Astonished Dice

by Geoff Cochrane

  Bede felt what he had said formed a modest but finished bolus. But his audience wanted more. The chairman had not prepared himself to speak again so soon. There was a lull, a scratching rupture of continuity as the chairman’s hand searched for a matchbox behind the big book in front of him on the table. Michael Hart took the opportunity of standing, restoring his chair to proximity to the table, and walking off in the direction of what looked like a lavatory, a door near the entrance. The chairman drew his matchbox toward himself across the table.

  ‘Perhaps, then,’ he said, ‘our friend from … Yes … Brendan, was it?’

  Brendan was ready enough to talk. As the chairman lit a fire in his pipe (a fire which seemed to spill, though green and oily, from the pipe’s bowl like water), Brendan turned his palms to the company, knitted his fingers, and flexed and cracked his knuckles. Perhaps he would speak at length.

  ‘I’m an alcoholic and my problem is Brendan.’ The chairman had made a success of his pipe. He looked with alarmed, candid eyes at the speaker as if at some senior, more lushly-pelted ape. ‘It is certainly a pleasure, a privilege to be asked to speak on my first visit to your group. I was born in Dublin, as my accent may tell you, at a very tender age, a good many years ago now. I guess I got up to all the usual childhood drinking pranks. By the time I was fifteen I was getting drinks all over. I had a mob of older brothers and had to be a part of their shenanigans. My eldest brother, Tommy, had me in a club for the boxing by the time I was sixteen. Of course, I was away at work b’ then, a yard man with the coal and what have you. Get away to sea our Tommy had told me, and I did, I was off in the end, the worst thing I ever did, so far as the drinking was concerned, but not at first.’

  Though Bede was interested in this, though it promised to provide an explanation as to what Brendan was doing in gaol, Bede felt there to be another, peripheral circumstance he should be attending. It might, he felt, alarm him if he could just bring it into consciousness. Brendan’s clever facial mobility continued to tell a story, perhaps funny, in which there was more than a hint of sagacity. But Bede did not hear it. He was fitting a cigarette to his lips when it became clear to him why he was troubled.

  He stood. He pocketed his cigarette. Like someone trying not to break a film projector’s beam, Bede ducked with grace away from the table. He seemed to whisper a word of apology. His shoes knocked like clogs on the wooden floor as he crossed to the toilet door. He had a glimpse of the night without, felt its chill on his shoulder. He could smell, for an instant, foliage as he passed the hall’s entrance. The door beside it swung inward. A light was on. The sole porcelain urinal chuckled and hissed at nothing.

  There was a mirror, also vacant. Bede combed his hair at it. The Bede in the mirror smiled at Michael Hart’s escape. He had strayed like an electron, blithely, obliquely. Bede lit his cigarette and inhaled with relish.

  Reckoning that he had had time to pee, he opened the door and returned across the reverberative boards. Lit orangely from above, the faces and hands of those present had that waxen lambency Bede associated with the poker table. The folds of the chairman’s pipe-smoke were plastic enough to have achieved blueness. Powell watched him as Bede resumed his seat. He returned Powell’s look with a shrug, showing him empty hands: He’s not in my pocket.

  ‘When I was arrested for the robbery for which I’m now doing time,’ Brendan was saying, ‘I had no criminal record. I was living the life of an alcoholic seaman whose funds were running low. I had a room in a boarding-house in an unfamiliar city, an idle port. It seemed to me that shipping was at a standstill. In what policemen used to call a “disorderly house”, I bought a pistol. Why? I had enemies. They followed me home to my crummy room, they populated my nights of crashing delirium, they came and went in whispers. They could only be bought with rum, appeased by the focus in a pistol’s hateful eye. I was smoking a lot of dope, other people’s ganja. My severance money was dwindling. I was mismanaging whores, I was mismanaging money. There was a bank near where we drank. The scale of the thing appealed to me, to what was left of my reason. By some queer chance I had seen that often its security video camera was not switched on. Picture it. I hadn’t changed my clothes in weeks and wore one of those plastic, rubbery Groucho Marx masks with the glasses and big moustache, something I’d seen on TV. I was affable but firm. And just as if it was all a part of the game, as she piled up the money in front of me with every appearance of having done this sort of thing before, she switched the camera on with her toe, I saw her do it, as if adding some new touch or other to her makeup.’

  Brendan grinned at the company. Powell leaned close to Bede.

  ‘I’ll have to do something unpleasant,’ he whispered. ‘I’ll have to ring the police when this is over. They expect it.’ He scowled.

  Bede heard the whistle of a Zip from the scullery.

  EIGHT

  Michael Hart had left a note for Bede. It was written on a single sheet of paper torn from a sketch pad, folded once and left on Bede’s bed.

  Bede,

  Stoned, faceless, tremulous with the prescience of mescaline or datura, you might see this place as a clutch of radio components, all of crystal. It’s aglow, this translucent chassis, with little worms of fire, with vortices of light, tiny and sharp. Your bloodstream steaming with Methedrine, you might paint it, you might draw it with an airbrush, this little city of glass. And what is its function? What does this pigmy metropolis of transparency and venous filaments do? It absorbs neuroses, it imbues itself with delusions.

  Yours. Mine. Theirs.

  I’m gone.

  Michael.

  Several days passed. One afternoon under an ashy, quilted sky, in a place where the air was saturate and a permanent dew clung in pearls to the gorse, Bede was helping Greg mend a fence.

  ‘I heard at lunch,’ said Greg, ‘that they’re bringing Michael back this afternoon.’

  Hart arrived as they were having tea in the lounge. Two policemen brought him. They were curious as to the function of this place, its extent. Powell met them.

  A doffing of hats; ‘best-place-for-him’ smiles of abdication; they went with the careful nonchalance of the observed back to their aliens’ car.

  What did Bede see?

  Hart had the tousled hair of a fugitive. Bede got an impression of captivity, of identity smeared, of the operation on Hart of an ethos which was its own compulsion, sans proddings or handcuffs. Bede saw a handsome, cowed head, a shadowed face of some beauty on which the smile seemed irrelevant, futile. He saw this in the bright, forceful concentration of an instant.

  Bede carried the image of Hart’s profile, its stamp, into his counselling session with Mr Snow.

  ‘Why do they bring him back? What’s the point?’ asked Bede.

  Mr Snow was very fair. His face had a raw, veiny appearance. Winter’s astringent air threatened to make it bleed. His skin seemed lit by irritations, a litmus paper on which were registered the stains of the inhospitable, the air, the very hour.

  ‘The point is, and I’m sure you’ve already thought this through, that he has asked to be brought back. He did that when he had himself committed. Have you any idea what a menace that guy had become? Anyway, this is typical of you, your concerns are always exterior, never in there with yourself where they should be, given your more recent history. You are the lame duck for the time being and it’s you you should be worried about, not him.’

  ‘A menace?’

  ‘They had to take some guns off him. But you know all that.’

  ‘No. I hadn’t heard.’

  ‘He had a modest arsenal. Seen with the things at four in the morning, that sort of thing. Very nervous neighbours.’

  ‘I believe he’s something of an artist, a painter.’

  ‘Won an Australasian prize. Look, we’re here to talk about you. Have you written to your boss yet?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You decided you would.’

  ‘I’ve changed my mind.’

 
‘So we’re back to the drawing-board on that one. Mind if I make a note?’

  ‘A weirdo, then. Him. Assembling, disassembling the instruments of death.’

  ‘His winning entry was called “Glass of Water and Maiden”. I hear they arrested someone this morning for a shooting in Otaki.’

  ‘They stormed the house. They don’t, you know, “storm” anything, they’re very quiet. Mute, up trees.’

  After dinner Bede moved his few things to a room he had been allocated. It was his own and small. There was a desk at which he might write those letters he dreaded because to each he must add this strange, remote address, an admission of defeat. His window looked out into that square of lawn and shrubbery where the little totem brooded. Night would soon immerse it.

  ‘Knock out that wall and window, you’ve got my cell in Japan.’ It was Hart.

  ‘Really? Come in. Your cell?’

  ‘Absolutely. I was in a Buddhist monastery for a while.’

  ‘On what basis?’

  ‘No basis. I was just there. The sound of two hands clapping, I suppose. My father had said he would send an airfare. Well, he took his time. So long, in fact, that I had time to get my head shaved.’

  ‘The other monks did that?’

  ‘No. A local barber. Outside our cells each morning one of the monks would make a fresh pattern in the sand, a new and careful pattern every morning with a rake. You must have seen it, that sort of thing, in photographs.’

  ‘One doesn’t think about the pattern being varied.’

  ‘The design mutates, even for the godless, and I was godless enough.’

  He stepped into the room. Hart had a face of a type, a face in which the cheeks were dominant. The images of two opposing hatchets, long and thin, seemed stitched into the skin. But there was about the modesty of Hart’s spare physique something Bede thought he would like to embrace, to test the substance of. Hart had glamour, was a thing of attractive parts. He settled on Bede’s bed with an untroubled, welcome discourtesy.

  ‘Were you though, are we?’ asked Bede. ‘I wonder. Oh, I know, we’re supposed to find it here, this spiritual life to which they urge us. But have you ever prayed?’

  ‘I’ll tell you. Do you mind if I smoke?’

  Bede accepted a Camel. With an ashtray positioned near his thigh, Hart leaned back on the bed and into his own tumbling smoke. He rested on his elbows, his chest concave and shallow, his cigarette white beneath the dark asymmetry of his hair. He exhaled productively.

  ‘I was returning from a detox ward,’ Hart continued. ‘I was going back to a cottage I rented on the beach. I’d been doing a little hunting, a little painting, before things caught up with me. There were pigs in the bush, I was equipping a studio, I had a lot riding on staying straight. My lady would stay, blah blah, I’d been promised some design work. There was a difference this time, or seemed to be. I had really tasted these very bitter lees. And been frightened. Dig this: it was all still an effort? This isn’t a simple story. Suffice it to say that I wanted to stay sober, I had seen right to the bottom and, surprise, there was no bottom. So here I am on a bus, returning, and I ask myself what could possibly weaken my resolve in this matter. Understand the question, Bede. What circumstance? Then I twigged. It came to me. There was this one guy. Between us, between the two of us, drinking had always amounted to a sort of sacrament. I hadn’t seen him in years. Imagine his turning up. After so long, after so pregnant an absence. So I asked, I asked Him, I asked God, “Is this what You’ve got planned? Is it?”’

  ‘And did you get an answer?’

  ‘My friend was waiting to meet the bus. I could have hit him. We only sat up until midnight. He drank two bottles of beer, and I, nothing, tea. But I don’t think we ever got closer, were ever more clear-eyed and direct with one another than we were that night.’

  Hart stood. Though, in a way, Hart’s story was one of defeat, Bede felt for the moment a thrill of possibility, the intimation of what it might be to win, to flourish. For were they not young, was there not already something resembling friendship underway between them? Hart’s shoulders radiated more than heat. The smile now making his cheeks two elongated dents of query revealed him to be a woodsman, a drinker at sobering springs. His teeth made that seem likely. Hart’s smile had, too, the reassuring shape of scepticism. In this, Hart’s caution struck Bede as being a function of his intelligence. For all their grace, Hart’s shoulders were not broad. But he kept them present, spread. He made more room with them than the world had yet allowed them.

  ‘So what frustrates us?’ Bede asked. ‘It seems to me that we have a fairly profound interest in states of mind, even in spiritual states. Where’s the serenity?’

  ‘I think of it as being a box, the box of entrapment in sequence, time’s box. This frustrates us. Personally. But further to this, making really sure we don’t get a good night’s sleep, is our fear of nuclear winter, our memory of the death camps. For the time being, our collective nerve has been shaken.’

  When Hart had gone Bede drew his curtains. Perhaps we love our own darkness. Reflecting on Hart’s last remarks, Bede saw him as an artist whose interest in life was alchemical. There was no other word for it. Hart cast long shadows—at night. He brought his own mystery to the lesser mysteries of ammunition and firing-pin. And perhaps, like Kandinsky, he was the smocked manufacturer of his own pigments, a white-gowned chemist from whose deliquescent powders bloomed bloods, azure inks. He was certainly complex, had left something of his egregious congruence of mind and person behind him. But the forms of his cigarettes’ blue and motile smoke, a series of steps or steppes erected in the air of Bede’s still room, were already collapsing, were already becoming diffuse.

  NINE

  He had left his door open to clear the air. For a while he rested with his knuckles on the desk, looking at nothing, listening to a growing constriction in his chest, feeling a wind at his cheeks which did not exist.

  Bede had a deep, private awareness of his asthma’s ability to kill him. When it attacked it imposed a condition as dark as it was airless. It impeded. It numbed. It starved. Bede hated and dreaded it. Thus, when it threatened, was broadening the bands of its gluey inhibition, Bede had trained himself to take twenty milligrams of Prednisone. He knew it would keep him awake and alter his mood. Time spent on Prednisone was time apart, of a subtly elevated kind of perception. It was a drug Bede welcomed, like alcohol. But, like morphine, it deprived him of the proper recollection of its bliss, its many kinds of euphoria, variously enjoyed, and he looked forward to using it again. Prednisone. Months might pass when he need not take it. When it became timely to resume its use, Bede was always a little glad. Its name suggested to Bede a holographic play of pastel geometries, the movement of thought across thought in gliding planes of transparency.

  It had gone seven. The muted, tinny rattle of water beneath his window told him it rained, still, or again. He straightened. He must see Powell.

  At a place in the passage where it darkened, became unfamiliar, intimated the possibility of trespass, Bede found Powell’s door. He knocked. Powell wore a wine-coloured dressing gown in which seemed to move, at depth, other lustres and hues. Powell’s room was his home. All of it. It had, therefore, a packed, orderly, complex character. And Powell was a travelled, well-read man. He had been reading in bed. A Penguin Evelyn Waugh lay face down on the carpet.

  ‘Do you do much reading yourself, Bede?’ he asked as he busied himself at a little Café Bar. ‘Tea, coffee, chocolate? I can offer all three.’

  ‘Tea, please. And sugars, two. Oh, I don’t get much time for reading. Wilbur Smith, Laurens Van Der Post, that sort of thing. I think I’d like Africa.’

  ‘I do. Hello, the sugar thing’s gone bung. N’mind. There’s more in the packet. Come to chat?’

  ‘Not really. I need some medication. Lardwrist’s left some tablets marked for me in the dispensary.’

  Bede took one of two easy chairs. Here he felt a certain privilege, the
pleasure of intimacy with things not his own. There were books, fish in a tank, the memorabilia of air force and cricket team. Powell brought their cups and sat down opposite Bede. In the present, abated light, Powell’s cheeks seemed broader, more Slavic than ever. But this appearance of breadth belonged to his cheeks alone. The dihedral of his moustache suggested balance, an equilibrium of tensions.

  They stirred their respective drinks. Powell, smiling, seemed content with the silence between them. Surfaces: Bede found one on which to rest his cup. A thin, wheaten light: he had almost decided to give something a try.

  ‘I have,’ said Bede, ‘misgivings.’ And sounded to himself abrupt, surprised.

  ‘Oh? About what?’ asked Powell. His eyes winked on and off like running water. His glance bent upward as if from a shelter, a carapace.

  ‘I want to put something to you. I’ve tried to decide what this place is. I’ve tried to decide if I belong in it. And my feeling is that I’m trapped behind barbed wire here. I feel I have unfinished business, out there in the world.’

  ‘I believe you’ve a brother in Sydney.’

  ‘And money from the sale of my bike. There’s already trouble about my seeing my daughter. I could be in Aussie tomorrow.’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘Aren’t you going to try to dissuade me?’

  ‘Me? I don’t think so. It’s never admitted, but there will always be people whose referral to these places is inappropriate. The question is, are you one of them. For me, the shame of all my past crimes keeps me sober. Where before it was a further reason to drink. I can’t explain that. But because I’m sober I can exercise a choice.’