Thought Crimes

by Tim Richards

  Eric didn’t want to hear this, didn’t want to entertain even the possibility that Emma and her still more fetching sister delighted in picking up muscle-men and taking them home to fry their brains. What could such gossip mean to him, the man who’d tasted Emma’s slice?

  ‘Hey, if you’re not going to finish those chips, mate …’ Eric slid the bowl across the table to Maggot.

  2. Excision

  Eric was capable of forgetting most dates and anniversaries, but he would always remember that June 20th. He’d taken a call from an employee who was distraught about the treatment she’d received from the company’s insurer. Since this call shouldn’t have been put through to him, Eric was about to complain to the switchboard operator when Emma arrived as if wanded into existence by a benevolent wizard.

  ‘There’s an article I need from this morning’s Age.’

  ‘Go for your life,’ Eric said, removing the paper from the drawer in his desk.

  ‘Are you sure you don’t mind?’

  ‘I’ve already read it on the train.’

  ‘That’s very kind. Thank you,’ she said, emitting her warmest smile before disappearing behind the partition.

  All thoughts of blasting the switch-girl vanished as Eric’s imagination shifted into top gear.

  An ex-lover had accepted the lead role in a Hollywood blockbuster. Her mother had been savaged by a drug-runner’s pit bull.

  When Emma returned the paper, Eric riffled through the front section to find the point of excision. On page eleven, he discovered a rectangular hole. As page twelve carried a full-page car advertisement, Eric deduced that Emma’s interest concerned a brief, three-column piece on page eleven.

  This was an unusual hole.

  Emma’s hole hadn’t been torn with fingers, or sloppily hacked with scissors. Emma’s excision left an exceptionally neat rectangular gap, a hole so meticulous in its creation that the deed must have been done with a Stanley knife, or a scalpel.

  The more closely Eric examined it, the more he was taken with the hole’s clean-edged perfection. Great painters like Kandinsky and Malevitch became so practised in the production of geometric shapes that they had no difficulty in suggesting exactness, but not even Mondrian knew Emma’s degree of precision.

  A ruler confirmed Eric’s suspicions. Emma had excised a geometrically perfect rectangle from page eleven. It was craft-mastery of the highest order. This was – as any Scotland Yard detective would conclude – the work of an immensely gifted Harley Street surgeon.

  Sitting in the train, newspaper carefully folded inside his briefcase, Eric considered all the things that might have prompted this unnatural precision. He saw Emma adding the extracted article to a scrapbook where perfectly cut rectangular reports were patched together in such a way that context utterly transformed content. This project was all about the shape of the thing, or the way she had already shaped it in her mind’s eye.

  That evening, unable to concentrate on his favourite television comedies, Eric removed the newspaper from his briefcase and raised the individual sheet for closer examination. While doing so, his attention shifted from the paper to the realities it framed.

  Seen through Emma’s hole, Eric’s chaotic domestic life began to make sense. Now the randomly arranged spines of paperbacks in his bookcase, the CD cases strewn across the table, images on his dusty television screen, were transformed. Eric was seeing the world through Emma’s eyes and, through her eyes, everything in creation took the form of an expertly composed still-life.

  The perfection of this world was overwhelming. Nothing was superfluous. Nothing was accidental.

  A sensible man would have left it at that. Eric had experienced revelation of a kind usually known only to great mystics. But his yearning for an insight that would bind his sensibility to that of the ineffably lovely Emma wouldn’t permit him to leave well enough alone.

  That weekend, Eric consulted the local library’s newspaper file. Hastening to page eleven, he discovered a three-column piece under the headline:

  COUNCIL DECIDES PAGANS ARE RAVING

  According to an agency report, a Borough council in Suffolk was using legislation enacted to prevent large-scale rave parties to ban pagans from practising their ancient tradition of naked ribbon dancing.

  And that was pretty much it. The pagan nudists intended court action to defend their rights under common law. Of all the items in the day’s newspaper, this was the one that the inscrutable Emma had been so precise in removing.

  Eric now saw it all. He saw ribbons attached to a pole erected in the hollow between green hills, and the uninhibited Emma, breasts and buttocks ashimmer as she and her posse of maidens cavorted. Each young beauty sported nothing more than a single garter and a crown of chained wild-flowers. Naturally, this fantasy soon came to govern Eric’s thoughts.

  3. Heart Surgery

  Eric now knew Emma in a way that not even her most intimate acquaintances knew her. He certainly knew her more completely than the lawyers who lusted after her from a distance.

  When she next entered the caf to buy an apple, Johnno drooled, ‘Look at that … I’d give two toes and a kneecap for a night with her.’

  ‘What about you, Ezza?’

  Eric was so much in the habit of letting these questions pass that fellow lunchers ignored his failure to answer.

  ‘What would she get up to of a weekend, a princess like that?’

  Max asked.

  ‘Sailing … hang-gliding,’ Maggot ventured.

  Then, speaking in advance of any considered intention, Eric told the gathering that Emma Ray was a nude Morris dancer.

  ‘What?’

  Eric must have believed the story that then emerged, because he told it with rare conviction. Emma was descended from a long line of East Anglian pagans who’d expressed their spirituality with naked dance for many centuries.

  ‘She told you this?’ Maggot asked, removing his jaw from the chip-bowl.

  ‘Only as much as she’s allowed to.’

  A chorus of moans preceded a wave of speculation about goats, rabbits and orgies involving sexual sacrifice. The men wanted to know where this dancing took place, and whether the females were maidens whose virginity had been preserved for sacrificial offering to the priest.

  The young graduates became so engrossed in these thoughts that hot chips went uneaten.

  ‘Who would’ve thought that?’ Johnno said.

  Eric then stood up and said he’d better be getting back to work. None of the gang said anything, but their eyes said, Yeah, you’d better do that. They all envied him and his desk just the other side of a partition from Emma Ray.

  Perhaps this subject was too difficult or revealing to be raised again. When nothing more was said about Emma’s nude Morris dancing, Eric knew that the gang’s sudden preoccupation with superannuation and the new factory in the northern suburbs indicated studious avoidance of the matter.

  Each morning, he scoured the papers and internet for news of Suffolk’s pagan nudists. Typically, there was no follow-up to the original piece. From time to time, Emma passed Eric with a smile, but there were no more requests for his newspaper. Nothing out of the ordinary occurred until Emma suddenly appeared at his desk, her expression a mirror of the raw distress Eric’s mother used to show when he alienated school friends.

  ‘It was you that told them, wasn’t it?’

  ‘What? …’ ‘What? About the dancing. You told them about the dancing.’

  ‘Only as a joke …’ ‘It was fun, was it?’

  ‘I never meant to hurt you.’

  ‘You … I thought I could trust you. I could have borrowed anyone’s paper … We’d taken those messages. We trusted each other.’

  Returning from a meeting next day, Eric found Emma cleaning out her desk. He spoke her name to no response; when he tried to approach her, she turned her back. He wanted to write a note, but couldn’t think what to say. By mid-afternoon, she was gone, and Eric found himself hiding from De
clan O’Riordan’s fierce scowl.

  Emma Ray’s departure coincided with a broader shift in mood at the office. The new financial year brought another crop of graduates, and the old lags began to split off from the discreet lunchtime gangs.

  The brightest of these arrivals, Karen Holt, took Emma’s job with Publications. Although Karen was a pretty brunette who loved to perch on one corner of his desk to exchange gossip, Eric couldn’t feel for Karen as he had for her mysterious, self-contained predecessor.

  Some nights, Eric thought about searching for Emma. Troubled by what he’d done to her, he considered quitting his job as an offering, but, since no one would see the meaning of such a gesture, he stayed put.

  From time to time, Eric raised that sheet of newspaper and looked through the gap, trying to rediscover Emma’s magical perspective, but he’d fouled his connection with the ineffable. Though moved by the flawless lines, one had to be careful not to touch the rim of Emma’s perfect, geometrical absence. A man could cut himself and never stop bleeding.

  FOREIGN EXCHANGE

  I remember Mum saying I wasn’t to blame in a way that made it sound like it was my fault not hers. Hana wasn’t to be blamed either. She had serious problems, and needed help. Other people – her people – were better placed to help her.

  And I told Mum to be careful when explaining the situation to Hana’s parents. Sending her home early might constitute a loss of face. Maybe that’s something I meant to say but didn’t. By then, Mum and Dad had spoken to her parents twice without me knowing. They’d taken the trouble to book a flight to Frankfurt, and all her parents cared about was the interruption to their Nile cruise. They hardly asked about their daughter.

  I accused Mum of exaggerating, trying to make them sound callous, so she had some way to explain why Hana was so fractious. So far as I could tell, there was no simple explanation. Except that we were in this spot because I chose to study German when everyone knew the future was Chinese.

  Back then, we consoled ourselves by saying we were doing our best for Hana.

  It’s hard to remember what life was like before the internet. In May 1997, my handwritten letter to Aachen told Hana how much we were looking forward to her exchange, and listed all the things she could do in Melbourne. Her reply was the first email I received on my new lap-top computer.

  Two years older than me, Hana described herself as a ‘statuesque Aryan’ with long, blonde hair. Having spent two years in Chicago with her parents – both architects – she spoke perfect English, as well as French, Dutch and a little Flemish. She thought it better that we write in English. I could practise my German when she was in Melbourne.

  During the next four months, we exchanged a dozen emails. Hana said Aachen was heaven for beer and chocolate lovers, blessed with suburbs that spread into Belgium and Holland. She described her favourite clubs and bars, and wanted to hear about Melbourne’s nightlife. Just sixteen, I could only tell her about the one Brighton club I’d snuck into. The rest came from guidebooks.

  Having a German friend was such an adventure that I never questioned whether we’d get along. We both loved dogs. Her three wolfhounds had noble, Russian names, while our dog, Mickey, was a black kelpie-collie cross who understood everything. When we spoke, the hair on Mick’s ears twitched like tiny antennas. Being a horse-lover, I knew Aachen as a major equine centre, but my one mention of eventing brought a reply that seems terser now than it did at the time. ‘Don’t ask about horses. The girls in my class are horse-crazy … I can think of better things to jiggle up and down on.’

  As her visit approached, Hana said how excited she was, and spoke of the great times us two girls would have together. I paid little attention to the sentence that said her boyfriend, Udo, would be in Melbourne at the same time.

  In the one photo I’d been sent, Hana was formally dressed. While you couldn’t call her pretty, she had a nice smile. Her chestnut eyes were too small for her full cheeks. But flesh-and-blood Hana was nothing like the girl we’d expected to exit customs.

  Statuesque wasn’t the half of it. I am average height. She was thirty centimetres taller than me, and must have weighed one hundred kilos. A loose sweater made it look like she was smuggling melons, and Dad whispered that she could play full-back for Melbourne. She hugged us, and said how happy she was to be here, but Hana looked exhausted. When I asked in German what the flight was like, she answered in English.

  ‘It was a nightmare. Squashed into a tiny seat for twenty-five hours.’

  We made mistakes that didn’t help. Even though Hana was too tired to speak, Dad insisted on taking the tourist route through the city and explaining the history of every building. Mum reminds him that Melbourne is more subtle than many cities, and only reveals its virtues to those who are patient and open-minded, but he expects visitors to instantly recognise Melbourne as the best city on earth. When we arrived home, Hana had to be woken up, and she was still woozy when Mickey saw her and started barking.

  ‘Get it away from me!’ she screamed.

  ‘Don’t worry, that’s Mick. He’s nervous with strangers.’

  ‘Keep it away. It’s savage.’

  Hana spoke German to me only when she wanted to complain. At home, she had a double bed, and she didn’t see how she could possibly sleep in my absent sister’s large single. Air-conditioning gave her conjunctivitis, and our house was completely wrong. It had no sense of cohesion. The two things she approved of were our new refrigerator and the television, which had an unusually large screen.

  I said nothing to my parents, who had no inkling that their taste was so poor.

  Whenever I spoke German, Hana answered in English. ‘Don’t speak German to me. You can’t speak it well enough.’

  We all recall the heaviness of Hana’s feet. With every move, she sent shudders through the house.

  ‘Get a nice, long rest,’ Mum told her. ‘Tomorrow we’ll give you a proper introduction to the city.’

  Hana didn’t wake till midday, by which stage rain squalls had arrived with the southerly change. She wasn’t bothered when Mum asked if we could postpone the orientation trip till the following day.

  ‘What do you most want to see?’ Mum asked.

  ‘Nothing in particular.’

  ‘Are you more interested in seeing animals and natural landmarks, or doing cultural things?’

  ‘Whatever you want,’ Hana said, as she slumped in Dad’s television chair with the packet of chocolate biscuits she’d taken from the fridge.

  ‘I was thinking of a roast for tea tonight. Do you like lamb?’

  ‘If that suits you,’ Hana said, as she flicked through the stations on the cable network.

  ‘Lamb it is,’ Mum said, already guessing that these six weeks might not pass as quickly as she’d hoped they would.

  Just before dinner, Hana asked if she could use the phone, and then took the hands-free to the lounge. Although I couldn’t make out what was said, she spoke German in a tone that was much gentler than anything I’d heard before. Fifteen minutes later, she found Mum in the kitchen.

  ‘My boyfriend wants to meet me in Carlton. Is that easy to get to from here?’

  ‘After dinner?’

  ‘Udo will meet me in Carlton at seven.’

  I’d seen Mum in stare-downs with my older sister, Rosey, and she’d never come close to losing one.

  ‘I know nothing about Udo, but he’s welcome to dine here if he can find his way to Black Rock by seven.’

  Hana looked like she’d been slapped across the face.

  ‘We know you’re an adult, Hana. But while you’re here, you’re under our care.’

  Snatching the phone from its cradle, Hana stormed into the lounge. Her brief conversation with Udo was loud enough for all to hear, but one of the few words I could translate was the German term for convicts. She brought a sarcastic smile back into the kitchen.

  ‘Udo has better things to do.’

  That marked the start of the silent treatment
. When Dad asked about Aachen, her school, parents, and her plans for university, she dead-batted him with it’s not like heres, and who knows? Afterwards, Hana’s thanks were marinated in bitter irony. ‘That was a notable family dinner, thank you.’

  Next morning, after sleeping in till eleven, she snorted when told that the best way in to the city centre was by bus and train. Having been advised to wear comfortable shoes, she chose two-inch heels that she was extremely awkward in. When I appeared, dressed in a pale-green sloppy joe, jeans and sneakers, she said no respectable German girl would be seen in public like that.

  Mum says that city tour was like a day in the dentist’s chair. Hana went out of her way to show no interest. Indifferent to landmarks, she sneered her way through the shopping arcades. Asked if she’d like to visit the gallery, she said native art made no sense and shouldn’t be called culture. Mum and I were about to raise the white flag when she showed her first hint of enthusiasm.

  ‘Maybe Julia could take me to Brunswick Street. I’ve heard they have great Thai food there.’

  Without asking if I wanted to spend more time with Hana, Mum found eighty dollars, slapped it into Hana’s hand and insisted we be home by ten.

  If I’d hoped that being alone together might expose a more tender side of Hana’s personality, I was severely disappointed.

  ‘Your mother speaks like a duck. Is English her first language?’

  ‘Country people have strong accents,’ I said.

  ‘The schools must be primitive.’

  I wanted to kick the heels out from under her. This cow on stilts was taking a shot at one of the kindest people in the world. But I had the Rotary president’s speech locked in my mind. No matter what differences we had with our guest, we should behave like diplomats, and say nothing that would reflect poorly on our country.

  ‘Where is Udo staying?’ I asked.

  ‘In a hostel in North Melbourne.’