdness, Bede spoke, if only in self-defence.

  ‘With all due respect, I feel that I can do little more than introduce myself. My name is Bede and I’m an alcoholic.’ There was a formal murmur of welcome. Bede took pleasure in this; it suited him to be speaking thus, and he continued. ‘When I arrived at the clinic I talked with Dr Lardwrist about matters. I found it easy enough. I found it easy because I was less than frank with him. The fact of the matter is, a certain amount of bitterness was creeping into my thinking. I had tried to stop drinking and couldn’t. I was only at my best at my work at the garage after a decent liquid lunch. I could remember, you see, a time when my drinking had been heavier. Perhaps it had also been less desperate.’