Night fell, and the wind picked up, rasping the city with sand off the Gobi desert. At evening rush hour the streets milled with people whose heads were bagged and masked against the wind. Then the streets emptied again. His stomach growling, his head aching, he screwed up his gritty eyes and placed one foot before the other with no thought of where. Faces were closed as firmly as shopfronts and courtyard walls to shut out the sandpaper wind. He had no knack of eliciting sympathy and walked doggedly forward, slower and more aimless, with an empty grin on his mouth, until he found a bare patch of trees and earth with an edifice in the corner, an open door to a large unlit bog. He squatted inside out of the wind, ignoring the stench, and wondered if there was a clean dry spot where he could curl up to sleep.
His eyelids were drooping when a man came in. The man humped his shoulders away from the draught to light up his smoke, coughed painfully, a tall figure in greatcoat and cap astride one of the trenches. The smell of smoke suggested pleasure. From his squatting position the boy asked whether the man knew the West Third Ring Road.
The man peered down into the dark. ‘What?’
‘The West Third Ring Road.’
‘I know it. Go west.’
He swept the coat around him and was already striding towards the door when the boy came up behind him and asked for a cigarette. Without a word one was offered. The boy grabbed it in the darkness. The match flared up and he concentrated on lighting the cigarette. Only when he leaned back with a grateful smile as the match burned out did he meet the foreigner’s face.
In other circumstances there might have been panic. But here a relationship had been initiated and they were brothers before they were Chinaman and Devil. The boy followed the man outside in order to see clearly the pale funny-shaped face, like a kind of horse. Clarence was equally struck by the face of the boy. He had expected another scrounging late-night Beijing prowler. The ruddy face in the match flame was a dirty cherub’s. But he had learned to be suspicious. He repeated the directions and turned to go. The boy came after him.
‘No, no,’ said Clarence. ‘That way is west.’
But the boy continued to walk beside him. Clarence coughed convulsively. The wind burned his throat. He could tell from the accent that the boy was from out of town, but there was something else. He did not bombard Clarence with the usual questions he encountered on his camera-less nocturnal rambles, and saved Clarence telling lies.
‘Are you cold?’
‘No, no!’ The boy was shuddering. Clarence suddenly pulled off his greatcoat and draped it over the boy’s shoulders, and a spirited tussle broke out, the boy refusing, flailing about, pushing Clarence away, throwing off the unwanted garment, and Clarence insisting, smiling, wrapping the coat round the boy’s body and holding him squirming—until polite refusal was enough and the boy slipped his arms into the engulfing coat. Clarence was cold, but didn’t care.
The boy’s story emerged through the Shandong burr. He had no possessions and no money and had spent his first day in Beijing looking for the place where his friend lived. The only information he had to save himself was the name of the No. 3 Vehicle Plant on the West Third Ring Road. Clarence took the boy inside a late-night noodle shop where he emptied two bowls of noodles in ravenous slurps. The old proprietor was bemused at the partnership and reduced the size of the portion. The only other customers, two slick youths, made exaggerated compliments on Clarence’s Chinese, to which he replied: ‘Don’t pull my leg.’ And the boy jumped up, angrily, offering his fists.
There was a cheap inn behind the noodle shop, where the night porter made difficulties.
‘The rules, the rules,’ he muttered as he shut the smooth-talking foreigner and the moron yokel out into the night. He had lost the place in his kungfu novel.
The wind sliced into Clarence’s chest. The boy squeezed his hand, kissing it sometimes like a puppy. When a lone taxi appeared, Clarence ran into the middle of the road and waved his arms. Seeing the pale face, the taxi stopped, and for a price agreed to take them to where the No. 3 Vehicle Plant was supposed to be.
They were dumped in an area like a ghostly airfield with the odd red flower of a light drooping above; low brick hovels, stretches of rubble, ditches, abandoned construction projects, iron fences, concrete walls, high iron gates labelled with names—and not a soul. A soft bundle turned out to be a sleeping guard who curtly said go west—a hundred metres.
The boy padded off.
‘Hey,’ said Clarence, ‘that’s east.’
‘West,’ said the boy.
‘East!’ said Clarence.
They stopped in the dead centre of the broad road, and the wind drove through their bodies as if they were shreds of rag caught on a wire.
Clarence spoke firmly. ‘That is north.’
The boy echoed agreement.
‘That is south.’
Nods.
‘Then that is east, and this is west.’
The boy granted north and south. He would not grant east and west.
Clarence imposed his will and they marched west by the compass to an obscure opening in the barrier behind which was a yard of puddles, mounds, shards surrounded on three sides by barracks. The boy shouted the name of his friend from the village. A bony figure in long johns came to the door and pissed voluminously on the step. The boy called and called. They tried another door. In a room of a few square metres a dim bulb revealed perhaps twenty-five tousle-haired grey-faced snoring snuffling bodies side by side, head to toe, toe to head, pressed against each other in their greatcoats on a wide platform where there was no room to lie flat. On shelves round the walls, on every hook, in every cranny, were their meagre towels and bags. The boy peered at each sleeping face in search of his friend. An eye opened to meet their investigations. They were all Shandong peasants come to work at the plant—but the friend was not there.
Clarence and the boy conferred outside. The boy was confident he would find his friend in the morning, and that his friend would get him a job shovelling coal at the plant for one yuan a day, which was why he had come to the city.
‘I don’t know your name,’ said Clarence. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Autumn,’ said the boy. ‘I was born in the autumn.’
Then Clarence broke with his usual practice and wrote down a telephone number. He told the boy to hang up if anyone else answered, but to keep trying, if he needed help. Clarence left the boy with his greatcoat and some money in the pocket, and started his own long coughing journey home. The boy yawned. He lay down on a ledge of the platform of bodies, squeezing against the outside man. Gradually the pressure of one more body was taken up by the others. Each adjusted his position a fraction, and by morning the boy was sleeping just like the others, a sardine, but one whose heart glowed with his adventure, and the telephone number on a scrap of paper in his innermost pocket.
5
It started when the winder in Wally’s camera jammed; in trying to fix it he wiped out thirty-six memorable moments. He couldn’t remember them anyway. A few days later he lost his address book. Deliberately? Ties were severed. Letters remained unwritten. He stopped bothering to listen to the World Service or read Newsweek. The world was slipping away. Whose fault? Was all-mothering China drawing him into its soma? Grey on grey. Or was withdrawal his own expression of the state his existence had reached? His work ceased to be in earnest. The days went by and nothing was asked of him. Whether he exercised among the blooming magnolias in the park or stayed sedentary, whether he drank scotch or sipped tea, made no difference. He slept for eight or ten hours at a stretch, his sleep weighted with accidie. His bones ached from too much sleep. Friends, acquaintances, the mystery of China—what nonsense!—all were forgotten in his submersion in the strangling web of sleep. And his dreams were drab, as if the power had been cut.
Until there came a singular, baffling dream.
He was a horse galloping swift as mind down a long drive that wound through snug hills and golding vistas, a landsc
ape of promise delivered, spring and autumn. His own motion, and a larger motion beyond his power, carried him eagerly through pine-covered cleft and wooded park, rainforest and open country where cattle lay beneath mighty spreading trees, through awesome wilderness and great good places to warm Arcadian Eden. As the horse galloped the scenes revolved, down a turning drive, back, to a place (he could not place it), a mansion of many rooms, one added to another over the years, in a declivity of scarlet earth, in a sea of ripe wheat, with the sound of ocean beyond.
It was a museum with polished floors and watery light cast through long windows onto worn country timber in well-proportioned rooms. On tables, melons and peaches nested in porcelain, and stars floated in crystal glasses of half-drunk wine. On a dining board by each place setting sat a small bronze fox, blackened, after Donatello.
The horse’s hooves struck the floor with a din. Through windows a sloping greensward and terraced Italian garden were visible where men in white togas were dotted about. Despite their theatrical whiskers, worn to make them look old and stately—greybeards of powder and greasepaint they were, with pencilled wrinkles and receding latex hairlines—he recognised among them his best friend from high school who was a trade union leader; he saw those of his contemporaries who had become doctors, and those thinkers who had become tax lawyers and media managers. He saw those bright sparks from the lab in Cambridge who were professors and professionals. And there was Harvey Heilmann bent like a tree for all his swimming. The men on the lawn conferred with solemn animation, colleagues, but boys all, in their silly robes. Arranged in Socratic dialogue on the grass, the figures were attending a symposium. They represented Western Mind—high-toned blokes with painted faces. Was it in Athens? The westering sun soaked garden and hills in apricot nectar. Had they gone outside Florence to escape the plague? Somewhere on holiday? Beyond the shrubbery was a stand of soughing white gums, and a kookaburra cackling.
The horse stood by the window and from the half-filled glasses on the table came an ethereal kind of music that should have been inaudible. A cavity of his horse-brain noted the music as Mozart’s for glass harmonica. Then suddenly, quite oblivious of the docile stallion, girls and women swept through the room as if summoned by the current of sound.
The women wore light, gathered robes that revealed their bodies through gauze, as in frescoes by Ghirlandaio. They laughed and whispered, reaching for each other as they hurried, mothers and grown daughters in a wise, passionate sisterhood. And the men on the lawn one by one cast their gaze towards the house, rubbing their hands, and one by one broke from their debate. Ewig’ Weiblich zieht uns hinan …
And the horse nosed forward after the rustle of women, through long dream corridors as the crystal music died away and another music was heard—earthly fleshy sound. He came to the last crowded room, with men craning at the back, women at the front, and at the very front not visions but the women he knew—Bets’s friends, the dancer, the abortionist, his mother-in-law, Cindy from Coogee, all in a solid phalanx—and leaning against the grand piano, her silver-blonde hair streaming, tanned shoulders bare, head high, mouth delivering that song was Bets—his wife.
A hand seemed to grab and wring his guts. The room was empty. The toga’d men and gowned women had vanished. He was a man again, and across the empty polished boards of the long sunroom he stared at her, in jeans and singlet, singing from the piano the old song.
Where was she? They? As day closed the hills burned with warmth and light, yet were cooled by zephyrs laced with sea tang. The nip of eucalyptus, the sweetness of hawthorn, the perfume of magnolia reached the mind from some displaced garden. Where was this dream that combined in one present too many enchanted stages of the past?—the house at Whale Beach, the upstairs in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the rented Tuscan villa, the flat in the other Cambridge, Tintagel, the holiday shack near Pigeonhouse Mountain, the city pub where he found her that night at the piano, with her friends around, singing her lungs out. Then it became that other night on the terrace above the growling sea, and she was there not in jeans and singlet or quattrocento gown; just in her flimsy nightie.
6
‘I didn’t want you to know before I did,’ she said. ‘I’ve been seeing Geoffrey Mithers.’
Wally blinked.
‘Darling—’ she said, reaching both her hands.
His own felt grubby after his night out, but she was sweeping aside such trivialities. She had floated free of accusation. At least that was her tone, a wafting lightness reserved for matters of utmost gravity. Mithers? He had never imagined, allowed for, a serious adultery. For all their separateness, he and she were too mature for that. One of his own colleagues?
‘Geoffrey wants me to go into hospital,’ she continued, ‘for tests. A biopsy.’
The facts so briefly recounted were commonplace in Wally’s line of work. It was as if she had told him of a minor domestic problem she had trouble with that he as a man could fix in a jiff; the kind of thing that need never become calamitous for sensible informed people like themselves. He refused to follow the implications, refused at first to respond.
‘Well?’
He was squeezing her hand with all his pressure and her hands were cold, his hands moved up her arms, he hugged her, as if to hoard the precious warmth of their two bodies, two drumming heartbeats. Over her shoulder the white fringe of the black sea was like a line of fatty tissue attached to the monstrous heaving organ.
She’d had pains, chronic indigestion, she’s been passing blood. Knowing something was up, she’d gone to see Geoffrey—poor man!—asking him to say nothing to her husband. She hadn’t wanted to burden Wally. Anyway an intuition or fear, a possibility like the present, had to be faced alone. She wanted to know first. Geoffrey’s preliminary tests had determined the need for acting straight away. And Wally wasn’t there.
‘Bloody hell. Mithers is a goon!’
From the tone of her singing that he heard as he came into the house, and the heavy serenity of her body, he guessed she had already renounced all alternatives but the worst; the patient’s clinical reaction, that usually intensified into guilt or anger, the power of her spirit was even now turning to a kind of gildedness, in the early hours of this cool, clear morning. Dawn would come …
By first light Wally was talking professionally. They should not jump to conclusions; if the diagnosis was made early enough … there was no one path for disease but an infinite number of permutations in which medical science could intervene at many stages. Nothing was irreversible. He was the committee man selectively dealing out the Janus-faced news. Bets nodded at the plausibility of his trade. At last she yawned and said she needed a shower. They made love instead and as the new day stirred they ignored the first of the telephone calls and sprinted down to the beach with long skidding steps.
There was never a point at which the truth was spoken. Perhaps there was no truth: as Wally kept insisting, the situation must be considered multivalent. His optimism was resolute, Bets’s light-hearted hopefulness the attitude required. Only once, without Wally’s knowledge, did she talk candidly with Jerome. The kid shunned her at first, involuntarily resisting the wound; then came very close.
For month-long stretches of almost normality, the cancer did not change, as all held their breath before the next lurch downwards. And there was always the possibility of remission, in no one’s power to effect, though Wally believed it should be his if anyone’s (even as Mithers continued to handle the case). Wally committed more and more medical improprieties. He got at Mithers. He called for second and third opinions, and scoured the latest publications in the journals. On flying trips to the United States, Britain, Germany, he consulted with the best and worst of his colleagues and old mates, some of whom were moved by his uxorious devotion while others regarded his behaviour as a frantic quest to salvage amour-propre: a campaign to vindicate his life’s work in medical science and his faith in humanity’s capacity to side with growth.
Bets submitted wi
th good grace to a punishing regime of treatments, from diet to radiation to the latest complicated hormone manipulation. Most she resented being discussed as a case. Among her friends she confided only in Aldo, who knew a miracle worker who used strenuous meditation to achieve remissions of forty per cent. In the end Wally looked to quackery too. Only partly submerged in the relentless pursuit of a cure, his anger was directed chiefly against himself—the mockery of his idealism—and himself as a representative of the fat vanity of the medical fraternity whose knowledge had scarcely advanced a step since Hippocrates—and himself as a member of a species that was nature’s whipping-boy. There was no case here for dignified philosophical acceptance of the inevitable. A fine healthy woman in her thirty-seventh year struck down by a stray biological bullet that did not kill cleanly but inflicted the most humiliating wastage.
Avenue of Eternal Peace Page 14