The Vivisector

by WHITE, PATRICK

  They got the stove going. It roared too fierce, till Mumma damped it down.

  ‘Well, I’d like to know!’ she complained. ‘And where is Hurtle?’

  Lena was sour because she had been told to change the nappy. ‘In the shed—droring,’ she said.

  ‘No, I’m not. I’m here.’

  ‘Well, if you’re here,’ Mumma said, ‘you’re the most unreliable of all.’

  She was that unjust, but had to make a quick stew: of a little scrag, and plenty of potato; the mildew had got into the carrot.

  As she scuffled in the pan she began a dry snivelling, and this was worse than her anger.

  Pa asked: ‘What’s got inter yer, Bessie?’

  ‘Lord knows how I’ll dry the wash down there.’

  At one point she had a proper cry, but settled down after tea to Mrs Ebsworth’s ironing. The storm had passed. It was quiet night, except for claws of rain scratching from time to time at the roof. Although you went back to the kitchen after the light was out, to hear what Courtneys had really said, Mumma and Pa weren’t talking tonight. There was only a short, wordless jingling of the bed.

  The sky was a watery white by morning. It wasn’t raining, but it hadn’t stopped, and Mumma, mumbling as if she had a mouthful of pegs, said she wasn’t going down there: nothing to iron, because nothing dry.

  ‘Lucky school hasn’t commenced.’ She used the word ‘commenced’ instead of ‘begun’ because of her respect for education. ‘Yer boots wouldn’t stand the weather. Now stay inside, all of yer. I don’t want any chesty children.’

  After the dishes were washed, and Florrie and Winnie helped on the dunny, Mumma herself went across the yard. Under the pepper tree Pa was harnessing the mare. He was wearing a bag across his shoulders fastened in front with a new nail. The water was dripping from the brim of his hat. The pepper tree dripped.

  For some reason Mumma wanted Pa inside the harness room.

  ‘Where are you going, Hurt?’ bossy Lena had to call.

  ‘I forgot me pencil. I gotter get me pencil.’

  He ran across the yard. Hens didn’t seem to mind rain once it got under their feathers. As he charged amongst them, two or three of their sodden bundles crouched low, combs flopping, prepared to be trod.

  He got inside the dark stable. Hay and manure made it warm, safe, except the smell of ammonia shot up his nostrils; the shock of it started him shivering.

  Through the door into the harness room he could see Mumma already having something out with Pa.

  ‘What about Hurtle?’ Pa didn’t want to know.

  ‘What we discussed.’

  Mumma was making the bed he shared with Will, or at least she was pulling up the horse-rug they used as a cover.

  Pa was making out he didn’t understand.

  ‘You know! Oh, you know all right!’ Mumma was acting as rough as she could, drawing down her mouth and hawking up the words so that she was no longer Mumma, but one of the women outside a public house. ‘About Hurtle’s future. Oh, you know all right!’

  She left off shouting and began staring at the wall. It was the wall where you had drawn the chandelier. You had never been able to rub it out, to make room for other things; it was still there, though grubbier. You had drawn over it what Mumma called ‘the Mad Eye’. And now you were staring at each other, eye to eye, through the stable door, only Mumma couldn’t see; she was looking frightened and again like Mumma.

  Pa was walking up and down, a scrawny cock, in the wet old sack nailed to his chest. ‘I dunno, Bessie! I dunno what’s got inter yer!’ he stuttered back.

  Then Mumma fished inside her front, and brought out a piece of paper. ‘Mr Courtney give me a cheque for five hundred pound.’

  Again she hawked the words up rough, so that the shock wouldn’t be too much to bear. If it had been sovereigns she might have chucked them on the floor, and they could have scrambled for them, testing the coins with their teeth, feeling the splinters in their knees.

  But here she had only the damp piece of paper to dangle under Pa’s nose.

  ‘You’re a bloody cow! A bloody mother!’ He might have been going to call her worse, because his usually hollow chest was filled, but he must have remembered he was the father.

  ‘But what are they gunner say?’ He couldn’t stop trembling; he couldn’t stop looking at the cheque: it might have been a forgery.

  He hollered: ‘No!’ once—before putting the cheque in his pocket, an inside pocket.

  Pa said: ‘Some of you women never stop to think a man’s responsible for his children.’

  Then Mumma let fly, enough to blast the harness-room walls: ‘Oh, the father! The father’s right enough—to get on top—flick flick—then when ’e’s ironed you out, off ’e gets, and there isn’t no more to it, till the congratulations are ’anded out. The father! Does the father know what it is to be a walkin’ pumpkin most of every year? Was ’e ever bloodied, except when ’e cuts ’imself with the razor? Not Dad! Who wipes their little bottoms? Who wipes away the snot? And bears with the bellyaches? I reckon it’s the mother who has the right to decide what is right an’ reasonable for ’er children. That is why I decided what is right for Hurt.’

  His name had never sounded so extraordinary as it glugged up through her loose shammy-leather throat.

  ‘Jim?’

  Because Pa had had enough, he was going out.

  ‘Eh, Jim?’

  Pa, who had always been a thin man, seemed to have grown thinner; while Mumma stayed big and flabby even when there wasn’t a baby in her.

  ‘Only reasonable,’ she called to his back, rounding out the word. ‘Jim? I think I copped another one already.’ Then as Pa unchained the wheel of his cart: ‘I know I ’ave!’

  Jim went off snivelling mumbling about his business, leading Bonnie; the rain had turned the brown mare practically black.

  Mumma lowered her head against the rain, or the eyes of children burrowing in, as she went back across the yard.

  Round about five the mare came dawdling down Cox Street. Unaccompanied, reins trailing, she was able to roam from side to side, pulling at the weeds and blades of pale grass which showed through the mud at the edges, or leaves over a garden fence. There was a fair few empties in the cart, though not what you would call a load, so that they slid and clashed, at times almost chimed. The mare knew her way, and was taking it easy, till a gatepost braked one of the wheels as she turned in at her home yard, and gave her a scare.

  Some of the kids got windy seeing the pink insides of her nostrils as she threw her head up: to hear her whinge as though someone had jabbed her with a knee in her belly.

  Mumma ran out. She didn’t appear frightened. Perhaps she had already been through the worst. The rain had plastered her hair, and was showing up her body. It made her look younger. Serious, though. She had to remain active: too much depended on her. She grabbed Bonnie by the wet mane, then the head-stall. At once the beast stopped prancing on her heavy legs, and tossing her head. She seemed relieved to find her freedom ended.

  ‘’Ere! Youse! Hurtle! Lena!’ Mrs Duffield strained her voice, trying to make it sound like a man’s, because that way she would be obeyed.

  They came scuttling. They were all three unbuckling. The familiar sound comforted: of cold chains swinging and clinking.

  He was surprised to find how quick and skilful he was with the stiff buckles and rain-sodden leather. He would have loved to linger over jobs he usually avoided.

  While Lena began a girl’s thin moan: ‘What’s happened to Pa?’

  It was lucky Mrs Duffield didn’t have to answer. Mrs Burt stuck her head over the palings wearing a bag and her husband’s hat. ‘’E’s up at the corner, Lene, dear—Mrs Duffield—with three or four other gentlemen. I’d say ’e’ll be back as soon as they put ’im out.’ Mrs Burt might have been going to say ‘throw’.

  Usually the neighbour was on for a laugh at human nature. But this evening her big face was solemn. She was heavy with rain
and sympathy. She knew too much.

  ‘Leave the bottles for yer father,’ Mumma decided. ‘Pa’ull unload the bottles.’

  Mrs Burt might have been tittering, only then, the other side of the palings, or it could have been the sound of mild rain on iron.

  Jim Duffield who never touched a drop came home after most of them had put themselves to bed. She had kept his tea, if not hot, not cold neither. He wasn’t real shickered, she was glad to see. Though bad enough. He was black-wet, and muddy up the legs, soles squelching.

  ‘Take yer boots off, Jim.’ She tried to make it sound like an order.

  With no experience of drunkenness she didn’t know what line to take.

  He sat down in his wet old boots and ate a little of the potato. Very dainty. Looking at it along his nose.

  Then she asked: ‘D’you think you’ve got enough, dear? There wasn’t that much meat, and it seems to’uv melted on the bones.’ She had never been good at soft voices, but tried.

  He stopped eating. He felt his pockets, and began slowly dragging out the money he had shoved into them. He seemed full of it: the Courtneys’ money. It fell, or fluttered, on to the table. It lay singly, buckled up, or in wads. Some of it landed in the plateful of cold stew.

  It was so quiet after the rain they might have dropped to you looking at them from behind the lace in the outer kitchen.

  Pa was picking one of the notes out of the gravy. He began wiping the grease off. With one finger. Looking at the finger, at the note. Like a person without their spectacles.

  ‘Plenty of money!’ He cocked his head at it. ‘Couldn’t persuade enough of ’em to drink it up. There was one or two paralytics, of course. An’ Josh Porter an’ Horrie Jackson. You know about Josh and Horrie?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He knew she knew, but that was beside the point.

  ‘Josh and Horrie are “in” more often than they’re “out”.’ He meant to draw it out slow. ‘Josh, they say, did in old Mrs McCarthy. But they’ll never prove it—so they say.’

  She stood looking down at the money.

  He stirred it up. ‘No money’s too black to buy grog for lags.’

  He began hitting at the money, which made some of it fly up. She was forced to chase after it, clapping with her hands at the mould-coloured butterflies, herself sometimes drunkenly smiling, as she fell on her knees to grab at the money; when she should have stood, straight and solid, wife and mother.

  ‘But we did it for the best!’ She repeated a lesson they must have taught her in Mrs Courtney’s pretty room.

  ‘We sold ’im like a horse!’ Although Pa included himself in the deal, she began to receive the blows with which he was punishing the money.

  He was hitting out at her, not punching, didn’t seem able to close his fists, but thwack thwack with straight arms. As she knelt on the floor they thumped against her neck, her head; while she raked in the fallen money, smiling with white lips, like a guilty girl who has to hide a lie, or a belly.

  ‘We did it for love!’ Her blubbering lips were having difficulty with the words.

  ‘Or money!’ He belted it out.

  That finished them both: instead of the money, they began catching at each other, sobbing, rummaging in each other’s clothes and hair, as if they were only now finding out about each other.

  The bedstead might have disjointed itself, to which they had staggered out, but together.

  When the brass had come to a standstill, Mumma was left dry-sighing. ‘Good job the children was asleep.’

  Pa didn’t answer.

  Mumma said: ‘Better shut yer mouth, Jim. Otherwise you might wake up and find a nasty taste.’

  She came out after that, back into the kitchen, herself and her other half: her belly. Her feet slopping. Her hair looked undone of itself. She was so tired she could scarcely have clapped her hands at a rat.

  There was the money, though. The crumpled stuff she began smoothing out. Some of it had been damaged, but Mumma was a great one for mending things with glue.

  All the money she put in a rusty tin she had kept for some future purpose. The hard wads of unseparated notes thudded into the old tin. Then she shoved it on a high shelf, where nothing could get at it, except only fire or a thunderbolt.

  The room had never seemed so full of children, some of them still playing, others fallen in a heap of sleep. Somebody crunched across the pegs one of them had scattered. Pa half spoke the sum he was doing with a pencil, on a piece of crumpled paper, on his knee; while Mumma kept time with her head as she ironed other people’s washed clothes, smoothing, sometimes stamping with the iron. The wedding ring was broad and brassy on Mumma’s pudding-coloured finger. As she tried out a fresh iron, holding it some way off her cheek, she could have loved what she mistrusted.

  This was his family. He should have loved them. He did of course: riding with Pa on the cartload of slippery bottles; Mumma’s smell of warm ironing; the exasperating hands of younger, sticky children; in bed with Will; Lena giving him a suck of a bull’s-eye, hot and wet from her own mouth. All this was family, a terrible muddle, which he loved, but should have loved better. Perhaps he was ‘too proud’, as Beetle Boothroyd wrote in one of those notes. Didn’t love himself, though. No. If he loved something he had inside him, that was different.

  He wasn’t going to cry, in spite of nearly pissing himself with fright at times. Courtneys were sending for him in the morning. He would show that Edith he hadn’t been bought. But how would he wake up the morning after, looking at what sort of empty wall?

  So he was frightened.

  Mumma stamped with the iron. ‘Nuisances of frilly things! I’d never ever go in for frills, not if I was the nobbiest of nobs.’

  Then Lena, who looked as if she had a fever, she was so determined to appear awake—Lena asked: ‘Won’t he ever come back to see us?’

  It was such a loaded question, Mumma for once left Pa to answer.

  ‘Not in the contract,’ he mumbled on his bit of pencil; since the evening he got shickered Pa was an even quieter man.

  Then somebody, it must have been Will, started a long, high moan. Several others joined in, like dogs.

  ‘’Ere! It’s time you was in bed, all you kids!’ Mumma had stamped with the iron on the stand, and at once she and Lena were pummelling, pushing, carrying out the younger children.

  Because you weren’t young, you hung around, but there wasn’t anything to say to Pa.

  When Mumma came back she took a fresh iron from the stove, and began to press with all her weight along a seam. Perhaps she hadn’t noticed him. Or perhaps it was her way of making him hang around: soon she would say something which would explain all of everything for ever.

  Then she said: ‘Didn’t you hear—Hurtle? Or does your ears want washin’ out?’ She stamped the iron extra hard.

  Was she going to kiss him? She wasn’t. He must have ‘bloodied’ her worse than any of the others; or she could still smell the bottom she had wiped. She continued ironing, smoothing softer, afraid she might singe somebody’s good clothes.

  So he held it tight in his throat, and went.

  It was a white night. All their hens were drooping white along the boughs, the boughs whitened by shit and light. Through the shit smells, musty of hen, moist-sweet of horse, he went inside the shed, Bonnie lifting a velvet lip, whinnying and shifting weight.

  He burned his fingers lighting their candle. Sleep had flattened Will, white too, like uncooked dough, but the yellow light fell across the cracked plaster of the wall, from which you had never succeeded in rubbing the more private thoughts, or ‘drorings’, or in making room for more. There would never be room enough for everything.

  Now he stood for a while drawing on the patch of candlelight, himself only flickering at first then more dreamily flowing, his head at the angle from which he saw and thought best. He was drawing Mumma’s hollow body, with the new baby sprouting in it like one of the Chinese beans the Chow had given them at Christmas. Over a
ll the chandelier. The Eye too: what Mumma called ‘the Mad Eye—it looks right through you’. Aiming its arrows the bow-shaped eye was at the same time the target, or bull’s-eye.

  There was so much, everything you knew, to include.

  Then Will began to stir plop awake. ‘What you doing, Hurt?’

  At least you didn’t ever need to try explaining to Will: perhaps that was how Mumma had felt just now.

  Well there was drawing. He made a dash or two at Mrs Birdie Courtney’s chandelier that wasn’t between hollowing out Mumma’s body he would have liked to creep inside to sleep tighter in warm wet love and white drool of hens if she would have opened to him she wouldn’t.

  2

  The morning was a sparkling one. The varnished woodwork of the buggy in which he sat showed him how far from best his best clothes looked. Not that he was worried by it. Mr Courtney seemed far more worried.

  Though they had announced in the beginning: ‘We shall send for the little boy on Friday,’ Mr Courtney himself had come, and alone. He was wearing a tweed cap, and a suit which looked new but probably wasn’t.

  As they drove away, down the rutted street, against the glare, Mr Courtney asked: ‘Would you like to take the reins, old man?’

  Remembering another occasion when he had refused, Hurtle said he wouldn’t.

  His last sight of the faces at the gate had been so painful he decided to shut it out of his mind, to keep his own misery at the greatest possible distance. It was easier in the glittering present. The wheels of the varnished buggy were thrashing into the light, the horse’s tail swished with light, while Mr Courtney’s frizzy beard smelled as good as it shone.

  They went a while in silence through the Surry Hills. Hurtle pointed. ‘Those are the piano shops.’

  Mr Courtney replied: ‘Oh?’

  There was no music at that hour.

  When they got to Taylor Square there were the pawnbrokers’.

  Hurtle said: ‘Once or twice my father had to take the ring to one of those shops. But he always got it back.’

  Mr Courtney was surprised, or shocked. ‘A ring, you say?’ He tried not to sound inquisitive.