Honk If You Are Jesus

by Peter Goldsworthy

  This wasn’t all. Complicating things was the small matter of that near intimacy. The disturbing physical presence of the man. As I fled I could still feel his breath on my neck, a ticklish afterglow; I kept wanting to brush it away, like strands of spiderweb. Such feelings were new to me, even at my age. There had been no menfriends in the past; no boyfriends. Boys had never interested me, especially the fully-grown variety.

  Scanlon and I had argued for some time; the world outside the Cell Lab was filling with the day shift: clerks, nurses, porters, even that rarity at Schultz Medical Centre, one or two stray patients. I stepped out of the lift on to my own floor to find one of the two department secretaries, Alison Jennings — a semiefficient mother of four, a second-income earner whose real interests lay at home — standing at the coffee machine. She followed me into my office performing her usual balancing act: the morning mail clutched under one wing, my appointments diary under the other, a cup of coffee in each hand.

  ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost,’ she said, predictably.

  ‘I’m not feeling … myself.’

  The room was dark, the venetian blinds shuttered. She set down her various burdens, then turned to jerk open the blinds. Slatted beams of light splashed across my desk; I sat, staring, hypnotised. Steam rose invisibly from the coffee, only becoming visible, swirling and eddying, as it entered the light some distance above.

  Alison flipped open the diary, and spun it on the desk before me: ‘Mary-Beth Schultz rang.’

  Dust motes swam in and out of the beams of sunlight like tiny glittering fish in a distant aquarium. I tried to focus my thoughts.

  ‘She wanted your first available appointment.’

  I sipped absently at the coffee, then set it down. Alison was still trying to reconnect me to the real world, to earth me: ‘I pencilled her in for this afternoon. 2 p.m.’ I had almost forgotten this third complication: the sterility of Hollis Schultz. The question of why I had been offered my Chair. Too many thoughts were jostling about in my head.

  ‘I’m not really up to it. Could you postpone the appointment?’

  ‘You’re going to refuse to see the boss’s wife?’

  ‘I’m taking the rest of the day off. If anyone needs me I’ll be at home.’

  An expression of concern replaced her incredulity: ‘Anything I can do?’

  I shook my head: ‘I’ll be fine.’

  ‘I’ll look in after work,’ she said. ‘In case you need anything.’

  An instinctive mother hen. Alison was my age, but saw me more as a dependant than a superior. Her shorthand was bad, her typing worse, but her secretarial skills in more important areas were indispensable: collecting dry cleaning, paying bills, sending out for food when I was too busy to eat. She ran the Department, and in many ways ran my life, and Tad’s: the nearest thing to the traditional ‘wife’ that I had always lacked.

  ‘Don’t bother. Tad will look in on me,’ I said.

  I suddenly wanted to be home, preferably in bed. Not so much sleeping, as taking refuge. Hiding. I left her standing in my office, those two cups of coffee steaming on the sunlit desk.

  At home I crawled into bed, fully clothed. I pulled the quilt over my head and lay huddled for a time, thinking. Thinking, thinking, thinking. I wanted to expunge Scanlon from my system, break those strands of sticky web. I felt disturbed, physically and mentally. I had no idea what to do about the physical disturbance, but surely I could do something about his ideas, his actual work.

  At length I threw the quilt aside, and began ransacking my bookshelves. The Bible was buried in a row of thick textbooks, all unread for years. Absurd the baggage that I’ve carried with me since my student days, unremembered, never needed. The Bible had stayed with me, near to me, hidden among a thousand other books. They were all still there, every book I had ever owned. Old dictionaries. Atlases. Cubic medical tomes: Gray’s Anatomy, Robbins’ Pathology, Lecture Notes in Gynaecology. The plays and novels from school — Hamlet, Macbeth, Great Expectations, The Invisible Man — that I had recently begun reading again. All had followed me from house to house like loyal pets, intellectual pets packed into tea chests or cartons each time I moved, then unpacked again into their narrow kennels. Why had I kept them? Auxiliary lobes to the brain? Extra reserves of memory — hard memory — that could be called on if needed? Or was it merely sentimental: they were snapshot albums, of a sort; snapshots of my thinking processes from the past?

  I lifted the stiff cover of the Bible — it seemed to creak open — for the first time since the age of fourteen, since that last Sunday School picnic. Presented to Miss Mara Fox. Wesley Sunday School, Intermediate Class, 1940. Two signatures were scrawled beneath: a barely legible Christopher Pearson, J.P., Superintendent, and my father’s precise, always legible Rev. B. Fox.

  That familiar signature trapped my gaze: a hieroglyph that I hadn’t seen for years, hadn’t expected ever to see again.

  He had written to me through my student days, long weekly letters which were nothing more than a systematic chronicle of his week’s activities: letters as flat and dead and dutiful as his sermons. My mother tacked on shorter postscripts: practical advice on the subjects of dress, food, sleep, deportment. Her handwriting was more expansive, less disciplined: large, generous loops, inflated perhaps by whatever frustrated love she felt for me, by feelings she could never actually express. Her great fear (reading between the lines, or within the loops) was always the same: I was heading for spinsterhood.

  She had never been entirely happy when my school reports came home: top of the class, invariably. My father was always pleased, mildly; she sometimes pretended to be pleased. She wanted me to do well, she claimed, but not that well. Not showing up the boys, not isolating myself from the girl world of domestic science, netball and average academic achievement.

  The choice of medicine as a career had worried her even more.

  ‘So much hard work, when will you have time to relax?’

  Meaning: when will you have time to find a husband? Teaching had been her career suggestion: the district was full of Pretty Young Things posted out to bush schools who had found themselves a Nice Young Man (preferably attached to a sizeable propertyholding), and settled down and lived happily ever after.

  At first I wrote back to both of them, weekly. Another Inverse Law: I always replied to my mother’s short, constipated notes at length; and to my father’s long, tedious chronicles in brief. To reassure my mother I invented a full social life, a fictional life that I was soon forced to keep track of in a diary, since she read and memorised and speculated about every word I wrote, and often referred back to events I had dreamt up months before and long since forgotten. Was that Bob the same Bob you went to The Sound of Music with? Patrick sounds like a nice boy, but your father wondered about the name? He’s not a Roman? In fact I was desperately lonely, and might even have gone to Mass or converted to Islam if a boy had asked me.

  I was living in a university college: one more island in an archipelago of country girls. Writing that weekly letter on Sunday afternoon helped give shape to the week. Later, as the years passed, my letters dropped off to once a fortnight, then once a month. I was able to plead, truthfully, pressure of studies.

  It’s difficult now to remember how much those books once meant to me. As a wheezing child in the country, but also through years of lonely study in the city, I found comfort in books, in some books. Texts of Mathematics, Biology, Physics, Organic Chemistry: these were the friends of my first year in the city. The Bible was already baggage; I no longer believed in any sort of God, had not believed since the picnic. I was interested only in ideas that could be tested and retested, proved or disproved. If I had read the Bible in those years it would have been for purposes of mockery: to ridicule those endless stories of rape and pillage and murder. God — the God of the Old Testament, at least — seemed like nothing so much as a little boy. A spoilt, murderous brat, playing with his toys; shaking them around a bit until they broke.
‘Take the toys from the boys’ — I believed it.

  Even as a girl, muttering my prayers each night, I failed to see the point of the random genocide, the petty tests of faith, the putting to the sword of every man, woman, and child in half the cities of the Middle East.

  God should be impeached, I once suggested as a teenager to my father. He should be tried for war crimes, I said. He glanced up from his desk and turned towards me; turned as slowly and methodically as he steered his Morris Major around a street corner.

  ‘Don’t take the Old Testament too literally,’ he told me, mildly. ‘The Ten Commandments and the prophecies are all that count.’

  I went away and read. And then came back. Fine, I said. What kind of egomaniac would put Himself at the centre of the first three Commandments — to have no other God but Him, etc — and relegate Thou Shalt Not Murder to seventh spot? ‘For I the Lord am a jealous God, visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children,’ I quoted.

  What kind of Hitler was running the universe? I asked, if not in those precise words. Was it really worse to bear false offerings to Baal, or take the Lord’s name in vain, than to murder?

  My father glanced up again from his desk. ‘Read the New Testament,’ he murmured.

  I went away again, and read some more. God did seem to have grown up a little in the later Testament. Matured. You couldn’t go past the Sermon on the Mount for a serve of spine-tingling poetry. But what about the magic tricks? If He was a spoilt brat in the Old, He was a teenage exhibitionist in the New: turning water into wine, walking on water, rioting in the Temple.

  ‘The Holy Trinity,’ I tormented my father. ‘God the Father, God the Teenage Delinquent, God the Spoilt Brat.’

  I was something of a teenage delinquent myself, intellectually.

  12

  Having had perfect understanding of all things from the very first … It was to the gospel of St Luke, fellow physician, that I first turned when I climbed back into bed, trying to find some reason to disbelieve Scanlon.

  Why are ye troubled? And why do thoughts arise in your hearts? Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself; handle me, and see; for a spirit Hath not flesb and bones, as ye see me have …

  I read through St Luke’s obituary, then (always methodical) through the other three novelettes that sandwiched it. Four versions of the Adventures of Jesus Christ.

  I’ve never had a problem with the notion of an historical Jesus: his outline is dimly visible even through the wildest escapades, urban legends, and magic tricks. I’d read through my father’s books as a girl — Jewish history, early Christian history, the Roman writers: Tacitus and others. I read everything I could get my eyes on in those days. I never thought to doubt the fact of Christ. I needed to read no further than Matthew 1: 2–16.

  And Abraham begat Isaac, and Isaac begat Judas, and Judas begat Phares and Phares begat Esrom, and …

  I could set this down obsessively, list the next thirty generations until the begetting of Joseph, husband of Mary, but the point is clear: if anything can be trusted, it is Jewish records, the Jewish registry of births, marriages and deaths. Cities rose and fell about them, plagues came and went, whole tribes vanished under fire and brimstone, but the scribes kept scribbling. This was, this is, the true religion of the Jews: the Word.

  And the alleged death, nailed to a cross? No problem believing in this either: a common enough cause of death. The road toll of Roman antiquity. The gospels might quibble over the exact date (before or after Passover?) but what did it matter? Once the existence of the man was accepted, Scanlon’s project no longer seemed quite so outrageous: no more outrageous than isolating DNA strands from a bottled dodo foot, or from the leathery skin of a stuffed Tasmanian Tiger.

  A thought that leaves me wondering — later, setting this down — just how thick I could be at the time? How much else could be hidden in full view, thrust under my nose?

  Some thoughts, it seemed, were still too blasphemous to actually think, even for my delinquent mind.

  PART

  THREE

  1

  Tad arrived home around midnight; the muffled sounds of Der Rosenkavalier carried to me through my closed bedroom door, and the sounds of food preparation. I ignored a gentle knock on my door; after a time the music ceased and everything was quiet.

  I couldn’t sleep. I rose early — long before Tad would be awake — and booked a seat on the first flight to Adelaide. I scribbled a note for Tad, then rang Alison, at home, and asked her to cancel my appointments for a week.

  ‘What’s wrong, Mara? Are you ill?’

  ‘No. I’m fine.’

  ‘you sound … strange. Out of breath. Are you sure everything is all right?’

  ‘I’m a little tight in the chest. It’s nothing.’

  Breakfast noises could be heard in the background, the sounds of a suburban family rising and preparing for the day: the high bird voices of children, the clatter of cutlery, a whistling kettle. Speech was difficult for me, and not just because of asthma; something else suddenly clogged my throat; those ordinary background sounds had a poignancy I couldn’t explain.

  ‘I’ll be gone for a week,’ I told her. ‘Back home to Adelaide.’

  ‘This is very sudden.’

  I lied: ‘Family illness.’

  I rewrote my note to Tad, incorporating this impromptu lie, for reasons of consistency. I was going home to Mother, I suppose. Or, more accurately, going home to myself, seeking refuge in the only safe house I knew. And if that also meant going home to Mother, it was coincidental: she happened to be living where I wanted to hide.

  I remember nothing of the flight, or the cab trips that sandwiched it at each end. I was preoccupied, chewing the same obsessive cud of thoughts that had kept me awake the night before. I had never felt so confused and so alone. Was I being employed — being used — merely to manufacture children for Hollis and Mary-Beth Schultz? Why had I been kept in the dark about so many things? And Scanlon — what was his part in this? His emotional grip on me was growing; I wanted to resist it, at least until I had properly thought it through.

  I found myself knocking on my mother’s door with only a vague memory of how I came to be there. The door opened to reveal a stranger: an octogenarian male clad only in a bathrobe and mottled, wrinkled skin.

  ‘You must be Mara,’ he said.

  I was yanked back to the world of things in a hurry. An Adelaide suburb assembled itself around me. It was raining; I was standing in the rain, wet and shivering in my light Queensland clothes. A taxi was pulling out into the street behind me.

  My mother emerged from a bedroom into the hall behind the stranger, looking confused and embarrassed: ‘I wasn’t expecting you till Christmas, dear.’

  Some kind of loose kimono was wrapped about her compact bulk; her skin, exposed in various places, glistened, as if varnished with oil.

  ‘I should have rung,’ I mumbled. ‘Or written.’

  ‘Um — this is Albert, dear. A friend. From the golf club. Albert, this is my Mara.’

  Albert offered a glistening hand, slippery with oil, and immediately withdrew it, embarrassed. I stalked past to my former bedroom.

  My mother appeared in the door a few minutes later, fully dressed, carefully brushed and combed, her oiled skin scrubbed and roughened. I might have been amused, given freedom to concentrate on anything except myself: the minister’s widow from the country, discovering sexuality at the age of seventy. Was it never too late?

  ‘I meant to write to you about Bert, dear. He’s been such a help. Around the house. Handyman things.’

  No joke was intended. I was unpacking clothes, hanging blouses and skirts. I didn’t answer. Men had become a difficult subject for me. She fiddled and twitched at the hems of a few things as I laid them across the bed.

  ‘This is nice, dear. I haven’t seen it before, have I?’

  ‘A birthday present to myself.’

  ‘Did you get the woollens I sent? You never wrote
back. Not that you have much need of woollens up there, I suppose. But it was so lonely after you left. I had a lot of knitting in me.’

  ‘Is your friend living here?’

  ‘He stays on weekends. In the spare room. As I said, I’ve been so lonely. A house needs a man.’

  ‘Can you trust him?’ I said. ‘He’s not just using you? Sniffing around for his regular fuck.’

  She was speechless for a few moments, her mouth open: ‘Mara, I can’t believe that you would say such things! Such language! You don’t even know him.’

  ‘I know the type.’

  ‘He’s the most gentle man you could hope to meet.’

  ‘They’re the worst type.’

  ‘Mara, it’s no wonder you never found a husband.’

  I sat on the edge of the bed, folding and stacking underclothes into a drawer, trying not to listen.

  ‘I sometimes wonder what happened to you,’ she said. ‘To my little girl. When you … changed. When you became so hard.’

  ‘I haven’t changed, Mum.’

  ‘So … cynical,’ she added, and then, as if remembering that she hadn’t seen me for some time, and that it was a bit early for criticism, began to tweak and fuss at my hair.

  ‘Why don’t you do something with this hair while you’re here, dear. A perm. Even a simple bun. I have someone down the road you should see.’

  I twisted free of her. My throat was clogging up again, my eyes seemed under a great pressure of tears. I had been holding them back for some time, suppressing them; now my chest heaved and they shoved their way free, burst to the surface, filled my eyes, rolled down my cheeks.

  I hadn’t cried for thirty years, but it still felt the same, exactly the same. Embarrassed, not knowing what to do, my mother rested a tentative hand on my shoulder, then lifted it off again:

  ‘Mara, whatever is the matter, dear? Do you want to talk about it?’

  Even as she mouthed the words she was backing towards the door, helpless in the face of real misery: