by Jean Bedford
Inside, she leant against the wall and took deep gasping breaths through her open mouth. She waited a few minutes, but he didn’t come after her.
*
‘Diana, I have to see you, tonight.’ Tom sat in his room at the university, his small suitcase on the floor beside him. ‘I’ve left Rosa. She’s kicked me out.’
‘I told you not to call me here.’ Her voice was unfriendly.
‘I can’t see you tonight. Your marital problems aren’t my affair, Tom. I’ll see you on Friday, as we arranged.’
‘I thought ... I thought perhaps I could stay at the flat, in the spare room, while ...’
‘No. Find yourself a motel. I have to go. See you Friday.’ Her voice softened. ‘I’ve got a surprise I think you’ll like ...’ He heard the click of the phone being replaced on its rest. She’d hung up. Through his frustration and despair he felt a frisson at the thought of the surprise. He looked at his watch. He had a lecture in five minutes, on the concept of good and evil, his own subject — the students used his book as a text for this course. He’d intended to go through the recent newspaper reports, get some of the gorier crime stories to illustrate his argument, but he hadn’t had time. He’d just give the same lecture he gave last year, the same old line, he could do that on auto-pilot, he thought, and he’d have to today. He got up and found the folder of the previous year’s notes and skimmed them as he started to walk towards the theatre.
‘So, is killing another human being evil?’ Tom asked, looking over his reading glasses at the crowded lecture hall. ‘Well? What do you think?’
A few murmurs of assent reached him. ‘Always?’ he said. ‘In every case?’ He pointed at a young man in the front row, from one of his own tutorial classes. ‘Tell me, Derek.’
‘Not always,’ the student said, embarrassed. ‘It depends on the circumstances.’
‘In what circumstances isn’t it evil, then?’ He pointed at another student, a woman.
‘Well, where there’s real provocation, I suppose,’ she said. ‘Where it’s self-defence, or defending your children, or ...’ She trailed off.
‘What about war?’ he asked. ‘What if you’re just obeying orders?’
Someone muttered, ‘Nuremberg,’ someone who’d read his book, he assumed. He nodded, acknowledging it. ‘And what if the killer has his or her own personal reasons which mightn’t make sense to anyone else? What about a serial killer who sincerely believes all black people are agents of the devil. Is he evil when he kills black people? By his own lights he’s doing a good thing. It’s what I want you to think about for your next tutorial,’ he said, glancing at the clock. He liked to leave them with a puzzle, it was one of the reasons his lectures were so popular. He waited while they all filed out, then collected up his notes and wiped the whiteboard clean.
Several students waited for him by the door. ‘Are you saying that evil is relative?’ one of them asked him as he came out, ‘or that it doesn’t exist except as a societal construct?’
‘That’s for you to think about, Gary,’ he said, smiling. ‘Don’t anticipate the next lecture, please, you’ll leave me with nothing to say.’
He was tired of it, he thought, walking back to his room. All this abstract ethical theory. He knew what Carly would say about it — she’d suggest that he bring his students on a tour through the children’s wards, see what real damage could be done by their so-called protectors and nurturers. They’d had shouting arguments when they lived together, when she was still a nurse on the floor.
He remembered one time shortly after they’d set up in their rented house, when he was unpacking his books. She’d been standing close to him while he squatted on the floor, stroking his neck while he made neat piles to place alphabetically in the shelves. Then she’d moved away to pick through them, coming up with a battered copy of Hannah Arendt.‘The Banality of Evil,’ she said. ‘Is that what you think? Is that what you teach, Tom, that evil is banal?’ He’d been surprised at her apparent emotion, had tried to outline Arendt’s argument, and for the first time he had seen her real anger, as she deliberately chose to misunderstand him.
‘It doesn’t have to be imaginative,’ she said. ‘But it is. I don’t think you could even come close to guessing the variations possible. The things I’ve seen. Evil’s ingenious enough, Tom, believe me.’ She gestured towards the book that he was now holding. ‘Perhaps the Nazis werebanal, stolid Germanic minds and all that. And it was institutionalised, which is always a damper on the creative spirit.’ She’d gone on to describe some of the recent cases of child abuse that had come through her wards, telling him with technical and anatomical precision what these children, some of them babies, had been through before they were finally hospitalised. He’d been sickened, listening, but she kept on with her infuriated monologue long after he asked her to be quiet. He’d got up and walked into the kitchen, and she’d followed him, still recounting her appalling litany. Then she’d stopped suddenly, almost in the middle of a sentence, and flung out of the house, leaving him shuddering. She hadn’t come home for two days and he’d never asked her where she’d been, though he’d been frantic, ringing everyone they knew looking for her.
For a while he’d tried to explain his position to her. Later he learned to avoid the whole subject. But occasionally, out of nowhere, she would tell him about some new case, some new horror from work, depicted in clinical detail. ‘Do you think that’s banal, Tom?’ she would ask, her eyes narrowed at him. ‘A little bit banal? A lot?’ He learned not to answer, but to put his arm around her and hold her close while she calmed down.
She was the only one of his adult acquaintance he had told everything about his own wretched childhood, trying to alter her deterministic view of things. ‘All right,’ she said, after a surprised and, he thought, sympathetic silence. ‘You seem to have escaped the inherited taint. Some do, I suppose. But most don’t. If it’s been done to them, they’ll end up doing it to others. They can’t help it — it’s all they know of relationship. Jesus,’ she’d twisted away from him in bed and sat up, her head on her knees. He’d stroked the long sweep of her back. ‘I sometimes think we don’t deserve to survive as a race. What other species can’t nurture its young?’
His thoughts had skittered around half-known facts — rats and male cats devouring their babies, but he hadn’t said anything. In a cold, intensely private part of his mind he agreed with her. He thought a plague, or a nuclear disaster, might be necessary to cleanse the planet of human corruption, but he never put it into words. Occasionally he imagined, half seriously, writing a blockbuster, contradicting everything else he’d ever said publicly, a ‘You deserve your doom’ sort of book with raised gold lettering on the cover and a mushroom cloud in the background. He had even begun collecting newspaper articles and keeping them in a folder which he labelled sardonically: ‘Man’s inhumanity to man’. Later, doodling in a frivolous mood, he’d changed it to ‘People’s inhumanity to people’, so as not to be accused of sexism.
Back in his room, putting off ringing the motel, he wondered where he’d put those old folders. Some of that material would be useful in his classes. He’d been fixated on it for a while, drawn in to Carly’s world, having serious doubts about his own philosophical and political stance. It was a long time, he thought now, since he’d been fixated on anything except himself and his paltry personal failures. And secrets. The lies he told to keep his secrets. He lifted the phone and punched in the numbers of the nearest motel, wondering again what Diana’s surprise might be.
They came again last night,but it’s too soon;only a few weeks since the last time.I have to ignore them.Fortunately I’ve got the sleeping pills—not even the demons can penetrate that coma,though it leaves me groggy in the mornings.It means the speed again for a while,just a judicious snort before I face the world.But I don’t like it;I don’t completely trust my judgement these days even when I’m straight.
You used to suggest that the demons were my parents.You said that
perhaps it was a real buried memory struggling to surface,a night when I’d woken and they were there,in the shadows at the edges of my room,watching me.That I’d realised they meant me harm and suppressed the knowledge.Something that happened before I formed the power of speech that I could never properly realise because I couldn’t articulate it.Perhaps you were right.It’s not hard to give them the shape of the demons,hut my impression is that there are more than two of them;I can’t imagine my father welcoming others to share his hobbies.And my mother never indicated what she knew to anyone.
They never invited anyone else to share anything.It seems impossible,but in my memory I didn’t meet another adult until I went to school.I have a faint memory of a little boy in shorts,down by the creek,but I don’t know who he could have been.As far as I knew there were no relatives,and we lived miles from the nearest neighbours.
I suppose there aren’t many places like that left now,as isolated as we were.My father worked the farm by himself,with my mother and me helping where we could,and every few weeks he would go off into the township,the van loaded with vegetables and fruit if it was the season,and sometimes he would come back with bags full of groceries from my mother’s list.He killed the meat we ate and we grew just about everything else.My mother baked her own bread and bottled cherries and pears and plums for the winter.She never went anywhere off the property,to my knowledge,except on my first day at school when she walked me the two miles to the crossroads where the bus stopped.After that I walked by myself,fast,my head down and my ears ringing with my father’s threats of what would happen if I dawdled and missed the bus,or was more than a minute late home.Sometimes I ran that two miles back in the afternoon,if the bus had been delayed,panting as much at the thought of my father waiting with the strap as with the exertion.
Unsurprisingly I made no friends at school,completely unequipped as I was for society of any sort.I was terrified of the teachers,all of them,even those who tried to get to know me.Especially those.I spent the first few years in an uncomprehending daze,never quite working out the routines,what all the different bells meant,often having to be collected from a remote part of the playground after recess because I hadn’t realised I was meant to be back in class.My schoolwork was terrible;I suspect I was considered retarded,and gradually they stopped asking me questions,passed over me when work was read out.Eventually I was ignored and I began to feel safer.Little country schools like that were used to the hillbilly kids who never learned anything,who were only there because it was the law.As long as you didn’t actively cause trouble you became invisible in the end.
They might have acted if they’d seen the bruises,but they never did.I always wore concealing clothing if there was anything to hide—long-sleeved shirts and jeans,which weren’t quite the fashion then;they were still considered working clothes—while the other kids were in shorts in the dusty summer heat,and there’d be a note from my mother on sports days,saying my asthma was bad.The worst damage,anyway,was where no-one would ever think to look.
Home,the farm,seemed like my refuge then,rather than the prison it was.As soon as our gate came into view,with the warped willow overhanging the track,I would feel grateful,reprieved,even though I knew what was often waiting for me there.I knew every inch of the long rutted drive between the rows of gloomy Lombardy pines leading to the large weatherboard,with its sagging verandah,badly in need of painting.The inside of the house I recall as vividly as if I had visited it yesterday:the dim cool passage leading to the vast kitchen at the back.The cupboard under the stairs,where I spent many nights in crawling blackness,too frightened to move a muscle,learning to retreat deeper and deeper inside myself so that at last I hardly noticed when they came to let me out.I found my companions,then,my other selves,who have comforted me all my life.
When my parents realised I no longer lay all night hunched on the floor with my eyes to the crack under the door,desperate for some glimpse of light,they stopped locking me in there.It was no fun for them after I learned to escape into the cocoon of myself.My other selves.They thought of different things to do then.New punishments for my wickedness,to drive the devil out of me.
I suppose an estate agent would describe it now as a gracious old farmhouse,but there was nothing gracious about the lives we led inside it.Bareness was the overwhelming theme.Bare boards,except in the living room,which had a square of cold brown lino;hard wooden chairs—four in the kitchen,two on each side of the scrubbed table and four with curved arms in the living room lined up in front of the television.
There was one cushion on my father’s chair nearest the empty fireplace where the radiator stood.The room across the hall was always locked.It was my father’s‘office’,where he did his farm accounts and his mysterious‘business’.I don’t remember ever seeing inside it,but my fantasies furnished it with deep comfortable armchairs and soft rugs like the rooms I saw when l was allowed to watch television,which was not often.My father had rigged up a two-way plug,which meant he could remove the power cord from the set.Only he knew how to connect it;only he decided when I had behaved well enough to be allowed an hour of some children’s show or cartoons.He and my mother watched it every night when I had gone to bed—I could hear the tantalising sounds of conversation and laughter from my room,but never what was being said.
That cord came in handy for other things,too,when he was in the mood.Like whipping me or tying me up so tightly I could hardly breathe.The plugs made quite different patterns in my flesh—one like the shape of a three-legged crab,the other an oval,blunted at one end.I had plenty of opportunities to watch the way the bruises changed,how they would stay red or angry purple in the middle,while the edges healed and turned yellow then faded,till I couldn’t distinguish which plug had made which mark.
Did I ever describe my parents to you?The way they looked?I don’t remember you ever asking me to.Sometimes I can hardly picture them.At other times,like now,they stand clearly in front of me.
My father was a big man,fat,with a square flat face and pale,thinning hair.He had huge hands,rough from all the farm work.His fingers were like uncooked sausages,mottled pink and white.His flesh was pasty;he never acquired a tan in all those years of working outside all day.He had the European’s distrust of the sun and always wore clothing that almost completely covered him,as well as a wide-brimmed straw hat.Yet you’d think he’d have taken on some colour,wouldn’t you?
His body was almost hairless,just one small wispy patch at the top of his chest.We took our weekly baths together you understand,and I would have to soap him all over,then wipe off the suds with the tattered great sea sponge he’d had since he was on the boats.He liked me to masturbate him with soapy hands then lightly sponge him there.Even with his fingers up my arse these were strangely gentle,almost playful times in the bath,the nearest he ever came to any tenderness,and I would be filled with gratitude at pleasing him.On those nights I would not be afraid of the cupboard or the whip,or that he would rape me roughly in my sleep.
My mother was a small,mostly silent woman.Her hair was in long braids that she pinned tightly round her head.I never saw her loosen them,though she must have for sleeping.She always wore high-collared shirtwaist dresses and heavy stockings,whatever the weather.If it was very cold she would put on a thick black shawl,tying its ends around her waist to free her hands for the housework.I never saw her undressed,not even in one of the ample flannel nightgowns that weekly adorned the clothesline. Asa child I assumed she never slept.
In the nights I spent in the cupboard I would be aware of her soft passing footsteps right up until the time I silently cried myself to exhausted sleep.I never called out to her.She never hugged me;she hardly ever touched me.My father was the physical one,but she was often the instigator of his punishments.There was venom in her voice when she threatened me with what he would do when he came inside and she told him about my latest crimes.She grew loquacious then,and her eyes sparkled with her promises.
Now l realise she hated me,with an adult spiteful hate;th
at she wanted me dead,but failing that,to be in constant misery.Then,I simply accepted that I was as wicked as she said I was;that she would love me if I was good,but I made that impossible by my behaviour.Such terrible behaviour.A shoelace left undone was worth a backhander at least.A drop of water unwiped on her sink might only earn a slap.Wetting the bed,on the other hand,gave vent to the whippings and the kicks to the ribs.And I wet the bed at least twice a week.My mother watched,while my father punished me,her arms folded under her breasts,her thin lips working with satisfaction;perhaps she hid a triumphant smile.
Then I would be wrapped round in the smelly cold sheets and put back to bed.In the morning I would wash them by hand at the old stone trough,and wrestle them onto the clothesline.But I’ve told you all that,many times.It’s getting late and I’m writing this on my laptop in an unfamiliar room.Everyone around me has been asleep for hours.I must take my sleeping pills now,or the demons will come again before their time.
‘Don’t move yet,’ Sharon said, trying to get her breath.
‘I have to, I’ll squash you.’ He rolled away from her and they both groaned as he withdrew.
‘It seems a pity you can’t just leave it in,’ she said. ‘Until I need it again.’
‘You’re so small,’ he said, stroking her arm. ‘I’m always afraid I’m going to hurt you.’ He circled her wrist easily with his thumb and forefinger. ‘Look at that. Bird bones.’
‘Better than a bird brain,’ she said, tapping him hard on the forehead. He pinned her down with his heavy hands on her shoulders.
‘It would be so easy to hurt you,’ he said. ‘Sometimes I can see the temptation, I can almost understand how blokes get off on it.’