The Vivisector

by WHITE, PATRICK

  ‘Here,’ she said, not urgently. ‘Take it. You need a drink. It’s my life, but you had a share in it.’

  So he accepted the cup, and drank, not with the sacramental reverence her voice of a moment before had seemed to invite, but by burning gulps. He sat guzzling the bad brandy. He wanted to participate in Nance’s life as he hadn’t before, although he had been her lover. He knew every possible movement of her ribs, every reflection of her skin. He had torn the hook out of her gills; he had disembowelled her while still alive; he had watched her no less cruel dissection by the knives of light. You couldn’t call an experience an experiment, but he had profited by whatever it was. His centrifugal rocks suggested something of her numb throbbing; but he hadn’t till now entered into her life as he had into her body. Now she had given him the last bubble the sea trails along the firm sand: he lay with the stranger, or Nance, or the stranger, inside the hairy overcoat; her old man’s dribbling dick threatened to club him.

  In fact it was Nance who clubbed him. ‘That night in Rushcutters bloody Park when I got caught up with Duffield it was that old digger’s coat you was wearun I got a sight of it it had the green look of old pennies as I’d always imagined and nothun you did nor said would ’uv thrown me off though it wasn’t hairy like I’d always imagined the overcoat would be.’

  He began to belch. ‘God, this brandy—it’s filth, Nance!’ he heard the educated part of him bleat. ‘It’s going to rot us.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it’s crook. But that isn’t what rots a person.’

  She remembered and went back to the table, and resumed guzzling and slopping the brandy till she was sucked under again.

  ‘Not what I imagined,’ she said. ‘Nothun is ever what you expect. Some big thug who comes upstairs lookin for a stretch you wait for ’im to knock the wind out of yer or rip you up when ’e starts tellun you about ’is bloody pigeons you can’t coo enough to please the pigeon fancier it’s more often the little ones some little mingy watchmaker or book-keeper who snaps at yer nipples with ’is wobbly dentures or tries to hamstring yer with a penknife.’

  ‘You’re obsessed,’ he maintained, because by now he had got up and helped himself again, and his head was rolling, and recovering, and leaping, at the length of his neck. ‘Obsessed!’ The word looked magnificent.

  ‘Yes,’ she grumbled. ‘I’m obsessed. Like you’re obsessed—by what you like to think is the truth.’

  She let out a long, uncontrollable burp.

  ‘Nuthin is ever what you expect. I never thought I would ’uv taken up with a so-called artist I was lookun for somethun else I would ’uv done better to ’uv got fixed up with some bloke who expects ’is chop at five-thirty ’is regular root Saturday because you’re married to ’im anyway he thinks you are you aren’t inside you are free but with an artist you’re never free he’s makun use of yer in the name of the Holy Mother of Truth. He thinks. The Truth!’

  She spat it out on the floor.

  ‘When the only brand of truth ’e recognizes is ’is own it is inside ’im ’e reckons and as ’e digs inter poor fucker you ’e hopes you’ll help ’im let it out.’

  No less metallic than the brandy he was drinking, the lamp’s narrow dagger of light had found its mark.

  ‘By turnun yer into a shambles,’ she trumpeted.

  ‘A shambles all right!’ he lunged back.

  ‘Out of the shambles ’e paints what ’e calls ’is bloody work of art!’

  Suddenly she grabbed the lamp, and the light, from being restricted and austere, blazed at the self-portrait which he was hoping she wouldn’t notice, or intended to ignore. She had only been saving it up, it appeared. She made it look devilish: furtive, ingrown, all that he had persuaded himself it wasn’t, and worse than anything else—bad, not morally, but aesthetically.

  ‘There,’ she said, holding her torch. ‘That’s Duffield. Not bad. True. Lovun ’imself.’

  She returned the lamp comparatively soberly to the table; while he continued flickering and fluctuating inside. The brandy threatened to choke him, uncoiling down his throat like a rope of burning light. All his past was splintering; he had never been able to catch it in its true prismatic colours: the colours of truth—as he saw it. His only true achievement was his failure. The self-portrait, though toned down by the shadow to which it had been withdrawn, was sprouting jagged diagonal teeth, womanly gyrating breasts, the holes for titivation by lipstick and tongue and prick.

  Of course this isn’t real; soon we shall soothe each other back into our actual bodies.

  He heard himself, like the worst of captions at the flicks: ‘We still have each other, Nance.’

  ‘Like shit we have!’

  She made it spatter brown across his forehead. And now he did begin to resent to accuse if not appreciate the situation. Anyway, took the tip. He was beginning running out along the short instinctive track over the same fallen leaves. A rock almost shocked him back but not. He ran. Or shambled on.

  Flies die in the dunny at night on yellow squares of the Truth you wipe your arse on.

  When he lumbered splurging back it was the sandshoes he was wearing she shouted: ‘What you have got!’ not a question: a proclamation.

  ‘What you told me.’

  ‘I told yer you should ’uv dug it deeper,’ she shrieked. ‘It wouldn’t ’uv stank. Not so many blowies. An’ no one would ’uv been tempted.’

  ‘You can’t dig through rock. Not humanly possible.’

  He began very patiently and seriously to smear all that he repudiated in himself. He had thought he knew every inch of that painted board, till working over it now. With enlightened fingertips. As he worked, he bubbled at the mouth, wondering wondering what would be left.

  Nance watched for a bit. Then she turned away. She got down, inside her dress, on the rusty bed. She was shrivelling. The lamp pointed at her old shammy-leather breasts.

  ‘Leave it!’ she moaned in the end. ‘For Chrissake leave ut!’

  ‘But I stink!’

  He knew he smelled loathsome. By now they had both reached the depths.

  In between, bursts of exquisite purity, of rubbed leaves, of sprinkled dew, made them writhe.

  He comforted her rags of flesh, but it was no more than comfort. He kissed her hare-lip, her disgusting john. Once she rose above him, and he thought she said: ‘My darling darling you are what I have lost.’

  Again, she was ticking off an inventory: the eyelids she suspected; the hair between her breasts; his slack, his slender, his humbled balls.

  Then stopped.

  ‘That ring,’ she was mumbling and fumbling.

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘What’s it for?’

  He couldn’t have explained to Nance it was for poor bloody Pa Duffield. ‘It’s just a ring. A family ring.’ She couldn’t have understood it was connected with the Adam’s apple of your incredible, but true, father.

  ‘But a ring!’

  ‘All right,’ he shouted back, ‘we know it’s a ring’; there was nothing he didn’t know without her harping on it.

  It was his worst perversion: to have hung on to a ring, long after the money was spent, the five hundred they sold him for. Or pretension: worse than anything Harry and Alfreda Courtney had tried to put across, blazing with brilliantine and diamonds under the chandelier.

  ‘You’re right!’ He supposed it was one of his selves still shouting at this whore beside him. ‘What’s in a ring?’

  He could tell Nance was frightened: he could hear, he could feel her, gibbering, blubbering, her fingers dithering, when all he wanted was to get up off the shuddering bed not to harm anybody but reach the door to fling the ring.

  ‘There!’ he croaked, after his moment of triumph.

  ‘Wadderyerdone?’ Seemed to need confirmation of what she had been watching.

  ‘Nothing to hurt anyone living.’ It was a lie of course: he could feel the wound deepening in himself. ‘I just wanted—’ he sighed it—‘what I
should’ve done long—ago—got rid of the ring.’

  He could hear the shock in Nance: it hissed between her teeth. ‘Throwun away a valuable ring yer grandad solid gold!’

  As he fell down beside her but apart she began moaning for all the abominations ever committed by man or woman: sometimes she blamed herself, sometimes him.

  Presently he fell asleep. When he woke he seemed to be alone in a dark room. A light, not of the sun, was moving faintly amongst the trees. At one stage he got as far as the door. Holding her smoking torch, Nance was stirring the fallen leaves with her foot. It looked feebly done, but if she had acted more forcefully she might have overbalanced. Then she got down, very methodically, on all fours, the better to look, but the lamp gave only the feeblest light: black smoke was pouring out of the slanted chimney.

  He found his way back to the bed and slept several ages in hells. Or was it awake in life? In which Nance was slucking at some brandy. She was standing at a narrow, untrue table. But he couldn’t properly see Nance: the hair was hanging over her face. Of all those who came and went, none was more terrible than Maman. Surely you don’t mean you can’t you didn’t forget to insure? Her sapphires were incredulous. After all we’ve paid for your education! He was insured against none of the calamities. At least they had taught him not to cry, or only in deepest privacy.

  The sun delivered him by waking him. Stupid bloody Nance must be at it still, by raw sunlight. She had brought back the lamp: it was standing on the table, blacked out. She had been at the brandy again, he noticed.

  He swallowed her dregs for company, and went out shivering into the raw red morning. The glitter, and all the brandy he had swilled, made his eyes ache, his mind function only furtively. He was glad he could see no sign of Nance: it gave him the chance to get down, bitterly, achingly, on his knees, and have a look for the lost ring. He worked very quickly, full of irony and disgust, turning over dead leaves, scuffling sand and pebbles, but quickly, and quicker, in case Nance showed up. In more assured privacy, in less harried circumstances, he might have settled down to enjoy a spate of self-pity.

  Now there was no time. He stank. He hated himself. He hated Nance, who didn’t show up, however, to receive his hate in person.

  Supposing she had left him? He raised his head, listening to the possibility of that.

  He called: ‘Nance? Nance!’

  Perhaps it was the early morning air, but his call was returned to him, clear and youthful, out of the mouths of rocks normally heavy and sullen with heat. He continued calling, not yet begging; in fact he darkened his voice with anger: and it kept floating lightly back. He who was a man had been reduced, it seemed.

  ‘Naa—aance!’ his voice nancied back to him.

  He more or less, no, he wasn’t running, but got back as quickly as he could, to the house, to find some reason for assurance.

  The old draw-neck leather bag with metallic sheen and choker of embossed waratahs was lying where it had been left, and the handbag, stuffed with credentials and the tools of her trade. Nance hadn’t left him—or had she? The shoes. She hadn’t. Nance’s soul, such as it was, might have drifted loose, but her professional body couldn’t have walked off without the shoes.

  He would have liked to celebrate his relief in some of the awful brandy, but the three bottles were stone-dry.

  There had been a fourth, he remembered. He went out very quickly. He no longer called, but looked, with an intensity which cured his aching eyes and head. A curtain of cold sweat gathered on his eyelids waiting to fall.

  In the meantime the sunlight had sharpened. Its glass teeth met with glass. Along the ironstone ledge directly below the house an explosion had taken place, he realized: of glass, and less spectacularly, flesh. The splintered glass almost rose from the rock to slash his conscience, but the flesh made no move to accuse. Nance in her black dress was lying like an old bashed umbrella on a dump. There was nothing of the curious sinewiness of nervous inquiry and recall which had distinguished her body the night before. The fall had rucked her skirt high up her big white legs, now heaped like left-over trimmings of dough or marzipan. One big white breast had squeezed its way to freedom. If it still suggested life it was of the very passive kind: of some variety of great polyp plastered to a rock. He couldn’t look at her face: the sun had golded it with too savage a brilliance.

  He began climbing slithering crashing grazing sideways down his ribs snapping the wire of plants his nails tearing at finally torn.

  On arrival, he stalked round her, hoping something he had experienced before this encounter with the full stop of suffering might help him deal with it; but nothing in his life or art did. He got down at last beside her, on his knees, and laid his forehead on a rock, the corrugations of which didn’t fit with his; as he hung there, sweating and trembling, groaning aloud for the inspiration withheld from him.

  All through the nightmare of police and ambulance which Nance’s death brought on, there was something real pricking at his mind, something he had forgotten to do, until, finding the axe in his hand, he began to hack. But the board on which the self-portrait was painted, turned the blade. The axe too blunt? Or was he too weak in his present condition? He scraped a while ineffectually at the board, its surface still encrusted with his own faeces as well as paint. Then he took the scarred monster, eyeing him to the end, and threw it out as far as he could over the gorge, his lungs straining. It clapped and clattered at first, before bowling rather tamely down, only occasionally whamming against the side of a tree, then drowning in total silence.

  At least in this instance nobody would inquire whether it was murder or suicide or accidental death.

  5

  Most evenings toward sunset, the bench the council had fastened to the pavement was fully occupied by neighbourhood acquaintances. Although they would sit staring out over the wasteland, with its deep swell of lantana and sudden chasms of ash-coloured rock, the landscape meant less to the rate-payers than their glimpses into one another’s lives. Even a total stranger could be persuaded to ignore landscape while exchanging the snapshots of experience, particularly as the sun was going down. But on this occasion, as the blind sockets of the white-faced houses squeezed together on the opposite cliff, reflected their evening illusion of gold, a solitary figure had possession of the bench.

  It was too good to last, however: a second form was bellying towards it, down the street which sloped along the vacant land. The man on the bench averted his face, and from sitting somewhere about the middle, immediately moved to the far end.

  The new arrival looked only fairly expectant: what he hoped for was a yarn, and so many people nowadays were surly. A large man, he advanced at a deliberate pace, breaking every now and again into a somewhat less calculated toddle; but his confidence appeared immense in planting his broad buttocks on the bench for nothing short of a long stay.

  ‘Well,’ he began almost at once, ‘nobody can complain about the weather, can they? I’d say it’s set good.’ He laughed slightly as encouragement.

  Then he looked towards the one he hoped he might persuade to become his temporary companion; but the other shifted where he sat, and made what was neither an answer nor a groan.

  The large man waited. The other was younger than he had estimated from a distance; he took a quick look around to see if there was anyone who might suspect him of wrong intentions. Then he laughed again, louder than before, his fat-chinned laugh. Of course this stranger wasn’t all that young: not young at all, in fact.

  ‘I like to take a constitutional,’ the large man confessed, ‘after I’ve shut up shop. Got to think of your health, eh? Business isn’t everything.’

  Again the other didn’t come good with an answer, but made a noise which he seemed to hope might pass for one, while settling deeper in his overcoat.

  The fat man would have liked to stare at what he had found. He did glance deeper than at first, but quickly away, and grunting it off.

  ‘Never seen you around before. Ge
t to know the local faces from running a grocery business. I lead a very normal life. It’s the right way, isn’t it? Plain food, regular evacuation, and fresh air. So I come down ’ere every night while the wife’s preparing somethun for tea.’ He coughed, and his teeth made a pebbled sound. ‘Don’t live in these parts, do yer?’

  ‘Near enough,’ the other said, shifting again, and reorganizing himself inside his rather shaggy overcoat.

  The grocer would have liked to assess the stranger’s status, but it wasn’t easy. Too many contradictions: good clothes, not old either, probably very good before sloppiness set in; good hat too, of an excellent felt, the band of which had been allowed to get sweaty; made-to-order brogues, with white scars in the tan, and laces tied anyhow.

  ‘That’s a fine overcoat you got,’ the grocer couldn’t leave alone. ‘I like to see good cloth. I’d say, at a guess, that was imported. But it’s English.’

  ‘Oh? It could be. Yes. I think it was.’ The stranger sounded unhappy.

  ‘There’s nothing like English cloth. Of course we was all English in the beginning, unless you count the Irish. My old man used to say—’e come out from the West Country: “Nobody need be ashamed if ’e brushes ’is clothes, shines ’is shoes, and ’as a decent haircut”.’

  The stranger’s hair was decent cut, even fashionable: those side pieces like the Prince of Wales’s. He had let it go, though: needed trimming.

  Suddenly the grocer overflowed. He leaned along the backrest of the bench on which they were sitting, and stuck out his pulpy hand, and said: ‘My name’s Cutbush—Cecil Cutbush. It’s a funny sort of name, isn’t it? But you get used to it.’

  There was a marbled moon coming up behind them almost before the sun had gone. Cutbush sighed. He didn’t understand why the stranger hadn’t completed the exchange of names like any other decent friendly bloke. He didn’t hold it against him, though. Perhaps the man had his reasons: could have been a released prisoner or something like that.

  The grocer sighed again. ‘It does me good to come down ’ere. If it wasn’t for the dew I’d be tempted to sit on indefinitely. And the wife. She’d create if I didn’t come in. Says she’s afraid of murderers.’ He paused to look over his shoulder. ‘It isn’t that at all,’ he resumed. ‘Can’t satisfy ’er nowadays. Doesn’t want to leave me alone. Even during trading hours. “You’ll ’ear the bell, Cec,” she says, “and as often as not it’s only a kiddy come for a pennorth of lollies.” There’s no puttin’ ’er off. And at our age.’ He realized, and added: ‘You’re younger, of course. It’ll still come natural to yer.’