Connections

by Robert Nicholls

  “What a good innings, eh?” one repeated.

  “Yep,” answered another. “Ninety-two, not out. I should last so long.”

  The watchers shuffled fretfully, passing comments and memories like dry biscuits.

  “He was a great old guy, wasn’t he?” one half remembered, half queried. “A fine man.”

  “Sure he was. A great old guy. Privilege to have known him. Broke the mould. And what a way to go. Just drift off to sleep. No pain. No fuss. None the wiser. Great way to go.”

  “Yep. Great way. I should be so lucky.”

  These were sons of the old man, who were also old men and had never known him well – not known him at all for many years. Around about, their wives and their sisters mumbled over the old man, their spells of well-being, of protection against whatever evil might be in the room as death approached.

  “It’s a blessing, really,” said one. “Far too old. Couldn’t be left on his own much longer. More graceful than finishing in a home, not able to do anything for himself.”

  “Yes, it’s a mercy, I suppose,” said another. “We’ve worried about him these past years, all on his own. He wouldn’t be put in a home – not ever! Too stubborn! Too independent for that.”

  “The grandchildren will miss him, of course. Such a wonderfully . . . energetic man! For his age. Surprising, really.”

  “Yes, well. He’s had a good innings, that’s for sure. Never a day of sickness until now. It’s nice to finish peacefully, with flowers and your loved ones around you. I wonder if he’s made his peace.”

  They struggled to remember him as he was in younger years, but the images of death, the distracting rattle of his breath, were too great. He was lost to them. Coma. Did it come over you like a blanket? . . . like warm water? . . . like a cold smack in the face?

  What was the old man doing, there in that body, in the final minutes of his long life; the battle finished, the darkness near? Would he be studying his conscience like some strange etched stone? Would he be crooning over the cold ashes of his life? How does one ‘make his peace’?

  “Do you think anyone’d mind if I turned on the t.v.?” asked a son. “Just softly?”

  Disapproving eyes swivelled. It doesn’t seem appropriate. What’s on?

  “It’s just, they’re running the marathon at the Olympics, see? They should be nearing the stadium soon. I’d kinda like to see how our guy’s going, is all. Cheer him on a bit, you know? I’ll just keep it quiet.”

  From far away over the sea, the voice in the cam-car mixed with those of the mourners.

  * * *

  “. . . a great run, but he appears to be tiring. He’s maintained that same stride, same pounding rhythm, same grim determination, without a break, for twenty-five gruelling miles. I’d say he’s running on sheer will power now, folks. Sheer guts and misery. The pain must be nearly overwhelming by this time, and only his hatred of that pain, his burning need to conquer that pain – even more than the other runners – will be driving him. His eyes have lost their outward focus. He’s concentrating on what resources he might have left. But he’s not carrying his arms quite as high as he was. And, from live here in the cam-car, we can see that he’s by no means alone!”

  * * *

  In the corner of the room, the television screen filled with the grey pallored face of the runner and millions around the world peered into his private agony, assessing the intensity of his inner focus. Everywhere, people grimaced and jaws sagged, in vaguely imitative empathy. They sucked air and wondered how much pain there was.

  In the bed, the old man’s eyelids fluttered and popped up. He rolled his head to one side and spoke softly, not quite audibly.

  “What? What is it, dear?” queried a solicitous daughter, lowering an ear to the old man’s lips. “Listen, everyone! Father’s speaking! Say it again, love! We didn’t hear you!”

  “Move,” he whispered.

  “What? Move? Do you want to move, love? Are you uncomfortable? Do you want to roll on your side? Can we help you?”

  “You move,” he said, noticeably louder this time. “I can’t see the t.v.”

  She moved, casting amazed and offended glances for the other mavens to appreciate. On the screen, the faces of the people who lined the streets in that far away city swam into focus. Some screamed, some cried, some laughed and the man in the cam-car reported to the world that they were going wild. It was a magic moment, he said. It was a memorable struggle, he said. One of the best ever.

  The old man spoke, quite audibly and all in the room heard him say, “Run, you mongrel.”

  And the mongrel did run, as he had for more than twenty-five miles, counting out a rhythm, husbanding his strength. But his eyes were not focussed and his arms were not as high as before. And he was not alone.

  “”Bastards!” the old man called, half rising in his bed. “Africans, the lot o’ youse!” he cried, as the Kenyans made their move, their eyes still dreadfully in focus, their arms alarmingly high.

  The old man’s eyes were wide and he raised a claw-like finger to point: “Look! There’s a Chink as well!”

  The reporter in the cam-car screamed back over the roar of the crowd, to say that the stadium was in sight, that the Kenyans and the Japanese were all making their moves, that our boy was tired, that he was giving it all he had. On the screen the runner’s head tilted back, his jaw pounded up and down as he drove himself into an oblivion of pain and desperation. He could feel the presence of the Africans, hear their breath, their pounding feet. In the periphery of his vision, the fists of the Japanese could be seen, driving, driving, driving. Surely this was enough? What more was there to give? What more could anyone ask?

  “Run, by God!” shrieked the old man, propped on one elbow and shaking his scrawny fist. “Go hard, boy! Go now! Now! Now!”

  Into the stadium and into the last lap the runners surged while the bands played and the people screamed and howled in a deafening crescendo of sound. They were loving it. It was a magic and memorable moment. In the room, all eyes were on the set, to watch the mongrel run; to watch him give his pain to the crowd; to maybe see him fall or stumble or to find a super human strength that would float him away from his rivals; to watch the whole glorious spectacle from the panoramic view of the hovering helicopter. He ran, and as he ran, their hearts raced with him, all but the one with the ruptured aorta, which died in the stretch.

  When the watchers turned back, they saw the old man with the sheets kicked off, his legs akimbo, like those of a runner. His head was thrown back in a grimace of effort – almost a smile. He had by-passed the coma altogether and gone out with his ancient prejudices fully intact; with a fine curse lodged in his throat. Defiant to the end. So that, perhaps, from his own panoramic viewpoint, God would see this old man striding in from the distance of earth, tossing his conscience like a bright new penny in the blue air.

  “God in Heaven!” whispered one of the astonished women.

  “Unforgettable!” applauded the voice from the cam-car. It really had been a very fine innings.

  Belinda and the Beast

  “Belinda! Even the name is honeyful, isn’t it Jack? And look at the photos! She’s a feast on legs!”

  “I’m not saying she’s not! What I’m saying is that I need more this time. Because the amount of time and money we spend grooming these girls is a small step short of being obscene. You take my meaning Alistair?”

  Photos and mementoes lined the walls of Alistair’s office, testimony to the dazzling brilliance of his career. His hands fluttered up to gesture reprovingly amongst them, before settling into a dusting pattern down the executive’s sleeves.

  “Of course, of course! But have I ever mistaken the magic, Jackie? The history of our ratings says no, doesn’t it? So take my word: the basics are in the genes and the genes, I promise you, are in this Belinda! Beyond that, with due respect for what the Fates have in store, we invent as best we can.”

  “Ye-e-s,” Jack said dubiou
sly. “And too often, what we invent, your ‘Beast’ has a habit of re-inventing. I would really like this one to be romanced instead of devoured. Okay?”

  And he too glanced meaningfully at the array of photos. Alistair tapped Jack’s cheeks lightly, dismissing his concerns.

  “There’s only one certainty, Jackie, and that’s that all of life is a surprise. I’m going to call her in. We’ll have a look at her in the flesh!” He rubbed his hands deliciously. “The flesh is everything, Jackie! The first and the final frontiers! Once you see her, you’ll know I’m right!”

  * * *

  Belinda was enthralled when summoned to the studio. She dressed fit to kill – or to be killed, it would hardly have mattered which. And her arrival was nothing less than a coup, she was so incredibly tall, leggy and buxom. Her hair was blondly long and curled, her teeth straight and white. When she moved, she was as sleek and surprising as a new metaphor, full of dancing rhythms and so very amazingly metrical. The eyes of Jack and Alistair strode appreciatively, from erubescent lips to sternum depths of cleavage to exuberantly muscled calves and, “Perfect! Magnificent! Delighted!” they both chirruped through thin lips and smoke rings.

  “Oooh!” Belinda trilled. “I’m so excited to be here! In the actual ‘Adventure Girl’ studio! It’s just like the movies!”

  Alistair paused in his orbiting around her, long enough to warmly demur.

  “Not quite that good, loveliest Belinda. But let me tell you, my dear, it is very, very close to being that good. Because now that we’ve met you, we’re confirmed in our decision. You, Belinda, from all the hundreds of screen tests that we’ve reviewed, are the Chosen One! It remains only for Jack and me to prostrate ourselves before you and to say . . . Welcome! Welcome to your new life . . . Adventure Girl!”

  * * *

  Adventure Girl! What incongruities of excitement are conjured in that name! What fabulously exotic deeds and places! What excruciatingly tantalising, not to mention titillating, glimpses into the mesmeric realms of danger!

  Adventure Girl! The nights we’ve gathered in the blue-white glow of the television to watch her, bikini-clad, crouching in dug-out canoes on the upper reaches of the Sepik River, or dropping, beautifully, curvaceously encased in thermal rubber, through metres of polar ice. Would she fling herself into the void from a high-flying aircraft? Would she submerge herself in a flimsy cage in the midst of ravenous white pointer sharks? Would she trek into the high Himalayas, there to strip in coy innocence and bathe in icy streams, perhaps beneath the very eyes of the mysterious and yearning Yeti? Of course she would! Adventure Girl, the high priestess of electronically distilled danger, dares all.

  * * *

  “Oh my God!” Belinda fizzed. “The Chosen One! I . . . I’m so, so honoured! I’ve loved every single Adventure Girl there ever was! But . . .” she paused, a trifle indiscreetly, “am I to be a stand-in then? I mean, there is already an Adventure Girl! Veronica Rose! I watched her just the other night, swimming in the river where . . .” her voice dropped to an uncannily resonant imitation of Alistair’s own T.V. sonority, “. . . ‘the Anaconda King rules with deadly intent!’ Oh it was fabulously thrilling! I couldn’t take my eyes off her!”

  “Aah,” sighed Alistair. “Veronica has, uh, failed to renew her contract, as it happens. Gone off to greener pastures, you understand.”

  “And before her there was Janey Armstrong! Oooh, remember her and her . . .” (again that startling resonance) “. . . ‘her quest for the remotest and most primitive tribe of cannibals yet surviving in the remote jungles of New Guinea’? Ooh God but that was exciting! My whole family was riveted!”

  Alistair’s gaze had begun to cloud over as she spoke and a strange rapture seemed gradually to possess him.

  “Excitement hardly covers it, my precious girl,” he murmured softly. “For the tingling of the spine, it was . . . piercingly good television. And the ratings! The ratings! Pray God we shall look upon their like again.”

  “It was all so real, though! When those men captured Adventure Girl! Just suddenly, she was in that funny little village, all tied up but looking so-o-o brave! So defiant! Oooh, she had it all didn’t she?”

  Alistair, lost in reverie, stared silently into the vacant air.

  “Uh, yes!” cried Jack in sudden, over-loud tones. “That she did, my dear! Entirely the world, she had!”

  “And did she fail to renew her contract as well then?”

  “Unhappily, yes,” simpered Jack, placing an arm about her exquisite shoulders and turning her from his entranced associate. “Lost her head, you might say, and failed to renew. But you are not to mind them, Belinda. They are the past while you . . . you are the future. And Alistair and I have agreed – haven’t we, Alistair – seen it clearly written in the mayhem of your eyes, Belinda, that you . . . you will be the best Adventure Girl ever! You will ignite the passions, fire the imaginations, inflame the desires of millions! They will find in you their ultimate reality! You have only to submit,” he gestured at his unusually silent director, “to Alistair’s creative genius.”

  Refusal was never an option for Belinda, tangled as she was since childhood in the chimerical mythology of television. She thrust her arms wide, in a passionately cinematic pose.

  “Tell me what to do,” she cried in Alistair’s direction, “and I’ll be putty in your hands!”

  Alistair’s eyes burned slowly into focus, a narrow smile of satisfaction crossing his lips. His head nodded, barely perceptibly, and he whispered, “Just so, my dear. Just so.”

  * * *

  And so, a new Adventure Girl was born; a creature whose ruddy magnificence contrasted so seemingly perfectly with a sublime aura of feminine vulnerability. At Jack’s insistence, they built her up with a series of minor feats. They took her to see estuarine crocodiles in Queensland, with a native guide to point out their slides and their tell-tale walnut eyes protruding from the muddy waters. They took her to swim on the Great Barrier Reef where she startled middle-sized rays off sandy shelves and prodded fat Moray eels that lived almost exclusively on handouts from foreign tourists. They took her to walk the night-time streets of Calcutta, where the crippled and the homeless saw her pass in an otherworldly bath of dim fluorescent light.

  It soon became clear that Alistair had been right: Belinda was a ‘feast on legs’ and did indeed have the magic that drew ratings. And yet, that design notwithstanding, when Alistair’s editing had been done, it was always his deeply alluring voice that wound itself around her luminous image. She was robbed of all vocal response, then fed, unprotesting, to a public which luxuriated in, craved nothing more than, her brave smile and her lush body.

  “Belinda, my honeybee,” said Alistair one day, “you know the fans adore you. Jack and I adore you. The entire medium adores you.” He frowned slightly. “But I worry. I worry about how to maintain that adoration. I worry about what we can do to continue to deserve it.”

  Belinda’s creamy forehead creased deeply.

  “No need for that, dearest girl,” he smiled, reaching to erase the furrows. “It’s a simple problem with a simple answer. And that is for us, the two of us together, to give more. We endure more and we sacrifice more, for the enrichment of the lives of those who love us.”

  “But Alistair,” she mouthed plaintively, “what more can we give? What more can we do? I give my best to every single script! You know that!”

  “I do! And you are magnificent, as only you can be,” he soothed. “The thing of it is, though, my lovely, that we must design some, shall we say, more challenging, more . . . menacing tasks for Adventure Girl. Not true menace, of course, but the powerful illusion thereof! Fragility in peril! The fine crystal before the swinging hammer! The Beauty confronting terror! You can see that, can’t you my darling?”

  Alistair’s eyes floated away to the various items of memorabilia that lined the walls of his office. Stills of previous Adventure Girls. A faint light seemed to be stirring within him and the corne
r of his mouth twitched irregularly.

  “The ‘terror’?” she squeaked.

  “Well, not true terror of course!” he minced. “But a sense of precariousness! Exposure! The palest suggestion of jeopardy! You must understand, my lithesome beauty! It’s the reason for Adventure Girl’s existence! It’s what her public expects!”

  “But not real danger though?”

  Alistair’s laughter was short and explosive, his assurances long and lavish.

  “Ne-e-e-ever! Belinda, my life! Believe me! I would not place you, for all the silver in Solomon’s crypt, in any real danger! It will be almost totally an illusion! An illusion that ‘the beast’ will conjure up and deliver into the night-time hearts of men and women everywhere!”

  “Almost totally?”

  Gently, he massaged away the tic at the corner of his mouth.

  “Almost totally. A scaffold to build on – that’s all we need.”

  “Oh my God, I love it already, Alistair. And that scaffolding is . . . ?”

  He opened his palms in a promise of innocence.

  “Borneo! To Borneo, Adventure Girl! To visit . . . the people of the forest!”

  * * *

  Belinda’s credulous heart soared with anticipation.

  “The people of the forest?” she murmured. “Oh my God, that sounds so-o romantic! Are they like, people that time has passed by, living in splendid simplicity in the forests primeval?”

  “N-N-Not entirely, my best dreamer. Though your description does have a rather distinctive ring about it!” And off-handedly, more as a distraction than a truth, he added, “You have a sweetly spirited way with the language, my love. Someday we must introduce you to writing.”

  “Ooh Alistair! Yes! Maybe I could even help with the voice-overs, or record comments live . . . on location, like! ‘In the fathomless forests of Borneo’,” she began to invent in her always surprisingly warm and rich contralto, “ ‘unspoiled and free, live the gentle people that time no longer remembers.’”

  Alistair’s complexion flushed crimson as he realised his gaffe. The girl, he reprimanded himself, was incorrigibly prone to suggestion, always needing to be carefully restrained and guided. He felt his twitch redoubling its intensity as she gathered momentum until finally he must shout, “STOP!”