by Black Inc.
Published by Black Inc.,
an imprint of Schwartz Publishing Pty Ltd
37–39 Langridge Street
Collingwood VIC 3066 Australia
[email protected]
www.blackincbooks.com
Copyright © 2015 Black Inc.
Individual stories © retained by authors, who assert their rights to be known as the author of their work
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.
The National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Where there’s smoke: outstanding short stories by Australian men / Various authors.
9781863957564 (paperback)
9781925203400 (ebook)
Short stories, Australian.
A823.010804
CONTENTS
D.B.C. PIERRE Suddenly Doctor Cox
NAM LE The Yarra
RODNEY HALL Silence 1945
J. M. COETZEE As a Woman Grows Older
A.S. PATRIC Guns ’N Coffee
MURRAY BAIL Camouflage
TONY BIRCH China
DAVID MALOUF Mrs Porter and the Rock
SHANE MALONEY I See Red
TIM WINTON Aquifer
PATRICK CULLEN Mauve
ALEX MILLER Ringroad
KIM SCOTT A Refreshing Sleep
LIAM DAVISON Sandtrap
FRANK MOORHOUSE I So Do Not Want To Be Having This Conversation
RYAN O’NEILL July the Firsts
JAMES BRADLEY The Inconvenient Dead
PATRICK HOLLAND Flame Bugs on the Sixth Island
PETER GOLDSWORTHY Shooting the Dog
CHRIS WOMERSLEY Where There’s Smoke
PUBLICATION DETAILS
CONTRIBUTORS
SUDDENLY DOCTOR COX
D.B.C. PIERRE
Driving to work I saw the most beautiful roadkill. It was a carpet of iridescent butterflies, squashed but flashing on the highway, as if concrete had worn thin over a seam of priceless opal. Wings twitched and glinted in the heat, spurring that human compulsion to stop and urgently gather treasures. But it was a frustrated compulsion. Under the sparkle were only dead insects. Like suicide-butterflies they swarmed from the jungle to die under minivans that throbbed drum and bass music; and when the traffic was light, to lie wavering in gentle reggaes that wafted down the mountains like fog. Even in death the butterflies were delicate and stunning. What a baroque start to a day, to a season, this emperor’s carpet of beauty and needless death; if any death can be needless, or beautiful. I tried not to hit the butterflies with the car but it was impossible; I swerved and slalomed in vain. And the drive made me ponder: whatever made the creatures shine in life was still active after death. Beauty had survived them, and in a strange way was even framed and made meaningful by their deaths. At any rate I will never forget them, nor the feelings and philosophies I had to suddenly deal with.
This was my first day of work in Trinidad. When I arrived at my new office I found that a young man lived in the dirt under the building. He was black, with doll’s eyes and a jutting, almost hanging lower lip. I discovered he was there when a colleague went to a particular spot on the office floor and stamped on it hard.
‘Cox,’ he explained.
After a few moments a man shuffled into the office. He was glazed with sleep, and looked like he’d slept in his clothes. David Cox was his name. His fly was open. He shuffled because his workboots had no laces. In a hangdog manner he took instructions from the colleague for an errand. His voice lacked the full twang and lilt of Trinidad, but had a drawl that tapered to quiet at the end of his words, making them somehow sad. He also mushed them in the way of Sean Connery. Cox shuffled away on his errand, probably to find food, and I watched his head weave past the tinted windows and up the road into Port of Spain. Then sunshine smacked the Gulf of Paria, opposite our building, and swallowed him up in a gleam. Mangroves, manatees and mud-crabs must have stirred – in the languid haze you didn’t have to see them to know they were there.
I first came to Trinidad for a cricket match. Now it was my first day of work in an air-conditioned office with a man living under it. Well, don’t ask me how one thing led to another. Suddenly I was among colleagues, not many more than a dozen, who were a teeming sample of the island’s bloods: Afro-Caribbean, East Indian, Syrian, French Creole, Anglo and Chinese. Their natures were so bright that my steepest learning didn’t come from the work we were meant to do together in the office, but from catching up with local patois, with wining and grinning and liming, with doubles and roti and parlour-juice, with macajuels, mapipires and pommes-cythere, with play-whe and soca and chutney and parang. And threaded between it all, between the island’s scent of intimate sweat and the bating of breath in case a boa constrictor should thud from the trees – I gradually learned more about the man under the building.
‘He fast,’ someone told me. ‘Watch out.’
David Cox would present himself in the office most mornings wearing some variation on a sheepish face. Understandable, I thought, if somebody stomps floorboards over your sleeping head. Apparently he was the building’s security guard, though he was absent most hours of the day, and seemed also to roam at night. One morning, while Cox shuffled about the office, a colleague grinned and told me there had only been two breakins during his tenure – and Cox had committed them both.
In the background Cox’s eyes fell; his shuffle grew awkward. I heard him click his tongue.
David Cox had been a street boy before mysteriously fetching up at our building. At first he had been allowed to spend his nights indoors; but after something went missing one night, he was banished outside. Our wooden single-storey building was raised off the ground, with a planked skirt around its base that hid the pillars and foundations. The front of the office faced a busy road along the gulf, but at its side was a residential cul-de-sac partly shaded by the building’s coconut palm, and with an exotic ruin across the road that dated back to the coup d’état, now fully reclaimed by lush foliage, with flowers, and arctic-white herons that posed in the sun; and behind the office, through a froth of hibiscus and bougainvillea, a narrow alley ran between the building and the neighbour’s fence. There David Cox had scraped a hole under the planks, and fashioned a nest from old clothes.
Cox never seemed to wear the same outfit twice. Over time his fashions showed that he was a man of drifting spirit; his accuracy to good taste had a margin of surprise in every direction. Some days he would suddenly appear in an old lady’s gardening hat, other days in the garb of a pimp, or a child, or a ramshackle country gent. I was told all his clothes came from a charity bin. He had the biggest wardrobe in Trinidad, and it doubled as his bed.
‘Good morning, sir, I’ll carry your bag.’ He would appear out of nowhere when I stepped from the car in the morning.
‘Thanks, Cox. I can carry it. And never mind “sir” – it’s only me.’
‘Yes sir mister sir.’
There was a creeping feeling on the island, as in many postcolonial places, that every good turn done for you was a token soon to be redeemed against cash. With this in mind, and with everything I had been told about Cox, I tried to keep a cordial distance at first.
‘Sir, mister sir sir—’
‘Cox,’ – I stopped to face him once under the coconut tree – ‘you’re not my servant.’
A sparkle came to his eye. ‘Just testing.’
As the weeks unfolded I saw that Cox was a man on the move, with a quick intelligence and a child’s candour. There came a time when I started s
taying back late in the office, and, as he grew used to me being there, he also came around. After a while two things would happen at night: at a certain time, quite late, a shadowy car would pull up outside. Figures would come to the door and hand me foam containers of food and drink. And soon after, Cox would darken the door and come in for the food. We chatted, and he made himself coffee, or used the bathroom. The building’s masters didn’t want him coming in at night, but he was good with me, and had a good mind; so after a while we grew familiar.
‘Lend me fifty dollars,’ he would say.
‘I’ll lend you the sharp end of a pineapple.’
‘I was only joking.’
‘The sharp end of a pineapple, I say.’
‘What! I was only joking!’
‘Good.’
‘But do you have ten? I’ll pay you back.’
And so it went with Cox, who could mount vast philosophical structures to achieve his ends: ‘But listen to me,’ he might say, ‘have you, in your life, given a total of more than ten dollars to beggars?’
‘Of course.’
‘But you never saw that money, nor probably the beggars, ever again, right? So here, on the one hand, you’re capable of throwing money clean away into the ether; and on the other, of resisting to lend to a sort of colleague who you know you’ll see every day, and whose life you can make hell until you get paid.’
‘Cox – it’s a beg. A high-functioning beg, because you know I don’t want to make your life hell. You’re trading on my sympathies.’
‘What! Do I look like a beggar? Like a man who would trade on sympathies?’ His arms would fly in outrage.
‘Yes.’
‘Well. Maybe a technical beg.’
‘And look, don’t enable that stereotype where I’m rich just because I came over from England, or owe you in a cultural sense because your poverty derives from a colonial past. Everyone has their roll of dice in life – I get paid on the same day as you, by the same people, and until then am in the same relative condition.’
‘Wow.’ His lip would fall back to a resting hang. ‘Like you really got out the wrong side of the bed this morning. Wow.’
I would turn my eyes on him.
‘Wow.’ He would shuffle away in his laceless shoes. ‘Like – at least you have a bed. At least you have—’
‘Cox – I’ll give you five dollars. OK? Give them to you.’
‘No, no,’ he would dismiss me over his shoulder. ‘Far be it from me to jeopardise the harmony of our interrelationship.’ Cox really did have a golden tongue, who knows from where.
‘Coxy – we’re starting to sound like an old married couple. Just take the five.’
‘Yes mister sir thank you sir.’
‘And don’t be like that.’
‘OK but I’ll pay you back.’
‘You don’t have to; that’s the idea.’
‘But only a beggar wouldn’t pay it back, only a beggar—’
And so gently I joined Cox’s orbit of support, delighting as he did in our philosophical charades. We alternated the roles of mentor and pupil; he with the wiles of the streets, and me with the overworld that was inexplicably out of his reach. One day, for instance, he watched me take a generous stance with a colleague, but get landed with an hour’s extra work as a result.
He sidled up to me afterwards. ‘You need to master mood swings.’
I looked up from my desk.
‘Don’t be so predictable. Get a reputation for moodiness and nobody will hit on you for favours.’ He winked and shuffled away.
Then there came a season when Cox started coming in with an old briefcase full of documents. One day he asked if I could read one to him. I wasn’t sure if it was because he thought I would find the paper interesting – but it turned out that he couldn’t read or write. He was too proud or too embarrassed to ask anyone else. Alongside a small kitchen area in our office there was a cubby with table and chairs, and Cox would sit there with the briefcase of papers, shuffling them, sometimes pacing importantly back and forth, muttering to himself. It was sad to watch. He had a shine that would have taken him anywhere in life, given only the most basic chances. Instead his faculties were turned to eking small wins on the streets, among equals in cunning who hadn’t half his humanity.
The beggars in the capital were the best talkers I’d ever seen, and each had a trademark style: there was the grand supplicant with the Moses beard who would approach reaching out like a toddler and whimpering, ‘My lord, my lord,’ in a tragic falsetto. There was a snappy beggar outside a pub who would sing for a burger, and Fat Beggar, a portly chancer who would saunter past busy food stands and say to a patron: ‘Give me ten dollars.’ If they said no, he would demand three breakfasts. Threats as bright as parrots always flocked around Fat Beggar: ‘Ten dollars? I’ll crack you down with the door of this car,’ et cetera. There was also the well-spoken white man who claimed to be Hitler’s brother, and gave creditable dissertations on the fall of the Reich. And there were genuine ragamuffins, who never spoke but simply scavenged in the gutters of the town – some could only walk on all fours. And precisely where Cox roamed in this sweltering arena, or what he really did, was a mystery to everyone.
One day I squeezed through the hibiscus behind the building to see where he lived. There were cables running over the fence.
Cox had power. He had cable TV in his burrow. I didn’t have a TV in my house. But Cox had cable in the dirt. He had rigged a line from a pole in the street. The bushes at the back of the building would flicker colours in the night.
Some time after seeing this I noted Cox was more anxious, and more attentive to his errands, in a bumbling sort of way. He forgot about his case of important papers for a time. Then I heard that his television had gone. He had sold it to an old lady, under some crushing sudden debt.
‘But how stupid he is,’ someone told me. ‘He only had it on hire purchase – Lord knows how he talked anyone into giving him credit. His tongue did its work that day. Now he sold it for less than he owes the shop, and he already spent the money he sold it for.’
Cox sharpened his wits as this new weight bore down. The energy of miracles came to him, as it can to certain people whose hopes and pressures blaze persistently inside them. One night after colleagues finished work they sent him up the road to buy beers. Cox went for the beers, and came running back with the bottles; but he was careless crossing the avenue to the office. A car hit him. It tossed him into the air, and tossed the beers up with him.
Cox survived to limp away. And he caught the beers. Not one was broken.
A legend was born in Port of Spain.
Still, and it’s probably in the nature of living legends, the period wasn’t all plain sailing for Cox. It saw him taking a more vigorous interest in being a security guard, which is a job also calling for steady judgment. Now he fancied himself chief of security. The nights I was there he more noticeably prowled outside, coming to the door every so often to check on me. He lurked, those days, and his eyes shifted suspiciously left and right like a secret agent. When I finished at night I would find him prowling by the door; he would hold up a hand while he scanned the shadows for villains, before waving me to my car.
This was his spirit the night he spied a figure on the roof of a nearby building. Cox sprang into action, assembling a posse of vagrants to rout the intruder, who tried every ruse to dissuade them. With sticks and projectiles they managed to dislodge the man from his perch, and gave him a thorough pasting on the ground.
But when the police came the man was identified as the security guard for that building.
The posse vanished into the shadows. Cox went to jail, and our masters didn’t get there to bail him out for at least another day due to laughter.
After this Cox drifted back to his shuffling self, coming to the office at night with important paperwork that he couldn’t read, scrutinising it and sorting it with momentous frowns, grunts and sighs. He shaved his hair close, and started wear
ing granny-glasses he had found somewhere or other. Suddenly Doctor Cox, with his glasses, and his case of papers. Not long after this next of his little lives began, I saw him by the avenue with a mobile phone. He paced up and down having earnest conversations, eyes reacting this way and that behind his glasses. Cox didn’t want to show us his new phone, but I found it one night and saw it was a rubber toy. One that squeaked when you squeezed it. It also had a little antenna that went up and down.
At his table in the cubby, next to his papers, he sometimes extended the antenna to listen for incoming calls. One time he handled the phone too roughly and it squeaked. He flinched, peering around to see if we’d heard.
After that it stayed in the case.
Everyone reckoned that Cox was about twenty-three years old. He actually carried a birth certificate in his pocket, like a passport, and it had his mother’s name. But nobody had put his name, or date of birth.
Cox’s mother was long dead.
One night I watched him through the window as he sat with a clean, proper-looking girl. She had come from a workplace, in her suit, and Cox had spruced himself up to meet her in dazzling white trousers. They sat on the ledge under the coconut tree. It was Cox’s first date. All he felt he could offer the young woman was a convincing pantomime of worth. I watched, thinking it was perhaps all any of us can offer. Cox frowned and smiled and frowned, and his hands masterfully framed notions and surprises for the girl. Occasionally he stepped away to take a call on his phone. I lurked in the dark of the window hoping the thing didn’t squeak.
As I began to lock up for the night, he hurried to meet me on the steps. When Cox was nervous or frightened his eyes grew round, and he clenched his teeth so that you could see them clenched.
‘Mister sir, sir …’
‘Don’t worry,’ I said. And passing the girl on my way to the car: ‘See you tomorrow, Doctor Cox.’
The girl didn’t come around again; I suspected she would have liked to, but Cox only had the ledge under the coconut tree to entertain her. He had illuminated what might have been, and that was all he felt he could ask of life. Plus the phone would’ve eventually squeaked.